After a war, a housing shortage. This is, of course, inevitable. There is no labour to spare for building when men are all fighting or making munitions, yet weddings are even more frequent than at other times and babies continue to be born. An increase in population is not met by any increase in dwellings. On the contrary, destruction is going on all the time. Throughout England in the last war bombers were razing homes to the ground or were making them uninhabitable. Repairs had practically ceased. Anyone looking for a house after the war found dry rot and woodworm rampant; found, too, that in empty houses broken windows had gone unrepaired, no painting had been done. Again and again, a young couple cheered by seeing a cheaply priced house were told by their surveyor that to make it habitable would cost more than the purchase price.

In 1946 we were looking for a flat in London: success was deemed almost impossible, but by great good luck—and a large premium—we got what we wanted in Kensington. All around us were empty houses, mostly damaged in the blitz, surrounded by delightful gardens run wild and with boards proclaiming that they were for sale. But soon we saw at night in houses with no gas, electricity or water, the faint light of candles moving from window to window: squatters had arrived from London’s East End, claiming for themselves the right to a home. ‘Communist influence’, intoned the daily papers in solemn notes; but it did seem possible that these families, like ourselves, had only wanted a place to live in. They had neither the luck nor the cash to get it in any other way.

I have been asked to write some account of the Church’s life in the West Indies, and how it is affected by changes taking place thick and fast in these islands. I say that I have been asked, because I would certainly not have tried to do so on my own initiative. I mean by this that I feel a priest is the one least able to see and judge the situation at such a level, and that for two reasons. The first is a purely personal, silly one. It is that one becomes so accustomed to people and things here as elsewhere that it is an effort to stand back and look at them. When I first came here, I learnt the names of streets, shops, government departments, various other places. I have to ‘think’, now. I go to them, that’s all, without thinking of their names. Not only names, but things that would strike the stranger at once, are precisely the things not noticed later on. Unbelievably so. A young woman came to ask for an interview with the Bishop who was out. I took her name, and made the appointment, and informed the Bishop later on. Not recalling the person, he asked me to describe her. He still didn’t remember, and then suddenly asked—‘You didn’t mention; was she black, or brown, or white?’—and was very understandingly amused: I confessed, I couldn’t say! I just hadn’t noticed.

It is all very unhelpful, I realize, but it is the only answer that can sometimes be given: ‘I dunno. I just live here’.

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.