The unresolved question of human destiny, with which both Among Women Only and The House on the Hill end, is the point of departure of Dialogues with Leucò, in which Pavese contemplates human destiny and imagines it in its mysterious origins and mythic manifestations. But it must be emphasized from the beginning that the mythological figures of the dialogues are also different aspects of Pavese himself, revealing his own metaphysical and Jungian drives as exemplary of psychoanalytical man.

Before dealing with these mythological figures, it would perhaps be well to return to an analysis of Pavese's search for maturity, a search that, starting from childhood and adolescence, arrives at myth (especially in the prose of August Holiday), and from myth develops into a poetics of destiny—of "ripeness" to be exact. To transform myth into destiny: such is the concern of a whole phase of Pavese's search. The essay "The Wood" [in La letteratura americana, 1951] marks the fundamental passage from myth to man, from symbol to destiny—the indispensable prerequisite for the human universalization of the mythical dialogues: "The wild that interests us is not nature, the sea, the woods, but the unforeseen in the hearts of our fellow men," Pavese writes at the beginning of this essay, and continues:

At the beginning there is only nature: the city is a landscape, rocks, heights, sky, sudden clearings; woman is a beast, flesh, an embrace. Then nature becomes words, the natural was only a symbol, we know the true wild, and we feel a need to scream. .. . If it were possible to destroy symbols, all symbols, we would be destroying only ourselves. We can discover richer, subtler, truer symbols. We can make substitutes for them, but we cannot deny the will underlying them, the adverse will, the wood. It is in our blood, our breath, our hunger. One cannot escape the wood. It, too, is a symbol. . . . We must accept symbols—everybody's mystery—with the calm conviction with which we accept natural things . . . and love all this, with desperate caution.

Thus, Pavese establishes the human, rather than the poetic, value of symbols, reaching a fruitful and compelling conclusion: fellowship and acceptance in the face of a common destiny.

Dialogues with Leucò is the finest result of the "return to man" theorized in "The Wood," but above all it represents the fusion of Pavese's own suffering, anxieties, and longings with the sufferings, anxieties, and longings of all mankind. It is his most complex nocturnal and solar song, at once both intimate and universal. Pavese's childhood really becomes here the childhood of the world, caught in its most famous and most obscure myths as told by Herodotus and Homer, by Virgil and Vico, interpreted in the light of ethnology and psychoanalysis, even expressed in a fashionable terminology, but above all permeated with Pavese's own suffering and love. That is why in the dialogues there is more human fellowship, more political participation, than in The Comrade: in Mediterranean mythology Pavese seems to have found himself and the world without a loss of stability and without tensions. By going to the origins of mystery, which being irrational "raises us to kinship with the Universe, the [Whole]," Pavese has found the link connecting himself and others, yet without completely overcoming his own solipsism, without conquering the difficulties inherent in intersubjectivity, which remained problematic for him. His solipsism remains, though sublimated and universalized. In turning to the origins of mystery, Pavese did not succeed in understanding and dominating the reality of contemporary history, which is so complex and perplexing in its various political, social, and sentimental aspects. He found a refuge in the irrational, a salvation that can be a refuge and salvation for any other self. Thus, with a multiplication of solipsisms, with the universalization of solipsism, at best one step is taken toward an intersubjectivity not yet reached or realized.

This universalization, this metaphysical viewpoint, this experience of Being, however, are perhaps the prerequisites for dominating the sublunary world, for really understanding the total movement of history in which the relationship of self to others finds its true meaning. In fact, Dialogues with Leucò, written at the same time as The Comrade, chronologically precedes Among Women Only and The House on the Hill, the novels that in turn lead to The Moon and the Bonfires. In the foreword to the dialogues, Pavese writes:

A true revelation, I am convinced, can only emerge from stubborn concentration on a single problem. I have nothing in common with experimentalists, adventurers, with those who travel in strange regions. The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object. Suddenly—miraculously—it will look like something we have never seen before.

It is the same boy of the short story "The Sea," who said: "Gosto doesn't know what it is to stand in front of a house and stare at it until it doesn't look like a house any longer." But here the object being stared at is a myth, which is unveiled, even if partially, to the astonished spectator. The great questions of mankind, irrational in that they cannot be answered sufficiently to explain the mystery of life, are discussed by mythological characters into whom Pavese has put himself. By naming the mysteries of sex and love, life and death, chaos and light, Pavese has, as it were, liberated himself; in a certain sense he has overcome and possessed them—for himself as well as for other men.

The anxious contemplation of the birth of the human world from shapeless, monstrous chaos is the core of the first two groups of dialogues. It is a slow and confused birth, but necessary and definitive; with awareness of self man also acquires the sense of the other-than-self, of material reality, of destiny and death. In particular, sex is seen as an irreducible aspect of reality, one in which life and death meet, sealed by mystery. For instance, in the dialogue "The Blind," Tiresias says:

Nothing is vile, except to the gods. There are irritations, feelings of disgust, and illusions which, when they reach the rock, vanish. Here the rock was the force of sex, its ubiquity and omnipresence under all forms and changes. . . . Above sex there is no god. It is the rock, I tell you. Many gods are beasts, but the snake is the oldest of all the gods. When a snake sinks down into the ground—there you have the image of sex. Life and death are in it. What god can incarnate and include so much? . . .

We all pray to some god, but what happens has no name. The boy who drowns on a summer morning—what does he know of the gods? What does it help him to pray? There is a great snake in every day of life, and it sinks down and watches us.

Tiresias is echoed by the centaur Chiron in the dialogue "The Mares," when he underscores the destiny of Asclepius with words reminiscent of Melville:

Your father is cruel, blinding light, and you must live in a world of bloodless, anguished shadow, a world of festering flesh, of fever and sighs: all this comes to you from the Bright One. The same light that made you will lay bare the world before you, implacably; everywhere it will expose sadness, wounds, the vileness of things. Snakes will watch over you.

Further on he says, referring to Olympus:

That mountain is death. That's what I mean. The new masters live there. They're not like the masters in the old days, Cronos or the Ancient One. They're not like us as we used to be, when [our happiness had no boundaries and] we bounded among things like the things we were. In those days wild beast and swamp brought gods and men together. We were mountain and horse, plant and cloud and running water; we were everything then, everything on earth. Who could die in those days?

There is in these words an effective description of the beginning of self-awareness, and therefore of death. Secondarily there is an explanation of Pavese's theme of nudism (in the remote swamps in stories such as August Holiday and The Devil in the Hills), which was felt as "an effort to become god through the beast." In the third place there are an eroticism and a pantheism that become explicit only later, in the dialogue "The Mystery," where Demeter, Mother Earth, almost repeating a line from Earth and Death, says: "For them [the men] I am a fierce mountain, bristling with forest; I am cloud and cave. . . . " This brings to mind the passage from A Great Fire . . . the meaning of which is so explicit it would seem to require no comment: "I found again my childhood memories, as of someone who dreams of a destiny and a horizon which is not hill or cloud but blood, woman of whom clouds and hills are only a sign."

At this point it is perhaps necessary to note that even a writer like Pirandello, who is very different from Pavese in so many ways, uses similar images, evoking similar feelings, in his "Conversation with His Dead Mother":

The tall young acacia trees in my garden, with their thick foliage, are blown indolently by the wind that ruffles them and would seem inevitably to break them. But like a woman they enjoy feeling so opened and divided in their leaves, and they follow the wind with a resilient flexibility. It is the movement of a wave or a cloud, and it does not wake them from the dream they close within themselves.

In commenting upon the preceding passage, typical of a certain cultural and spiritual climate in our century, Gaspare Giudice remarks:

It is an abandonment to the unconscious, where Pirandello's love for his dead mother comes to the surface in the primal forms of an immediate eroticism, which is one with the symbols of the wind, the sea, the wave and the cloud, the eternal movement and the pantheistic dispersion of birth. Pirandello's pantheism . . . clings to him physically like a lost nostalgia for a profound and primordial experience, with scarcely any intellectual involvement.

We cannot but note the perfect relevance of Giudice's words to Pavese's poetical images and symbols. Indeed, they express an "abandonment to the unconscious" that is fully revealed in another dialogue, significantly entitled "The Mother": "In every man's flesh and blood, his mother rages"—words that by themselves might remain unexplained, were it not for the preceding considerations, whereby they acquire a meaning and a value that underlie much of Pavese's work: nudism, mythology, the countryside, the despairing love lyrics are thus all interconnected aspects of a vision du monde whose roots go deep into the irrational, into the dark forces of sex and the psyche as explored by Freud and Jung. Dialogues with Leucò is a precious aid in discovering these roots.

In the dialogue we are examining, "The Mares," Hermes introduces a symbolic image that will recur throughout the book: the smile of the gods—which is both perfection and death, the longing and the tragedy of Pavese:

The new gods of Olympus are always smiling, but there's one thing at which they do not smile. Believe me, I've seen destiny. Whenever chaos spills over into the light, into their light, then they must strike down and destroy and remake. That is why Coronis died.

Chiron replies: "But they can't remake Coronis. I was right when I told you that Olympus is death." But at least Coronis, the beautiful woman who "walked through the vineyards and . . . played with the Bright One till he killed her and burnt her body, . . . found herself as she died"—a mythical prefiguration of Santa in The Moon and the Bonfires. Man, born of chaos, always longs for the light and order imposed by Olympus. Perfection destroys, true, but it is worth being destroyed in order to achieve it: "In order to be born, a thing must die: even men know that," says Thanatos in the dialogue "The Flower," speaking of Hyacinth transformed into a flower by Apollo. The same motif of love-perfection-death is taken up again, with poignant intensity, in "The Lady of Beasts," where Pavese's personal experience is transfigured and transfused into a universal myth, probably to a greater extent than in any other dialogue. Endymion speaks to a Stranger, who is already on the move at dawn because he likes "to be awake when things are just coming out of the dark, still untouched," and tells him about his nocturnal adventures on the sacred mountain Latmos—about his immense love for an unspeakable creature:

Friend, you're a man; you know the shiver of terror you have at night when suddenly a kind of clearing opens before you in the forest? No, you don't. Or how at night you remember the clearing you passed through during the day: you saw a flower there, or a kind of berry swaying in the wind—and this flower, this berry, became something wild, something untouchable, mortal, there among all the wild things? Do you know what I mean? A flower like a wild beast? . . . Have you ever known someone who was many things in one, who brought them with her, so that everything she did, every thought of her seems to contain the whole infinity of things of which your countryside, your sky consists, and [words,] memories and days gone by you'll never know, and days to come, and certainties, another countryside, another sky forever alien—have you ever known such a person, stranger?

One notices the Freudian sexuality of the natural images in the first part of the quotation; and in the second part, the decadent spiritualization of sexuality, which follows a literary pattern that can be traced back to D'Annunzio's The Pleasure:

Andrea [Sperelli] felt an exotic air involving her person, felt that from her a strange seduction, an enchantment came to him—the vague ghosts of faraway things she had seen, the views she still preserved in her eyes, the memories that filled her soul. It was an unspeakable, undefinable enchantment. It was as if, within her person, she brought a trace of the light in which she had immersed herself, of the scents she had breathed, of the languages she had heard; it was as if she bore within her all the confused, vanished, vague magical qualities of those lands of the Sun.

The substantial similarity of the attitude of Pavese-Endymion and D'Annunzio-Sperelli toward women in the above two passages is obvious. In Pavese, however, the subtlety and exoticism are tempered by a painful, desperate, psychoanalytical sincerity lacking in D'Annunzio.

This is confirmed by several [poems by Pavese], in which are to be found the tender and erotic image of the cloud (see too the observations on Pirandello above); for instance "Nocturne," which closes Work Is Wearying: "You are like a cloud / glimpsed between branches. There shines in your eyes / the strangeness of a sky that is not yours"; or "You Have a Blood, a Breath," one of the first poems in Death Will Come and Its Eyes Will Be Yours: " . . . as a little girl you played / under a different sky, / you have the silence of it in your eyes, / a cloud. . . . "

Between these two poems there is the collection Earth and Death, in which almost every line shows Pavese's sorrow, the poignant desperation of being rejected by the "wood," by the adverse will of the "other," the impotence in the face of the wild mystery of sex and especially in the face of the other's lack of recognition—an impotence that D'Annunzio did not feel and that Pavese expresses in tormented, psychoanalytical images, comparable perhaps to those in Pascoli's poem "Nocturnal Jasmin": "sure / like the earth, dark / like the earth, mill / of seasons and dreams"; "you are dark"; "you are a closed cellar"; "you are the dark room"; "you are closed, like the earth" and "unknown and wild thing."

One understands how, in the mythological texture of the dialogues, Pavese has sublimated and universalized his personal datum, which is so overwhelming in the lyrics. But at the same time he has preserved it in poetical images that never before seemed to be so significant: the hill, the cloud, the different sky, the glance, the wave, the blood, the wild, and the smile.

Some of these images, in fact, are to be found in Endymion's story, when he tells of his encounter with Artemis, the virgin and proud goddess, "a slight, awkward girl":

The moon was shining when I woke. In my dream I felt a shiver of dread at the thought of being there, in the clearing, in the moonlight.

Then I saw her. I saw her looking at me, looking at me with that sidelong glance of hers. But her eyes were steady, clear, with great deeps in them. I didn't know it then, nor even the next day, but I was already hers, utterly hers, caught with the circle of her eyes, in the space she filled, the clearing and the hill. She smiled at me, timidly. "Lady," I said to her, and she frowned, like a girl, like a shy, wild thing. . . . Then she spoke my name and stood beside me—her tunic barely reached her knees—and stretched out her hand and touched my hair. There was something hesitant in the way she touched me, and she smiled, an incredible, mortal smile. .. . I [was] like a small boy. "You must never wake again," she said. "Don't try to follow me. I'll come to you again." And she went off through the clearing.

Endymion goes on to say that he walked all over Latmos, following the moon, listening, and all he could hear was her voice, "like the sound of sea water, a hoarse voice, cold and maternal"; at dawn, he says, "I knew that my home was no longer among men. I was no longer one of them. I was waiting for night." Then he speaks again of the goddess, above all of her glance:

And those great transparent eyes have seen other things. They see them yet. They are those things. Wild berry and wild beast are in her eyes, and the howling, the death, the cruelty of flesh turned stone. The shed blood, the savaged flesh, the ravenous earth, the wilderness—all this I know. For her, the Wild One, this is wilderness, and loneliness.

After all that has been said there is no need to point out how many of Pavese's motifs are included and relived in Endymion's story—from Concia in The Political Prisoner to the poems of Death Will Come and Its Eyes Will Be Yours. It might be more worth while recalling that the myth of Endymion was a poetical subject for Baudelaire and D'Annunzio, two poets dear to Pavese; this myth is placed by Mario Praz within the framework of the romantic-decadent conception of the belle dame sans merci, of the femme fatale:

In accordance with this conception of the Fatal Woman, the lover is usually a youth, and maintains a passive attitude; he is obscure, and inferior either in condition or in physical exuberance to the woman, who stands in the same relation to him as do the female spider, the praying mantis, &c, to their respective males: sexual cannibalism is her monopoly. Towards the end of the [nineteenth] century the perfect incarnation of this type of woman is Herodias. But she is not the only one: Helen, the Helen of Moreau, of Samain, of Pascoli (Anticlo), closely resembles her. The ancient myths, such as that of the Sphinx, of Venus and Adonis, of Diana and Endymion, were called in to illustrate this type of relationship, which was to be so insistently repeated in the second half of the century. The following point must be emphasized: the function of the flame which attracts and burns is exercised, in the first half of the century, by the Fatal Man (the Byronic hero), in the second half by the Fatal Woman; the moth destined for sacrifice is in the first case the woman, in the second the man. It is not simply a case of convention and literary fashion: literature, even in its most artificial forms, reflects to some extent aspects of contemporary life. It is curious to follow the parabola of the sexes during the nineteenth century: the obsession for the androgyne type towards the end of the century is a clear indication of a turbid confusion of function and ideal. The male, who at first tends towards sadism, inclines, at the end of the century, towards masochism.

There is no doubt that Praz's observations can be equally well applied to Pavese, who belongs historically to the late European decadentism in his style of writing and of living (the passive and masochistic young man; the basic lyricism, beyond the lesson of verismo; the mastery of the "analogical" word; symbolism; extreme sensitivity, "metapsychology," and psychoanalysis).

But to return to the dialogue, after Endymion's story the Stranger, who has lived "always alone" and knows that the "immortals know how to live alone," manifests himself as a god. Endymion prays to him, "O wanderer god, her sweetness is like dawn, or like earth and heaven revealed." The god concedes that he may see her again, and while leaving exhorts him:

Everyone has his own kind of sleep, Endymion. Your sleep is infinite with the cries and the voices of things; it is full of earth and sky and day following day. Sleep your sleep bravely, you have nothing better. The loneliness, the wild places of earth are yours. Love them as she loves them. And now, Endymion, I must leave you. You will see her tonight. . . . Farewell. But you must never wake again, remember that.

Artemis' smile that destroys is really the symbol of a perfection sought in vain, achieved only through death. In fact, Artemis is also "the cruel virgin who walks on the mountain" and who presides over the bloody story of the house of Atreus in the dialogue "In the Family." The Atreidae, just like many Pavesian characters, "wouldn't know what to do with a tame, submissive woman. They need a woman with cold, killer's eyes, eyes without shame, eyes like arrow slits," eyes which hide at least a reflection of Artemis' brief smile.

The same smile reappears in the dialogue "Sea Foam" as an attribute of Aphrodite, "the tormented, restless one who smiles to herself," and seems intended to symbolize, to sublimate, the unattainable love of Helen Tindaridis, who "lied to no one, smiled at no one." Britomart the nymph explains admirably what smiling means: "Smiling means living like a wave, like a leaf, accepting your fate. It means dying in one form and being reborn in another. It means accepting—accepting oneself, accepting fate." But for Sappho it is difficult to accept:

I didn't know it was like this. I thought everything ended with that final jump. I thought the longing and the restlessness and the tumult would all be done with. The sea swallows, the sea annuls, I thought. .. . I knew how to run away too, when I was alive. My way was to look into things, into the tumult, and turn it into speech, into song. But fate is something quite different. .. . I was never happy, Britomart. Desire is not song. It destroys and burns, like a snake, like the wind.

In Sappho's words there is also Pavese's destiny: he knew how to sing but did not know how to smile; he knew his "job of poet" but not the other "job of living." The image of the snake, then, brings us back to "that mysterious short circuit sex-death" of which Solmi speaks, and which is the focus of the dialogue "The Mother." Hermes says to Meleager, referring to his mother's eyes:

The fact that those eyes grow old and die means that in the interval you become a man, and knowing that you offend them, you go somewhere else in search of them—live eyes, true eyes. And if you find them—and one always finds them, Meleager—the person they belong to is again your mother. . . . And no one can escape the fate that has marked him from birth with the sign of the fire. . . . The same death awaits them all. They all die of another's passion. In every man's flesh and blood, his mother rages.

Even the young woman whom Meleager loved had eyes like his mother's, in fact "she was those eyes"—those eyes that have within them life and above all death, as in Pavese's last poems.

The awareness of death grows more and more insidious in the dialogue "The Friends," and becomes Oedipus' destiny in "The Road." To him, it is a destiny embodied in Mt. Cithaeron, the mountain of childhood, and it must be silently, painfully accepted: "This fatigue, this peace, after all the uproar of our destiny—they're perhaps the only things that are truly our own." This peace after destiny is also the theme of "The Werewolf," whereas in "The Inconsolable" destiny appears ineluctable; death destroys love, Orpheus turns deliberately in order to lose Eurydice, who could never be the same again:

The Eurydice I mourned was a season of life. I was looking down there for something very different from my love. I was looking for a past which Eurydice knows nothing of. I understood this among the dead while I was singing my song. . . . When I wept, I was no longer looking for her, but for myself. For a fate, if you like.

Actually, as the Bacchante says, by now Orpheus' thought is "only death." He confirms it when, desperately, he confesses what the knowledge of nothingness (juxtaposed with the joyous and drunken ignorance of the Dionysian rites) means to him: "Every time you invoke a god, you meet death. And you go down to Hades to bring something back, to violate a destiny. You don't defeat the darkness, and you lose the light. You're torn apart, like a man possessed."

In Pavese's interpretation, then, the knowledge of self coincides with everyone's destiny (one's own private hell) and with death. In some dialogues, however, Pavese's attention is focused on the awareness of others, and social life is described at its dawn. In this sense Prometheus in "The Mountain" is really a model:

What is a victory but pity turned gesture, saving others at your own expense? Everyone works for others, under the law of destiny. . . . Our fates are fused. By the world's law, no one goes free unless another's blood is shed for him. The same will happen with you [Heracles], on Mt. Oeta. ... It will be the blood of the monsters which you now live to destroy. And the pyre you mount will burn with the fire I stole.

Prometheus' fire is thus an essential element of the human world (and of Pavese's mythology), in dramatic juxtaposition to the Vichian cycle of nature:

Titan is a name, nothing more. Understand me, Heracles. The world has its seasons, like the fields, like the earth. Winter returns, summer returns. How can we say that the forest dies, or remains the same? Before long, men will be the Titans.

In "The Guest," the seasons are juxtaposed with the rites of the peasants, who pretended to fertilize the earth with human sacrifices; Lityerses says to Heracles:

Before cutting up the body, we have to sweat him in the sun till he comes to a lather. And that's why we're going to put you to work, reaping and bringing in the sheaves until you're running with sweat. And then, at the last minute, when your blood is boiling pure and foaming like a living thing, that's the moment when we'll slit your throat. Yessir. You're a strong young man.

The reference to certain pages of The Harvesters is obvious, with their primordial and vaguely sacrificial violence.

It will be remembered in this connection that [previously] . . . we explained the references to pages of Vico that were more directly linked with the primitive world of the peasant (already mythological and ethnological), and especially those concerning "the fire that the heroes must have kindled with flints and set to the thorny underbrush on the mountain tops, dried out by the hot suns of summer ... " and the "eternal property expressed in the saying that servants are the paid enemies of their masters." We can, in fact, see the social significance attributed to the bonfires—another of Pavese's myths—in the propitiatory rites of "The Bonfires."

Look, the gods are our masters. They're like the landowners. . . . Let's suppose a bonfire can make it rain, and burning some useless loafer can save the harvest. Well, how many owners' houses would you have to burn, how many owners would you have to kill in the streets to bring some justice back to the world and make us our own masters again?

The answer of the son, who feels a strong repugnance for such human sacrifices, is noteworthy: "I don't want to think about it. I won't. If that's the way we treated each other, then the landowners have every right to eat us alive. The gods are right to watch us suffer. We're evil, we're all evil."

The element of violence in the peasants' life concludes the first two groups of mythological dialogues. In them Pavese poetically relives the birth of the human world in all of its contradictory complexity. The complexity cannot be resolved in dichotomies such as Titanism-Olympicism or city-country, but is rendered with a richness of nuance that reflects the human reality born of chaos, which still tends toward order in a fatiguing daily conquest.

In the dialogues of the third group the central focus is the theme of love, and more precisely of love seen as a pretext for or cause of the contrast between immortality and happiness on one hand, life and suffering on the other. In "The Island," for example, when Odysseus complains of not being immortal, Calypso, who is in love with him, answers: "You will be, if you listen to me. What is eternal life if it's not accepting the moment that comes and the moment that goes? Drunkenness, pleasure, and death have no other aim. What else has your restless wandering been until now?" In "The Lake" Virbius-Hippolytus, who walks through Hesperia "as if he were a cloud," asks Diana "for life, not happiness."

In "The Witches," Circe discovers the uselessness of the divine smile and would like to become mortal in order to have Odysseus. (Her attitude is already a prelude to the last group of dialogues.) "And as I sang, I went to the loom, and I put his home and his childhood into that harsh voice of mine, I gentled it, I was his Penelope." Circe sees clearly the contradictions, but also the greatness of men:

You can't imagine the way death fascinates them. They're destined to die, of course, it's a repetition, something they know in advance. And yet they deceive themselves into thinking that it changes something.... That's the one immortal thing about a mortal, Leucò. The memory he carries with him, the memory he leaves behind him. That is what names and words are. When they remember, even men smile. A smile of resignation.

Or men act in order to be similar to the gods: this is the theme of "The Argonauts," perhaps the most Mediterranean of the dialogues, filled with light:

Little Melita, you're one of the temple girls. Surely you all know that when a man climbs up there it's because he wants to become a god, at least for a day, for an hour. Because he wants to sleep with you as though you were the goddess. He always pretends he's sleeping with her; then he realizes it was only mortal flesh he was dealing with, poor human creatures like you and your friends up there, like all women. Then he flies into a rage and tries to be a god somewhere else,

for example by going in search of the golden fleece, to discover a "virginity in things, more frightening than danger."

In "The Vineyard," too, there is a longing for immortality. The nymph Leucothea announces to Ariadne—the same Ariadne "made of earth and sun" abandoned by Theseus in "The Bull"—that a god will be sent to console her:

The youngest of all the gods. He has seen you, and he likes you. His name is Dionysus. .. . He was born at Thebes, and he courses the world. He is a god of joy. . . . He kills with laughter. Bulls and tigers walk beside him. His life is a festival, and he likes you.

Leucothea also explains to Ariadne that her abandonment by Theseus has taught her a great deal: "You've been afraid, you've suffered. You've thought of dying. You've learned what waking is. Now you're alone, and you're expecting a god." Leucothea concludes by announcing not so much the coming of a god, as immortality:

It will be like loving a place, a stream of water, an hour of the day. No man can give you this. The gods last as long as the things that make them gods. So long as the goats frisk through the pines and the vineyards, he will please you and you will please him. . . . The stars shine over the vineyards at night. The god who waits for you is a god of night. Don't be afraid.

The memory of the "young god" and of the "goat-god" of Work Is Wearying is fused here with the motif of the "festival night" in a repetition and a deepening of Endymion's symbolic sleep and awakening: love as death and immortality, reflected in nature.

In the dialogues of the last group there is indeed a "return to man"; they enhance the value of man in all of his poignant, imperfect, and fleeting durée, with all the feeling and the mystery of death, with the immortality given him, even more than by rare instants of love, by the word that becomes memory—story and poetry. In "Mankind" Kratos and Bia say:

But do you realize what men are? Wretched little creatures who are bound to die. More wretched than worms or last year's leaves; they're dead and they don't even know they die. But men do know and they talk about it; they never stop invoking us, trying to snatch a favor or a glance from us. They light fires to us—the fires they stole away in the fennel stalk. . . . Men are poor worms, but with them everything is unforeseen, everything is a discovery. You can understand an animal and even a god, but no one, not even we immortals, knows what is going on in the hearts of men. Some of them even dare to make a stand against destiny. Only if you live with them and for them can you enjoy the savor of the world.

This affirmation of man's value is emphasized by two motifs that mark crucial points in Pavese's search: the impossibility of knowing the human heart ties up with the essay "The Wood" (with the related mythological substratum), and the propitiatory fires echo practically the greater part of Pavese's work, culminating in the final scene of The Moon and the Bonfires. But in the dialogue "The Flood," the contrast between the human condition and the divine is seen above all in relation to death. Men live in time, and "the seasons of their life are festivals," but death is the main factor concluding these human seasons:

But dying is precisely this—no longer knowing that you're dead. And this is what this flood means: dying in such numbers that there won't be anyone left to know it. That's why they'll come to look for us. And they'll ask us to save them, and they'll want to become like us, like plants and stones—insensible things that are nothing but destiny. In them they will save themselves. When the waters retreat, they'll come forth as stones and trees, just as they did before. And this is all that mortals want, just as before.

We are reminded of a passage from Pavese's essays in which he outlines the "poetics of destiny":

Men do not have nature's immutability, its breadth of interpretation, its silence. .. . My poetry has tried in various ways to petrify them—by isolating them in their most natural moments, immersing them in things, by reducing them to destiny.

But death cannot be escaped, and men are left with only "hope or destiny"; thus Pavese reasserts the fleeting value of life more than in any other of his works: a hamadryad, speaking of men, says:

Well, I hope this flood at least serves to teach them the meaning of festival and play. After all, there's a make-believe which destiny imposes upon us mortals and which we are aware of—why can't they learn to live their make-believe as though each moment of their wretched little lives was eternal? Why won't they realize that it's precisely the shortness of their lives that gives them their value? . . . They too will learn something tomorrow. ... In the new world even the shortest lives will be in some way blessed.

Death is also the starting point of the dialogue "The Mystery." Everything men touch "becomes time. Becomes action. Waiting and hope. Even their dying is something," in fact it is something extremely important, as Dionysus, who almost seems an involuntary spokesman of much phenomenology, says: "But they wouldn't be men if they weren't miserable. Death is what they're born for. [Their only richness is death.] It's death that drives them to their efforts, to memory and foresight."

But man's true wealth, even more so than death, is the word. As Dionysus says: "They have a way of giving names to themselves and things and us which enriches life. Like these vineyards that they've taught themselves to grow on these hillsides. Demeter recalls the blood rites with which men found a transcendence and expresses a wish to "give a meaning to their dying .. . by teaching them the life of the blessed," by making the word overcome death:

Teach them that they can become like us, beyond grief and death. But we'll tell them ourselves. Teach them that just as the wheat and the vine go down beneath the earth in order to be born again, so death is a new life for them too. Give them this holy story. Lead them upward by means of this story. Teach them a fate which is woven with our own.

From the Eleusinian-Christian mysteries to the poetical dialogue "The Muses," the theme remains the story, the word: Mnemosyne, whose "voice and glance are immortal," teaches Hesiod, whose existence is a Leopardian "weariness and unhappiness," how to transfix with a word the immortal moments, the divine models of daily life, the mythical archetypes of Pavese's search:

Have you ever asked yourself why an instant can suddenly make you happy, happy as a god? You are looking, say, at the olive tree, the olive tree on the path you have taken every day for years, and suddenly there comes a day when the sense of staleness leaves you and you caress the gnarled trunk with a look, as though you had recognized an old friend, and it spoke to you precisely the one word your heart was hoping for. . . . For an instant time stops, and you experience the trivial event as though before and after had no existence.

So, Mnemosyne concludes, "You know what immortal life is like"; and she suggests to Hesiod that he tell about work and the days, catching the ecstatic moments of life: "In everything you do, you renew a divine model. Day and night, there is not an instant, not even the most futile, that has not sprung from the silence of your origins." With the mention of the swamp of Boibei's, from which "at the beginning of time, in a seething bubbling silence" monsters and gods were born, Mnemosyne closes a circle: the circle of human destiny composed of chaos and light, death and immortality. And Pavese too closes poetically the circle that he began in the first dialogues.

In the pages of Dialogues with Leucò we find again the images and poetic motifs that enrich so much of Pavese's work: the taste for wandering and solitude, the attraction of an unknown and exotic world, the fires or bonfires, the hills or mountain of his childhood and imagination, the seasons and festivals, blood and earth, the fierce sun and the fateful moon, the clouds and the rocks, the vineyard and the stars, divine and pitiless smiles, eyes which bring happiness and death. His style, which is always clear and lively, is both classic and realistic in its symbolism. Pavese himself had wanted the Dialogues with Leucò to be his own Short Moral Works ("with due proportions"), perhaps because, like Leopardi, he is examining and inquiring into the great questions of life and death, sorrow and unhappiness, and though he does not solve them he at least makes them universal and therefore more acceptable.

But Leopardi, even when he portrays himself in his characters (mythological or otherwise), faces reality and the absolute with a stubborn and stoic determination to achieve clarity, with a philosophical rationality not to be found in Pavese's dialogues. In the latter, the determination to achieve clarity often yields to the elegiac and imaginative, and for philosophical rationality is substituted mythological (and personal) irrationality. Both Leopardi and Pavese are pessimists when confronted with human destiny; but Pavese, writing almost a century after Leopardi and familiar with the symbolists and with phenomenology, relies more explicitly on the word to express the longing for eternity, the need to give a meaning to death, whereas for Leopardi it was expressed in his dramatic and "magnanimous" desperation. For both writers, however, the word is above all a consolation.

Another nineteenth-century author, Ugo Foscolo, should be mentioned, for Pavese could have found in his poems, instinctively more than rationally, a suggestion and an example. Apart from the obvious mythical figures of the Sonnets and The Graces, one should notice the conclusion of The Sepulchres. For Foscolo, poetry overcomes time and death; poets are the bards and priests of mankind. Something similar can be found in Pavese: a religious feeling for the word, which defines the poets as "oracles," as we shall soon see, and makes the story a form of immortality, as we have already seen. But Pavese has no Hector to celebrate as a vanquished hero; the dead who are to be remembered are either unknown or familiar—vanquished but not heroes: hence the crepuscular or at least elegiac character of so much of his work, especially the last novels.

This absence of heroes is also important from a cultural and historical point of view: it corresponds exactly to the failure of D'Annunzio's superuomo and to the contemporary experience of Pascoli's meek and humble man. Pavese, who inherited Leopardi's "traditional" and Foscolo's "decadent" classicism, also inherits the last faded aspects of D'Annunzio's violence, and as he echoes them in his own introverted and frustrated way, develops them naturally in patterns and subdued tones similar to Pascoli's. Thus, two conceptions of classicism and two conceptions of decadentism find their focus—and their transformation into a single vision du monde—in the complex figure of Pavese. This vision du monde manages to give unity to the poetry of Pavese, but nevertheless fails to reconcile the exigencies of poetry with those of life and again presents the problem and the tragedy of alienation. Pavese's poetics, which began with myth, become in Dialogues with Leucò a "poetics of destiny," which affirms both the value of man and of the word; the protagonists of the dialogues are, in fact, treated as "beautiful names charged . . . with destiny":

The fountainhead of poetry is always a mystery, an inspiration, a perplexity in confrontation with the irrational—unknown territory. But the act of poetry, if we are permitted to distinguish, to separate the flame from the burning matter, is an absolute will to see clearly, to reduce to reason, to know. Mythos and logos.

Pavese himself outlines the development of his search from myth to destiny, recalling the two dialogues "The Muses" and "The Gods." These dialogues and the essay "The Wood" ("We must accept symbols—everyone's mystery—with the calm conviction with which natural things are accepted. The city produces symbols like the country produces fruit") anticipate the most daring motif of such a poetics: the application to complex human relationships ("destinies," "the city") of this doctrine of a mythical scheme, of the atemporal contemplation of experience, which until now seemed only to be related to the childhood status of memory, to the making of certain universal, naturalistic symbols ("cloud," "wood," "country").

Essentially, Pavese wants to transfix a temporal moment into an eternal meaning:

What is this destiny? The fact that acts, words, human life are seen as symbols, as myths, means that they seem to exist outside of time and yet discovered in each single instance as unique, as revealed for the first time. A life appears as destiny when, unexpectedly, it is shown to be exemplary, and fixed ab aeterno.

This view of poetics was already foreseen in the words Pavese had dedicated to Edgar Lee Masters:

Each of us possesses an abundance of these things made into acts that are the symbols of our destiny: they are not in themselves valid, by their natural qualities, but they invite and call to us; they are symbols. For Lee Masters it might be said that death—the end of time—is the decisive moment that snatched one personal symbol from all the others and has welded and nailed it forever to the soul.

Thus, the poet becomes "the oracle of his heroes' lives":

A whole work can be traced back to that one simple oracular sentence that contains its essence. This observation is important, because it links the completed poem to the mythical nucleus that shapes it. This nucleus, a destiny that is glimpsed in the midst of the indifferent reality, is by definition an oracular moment of supreme vision and bliss; it is not formed but gives form.

We are brought back to "the beautiful names charged with destiny" of the dialogues, and particularly to the three poets of antiquity who appear as characters and stages in the poetic history of their author: Orpheus is seeking himself when he descends into Hades; Sappho looks unsuccessfully for happiness in song; Hesiod, who is incapable of happiness, finds immortality in words for himself and for others. Thus Pavese, in his simple and sublime dialogues with Leucò (i.e., Ino Leucothea, one of the "amorous Oceanine Nereids," the nymph who consoles), examines the most intimate aspects of himself; he recognizes the tragic unhappiness and fleeting, precious greatness of the human condition, and finally celebrates the works and days of mankind: love, work, festivals, and death.

It might be said that Pavese has solved his problem of human participation, in a completely abstract way and with a decadent taste directly proportional to the classical orderliness of his words and clarity of his style. At least for the moment, this is his finest contribution, more sincere than any political action, for which he was not suited. One is reminded of the words he wrote in his diary a few days before his death and their lapidary conciseness makes one shudder: "I have done my part by the world, as best I could. I have worked; I have given poetry to men; I have shared the sorrows of many."