LIFE
POETIC
THEMATIC
Life
Cesare Pavese was born in S. Stefano Belbo, a country of the Langhe, in 1908. His father, magistrate clerk of the court of Turin, had a farm in the Langhe, where Cesare spent the summer holidays when he was a boy. To those places of the infancy, mythicized in the symbols of an indelible memory, he remained always tied up also in the years of the maturity; rather they will have a conclusive value in his life and in his poetic. This happiness of the boy lasts up until 1916; then the farm and the cottage were sold after his father’s death.
In Turin Cesare completed his first studies and he had as teacher Augusto Monti, who later had to be a point of reference of the liberal Turinese youths and an exceptional teacher of a whole generation of patriots.
His literary vocation was manifested soon and with a not common seriousness in a young man. Neither we don’t have to forgive that he forms himself in that Piedmontese culture that was to the vanguard with Gobetti, Gramsci and then Ginzburg. The 20th June 1930 he was graduated in Letters discussing with Ferdinando Neri a thesis Sulla interpretazione della poesia di Walt Whitman, that constituted the start of a long Americanist activity and, also the initial model of his poetic texts. In fact he has begun since the November of that same year his collaboration to the " Cultura ", directed by Cajumi, with a critical essay on S. Lewis, to which others on Anderson, Lee Masters, Melville, Dos Passos, G. Stein, Whitman, Faulkner will follow. These essays were followed soon, by magistral translations from the American and from the English.
In the American writers he looked for new realistic models, that confirmed and clarified him his impatience against the dominant aesthetical hermetic and rondist forms in Italy. In a certain sense he, discovering the new American literature, tried to discover himself and he began a deep breakup against the Italian official culture; in this way, also without wanting, he toke sides with that political culture of the Resistance that will be converged in the Communist Party.
But to this fact also some family circumstances contribute; his mother dies in 1931; and he continues to live with the family of his sister Maria in Turin, but more and more he shut himself up. Not having enrolled in the fascist party, he had to adapt himself to teach for a few time in private and evening Institutes. The opening of the publisher house Einaudi sees him among the first collaborators with Monti, Ginzburg, Geymonat, Mila, Antonicelli, Cajumi and Levi. In 1934 Ginzburg, having been halted for political motives, he replaces him in the direction of the " Cultura "; of this period is his love for a teacher of mathematics, hard and volitive woman, busy in the clandestine Communist Party. Because of this love he suffered one of the most violent frustrations of his life. He had accepted to receive some political letters, directed to his woman; but the police stormed in his residence halting him. Tried and convicted, he was envoyed to the confinement to Brancaleone Calabro for three years in 1935.
The magazine was suppressed and the leaving from Turin didn't certainly contribute to improve his introverted and meditative nature. After a year of confinement, the others two were remitted and he could return in his country and in his city, but the teacher he loved had already married with another man the previous year. His big trauma , his unadaptability to the life starts here; it is a serious crisis, that will hold him suspended in a tormenting obsession of suicide for years. So he closed himself in a desperate isolation, finding shelter only in the literature and starting untiringly to work again . The testimonies of this internal suffering are found in a diary, Il mestiere di vivere, that will be published in 1952.
In 1936, at the return from the confinement, he publishes his first collection of poetries, Lavorare stanca for the editions of " Solaria ". Few people will appreciate it, also because few people will understand it, because his collection a new book, made with an unknown prose technique in Italy. Meanwhile he had returned near the Casa Einaudi, where he takes back with energy and success the job of translator. In 1941 he published the novel Paesi tuoi, written in 1939, that had a certain success of critique.
In 1940 the fascist war starts; he was called up, but for a serious form of asthma he is dismissed. In 1942 he publishes La spiaggia, a novel of which he will be soon ashamed because it isn’t engaged. In 1943 he is in Rome, where the Casa Einaudi has opened a branch; but the armistice of 8th September 1943 gathers him to Turin. After the disbandment of the army and the conquest of the Germans, he sheltered with the family of his sister to Serralunga of Crea in the Monferrato. Those hills, remembering him his Langhe, presented him again the myths of his youth.
The 1944 is for him a year of grace and rest, dedicated to the meditation, that the presence of the partisans doesn't even succeed to upset. He teaches in an institute of Padri Somaschi, to Casale, and he sees them with assiduousness discussing with them. It seems that he is to the threshold of a religious conversion. But after the Liberation he is again in Turin that he finds very changed, he enrolles, without conviction, to the Communist Party and he collaborates to the newspaper “L’Unità". Meanwhile the novel Il compagno (1947) wins the prize Salerno consecrating him as busy author in a new literary realism. In 1950 he got the prize Strega for the triptique of La bella estate.
He meets a young American actress, Constance Dawling, he falls in love with her, he writes cinema subjects for her, he dedicates her his last novel La luna e i falò. But the beautiful actress will move to America leaving him alone; the 27th June 1950 Pavese killed himself in a room of a hotel of Carlo Felice square in Turin swallowing numerous packet of sleeping pill. On the frontispiece of his work staid on the night table, his last words could be read, the same of Majakovskij: I forgive everybody and I ask pardon to everybody. Does it go well? You don’t have to do many gossips.
In Lavorare stanca, there is a group of busy lyrics, where Pavese’s realism, also participating to the workers appeals and recalling some martyrs of the syndical struggle, he doesn't succeed sometimes to go over the frame and the technique.
A big part of the lyrics of Lavorare stanca doesn't overcome the terms of a serious Neorealistic experiment , of a series of stylistic techniques, but despite the realistic intentions and the new techniques, Pavese has not succeeded in creating a new way to make poetry and his place as poet is well soon overcome by that of narrator. Insofar Lavorare stanca ends to have a marginal value in comparison to his narrative art.
Between 1938 and 1939 Il carcere was born, later published with the novel La casa in collina in 1949 in the volume Prima che il gallo canti. The motive of the confinement, bouncing from the poetry to the stories, finally finds its full artistic realization in this novel, whose original title would had to be Memorie di due stagioni, but that then took the title Il carcere. The moral situation of Stefano, protagonist of the novel, is a resumption and a psychological deepening of the theme of who is looking the life from the window without succeeding in having or establishing any contact with the reality. Either Il carcere that other stories remained for a long time unpublished and they brought to the author a lot as experiments and apprenticeship for a new fiction and new realistic themes , over that for the search of a Neorealistic style .
Paesi tuoi, written in 1939 and published in 1941, is not only the novel that revealed Pavese narrator to the critique, but it fixes the year to which the official birth of Neorealism traces its origins in the Italian fiction. In that occasion the official critique was expedited to catalog Pavese among the neoralists. Beyond of those polemics ( also the fascist critics didn't miss to underline the new style derived by Steinbeck).
The novel, putting in antithesis city and country, pointed out under that metaphoric contrast a substantial polemic against the fascist myths moving its objective not on themes of escape but on the contrary on strong passions, and on real problems.
In 1940 Pavese writes the novel La bella estate, that will be published in 1949 with Il diavolo sulle colline and Tra donne sole: La bella estate is distinguished not only for the poverty of the stylistic means, but also for a particular technique of mounting of the varied narrative sequences structured in short chapters, that condense in themselves a finished circumstance autonomously, almost as a diary objectively compiled. The dialogue structure is at the base of this novel and it is the dialogue and the internal monologue that set off the human dimension of the characters with great evidence.
In 1941 he wrote La spiaggia: the importance of this novel, that the same Pavese would have denied then because it wasn’t entgaged, consists in the clear presentation of the binomial city-country. For the first time Pavese moves his objective of narrator from the proletarian and farmer world to the world of the high middle class, putting in evidence its inside crisis.
In the years of the war Pavese will systematize his big theory of the myth and he will deepen his poetic fiction. Trying to save himself from the Naturalism through the poetic of the image-story that he has already replaced to the poetry-story . The aerial alarms on his city and the bombardments wake up him again an atavistic terror, a primitive reality, an almost animistic perception of the nature. Pavese’s myth is born and is in force in that climate of symbolic discoveries of the infancy, in that instinctive-irrational world that is really freed during the war.
The only and true inspiration can be born from the myths, when these are believed. "It is not by chance that many artists resort to the infancy and try to go up again the river of the memory to approach to the larval and instinctive world of the origins. To go up again the course of the memory, also entrusting ourselves as Proust to the pure feeling, it seems however an inadequate way to Pavese: the feeling is always memory and therefore subjected to the colorings of taste. It is necessary instead to know how to neglect the glorious memories and to withdraw to dig the monotonous and neutral zones, to give up the memory to dig in the actual reality and to bare the own essence. The inspiration is a real illumination, it is religious ecstasy and of such fullness, that threats to overwhelm the artist" (Mondo).
In this climate he writes Ferie d’agosto in the ' 41 - ' 44 (publishing them in the ' 46), a collection of stories and aesthetical proses on the myth, the group of lyrics La terra e la morte (1945 - ' 47) and the Dialoghi con Leucò (1945 - ' 47), that constitute his more specific book of this theory of the myth, and in which he conformed his conception of the world and the art.
It would be useful to read these dialogues to realize that Pavese’s book was estranged by Neoralism, despite he was persisted to sustain it in 1946 - ' 47 with the novel Il compagno , with which he paid his tribute to the political engagement in the Communist Party.
Pavese, in 1945, had already written in “L’Unità" the article Ritorno all’uomo and on " Rinascita" Dialoghi con il compagno, in which he justified the position and the meaning that the literate of Left hired in the political context of a society that had gone out of the war and it had freed from Fascism after the struggle of the Resistance.
Obviously it is about elaborate writings and compiled in the euphoria of the Liberation and in the wait of a new and renewed world, where, according to Pavese, it had to be saved the opening of the man toward the man. But the engagement of Pavese happened after a long elaboration of decadent myths, disguised of American Realism.
The critique welcomed favorably Il compagno in the immediate postwar period, when the necessity of a politically busy literature was more alive. " But all it takes is wanting to write a busy novel to make work of poetry. The failure is notable to the eyes of the critique, after some decade from his success.
La casa in collina (1947 - ' 48, but published in 1949) is, instead, an authentic novel of the Resistance, really because it has as protagonist an intellectual. It is obvious, also in this novel, the reference to the autobiographic experience of Pavese who has taken refuge in the Langhe during the clandestine period. All the plot of the story is interwoven, of tragic sense of the life, that now Pavese has risen to pathos and anguish that runs over all the men, defeated and winners, pooled by the sad destiny of the life that disappears in the nothing irreparably.
Il diavolo sulle colline, with La bella estate and Tra donne sole, got the prize in the ' 49. The novel is a juvenile hymn on the discovery of the nature and the society: to the three boys, protagonists of the story, it seems all beautiful, and only little by little everyone takes contact in his way with the sordidness of the bourgeois world that doesn't do anything, that doesn't believe to anything.
In the novel Tra donne sole the characters rotate within a sphere of incommunicability and egoism that makes them deprived of every motion of pity or humanity. Also Clelia, the positive character, assists impotent to the silent tragedy that is acted around her; herself is a déracinée who is not able to choose her own destiny, even if her will-power seems apparently to save her from the fate of the other alone women.
In this woman Pavese has realized the last attempt to believe to a life that can be the only product of our abilities. Clelia is one of the few creatures that are saved, because she knows how to accept her loneliness as her job, also refusing the consolation of the love and the sex.
The last Pavese’s novel, written in 1949 and published in 1950, La luna e i falò, develops in higher and finished elegy the theme of the return.
Anguilla, the protagonist of the novel, is a typical character of Pavese, one who returns and to follow again in pilgrimage the mythical places of the infancy, contemplated with pleasure as the only way to draw the fullness of the provision and the awareness of his own destiny. But the reality intervenes always to lacerate the veil of the memory, because the past is lost forever.
It’s for this reason that La luna e i falòcan be thought the definitive work of Pavese: because it represents the return to the infancy, but […] to find in it the oblivion, that is the not-humanity, but rather as the revision of an interpretative form of the reality with which the little boy had given life to the things of which the man will discovers substantial moral insubstantiality . The big bonfire [...] has just this meaning. To find again irrimediably himself different from the boy of once, and to accept the new reality made of conscience, represents the overcoming of the wildness, [...] and the aching heartache to see that mythical landscape melt, it is the strive completed by the man to be saved from the regressive trial that would condemn him to the perpetual inaction, that is to the amorality of the isolation" (Mollia).
Poetic
It always emerges in Pavese an internal contrast, a leading antinomy, between his innate decadent taste and his firm intentions to establish or to experiment a new literature of realistic anglo-American type, from Defoe to Dickens, from Melville to Joyce, from Lewis to Dos Passos and to Stein, of which he furnished exemplary and symbolic interpretations.
In fact the modern American writers (Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Faulkner) assimilated by him so much to result in an original form of contamination between the Piedmontese hills and the American landscapes of the South, between the underalpin outskirtses and the American megalopolis, gave to Pavese a stimulus and a mean of moral and ideological liberation, an occasion of protest and search in realistic key, during a period of our culture dominated by the political redemption of the literates and by the Ermetism; but that Neorealistic lesson, was contaminated since the beginning by the European decadent culture and it always reappeared between the lines and the good intentions of renewal.
The neorealistic vocation , the true lesson of Realism that was contained in Verga’s work, had developed instead by the cinema directors, who, at least in the first moment, knew how to offer us an authentic realistic art.
We cannot affirm that Pavese is to the American realists, as Verga is to the French naturalists. Verga, in fact, composed realistic art after he had freed definitely from all the romantic and sentimental residues, while Pavese brought with himself in the realistic world of his novels the suffering of his own existential problems, the anguish of his loneliness, his tragic elegy.
Insofar Pavese, in every work of his, denounces this leading dissension between his authentic lyric-elegiac inspiration and the intention to fold up his vocation to ideological demands, that at first can be those of the American Realism, and then those of the Marxism, understood as moment of breakup of the incommunicability and insertion in the society. Therefore he remains always a lyricist, because in him the tragic elegy will always returns to grow thick as feeling of the melancholy of the provision, also when he will believes to have resolved such elegy in an objective and realistic story, as it happens for her beautiful summer and The moon and the bonfires.
We can say immediately that Pavese, since he suffered fully the insidious suggestions of the contemporary irrazionalism in all his varied psychological and sociologicalmand ethnological demonstrations, because he felt the incurable contradictions of the modern man and the alienated society, he tried to make strong and to defend himself with his humanistic culture against every irrational dispersion in the artistic center. Of here the awareness and the conciseness of his style opposite to the irrationality of the feelings, the health of his poetic word opposite to the constant absurd vice of the loneliness and the death.
And he pointed out as the first realization of these velleities of his the poetry The seas of the south, in which he had passed from a lyricism of outlet to the tone of a peaceful and clear story. And such poetry-story, is a form of objective poetry in the spoken language and in the form of the verse: a first start of the neorealistic poetic. To translate, this deliberate world in a realized artistic world, has been then, for Pavese another thing, mails the premises of his fundamental decadent culture. Subsequently Pavese will have the tendency to overcome the naked and simple psychological and chronistic recording, the cult of the immediate objectivity, moderating the technique and the poetic of the poetry-story and of the image-story, as in the Landscapes.
Undoubtedly Pavese warned a big uneasiness in the contemporary Italian culture; but it is very probable that he transferred indiscriminately the political uneasiness and the crisis of the society and the modern conscience in the field of the poetry and the hermetic and rondist art, and, therefore, he saw in that art the essential aspect of that society in moral breakup. And he declared openly it in The work of poet in an epoch of pure art, of prose of art, of attenuate poetry, really when the Italian prose was an exhausted interview with itself and the poetry a suffered silence, he assumed antihermetic and antirondist attitudes antiermetici and, discovering in the alive and realistic language of the American literature themes and realistic forms that had a new historical perspective of true vanguard. And this because his point of start was an objective realistic poetry, a poetry-story.
My taste wanted an essential expression of essential facts but not the usual introspective abstraction, expressed in that language, because it was of books, allusive. Pavese’s Realism has remained merely, therefore, a deliberate fact, sometimes also in contrast with his authentic elegiac vocation; and to such intention it is very indicative that really in the years of the triumph of the Neoralism in the literature and in the cinema Pavese writes the Dialogues with Leucò "where, to the opposite one, the nature will be represented soaked of doubt, of mystery, of anguish…" (Stella).
For his style, however, his language and his cultural function he was an authentic teacher and popularizer of realistic literature, beyond of his artistic realizations.
We have asked, following this, how Pavese can have been considered a teacher of the Realism, if his poetic is how much more decadent that has ever been in Italy, and if it is true that the Realism has to be understood as overcoming of every form of Decadentism and also as affirmation of the positive and progressive values of the life. Indeed we have to consider Pavese’s introspective temperament, who knew how to be man of action in any occasion and to come to direct contact with the reality of the social life, even during the period of the partisan struggle, that he had to admire and to understand. We have to consider, then, his cultural formation, that is a decadent type, but enriched by psychological ethnological studies, and by the literature American so rich in social unrests. We have to consider also the political and social condition in which he lived; he found on his way nationalism, idealism, the old message of our humanistic tradition in crisis and he lived the whole arc of the involution of the civil life of our Country, fallen in the fascist dictatorship and he was found in polemic with the official culture, rather with the culture that was the cultural breakup of the fascist years.
Thematic
One of the main themes in Pavese’s work is the description of the psychological situation of the man definitely closed in a moral jail, in an absolute incommunicability, that gives unitary tone to the novel compiled according to the technique of the image story and in form of internal monologue with opportune interruptions of conversed parts stretched out toward the dialect (Prima che il gallo canti)
Paesi tuoi represents the result of that cultural operation of widening of the Italian literary culture of which Pavese, with Vittorini, was one of the greatest protagonists in the years between 1930 and the ' 40, through the introduction in Italy of the realistic anglo-American fiction realistic. As the American writers in their provinces wanted to discover the tragedy of the man, so Pavese wanted to reveal in Paesi tuoi the reserves of more sincere humanity guarded in his province, the hidden and unknown ferments of the life of the fields, reviving them with the experiences and the narrative techniques of the new American literature. Certainly the author's attention moved on some least comforting aspects of the reality, more rough, as well as the use of the elementary ways of the language, shows the remain in Italy of the big lesson of the Realism of the ninenteenth century of Verga and Balzac, but with the addition of the decadent and neorealistic experience. As the writer in the naturalism had to disappear in front of the reality, now he has to disappear also in front of the charater (La bella estate).
With La spiaggia one of the recurrent themes begins in Pavese, that is that of the opposition between cities, thought as maturity and responsibility and country thought as infancy and contemplation of the juvenile memories. This theme will be taken back in other works as Il diavolo sulle colline where two socially different worlds are put to direct contrast, of which they are respectively exponents on one side the three students sons of country or populate families, and from the other Poles, his wife and his Milanese friends. Nevertheless between the varied protagonists, despite the difference of the social classes, there is not a rigid demarcation, that can legitimate the satire to the middle class as only theme, even if at least in appearance, the antithetical terms city-country, infancy-maturities, also here seem to put in relief this duality of values, with the moral preference for the health of the world of the country.
In Dialoghi con Leucò Pavese interprets again the figures of the Greek mythology to the light of his modern culture founded upon the studies of ethnology, of Freud and of the existentialism. Heroins and heroes of the Greek and mythological world become the projection of the myths of the mind and the feeling of the author, to the same manner of the Operette morali for Leopardi.
"The ideological velleities, also generous, that were the big misunderstanding of the Neorealistic period, they don't even save up Pavese, at least for that that Il compagno concerns, a novel written apparently for a rightful admission of political faith; […]. Il compagno wants to be the recovery of the ideological reasons for the Resistance through the description of a destiny, that of Pablo who from the dark of the conscience, he reaches to the awareness of the why he lives and he fights" (Venturi).
In La casa sulla collina, the theme of Il carcere returns: the impossibility to participate in the history without compromises; problem that he had partly narrated in the story La famiglia.
The theme of the return, of the infancy of the country is taken back in La luna e i falò. To the legionary that looked for the traces of his past in the places of his infancy he doesn't remain but to accept the extraneousness to his country and, departing, to ascertain, oppressed by now by the past and by the present, that
to grown means to go, to grow old, to see to die, to find again the Mora as it was now.
The whole conclusion of the novel is founded upon the verification of the law of the death that is connaturated to the things of the man and the life.
" Ripeness is all (to mature is everything): it is the sentence that, on purpose in the dedication of this last volume, Pavese had done his in the meditations of the diary. Here it represents the result of an internal trial that brings Pavese to see again if the same little boy in the rediscovery of the vineyard, of the hill, that, out of the time and of the space, they reassume the perspective of an infancy that is not yearning, or recherche du temps perdu of Proust, but instinctive identification with an actuality lived in the tragic awareness not to be able to be never himself if not when the myth, becoming conscience, will be dissolved, and will have replaced by the full human morality, that is history.
“It is known that to the origin of the Pavese’s poetic there is the discovery of the infancy as the age in which the man completes his fundamental experiences. It is in the infancy that we have the first contact with the world and that the symbols are created, the myths, correspondents to the single revelations of the things […]. The following experiences are to know a second time, to rediscover and to reduce that myths to clarity. […] To the opposition between infancy and maturity is placed side by side, as equivalent, that between country and city on the historical plan, that between the primitive age of the man, enormous and wild, and the civil and cult age. We have arrived [...] to the contemplation of a mythical and irrational world, point of departure of the whole European Decadentism [...]" (Salinari).