`I Won't Write Anymore'

At the heart of Geoffrey Hill’s most recent collection, Without Title, is a series of 21 odes titled “Pindarics: After Cesare Pavese.” Each is prefaced with a citation from Pavese’s The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950. The poems, each 23 lines long, address Hill’s customary concerns – poetry, history, sex, politics, anything under the sun. From the 11th ode:

“I think catastrophe; feel, touch, stasis
wholly without stillness. The pilot scans
into the nimbus of his utmost fix;
an ancient anabasis, lift of pride.”

And from the eighth:

“Typical as comedians – something lewd
slips from your homework-journal to my hand,
sticks like a noxious treat in silver paper.
Disasters have their triumphs: redeemed swots,
you with your Whitman, while I cribbed from much
maligned beau Allen Tate pindaric odes.
Narrative’s easy – up we go and down –
except I feel a bounder to myself.
Now, that is you, Ces, sullen and alert.”

Throughout, Hill addresses the Italian writer as “Ces.” I’ve read much of Pavese’s fiction and poetry, and his nonfiction on American literature (Pavese was a prolific translator of American writing, including Moby-Dick). Hill’s example set me to reading Pavese’s “homework-journal,” and it is anything but the usual confused, unfinished, self-involved muddle we expect from diaries. Fragmentary, yes, but pithy and aphoristic, charged with the experience of life under fascism and during wartime. His thought-shards carry more weight than entire essays by some writers. This Pavese wrote on March 10, 1947:

“The difficulty of art is to present things you know well in such a way that they are surprising. If you did not know them well, you would not be sufficiently interested in them to treat them in a way that makes them surprising.

“The delight of art: perceiving that one’s own way of life can determine a method of expression.”

And Dec. 3, 1938:

“When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own – the place where we live – and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.”

And this, from June 23, 1940, in which he is ridiculously but fruitfully wrong:

“Defoe is the greatest English novelist because he is the least affected by Elizabethan influences. His voice is unmarred. The others, even Dickens, reflect the seventeenth century, either in their poetry or in their humor. They are imaginative and express themselves in images, but no longer have the lusty instincts and wit of the Elizabethans. They indulge in rhetorical phrases and keep nothing concealed from their characters, consequently they are not dramatic.”

And May 27, 1944:

“Who knows how many things have happened to me: what a very good question on which to base your `summa.’ It simply means: who knows in how many different lights I shall again see my past, and this implies that I shall discover in it many new developments.”

And this, as apropos today as when Pavese wrote it on June 5, 1940:

“The reality of war suggests this simple thought: it is not sad to die when so many of your friends are dying. War gives one a sense of being one of a group. Welcome! Come on in!”

In the final years, Pavese mentions suicide with ominous regularity – not as a subject but as a choice, as though he were testing his own nerve. The final passage in his diary is dated Aug. 18, 1950:

“The thing most feared in secret always happens.

“I write: oh Thou, have mercy. And then?

“All it takes is a little courage.

“The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes.

“It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It takes humility, not pride.

“All this is sickening.

“Not words. An act. I won’t write anymore.”

Those final four words are among the saddest I know. Eight days later, at the age of 42, alone in a Turin hotel room, Pavese killed himself with an overdose of barbiturates.