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PARTISAN REVIEW
jolo, in which he wrote: "If you want to know who I am now, re-read
'La Belva' in
Dialogues With Leuco."
The reader who would attempt to make sense of the man and his
suicide will naturally hasten to the piece in question (translated in this
edition as "The Lady of the Beasts"), as I did. Alas, it is a frustrating
point of entry, offering no clear answers, only enigmas. Pavese was simply
not the kind of writer to hand his deepest insights to anyone who came
knocking.
But maybe such an approach has its uses. For a reading of "The Lady
of the Beasts" will almost inevitably send the reader back to the begin–
ning of the book, for context - just as, again almost inevitably, a reading
of the whole dictates that one turn back to the first page and start again,
for comprehension.
Dialogues With Leuco,
even in the translucent idiom
of William Arrowsmith and Donald Carne-Ross, is a Gordian knot of a
book, except that no stroke of the sword will solve it; one must work,
slowly and patiently, drawing continually on what one knows of life.
Only then comes a loosening of the cord, some understanding of the
mysteries as mysteries, some grasp of the complexity of Pavese's vision.
The work comprises twenty-seven dialogues, each representing an
encounter between figures - often obscure figures - from Greek
mythology. At first glance the dialogues seem unrelated; they make no
extended tale. But a closer inspection - a reading that attends and pauses
long enough for the resonance to gather - reveals a thematic develop–
ment of great suggestiveness. Di Piero goes so far as to insist that the
book be read as a poem. Then, if we consider "each of the twenty-seven
dialogues a stanza or strophe,
Dialogues With LeIlCO
emerges as an epic
history of consciousness, the insinuation of death and blood-fear into the
Western psyche, stretching from the Age ofCronos to the present."
A large claim, that, but not too large. The extraordinary compres–
sion of the material, the subtle braiding of the principal themes, the pro–
gression that declares a deepening authority - these are all properties of
the epical poetic endeavor. Moreover, the language, while not shaped to
the line, nevertheless strives toward the condition of charged and un–
cluttered utterance that we so prize in the archaic bards.
The dialogues are difficult to read or discuss without psychologizing,
at least at first. Read in sequence, they appear to tell of the repression
over time of the primal drives and to point to their reemergence, or
sublimation, in our societal institutions and arts. But such a description
plucks the fangs from a fierce, original, and decidedly non-programmatic
work. It also misleads. For Pavese's aim is somehow anterior to such in–
terpretations. That is, the dialogues are there in and for themselves; they
take the form they do because interpretive discourse cannot reach the
