In one of his novels—II Conformista, I think it was—Moravia makes the hero reflect that everything can be understood except existence. The observation is pointed enough to start one reflecting on this interesting and influential writer; it offers, I think, a clue, slight at first glance but likely to repay attention, to Moravia’s mind and habits of thought and even, implicitly, to the way he poses and attempts to answer the fundamental moral question: what is the right discoverable term of human desires?

To say that everything except existence is intelligible sounds like a way of declaring oneself an intellectual, in the sense of one who has a large confidence in reason; but also, at bottom, an intellectual agnostic, for the fact of existence itself is declared unintelligible. But let us note, first, the rationalistic temper. Moravia is a man who tends to place knowledge above all other values. In a recent interview arranged by a popular weekly, on being questioned about the erotic stress in his work, he came out with this: ‘sex is above all a means to knowledge’; and it is obvious from Moravia’s novels that the knowledge he speaks of here presupposes, besides immediate experience, a great deal of rational analysis. This is not to say that the many pages of explicitly reflective analysis that occur in his novels are always convincing, either in themselves or in their context: the prostitute Adriana’s reflexions in La romana (The Woman of Rome) offer easy game to the critic in this latter respect; but simply that Moravia’s is the sort of mind that does not rest until it has distinguished every experience into its components and so gained lucid rational control—or what he takes to be such—over each aspect and phase of life. At his best Moravia is certainly a formidable analyst of character, mood and situation.