In the last throes

Narrated by: Alberto Moravia
Translated by: Faslli Haliti

Last December, at daybreak, I was urgently summoned to go and sit at the head of my friend, the distinguished critic S. I knew he was impossible, but the summons at such an unusual hour, I worried immensely. And indeed, as I entered his house, the waitress, helping me to take off my coat, informed me that my friend had no hope of salvation: Critic S. was dying.

I found the wretched friend lying in bed with his arms outstretched on the sheets and his trunk resting on a pile of pillows. Orderly and pure in life, the critic S. was dying as he had lived; on the dresser was the last book, cut in half by the paper cutter; he had just shaved and had just combed his hair carefully. If it hadn't been for that pallor of his face and the weary squinting of his eyes, I wouldn't have noticed that I was near a dying man. Critic S. motioned for me to sit next to him and, in a low voice, told me that he had called me because he was my closest friend and wanted to confess to me.

"My whole life has been nothing but a long lie", he added calmly.

I judged this as an incision of the conscience of a dying man, and hastened to protest frankly, among others, the life of the critic S., above all, as far as it pertained to his profession as a critic, we may say, unabashedly and without exaggeration, it was a model. But he shook his head, and answered me that he did not seek flattery or consolation at such a moment. He had told me the truth, so I had to listen to him and then admit that the word lie was, after all, too mild a term. Convinced more and more that he spoke of a great concern, connected with his rigid character, I told him that I was willing to accept his confession. And here's what he told me in short.

Since he was very young, the critic S. had nurtured the most ardent hope to become a writer, but not from the beginning to write essays and critical articles, as he did later, but novels, poems, dramas. His culture, at the same time profound and eclectic, had not seemed to him sufficient for an initiative, to which many approach with a dormant mind, with no other baggage than that acquired by the few disorderly readings and a false youthful inclination. But as far as the critic S. is concerned, despite all the great work, even though he had knocked on the doors of poetry, the muse of Nopran, he still did not open the doors. The critical tendency, now highly developed, constantly warned him that those poems, those dramas, those novels that he continued to write, were all cold and lifeless loot, the product of a will that did not give birth to any inspiration. However, always hoping that one fine morning he would wake up a poet, the critic S. persevered for another year with this effort, not in vain and saw no blessings, until one day, in despair, finally realizing that he could never be other than a critic, he burned poems, novels, plays, everything and wrote the first review. Thus began the path, which he would continue with determination and success, until the end of his life.

But, because of the collapse of his fondest hopes, he was left with a bitterness and a deep disappointment and a furious hatred, against all who reached where he had failed, against poets, novelists, dramatists, and more. finally against those who managed to sing or at least mutter under their breath their song short or long, sad or happy; against all those different songbirds, tried the swan's hoarse, quiet voice. Contrary to what is said, he is as silent in life as in the moment of death. Thus, it does not seem excessive to him to keep everyone under the intimidating jurisdiction of a critical activity that made him instantly famous. He also wanted to equip himself with a device that was designed to destroy the creators, to take revenge against them, to prevent them all from singing, or at least, singing as they should.

It was noted that his authority was undisputed and highly supported in various literary circles, especially among young people. He began, therefore, with a measured and wisely weighed action to avoid their tendency to genius and tell them not to look at all on the roads unsuitable for them, the desert roads, in which he knew they would be stuck. There was, for example, a poet, whose verses promised a happier growth, the critic S., with great fragility, tried his best not only to give up poetry, but also mischievously, S., advised him to jump and to write long psychological novels. Instead, a novelist who showed precocious maturity in creating and drawing characters tried to persuade him to abandon the novel and write verse. A dramatist who was endowed with extraordinary theatrical talent, urged him to leave the stage and take up artistic prose; a novelist who rivaled Chekhov advised him to concentrate on monographic studies. And, passing from the genres to the style, he advised the simple and timid to become puffy and baroque, the concise to become prolix, the choleric to become flushed, the calm, the emphatic, the dry to become plump , the clear dark, the clear dark. And so on. Critic S. was not satisfied until he had completely spoiled the young talents, who had confidence in themselves. The keeper of a lighthouse, which everyone trusted in good faith, the critic S. drove any boat or ship he tried to steer to sink on the steep rocks. The bad guide took it upon himself to lead them safely to pieces in abuse.

The terrible confession went on for a long time, because the critic S. wanted me not only to hear all the details of his long lie, but with his usual peculiar pedantry, he wanted me to hear the names of the victims one by one his and the ways he had used to kill them. Paraded before me, all the characters, both prominent and unknown, of our literature of the last thirty years. Gatti took a certain pleasure in the critic S.'s enumeration of details, and in the strangely calm manner in which he sometimes commented on them: "And so he who had the opportunity of becoming a second Manxon, I made him he became an ordinary poet", but his last words were the words of a man who remembers his crimes and is sincerely sorry for them. "Lord, forgive me...", - he concludes, "I know that I have done a lot of harm... especially to those people I told you... but above all to my country, which because of my fault was deprived of a literature, which would be excellent… God forgive me”. Saying this, his voice softened to an extremely raspy tone, he laid his head back on the pillow and breathed his last.

I spent that morning staring at the corpse of my poor friend. Then, for several days, the grand funerals, the celebration, in a word, all the extreme cares that must be taken of a dead person, absorbed my every thought. But, a week later, thinking about the extraordinary confession of the critic S., I could not feel the least, not even a tinge of disbelief. Because, while the sincerity of the critic S. in those moments, one step before death, I could not doubt, on the other hand, it was not at all certain that those poets, novelists, dramatists that the critic S. accused himself of having diverted from their true inclination, it was impossible to imagine them as authors of works other than those by which they had become known. And what is worse, such works did not seem weak and insincere as the critic S. claimed, but unlike each other they looked and sounded significant and important. I thought a lot about this mystery and finally I was forced to formulate these hypotheses:

1. Critic S. might have wanted to lie to me (the least possible).

2. The critic S.'s taste and critical skill were perhaps so false that he had managed to be a good critic by chance only by saying the opposite truth of what he thought and felt.

3. And that the first inclination of artists is always false and must be avoided and interrupted.

4. The critic S. was right that even the whole era was wrong about its own writers and all this much-admired literature was not worth a penny, being exactly as you maliciously wanted the critic S: false , empty, tasteless, badly written even, and worse in thoughts and ideas…

These were only some of the main hypotheses. Sometimes others were outlined..., a real forest. I affirm that for a while this worried me, moreover, that I was among those authors who the critic S. had supported to take the path of the novel. What if I, too, had drowned in myself the worm of the lyric poet or the essayist? I felt that I lacked the ground under my feet and cursed the critic S. as well as his belated candor. But, finally, not finding the thread, as often happens in such cases, I kept silent and did not think about it anymore. Meanwhile, the work of the critic S. continued to be exalted in the most demanding literary circles. An entire school prides itself on following his aesthetic principles. As I write, meanwhile, the collection of scattered criticisms of him to be summarized in a single volume continues. And one of our best critics will deal with the publication of this summary, which he will also accompany with a long introductory monograph.