The Sadness of Cesare Pavese
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING The Sadness of Cesare Pavese By Stanley Edgar Hyman "The fame Vittorini has won in America, has it made you jealous? No. I am in no hurry. I shall beat him in the long run."...
...There is a wry aptness to a wild slip in an editorial footnote, which describes Pavese's 1935 imprisonment for anti-Fascism as "sentenced to prison for anti-Communist activities...
...Now Walker and Co...
...At times the diaries talk about nothing but sex, and one sad affair succeeds another...
...My stories are always about love or loneliness," he wrote in 1938...
...Some days he scrapes it with an old knife, on other days with his nails...
...Sometimes the tone is ruefully comic, as when he observes: "When a man is suffering people treat him like a drunkard: 'Get up, now...
...In 1938 he notes bitterly, at the end of a long recital of failure: "You will never have the courage to kill yourself...
...But how disturbing these books are to read, and how terribly sad...
...The most common image for writing is pain and torment: "poetry is an ever-open wound...
...In 1949 Pavese is questioning the limits of "dialectical materialism,' and by the next year he quotes the opinion of unidentified persons that "Pavese is not a good Communist...
...Sometimes I hope they will and then I get in a panic...
...And so the diaries go, endlessly toying with the subject, until 1950, when we find a sudden note of decisiveness: "There is only one answer: suicide...
...A good deal of it is devoted to problems of writing and of literature generally...
...be on your way...
...come on...
...No one has any rights over us," Corrado had said, denying all human ties...
...Even later, when he wrote novels of the War and the Resistance, they became inner events: the War an externalization of the torn self, the Resistance an initiation into manhood and a test of the initiate's capacity to love and to act...
...The boy, Corradino, is certainly Corrado's son, and his failure to be a father to him is perhaps even greater than his failure with Cate...
...But nothing in The Moon and the Bonfires is quite so poignant as the scene here when Dino nestles up against Corrado in the dark, and Corrado feels that "I had lost myself for a moment among the stars and in the night space...
...Much of the novel's power inheres in those two symbols, which in different terms are the Holy Family and Calvary...
...that's it.'" There is little politics in The Burning Brand until 1946, when Communism appears as a subject...
...During a bombing he thinks: "I would like to have been a root, a worm, and gone underground...
...there was a time when the pot was full, the food good...
...When the adults are arrested by the Germans and the boy runs off, the narrator goes dispiritedly back to his native village...
...The problem is Corrado's own immaturity...
...He imagines: "A man alone in a hut, eating the grease and gravy from a cooking pot...
...When his son runs off, Corrado thinks only: "If I had Dino here with me, I could still give him his orders...
...The narrator, Corrado, is utterly inadequate in his relationship with the woman, Cate...
...now it is stale, and to get the taste of it the man gnaws his broken nails...
...Like the best Italian films, Pavese works by understatement and implication...
...My basic principle is suicide," Pavese writes in 1936...
...We are in the world by chance...
...His reward at the end is bitter self-contempt, the-recognition that he was saved only because he was "the most useless of them...
...Nothing seems to happen in the foreground of The House on the Hill...
...Page after page cries out in pain: "But it is agony," "Loneliness is pain,' "I am filled with distaste for what I have done," "I have a live coal in my breast," "The greatest misfortune is loneliness...
...During their affair Cate's "sole appeal was sex, sex somewhat tediously and embarrassingly manifest," and he had failed her as a lover...
...Pavese's long discussions of myth and ritual, of J. G. Frazer and Jane Harrison, make clear how conscious his symbolic effects are, as do such definitions of his intention as "Narrating realities as though they were incredible...
...The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950 makes very melancholy reading...
...His contemptible reaction to her arrest is to think "I could still save myself" and to flee to safety, where he eventually concludes: "I do not know whether Cate, Fonso, Dino and all the others will ever return...
...Like Corrado, Pavese spent 1943 and 1944 in the Piedmont countryside, two of his close friends were active in the Resistance and were killed by the Germans, and he records his feelings of "bewilderment and nothingness" during those years...
...No symbol in The House on the Hill is as powerful as the two terrible human bonfires in The Moon and the Bonfires, Pavese's last novel and perhaps his best...
...Youth ends," Pavese writes bleakly at 29, "when we perceive that no one wants our gay abandon...
...In Pavese's world of myth and irony, The House on the Hill is a powerful anti-Odyssey, in which a weakling Odysseus is returned to his long-lost wife and son, only to lose them again through impotence and inefiectuality...
...Pavese is quite frank about his sexual difficulty, a history of premature ejaculation that made him unable to satisfy women and determined him never to marry...
...We listen to be assured of what we already think, to be exalted by our common faith and confession.' In 1948 there are traces of Marxist thinking, of a rather existentialist sort, such as: "To know the world one must construct it...
...The narrator, a 40-year-old schoolteacher taking refuge in the countryside from the bombing of Turin, encounters some anti-Fascists staying at an old inn, among them his former mistress and her illegitimate son, who may be his son too...
...There are so many answers—sex, politics, loneliness, self-disgust, depression—that the question might better be: How did Pavese manage to live so long...
...The worst thing a suicidal type of man can do," he remarks the next year, "is not killing himself, but thinking of it and not doing it...
...Nothing dramatic has happened, we never learn the fates of the boy and his mother, yet the suggestions and resonances of the story are profoundly moving...
...Many of the entries are bitter wisdom about life, "Living is like working out a long addition sum," Pavese writes, "and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer...
...Why did Pavese kill himself...
...As winter comes they die, and new flowers of hope will appear: "Under the rotting leaves on the hillside, the first flowers would soon be coming through...
...Cate tells him, "You are just like a boy," and later clarifies it: "You are not capable of love...
...The diaries show that to some degree the figure is autobiographical...
...Now he fails her as a friend and potential husband, deeply attracted but fearful of something "elemental and savage, a woman in her prime...
...There are few years without thoughts of suicide...
...He wants not a son, but a companion for roaming the woods, where "all notion of woman and the burning mystery of sex was out of place...
...Most touching, perhaps, is the absurdity of what he calls "an old dream": "To live in the country with a beautiful woman—Greer Garson or Lana Turner —and lead a simple, perverse life...
...Knowing better, he accepts Cate's transparent assurance that he is not Dino's father, and he cultivates the boy in a chummy relationship involving no responsibilities...
...A few months later he killed himself, at the age of 42, and achieved in death the American public that he had not been able to achieve in life...
...The last entry in the book, just before his death, notes: "All it takes is a little courage...
...As Corrado is less than a husband and less than a father, so is he less than a man in the existentialist situation of the Resistance, which demands action against the enemy...
...Phalliforra scarlet flowers explicitly represent sexuality...
...At the novel's end he recognizes himself as a failure who "ran away from the Germans and from sorrow and remorse...
...not like that...
...A bomb is a "maddened fire-bird," the Germans are "bony, green like lizards,' a fearless rat on a rubbish heap in Turin embodies all the horror of war...
...A later entry adds gloomily, "Mistakes are always initial...
...A man, a woman, a boy," the diaries note, and later: "A house on the crest of the hill, dark against the crimson sky—the place that evokes your passion...
...So Cesare Pavese wrote in his diaries late in 1949, at a time when not one of his books was available in English...
...Other symbols in the book seem more contrived...
...Corrado's disengagement from the world, Pavese makes clear, is the disengagement of catatonia, not of philosophic freedom...
...that's enough...
...has brought out the fourth (The House on the Hill, translated by W. J. Strachan, 192 pp., $3.95) and the diaries (The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950, translated by A. E. Murch, 368 pp., $7.50...
...Look how many times you have thought of it...
...A meeting of the Party has all the characteristics of a religious rite," he notes in 1947...
...At one point Pavese is convinced that he is cured: at another he resolves: "One can do without it...
...There is a terrible anguish in his recognition that "no woman ever finds pleasure with me, or ever would,' combined with his conviction that sex "is the central activity of life, beyond question...
...We should rise in revolt and throw bombs," he tells Cate, but when she acts on his words, he says "You've become a real bolshie...
...About other writers Pavese is sometimes very perceptive, as when he remarks of Balzac, "He is never comic or tragic, he is curious," or discovers that Faulkner's metaphors are Elizabethan...
...Pavese was a greatly talented writer, and one fervently wishes him the American success he longed for...
...Ultimately The House on the Hill is an existentialist allegory of the human condition, man's loneliness and terror as a dying animal, his humiliation and disgust as a nasty one...
...The diaries reveal that for a while at least Pavese was a member of the Italian Communist party, but surely he was the least political of Communist novelists...
...Three of the four novels of his last period, which he called "symbolic realism," were published in the United States in 1953 and 1954...
...He will do the same tomorrow and the next day...
...One image that Pavese presents for himself and his writing is almost unbearably painful...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 40
