In his superb essay on Cesare Pavese, "The Silence of Origins," W. S. Di Piero reports that the author had a special fondness for his book of mythic dialogues—indeed, that on the day before he was to take his life he sent a special delivery letter to his friend and biographer, Davide Lajolo, in which he wrote: "If you want to know who I am now, re-read 'La Belva' in Dialogues With Leucò."

The reader who would attempt to make sense of the man and his suicide will naturally hasten to the piece in question (translated .. . 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 beginning 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 Leucò ... 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 development 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 Leucò emerges as an epic history of consciousness, the insinuation of death and blood-fear into the Western psyche, stretching from the Age of Cronos to the present."

A large claim, that, but not too large. The extraordinary compression of the material, the subtle braiding of the principal themes, the progression 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 uncluttered 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 interpretations. That is, the dialogues are there in and for themselves; they take the form they do because interpretive discourse cannot reach the charged materials that Pavese would assay; they ask us to read past reason, for they concern, at one level, the late emergence of reason from the autonomous play of chthonic forces.

Pavese's procedure is to give a short situating preface and then to plunge in medias res, trusting that the reader will pick up the necessary context. We are not required to be versed in the mythological particulars, though every reading further confirms that Pavese's own imagining is deeply referential—a good handbook of mythic lore will open unsuspected vistas.

"The Chimera," the second of the dialogues, can be taken as representative. Pavese's preface notes:

It was with high hearts that the youth of Greece set out for the East in quest of glory and death. Here their courage and daring took them through a sea of fabulous atrocities, in which some of them failed to keep their heads. There is no point in citing names. Besides, there were more than seven such Crusades. It is Homer himself who—in Book VI of the Iliad—tells us of the melancholy which consumed the killer of the Chimera in his old age, and of his young grandson Sarpedon who died under the walls of Troy.

The speakers in the dialogue are Sarpedon and Hippolochus. Hippolochus is the son of Bellerophon; Sarpedon, who was slain by Patroclus at Troy, is sometimes represented as the son of Zeus and Laodamia, the daughter of Bellerophon. The exchange, then, is between a son and a grandson. As for Bellerophon, it may be remembered that after his successes in slaying the Chimera and pacifying the Amazons, he deemed himself a god and tried to mount up to heaven. Zeus, outraged at his presumption, caused him to fall to earth, blinded. Thereupon, Bellerophon avoided all contact with mortals and passed his days wandering aimlessly in the Aleian fields.

Sarpedon begins by reporting to Hippolochus that he has seen Bellerophon, that he is "a terrible sight." Bellerophon has said to him, "If I were your age, boy, I'd go drown myself .. . If you want to stay just and merciful, stop living." Hippolochus is shocked, unable to believe that his heroic father has succumbed to bitterness. Sarpedon tells of the old man's belief—that he has been deserted by the gods, that he must now make atonement for the slaying of the Chimera. He had spoken to Sarpedon as follows:

From the day I stained myself with the monster's blood, I haven't had a real life. I have looked for men to fight, tamed the Amazons, slaughtered the Solymi. I ruled over Lycia and I planted a great garden—but all this was nothing. Where can I find another Chimera? Where is the strength of the arms that killed her . . . How can the man who met the Chimera resign himself to death?

Hippolochus can neither grieve for Bellerophon's plight nor for the bloody past that is no more. It falls to Sarpedon to search out the meanings in the old legends. When Hippolochus says to him, "There's no point in thinking of those things," it is clear that he is refusing the truth of origins. Sarpedon can only reply:

The spring remains, the mountain, the terror. The dreams remain. Bellerophon can't take a step without stumbling on a corpse, an old rancor, a pool of blood, surviving from those days when it all happened, and things weren't dreams. In those days his right arm had a weight in the world, and he killed.

The dialogue is, on one level, a lament for the passing away of ruder, bloodier, more real times. On another level, it proposes the survival of the archaic through the internalizations of memory and dream. Throughout the Dialogues we find this duality—not ambivalence—of presentation. The projection of the mythic figures gives dramatic animation to concerns that we accept, with habituated passivity, as mere ciphers in a psychic code. Pavese commands both perspectives, but his clear ambition is to track our chimeras back to their bloody places of origin. To this end, he does not enclose the mythic in quotation marks—he treats it directly, as another species of history. We can invoke the psychoanalytic paradigm, but we cannot deploy it with easy assurance.

There is simply not the space here to track the woof and warp of the unfolding dialogues. I can affirm only that the reader is drawn slowly forward, made to plumb the root passions and drives. The mythic frame gradually shifts; the ancestral becomes the timeless. It is a commonplace, I realize, to say that the myths live on, but sometimes the commonplace must serve.

In Pavese's dialogue "The Mother," he has Hermes speak as follows to Meleager:

Your lives are forever contained in the burning brand, and your mother draws you from the fire, and you live half blazing. The passion of which you die is your mother's passion, smoldering on in you. What are you but her flesh and blood?

The truth, or message, is here given in the context of the mythic, but what we realize in the encounter is that myth itself is but the original metaphor, the first and possibly still the most charged dramatization of the patterns that were seen to underlie experience. All artistic expression, it stands to reason, must consciously or unconsciously echo the mythic. Pavese recognized this and elected to take the most direct path. He returned to the source, not so much to reinterpret as reinhabit. What he shows is that these original legends are less a set of codified—and completed—narratives than they are an archive of live recognitions and patterns. He is not intent upon modifying or adding but upon reading more deeply into what has been given.

What is destiny—for gods, for men? Is experience arbitrary, or is it governed by some undisclosed purpose, some telos? Do events happen because they happen, or because they must? Pavese was clearly bedeviled by the primary existential questions, and the dialogues take them up over and over, moving from the godly perspective to that of the mortals.

The gods, of course, inhabit a realm beyond all contingency; for them all is known, foreseen. And this is at once the apotheosis of freedom—they are deathless and dread-free—and an almost intolerable burden. For to know all, and to be exempt from mortality, is in a sense to be enslaved. And this, interestingly, is seen as the reason why the gods were so bent upon intruding into the domain of the human. Here, in "Mankind," Bia tells Kratos:

Brother dear, will you try to understand that even though the world is no longer divine, for this reason the gods who come down from the Mountain find it always new and always rewarding. To hear the speech of men—what a marvelous experience that can be! They know they suffer, they struggle, they possess the earth . . . 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. Only if you live with them and for them can you enjoy the savor of the world.

But if it is given to the gods to be deathless, it is not likewise given that they should remain omnipotent. The Dialogues are, as I've suggested, very much about the dying of their power, their withdrawal from the human sphere. As Prometheus tells Heracles in "The Mountain":

Death entered this world with the gods. You mortals fear death because you know that the gods, being gods, are immortal. But everyone has the death he deserves. Their day will come too . . . Not everything can be explained. But always remember that monsters do not die. What dies is the fear they inspire. So with the gods: when men no longer fear them, they will vanish.

Their vanishing, one might theorize, happened by way of a transubstantiation. They became their legends, their myths, and as these, too, lose potency—as they are forgotten—their fabled might all but disappears. They again become what they were at first: the paradigmatic forms of our experience, our longings, our imaginings.

The last dialogue, "The Muses," gathers such intimations and gives them form. We read the piece as an account of the passing of the torch from gods to men, but it is also Pavese's summary articulation of the place of the mythic. The exchange is between Mnemoseyne (also called Melete) and Hesiod, first of the line of poets:

Mnemoseyne: . . . Don't you understand that man, every man, is born in that swamp of blood? That the sacred and divine are with you too? In the bed, in the fields before the fire? In everything you do, you renew a divine model. Day and night, there is not an instant, not even the most futile, which has not sprung from the silence of your origins.

Hesiod: You speak, Melete, and I cannot help believing. Only let me adore you.

Mnemoseyne: You have another alternative.

Hesiod: What is that?

Mnemoseyne: Try telling mortals the things you know.

This is the task, the high responsibility, that Pavese took upon himself. His Dialogues With Leucò, grave and mysterious, will never be a popular work. But it is—and I would say this of very few other books of our time—a repository of human wisdom and the anguish that earns it.