PAVESE, Cesare

Nationality: Italian. Born: Santo Stefano Belbro, 9 September 1908. Education: A Jesuit school, Turin; Ginnasio Moderno, Turin; Liceo Massimo d'Azeglio, 1924-27; University of Turin, 1927-30, degree in letters 1930. Career: Translator and teacher in the early 1930s; editor, La Cultura review, Turin, 1934-35; confined for association with communists to Brancaleone Calabro for 8 months, 1935-36; staff member, Einaudi, publishers, Turin, from 1942. Awards: Strega prize, 1950. Died: 27 August 1950 (suicide).

Publications

Collections

Opere. 16 vols., 1960-68.

Short Stories

Feria d'agosto. 1946; translated in part as Summer Storm and Other Stories, 1966.

Prima che il gallo canti (includes "Il carcere" and "La casa in collina"). 1949; "Il carcere" as "The Political Prisoner," in The Political Prisoner, 1959; "La casa in collina" as The House on the Hill, 1961.

La bella estate (includes "La bella estate," "Il diavolo sulle colline," "Tra donne sole"). 1949; "La bella estate" as "The Beautiful Summer," in The Political Prisoner, 1959; "Il diavolo sulle colline" as The Devil in the Hills, 1959; "Tra donne sole" as Among Women Only, 1953, and For Women Only, 1959.

Notte di festa. 1953; as Festival Night and Other Stories, 1964.

The Political Prisoner. 1959.

Fuoco grande, with Bianca Garufi. 1959; as A Great Fire, in The Beach, 1963.

Racconti. 1960; as Told in Confidence and Other Stories, 1971.

The Leather Jacket: Stories, edited by Margaret Crosland. 1980.

Novels

Paesi tuoi. 1941; as The Harvesters, 1961.

La spiaggia. 1942; as The Beach, 1963.

Dialoghi con Leucò. 1947; as Dialogues with Leucò, 1965.

Il compagno. 1947; as The Comrade, 1959.

La luna e i falò. 1950; as The Moon and the Bonfires, 1952; as The Moon and the Bonfire, 1952.

Ciau Masino. 1969.

Poetry

Lavorare stanca. 1936; revised edition, 1943; as Hard Labor, 1979.

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (includes La terra e la morte). 1951.

Poesie edite e inedite, edited by Italo Calvino. 1962.

A Mania for Solitude: Selected Poems 1930-1950, edited by Margaret Crosland. 1969; as Selected Poems, 1971.

Other

La letteratura americana e altri saggi. 1951; as American Literature: Essays and Opinions, 1970.

Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950. 1952; as The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950, 1961; as This Business of Living, 1961.

8 poesie inedite e quattro lettere a un'amica. 1964.

Lettere 1924-50, edited by Lorenzo Mondo. 2 vols., 1966; asSelected Letters 1924-1950, edited by A. E. Murch, 1969.

Selected Works, edited by R. W. Flint. 1968.

Vita attraverso le lettere, edited by Lorenzo Mondo. 1973.

La collana viola: lettere 1945-1950. 1991.

Translator, Il nostro signor Wrenn, by Sinclair Lewis. 1931.

Translator, Moby Dick, by Melville. 1932.

Translator, Riso nero, by Sherwood Anderson. 1932.

Translator, Dedalus, by Joyce. 1934.

Translator, Il 42° parallelo, by John Dos Passos. 1935.

Translator, Un mucchio de quattrini, by John Dos Passos. 1937.

Translator, Autobiografia di Alice Toklas, by Gertrude Stein. 1938.

Translator, Moll Flanders, by Defoe. 1938.

Translator, David Copperfield, by Dickens. 1939.

Translator, Tre esistenze, by Gertrude Stein. 1940.

Translator, Benito Cereno, by Melville. 1940.

Translator, La rivoluzione inglese del 1688-89, by G. M. Trevelyan. 1941.

Translator, Il cavallo di Troia, by Christopher Morley. 1941.

Translator, Il borgo, by Faulkner. 1942.

Translator, Capitano Smith, by R. Henriques. 1947.

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Critical Studies:

Three Italian Novelists: Moravia, Pavese, Vittorini by Donald W. Heiney, 1968; The Smile of the Gods: A Thematic Study of Pavese's Works by Gian-Paolo Biasin, 1968; The Narrative of Realism and Myth: Verga, Lawrence, Faulkner, Pavese by Gregory L. Lucente, 1981; Pavese: A Study of the Major Novels and Poems by Doug Thompson, 1982; An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Pavese by Davide Lajolo, 1983; Pavese by Áine O'Healy, 1988; "Woman as Conquered Landscape in Cesare Pavese's La luna e i falo" by Laura A. Salsini, in Cincinnati Romance Review, 1993, pp. 177-85; "The Value and Devaluation of Nature and Landscape in Pavese's La luna e i falo" by Christopher Concolino, in Italian Culture, 1993, pp. 273-84.

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The novels and short fiction of Cesare Pavese feature the recurring, tormented figure that is by now legendary. The motifs in his short fiction, often elaborated in his novels, radiate around a knot of irresolvable conflicts and spiritual angst that is both autobiographical and reflective of the social and literary tenor of Italy in the 1930s and 1940s. Pavese's work is informed by his anti-Fascist experience—which takes a number of forms, including the development of the myth of America, common to other writers, such as Vittorini; his internment ("Land of Exile"); and his many disappointments in love. He depicts the cruelty of human nature—of man toward woman ("Wedding Trip," "Suicides") and woman toward man ("The Idol")—as well as the natural cycles that govern our world. The poignancy and power of Pavese's writing stems from the lyricism of a remote past that is revisited and from the often tragic mire of irreconcilable elements. These include a host of mutually exclusive impulses within the male protagonist. The desire to return to his homeland and his childhood is offset by the sense of non-belonging that follows him everywhere. His inability to put down roots undermines his need for roots. His desire for happiness shrivels under his hopelessness. The fulcrum on which these conflicts balance is the theme of solitude: Pavese's male protagonists fashion for themselves a self-containment that breeds that very solitude from which they suffer.

Perhaps the short story "The Family" is the best exemplification of just such an emotional trap. At the age of almost 30, Corradino begins to revisit the river where he and his friends had often gone boating in their youth. The motif of a return (elsewhere in the form of an immigrant returning from America) is characteristic of Pavese's narrative. Corradino's friends know that Corradino hates to be alone and that in the evening he abandons his furnished room for his friends' homes. Nonetheless, he decides to spend July, when his friends are away on vacation, in Turin and goes alone each day to the river to smoke and swim and meditate.

His simultaneous love and horror of solitude become more evident as Corradino struggles with the reality, rooted in a vision of Freudian predeterminism, of his own—and presumably a universal—inability to change. He tells his friend's wife that he would have to be deeply tanned if he were ever to get married: "Because it changes me. I feel a different man" (translated by A. E. Murch). Yet he has a longing "for something to happen to change his life without robbing him of a single of his old habits."

Corradino affirms that a child of six years old already has all the characteristics of the man. Yet soon Corradino meets Cate, an old girlfriend he dropped years ago, who has changed; she is now a sophisticated, self-confident, and financially self-sufficient woman of 28 years. Confronted by his past in Cate, Corradino feels at a loss, discomfited by the conviction that it is now she who no longer seems to desire or need him. Cate's new independence grows more alarming when she suddenly announces that she has a son, Dino, and shortly thereafter announces that the child is his. Cate further confounds him by making absolutely no demands on him, and Corradino is torn by disbelief, resentment that the three women in her family raised Dino without him, and fear that he will be imposed upon, that he is now trapped. In an ironic parallel storyline his lover Ernesta calls, and he treats her with the same coolness and indifference with which he must once have treated Cate.

Corradino acknowledges to himself that he has never been involved with anyone, that he has had plenty of women but has dropped them all, and that he has "shirked all … [his] responsibilities." The ultimate irony is that when he finally decides to ask the elusive Cate to marry him, she rejects him, for she is in love with another man. She explains to him that in fact she has changed while he has not. His decision to drop her in the past has had irreversible consequences. Revisiting the past has shown him that he lived only a fraction of what there was to be lived, and Corradino is left on the fringes of "the family."

Many of Pavese's male protagonists share this feeling of exile—emotional, social, and familial. This exile is internal—and to some extent self-inflicted—as well as external. In "Land of Exile" the protagonist's restlessness follows him into the internment and home again to Piedmont (Pavese's birthplace). Often, this sense of restlessness revolves around the female figure, for woman in Pavese is fundamentally different from man, alternately cause and victim of the protagonists' unhappiness. It would perhaps not be going too far to say that in Pavese's narrative the woman functions as the man's natural enemy. She is both threat to his solitude and relief from it. In "Wedding Trip" Cilia's husband, the narrator, laments his solitude even more than her untimely death. Yet his killing indifference through their marriage was caused by his thwarted desire for freedom from all commitments, as embodied in the free-roaming, adventurous figure of Malagigi.

In "Suicides," another story of the cruel war between the sexes, the spurned Carlotta kills herself. Her lover, torn between guilt and bitterness, reveals the impossibility of harmony in Pavese's narrative when he confesses, "So, having been treated unjustly, I revenged myself, not on the guilty one but on another woman, as happens in this world."

—Tommasina Gabriele