The Beautiful Summer
Cesare Pavese
THE BEAUTIFUL SUMMER
With an introduction by Elizabeth Strout
Contents
Introduction
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
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Introduction
Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in a rural part of northern Italy called Santo Stefano Belbo. His family returned from this home to Turin every autumn, and all his life Pavese would be torn between country and city life.
He began his writing career as a poet, eventually publishing his collection Work Wearies in 1936 (also known as Hard Work). But Pavese had always been interested in translating, and in particular, he developed a passion for the American literary voice. His first book of translation was Sinclair Lewis’s Mrs. Wreyn in 1931, and he went on to translate many more American writers, including Moby Dick, and also the work of Sherwood Anderson and John Dos Passos. His belief was that Americans were writing in a new language, using the vernacular of their lives, ‘a new texture of English … a style no longer dialect but language, reworked in the mind, recreated,’ and that the contemporary Italian language of that time, he felt, was stuck in an expression that no longer could make space for all that was happening in its country.
What was happening in the country was, most notably, fascism. Pavese lived during the rise of Mussolini, and all his work is, in some way, informed by this. In 1935 he was arrested for having letters of an anti-fascist friend, and he spent a year isolated in confinement in Brancaleone Calabro, in southern Italy. Later, during the war, he was excused from going into the armed services because of asthma. But it is important to think of Pavese – to think of any writer – writing during his time and place in history, and Pavese’s time was during the rise of fascism and his place was, of course, Italy, both rural and city.
Before his arrest he had become a major part of the Einaudi publishing house, which opened in 1933. He had first collaborated with its director, Giulio Einaudi, both as a creator of, and a contributer to, the magazine La Cultura, and Einaudi welcomed Pavese as a member of its house in 1937. They would remain his publisher and lifelong supporters, and he would work there as an editor and then editorial director for the rest of his life.
During the spring of 1940 Pavese wrote The Beautiful Summer, the book you have in your hand, leaving it in manuscript form until he had completed two more short novels, The Devil in the Hills and Among Women Only. These he published together under the title of The Beautiful Summer in 1949. In June of 1950 he received the most prestigious prize in Italy, the Strega, for this book. In August, two months later, he died by suicide, taking an overdose of sleeping pills in a rented hotel room.
About The Beautiful Summer, Pavese wrote in a letter to his former teacher that it was ‘the story of a virginity that defends itself.’ The narrative of this book is an astonishing display of a dense, almost frenzied writing – there are whispers here of the future work of Elena Ferrante – and yet the style holds always a gentle graciousness as well. This combination makes it an inimitable read; it has a style entirely its own. The story is essentially that of a young woman’s fall from innocence, and while one might rightly say this story is as old as all storytelling, the manner in which this book is written makes it a completely different version of such a theme. It takes place in Turin, during a time when the city had a bohemian artistic community, and it is this community which Pavese uncovers for us.
The novel tells of Ginia, a young shop girl living with her brother, who falls in love with a painter over the course of a summer of freedom. There are three other women protagonists, although Ginia takes center stage. But the woman who leads her into these artists’ quarters is an older woman, Amelia, who is experienced in the ways of the world. The dichotomy of these two women sets up a splendid device in the construction of the book: Ginia’s innocence and Amelia’s experience. Throughout this narrative, the reader is taken through the most deeply believable aspects of Ginia’s loss of innocence. There is a generosity towards her that we see and we believe: Pavese is just stating the facts, and yet the facts are presented with an underlying charitableness to Ginia.
In his real life, Pavese had trouble with women; he felt the betrayal of them deeply. In this book, he uses those feelings and gives us the portrait of an innocent, on the verge of discovering the cruelties of love.
Elizabeth Strout
ONE
Life was a perpetual holiday in those days. We had only to leave the house and step across the street and we became quite mad. Everything was so wonderful, especially at night when on our way back, dead tired, we still longed for something to happen, for a fire to break out, for a baby to be born in the house or at least for a sudden coming of dawn that would bring all the people out into the streets, and we might walk on and on as far as the meadows and beyond the hills. ‘You are young and healthy’, they said, ‘Just girls without a care in the world, why should you have!’ Yet there was one of them, Tina it was, who had come out of hospital lame and did not get enough to eat at home. But even she could laugh at nothing, and one afternoon, as she limped along behind the others, she had stopped and begun to cry simply because going to sleep seemed silly and robbed you of time when you might be enjoying yourself.
Whenever Ginia was taken by a fit of that kind she would unobtrusively see one or other of her girl friends home and chatter on and on until she had nothing more left to say. So when they came to say goodbye, they had really been alone for some time and Ginia would go back home quite calmed down without missing her companion too badly. Saturday evenings were of course particularly wonderful when they went dancing and next morning she could lie in.
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