SOURCE: "Directives for Salvation," in The Hudson Review, Vol. IV, No. 2, Summer, 1951, pp. 314-20.

In the following excerpt, Aaron notes that, while not an extraordinary book, Conjugal Love demonstrates "how the artist can achieve a poetic reality without being topical. "

Alberto Moravia is deaf to the demands of earthly and heavenly authority, at least in Conjugal Love, and deferential only to instinct. He also writes of people out of time, whose difficulties are personal.

Conjugal Love is a severely classical sketch of a man's discovery of himself after a deep humiliation, a humiliation neither political nor religious. Silvio Baldeschi, a dilettante critic and self-satisfied husband, attributes his failure to do creative work under the most ideal of conditions to the demands of love, and renounces his conjugal duties until he has finished his masterpiece. He completes the book at precisely the moment when his strongly sexed wife, Leda...