Darina believed that Silone married her seeking happiness, but that, in the end, “he was not capable of finding happiness.” He was, she thought, suffering not only from depression but perhaps schizophrenia as well. At times, he could be “horrible,” even when not in a depression; “he had no talent at all for human relationships.” He could often be cruel, as when he would not permit her to renew her passport or when he was casual about his extramarital affairs. He sometimes told people, “I couldn’t leave the poor, mad thing.” With a frankness and steely resolve in her voice, Darina admitted that her marriage to Silone was “difficult.”
They had no children, and Silone was casual about his adultery, seeming not to care that he wounded Darina deeply. This further muddies the already murky waters of his state of mind and persona. Perhaps Silone was victim of the traditional Madonna/puttana complex in which women fall into only one of these two categories. Where, then, did Darina fit into this schema? Some have even maliciously suggested that Silone’s own mother, after the death of her husband in 1911, was forced into semiprostitution, destroying her in her young son’s mind even before the earthquake of 1915 killed her, but there is no evidence of this.
Other than a brief homosexual scene in the early short story “Viaggio a Parigi,” there are no overtly erotic passages in Silone’s oeuvre. He had a “repugnance” for what he thought was a “fashion” for eroticism taken up “not only by wary scribblers who pander to the bad taste of the public, but also by writers of talent.” Perhaps Silone was here thinking of Alberto Moravia? “In my opinion there is nothing more false than to justify the literary commercialization of eroticism in the name of freedom, while I remain convinced that it cannot be countered efficiently by censorship or any other bureaucratic means, only by the disgust that springs from a serious and profound sense of life.”
Ignazio and Darina Silone lived in Rome for the entire period of their marriage. He would not contemplate living anywhere else. Like many adopted Romans, he could be withering in his appraisal of other Italian cities. Referring to tourist-favorite Florence, he once asked the American scholar R.W.B. Lewis, “Why do you live in that dusty backwater?” Lewis, who taught literature at Yale University, had fought in Italy during World War II, and had come across Silone’s early novels while stationed in the Abruzzo, considered himself a “belated Florentine.” He wryly describes how, while writing a long essay on Silone, the Italian writer decided to accept an invitation for a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner with Lewis and his wife, Nancy, in Florence. This visit, announced with Silone’s customary succinctness by the simply stated telegram ARRIVE THURSDAY AFTERNOON SILONE, “threw us into something of a turmoil; it was uncertain our oven was big enough for a turkey.” The Thanksgiving dinner confirmed Lewis’s original impression of Silone’s “quizzical, darkly amused Abruzzese mind.”
Silone and Darina had many differences. She had an innate love of animals. Silone, like many people from the countryside, had no particular love for animals, except donkeys, and refused her many requests for pets. It became a point of contention that Silone tried to defuse by sending her a photo of a teddy bear in March 1952 with the following on the reverse:
My dearest,
My best wishes for your birthday brought to you by this teddy bear. But, as you well know, he is mute, it’s only an image. If, though, you welcome him warmly and you look at him for a while, you will clearly feel that one ineffable thing [quell’unica cosa indicibile] that he is charged with making you understand.
Yours, I.S.
Darina remained Silone’s most important collaborator for their entire marriage. One scholar has detected a maturation and fuller development of his female characters between the three “Abruzzo” novels written before 1944 and their subsequent revisions after the war. In the postwar rewrites, the female protagonists are more developed, are more central to the plot, and have their own dynamic function lacking in the earlier versions. One cannot help thinking that the indomitable personality of Darina Laracy might have something to do with this fuller development of the female protagonists. Her first major work was translating Silone’s first play, Ed Egli si nascose into English as And He Hid Himself. When she casually commented that she thought he was a better novelist than playwright, he was furious. Silone’s concept of the theater had been formed by the itinerant players, the so-called guitti, who traveled to small towns like Pescina, setting up a makeshift circular stage in the town’s piazza, illuminated by acetylene torches and with almost no props. The guitti, influencing the filmmaker Federico Fellini as well, were often considered the least accomplished actors as far as the formal recitation of lines and the classic repertoire were concerned; what attracted Silone was their use of dialect and their absolute refusal to be bound by formal scripts.
Darina was a fine translator of Silone’s work into both English and French. He, though, resisted all her attempts to teach him English; she called his aversion to English “a fetish.” For the entire period of their marriage, Darina chafed in the intellectual and cultural shadow of her husband. She published an English translation of Beniamino Gigli’s memoirs (finding the opera singer a rather distasteful person) and translated some of Silone’s later works into English. She was a friend of Indira Gandhi, Martin Buber, and Leopold Sédar Senghor, the cultural and political proponent of “negritude.” It was only after Silone’s death, which she somehow sensed as a belated gift of liberation, that she then threw herself into various political and cultural movements and repeatedly visited India.
As a widow, Darina spent some time in Ireland, surrounded by “sixteen unexpectedly delightful nephews and nieces.” Although she complained that she oftentimes could not tell nieces from nephews (“they all dress the same way and have the same sort of unisex hairdo”), she reveled in her newfound family life. Somewhat wistfully she wrote to Mary McCarthy that “I realize that I haven’t lived in a ‘normal’ family for a very long time and find that the experience is somehow helping me to become a ‘normal’ person again.”
Although she confessed that even she, who knew Silone best, could never fully plumb the mystery of his identity, Darina did come to understand something about her husband’s enigmatic and exasperating personality, including his need for her nurturing concern. “Often he would seek refuge from a difficult situation by claiming to be ill, and then he would really become sick.”
They eventually settled into an apartment on via Villa Ricotti. In Darina’s own words, it was a “poky, horrible little flat where no sunlight ever comes, rented from INAIL [the National Institute for Worker Safety], in the dreary and squalid district of Piazza Bologna.” Even this modest apartment somehow found its way into the spying scandal. When a press conference was held in New York City to announce a sensational scoop, one person inquired why, if Silone had been spying for so long, did he not—like others in the pay of the Fascists—build himself a villa? (The most infamous example was Curzio Malaparte’s beautiful house on the island of Capri.) The response, “He possessed a magnificent villa in the most luxurious section of Rome,” made those who knew the apartment laugh out loud. During the time Silone was a member of the Chamber of Deputies working in the Constituent Assembly in 1946 crafting a new constitution for Italy, he was offered an apartment but was horrified when Darina pointed out the fine print in the original contract: After twenty years of paying a mortgage, they could own the property outright. “No, it’s impossible!” Silone raged. “Me, a capitalist? Never!” They returned to a modest hotel with no electricity or running water. After some time, they moved to the relatively “luxurious” Plaza hotel. The couple refused a large apartment on via Barberini; instead, spurred by curiosity, Darina decided to take a look at an odd offer: the confiscated villa of Giuseppe Bottai, fascism’s minister of education (1936–43) and mayor of Rome (in which capacity he promulgated and enforced anti-Semitic legislation). Bottai had been one of the more courageous members of the Fascist Grand Council to vote against Mussolini on the eveni
ng of July 24–25, 1943. (Il Duce was removed from office on the twenty-fifth by King Vittorio Emanuele III.) Bottai managed to avoid the firing squad for his vote against Mussolini (something that Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, did not) and fled to join the French Foreign Legion. Amnestied for his fighting against the Nazis, he returned to Italy in 1947. Darina was fascinated by the villa: There were trompe l’oeil books on trompe l’oeil bookcases behind which was an extensive (and very real) collection of liquor.
My first thought on entering the apartment on via Villa Ricotti to interview Darina Silone was that I was trespassing into Plato’s Cave. This feeling has haunted me for years as I sought to distinguish between “truth” and the shadows thrown upon the back wall of that cave. Not that I ever felt Darina Silone was insincere or seeking to hide embarrassing details of their life together; on the contrary, she was quite open in her remarks and willing to answer difficult questions. But I had a sense that memory here could be a tricky ally in writing a biography. Most interviews were broken in two by a pause for a delicious Indian lunch, prepared and served by Darina’s domestic aid, Shanta (who had a degree in economics), beneath a signed photograph of Indira Gandhi, a dear friend of Darina’s.
Darina had often said publicly that she considered it her life’s work after Silone’s death to act as custodian of his work and memory. Yet in interviews she could be frank and even a bit mischievous. Once, when commenting—not for the first time—on Silone’s resistance to learning English and his difficulty with the language, she said, “He had trouble understanding and pronouncing certain English words; words like truth, for example.”
Darina had invited me for an interview with warm words of praise for my first book. Our first meeting in the Silone apartment in Rome, though, was not an overwhelming success. Silone’s dark study remained off-limits, a sort of sanctuary where I was not invited to venture. A surreptitious peek revealed it decorated with memento mori: There were photos of Romolo, Benedetto Croce, Martin Buber, Gaetano Salvemini on his deathbed, Lazar Shatzkin (a Russian Jewish friend who had committed suicide), Simone Weil, and Piero Della Francesca’s Resurrection. When Darina asked whether I spoke French and I answered truthfully that I did not, I caught a glimpse of disappointment in her eyes. She said she valued her meetings with Indira Gandhi more than those with writers such as Hemingway, Koestler, Gide, or Mann. Silone’s 1942 call for civil disobedience, Darina claimed, was inspired by her introducing Silone to Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas.
In another interview, Darina Silone was ambivalent about her husband. She claimed that the PCI did not attempt to bring him back into the fold and adamant that although Silone had met Carl Jung in 1935, he did not undergo psychoanalysis in 1929 as many articles and biographical essays repeat. Silone himself was to offer evidence that—if he did not undergo psychoanalysis with Jung—he was familiar enough with the Swiss doctor’s theories to offer an essay to Angelo Tasca for his journal Monde. Darina Silone was far more forceful and convinced on this matter than the spying affair: She confessed that it was all a murky business.
Darina insisted that Silone’s sexual relationship with Gabriella Seidenfeld ended as early as 1930 and that Silone had often been unfaithful to her, but they remained close. Silone’s relationship with Seidenfeld was, understandably, a source of tension between him and Darina. In fact, when Fontamara was first published in Italy after World War II (by then Silone and Laracy had wed), its original dedication to Seidenfeld and Romolo was omitted. This has caused one scholar to argue that Silone was engaged in an act of erasing his brother’s fate from memory, but the real reason was more venal: Darina had insisted that Silone drop Gabriella from the dedication, and Silone, caught in an unpleasant situation, decided to omit any dedication. When Darina Silone donated Silone’s archive to the town of Pescina, she could not help but pen a note to add to Seidenfeld’s typescript memoir, “Le tre sorelle”: “largely rewritten and fictionalized [rimaneggiato e romanzato] by I.S. . . . there are many inaccuracies that I have not attempted to correct.”
In a final series of interviews before her death in 2003, Darina reflected on her husband’s ambiguous character and the most recent scandal. Having devoted the years after his death to a concerted effort to track down his papers and organize his archive, she spent her own last years grappling with the possibility that her husband had been a spy. “I am becoming aware—not just in this difficult situation—that the real document is the entire life of a person. It is necessary to give some space, a more ample sense of things, otherwise one runs the risk of losing that which is most important, the thing that is truer [la cosa più vera], the sense of the whole.” Silone, she continued, “was—under certain aspects—a mystery even to me, but it is precisely this mystery that I wish to respect and believe to have done so by standing by him until the end and beyond, dedicating myself to his work.”
In the summer of 2003, she suffered a stroke. Don Flavio Peloso, a follower of Don Luigi Orione who was called to her deathbed at a Rome clinic, asked if she wished to receive the last rites, and she said yes. With her right side paralyzed from the stroke, she made the sign of the cross with her left hand. Just before she died she had a dream in which she saw Silone calling to her: “Come.” “Wait, I’m not yet ready,” she replied. She soon slipped into a coma and died on the evening of July 25. She was eighty-six. A small Christmas presepio (nativity scene), given to her by Don Peloso, was at her bedside. After cremation and a simple service at the Prima Porta cemetery in Rome, her three sisters scattered Darina’s ashes over the Sea of Ireland. Once asked what she thought about life, she responded simply that it was an “ethical adventure.”
*“Little Black Face” was an anthem sung by Italian soldiers promising a young Ethiopian girl the blessings of “Roman” civilization.
FIVE
The PROBLEMS of POSTFASCISM
Many of us have remained prisoners of an anti-Fascist mentality and even a pre-Fascist mentality, but the very difficult problems that we must solve are those of postfascism.
—SILONE, Speech at Salerno, November 1945
Before the flames of World War II were extinguished, Silone turned his attention to a postwar Europe. As early as 1944, he was already arguing that “our problems now are those of postfascism.” A decade later, he would warn that fascism might have been defeated, but the seeds of the “moral infection of nihilism,” which had been responsible for its birth, were “planted in people’s consciences.” Central to his concern was the desire to make clear to the Western Allies that fascism was not synonymous with the Italian people. The corollary to this argument was the necessity of reestablishing or, more accurately, establishing a true and representative democracy in Italy for the first time. Beyond the confines of Italy, Silone set his sights on that grand dream of nineteenth-century idealists and visionaries, the formation of a united Europe.
In February 1944, Silone was appointed editorial director of L’Avvenire dei Lavoratori, the bimonthly journal of the Italian Socialists in exile in Zurich. The journal’s motto was an echo of Silvio Trentin’s movement in Toulouse, Liberare e Federare, “to liberate and to federate” (or bind together) Europe. While editing the journal, Silone also collaborated on the Socialist newspaper Libera Stampa in the Ticino. As editor, he continued to resist Pietro Nenni’s proposal to fuse the PCI and the PSI. The foundational principle was that socialism’s intellectual, cultural, and political prospects were not fulfilled in Marxism. To the contrary, as Carlo Rosselli had argued in the 1920s and 1930s, socialism had to find the courage to divorce itself from its Marxist variant and return to what it had been originally: an ethical and moral protest. Silone added his own perspective to Rosselli’s theory. If Rosselli argued that a liberal, humanistic socialism was founded on the twin pillars of “Greek rationalism [liberalism] and the messianism of Israel” [socialism], Silone countered that a contemporary socialism could free itself from a suffocating Bolshevism only by reviving a new religiosity, “a socialism founded on ce
rtain Christian certainties.” At the same time, contemporary socialism would have to paradoxically look back to the modernity of the nineteenth-century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the federalism of his contemporary, the Italian anarchist Carlo Cattaneo.
His former Communist colleagues could not let such a critique pass unchallenged. The editorial for the December 1943 issue of the PCI’s Lo Stato Operaio (published in New York because of the war) took a moment from celebrating Palmiro Togliatti’s fiftieth birthday to criticize Silone, recalling his expulsion in 1931 and calling Silone and others “a group of capitulators, demoralizers, double-faced cowards.” Even now, twelve years after his expulsion, Silone was once again mistakenly branded a “Trotskyist counter-revolutionary.”
Nine months after he assumed the editor’s post at L’Avvenire dei Lavoratori, the newspaper was temporarily shut down as Silone and Darina made their way back to Italy in October 1944. The new editor, Guglielmo Usellini, who reopened the newspaper in February 1945, put Silone in contact with the director Luigi Comenici for the purpose of exploring the possibility of a film based on Fontamara. Silone, eager to return to Italy after fifteen years in exile, could find no time for the film. Instead, he turned his attention to the first face of a war-ravaged Italy: the city of Naples.
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