Context

"Non scriverò piú." With these solemn words, which mean "I will not write anymore," the Italian novelist, short-story writer, and poet Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) concluded his diary, and killed himself nine days later by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Of what is a writer’s suicide emblematic? Of writing’s inability to save a life? Ardent lovers of literature may even find it hard to believe that a talent like Pavese’s could not somehow have kept on producing, plunging anew into the toils of composition as a way of resolving perfunctorily (or at least of putting off) the comparatively minor problems of unrequited love and daily living. But of course I am waxing ironic. It is arresting and, I daresay, grimly informative that Pavese’s extraordinarily lucid and pessimistic diary is entitled Il mestiere di vivere (1952), a book translated into English as This Business of Living and all too significantly emphasizing the "métier" or "trade" of living—as in, say, "Mastering the Trade of Living."

If Pavese failed at this trade, he "successfully"—to mimic his own penchant for implacable ironies—analyzed the failure in his diary, one of the most excruciatingly honest ever composed. This is why the challenge put forward by the title must be kept in mind when reading his stories, as well as the four important novels—The Beach (1942), The House on the Hill (1949), Among Women Only (1949), The Devil in the Hills (1949)—that have been collected in the recently republished Selected Works of Cesare Pavese. As the diary amply reveals, few authors have worked so long with such a heightened awareness of the perilous gap between living and writing. Few writers have so bravely stood astride the chasm, as it were, observing how it widens inexorably, ever awaiting—while continuing to write—the fated moment when they must fall.

Yet if Pavese’s fiction is personal in this essential sense, its deep-running autobiographical orientation is not immediately visible on the surface. Whereas his lifelong struggle with the prospect of self-afflicted death is exhibited straightforwardly in his diary, it is transposed imaginatively in haunting stories like "Wedding Trip" or "Suicides" (to mention just those two), or in a novel like Among Women Only. The unity of his oeuvre is that of a coin: two sides superficially different in the images that they put forward to the world, yet intimately connected, perhaps even ultimately identical.

Early on, Pavese alludes to this troubled relationship between living and writing by means of a subtitle, Secretum professionale, which covers four months during the first two years (1935-1936) that he records in his diary. Evoked as well in stories like "Land of Exile" and "Gaol Birds," this same period was marked by his arrest and ten-month imprisonment in Brancaleone (Calabri) because of his editorials in the anti-fascist magazine La Cultura. But surely the subtitle also recalls Petrarch’s highly self-conscious Secretum (composed in Latin around 1347), an imaginary confessonal dialogue with his intellectual mentor, Saint Augustine. Their dialogue revolves around Petrarch’s poetic, spiritual, and amatory qualms.

As to Pavese, while analyzing in his diary what he calls "stylistic situations" (one of several critical concepts that he forged), he criticizes Petrarch for "confusing life and art"; he sides with Dante, Stendhal, and Baudelaire because they departed from real life by constructing self-contained "mental situations" governed by "internal laws." This distinction being made (and whatever surprise one feels upon finding Stendhal thus cited), Pavese’s own conflict between life and art remains arduous to grasp. His experiences quite evidently fuel his fiction, yet he aims, stylistically, to transform them—and in no simplistic manner. (It was Stendhal, after all, who proposed that a novel, as it was borne down a road, held up a mirror to reality.)

To return to Petrarch, a pre-eminent European autobiographer, it is furthermore hard not to notice that, like the author of the Canzoniere and Secretum, Pavese is a perpetual doubter who constantly delves—in both his diary and fiction—into pre-eminently Christian questions like guilt and charity, selflessness, and necessary solitude; and secondly, that he likewise aspires to the most sensual aspects of love all while developing an authorial vision whereby literature is the medium par excellence through which life is approached or, alternately, kept at bay. Paradoxically, for sensibilities such as Pavese’s (or Petrarch’s), only writing can near one to life, or to the beloved other. The life one is living daily actually remains—in one’s conscience, in one’s consciousness—at a strange, and estranging, remove.

Although Petrarch’s ornate rhetoric in his Italian love poetry (his Latin prose is something else again) could not be more distant from Pavese’s deceptively realist prose, the two writers equally idealize yet at the same time harshly scrutinize women. Bordering on misogyny (as he himself admitted), Pavese fatally linked love to morbidity. His final poetry collection, found on his desk after he had committed suicide, is significantly entitled Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (1951), literally "Death will Come and [She Will] Have Your Eyes." "Death," a feminine noun in Italian, is here associated with the American actress Constance Dowling, who had recently left him. In one tale collected in Cesare Pavese: Stories, the first-person narrator envisions self-destructive desires as occurring one step earlier. He coolly concedes that every time he is in love he thinks of killing himself. It seems that Pavese was driven by a perpetually adolescent romanticism with respect to women, as well as, in contrast, by an amorous philosophy so inflexibly pessimistic that any enduring partnership was excluded in advance.

Interestingly, scenes in his novels more often than not involve not a single man and a single woman interacting, but rather a group of characters. Prolonged conversations between these characters build up tension and authenticity; the author’s written words, which presumably record once-spoken words, are ontologically closer to what actually happened (was uttered) than are descriptions. As they bring to the fore the difficulties of lasting friendship, the forces of sexual attraction, the impasses of love, many passages are conspicuously theatrical in narrative structure. Plots shift decisively during parties, dances, or outings. A prime example is the ménage à trois artfully studied in The Beach, a novel otherwise portraying a small crowd of friends who have gathered at the same summer resort.

Yet this social dimension of Pavese’s novel-writing deftly masks a much more somber awareness of an individual’s abject aloneness. A clue to this subtle double-layering can be found in his diary, when Pavese advises caustically that any person convinced of a human being’s utter solitude should "lose himself in countless social relationships which, in consequence, demand little." He also contended that writers "spoke" their characters; that it was essentially the same thing if a novelist employed one character or several. "My lot is to hug shadows," he confessed in a letter dated 6 July 1950, referring not only to Constance Dowling but also—I would posit—to his habit of sectioning himself off into characters. As lively and full-rounded as these characters seem to us, they were hopelessly phantom-like for Pavese.

Though resembling early twentieth-century American realism in certain ways, Pavese’s stories and novels are thus more deeply structured around a series of fascinating oppositions. He once noted that he lived "with antinomies," which he began to list as "voluptuous-tragic, cowardly-heroic, sensual-ideal . . ." In his fiction, such antinomies add fathomless ambiguity to relatively simple plot lines; they also enable him to experiment with himself, even in novels ostensibly offering social panoramas. He imaginatively crossed distances that he could not cross in real life. He even uses a woman first-person narrator in Among Women Only, an engrossing novel that explores solitude and the quest for affection even as it satirizes the affluent milieus of post-war Turin, Pavese’s hometown.

Some stories similarly test hypotheses about how he might have behaved in this or that amorous situation. In one of his most absorbing tales, "The Family," the fictional Corradino runs into an old girlfriend at a dance and starts going out with her again, only to learn that he is the likely father of her illegitimate son—not coincidentally named "Dino" and aged six-and-a-half. Having himself suffered from the early deaths of his father (when he was six) and mother (when he was twenty-two), Pavese seems to toy here with what founding a family—even under such circumstances—might be like. In Among Women Only, Momina, Morelli and the narrator Clelia likewise debate the advantages of "accepting life" and "having children." Pavese’s characters and alter egos often assay the potential happiness of lifestyles that he never followed.

In "The Family," moreover, Corradino longs "for something . . . to change his life without robbing him of . . . his old habits." He would like "to become a different man without being conscious of it." These secret aspirations for change—effortless changes, immobile escapes—intensify Pavese’s stories because the changes never come about. On the surface, his tales thereby recount "long illusions," as he himself puts it in The House on the Hill, a novel set during the final stages of the Second World War that charts the attempts of a Turin teacher, linked to the underground, to hide out in the surrounding hills, the very territory of his lost childhood. During his seclusion, his recollected boyhood tellingly becomes his surrogate "companion, colleague, son." Yet beneath his acts lurks the bleak truth that no recovery of the past is possible, that no evolution in a human heart can take place. Pavese’s diary (which, incidentally, comments very little on the war) discloses how relentlessly such dire axioms ate away at him. In European literature, Marcel Proust is by no means the only writer to probe the existential and philosophical consequences of the urge or necessity to remember.

Not surprisingly, Pavese elucidated, both for himself and more generally as a critic, the "static essentials" of a novel, as they are incarnated in a hero who remains the same from the beginning to the end. In "Evocation," an oddly rambling prose text departing from the classical short-story form that Pavese normally practiced, the narrator accordingly despairs because "nothing happens." Sitting in an empty corner of a tavern, he tries to "fill the silence with the sound of a distant tram." Eventually a stranger sits down nearby, rests his elbow on the table and his jaw on his fist. The narrator becomes fascinated with the man’s knuckles—just one of countless instances, throughout Pavese’s oeuvre, where a minuscule detail is magnified obsessively, radiantly. In his poems, similarly, a nameless woman’s "husky voice" recurrently crystalizes longing and resentment. Scholars have since determined that this donna dalla voce rauca was the fiancée who broke off with Pavese shortly before his return from prison. Whatever the autobiographical inspiration underlying them, such details are "caressed," as Vladimir Nabokov counseled his disciples to do, and for reasons that transcend mere craftsmanship.

Pavese surely learned much from the inherent empiricism of English-language writing—a salient quality of our literature, yet one which also harbors potential philosophical limitations. As an Americanist (who wrote a thesis on Walt Whitman), he had already translated Sinclair Lewis’s Our Mr. Wrenn, Herman Melville’s Moby–Dick, Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter, as well as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by the time his first poetry collection, Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor), devoted to village life and to his exile from it, was published in 1936. Although he was raised and schooled in Turin, a large town, he spent childhood summers and once an entire year in his father’s native village of Santo Stefano Belbo.

Yet details in Pavese reveal a still more intricate motivation. The opposition between town and countryside, as experienced during his childhood, directly relates to his conscientious use of "images." This opposition arises thematically in the plots of several stories and novels, but also and especially in probing reflections (in the diary) about how images spontaneously engage his mind while he is writing. He worries, for example, whether his "images" are perhaps nothing but "ingenious variations" on a single "fundamental image" associated with his paese, his homeland, the Piemonte region. Ever scrupulous about the authenticity of his inspiration (in its autobiographical aspects) and about the accuracy of his perceptions (as he scrutinized the particulars of the outside world), he sought to measure the extent to which he was naturally, that is unconsciously, a "regional writer." Of course, the earnestness and obsessiveness of his self-interrogation reveals how unnatural a regionalist he actually was. It is because he felt, as an adult, incurably separated from his at once beloved and tragic childhood memories, which were attached to village life and the death of his father, that he could use them so profoundly in his writing. This is why The House on the Hill (to cite just that novel) is cryptically, but essentially, autobiographical.

His remarkable details, moreover, function like bridges leading away from the self, enabling the Italian writer to cross over into the pure, emotionless, objective world of matter. Such bridge-crossings perhaps brought temporary relief. The reader certainly takes pleasure whenever Pavese abruptly focuses on, say, "the toes of Cate’s little shoes." But probably Pavese’s pleasure in these lovingly-rendered close-ups, in these desperate leaps toward the "thing-in-itself," was short-lived. He confessed that his "contemplation of things" was ultimately always inquieta—"anxious," "troubled," "uneasy."Inquieta indeed. One senses that Pavese was soon gazing no longer at the thing, but inwards. In his diary, he declares that people in a story "have a given character and that things happen in accordance with pre-determined laws." "But the point of our story," he insists, "must lie neither in these characters nor in those laws." For all his so-called realism, it is to his credit that such "points" are rarely easy to deduce, or define. But they certainly stir up a pervasive "un-quietness" extending well beyond the narratives themselves, and one imagines Pavese—his own analysis of Dante, Stendhal, and Baudelaire notwithstanding—ultimately holding up a mirror to himself, to a self splintered into a host of surrogate characters, each struggling to recover an impossible wholeness and to master that redoubtable "trade of living."

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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