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FIVE Liberation? R For many Italians, particularly those on the political left, the immediate postwar days and months carried great hope. They felt that the blood shed in the civil war surely would lead not only to peace, but to a renewal and reordering of Italian society. Intellectuals were to play a leading role in bringing about a more just and equitable society, a public role. Both because he wanted to believe in that role and because he needed to atone for his nonparticipation in the civil war, Pavese joined the Italian Communist Party in 1945 and began writing for the party newspaper, l’Unità. His first article appeared on May 20, 1945, about two weeks after his return to Turin. It is, as Lorenzo Mondo notes, “significant not only for the sincere passion that animates it but also for its confessional tone, something between sorrowful and stubborn.”1 It is indeed as much confession as profession, a public confession that corresponds to the private one he asked Fr. Baravalle to hear in 1944. It also shows his deeply felt desire to connect with other people, and contains obvious references to his months in the Monferrato hills. Italian journalists, when writing commentary as opposed to news, conventionally use the first person plural. Pavese, too, but in writing this piece every “we” also signified himself. If, in reading it, one substitutes “I” for “we” and “me” for “us,” that equivalence becomes affectingly evident. Entitled “The Return to Man,” it starts with his [฀฀107฀฀] 108 ]฀CHaPTER FIVE commenting that, because of the vacuousness of Italian culture during the Mussolini era, he and others sought authenticity in the vitality of various foreign cultures. Things are different now: We now know in what direction we must work. The scattered signs that we received during the dark years from a friend’s voice, from something we read, from a little joy and much pain, are now synthesized in a clear discourse and a certain promise. The discourse is this: we are not moving toward the people because we are already the people, and all the rest is nothing. If anything, we are moving toward man because this is the obstacle, the crust to break, the loneliness of man, our own and that of others. The new legend, the new style is all here, and with it our happiness. To propose to move toward the people is to confess in principle a guilty conscience. Right now we feel guilty about many things, but at least we never forgot of what flesh we are made. We know that in the social stratum that one usually calls the people laughter is more open, suffering more alive, words more sincere, and we take all this into account. But what else does all this signify except that, in the people, loneliness has already been overcome, or is on the road to being overcome? . . . These years of blood and agony have taught us that blood and agony are not the end of everything. One thing was saved in all the horror and that is the opening of man toward man. We are certain of this because man has never been less lonely than in these times of fearful loneliness. There were days when a look or sign from a stranger was enough to surprise us and to keep us away from the precipice. We knew and we know that everywhere, in the most unlikely or glaring eyes, there lies hidden a tenderness and innocence that we must share. Many barriers, many stupid walls crumbled in those days. Even for us, who for some time already heeded the unconscious petition of every human presence, it was a shock to feel ourselves struck with, submerged in so much richness. Truly, man, in the sense that he is more alive, has awakened and is now waiting for us, whose job it is to learn, to understand, and to speak. To speak. Words are our profession. We say this without the slightest shyness or irony. Words are tender things, inviolate and alive, but made for man and not man for them. We all feel that we are living in a period in which we must carry words back to the solid and naked clearness of the time when man first created them for his own use.2 Pavese was far from the only creative writer to become engagé immediately after the war. Natalia Ginzburg remembers that “it was, [3.141.202.187] Project MUSE (2024...

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