Now, nearly a half century later, the true murderer had given a deathbed confession, complete with details that were known only to the perpetrator. Zauri was released from the prison on the island of Elba at three in the morning, told he was pardoned (to which he angrily protested, pointing out that being pardoned assumed guilt, whereas he had been proven innocent), and sent on his way with a hundred lire in his pocket. He made his way to Piombino and was given a train ticket for Pescina via Rome. Sitting in his third-class compartment, Zauri could think of only one name: Secondino Tranquilli, the young boy who had so earnestly and scrupulously written on his mother’s behalf. By one of those inexplicable twists of fate that are more characteristic of nineteenth-century romantic novels than real life, Zauri had met Romolo Tranquilli in prison. At the mention of the surname, Zauri struck up a conversation with Silone’s brother and was later told that Secondino was no longer a student in Pescina but a world-famous writer by the name of Ignazio Silone. Discreetly tapping the shoulder of the train passenger in front of him, Zauri asked if the gentleman might know of a certain Ignazio Silone. And again, with an improbable novelistic twist, the passenger replied that Silone lived in Rome and edited the Socialist paper Avanti! Armed with this information, Zauri presented himself at the editorial offices as a specter from another world.
Silone took Zauri home to Darina, who saw before her a veritable Rip Van Winkle. After washing and shaving and changing his clothes, Silone, along with Darina, took Zauri to an open-air lunch in a trattoria. To Darina’s question as to what most struck him as different after almost a half century in prison, Zauri responded dryly, “the women.” She wondered aloud how he managed to survive a decade in solitary confinement. Before their insistent staring, he apologized for eating with his hands, as five decades of meals without a knife or fork had left him unable to use proper utensils. “I asked your mother what importance my opinion had, since I was still just a boy,” Silone told Zauri. “Because you’re still innocent,” the mother had replied. But “from that moment on, though, I must confess,” Silone confided to Zauri, “I began to doubt my innocence and that of the world.”
Permitted only two texts in prison, Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Bible, Zauri had memorized entire passages, including Canto 33, regarding Count Ugolino’s tragic and barbarous end. When Silone begged to know why Zauri had refused to defend himself, the old man simply smiled and said sadly, “I’m sorry; I can’t say why, I can never say why.”
Zauri eventually made his way to Pescina a broken man, the townspeople refusing to welcome him back. Begging his bread, every so often boasting that he had been given a sweater by the great writer Ignazio Silone, he died a mere two years after gaining his freedom. For a decade, Silone was haunted by Francesco Zauri. Inquiring about records of the trial from officials in Avezzano, he was told in 1949 that the court documents had been destroyed in an Allied bombing raid during the war. Silone’s torment was only partially exorcised with the publication of The Secret of Luca in 1956.
In July 1956, a month after the proclamation of the republic, Silone resigned as editor of Avanti! His farewell editorial, “Autocritica,” did not spare the Socialists or the Italians from some severe criticism. The modern mass political parties, he wrote, were perhaps the worst possible vehicle for democracy. Constituting an oligarchical trust, they suffocated the spontaneity of social and political life, placing obedience to the party line above the most demanding moral imperatives of the individual conscience. Echoing Massimo D’Azeglio’s famous remark after the unification of Italy—“We have made Italy; now we must make Italians”—Silone implied that fascism had been defeated but the Italians had still not yet constituted themselves as “post-Fascists.” As the Constituent Assembly began its work to craft a constitution and new legal and political foundations, “everything is open to debate. Even ourselves.”
The Socialists continued their suicidal propensity, dividing once again. By now there were three major Socialist parties: the once-venerable PSI, the PSIUP, and the PSLI (Socialist Party of Italian Workers). Postwar Italian politics, in Silone’s eyes, was incapable of fostering the moral, ethical, and cultural regeneration necessary after the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. (Silone did not place these two on the same moral plane; he meant only that war generated moral catastrophes all around.) An incident at the PSI’s national congress in the summer of 1945 was emblematic: Nenni had announced from his political pulpit a policy of politique d’abord (“politics above all else,” a phrase adopted, ominously, from Charles Maurras). Silone was indignant and outraged, believing the policy to be not only reactionary but even immoral. Before politics there were certain fundamental truths; there was culture, there was history, there were the people. Thirteen years later, in an open letter to the leader of the leftist Republican Party and editor of the literary journal La Nuova Antologia, Giovanni Spadolini (later the first postwar Italian prime minister not from the dominant Christian Democratic Party), Silone proposed an alternative to Nenni’s formula: societé d’abord. Silone had already discerned the suffocating power of the political parties in Italian society that subsumed all of culture under their oppressive weight, crushing civil society.
So disillusioned was Silone by politics that he declined the plum invitation to be ambassador to France, instead deciding to launch another cultural journal, Europa Socialista. In an attempt to resuscitate European socialism, Silone invited writers and politicians from all the various Socialist currents in Italy (there were at least a half dozen) as well as European writers of such stature as André Malraux. Binding them all together were three threads: The failure of the Socialist movement in Italy was caused by its inability to distinguish itself from the Communist Party and to imitate the evolution of the Socialist Party in France, Belgium, or Switzerland; “culture” could not be subsumed under “politics”; and the grand project of European socialism after the war must be the political unification of the Continent.
In October 1946 at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome, leading Italian intellectuals such as Luigi Einaudi, Gaetano Salvemini (recently returned from exile in America), Ferruccio Parri, and Piero Calamandrei convened a conference on the prospects for European unity and peace. For Silone, it remained to be seen if the “revolution of our time” would be able to synthesize the necessity for collective well-being and the cultural values of the past. In the twentieth century, bureaucratic collectivism and “tecnocrazia” threatened the “insuperable values” of ancient Greece, Christianity, and the liberal revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “If we do not make ‘Europe,’ ” Silone concluded, “our generation will have to consider itself a failure.” He often returned to this political and moral imperative in the immediate postwar period. “Together with the social question, the unification of Europe is the fundamental political task of our generation. If we do not solve this problem our generation can consider itself an historic failure.”
Late winter and early spring of 1947 saw yet another political crisis unfolding for the new republic. Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi presided over a coalition government that included the Christian Democrats with the PSI and PCI, all in uneasy alliance. These latter two practically came to blows over the contested article proposed for the new constitution formally recognizing the Lateran Accords, which strengthened the position of the Holy See and established Catholicism as the official religion of Italy. Surprisingly, Togliatti and the Communists voted to include the accords while the Socialists were vehemently opposed. De Gasperi, that wily politician, took advantage of the split to dismiss both from the governing coalition. In their place, he invited the liberals and neo-Fascists.
By 1948, Silone was disillusioned with the state of Italian politics. It had become apparent that the aspirations embedded in the Resistance as a second Risorgimento, finally uniting Italians, would fail. He refused to stand as a candidate in the April election but did not retire from the electoral fray. He challenged Nenni to a public debate on the merits of joining
the PSI with the PCI, but the debate never took place. Four days earlier, Silone had delivered a speech in Milan that argued for the formation of a third party between the PSI and the PCI while recognizing that modern mass politics could not escape from its inherent sterility. It was a tragic and vicious circle: A political solution was necessary but from institutions that were structurally and intellectually incapable of offering real solutions.
“We are surely the people who have been defeated more than anyone else,” Silone lamented in Milan. He had believed that it was possible to remain within the traditional parties and transform them from within; he had the illusion that it would have been possible to avoid the division of Italian politics into two warring camps, one under the protection of America, the other under the patronage of the USSR; he had the illusion that the church might play a political role in the new republic different from its traditional one. All in vain. Most bitter was his disillusionment with the political parties. One no longer joined a political party because of a certain view of the world. The mainstream parties now had to promise social welfare, a job from which one could not be fired, and vacations for one and his family. The modern mass political party had become, for Silone, nothing more than a surrogate for the paternalistic state.
Thirty years later, the writer Geno Pampaloni recalled the speech and its effects. Silone rose and began to speak, slowly, in a low voice with frequent coughs that reminded listeners of his battle with tuberculosis. But what most struck his listeners was that out of an “inexorable recognition of defeat,” Silone derived not resignation or despair but, on the contrary, “a liberating force of faith, a corroborative strength.”
In the spring 1948 elections, Silone opposed the PSI tactic of alliance with PCI, and when the results were tabulated, he was shown to have been prescient: The DC won with 48.7 percent of the vote, overwhelming the combined PSI-PCI list with 30.7 percent. Within the combined list, the Socialists managed only 42 seats in the Chamber of Deputies as opposed to 141 for the PCI; two years earlier, those numbers had been 114 for the PSI and 109 for the PCI. It was, in short, a catastrophic defeat for the left and a humiliation for the Socialists. Things would only get worse: On July 14, an attempt was made on Togliatti’s life as he was leaving the Chamber of Deputies, and the nation appeared to be on the brink of civil war.
Silone increasingly turned his attention away from domestic politics to European affairs and signed the manifesto “Europe, Culture, Freedom” drafted by the historian of antiquity Gaetano De Sanctis and promoted by the philosopher Benedetto Croce. While a Socialist deputy in parliament, Silone never neglected his contact and work with various cultural entities in Italy and Europe. One that was close to his heart was the Amici dell’Università, of which he became president. The “friends” of the university included such prominent intellectuals as the liberal historian Guido De Ruggiero, Guido Calogero, Carlo Antoni, and the Jewish architect Bruno Zevi. Based on the premise that a university education should be available to all and not just a cultural, political, and economic elite, it sought to open higher education to all Italians. Likewise, the Teatro del Popolo project, founded with Darina, organized for workers and students. This was to be not only a theater with lodgings for actors but also a foundation offering courses in the history of music and the stage. In 1949, Silone was called upon to testify as a character witness for Giovanna Berneri, the widow of the assassinated anarchist Camillo Berneri. Giovanna had been arrested and charged, along with her companion Cesare Zaccaria, with advocating birth control and promulgating “propaganda contro la procreazione.” Silone wrote to the presiding judge in Naples that Giovanna Berneri led a life of selfless sacrifice and criticized the vestige of anachronistic laws left over from the Fascist regime’s demographic campaign known as the “Battle of the Births.” (Berneri was acquitted.)
“Emergency Exit”
Silone’s essay “Emergency Exit” first appeared in English in Richard Crossman’s collection of essays, The God That Failed, in 1950. (The essay would lend the title to a collection of autobiographical essays in 1965.) The five other essays in Crossman’s anthology were by former Communists or Communist supporters, including Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fisher, and Stephen Spender. Silone chose as an epigraph for the essay a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Non vi si pensa, quanto sangue costa” (They think not how great the cost of blood).
The essay, delineating Silone’s early enthusiasm for communism, his rise through the ranks of the party, and his subsequent bitter disillusionment, sparked a fierce international debate and ignited a firestorm of protest and recrimination with his old comrades in the PCI. The essay had already appeared in its original Italian in the journal Comunità in the fall of 1949. Consequently, when The God That Failed appeared in early 1950, Togliatti was prepared. Writing in the PCI daily newspaper, Togliatti offered an explanation of how Silone had been expelled from the Communist Party and “the psychology of a renegade.” Using his usual nom de plume, Roderigo di Castiglia, Togliatti argued in another essay that Silone’s criticisms, as part of “the six that failed,” were “enormous stupidities” that could be believed only by a public composed of “idiotic sheep.” The six writers were, according to Togliatti, tainted by “an abyss of corruption and degeneration that seeks to present itself with a mask of intellectual refinement.”
Not content with disparaging Silone and the other five contributors of The God That Failed, Togliatti expended considerable energy in criticizing all Italian intellectuals of the left who failed to recognize the historical infallibility of communism. Benedetto Croce was defined as a “blasphemer against humanity,” while Gaetano Salvemini was not to be taken seriously. (The Fascists took him seriously enough to destroy his home and library and force him into exile.) The journalist Vittorio Gorresio was “a cockroach” and liberal intellectuals “pygmies of the cold war.” No one escaped Togliatti’s wrath, including the writers Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, and Cesare Pavese. Togliatti accused Pavese, who had spent the 1930s translating American literature (Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, and others) and suffered a period in confino, or domestic exile, of “not being able to make himself either an American or a Communist.” (Pavese, distraught over his failed emotional life, would soon commit suicide in a dismal hotel room in his native Turin.)
Two years after the publication of “Emergency Exit,” Silone received a scathing letter from Natalia Sedova Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary’s widow, then still living in Mexico. Addressed to “dear Comrade Silone,” the letter charged Silone with moral cowardice for failing to speak out sooner. “Your report makes a truly startling revelation, made known to me now for the first time.” Natalia Trotsky’s letter is a series of pointed questions: How was it that Silone had kept hidden all these years the truth concerning the supposedly “unanimous” resolution passed by the Executive Committee of the Communist International in condemnation of Trotsky? She bitterly reprimands Silone for speaking the truth of what happened at the May 1927 meeting of the ECCI twenty-two years too late. If Silone had made known the truth of what had transpired at the meeting in 1927, “or even in 1930 [sic] when you broke with the Communist Party,” the revelation would have made “a tremendous impression.” It would have served as a blow to the diabolical Stalinist bureaucracy; possibly it would have “saved many workers from that fatal disease that has undermined the entire working class movement.” Trotsky, his widow pointed out to Silone, “would have known how to utilize the amazingly long-suppressed information.”
Natalia Trotsky was all the more indignant because Silone had been one of “the very few who had the intellectual honesty” to refuse to vote against a document that no one had seen (Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin’s policy in China, “Problems of the Chinese Revolution,” published later). Silone, she pointed out, had seen the Moscow trials for what they really were; he had, to some degree, defended Trotsky in 1937. Why then this delay? “Is it possible that there is some good explanati
on for this conduct on your part? I think you owe to yourself and to others, as well as me, an explanation of this strange ‘oversight.’ ” There is no record of Silone’s response.
All this was part of a cultural war raging in postwar Italy. In 1948, Communist intellectuals had met in Wroclaw, Poland, and the following year in Paris. Organized by the Cominform, the Partisans for Peace organized the World Peace Council in 1950. Non-Communist intellectuals responded by creating the Congress for Cultural Freedom the same year. The Central Intelligence Agency noted at the time that leadership of the CCF had been assumed by “two eloquent Europeans” with very different views: “Although both had penned autobiographical essays about their breaks with the Party for a new book titled The God That Failed, they represented the two poles of opinion over the best way to oppose the Communists. Koestler favored the rhetorical frontal assault, and his attacks sometimes spared neither foe nor friend. Silone was subtler, urging the West to promote social and political reforms in order to co-opt Communism’s still-influential moral appeal.” Peter Coleman, in his history of the CCF, recounts how the founding of the organization pitted the “pugnacious and energetic cold warrior” Koestler against Silone, a “gentle socialist moralist.” There was bound to be friction between the two, as Silone could never abide Koestler’s womanizing (although the Italian was not exactly a monk) or his rabid anticommunism. If Picasso went to communism “as one goes to a spring of fresh water,” Koestler opened the second volume of his memoirs by agreeing with the Spanish artist, but then adding “and I left communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.” Silone’s anticommunism was always tempered by the realization that there were millions of men and women in various Communist parties around the world sincere in their desire for political, economic, and cultural liberation. At the founding convention of the CCF in Berlin in 1950, as Silone took the podium, Koestler passed a note to a colleague: “I have always wondered whether basically Silone is honest or not. Now I know he is not.” When the congress was over, Koestler approached Silone and admonished the Italian for acting like an Abruzzese cafone. Silone thought Koestler was a “cosmopolitan gigolo.”
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