Missing in Action

In “The Gods,” the book’s coda, Pavese converses with himself about “how grueling it must have been for people living in a time when everything they touched was mortal,” when the world was filled with the presences of unseen beings. “Do you believe in monsters, believe in animal people, in living stones, divine smiles, and in words that annihilate?” The poet, Pavese implies, is a creature of Chaos—that anarchic state in which good is mixed with bad and monsters mingle with men and gods. Something, in other words, a bit like the war and its aftermath.

The Craft of Living is mostly a set of literary notes, like Leopardi’s Zibaldone, with almost no mention of the history going on all around him. (Pavese’s lively letters, by contrast, are full of talk, gossip, and the quotidian; he comes across as a magisterial man of letters, an efficient manager, and a generous friend.) The diary is, instead, a document of a writer’s intellectual and emotional life, which you can see him process into material. It’s most interesting when Pavese tries to write his way out, simultaneously, of literary and life problems, which he carefully interweaves. “That one must live tragically, and not voluptuously, is proved by all I have suffered,” he wrote in April 1936, the day after Tina’s wedding. “The fault lies in daydreaming, the distant enemy of good art, and in my need to avoid responsibility, to feel without paying the price.” The “lesson,” he concludes, is to “build in art and life, banish voluptuousness from both, and exist tragically.”