...Don't gossip too much."

The gossiping began straight away, with newspapers querying the identity of various young ladies that accompanied the funeral procession, and has continued more or less unabated ever since. The formidable myth-building of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to various attempts at deconstructions and reconstructions in the 1990s. Myth and reality have been intermeshed to such degree, however, that it might be best to take a stoic approach and ponder the irony that such a situation after all, does reflect Pavese--a life torn between the need to reach out to timeless gods and everyday individuals, between solitude and company.

A suicide, as Tim Lott pointed out in his meditation in the Guardian on some of the reactions to the mass-murderer Harold Shipman's recent demise, shakes the foundations of our belief system, and we seek to redress our own balance by labelling the act as cowardly, wicked, tragic, or by some other tag. "Our perception of the suicide almost never fits with the reality, but this will not stop us. Like the suicide, the deepest part of ourselves is angry and afraid, and thus we always consider the assertion of our selves, more important than the facts."

Where poets are concerned, the suicide of a Sylvia Plath, Paul Celan or Cesare Pavese influences our reading of the words left behind. We search the poems as if they are cryptic clues to some hidden meaning that might explain the desperate act. But such a reading merely causes us to slide into gossip.

On the tenth anniversary of Pavese's death, Italo Calvino (in Pavese: Essere e Fare--Pavese: Doing and Being) wrote: "Too much has been said about Pavese in the light of his extreme act and not enough in the light of his battle won day after day against his own self-destructive drive." Calvino offers a rare portrait of a man whose laconic and unsociable traits were not a defensive shield against pain but "an internal iron shell able to contain the pain like the fire in a furnace". It is a portrait of a nervous man in the grip of a febrile creative activity.

Disregarding, indeed destroying, much of his teenage writings, Pavese set 1930 as the year he began his literary career. His output over the next twenty years was to fill sixteen volumes, spanning poetry, fiction, essays and diaries. To these should be added sixteen volumes of translations from English (which he taught himself as a teenager) beginning in 1931 with Sinclair Lewis's Our Mr Wren, followed by Melville's Moby Dick in 1932,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Quadrant
Not Bringing Home the Bacon.(Book Review), July 01, 2004
Corruption.(Poem), July 01, 2004
Betsy and the emperor.(Story)(Short Story), July 01, 2004
South Otago Sculptures.(Poem), July 01, 2004
Adders.(Poem), July 01, 2004

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