The Moon and the Bonfires

"Pavese was a very difficult young man with all kinds of problems – above all, problems with women. He never really had a happy relationship with a woman. His notebooks are full of discussion about premature ejaculation and the difficulty of ever having a mature relationship with anybody. He became quite an important translator very early on in his life. He translated [James Joyce’s] A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and he translated Moby Dick when he was only 21 or 22, and that – for people who understand translation particularly – is an extraordinary thing to have done because you need a huge maturity as a translator to cover all the styles wrapped up in Moby Dick . Translation had become a way of hiding for him. I think a lot of translators find that. You can really just bury your own problems in somebody else’s book. Then he started writing himself, and they are all books about people who, in a certain sense, miss the action, as Pavese himself felt he missed the action. So in The Moon and the Bonfires , which is generally considered his masterpiece, we have a man who grew up as an orphan. He was abandoned on a church doorstep and grows up in this village in Piedmont. He’s kind of a misfit who emigrates to the USA before the war [World War II] and then returns to the village after it’s over. There is this sense of having missed everything happening and he would have liked to have been there in a way because what happened was heroic and his old friend was a major member of the partisans and the resistance. But then gradually he begins to discover, through various dramatic events, what actually happened in the war among the partisans was absolutely disgraceful, and that there were executions and rapes and so on and so forth. His confusion is about whether he really wants to be involved in life or whether actually he was rather fortunate to have missed out on it. Very shortly after writing The Moon and The Bonfires Pavese killed himself. That was either his final removal of himself from life or his first really dramatic action. I don’t know – you could look at it both ways. It’s a wonderful book. Deeply pessimistic but a wonderful book. Yes. If you read his journals, which are also published in English, they’re quite hard going but you realise that you are up against a guy for whom it was incredibly difficult to get from dawn to dusk. I don’t think about that stuff. Let’s not rate people. Let’s simply avoid getting drawn into any kind of celebratory-driven feelings about literature. He isn’t talked about as much as he might be. But there are an awful lot of authors out there in the world. For those who know Italian literature he’s a huge name and a very wonderful writer. He may not be that much read today, but people who do read him are obliged to realise what a big mind it is and what a fascinating experience. Actually, Pavese was one of the first guys to really understand the big dangers and almost the horror of literary celebrity. Something really changed in the way that literature was presented after the war. It became part celebrity and that way of thinking about literature was entirely substituting any intelligent discussion or proper appreciation of writing. So he was kind of shocked when he won one of the literary prizes in Italy and had very conflicted feelings about what it meant to become successful."