The Burning Brand by Cesare Pavese

First published:Il mestiere di vivere, 1952 (English translation, 1961; also known as This Business of Living: Diaries, 1935-1950)

Type of work: Diary

Time of work: 1935-1950

Locale: Italy

Principal Personage:

• Cesare Pavese, an Italian poet, novelist, and translator

Form and Content

In October, 1935, Cesare Pavese made the first entry in his diary; he wrote his last note on August 18, 1950. He began the diary while imprisoned by Italian Fascists and ended it a few days before his long-contemplated suicide. During those years, his literary interests shifted from writing poetry and translating American fiction to writing novels. He rose from the obscurity of his early life to achieve national recognition of his literary accomplishments by the end.

Readers interested in Pavese’s life will not find in his diary a record of his daily activities. He said that it contained the “shavings” spun off as he shaped his creative works. In his diary, he reflected on the theory and nature of poetry and prose composition, recorded his thoughts on the works of other writers, ancient and modern, and contemplated his own life as he searched for the sources of his creativity.

Despite Pavese’s characterization of his diary, it is more than the intellectual and abstract “shavings” thrown off as he polished his poems and novels. His diary entries were not important as a record of his activities, he noted, “but for the insight they give into the way I unconsciously live. What I say may not be true, but the fact that I say it betrays my inner being.”

The diary reveals much about Pavese’s “inner being,” and does so partly by its surprising omissions. It contains almost no description of his daily existence. Although his literary works revolve around the Piedmont hills of his birthplace, the peasant region to which he periodically returned for renewal, and the city of Turin, where he spent most of his adult life, there is little description or analysis of the meaning of either to his life. The diary contains little account of his friends and associates, often themselves important literary people. When he discussed his friends he was mainly concerned with how he appeared to them. Despite the fact that Pavese’s intellectual circle was composed of anti-Fascists and that he was arrested by Benito Mussolini’s police apparatus, and despite the fact that Pavese later joined the Communist Party, the diary contains almost no political commentary. There is little in it to establish his Marxist credentials. Rather, it shows why some of his Communist friends became uneasy with his lack of political commitment.

Pavese wrote in his diary regularly, sometimes making daily entries, but more commonly several a month. The form of the diary, regular entries of a paragraph or two, did not change over the years, but the tone did. In the early years, Pavese puzzled over aesthetic problems, making few references to personal matters, not even referring to the imprisonment he was suffering when he began the diary.

After 1936, the tone and subject matter changed. The diary began to reveal the passion of the man behind the analytical artist. He expressed the difficulty he found in managing “this business of living,” as the diary was titled when published in England. He used the diary to explore the problems he experienced with women, with love and sex, and to relieve his unrelenting obsession with suicide. When his personal life was stable, he returned to aesthetic problems, but during the increasingly long periods of crisis, Pavese engaged in ruthless examinations of himself as a human. The diary reveals that as an artist Pavese felt secure; as a man he found himself deeply flawed.

Critical Context

Pavese is recognized as a major figure in twentieth century Italian literature, with a devoted following that regards him as the best of the postwar writers. Many scholars will turn to Pavese’s diary to gain insight into the work of a major translator-poet-novelist. More readers will turn to it as an important record of a sensitive and intelligent man confronting a major problem of the twentieth century, how to go about “this business of living.” Pavese in many ways achieved the trappings of success. He won recognition in his lifetime for his literary work, winning the important Strega Prize only a few weeks before his death. He was a major figure in the Einaudi publishing house; he had loyal friends and fervent admirers; he retained a sense of place that eluded many modern intellectuals. Yet, as he wrote in 1936, he was “a man who has no idea how to live.”

His diary deserves close study, but to catch the full flavor of this solitary, lonely man it must be read in conjunction with his other literary work and with biographical studies of him. Pavese wrote about and lived the alienated, disjointed, and embattled existence many intellectuals are condemned to live in the modern world. Like Jean-Paul Sartre and others of his generation, Pavese struggled to find a path that allowed him to have personal peace, to create, and to get on with the business of living as a creative intellectual. He lost the struggle, and his diary reveals the battleground on which he waged his solitary fight for survival.

Bibliography

Biasin, Gian-Paolo. The Smile of the Gods: A Thematic Study of Cesare Pavese’s Works, 1968.

Fiedler, Leslie A. “Introducing Cesare Pavese,” in The Kenyon Review. XVI (Autumn, 1954), pp. 536-553.

Lajolo, Davide. An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese, 1983.

O’Healy, Aine. Cesare Pavese, 1988.

Thompson, Doug. Cesare Pavese: A Study of the Major Novels and Poems, 1982.