Stories by Cesare Pavese (The Ecco Press)
In
the first Pavese story I ever read, a story called “Wedding Trip,” completed on December 6, 1936, the
narrator—a newly married man named George—stands, with his young wife, Cilia,
by the Genoa harbor at night, the only night they could afford for their
honeymoon, and feels the darkness closing in upon them. “We came to the
railings of a terrace and caught our breath. The night was calm but dark, and the street lamps floundered
in the cold abyss that lay before us.” For Pavese this darkness, this abyss, as
perceived by the narrator, is not simply hyperbole, a figure of speech designed
to intensify the mood, nor is it merely the aggravated projection of a newly
married man, pinched with mourning for his bygone bachelor days, but a stark
and telling measure of Pavese’s own special dread.
All
of the stories in this collection, the ones for which Pavese is most widely known
and admired, were written in the shadow of Italian and German fascism, a period—dating
roughly from 1936 to 1945—that marked a kind of Dark Ages for Italian
intellectuals, artists, and writers, like Pavese. Surely this was a part of his dread. Under Mussolini, the parliamentary
system was abolished, all teachers in schools and universities had to swear
allegiance to the fascist regime, and freedom of the press was strictly curtailed. Pavese himself was summarily convicted
of antifascist activities and sentenced to a year of ‘preventative detention’ in
1935 for a series of articles he had written as editor of a review called La Cultura. After a few months in prison at Brancaleone Calabro, he was
sent into ‘confino’ or internal exile in Southern Italy, the
common punishment for those guilty of lesser political crimes, the same punishment
suffered by fellow writers and Leftists, Leone Ginzburg and Carlo Levi. It was an experience—Pavese’s time in prison and exile—that wrought
a significant change in him, scarring him psychologically and darkly coloring his
work.
That,
by the end of his life, Pavese hated women is a fact well-known to readers of
his work. This too must be understood as a part of his dread. Plagued by
depression and asthma, a tortured loner long-enamored of suicide, he suffered
one failed relationship after another, first with a mysterious woman he met while
at university known only by the phrase “la donna dalla voce rauca” (the girl
with the husky voice), and finally with the beautiful American actress, model,
and former mistress of Elia Kazan, Constance Dowling. So intense was his love for Dowling, so turbulent their
affair, that he never recovered from it, finally taking his own life in a hotel
room in Turin. "Non scriverò piú," “I will not write anymore,” he
concluded his diary that night, swallowing a mouthful of sleeping pills before
climbing into bed. One
of his last poems, “Verra la morte e avra i tuoi occhi,” or “Death Will Come
and Look at Me with Your Eyes” was written for Dowling with Dowling in mind:
eyes-
the
death that follows us around
from
morning to night, insomniac, deaf,
like
some stale, now irreparable guilt
or
ridiculous habit. Your eyes
will
be empty words,
a
suppressed cry, a silence-
the
way you see them each morning
when
you lean toward yourself alone
in
the mirror.
O dearest hope, on that day
we too will know
that
you were life, and you were nothingness.
For
everyone, death has a certain look.
Death
will come and look at me with your
eyes.
Then the habit will be given up,
we
will see in the mirror
the
dead face reemerging,
the
sealed lips will have their voice.
And
we, the silenced, go down into the abyss.
(translated
by Alan Williamson)
If
Pavese felt tortured and betrayed by women, he felt tortured and betrayed by
love itself, which he dreaded for the way it exposed him as a man. In his diary
he wrote: "One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love--any
love--reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our
nothingness." Indeed his stories and poems are replete with examples of
what he came to see as the fundamental treachery of women, of love. Still, Pavese’s need of and obsession
with women is clear. As Geoffrey
Brock puts it in his thoughtful introduction to Pavese’s poetry, Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950,
“Most of the late poems are addressed to a female ‘you,’ who, while inspired by
particular real-life women, tends to blur into an archetypal figure who is by
turns, and sometimes simultaneously, attractive and repulsive.”
Such
is Pavese’s complexity when it comes to women, when it comes to his vision of
life, that to simply dismiss him as misogynist is to miss the anguished,
hard-won beauty of his work. For
while, in his story “Wedding Trip” (to take but one example), his narrator is
relentless in his derision of his young wife, Cilia, resentful of her for the
inadequacy that her love makes him feel, Pavese’s portrayal of her is neither
that of succubus nor shrew. In contrast to him—the narrator, George—Cilia is
radiantly human: tender, trusting, romantic. A haunting affirmation of life,
she is all he longs for and dreads. Even in his story “Suicides,” in which the
narrator’s callous behavior actually drives his lover, Carlotta, to take her
own life, Pavese makes it clear, if only in the way he yields to gentleness and
pity in his description of her, that the story’s life-force, its humanity, is hers.
In
this same story, the narrator reflects: “Long ago I realized how essential
astuteness is to living, and before being astute with others one must be astute
with oneself.” Pavese, the man, the writer, was nothing if not astute—with
others, and above all with himself. What is plain, what elevates these haunting, often pain-filled
stories to the stature of art, is that Pavese himself was well aware of the
fact that his much-professed hatred of women had less to do with women
themselves than with his own insecurity and self-loathing. Cruel as his male
characters can be, they remain defiantly human, tortured as they are by remorse,
by regret, by longing—by all the “dark angles” of love they are blessed and burdened
to know.
As
Brock concludes in his aforementioned introduction to Pavese, “Even when his
subject is the turning inward, the work itself is a reaching out…” Complex,
resounding, often deeply elegiac, Pavese's stories have survived him to do just
that.
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was a novelist,
short-story writer, and poet who, in 1950, one month before his death, was awarded the Strega Prize, Italy’s
preeminent literary award. He was
then at the height of his fame as a novelist and a Communist man of letters. The youngest of five children in a
lower middle class family of rural origin, Cesare Pavese was born on 9th
September 1908 in S. Stefano Belbo. His father died when he was six. He went to school in Turin, studying at high school under Augusto
Monti, a friend of Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci, and a prominent figure in
the anti-fascist Turin. He graduated in letters in 1932 with a thesis on Walt
Whitman. During the same period he began working as a translator for the
publisher Frassinelli, translating Moby
Dick by Melville and Dark Laughter
by Sherwood Anderson. It was through Pavese’s translations that most Italians
of the period first became acquainted with the works Faulkner, Joyce, Stein,
Dickens, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Defoe. Suffering from one of his recurrent fits of depression, Pavese
committed suicide on 27 August 1950.
While Pavese’s short stories are
only available from used booksellers like AbeBooks
http://www.abebooks.com/ and Alibris
http://www.alibris.com/, I also recommend The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese and The
Moon and the Bonfires published by New York Review Books Classics, as well
as Disaffections: Complete Poems
1930-1950 (English and Italian Edition) published by Copper Canyon Press.
Peter Adam Nash
This looks like a fascinating blog.
ReplyDeleteThank you--I hope you find some things here of interest.
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