Last February, a leading newspaper that is proposing the most relevant works of Italian 20th century fiction to its readers chose Cesare Pavese’s The house on the hill, a short novel written in 1948. The debates, praise and even controversy raised by this book’s return are proof that Pavese’s myth surpasses time.

Born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, Langhe, he took his life on Sunday, August 27 1950 in a hotel room in Turin. He took an overdose of sleeping pills. Five months prior to the event Pavese wrote in a disconsolate love poem: “It will be like giving up a vice, / like looking in the mirror /to see a dead face appear, / like listening to closed lips. / We shall descend mute into the whirlpool”.



He kept that desperate appointment. That Sunday, August 27 1950, he only wrote a brief message: “I forgive all and I ask all to forgive me. Is that all right? Don’t gossip too much”. Let us repeat the question: why is Pavese’s myth still alive despite his course after his death has not only been marked by positive moments. Around 1960, when the reverberations of his suicide died out and his lines of love for the American actress Constance Dowling were categorized as a crepuscular “love story” (and not because they were, but for the ordinary use that was made of them), his decline seemed unavoidable.
The filing process was speeded up with an effort.
The Langhe kingdom, the painful and magical setting of novels and stories, became excessively rural. Pavese’s other themes (the contrast between city and country, the anguish of the urban drift, the rural background, man’s impossibility to communicate with man, the inexhaustible meditation on death) created a picture that seemed equally and inconsistently open to Neorealism and late Romanticism.
Even his suicide, the object of ordinary interpretations – why not mention it? – was turned into a political and sexual crisis. Pavese’s return (but, considering post-war generations, it is more accurate to speak of discovery) took place in 1970. This return-discovery increasingly and clearly appears as the 1968-69 protest’s delayed effect. Just as if, once that resounding tide had subsided sweeping away moorings that had stood for decades, Pavese’s life and works should suddenly seem a haven, a steady compass. We have already stated his topics. Let us also mention his antifascism and youthful passion for American literature. But antifascism and even broader cultural horizons were not only typical of Cesare Pavese.


Despite being a real, existent and looming factor, the impossibility to communicate has by now risked and still risks becoming consumer goods. There remains the suicide, as Camus said, “The freedom of coming to an agreement with death”.
But, what kind of suicide? Was it the suicide of a man who wished to escape from other men? Suicide – the picture is still Camus’ – “prepared like a great masterpiece in the silence of the heart”? Dostoevskji’s “Tomorrow’s void”? A sacrifice to the “Wild God”, for which reason “suicide for Pavese was as unavoidable as sunrise”, as a British critic once wrote, “and an event that all this world’s praise and success could not postpone”?
There is some truth in each of these theories. But they all consider Pavese’s suicide a barren land into which the tiring effort to live (or the defeated “profession of living”, to use Pavesian terms) would have ventured in the name of deep, dark tendencies.
Pavese wrote: “The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it”.
The unconscious seems to be placed aside. There is rather a clear will to pay: pay for what we are not, for the impossibility to adjust to society because society imposes duties and masks that deny both freedom and justice.
Pavese is one who has paid in a world where nobody pays. A self-analyst, he built his death like a theorem of consistent anguish. His figure’s appeal is born of a refusal of things that are usually not refused.
His book The beautiful summer won the Strega award a few days before his death, thus fame was achieved and his praise was sung. But the relations that type of life demanded were unbearable and this is why he paid: the man from Langhe in the limelight, the man who writes of love and the man who can barely take a glimpse at love or is repaid with unfaithfulness, the bourgeois who seeks people and is looked on with mistrust. Others prosper on similar ambiguity.
Pavese neither wished to nor did he know how to do it.
The last chapter of the House on the hill (probably the peak of Pavese’s fiction) begins thus: “Nothing has happened. I have been at home for six months and war goes on. Rather, now that the weather is getting worse, the armies on the main fronts have gone back to their trenches and another winter will go by. We shall see snow again. We shall form a circle around the fire to listen to the radio…”.
The speaker is Corrado, the narrating self, a professor who has left the city of Turin and has taken refuge in the mountains without on the other hand a clear awareness of participating in the battle: “This war burns our houses. It sows dead executed in open squares and roads. It chases us like hares from refuge to refuge. It will end up by forcing us to fight, to wring out an active approval. And the day will come when nobody will be outside the war, neither cowards, nor the sad, nor the lonely”. Let us repeat once again - it was 1948. Pavese wrote in that last chapter, “But I saw the unknown dead, dead members of the Italian Social Republic. If a stranger, an enemy becomes such a thing when he dies, if we stop dead fearing to step over him, it means that even the defeated enemy is someone who after spilling blood must be pacified. This blood must be given a voice and those who spilled it must be justified. It is humiliating to look at certain dead. They are not others’ concern anymore… We feel humiliated because we understand that we could be that dead person: there would be no difference and if we are alive, we owe it to that blood smeared body. This is why every war is a civil war: every fallen person resembles those who remain and demands a reason from them”.
During the same years Pavese went with Giulio Einaudi on an advertising tour for the publishing house. I went from my town to Verona on bicycle to be able to shake hands with an author I dearly loved. Pavese’s smile behind his spectacles was shy and almost bewildered.

Transl. by interpres sas