Into the Valley

THE BURNING BRAND (368 pp.)--Cesore Pavese--Walker ($7.50).

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL (192 pp.)--Cesore Pavese--Walker ($3.95).

At his death in 1950, Italy's Cesare Pavese was a novelist ranked by his countrymen with Elio Vittorini and Alberto Moravia. He was also a highly respected poet and the foremost interpreter and translator of American literature in Italy. Ironically, he is little known in the U.S., perhaps because he wrote a poet's kind of novel (The Moon and the Bonfires) whose language faded in translations.

The Burning Brand, the journal Pavese kept from 1935-50. may well bring his novels into vogue. It is a haunting book, at once a cry of anguish, a case history, and a series of thoughtful notes on the art of fiction. Like any diary not intended for other eyes but not effectually shielded from them, the journal is an invitation to soul-peep, teasing the reader with questions: Which revelations are honest, which are subterfuges, and how clearly did the confessor see the difference? Pavese himself warns that "what I say may not be true, but the fact that I say it betrays my inner being." Suicide was Pavese's most constant preoccupation, and a few days after the last words were written, he killed himself by swallowing sleeping pills. There are false notes almost to the end, but the last entries have the sickening truth of skid marks on a mountain road. The reader peers into the valley, fascinated with the wreckage, and somehow embarrassed to be present and whole.

Not Words, an Act. The most obvious cause (although certainly not the deepest-lying one) of his spasms of melancholy and eventual suicide was ludicrous and pathetic: although not impotent, he could not make love satisfactorily. "It is a failing that makes suicide worthwhile," he wrote in 1937. His life by that time had become a series of failed love affairs and slow convalescences. At his high points he could theorize about the construction of the ideal female breasts, or amuse himself with quips ("Rome is a crowd of young men waiting to have their shoes polished"). But always the diary entries turn to despair, and the joking becomes brackish: "No would-be suicide can endure the thought of anything so meaningless as being run over or dying of pneumonia. So beware of draughts and street corners."

Pavese's last courting of death seems to have been deliberate, as perhaps the others were. At the height of his fame he fell in love with a pretty, heedless American actress. After she broke off their affair, he penned a line of furtive self-knowledge in an agonized love letter: "Yet even you are only a pretext . . ." She was just that, for Pavese yearned to die, and did, after a final entry: "All this is sickening. Not words. An act. I won't write any more."

The trouble with knowing this is that one is tempted to regard it as an easy key to the author (when clearly the busy, successful literary man is as real as the agonized lover) and a road map of his work. Pavese's journal is a strong argument for the theory that one should know nothing at all about an author. A look at his brief, excellent novel, The House on the Hill, shows why.

Relearned Lesson. The hero is a Turin schoolteacher who has cut himself off from all but casual contact with his fellows. It is the winter of 1943-44; the people of Turin take to the hills each night to escape Allied bombing. The teacher, Corrado, drifts into the company of an underground group. One of the members is Gate, a former mistress, and he suspects that he is the father of her son Dino. But Gate does not want to take up with him again, and although he likes Dino, he does not press her. Eventually she is arrested, and he loses track of the boy. Feeling only vague remorse, he walks through the hills to his parents' home in San Stefano Belbo. There his immunity from feeling gradually vanishes. The chaotic, tag-end war comes nearer: "We are being driven from one hiding place to the next like so many hunted hares. In the end [the war] will force us to fight too, extorting an active consent from us." Corrado begins to accept what has been distasteful to him (and what Pavese never resigned himself to)--complicity in the frightening crime of being human.

Earnest readers, equipped with the half-truths of the journal, will equate the hero's unnamed hurts with the author's specific sexual wounds and assume that Pavese is the hero of his own ink-and-paper daydream. He is not, for the simple reason that Corrado accepts life as the author could not. The cause of Corrado's estrangement from humanity is kept ambiguous, not because it is a Freudian acrostic but because the ambiguity lets the author make a general statement about the human condition.

Thus journal and novel teach a lesson that amateur psychologists might well (but probably will not) take to heart: the art is never the man, the novel cannot be understood by psychoanalyzing the novelist. In fact, a novel can be ruined by a reader almost as easily as it can be botched by a writer.

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