Fragments

Paul Ableman

The Voice of the Sea Alberto Moravia (Seeker 24.50) After reading Molly Bloom's soliloquy at ,the end of Ulysses, Jung remarked: Perhaps the devil's grand-mother knew half as much about women — chrin,t ., A pl. certainly

committee of the entire distaff Side of the diabolic dynasty might be postulated as Moravia's necessary counsel for the production of this dazzling assembly of first-person fragments. We have here, in some two-hundred

Pages, a collection of thirty pieces in which a galaxy of disparate women, sharing only the characteristic of being inhabitants of Rome, leflect on themselves and their lives. Only reflect' is not the right word. Nor is muse, itior contemplate, nor consider —because all b

ese terms suggest leisurely and passive _streams of consciousness' such as Molly Sfoorn' i

s. In fact, although speaking n preIFIselY individuated voices, and not shrink! g from the subtlest probing into the most lit tie reaches of the psyche, these lite episodes are full of action and the tnovement of life. A wife from the country, married almost I') childhood, begins to smell, in her apparently ordinary bourgeois husband's family, e Presence of the never-uttered word Mari , Cinated a , A woman doctor who has long been by Plato's concept of 'the Lqutogyne • a rotund monster with two ci four arms, four legs, two backsides two sexes' finds her apparent Platonic Soul mate in a young layabout and then, wrien she is cruelly rebuffed by him, disci2ver5 in herself a taste for masochism ‘tstead. Nothing in these pages is forced. ,4ents succeed each other with the logic of iiekalirY, which may seem arbitrary as we live 'utir which Freud and others have taught us often contains a message in cypher. In strictly technical terms, these accounts illight be considered impossible. Moravia's

efeintingent, although including pro ,essionally articulate people, could no more ':.ganize their thoughts or find the language

wnd imagery to clothe them in this masterly

s:Y, than could, say, the originals of 6ake5Peare's women (where any existed)

e"ve generated the world's loftiest verse to xPress their inner beings. If this book were really r the distillation of lengthy tape_

Aecorded interviews, edited with great skill

Lievrid tact by an unusually perceptive editor, n something like these poignant frag'4,,e,nts might have resulted. But only 'sometuiaig like'

a For irradiating and illuminating

etieh of tbem is a force that no technical ofttning can simulate the generative power tile imagination. This 'Voice of the Sea',

no matter how compellingly it peals of womanhood, is also the voice of the master poet, Alberto Moravia.

'My right breast — what is it doing? Is it exploding out of my blouse, or is it behaving properly, enclosed inside the cup of its brassiere? And my belly —'. Thus, the agitated ruminations of an ex-star of pornographic films, trying to settle into respectable married life. And the heroine of the title story, on a trip to Tahiti with her self-doomed lover, listens to the sound of the surf on the barrier-reef and finds it to be a harmony of 'sounds, alternating though always repeated, which, when combined, seemed to me to compose a word . . . love.'

I must not give the impression that these pieces are predominantly concerned with sex and romance. In a sense they are but it is in the sense in which these elements occur in life: as dominant themes which interact with, and often change, all other aspects of experience but are often barely detectable in their pure form. These women of Rome pursue goals which they themselves fail to recognise as sexual or romantic until some chance turn of events reveals their true character. Conversely they pursue erotic goals and only subsequently learn that their true quest was a metaphysical one. The concrete and the intangible are blended with great subtlety and poetry. Moravia has a wondrous capacity for making the dramatic and violent commonplace, and the commonplace dramatic and violent. He sees how, in Auden's phrase, 'the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead' or, in imagery more appropriate to this book, how a tear in a pair of tights may lead to murder in another country.

And yet, for all its riches and delights and truths, this book is not, as a book, a total success. As the reader flips from one gem of consciousness to the next, he can't help asking: why? What is it for? Is this collection simply a dazzling display of virtuosity, like Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style? Or are these sketches destined for ultimate incorporation in larger-scale works? Are they meant to reflect the fragmentation of urban, technological man (or rather woman)? Whatever the answers, The Voice of the Sea does not add up to a book, a complete work of art with the coherent, internal structure that even a collection of short stories should have. Rather, by the end, it has begun to resemble something slightly sinister: a pet shop, perhaps a fashionable establishment specialising in tropical birds. And there they all are, ranked in ornate but cramped cages, the gorgeouslyplumaged winged creatures, yearning for the freedom of their native forest. These women of Moravia's, fluttering passionately in the tiny aviaries into which he has penned them, seem to be shrilling for release into a great work. By the very vividness of their realisation the artificiality of the form is emphasised. Each fragment is like one of those photos of birds arrested in flight, revealing, compelling but, because it is frozen, ultimately unreal.

Aria Brown Meggs (Hamish Hamilton £5.50) Kassandra and the Wolf Margarita Karapanou (Harcourt Brace £4.50) In this trade, I thought I'd seen just about everything in the literary soap opera line — and most of it can be dis missed with the usual upmarket upturned toffee nose that the general reading public loves to hate us for. However, here we have something which contains all the usual American blockbuster ingre dients: expensive champagne flows through every page; exhaustive lists of the kind of food and restaurants and zip less sex that for most of us are at the least a forbidden dream and at the most a dim memory — you've heard that all before. But this one is not just the big

business balling game: this is a soap opera about opera, the tears, dramas, per

sonality clashes, mediations, ego mas

sagings involved in making a new major recording of Otello. Flow charts, prog

ress chasings, sales analyses are all very well and copeable with when you're making cars, but Harry Chapin's job of get

ting an egotistical black tenor with the voice of a god (but 'one thing we know . . there are singers and there are musicians and never the twain shall meet'), a just-past-it Italian Iago and a Desdemona best known for various strictly non-operatic appearances in Penthouse, together in one place at one time, not grappling at each others throats or genitals for long enough to lay down the tapes, makes Michael Edwardes's job look like producing Playschool.

The sheer cliffhanging tension of getting this lot together with sulky technicians and moonlighting musicians in the sweltering Rome Opera House in August all at the same place at the same time is both comic and agonising. The bonus is

I that Mr Megr, knows every line and inflection of his Verdi: this, combined with fascinating trade secrets of how to fudge up a great recording out of patchy raw material is manna for the opera buff. Kassandra is something else again. An extremely intense evocation of pre-verbal half-understood encounters with child and adult sexuality. Choppy, often badly translated, but with a real ability to express in every line the half understood inexpressibility of a little girl caught up in a rich Greek household peopled with musty relatives and lascivious servants. She prefers The Turn of the Screw to Winnie the Pooh: an old head — and worse — on young shoulders. I have never before read a book which so accurately breaks down the process of verbal development, the actual nature of the gradual painful grappling with the essence of language and its relationship to physical reality. Frightening, rivetting and brilliant.

Mary Hope