Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  Trotsky, whom Silone had met in his brief visits to Moscow in the 1920s, had read the book aboard the ocean liner Bulgaria in July 1933 during a transatlantic voyage. In a letter to Silone, the Russian revolutionary wrote, “In Fontamara passion is heightened to such a fever pitch that an authentic work of art is the result.” Later that year, Trotsky repeated his private thoughts in a review in a Parisian journal and concluded, “From the first to the last line, this remarkable book is directed against the Fascist regime in Italy, its acts of violence, and its atrocities. Fontamara is not only a book of passionately political accusation; for in it the revolutionary passion is raised to such a height that it becomes a true work of art.” Trotsky’s “benediction” of the book opened the doors for Silone’s appraisal in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic: from the Nouvelle Revue Française to Partisan Review in New York. Silone, detecting an ideological dogmatism in Trotsky, judged a political collaboration impossible and declined an invitation from the exiled Russian to meet.

  A fellow exile in Zurich, the German writer Bernard von Brentano, noted the book’s revolutionary power: “One hundred rich men can beat a poor unarmed man, force him to kneel before them, humiliate and exploit him. The poor man seems lost. But it is not so. Look, reader, at the story of Fontamara, to see how freedom itself begins to write when everyone believes its defenders have been locked up for good.” Graham Greene’s review in London’s Spectator, in which he confessed to a spiritual affinity with the Italian writer, paved the way for a positive critical reception on the part of English readers:

  In Fontamara we are not concerned with eternal issues: we are down in the mud and the blood, the injustice and ignominy of the present. This story of an obscure Italian village [of] “about one hundred ragged, shapeless, one-floor hovels” is the most moving account of Fascist barbarity I have yet read; it is told simply, in the first person, as if by one of the peasants: how the villagers of Fontamara were driven by suffering at the hands of the swindling landowners and corrupt administrators to a useless tragic revolt against the State. Only an old man, his wife and son have escaped abroad to tell the story to Signor Silone of how the Blackshirts came down to Fontamara . . . It should be read to its merciless end.

  Almost four decades after the book first appeared, Silone responded to a series of questions from a student in Brescia, noting that “the entire action of Fontamara unfolds over the fundamental contrast between the still semifeudal psychology of the ‘cafoni’ and the irruption of new elements of exploitation and oppression. The contrast has tragic elements but comic and grotesque ones as well.” When the student noted that the novel ends with a question (“What is to be done?”) that has no answer, Silone corrected her: “It is a question that is in itself an answer. The Fontamaresi, before then, had never asked that question. The abuses and humiliations were considered a part of the natural world created by God. To begin to pose the question was already a liberation. (And in Berardo’s sacrifice is the beginning of an answer.)”

  Silone’s German translator Nettie Sutro was also one of his most astute critics. In Silone’s writing, “life itself is dressed in poetry,” she wrote, “even if it presents itself in all its dark sadness.” Fontamara unfolds with an inexorable necessity; one reads with a sense of foreboding, of fate hovering over the action. As Sutro noted, “Because all this is equivalent to a Greco-Roman tragedy, there is no place in it for sorrow or sentimental pity. Everything happens because it must. It cannot be otherwise, it can come about in no other way; and all the time one keeps staring at the next development in the story, as a sailor in distress watches the next wave that threateningly rolls toward him.”

  Silone often commented on how his characters went on living and evolving in his mind long after a novel was finished; hence his propensity to revisit and rework his books. When a new edition of Fontamara was to be published in 1960, he expressed surprise on rereading it: “My embarrassment was not the result of comparing the book with the reality that I once more had before my eyes, but between the 1930 story and the developments it had undergone inside me during all the years in which I had gone living in it.” Speaking in Rome to a group of students from Smith College in 1962 who specifically asked the writer about the various versions of his novels, Silone replied that in the rereading and subsequent “corrections” he was guided not by “the norms of beautiful writing [bello scrivere] but by my new way of seeing and feeling.”

  Unfortunately, because of Fascist censorship, Fontamara’s great success abroad was not matched in Italy. Even though it circulated clandestinely, most Italians remained ignorant of Silone until after the war. An episode involving the 1934 Nobel Prize–winning author Luigi Pirandello was telling: At a press conference in America before World War II, the author of Six Characters in Search of an Author was asked his opinion of Silone as the first question at a press conference. “Who is he?” asked Pirandello. “I never heard of him.” Whether Pirandello was sincere in his ignorance or simply being politically astute, we do not know. It was not until 1949 when Mondadori put out a revised and corrected version from the Jonathan Cape edition that the Italian critical establishment began to take note. The young Guglielmo Petroni, who had spent time in Fascist prisons and whose memoir The World Is a Prison was a literary jewel, recognized that Silone was a writer for whom “the necessity of a deep consciousness of the moral figure of man was stronger and more necessary than for any other writer.” The Communist literary establishment held back their firepower, thinking of Silone as the prodigal son who would eventually return.

  Fascism

  Their thinking was based partially on the vaguely Marxian overtones of Fontamara and on the orthodox Marxism in Silone’s Der Fascismus: seine Enstehung und seine Entwicklung (Fascism: Its Origin and Development), first published in 1934. Based partially on articles that had appeared in the official theoretical journal of the PCI, Lo Stato Operaio, Silone offered a three-part definition of the new political ideology. First, he defined fascism “chronologically”: as a movement that arises in capitalist societies, at times of economic crisis, typically when the crisis is prolonged, and when both capitalist and workers’ parties are incapable of filling the vacuum. Second, Silone described fascism “morphologically” (that is, by its shape, or phenomenologically): as “a broad political movement of the masses,” typically with a nationalist ideology and petit bourgeois support. Third, Silone defined fascism “dialectically”: as a movement that develops and changes. In particular, he contrasted fascism as a movement with fascism as a regime: “Fascism, the strongest movement that has ever emerged from the petite bourgeoisie, results in the open dictatorship of high finance and in an unprecedented repression of the petite bourgeoisie as a class.” Fascism, Silone wrote, “was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.” It was “the elevation of nihilism to power.” And combining political acumen with peasant wisdom, he warned in a later essay that “revolutions, like trees, are recognized by their fruits.”

  Sandwiched between the first two exile novels, Der Fascismus was a brutally stark work. As Silone confessed to Angelo Tasca, he undertook the task solely to earn a bit of breathing room, pay some bills, and afford him a few months’ leisure to finish Fontamara. Written between 1931 and 1934, never published in Italian during its author’s lifetime (indeed, he renounced the work and forbade its publication in Italy), it originally appeared in 1935. Translated into three languages (Croat and Polish in addition to the German), it did not appear in Italian until 1992 (in an unauthorized version); it wasn’t until a decade later that an edition appeared with the blessings of Darina Silone. These Italian editions were translated from the German, as the original manuscript had been lost in Silone’s Swiss exile. Silone wrote several times that he felt his position on fascism was better explained in the subsequent School for Dictators, which appeared in 1938.

  Employing a strict Marxist methodology and written in a polemical vein, Der Fascismus was the last remnant of Sil
one’s party mentality. Its essence is distilled in an essay that appeared in an unorthodox journal Silone founded, information, as “Was ist Fascismus? Versuch einer Definition.” It was published in Zurich by Emil Oprecht, who, with the success of Fontamara, had founded Europa Verlag, publishing some of the great works of the 1930s in German: Benedetto Croce’s History of Europe; Bernard von Brentano’s Theodor Chindler; Hermann Rauschning’s study of Nazism, Die Revolution des Nihilismus; and Thomas Mann’s journal Mass und Werk.

  Notwithstanding the Marxist analytical framework of Der Fascismus, the PCI intervened with Paul Nizan, editor of Carrefour in Paris, to prevent its publication in French. That did not prevent Nikolai Bukharin from writing a positive review in Izvestia in May 1935. (Three years later, Bukharin would become a victim of Stalin’s purges.)

  The work is both a sociological study of the development of fascism as well as a study of class conflict in Italy. It is also a history of the workers’ movement in Italy, its successes and failures. A major interpretive key was Silone’s assertion that fascism arose more in reaction to reform, rather than revolutionary, socialism. His conclusion was that the political immaturity of the workers’ movement in the immediate postwar period caused it to fail against capitalism and, in so doing, assisted the rise of fascism. Writing from the mid-1930s, Silone recognized that fascism could last years, even decades, but “that the victory of capital over labor could not be eternal. The future belongs to socialism. The future belongs to liberty.”

  After World War II, he occasionally returned to examining fascism in his essays. With its bombastic rhetoric, its climate of fear, and its insistence on servility, fascism had brought about an aggravation and acceleration “of the general moral decadence” in Italy. With its myth of Rome and claim to totalitarianism, fascism “deluded itself that it was purging the Italians of their skepticism with strong medicine.” Thus, public life was “bristling with heroic sentiments” but failed to take root in people’s consciences. While the “half-tragic, half-farcical nature of Fascism facilitated its downfall,” the end of fascism created the “unfortunate illusion” that the “moral infection of nihilism” that had inspired it had disappeared with it.

  When the manuscript of Fontamara had been completed and as Silone established an editorial relationship with Oprecht, he conceived the idea of a new cultural review, information, whose inaugural issue appeared in June 1932. Rejecting any school of philosophy, any system of ideology, or any imposed orthodoxy, information attracted a heterogeneous group of artists, writers, designers, and architects. Although it appeared for only two years, it was a signal achievement for intellectuals of Mitteleurope fleeing the burgeoning Nazi movement in Germany and elsewhere. The inaugural editorial laid out a vision of modern life as “development, movement, change, struggle, contradiction, evolution, and revolution at the same time.” Dialogue and dialectic were the forms that best established a link between thought and life conceived as “an incessant becoming.”

  The School for Dictators

  Since Der Fascismus was undertaken both as a last expression of Silone’s orthodox Marxism and for purely pecuniary reasons, Silone later disavowed it, although its most profound line is one he embraced for the rest of his life: “La storia è sempre autocritica” (History is always self-critique).

  During the summer of 1937, after the successful publication of Bread and Wine, and while he was working on The School for Dictators, Silone was again deeply unsatisfied with the recent turn of political events. Urged to join the Italian Socialist Party, he confessed to a temptation, only to see it cooled by “the idea and a memory of what a party (every party) really is.” As for his work at the time, “even if with good results, [it] gives me only mediocre satisfaction and I cannot successfully delude myself into making a virtue out of necessity.”

  When asked for his theoretical analysis of fascism, he would respond that readers should look closely at his satire in the form of a dialogue, The School for Dictators, composed between 1937 and 1938. The interlocutors are three: a certain Professor Pickup, founder of the new “science” of “pantautologia” (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Dr. Henry Kissinger) and adviser to Mr. W, aspiring future dictator of America; and Thomas the Cynic (Silone), whom they have sought out for his wisdom in all things political. (Silone’s ironic epigraph for the book is “Quam parva sapientia regit mundum”: How little wisdom rules the world.)

  Before introducing the two to Thomas the Cynic, the author amuses himself with the professor and Mr. W in polite discussion and debate on how best to bring about a dictatorship in America. Noting that there has been a “recent setback” in a possible dictatorship (an allusion to the 1936 reelection of Franklin D. Roosevelt), Professor Pickup (so called even in the original Italian) insists that he has made a scientific analysis of dictatorships and the two aspirants have made pilgrimages to the beer halls of Munich as well as Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan, the birthplace of Italian fascism on March 23, 1919. Silone warns him against excessive faith in a scientific theory of politics and offers a humanist interpretation of Machiavelli’s theory of politics:

  Politics [for Machiavelli] were not immoral, but pre-moral or a-moral. He humanized political thought in the sense that he brought it down to earth from the theological clouds in which it had been soaring for centuries. He demonstrated its purely terrestrial foundations. He showed that politics were a purely human, historical product, the result of the energy, the virtues, the weaknesess, the vices of men . . . He broadened the conception of human liberty—that is, of human responsibility—that is, of human morality.

  But simply aping Machiavelli would not be sufficient. “A deep knowledge of history,” Silone warns the two would-be dictators, “makes fanaticism impossible.”

  Thomas the Cynic tells his pupils that fascism is indeed barbaric, not because it pits one class against another but because “it mobilizes and marshals all the relics of primitive barbarism that still survive in modern man, whether plebeian or aristocratic. It frequently succeeds in also contaminating many of its political opponents, who, struggling against fascism by fascist methods, become barbarians themselves, Red barbarians.”

  Long before scholars were writing about fascism as the aestheticization of politics, Thomas the Cynic points Professor Pickup and Mr. W to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s seizure of Fiume after World War I as a “work of art, an empty rhetorical creation” behind which, however, were the “concealed fangs” of the Italian military. To this must be added a fanatical will to power. “The fascist leader’s superiority over his opponents consists above all in this: that he aspires to power, only to power, and nothing but power. Whether he is on the side of the capitalists or the workers, the church or the devil, is a secondary matter to him. What matters to him is power.” Thomas the Cynic sees fascism as a kind of metapolitics:

  Although a political movement, fascism succeeded from the first in avoiding the arena of struggle on which its opponents took their stand. On the latter it would have easily been beaten. Instead, without opposing program to program, without pledging itself to this or that organization of the state or society, it successfully applied itself to discrediting politics in general and political parties and programs in particular, thus reviving and transferring to the despised political scene many pre-logical and a-logical relics of primitive mentality which were slumbering in the masses and which the progress of civilization had covered with a thin exterior varnish without touching their deeper roots.

  To his pupils’ mistaken notion that fascism is dependent on a certain form of state, Thomas insists that fascism can exist without national traditions or the vaunted “corporations.” The essence of fascism lies not in any of the institutions it may create. Therefore, you may have fascism in a monarchy or a republic. “The only thing fascism cannot be reconciled with is clear ideas . . . The only thing with which fascism is incompatible is discussion.”

  In a passage that echoes both Carlo Levi’s idea that fascism perverts the s
acred into the sacrificial to induce a holy terror and Emilio Gentile’s later notion of fascism as the “sacralization” of politics, Thomas responds thus to Mr. W’s query about the proper drug to induce a mass following:

  Nothing but an adequate liturgy. A religious and sacramental nothing; a pure, perfect, and disinterested nothing; the self-sacrifice of a life that in nostalgic moments rejoins its creator and returns to the unformed. The defeated in life, those for whom existence has no more meaning or value, who yet refrain from suicide because their despair is not yet purely individual, because they feel themselves buoyed up and spurred on by a vitality that needs to be employed for some unusual object, are the likely recruits for our contemporary impresarios of terror. Fascism for them is a kind of nihilistic drug . . . Fascism, with its violence, its terrorism, and its liturgy of death, was made possible by the war and the consequences of the war in certain countries, the bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, of capitalism and anti-capitalism, of monarchies and democracy, of religion and atheism.

  In essence, Silone’s analysis of fascism is a synthesis of the sociology of the Frankfurt School with the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung, grafted on to his own personal experiences sifted through a sieve of peasant wisdom.