Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  The “memoir from a Swiss prison” was drafted on December 17, 1942. As the Italian historian Lamberto Mercuri wrote in his introduction to the first publication of the memoir in 1979 (a year after Silone’s death), the document details Silone’s conception not just of his political faith but of writing and life as well. It is, in short, an “examination of conscience” of a major twentieth-century writer, one who struggled against two forms of totalitarianism but whose greatest battle may have been within his own soul.

  Allen Dulles and the OSS

  Silone was to find a problematic ally in his return to politics in Allen Dulles, station chief in Bern, Switzerland, of the Office of Strategic Services. Silone had been introduced to Dulles through the latter’s secretary, Betty Parsons, a Quaker and a friend of Darina Laracy, whom Silone was dating at the time. Dulles introduced himself as “the special representative of President Roosevelt,” not as a member of the OSS. Dulles often asked Darina about Silone’s opinion on currently unfolding political events. Dulles even speculated to Darina about Silone leading a government in exile from Tripoli! There is no record of how Silone responded, but it is not hard to imagine his wry, ironic smile at such a suggestion. Dulles had reached Switzerland in November 1942, mere hours before the Nazis sealed the French borders. He established an outpost of the OSS in Bern from where he kept the Roosevelt administration informed about the precarious situation in Italy immediately after Mussolini’s fall in July 1943 and was a forceful advocate of the Italian anti-Fascist Resistance. By gaining the trust of important figures in the Resistance, including the first postwar prime minister Ferruccio Parri, Dulles was successful in managing the surrender of the Germans in Italy.

  Silone was given both financial support and, perhaps more important, a channel of communication to the Allies. The Bern office of the OSS allowed Silone to communicate with Count Carlo Sforza, the Allies’ emissary to Italy. Through Dulles, Silone was able to secure funding from Italian Americans in the labor unions of the United States as well as support from Italians abroad like conductor Arturo Toscanini. (The maestro had been forced to flee Italy after having been attacked by blackshirts at Milan’s La Scala for refusing to play the Fascist anthem Giovinezza.) Money from the United States would be funneled to the PSI but first “laundered” through Luigi Antonini (1883–1968), an Italian-American labor organizer. He joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in 1913, and from 1934 to 1967 he was ILGWU vice president. Antonini was founder of the Italian Chamber of Labor in 1913 and of the Anti-Fascist Alliance in 1922. He also was president of the American Labor Party (1936–42) and editor of L’Operaia, the Italian-language magazine sponsored by ILGWU Local 25. Another labor leader in the United States, Vanni Montana, cabled Silone through the Bern office that, if all the anti-Fascist parties were to break relations with the Communists, American labor and public opinion would more easily support the anti-Fascist Resistance. Montana had changed his name from Buscemi; unbeknownst to Silone, he was also a Fascist spy.

  Dulles’s involvement in Italian affairs led to the more controversial manipulation of the critical 1948 national elections in Italy. Silone’s relationship with Dulles laid the groundwork for accusations in 1968, and more recently, that Silone was a spy for the CIA.

  Silone was given a code number (475) and various aliases (“Tulio,” “Frost,” “Mr. Behr,” “the Man from the Mountain,” and, the most commonly used, “Len”). The relationship must have been fairly close because, as Neal Petersen notes, “With the war raging, Dulles found time to interest himself . . . in Ignazio Silone’s search for a U.S. publisher.” Silone, profoundly moved by stories that Italian peasants were sheltering Allied soldiers from the Nazis and Fascist militias, thought to write a screenplay for a movie. Dulles, struck by the “psychological value of such a movie as well as my wish to help 475,” sought to have the material sent directly to Harper & Brothers publishing house in New York. Dulles even took some heat for advocating too insistently on Silone’s behalf. When Silone requested from Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle that the United States publicly denounce the Italian monarchy and call for its liquidation, none other than “Wild Bill” Donovan admonished Dulles that the OSS was to avoid the appearance of carrying out activities of a political nature.

  More concretely, Silone—even from his Swiss exile—supplied critical information concerning the situation in Italy. For example, Silone informed Dulles that the Allies’ insistence on Italy’s “unconditional surrender” along with Nazi Germany was counterproductive. It was a propaganda coup for the Fascist regime and “is being used to paint a somber picture of the result of the Italian defeat; that is, extreme poverty, servitude, territorial mutilation.” “Len” went on to suggest a revision of strategy: “Unconditional surrender” would be modified to signify a refusal to compromise with Mussolini and apply to the Italian people, who would be protected by the Atlantic Charter; the precise conditions of the postwar settlement would be applied by the United Nations to reflect the degree to which the “Italian people themselves help toward the victory of the democracies.” There would be neither a Soviet-styled nor an American system imposed on Italy after the war; the future political regime in Italy would depend “exclusively on the free will of the Italian people.” Silone tried to impress on Dulles that “from the earliest days Italian history has contained traditions of freedom that are adequate to inspire the choice of political regime when Fascist dictatorship collapses.” Silone recommended that the Allies use Count Carlo Sforza as a conduit to the anti-Fascist Resistance in Italy. Silone and others were desperate that the Allies not force them to deal with Marshal Pietro Badoglio or the king, “who have compromised with fascism,” for this would lead to a bloody revolution and would preclude the possibility of restoring to Italy a true democracy. In the spring of 1943, Silone informed Dulles that the major anti-Fascist parties were willing to foment strikes in Italy itself.

  Silone’s information to Dulles could be surprisingly specific, as when he suggested that partisan forces could unite in a military action aimed against the Axis rail line through the Brenner Pass. This suggestion, just two weeks before Mussolini was overthrown in the summer of 1943, would prove to be prescient, as German forces overwhelmed the Italian peninsula soon after. Silone even broached the daring idea of an invasion of the Abruzzo by Yugoslav partisans, crossing the Adriatic and landing in Pescara. In a dispatch from Bern to Washington, D.C., on July 12, Dulles cabled that Silone “states that the insurgents could hold out in the Pescara region for some time; the large stone bridge halfway between Pescara and Rome could be blown up causing the single rail line to Rome to be cut. Since there are no Italian troops stationed in this section at the present time, he believes that arms could be dropped safely and substantial numbers of insurgents established there.” The militarily risky and politically suicidal project was wisely dropped.

  Dulles provided Silone with a conduit to Adolf Berle; as Allied forces made their way through Sicily, Silone requested from Berle that anti-Fascist workers be permitted to “take over Fascist corporations and that publication of Socialist newspapers be authorized in Italian territory occupied by the Allies.” A few days after King Vittorio Emanuele III deposed Mussolini and installed Pietro Badoglio as the new prime minister, Silone, writing to Dulles on behalf of the PSI, denounced the king, who had failed to preserve constitutional rights on October 22, 1922, and who did nothing to avert war on June 10, 1940. “Badoglio’s role is to sacrifice Mussolini, to save the throne and Fascism, and lastly, to prolong the war. There is nothing but rapid failure in sight for this maneuver. The Italian people want an end to war, they want an end to dictatorship.” Dulles concluded, after conferring with Silone and “other competent sources,” that “the unanimous opinion was that unless the Badoglio government brought peace immediately, on any terms, the government would be promptly discredited.” Furthermore, Silone convinced Dulles that “if we desired to support the Italian people,” it would be necessa
ry that the Badoglio government be liquidated in favor of one with no previous Fascist connections and no Fascist attributes.”

  By 1944, with an end to the war in sight, Dulles and his colleagues were already thinking of the postwar situation in Europe, as was Silone. Eager to reinforce his anticommunism, Silone sent a message to anti-Fascists in London through Dulles arguing against Pietro Nenni’s proposal to fuse the Socialists (PSI) with the Communists (PCI). The newly created Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP), created for the express purpose of preventing the fusion of the PSI and PCI, and its new party organ, L’Avvenire dei Lavoratori (The Future of the Workers), were committed to the principles of democracy and federalism. The postwar period offered an opportunity for a vast reordering of Italian society. To Count Sforza, Silone wrote that “it is impossible to win the peasants to the democratic cause unless there is a strong alliance in southern Italy between the Partito d’Azione and the Socialist Party for the liquidation of the latifundists and the establishment of a republic.” More than six decades later, there is still debate and controversy over Silone’s relationship with Dulles and the OSS, but a dispassionate review of these documents should lay to rest at least this aspect of the caso Silone.

  In the darkest days of World War II, when Europe was largely under Nazi occupation and the Battle of Stalingrad had not yet ended, Silone discerned something that seemed counterintuitive: a seed beneath the snow. Speaking to intellectuals and ordinary folk who had sought refuge in Switzerland, he wrote in November 1942 for The New Republic that “many things which had been dispersed, buried and forgotten are returning to life.”

  Silone always harbored warm feelings for his exile in Switzerland. Nearly a quarter century after having returned to Italy, now a famous writer, inundated with requests for interviews from foreign journalists, American scholars, and Italian students seeking advice for their theses, Silone wrote that at times like these, “My nostalgia for Switzerland becomes irresistible.”

  Silone’s Swiss exile had offered him a destination after passing through the “emergency exit” of his expulsion from the Communist Party and a refuge in which to develop as a writer. With no formal literary training, he spent much time in exile deeply immersed in European literature, especially French, Russian, and Middle European. He gave much thought to his craft. Among the handwritten documents in the archives is a revealing page—titled “Confessione”—listing a series of elements to consider in crafting characters in his writing. These ranged from the expected categories of “Look,” “Manners,” “What they believe,” and “What they think” to more complex considerations such as “their directions in decisive moments” and “the most profound strata of their being and the contradictions derived.” The character of every protagonist, Silone continued, must follow from an ensemble of data:

  a) Their manner of acting even (above all) in minor episodes and revelatory scenes

  b) Their manner of speaking

  c) Their manner of hiding themselves

  d) Their manner of wanting to appear something they are not

  e) Episodes recounted by others

  f) Confession

  g) Judgments (true or false) of others

  When he began writing in the 1930s, Silone considered “a book once published belonged no longer to the author but to the public.” But he found that even after finishing a novel, having it published and read by millions of people, the characters continued to live and evolve in his mind. Hence, on returning to Italy in 1944 and considering the reprinting of Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and The Seed Beneath the Snow, he discovered to his surprise that his characters had changed. He began a process of whittling away the extraneous elements of plot and development. For example, in the original version of Fontamara, the saintly Don Benedetto, Pietro Spina’s old schoolteacher, is assassinated by Fascists who poison the sacred wine of the Eucharist. In the postwar edition, this episode, while based on a real event in Italy, was deleted by the author because he thought it too melodramatic. Silone’s editing of his novels might be likened to Michelangelo’s conception of sculpture: Remove excess marble to reveal the trapped human figure within. Silone the writer removed all that was superfluous to the interior development of his characters. The result was a sparer—but more intense—body of work.

  If Switzerland was where Silone matured as both a man and a writer, it was also there that he was to meet a woman under unusual circumstances, a woman who would remain at his side for the rest of his life and with whom he had a tempestuous and ambiguous relationship.

  *The Ago di Sciora is a rock formation in the central Swiss Alps.

  *Silone sometimes conflated the deaths of his entire family in the earthquake, a point often repeated by biographers.

  FOUR

  DARINA

  Better to read a writer than to meet him.

  —DARINA LARACY, after meeting Silone for the first time

  Darina Laracy and Ignazio Silone were a study in contrasts: she tall, extroverted, proud, self-assured, confident, and radiating a luminous presence; he shorter, introverted, quiet, often morose, full of doubt, restless, taciturn, a dark star.

  One day Darina’s father, who had lost a leg in World War I, brought home the English translation of Fontamara. Darina, then seventeen, who had been taught to read by age three by her paternal grandfather, inquired about the book only to be told by her father that although it was a beautiful book, “it’s not for you.” (The first edition of Fontamara and the first English translations had several brutal scenes that Silone edited from subsequent printings.) Darina, though, knew where her father kept books that “were not for her” and devoured Fontamara in one sitting. From the book’s jacket, she learned that the author was an Italian anti-Fascist exiled in Zurich. A few years later, she would find Bread and Wine as well as The Seed Beneath the Snow; these, though, she did not have to read in secret.

  Born in Dublin on March 30, 1917, Darina was one of four daughters and educated in Catholic schools by nuns. Tall, with auburn hair, she was a striking woman. Eighty years later, she was still bitter about how the nuns treated her and her sisters, rejecting “the superstitious nonsense I heard from ignorant priests and nuns.” Their main concern, it seemed, “was to get it into my head that Protestants went to hell.” Not surprisingly, at an early age she decided she would secretly be a Protestant. At the same time that she developed a wish to attend Alexandra College, a Protestant girls’ school in Dublin, the archbishop of the city suddenly discovered a new mortal sin: Catholic parents could not send their children to Protestant schools. (The archbishop, she noted scornfully, was later implicated in a pedophile scandal.) Thus, by decree, she was condemned to a school where the nuns were “stupid, bigoted, ignorant, and to a large extent obsessed by sex.” At the age of twelve, when she was found by the curate of the local parish to be reading Pascal’s Pensées as she walked along the street to school and reported her to the mother superior, Darina coolly responded to both that “if God gave us intelligence, it is an insult to him not to use it.” Naturally, there was scandal. Three years later, she was reading a biography of Father Charles de Foucauld, whom she would later introduce to her husband. During her first year in college, she devoured all the works of Jacques Maritain and took up the Russians, mostly Dostoevsky, and began to approach the mystics, beginning with Meister Eckhardt. One gets the impression that in her autobiographical writings (all unpublished) she sought to establish an intellectual résumé equal—if not superior—to Silone’s. In interviews, she was often irritated that her husband refused to acknowledge that it was she who had introduced him to Charles de Foucauld and, later, Simone Weil.

  Darina Silone maintained an enduring, though complex, relationship with her native Ireland. The trauma of the Troubles and the terrorism of the IRA were only part of the reason she criticized Irish parochialism her entire life. As early as age four (or so she claimed), Darina looked to India in search of a different “truth.” As a child reading about the
Black Hole of Calcutta and the first rebellions of 1857, she wrote, “The curious thing is that I felt myself on the side of the rebellious Indians. Thus was born in me an interest in India that became a passion for my entire life.” Later, she called India her “elective affinity.” She renounced both her Catholicism and her Irish heritage, giving up her Irish passport for a British one (“which did not deprive me of Yeats’s poetry”). The atmosphere of religious bigotry and political hatred in which she grew up forced her, in conscience, “to become a heretic at the age of seven.”

  If her relationship with Ireland was fraught with the desire to flee its conformity yet embrace its culture, her relationship with Italy was more straightforward. In 1924, when she was seven, Darina Laracy read of the assassination of the reform Socialist member of the Italian parliament, Giacomo Matteotti. “I understood that Mussolini had had him killed because Matteotti was for liberty. I began to hate Mussolini; I cut out a portrait of Matteotti from a newspaper and pinned it to my wall next to my bed.”

  Matteotti inflamed Darina politically; Dante inspired her in other ways. She was “thunderstruck” by the Florentine poet, and acquaintances sometimes came to her mother worried after having seen the young girl talking to herself on lonely walks in the countryside outside Dublin, reciting Dante from memory. In a passage that strikingly echoes Silone’s own autobiographical accounts, she recalls: