Vita Without the Dolce

THE SELECTED WORKS OF CESARE PAVESE translated by R. W. Flint. 390 pages. Farrar, Straus & G/roux. $6.95.

Cesare Pavese, who died a suicide at 42 in 1950, was probably Italy's most honored postwar writer, though he remains virtually unknown to U.S. readers. This collection of four novels ought to redress that situation. The translation is fluent, and each work bears the distinctive Pavesean coat of arms.

Autobiography is everywhere apparent. The fumbling, hesitant lover, the suicide-bent pessimist, the intellectual incapable of action, the Piedmontese boy who even in the city never loses his love for his native mountains--these are all Pavese. His characters are en gaged in a relentless search to figure out what it is they want from a prosaic life; that too was Pavese. He was a lonely man, and his narrators are lonely; they are wanderers, loving solitude and yet caught up in the senseless rush of people who have a need for febrile action, drink and meaningless sexual bouts.

Fighter Through the Mouth. The novels are almost naive in their simplicity. The Beach is an incident involving the tug of war between the sexes in a pointless marriage. Two seemingly compatible people are brought down by a typical Pavese monster: ennui. Not much here, but short and clean; no wasted words. The House on the Hill has bigger aims. Pavese was an anti-Fascist who was put in prison by the Mussolini regime, and then exiled to Calabria. Actually, he failed to do much more than sympathize with those who risked their lives. He was a fighter through the mouth, and it troubled him. The timid schoolteacher in The House on the Hill is again Pavese. The teacher loves the peasant partisans of the story but lacks their guts. He knows he is a coward, and he knows he is settling for survival.

Among Women Only is a wonderful tour de force about the self-made woman. The heroine is a Turin gamine with enough brains and beauty to make good in the silky Roman world of couture. She knows her men well, and her willingness to share their beds implies no regard for their superiority. She is the novel's narrator, but the disguise is transparent: it is still Pavese speaking. His observations about women are cutting, as when a restless wife concludes: "Living is really putting up with someone else and going to bed with him, whether you feel like it or not." And it is still Pavese speaking as narrator in The Devil in the Hills. Here he returns to the Piedmontese hills, where he is confronted with the senseless incursions of vice from the cities and a rich young man drugging and drinking himself to death--all placed in a framework of nature accurately observed.

Pavese feared impotence, was never happy in love, and failed for the last time with a young U.S. movie actress. In his suicide note he wrote: "Don't gossip." But of course everyone did--and not, perhaps, simply about the unsuccessful love affair. For Pavese's complex character has left friends and critics guessing ever since. These novels prompt the suspicion that he suffered from a sense of personal inadequacy compounded by postwar disillusionment. He had a Hamlet streak in him too wide to live with.

There is no false cheeriness in Pavese, and a candor that all who live by deluding themselves may find unwelcome but valuable. And there is a devotion to nature and to the virtues of the land that surprises the reader who thinks he is in the hands of a total pessimist. In near lyrical terms, Pavese expresses his warmest admiration for the peasants, their generosity and their capacity for honest work and robust living. As one of his characters replies when asked if he likes Mussolini's Italy: "Not Italy. The Italians."

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