Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  Begun in 1930 but not published until 1933, Fontamara is the story of a fictional town based on the older, poorer part of Pescina, farther up the mountain, inhabited only by the poorest peasants and without even a parish priest. “Ill and in exile in a Swiss mountain village,” he wrote in 1965, “I believed that I did not have much longer to live, and so I began to write a story to which I gave the name Fontamara. I invented a village, using my bitter memories and my imagination, until I myself began to live in it.”

  Writing to Gabriella Seidenfeld (addressing her as “dearest wife” and signing as “your husband”) while composing the novel, he told her that although the town of Fontamara is fictitious, everything that unfolds there is true to reality. And even though the setting is a provincial Italian hill town, he endeavored to strip his writing of all folklore and colorful description. There were certain characters of Fontamara who were so alive, Silone wrote, that he found himself talking to them. “I believe they are the first peasants of flesh and blood who have appeared in Italian literature. I have never attempted, in writing, what I am now attempting.” At night, he would waken and go to his desk to jot down notes; other times he found himself recuperating in the garden of the sanatorium at Davos and would have to run back to his room to edit a passage. “I have told you on other occasions,” he continued to Seidenfeld, “that the time to produce for me had not yet arrived and that I always considered myself in a period of preparation. Now I believe that the time to produce has arrived. There is something new in me.” Claiming that he was not worried about the judgment that others would render of the work, he boasted that “I have never been so sure of myself. I am certain that it will be a brick in the stomach of the southern Italian bourgeoisie.” To Angelo Tasca, Silone confided, “I am working on a novel about southern Italian life . . . I am writing it because one can’t say everything in political essays: There is always a part of reality that escapes.”

  The real protagonist of the novel is not an individual but a social class, the rural proletariat, the eternally suffering peasants, the much-despised cafoni. The peasants are the existential primum for Silone. Scorned in Fontamara as “flesh used to suffering,” they are for the author the protagonist of contemporary history that most clearly reflects the human condition, the true children of the suffering Christ depicted, as in an ancient Roman graffito, as a crucified donkey.

  Silone wrote most of Fontamara in a small pensione in Davos, so poor that he was forced to leave the manuscript, his typewriter, and a raincoat until he could return to pay the bill. When the book was finally published, not in Italian but German, in 1933, it carried a poignant dedication to “Romolo Tranquilli and Gabriella Seidenfeld.” In his own personal copy, Silone inscribed the Latin from Lamentations 1:12: “Videte si dolor vester est sicut dolor meus” (See if there be any sorrow unto my sorrow).

  The novel opens with an exiled Fontamarese living in Zurich returning home one evening overwhelmed by nostalgia, finding three fellow villagers awaiting him on his doorstep. Father, mother, and son are the survivors of a tragedy and recount their tale in turn.

  The poor cafoni of Fontamara are subject to the eternally unchanging barren landscape and an indifferent if not hostile local aristocracy. Into this semifeudal world a new actor appears in the guise of the Contractor, representative of the Fascist regime in Rome. It has taken eight years but the new dispensation has finally arrived in Fontamara: The Contractor has easily absorbed the local village elites such as the priest Don Abbacchio and the old lawyer Don Circostanza and the petty aristocrat Don Carlo Magna. Into the millennial suffering of the peasants has arrived a new brutality.

  Beginning with a cynical exploitation of the peasants’ illiteracy, which gives specious legal claim to the diversion of a precious stream of water to the Contractor’s land, the story unfolds of one peasant’s dire plight to obtain a meager piece of land so as to be able to marry his sweetheart, Elvira. Berardo Viola was born, as his mother prophesied to everyone in the village, under a dark star. (San Berardo was one of the patron saints of Pescina; the Church of San Berardo had been irreparably damaged in the 1915 earthquake and consequently deconsecrated.) From passive resignation to primitive rebel and, finally, through his meeting with a mysterious underground man, to fledgling revolutionary, Berardo Viola is transformed by his condition. In the process, though, he brings down the wrath of the regime on the heads of his fellow villagers. In a final horrific orgy of violence, fascism reasserts itself in the town, and Berardo sacrifices himself in prison to the cause. Berardo’s arrest, torture, and subsequent death in prison closely mirror Romolo Tranquilli’s fate. And here surely Silone was trying to expiate his own sins in failing to help secure his brother’s release and what he felt was his own complicity in his brother’s martyrdom. (Berardo’s death, which the Fascist police falsely attribute to suicide, also mirrors the death in prison by “suicide” of Gastone Sozzi on February 6, 1928. Sozzi, a fellow militant in the PCI, had suffered three months of torture; his death was a catalyst for Silone to begin a campaign condemning Fascist judicial procedures.)

  Writing to a readership completely foreign to the world of Fontamara, Silone offers two cautions in his foreword: This is no picturesque, romantic lyric to a sunny southern Italy that exists only in the imagination of northern Europeans, and the reader is to be aware that although the dialogue may be written in formal, proper Italian, the reality took place in dialect, a universe away from the Italian learned in school. Related to the idea of a story translated from the dialect, Silone offers a model of writing and storytelling. If the former was almost unknown because of illiteracy, the latter was one of the arts of Fontamara, learned as children, sitting on the doorstep in the late afternoon sun, or around the fireplace in the long nights of winter, or by the hand loom, listening to old stories to the rhythm of the loom’s pedal. “The art of storytelling—the art of putting one word after another, one line after another, one sentence after another, explaining one thing at a time, without allusions or reservations, calling bread bread and wine wine—is just like the ancient art of weaving, the ancient art of putting one thread after another, one color after another, cleanly, neatly, perseveringly, plainly for all to see.”

  The word “fascism” is not mentioned; when the peasants are forced to attend a rally, they are made to feel ridiculous when they insist on bringing along the banner of their patron, St. Rocco, to what turns out to be a political demonstration choreographed by the Fascist regime.

  The novel ends with the self-sacrifice of the peasant Berardo as well as the woman he loves, Elvira. A final scene has the surviving peasants of a Fascist massacre gathered together to publish the first “cafone” newspaper, arguing over its title. Unknowingly echoing Lenin, Nicolai Chernyshevsky, and Tolstoy, they finally agree on a title that is also a plaintive cry for change. “They have killed Berardo Viola, What Is to Be Done? . . . They have taken away our water, What Is to Be Done? . . . The priest refuses to bury our dead, What Is to Be Done? . . . They violate our women in the name of the law, What Is to Be Done?”

  After completing the manuscript, Silone wrote to Gabriella Seidenfeld that every period of a person’s life must be judged according to the place it delivers you to. (Twice he uses the Italian word destino, “fate.”)

  Fate has decreed that, in order to express all the suffering of our age, I should know and experience all the miseries, all the shame, all the enthusiasms, all the defeats of our age; nothing that a man can suffer has been unknown to me. But if I am able to still live and recount the tale and if I can judge myself and if I can have pity for this poor human being, it’s only because of you, dear. Without you, where would I have ended up? . . . Fontamara is no more than a first chapter . . . I wish to say two or three things before dying, things that no one else can tell and that fate has charged me to say. Two or three things that every worker, every peasant, every Communist, and every Fascist should think about, which every man should reflect upon. Two or three things about this da
mn world.

  Getting the work published proved to be a daunting task. Since publishing it in Italy was impossible, Silone turned to his circle of foreign friends for assistance and advice. The manuscript was in the hands of Jakob Wassermann and scheduled to be published in German by Fisher Verlag, but Hitler’s ascension to power in January 1933 precluded that possibility. Aline Valangin sent the typed manuscript to the exiled historian Gaetano Salvemini, then in Paris. Salvemini wrote back to Valangin that the work is “valuable,” Silone “has much talent,” and the author “has vividly felt the life of our peasants,” but he spent most of the letter offering a critique of the novel: The use of the first-person narrative was clumsy; the writing was repetitious; the peasants appear “too stupid”; “certain obscenities are better off being suppressed or masked; naked and crude life is not art.” Salvemini continued that “the rape of the girl is true enough but no one will believe it; they will say it’s ‘anti-Fascist propaganda,’ and the work will lose any value.” His advice was “to tell a lot less of the truth to be believed.” His prediction of the book’s fate was equally pessimistic: “A translation would be impossible; it is too far removed from the experience of those who are not Italian, and even to many Italians . . . It will sell very few copies because the Italians abroad read little, even less than Italians in Italy.” For once, Salvemini was wrong. Tasca sent his encouragement from Paris: “My impression is less pessimistic than Salvemini’s.”

  Notwithstanding Silone’s precarious position with the PCI (he had not yet been formally expelled), the German Communist Alfred Kurella, a high-ranking member of the Comintern, read the manuscript and was impressed. When Silone was later expelled from the party, Kurella met with the writer in Zurich and brought a typewritten copy with him back to Berlin in search of an editor. Twenty-two years after its first publication, Silone could still remember with bitterness the “insolent” reply of Rascher, Henri Barbusse’s German publisher (and future publisher of the complete works of Mussolini).

  Just when it seemed that the manuscript was fated to languish, it was taken up by Nettie Sutro, originally from Bavaria, now resident in Zurich. Silone had met Sutro and her husband, the noted neurologist Eric Katzenstein, through the French poet Jean-Paul Samson. A conscientious objector during World War I, Samson had fled to neutral Switzerland. (He too would later translate several of Silone’s works into French.) Many years later, Silone recalled with profound gratitude Sutro’s “act of pure generosity” in translating the manuscript into German, perhaps because she had come to take pity on a manuscript that Silone had left in the pensione at Davos until he could pay his bill. At the apartment of Katzenstein and Sutro, Silone was introduced to Ernst Toller, Jakob Wassermann, and Martin Buber. The Austrian novelist Wassermann wrote to Sutro after having read the manuscript that it had “a Homeric simplicity and grandeur.” He, contrary to Salvemini, was convinced that the book was destined for great fame. Silone’s circle of friends urged him to publish Sutro’s German translation, even at his own expense; they would pledge a certain number of subscriptions. With Aline Valangin a moving force, eight hundred subscriptions were secured and Fontamara appeared “at the expense of the author,” first in a Swiss German edition by the Zurich publishing house of Oprecht. Silone recognized that even with eight hundred pledged subscriptions, which permitted Emil Oprecht to publish two thousand copies of the book, Oprecht was taking a political as well as a financial risk. Hitler and Nazism had recently come to power in Germany. In fact, the Frankfurter-Zeitung had planned to publish the work in installments starting in February 1933, but this was abandoned in light of the unfolding political catastrophe. But, as Pietro Spina recalls his grandmother saying, “when God closes a door, he sometimes opens up a window.” The book was typeset by the Tipografia Cooperativa in Sciaffusa, and the Socialist typesetters there asked for neither an advance nor a guarantee of payment.

  Since the publication of Fontamara coincided with the Nazi seizure of power, many German refugees found it in their hands as they passed through Switzerland, fleeing Hitler’s regime. By the winter of 1933–34, the book had already made its way onto the Nazi blacklist: “to be confiscated even in bookstores and household searches.” German refugees made the book known in the other European countries in which they settled, as well as in the United States, where a Hungarian Jewish pacifist, Rosika Schwimmer, received no fewer than a dozen rejection letters from American publishers to her proposals for an English translation. Sutro’s translation was reprinted by the associates of the Universum Bücherei guild in Basel and serialized in fourteen daily and periodical publications in Switzerland between 1934 and 1935. A flawed American edition was finally published in 1934, and a much better English translation by Eric Mosbacher and his wife Gwenda David was published in Britain the same year. Mosbacher was perhaps Silone’s best English translator and carried on a thoughtful correspondence with the writer for several decades. Jean-Paul Samson published a French translation in 1934, and an Italian edition was published the same year in Paris by the fictitious publishing house Nuove Edizioni Italiane. In reality, the Italian edition was printed by Imprimerie SFIE, a group of Italian anti-Fascist emigrant typesetters at 29, rue du Moulin Joly. The cover of this edition was graced by a woodcut engraving by Clément Moreau, pseudonym of Carl Meffert, who also produced the half dozen striking woodcuts for the English translation of Viaggio a Parigi as Mr. Aristotle in 1935.

  Over the next few years, the book was translated into twenty-seven languages, including Dutch, Flemish, Polish, Czech, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Croat, Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, and even Esperanto. During World War II, Jonathan Cape in London published a cheap edition of twenty thousand copies in Italian to be given to Italian prisoners of war. In late 1944, one of these copies ended up in the hands of the archbishop of Naples, Alessio Cardinal Ascalesi, who denounced the book from his pulpit. In London in 1942, the BBC transmitted a radio broadcast of Fontamara. By 2000, the book had sold close to two million copies. Three decades after the book had been published, Silone mused on its fate. He had been compared to Giovanni Verga and William Faulkner by foreign critics but confessed to having read Verga only after having written Fontamara. Conscious of (but in no way embarrassed by) his lack of formal literary training, “I hastened in search of books by these two illustrious authors” only to discover that “we had nothing in common: neither the sense of life nor our way of representing it.” To the Sicilian writer, journalist, and anti-Fascist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Silone confessed that perhaps success had come a bit early in the wake of Fontamara, but that he wanted “to remain faithful to myself and to the reason that pushed me to write. Because as far as talented writers are concerned, Italian literature has had perhaps too many already and in this sense my contribution would be fairly limited; if, instead, I continue along my path, I will create impure art, but art that would count for something.”

  On returning to Italy in October 1944, Silone refused to hand Fontamara to any Italian editor or publisher who had collaborated with fascism. This curtailed his options, to say the least. It prevented Fontamara from being made into a film because Silone felt that the studios had been too accommodating with fascism. But Fontamara was finally published in Italy in 1945, serialized in Il Risveglio, a weekly journal published by the defrocked priest Ernesto Buonaiuti. A modernist priest, Buonaiuti was excommunicated in 1925 and lost his university position in 1931 for criticizing the Lateran Accords between the Fascist state and the Vatican and refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to Mussolini’s regime. (Only eleven professors out of twelve hundred refused.) He later was forced to give up a chair at the University of Lausanne because he refused to convert to Protestantism. Buonaiuti recalled that Fontamara had circulated clandestinely in Fascist Italy and came as a revelation to artists who had matured “in suffering and hope.” He felt the 1945 publication in Italy was a triumph and a definitive condemnation of that kind of poor and pale literary aesthetic or va
in poetic fantasy intended to satisfy the taste of “spineless aesthetes and effeminate dandies” (smidollati e cicisbei). A year after Buonaiuti published Fontamara, he was dead. Silone was forced to recognize the realities of the publishing industry in Italy and, accordingly, Fontamara was first published in book form in postwar Italy by Mondadori in 1949. Translations continued apace around the world, including Slovenia, Serbia, Greece, Catalonia, and two editions in India (in Kannada and Bengali). A Turkish translation appeared in 1943; Japanese, 1952; Lebanonese, 1965; Afrikaans (South Africa), 1968.

  The book’s message, though, was not universally well received. Writing in an Italian literary review in 1973, an American professor at Florida State University noted how his deeply bourgeois white students had difficulty understanding Fontamara, while his black students, marked by a very different social and cultural history, were deeply moved by the novel.

  Carlo Rosselli, writing to Silone from Paris on November 17, 1933, was effusive in his praise: “I have reread Fontamara. And my first impression has been greatly reinforced. It is a very beautiful book, the most beautiful Italian social novel.” It was a “painful and stunning” book; more important, Rosselli made the critical point that it was the first Italian “social” novel in which the protagonist was not an individual but a social class, the cafoni, and a social condition: la miseria. Rosselli went on to say that he only recently discovered that the Romolo Tranquilli who died in prison a year earlier was Silone’s brother. “In the name of all anti-Fascists, permit me to send all my sympathy.” A month later, Rosselli wrote again, proposing to publish Romolo’s letters in his journal, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà.