Cesare Pavese was at the center of Italian literary life — an editor at Einaudi, his country’s chief translator and interpreter of American literature, and a relentlessly productive novelist — when he checked into Turin’s Hotel Roma in late August 1950 and killed himself with sleeping pills, two weeks short of forty-two. He had won the Strega Prize that year. In his diary he had written: “I am king. In the course of ten years, I have done it all.” Beside the bed, sixteen empty tranquilizer packets and a note: “I forgive everyone and ask forgiveness of everyone. Okay? Not too much gossip, please.”

Max Norman reviews a raft of new editions that recover the parts of Pavese that English readers lost — Hard Labor (the 1936 poems, in William Arrowsmith’s translation, reissued), The Leucothea Dialogues (the 1947 encounters with Greek myth, freshly translated by Minna Zallman Proctor), and The Craft of Living, the journals finally published complete in Julian Sachs’s translation.

  • Pavese’s first Italian Moby-Dick appeared in 1932, when he was twenty-three; he went on to translate Stein, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Sherwood Anderson.
  • American writing was his alternative to Fascist aesthetics — “To possess a tradition is less than nothing. It is only in searching for it that you can live it.”
  • Arrested in 1935 over letters written on behalf of Battistina “Tina” Pizzardo, an anti-Fascist Communist, he was sentenced to three years of internal exile in Calabria and released after less than eight months; he had joined the Fascist Party in 1933 only to work as a teacher.
  • He organized and edited his own diary in the days before his death, and wrote his suicide note on the title page of a copy of the Dialogues.

The essay’s sharpest turn is political. Unlike Beppe Fenoglio or Italo Calvino, Pavese did not join the Resistance; he joined the Communist Party in 1945 and wrote for L’Unità, producing The Comrade — “his most explicitly political book, and his worst.” Italian Communists were enraged by the fatalism of the Dialogues, published in 1947, and the postwar settlement gave them reason to be raw about justice: around fifteen thousand people were shot in score-settling after the war, but Togliatti’s 1946 amnesty meant few Fascists were ever prosecuted, while Partisans were purged from institutions. In 1948 the Americans intervened to block the left from power.

The Dialogues are set just after the Olympians defeated the Titans — a violent revolution with obvious resonance for a country that had been through dictatorship, occupation, and near civil war. Norman reads them not as an escape from history but as a way of handling what history produced: estrangement, confusion, guilt, shame, resignation, ambivalence. Pavese’s own formulation: “We fight mostly to not be something, for a form of liberation.” The late fiction does the same work — in The Moon and the Bonfires, the murder of a woman who collaborated with the Fascists reads as ritual sacrifice expressing a desire for justice rather than justice itself.

Norman is honest about the diaries, and about the man in them: prickly, pretentious, and “scarily misogynistic,” incapable of writing about women without the threat of violence. Moravia dismissed him as a “decadent provincial”; Pasolini called him mediocre. Twenty years on, the case for reading him is that his private preoccupations look less like decadence than like the honest record of a morally compromised moment — one whose myth of itself was, and still is, “not so much defeated as repressed.”