The most recent scandal, that Silone was engaged in a decadelong spying operation against his comrades in the Italian Communist Party, has come to overshadow everything else, calling into question as it does Silone’s status as a reluctant secular saint of the independent left in Europe, a persona that Silone worked hard to root in the public imagination. In Silone’s second novel, Bread and Wine, Don Benedetto reads from an old essay of Pietro Spina’s: “But for the fact that it would be very boring to be exhibited on altars after one’s death, to be prayed to and worshiped by a lot of unknown people, mostly ugly old women, I should like to be a saint.” But surely he would have echoed Dorothy Day’s retort: “Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” And it was George Orwell, to whom Silone has often been compared, who wrote “saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” a sentiment that certainly would have provoked a wry smile and a knowing nod from the Italian writer. “Silone was the man of capital letters,” his wife recalled. “He used to write the word ‘verità’ with a capital ‘V’; ‘libertà’ with a capital ‘L.’ But his lowercase character was mysterious and unknowable.”
How then, in this tangled thicket of representation, self-representation, and misrepresentation, is a historian and biographer to approach Silone? And how should these most recent revelations affect our perception of the writer? Perhaps a comparison with an earlier work—also a biography—might prove useful. Then, the subject (Carlo Rosselli), while a complex and charismatic figure, was a relatively “open” text, his thinking accessible through his essays, letters, anti-Fascist activism, and most important theoretical work. Silone, by contrast, has been “known” only through an association with the protagonists of his novels and his autobiographical essays. But this presents the reader and the biographer with a challenge. As Elizabeth Leake demonstrates in her recent analysis, Silone reinvented himself as a novelist who had passed through the inferno of the militant’s life in the Communist underground, thereby giving his writings an aura of authenticity. Because of Silone’s role as Fascist informer, Leake argues that his identity was based on “incoherent decisions” and that when the discrepancies between his life and his fiction are taken into account, the reader is unable to fix Silone’s position on the moral spectrum. “The paradoxical nature of his identity,” she concludes, “is thus insurmountable.” But was Silone’s transformation insincere and therefore, in some way, deceitful? There is no reason to doubt that Silone’s transition from underground political activist to exiled solitary writer was as sincere and painful as he claimed.
Silone’s notoriously difficult personality has sometimes been blamed on a certain strain of misanthropy. Yet, in May of 1936, he wrote to the German writer Bernard von Brentano:
The difficulty Spina encounters (in Bread and Wine) in communicating with other men reflects in good measure my state of mind [stato di anima]. Relations with other people do not have a simple, natural, and direct character which I would love. This dissatisfaction sometimes pushes me toward solitude and willful silence. It is not misanthropy, but just the opposite: a love of man that remains unsatisfied, a need for friendship that fails to find its subject. This ends by irritating me and wearing me out. I begin again to love solitude as I loved it when I was 17: it is a very particular kind of solitude in which one chooses and invents one’s friends, and one reads much.
This biography employs neither the psychoanalytical approach (for which I am not trained) nor the literary-critical method, for I am convinced that the “truth” of Silone’s life lies neither hidden in the archives nor wholly revealed in his writings but in some contested and ambiguously mapped terrain between memoir, literature, and history.
That terrain was shaped by the forces of heresy in daring to challenge certain Marxist and Stalinist “truths,” exile in Switzerland, and the twin tragedies of a failed politics and a disillusionment with the Catholic church. In the 1920s, as a major figure of the international Communist movement, Silone refused to accept the orthodoxy of Stalin’s cult and suffered the fate of the heretic, excommunicated from the Marxist church. Broken, disillusioned, told by his doctors that he was near death, and contemplating suicide, Silone retreated to Davos, where he began composing his most famous work, Fontamara, literally “Bitter Spring.” The book’s “unforeseen and unforeseeable” success “made me a writer,” he recalled forty years later. Like a long line of Italian intellectuals before him, from Dante to Machiavelli, from Mazzini to Garibaldi, exile transformed Silone into an entirely new person. He was ostracized by the Communists and hunted by the Fascists. Rather than the relatively congenial exile of bohemian Paris, Silone chose austere, Protestant Zurich. He was accused of failing to change with literary taste, of refusing to accommodate the whims of the reading public, of writing the same book over and over again. But as his close friend and colleague the Polish writer Gustaw Herling wrote about him, “Anyone who is deeply convinced that he is saying something important is not ashamed to say things more than once. The secret is the gravity of the words, and what gives words their gravity is their unceasing vigilance.”
It was this existential status as an outsider and exile—even after returning to Italy—that marked his life and work. An interviewer once noted a certain “Erasmian component” to his personality. But an Erasmus plucked from the aristocratic Renaissance and dropped into the Industrial Age, “not afraid to get his hands dirty in peasant revolts.” This was an Erasmus who rendered Silone “a citizen of an invisible world community of free men, not very numerous, but united by cultural ties.” This Italian had no homeland. Indeed, Silone claimed no other citizenship except that of this “imagined communion” with peasants and workers around the world, so different from the “imagined communities” of nationalism.
Silone’s personal traumas (the loss of his father, the death of his mother in an earthquake, his precarious physical and mental health, his brother’s imprisonment and death, his “spying”) inevitably left their marks but were only obliquely played out in his work. It was only the public trauma of expulsion from the PCI that was explicit in his writing. His struggle with demons private and public may not have been as obvious as that of other intellectuals with whom he has often been compared, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, or George Orwell, yet it was no less dramatic. His story is, in short, a modernist tragedy.
Silone represents a special genre of intellectual: passionately committed to a political ideology that eventually proves illusory; in the light of that failure desperately attempting not to succumb to nihilism; perhaps morally compromised by a relationship to the very powers of oppression; caught in a Sisyphean task of political liberation in a century that placed all the powers of modern mass communication, technology, and awesome violence in the hands of totalitarian states.
In 1962, Silone and Darina made a pilgrimage of sorts to the Holy Land. They had taken the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and found themselves in a barren valley bereft of trees, shrubs, plants, or flowers. There was no sign of water or human life. But near Bethlehem they came upon a woman dressed all in black, carrying a child and riding a dusty, gray donkey. The three silent figures passed Silone and his wife without so much as a glance in their direction. The vision created in Silone a particular state of mind and he was silent for a long time. Although he had never been in this part of the world, he had the distinct impression that he had already seen and lived this panorama. It was Darina who after a long while broke the silence by pointing out to her husband that this was the landscape of his novels. It was a revelation. “I saw once again,” he later wrote, “outside of myself, something that I had carried within me for years, perhaps since birth: the landscape of my soul.” In this landscape, bread, wine, wolves, donkeys, and water all had potent hold on his imagination, both in their literal and symbolic manifestations. Water in all its forms—from fountains and springs to snow and tears—is always critical in his work. (One is reminded of Picasso’s famous remark: “I
went to communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water.”) In Silone’s work, towns and people have names such as Acquasanta (holy water), Acquaviva (living water), and Pietrasecca (dry stone), indicating their interior life. The cover of his last work was graced with Giotto’s fresco “Miracle of the Spring,” depicting St. Francis of Assisi in prayer while a fellow pilgrim quenches his thirst nearby. But “if the spring is not clear,” declares one of Silone’s protagonists, “I refuse to drink.”
ONE
SAINTS and STONECUTTERS
When September comes to Fontamara, the old cornmeal is almost finished, and the new is not yet ground.
When September comes to Fontamara, the old meal is wormeaten, and the polenta is bitter indeed.
—SILONE, “Viaggio a Parigi”
Homo Homini Lupus
Ignazio Silone came from a land where wolves still roamed the earth. They were sovereigns of the mountain passes that linked one small town to another in the rugged Abruzzo region of Italy. After years of merciless hunting, today the only wolves in the still-rugged Abruzzo are safely ensconced in a national park. But as unwary visitors may unexpectedly discover, their cousins—menacing wild dogs—still wander the hills above Silone’s hometown of Pescina dei Marsi. Jealous of their inheritance, the dogs defend their domain while birds of prey lazily circle high above. Wolves in all their myriad forms haunted Silone’s imagination and writing his entire life. Their physical presence in Abruzzo was a defining feature of life in the region, especially in winter:
The wolves would come down from the mountains in the afternoon and lie in wait near the watering troughs. There they lay buried in the snow until dusk. To their famished bellies the wind bore the plump, warm smell of the sheep. The moment it grew dark, they threw prudence to the winds. The smell of sheep made them desperate, mad, and capable of anything. They moved in groups of three, one behind the other, according to their ancient rule of war. Not even the sight of men waiting in ambush for them—not even certain death—would make them turn back.
Few readers of his masterful second novel, Bread and Wine, can forget its tormenting last lines, as the innocent Cristina desperately seeks to follow the fleeing Pietro Spina into the mountains during a snowstorm:
Eventually a voice in the distance answered her, but it was not a human voice. It was like the howling of a dog, but it was sharper and more prolonged. Cristina probably recognized it. It was the howl of a wolf. The howl of prey. The summons to other wolves scattered about the mountain. The invitation to the feast. Through the driving snow and the darkness of the approaching night Cristina saw a wild beast coming toward her, quickly appearing and disappearing in the dips and rises in the snow. She saw others appear in the distance. Then she knelt, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross.
The wolves that permeate Silone’s oeuvre are accompanied by another force of nature: the ever-present earthquake of 1915 that destroyed a good part of Silone’s hometown. Wolves and the earthquake are mentioned in every one of Silone’s novels, often seemingly in passing but freighted with power and symbolism. The earthquake affected Silone in much the same way that Dostoevsky’s mock execution marked the Russian writer; neither man was the same afterward and their writing bears the often subtle and sometimes obvious imprint of the event. Pescina had a population of five thousand on the morning of January 13, 1915; within thirty seconds, thirty-five hundred people were dead, including Silone’s mother. The son dug his mother out of the ruins with his own hands. After five days, Silone’s last surviving sibling, a younger brother, Romolo, was pulled from the rubble. In a passage many years later, Silone conflated the wolves and the earthquake in a scene of deep despair that apparently was never far from his mind or his writing.
It was a few days after the earthquake. Most of the dead were still lying under the ruins. Help was slow in coming. The terrified survivors lived among the ruined houses in temporary shelters. It was the dead of winter, and that year had been especially cold. New tremors and snowstorms were threatened. The donkeys, mules, cows, and sheep had been gathered in makeshift pens, since their barns and stalls had been destroyed. And at night the wolves came, attracted by the strong warm odor of the animals no longer protected by their stables. Night comes quickly in our part of the world, and in that season it’s already dark at four o’clock. So it was dangerous to go too far from the shelters. On the mountain, unusually deep in snow, it was impossible for the wolves to get their customary food. Irresistible hunger drove them down into the valley. The smell of the herds in the open air made them bolder than usual, almost mad. To keep them away we had to keep big fires burning all the time. Some nights the cries of these beasts did not let us sleep.
In the bitter, piercingly cold nights after the earthquake, one could hear the wolves howling, each time a little closer to the ruins of the town. “You know,” Silone sadly recounted to his wife a few days before his death in 1978, “even outside the ruins many people died in the snow . . . By day I tried digging with my hands in the rubble, but all I could see were the large fallen beams . . . One night I couldn’t face the cold outside and pretended to sleep. I heard one of my uncles saying I must be wakened, then someone else replying, ‘Let him sleep, he’s better off dead, since he’s got no one left.’ ”
The despair brought about by nature was compounded by horrors committed by friends and family: A wife fails to notify others that her husband is still alive beneath the ruins, ensuring that he perishes. And during the first evening after the earthquake, Silone witnessed a relative stealing his dead mother’s purse. “I believe it was that night,” he caustically recalled, “which colored my opinion of money in a veil of deep horror.”
Until he was fifteen, Silone’s entire world was circumscribed by the view from the hills above Pescina with the mountains encircling the Fucino plain below. Compared to other regions in Italy, Silone wrote, the Marsica had been very poor in terms of any civil history. “Its glories,” he wrote dryly, “have been primarily religious.” The area, Silone insisted, was not backward but rather “overburdened and exhausted by its load of medieval history.” Yet in spite, or perhaps precisely because, of this, he felt that it was the only setting in which he could situate his “living” characters. The one novel not set in Abruzzo, The Fox and the Camelias (1960), takes place in the Ticino canton of Switzerland, and its main character, Daniele, is the son of an exiled Abruzzese peasant. Yet Silone once admitted: “In the judgment of the Abruzzesi, the countryside comes off poorly [maltrattato] in my books. I must say that they are absolutely right.” He went on to insist that in a novel, the landscape is an integral part of the characters, the situations, and the problems represented. It was not until many years later, in a journey to the Holy Land, that he became fully cognizant of this.
He was acutely aware that the Mezzogiorno (the Italian south) was a society lacerated by profound contradictions. It had given Italy some of her most original philosophers (Benedetto Croce) and artists (Ovid), yet it was the part of the country in which ignorance was most widespread. It was a region of mystics such as Joachim of Fiore and sensualists such as Gabriele D’Annunzio; it was permeated by anarchists and overrun with police; it was populated by landless peasants and large landowners and latifundisti. “It is one of the most inhuman parts of the world (comparable in certain aspects with Spain) and its contradictions are so ancient,” he wrote in 1938, “that they seem natural. The refusal to accept poverty, ignorance, and injustice as natural facts was the impetus for my non-conformity.”
For Carlo Levi, a northern Italian Jewish intellectual, banished to the remote town of Aliano in the province of Matera for his political activities, contact with the Mezzogiorno was a revelation. Levi came to see it as “that other part of the world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient,” a land and a people “without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on the barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.”
What kinship did Silone have, an interviewer once asked rhetorically, to Italy? Pescina was not in Italy; it was “outside time and space, forgotten by God and men.” And paraphrasing the title of Carlo Levi’s most famous book, he concluded, “Christ did not arrive at Pescina.”
A decade before his death, Silone looked back at the Abruzzo and its people as “quite ordinary, simple, taciturn, even crude and mean.” But when the occasion demanded it, they could also be “capable of exceptional acts of generosity and courage.” A South African prisoner of war, escaping from the Fascists and Nazis, had been hidden and succored by the peasants of Abruzzo. On meeting Silone, he recounted his promise to return to Italy and tell of how he had then, for the first time, “glimpsed the possibility of absolutely pure, selfless human relationships.”
Bitter Spring Page 3