Cesare Pavese said that his first and only book of poems, Lavorare Stanca, published in 1936, ‘might have saved a generation’. Might have, i.e. didn’t: Pavese, having become moderately famous as a novelist, died by suicide in 1950, his poetry still obscure. In the Thirties, his spare poems of provincial Italian life were out of step with prevailing trends, aesthetic and political. The Fascists censored the book; the literati ignored it. In 1976, William Arrowsmith, a classicist and translator, produced an English version, which he called Hard Labor. (The Italian title is an idiom meaning something like ‘work is exhausting’: Arrowsmith’s version, like his introduction, over-eggs the political dimension of Pavese’s work.) Arrowsmith’s translation, acclaimed by literary gatekeepers Saul Bellow and Harold Bloom, picked up a National Book Award. Now the NYRB press has reprinted Hard Labor in a facing-page edition, preserving Arrowsmith’s overlong introductory essay, and appending some short, pompous postscripts by Pavese and a strange roundtable-style afterword by Ted Olson, in which five poets talk about the influence of Pavese’s work on their own. The book comes to more than two hundred pages, with not a woman in sight; more on which later.
So Lavorare Stanca didn’t save Italy from Mussolini – much of it was written during Pavese’s time in confino, the internal exile to which he was sentenced for associating with anti-Fascists – or from itself: the post-war ‘Years of Lead’, Berlusconi’s scandals, Meloni’s “post-fascist” Fratelli d’Italia. (Nor did its translation save America from what came after 1976.) And for all I respect the New York Review of Books, I doubt this new edition will give Meloni (Trump, Farage, Le Pen, etc.) much pause. Part of this is because poetry famously makes nothing happen, but another part comes from the fact that Pavese’s poetics, once prescient, now feel a little shopworn. His demotic is never totally convincing (though this might be a problem of translation), while his vision of poetry, expressed through the poems themselves and articulated in attendant essays, politicises mainly by aspiring to the suprapolitical: ‘the condition of every poetic stimulus, however lofty, is always scrupulous attention to the moral—which is to say the practical, experiential—requirements of the world in which we live’. These Thoreauvian decrees ring of blithe homogeny, not solidarity. Do ‘we’ all live in the same world? Are we really subject to the same ‘requirements’? Pavese’s MA thesis was on Herman Melville (whom he later translated), and his love for the American myth was, at least until the Cold War set in, mostly impervious to American actuality.
This isn’t to say Lavorare Stanca is uninterested in history or alienation (or that poetry must respond in kind to current affairs). Set among the working poor, rural and urban – one section is called ‘City and Country’, and considers the unsatisfied mutual dependency of the two – the poems’ combination of unfussy perceptual accuracy with a vague aura of significance is effective: ‘A garden between low walls, bright, / made of dry grass and a light that lowly bakes / the ground below. The light smells of sea’. Pavese’s synaesthetic impulse produces some memorable lines – a sea ‘like a meadow at twilight’, a wall catching ‘the first / groping fingers of boyish sun’. These moments, aspects of what Pavese called ‘imaginative relationships’ (insisting that these were entirely different from boring old ‘imagery’), are the currents of air stirring up a diction otherwise stubbornly flat. Trees are always just ‘trees’, hills ‘hills’. It’s a welcome change from all the poets who want you to know how many plants they can name, and it has a peculiar effect. Individual poems circle slowly, repeatedly, around a set of unobtrusive words (in ‘August Moon’, for instance, ‘sea’, ‘hills’, ‘moon’), turning and turning until the words themselves seem to soften and blur at the edges. The result is a little like how a word loses its meaning after rolling over your tongue too many times; or, closer to home, like reading a sestina, drifting around in what William Empson called the form’s ‘aimless multitudinousness’. What’s true of individual poems is true of the collection as a whole. Taken together, the six sections comprising Lavorare Stanca form a wide, semi-abstract landscape, of green and blue and grey, sky and sea and river and hill, in which, here and there, the shapes of a man (smoking in the dark, ‘a spark of fire burning at his mouth’), a woman asleep, a cobbled street, shift briefly into focus.
It’s here – not in the few approximations to workerist sentiment, and certainly not in Pavese’s pretentious manifestoes – that the book reaches toward something like history, hence politics. Reading it I was reminded of Adorno’s line about the ‘utopia of the qualitative’, the dream, voided again and again by capitalism, of a value-form expressible in terms outside the ‘the ruling exchange relationship’. However much it resembles special pleading, Pavese’s need to distance himself from ‘imagery’ – and its extensions into symbolism, allegory – and his intransigent refusal to call a spade anything other than a spade carry with them something of this dream. What would it be like to see the world as made up of objects and beings completely unavailable to fungibility on the one hand and fetishism on the other? Pavese: ‘To the boy who comes in summer the country / is a land of green mysteries’.
But it’s always a boy. The granite stupidity of Pavese’s sexism doesn’t so much stick in your throat as poison the meal. There’s something metaphysical about it, as though the poet’s world depended in some desperate way on sexual difference: his necessary binary is nothing so modern as mind and matter. Women, when they appear in the poems, are hot bodies, or gross bodies, or silly girls, or old hags, or wretched prostitutes, or dead mothers. Of the five (male) poets Ted Olson interviews for his afterword, one, Edward Hirsch, admits that ‘When I reread Hard Labor two years ago, I began to cringe at the sexual dynamic in the poems’. (This cringing was occasioned by reading the book aloud to his partner, whose reaction was ‘not good’.) Olson’s gloss:
Several of Pavese’s poems from Lavorare Stanca were suppressed in Italy on moral grounds by Fascist censors during the poet’s lifetime (for reasons different from the attitudes attributed to Pavese in Hirsch’s quote), and twenty-first-century readers’ responses to this volume—whether the poems are read in the original Italian or in translation—will inevitably be informed by current societal values. It is not to defend Pavese’s biases to observe that his difficult life experiences when interacting with other people (whether political opponents or women) were a basis for the ideological and psychological compulsions that drove him to art. To Pavese, art was not only an escape from alienation and displacement, it was the only real comfort he ever knew.
As far as I can make out, there are three points here. First, readers who object to Pavese’s misogyny are like Fascist censors, because they’re adhering to ‘societal values’; second, Pavese had ‘difficult life experiences’ with Fascists and women, so his hatred of both is fair game; third, writing sexist poetry was the ‘only real comfort he ever knew’, so knock it off, alright? Each of these is naturally hedged by phrases like ‘It is not to defend Pavese’s biases’, which, if you squint, give an impression of liberal broadmindedness. If you don’t squint, this is dismal grasping, and it disgraces its author. Arrowsmith’s introduction isn’t much better – Pavese, apparently, was ‘a true nympholept in the great Italian tradition’ – but his sweaty theorising at least belongs to the ’70s. There’s a lot a lot to take from the poems in Lavorare Stanca: their skill at compressed narrative, their play of clarity and abstraction. There’s a lot to leave behind, too.