Cesare Pavese: Sources of Life, Shadows of Life | nd-aktuell.de

When Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime sent the poet Cesare Pavese into exile in 1935, he was allowed to continue working on his literature, but suffered immensely because his friends were away and vermin were spreading in his sparsely furnished room. In the remote village of Brancaleone in Calabria, his diary became the only conversation partner with whom the poet could exchange ideas and feelings that were constantly rumbling inside him.

It was created in stormy times. Mussolini ruled Italy dictatorially; the Second World War broke out on people with all its monstrous violence; After the long, bloody battles against fascism and National Socialism, there finally came a short phase in which the hope that the world could become a friendlier one blossomed. And Pavese always right in the middle of it all. He fought against the fascists, stood up for a different, civilized, cosmopolitan Italy, and became a member of the Communist Party in 1945. However, all of these external events were hardly reflected in his diary; instead, discussions with writing and literature, with love, mythology and religion. Pavese’s diary is the biography of his thought.

Nowadays, the majority of people in our part of the world are resolutely dismissive when religion is mentioned. This is usually said to be superstition, and all too often the root of fanaticism. Cesare Pavese, on the other hand, approached the texts of ancient Greek, Roman and Christian mythologies with a thirst for knowledge. Poetry and religion, he noted in his diary, are close relatives; Both are concerned with making our existence, which is in many ways mysterious, understandable. Pavese’s comments on modern American poets such as Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, whose books he translated into Italian, are numerous. Americans, the author noted admiringly, never see everyday things as ordinary, but rather as connected to a larger context.

His own style of writing, which Pavese gradually developed while immersing himself in ancient and modern texts, impresses with its simple, short sentences with which he soberly describes the concrete everyday reality. This was new, different, groundbreaking – an antidote to the pathetic glorification of homeland with which the fascists blanket the world. For Roberto Rossellini and the other directors who helped invent Italian neorealism in those years, Pavese was a formative stylistic role model.

Pavese’s style was an antidote to the pathetic glorification of home with which the fascists blanketed the world.

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When the poet talks about his numerous love euphorias and love setbacks in his diary, he touches on a hot topic in modern art history, namely the question of whether love doesn’t get in the way of artistic development? In his earlier years, Pavese had seen himself as someone who subordinated everything to writing and therefore could not live closely with anyone. A self-concept that was increasingly becoming cracked. In the case of the late Pavese, for example, we read that he no longer had the physical and mental strength to maintain the modern artistic ideal of an independent, solitary existence. The really great affirmation, he wrote, is love, the embrace of bodies.

When Pavese fell in love with the American actress Constance Dowling at the end of the 1940s, he hoped that he had found a woman for life, but, as had happened several times before, he was terribly disappointed. During this time, Pavese enjoyed great success. His books sold brilliantly and he enjoyed the reputation of a sought-after public intellectual and literary star in Italy. This obviously could not compensate for the increasingly severe depression that his diary reveals. In 1950, aged just 42, Pavese took his own life in a Turin hotel.

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There has been a lot of speculation about the motives. A lack of happiness in love and the repeated failure of Pavese’s relationships are considered to be the decisive trigger for the crime. The German literary researcher Verena Lenzen sees it differently. Pavese, she points out, took his inner contradictions and conflicts to such extremes in his writing that he could no longer endure them.

If you read his diary, you will encounter Pavese’s conflict page after page. Sometimes he resolutely asserts his desire for absolute freedom, sometimes just as resolutely his desire for lasting connection. At times he appears satisfied with the public recognition given to his books, at other times he is despondent because literature is merely a commodity that is used to make money for business people. Sometimes he celebrates the writers as monks of modernity who enable people to better recognize the deep dimensions of everyday life, sometimes he falls into deep resignation because the views of the masses are determined by pure propaganda and literature can do nothing about it. A few lines later he advises all writers to create a second source of income and to take up a profession that makes them independent of the constraints of the market. “At any given moment, the writer must be able to say: No, I’m not writing that.”

There are even passages in the diary of this literary-drunk poet where Pavese goes so far as to dismiss his passion out of hand. Much more important than all literature and all thought, he proclaims in it, is charity, which declares the pain of another to be a common fate and is therefore a prerequisite for a coexistence determined by goodness and justice. For such aspects, the perception of the egoist, whose future social dominance Pavese anticipates, is completely nailed down.

Cesare Pavese is certainly a writer from a long time ago. But his diary reads as if it had been written by someone who lives in the slalom of our day, which constantly requires violent intellectual conflicts and changes of position – and whose thinking simply does not want to fit together into a coherent, harmonious worldview.

But what sets Pavese apart is that he sticks to intellectuality. He is always ready to question positions once taken, to examine their consequences and their correctness, and to think further. Because in Pavese’s diary the myth of the brilliant and successful artist recedes and instead a person emerges in his needs, crises and weaknesses, it is a highly topical text.

Cesar Pavese: The Craft of Life. A.d. Italy. v. Maya Plow. Rotpunkt, 460 p., hardcover, €32.

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