The House on the Hill

This week, a new work, Cesare Pavese’s semi-autobiographical 1949 novella, The House on the Hill. I am reading a 1968 New York Review of Books edition that includes three other of Pavese’s short novels, The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese.

The story begins: “For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods.” In classic story-telling fashion, we the readers are presented with a first person narrator, an “I,” who looks back from the future to tell the tale. “I used to go there…” the narrator says, referring to the countryside where he goes each night. “I saw no difference between those hills and these ancient ones where I played as a child and where I live now.”

Modernism? Best B. You know it.

The narrator apparently is telling us the story from a different geographical space where he once played a s a child. Then we have a shift to simple past—"We began to climb, everyone discussing the doomed city, the night, and the terrors to come.” The “we” refers to he and the others who are escaping the city at night by going to the countryside, the “hills.”

The story’s final paragraph returns us to the narrator’s future vantage point: “I don’t believe that it can end. Now that I’ve seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: ‘And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?’ I wouldn’t know what to say. Not now at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only the dead know and only for them is the war really over.”

Let’s come back to this ending later.

The first thing that strikes me about The House on the Hill is the lack of exposition. The narrator and implied author assume the reader knows a lot or is capable of doing some independent research, or perhaps really doesn’t need to know much about the context for the story.

In the first paragraph, the aforementioned hills and city are unnamed. There is mention of air-raid alarms, of people escaping the city at night to head for the hills. Then on the second page, the narrator writes that the city is Turin, Italy, and that his work kept him there during the day. So we learn that we are in Italy and that there are nightly air raids—‘kay, with a modest amount of historical knowledge, we can surmise that the story takes place during WWII—the text doesn’t say so. Sure enough, the narrator writes in line with this that “blame for what happened to me cannot be laid to the war.”

There is a dog named Belbo who lives in the hills and waits for the narrator to appear at night, greeting him happily. “Since childhood it has seemed to me that a trip through the woods without a dog means losing too much of the life and the hidden parts of the earth.”

The narrator writes that his destination is a villa and that he has “landladies,” who wait for him to give them news, “to make me pay for the trouble they took on my account and their affability, with the tortuous, casual opinions on the war and things in general that I kept at hand.”

The landladies are an unnamed mother, “calm and earthy,” and her daughter Elvira, the first named character (besides Belbo).

There is a sense here, I think, that this story is not tethered to the Italy of 1943 but could be about living through any war. The lack of names goes a long way toward achieving this effect, as does the first-person narration which gives the reader a feeling of being very close to what’s going on, as opposed to distanced from a real historical event. The narrator doesn’t spend a lot of time describing his external world, he focuses inward on his conflicts and issues and memories:

“All the war did was to remove my last scruple about keeping to myself, about consuming the years and my heart alone; and one fine day, I realized that Belbo, the big dog, was the last, honest confidant I still had.”

“I began in those days to enjoy my childhood memories. One might have said that between bitterness and uncertainties, behind the need to be alone, I was finding my boyhood just to have a companion, a colleague, a son…We were alone together, the boy and myself; I relieved the wild discoveries of earlier days. I was suffering of course, but in the peevish spirit of someone who neither recognizes nor loves his neighbor. And I talked to myself incessantly…”

In an ironic twist, the narrator will soon encounter a real boy who may be his son. More on that to come.

So here, we have a very self-involved character in a dramatic situation. There is no sense that the narrator feels much connection with anyone. He writes: “I liked to be alone and to imagine that no one was waiting for me.” However, others are waiting for him—his “landladies” whom he experiences as annoyances, and Belbo, of course. Then, “…that evening, a buzz of voices came up the slope, mixed with songs. They came from the other side, (of the valley where he’s staying) where I had never explored, and sounded like an echo of earlier times, a voice from my youth.”

The narrator reflects on the wonder that, despite the war, some people can sing and, apparently, enjoy the summer evening and each other. But he writes, “For my part, I was happy to have in my life neither any real affection nor embarrassment, to be alone, tied to no one.”

Yet, finally, he goes with Belbo to see who the others are, thereby showing how torn he is between wanting human connection vs. solitude.

Let’s pick this up next time.

Till then.

#TheHouseOnTheHill #CesarePavese #AlanBray