Bitter Spring
Page 1
ALSO BY STANISLAO G. PUGLIESE
Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile
Desperate Inscriptions: Graffiti from the Nazi Prison in Rome, 1943–1944
BITTER
SPRING
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2009 by Stanislao G. Pugliese
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2009
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “At the Grave of Silone,” from Night Train Through the Brenner, copyright © 1994 by Harry Clifton. Used by permission of the author and the Gallery Press, Ireland.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pugliese, Stanislao G., 1965–
Bitter spring : a life of Ignazio Silone / Stanislao G. Pugliese.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-11348-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-374-11348-3 (alk. paper)
1. Silone, Ignazio, 1900–1978. 2. Authors, Italian—20th century—Biography. 3. Socialists—Italy—Biography. 4. Anti-fascist movements—Italy—Biography. I. Title.
PQ4841.I4 Z78 2009
853'.912—dc22
[B]
2008050410
Designed by Cassandra J. Pappas
www.fsgbooks.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Giulia, Alessandro, and Jennifer:
fontana della vita
Perhaps those who . . . search through these miserable
papers will understand enough to seize a
spark of the great struggle of our time.
—IGNAZIO SILONE, Memoir from a Swiss Prison,
December 1942
At the Grave of Silone
HARRY CLIFTON
Lost in a fog at four thousand feet
When the lights come on, I can see them all,
The mountain villages, so small
A blind man feels his way about
Without a stick, and everyone overhears
Everyone else, as they quarrel and shout,
And still they are all alone—
And the places, the years,
Who redeems them? I think again
Of you, Ignazio Silone,
Ten years dead . . .
On this freezing Apennine chain,
A body interred, forever looking out
On an endlessly fertile plain—
And how we had visited you, one day
When August blew the crops awake
And harvesters toiled, in the drained lake
Of human promise . . . Skies were passing away
But nothing had changed on the ground.
Heat and apathy, absence of sound
In your natal village. Unsuccess
With its local dreamers, revving their motorbikes,
Punishing the slot machines.
Fontamara . . .
Without knowing it, we had come to pray
At the shrine of ordinariness . . .
We, who were running away.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Unconsciousness everywhere . . . Fifty years ago,
In exile, writing Bread and Wine—
The War was coming. Now, below your shrine
Memory tries to wake
Blind monuments, to the Fascist dead,
Disheartened villages, men who cannot shake
The ant of toil from their Sunday clothes,
Slatternly women, old for their years,
The Christian cross, the Communist rose,
With the human word you said.
Contents
List of Illustrations
A Note to the Reader with Some Thoughts on Biography
PROLOGUE The Landscape of My Soul
ONE Saints and Stonecutters
TWO The Choice of Companions
THREE Writing in/and Exile
FOUR Darina
FIVE The Problems of Postfascism
SIX Cold War Culture
SEVEN The Painful Return
EIGHT “Silvestri”
EPILOGUE That Which Remains
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Illustrations
IN TEXT
The illustrations accompanying each chapter are reproduced from Clément Moreau/Carl Meffert: Linolschnitte zu Ignazio Silone (Berlin: Lit Pol, 1980). They were originally used to illustrate a German edition of Silone’s Fontamara and Die Reise nach Paris as well as the English edition, Mr. Aristotle.
PROLOGUE The Landscape of My Soul: Fontamara
ONE Saints and Stonecutters: Frau am Brunnen (Woman at Fountain)
TWO The Choice of Companions: Cafone am Brunnen (Cafone at Fountain)
THREE Writing in/and Exile: In der Stadt (In the City)
FOUR Darina: Liebespaar (Lovers)
FIVE The Problems of Postfascism: Die Cafoni von Fontamara (The Cafoni of Fontamara)
SIX Cold War Culture: Maisfeld (Cornfield)
SEVEN The Painful Return: Nächtliches Gespräch (Nocturnal Dialogue)
EIGHT “Silvestri”: Letizia
EPILOGUE That Which Remains: Der Erzähler (The Storyteller)
FOLLOWING PAGE 170
1 Pescina after the earthquake of January 13, 1915
2 Romolo Tranquilli (1904–32)
3 Silone in Davos, Switzerland, 1930
4 Silone with Gabriella Seidenfeld
5 Silone in Switzerland, 1935
6 First page of Fontamara
7 Darina and Ignazio Silone in the study of Marcel Fleischmann’s villa in Zurich, August 1945
8 Darina Laracy Silone
9 Silone beneath a banner of the PSIUP (Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity)
10 Silone at home reading a newspaper created by the children of Pescina, echoing the last line of Fontamara: “What is to be done?”
11 Silone’s study in Rome
12 Silone at the fountain in Pescina
13 Codicil to last will and testament
14 Silone’s tomb in Pescina
15 Fountain in Pescina
A Note to the Reader with
Some Thoughts on Biography
The destiny of names, like that of men, is strange.
Although he was born Secondino Tranquilli and known by more than a dozen aliases during his period of clandestine political work for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and with the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the subject of this book is referred to throughout as Ignazio Silone. Silone was fully cognizant of the ramifications of changing names so often: He once described a man “compelled to use so many names” that he was in danger “of forgetting his own.” When it came time to join the Communist underground, choosing a new name was a decision fraught with political, cultural, and psychological ramifications. After adopting and sloughing off names in an effort to remain unknown to the police, Silone confessed, “We have acquired too many names . . . and one of them, probably not the most pleasant, has stuck.” The effect on personal identity was sweeping. Silone compared it to the case of a monk entering the monastery, requiring “a break with his family and every private relationship, and his installation in a separate world.”
Silone’s works are referred to by their English titles. I have used Eric Mosbacher’s translations (revised by Darina Silone) in The Abruzzo Trilogy for Silone’s first three novels (Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and T
he Seed Beneath the Snow) and Harvey Fergusson’s 1968 translation of Emergency Exit, checking the English renditions against the Italian originals. Unless otherwise noted, all other translations are my own. When necessary—because of the inexact art of translating—I have included the original word or phrase. I have retained Silone’s use of “man” and “mankind” rather than use gender-neutral terms, as they would be anachronistic.
Throughout the text I have also retained Silone’s use of a contentious word—cafone—to describe the southern Italian peasant. Silone was painfully aware that the term was one of derision and contempt in most of Italy (including the south), but he insisted on using it with the hope that “when suffering ceases to be shameful, it will become a term of respect, and perhaps even of honor.” That hope, sad to say, has not yet been fulfilled in Italy, or any other country. Today, the cafoni are known by other names: marocchini, zingari, clandestini, extra-comunitari, but their suffering is unchanged.
I have sought in this work to counter two current trends in the writing of biography: the massive eight-hundred-page doorstop and the use of the omniscient biographer’s voice. James Atlas has warned us against pedantry, “the insistence—prevalent especially among academics—upon entering every fact, however insignificant, into the biographical ledger merely because it has been found.” More dangerous, I think, is the belief that after having spent nearly a decade living with a subject, the biographer has attained some mystical union with him and privileged insight or wisdom. To give one banal example: Someone casually remarked to me that the title of this book had been rendered in cyberspace as Bitter Spring: The Life of Ignazio Silone. I immediately tried to set the record straight in that the definite article was incorrect. The subtitle of the book has been since its inception A Life of Ignazio Silone. I hope to have avoided Jay Parini’s criticism that, in most contemporary biographies, “the biographer remains invisible, a kind of God who toys with the strings of his puppets, who dance across the page, or—in most cases—fail to dance.” While never known to have danced in real life, if Silone fails to do so in these pages, the fault is entirely my own.
The reconstruction of Silone’s life is made more difficult by his desire, voiced to his wife Darina Laracy and included in his last testament, that his personal letters (both those he wrote and those he received) be destroyed after his death, a wish only partially carried out by his widow. Nonetheless, vast quantities of correspondence and documentation remain in Rome, Florence, and Pescina, as well as Zurich, Bern, Amsterdam, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
The idea for this book was born while I was seated on the mountainside next to Silone’s tomb. I was in Pescina, Silone’s hometown, in March 2000 to accept the International Ignazio Silone Prize for my first book, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile. Because of its genesis, I cannot claim scientific objectivity for this book; I can only profess that I have tried to be faithful to Gaetano Salvemini’s belief that “impartiality is a dream, honesty a duty.” In one of the last essays before his death, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who won Pulitzer Prizes for his works of history and biography, wrote that “all historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age. We cannot seize on ultimate and absolute truths. So the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise—the quest for an unattainable objectivity.”
A premise of this book is that much of Silone’s writing is autobiographical; it follows that the writing of biography is also, in some sense, autobiographical. Ideally, the biography of an individual can be a prism through which we may gain insight not only into the life and times of the subject but into our own as well. Consequently, it is best that the biographer confront the enigmatic and ambiguous relationship between subject and author in a straightforward manner. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify some points here before the reader begins what may be—in the end—an arduous journey. Perhaps my stance can best be described by Silone himself who, on commenting about his autobiographical writing, once confessed, “I can guarantee its sincerity, not its objectivity.”
No birth is without its complications. Two essays by prominent scholars have dogged me during this project. Just as the proofs of the Rosselli biography were arriving on my desk in 1999, an op-ed piece by Stanley Fish raised all manner of doubt in my mind. Fish noted that although biographies are popular with both the reading public and reviewers, as a reader, beginning a biography always made him feel “queasy,” and that queasiness turned into something close to “a feeling of illness” by the third sentence. There was “nothing to stop the spiral sprawl of unconvincing speculation” except bald statements of fact, mostly uninteresting. Since the master narratives of biography have been dismissed along with most other master narratives in the West, biographers are reduced to piling on details divorced from a story line (hence the eight-hundred-page behemoths). Bad enough; but Fish charged biographers with a far graver offense, one that has haunted me for the past decade. “Biographers,” he argued, “can only be inauthentic, can only get it wrong, can only lie, can only substitute their own story for the story of their announced subject. (Biographers are all autobiographers, although the pretensions of their enterprise won’t allow them to admit it or even see it.)”
I have tried not to substitute my own story for that of Silone; hence the refusal to adopt the voice of an omniscient scholar. And although I have crafted a story that accepts contingency and embraces ambiguity, the reader will still, I trust, discern some “general truths.”
Equally important in crafting this biography was an address by the historian Joseph Ellis at the 2004 meeting of the American Historical Association. An eminent biographer, Ellis noted that the genre was something of a “bastard” in the historical profession. While most members of the public get their history from biographies, the genre is seen as “an orphan periodically adopted by history or English departments.” It has now been two generations that the historical profession has been dominated by social history and a professional disdain for the “dead white male” and “great man” narratives. But this, according to Ellis, is a mistaken conception of biography as a form of writing that “invariably imposes a simplistic set of assumptions about human agency, namely that men make history rather than the other way around.” This, insists Ellis, is a “patent falsehood.” A falsehood that I hope will be borne out by this telling of Silone’s life.
Ellis questions Jill Lepore’s assertion that historians who write biography tend to succumb to hagiography. “Every great man,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “has his disciples and it is always Judas who writes his biography.” This is only partially true in Silone’s case, where, until recently, hagiographies and character assassinations have more or less canceled each other out. If Lepore thinks historians are falling in love with their subjects, Janet Malcolm argues that they are driven by an Oedipus complex. “The intellectual health of biography,” Ellis mischievously asserts, “is largely a function of its outlaw character.”
The irony should not be overlooked: Ellis, a noted historian who had won the National Book Award for his biography of Thomas Jefferson and a Pulitzer Prize for his book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, and who had been caught fabricating details of his own biography (that he had served in the Vietnam War and was active in the antiwar and civil rights movements), influencing a biography of Silone, a man who was himself accused of fabricating and hiding aspects of his own life.
Speaking to a group of nuns late in life, Silone confessed to “a tremendous fear of the terrible ambiguity of words.” The reader of Silone’s work (and the biographer) should be cautioned not to see the author in his idealized protagonists. Certainly, this biography will please neither Silone’s many admirers nor his myriad critics. I must confess that after nearly a decade of being haunted by my subject, I am not at all sure whether I have exorcised his ghost or avoided Fish’s criticism, only that Silone remains—surely now more than ever—an enigmatic yet repre
sentative figure of the twentieth-century intellectual swimming in the rough seas of history and ideology.
Pescina / New York
March 2009
BITTER
SPRING
PROLOGUE
The LANDSCAPE of MY SOUL
What the “true” image of each of us may be in the end is a meaningless question.
—PRIMO LEVI, “Lorenzo’s Return”
In 1923, “Ignazio Silone” was born in a Spanish prison. Perhaps it was no coincidence—and surely appropriate—that at the time he was reading Dostoevsky. Secondino Tranquilli, the person whose identity he erased with his new name, had been born twenty-three years earlier in the rural Abruzzo region of Italy and burdened with the given name “Secondino,” which, in the local dialect, meant “prison guard.” In Spain, he had been writing for Andrés Nin’s journal La Batalla and imprisoned as a Communist. Significantly, he derived “Silone” from the ancient warrior Poppedius Silo, a native of Silone’s beloved Abruzzo. Silo had led a successful revolt against the tyranny of Rome in 90 B.C. and thereby gained official recognition of the local population’s autonomy. “Ignazio” he borrowed from the Spanish Counter-Reformation saint Loyola in order to “baptize the pagan surname.” In this defiant act of self-appellation and identity creation, he synthesized a classical, pagan past with the Christian tradition.
Silone has most often been associated with the protagonist of his novels Bread and Wine and The Seed Beneath the Snow, Pietro Spina. (“Read my books,” he once said, “only in them do I fully recognize myself.”) A Communist intellectual and activist, Spina is returning from exile to his native Abruzzo, hunted by the Fascist police. In order to elude arrest and move about the countryside, he dons the robes of a priest and becomes Don [Father] Paolo Spada. The metamorphosis from Pietro Spina (literally Peter [the] Thorn) to Paolo Spada (Paul [the] Sword) is revealing: The Communist “thorn” is transformed into the religious “sword.” The American literary critic Edmund Wilson, after reading Silone’s novels while sitting on the benches of the Villa Borghese Gardens in Rome, Italian dictionary at his side, perceptively sensed that Silone was “a queer mixture of priest and communist.” Nicola Chiaromonte, Silone’s fellow founder and editor of the literary-cultural journal Tempo Presente, and one of the few people who could claim to be close to the writer, intuited that Silone was in some ways a “prete contadino,” a peasant priest.