Love and Despair

Cesare Pavese

Cominciavo a capire che nulla è più inabitabile di un luogo dove si è stati felici.  ("I began to see that no spot is less habitable than a place where one has been happy." The Beach, Chapter 11) 

Il y a des femmes à Gênes dont j’ai aimé le sourire tout un matin. ("There are women in Genoa whose smile I loved for a whole morning." Camus, "Love of Life") 

Most of my lifetime ago I was on a Cesare Pavese kick and I read as much of his writings as I could find at my local (Denver) public library. Among them was a novella called simply The Beach - originally La Spiaggia - that Einaudi published in 1941. R. W. Flint made the translation, which must have seemed a strange experience for Flint, since Pavese had been a scholar of English and had translated several works by American writers, including Melville's Moby Dick. 

The Beach somewhat resembles Camus's L'Etranger, published in Paris in 1942. Camus had modeled his writing on the bare bones school of Hemingway, and one feels that The Beach is a novel that a young Camus might have written, before he became preoccupied by metaphysical themes, because it's a novel about watching the last of one's youth pass away in a setting of sun and sea and in which the love of life is exuded by its imagery. 

The story of The Beach is becalming, in which you can feel the to and fro of the sea (even though tides in the Mediterranean are slight). And it's the same sea that Camus loved, but on the opposite coast, near Genoa. The characters in Pavese's story, Doro, Clelia, Berti, and Guido, are always going into the sea or emerging from it - all except the narrator, the Professor, the old friend of Doro's, who is in love with his new wife, Clelia. But everyone is in love with Clelia, or in lust for her - until the playful atmosphere among them is destroyed by the news, which arrives in the penultimate chapter, that Clelia is pregnant. 

I can go further with the similarities between Pavese and Camus. Pavese's home town, Santo Stefano Belbo, situated between Turin and Genoa, informed much of his fictional writings and overshadowed his personal life. For Camus, it was Algiers, a French colonial city in North Africa. Pavese, five years older than Camus,(1) suffered from asthma that was severe enough to spare him induction in the Fascist Italian army. Camus was diagnosed with tuberculosis at 17 and suffered relapses throughout his life. Camus used a publisher's advance on his first novel, L'Étranger, to visit France in 1942, in the middle of the Nazi Occupation. During the war, Pavese was caught up in the fighting of Italian partisans against retreating Germans around Turin, though he did not play an active role. Caught in Paris by the war, Camus had clandestinely joined the Resistance and wrote for their broadsheet Le Combat. After the war, both men had affairs with glamorous actresses: Camus with Maria Casarés, daughter of a Spanish ambassador, and Pavese with the American movie star Constance Dowling. Pavese's affair was abortive, and it may have precipitated his suicide 72 years ago last Saturday, but it was only natural that he would've been attracted to Dowling, since he had been in love with the idealized America he'd first encountered in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Camus's narrator in L'Étranger, Meursault, could almost be construed to be a sociopath. He is portrayed by Camus as an outsider because he refuses to go along with society's lies - like showing grief at his mother's funeral when he doesn't feel any, or like blaming the bright sun for his murder of an Arab man on the beach, since the sun's reflection off the blade of the man's knife temporarily blinded him. 

Pavese's isolation from the lives of those around him was more of the emotional adjustment of a psychological condition. It's perhaps too simple to conclude that Pavese is the narrator of The Beach: 

I was finding my usual perverse pleasure in keeping apart, knowing that a few steps away in the light someone else was moving around, laughing and dancing. Nor did I lack for something to reflect upon. I lit my pipe and smoked it through. 

(Pavese also smoked a pipe.)   

A familiar depression took hold. The memory of my talk with Guido, added to that, sank me completely. Luckily I was by the sea where the days don't count. "I'm here to have a good time," I told myself. 

The narrator, evidently, has to work hard to keep himself from succumbing to despair, even in the face of natural beauty. Camus defined this odd dichotomy in the so-called Lyrical Essays he wrote and published in the 1930s. In the essay, "Love of Life," he wrote: "There is no love of life without despair of life." Based on his visit to the Balearic Islands, Majorca and Ibiza, the essays in the collection called The Wrong Side and the Right Side ("L'Envers et l'endroit") were written in 1935 and '36, when Camus was 22. They are discursive and impressionistic, and are a unique combination of sensualism and philosophical discourse. At the end of "Love of Life," he wrote: 

In Ibiza, I sat every day in the cafés that dot the harbor. Toward five in the evening, the young people would stroll back and forth along the full length of the jetty; this is where marriages and the whole of life are arranged. One cannot help thinking there is a certain grandeur in beginning one’s life this way, with the whole world looking on. I would sit down, still dizzy from the day’s sun, my head full of white churches and chalky walls, dry fields and shaggy olive trees. I would drink a sweetish syrup, gazing at the curve of the hills in front of me. They sloped gently down to the sea. The evening would grow green. On the largest of the hills, the last breeze turned the sails of a windmill. And, by a natural miracle, everyone lowered his voice. Soon there was nothing but the sky and musical words rising toward it, as if heard from a great distance. There was something fleeting and melancholy in the brief moment of dusk, perceptible not only to one man but also to a whole people. As for me, I longed to love as people long to cry. I felt that every hour I slept now would be an hour stolen from life … that is to say from those hours of undefined desire. I was tense and motionless, as I had been during those vibrant hours at the cabaret in Palma and at the cloister in San Francisco, powerless against this immense desire to hold the world between my hands.  

I know that I am wrong, that we cannot give ourselves completely. Otherwise, we could not create. But there are no limits to loving, and what does it matter to me if I hold things badly if I can embrace everything? There are women in Genoa whose smile I loved for a whole morning. I shall never see them again and certainly nothing is simpler. But words will never smother the flame of my regret. I watched the pigeons flying past the little well at the cloister in San Francisco, and forgot my thirst. But a moment always came when I was thirsty again. 

I have basked in the warmth of these words, of this vision, since I first encountered them at the age of 20.

(1) Cesare Pavese born September 9, 1908, died August 27, 1950. Albert Camus born November 7, 1913, died January 4, 1960.