One Fascist

THE CONFORMIST (376 pp.)--Alberto Moravia -- Farrar, Straus & Young ($3.50).

One of the best writers in the world today is a 43-year-old Italian named Alberto Moravia. The U.S. knows him for three books: The Woman of Rome, a realistic portrait of a prostitute, Two Adolescents, in which Moravia writes about the hazards of growing up, and Conjugal Love, a cameo masterpiece about a marriage.

Moravia's new novel unravels the character of a Fascist--a weak-kneed fellow named Marcello whose troubles all seem to stem from a cruel streak and a wish to be "normal," to be like everybody else or maybe a little more so. The Conformist is not Moravia's best novel, but it is his most ambitious. Underlying it is the question that many an Italian asks himself: How could seemingly decent people have turned into Fascist bullies?

Moravia's little bully grew up in a broken home; his mother neglected him one day and besieged him with affection the next. Marcello diverted himself by killing animals. "It was from cruelty that he derived the only pleasures that did not seem . . . insipid." At 13, he suffered an unforgettable shock: a grownup invited Marcello to his room to see a revolver, then began making homosexual passes. Marcello, in a panic of fear and fascination, picked up the revolver, fired and fled.

Marcello is sure the man is dead. As he grows up, he does his best to blot out the thought that he is a murderer and, if only latently, a homosexual. He finds two partial escapes--becoming a bureaucratic pea in the Fascist pod, and marrying a lusty girl named Giulia.

Marcello's downfall begins when he zealously volunteers for a role in a political murder plot, and funks it. At the same time he finds that Giulia, his angel of normality, has her Lesbian side. But he really goes to pieces when he finds that the man he shot years ago is alive & kicking. Marcello lives just long enough after that to realize that his whole life has been twisted by "a thing that never happened." Then he dies in an air raid.

Except as a distant allegory, The Conformist leaves the larger part of Fascism unexplained. Yet, as a picture of one particular Fascist, it is a thoroughly convincing book. It is flawed somewhat by a languorous analytical style which prevents it from picking up dramatic speed, but even second-rank Moravia makes fine reading.

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