In contrast, Silone’s relationship with CCF Secretary-General Michael Josselson was based on mutual respect and admiration. Even the CIA noted their close relationship: “In Josselson’s eyes, Silone seems to have won his debate with Koestler.” Josselson, born in Estonia and educated in Berlin, had immigrated to America and served in World War II and in the State Department and was a founder of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. (Like Silone, he was rumored to have ties to the CIA; unlike in Silone’s case, the rumors were true.) When Josselson died in January 1978, eight months before the Italian writer, Silone and Darina sent a telegram (in French) to his widow, Diana: “An unforgettable loss of a noble, heroic, and extraordinary friend.”
At the conference, Silone took to the podium with such luminaries as Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, and Bertrand Russell in the audience. Silone had been reluctant to attend the inaugural congress, telling Darina that he suspected it was an American State Department “operation.” Refusing to submit to or encourage any sort of fanaticism, Silone urged his fellow writers to prevent the CCF from becoming merely an organ of propaganda. The CCF was to be an encounter of free men and women, writers and artists, who refused to renounce their “supreme duty of freely speaking the truth.” Rather than being among those who beg for their freedom, they were to grasp their own freedom. Silone’s critique was not directed solely at the countries that had fallen behind the Iron Curtain: He fully recognized the pitfalls in the Western democracies. Learning from bitter experience that freedom was neither a natural right nor immutable but painfully acquired and maintained at great personal and collective price, he warned that “a democracy that, in the name of maximum efficiency, imitates the methods of totalitarianism, acts like the man who, through fear of death, commits suicide.”
In a community of ex-Communists who extolled their inflexibility and refusal to accommodate their former comrades, Silone stood out for his insistence on dialogue with Soviet and Eastern European writers. The writer Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, representing the American delegation and writing in Milan’s Il Corriere della Sera, noted the prevalence of ex-Communists in the CCF and warned that this was its fatal flaw. The former Communists, like Koestler, may have abjured the letter of Soviet Marxism, he wrote, but they retained the “spirit of its totalitarian crudeness.” Except Silone. He was, according to Borgese, a “rare case,” a Communist in name only, with “a gentle and free soul, in the ancient meaning of the words,” impossible to assimilate into such company.
At the closing session of the second congress in Brussels on November 3, 1950, Silone delivered one of his most powerful speeches: “Habeas animam!” Against the absolutism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, liberalism posited the concept of habeas corpus. For Silone, the twentieth century could respond to the depravities of totalitarianism only by counterposing habeas animam: the right of each person to his or her own soul. If, in the past, certain colleagues could be accused of a lack of imagination and foresight, now it was time to charge them. “If you still have ears, you have a sacred duty to listen.” How could intellectuals remain silent when faced with the twin abominations that had afflicted and still afflicted Europe: fascism and the forced labor camps in Siberia? European intellectuals had failed in the first instance, but how could they again remain silent with the voices emanating from the frozen wastelands of Siberia? Before this “monstrous and diabolical reality,” our “gravest words sound weak, pallid, banal, and inadequate.” Even though our lexicon for describing man’s suffering under tyranny had been tragically augmented during the past three decades, corresponding to our ability to torture and destroy human beings, it was still unable to delineate its significance. What language do we use in describing the deaths of ten to twelve million forced laborers? And perhaps what was the worst part of the horror: It was legally instituted and considered simply part of the normal bureaucratic, legal, and political system. Reflecting for a moment on those vast cities populated by slaves in Siberia, Silone could see a contemporary parallel to biblical stories of inhumanity and the ancient and desolate images of profound human suffering that so enraged the prophets. Citing Isaiah (“All that was human in him would be abused and offended”), Silone also referred to Stalin’s victims as the paschal lambs whose cries are heard by no one but who atone for the sins of the modern world. This was the “tragic degeneration” of the Russian Revolution and it contained a “tragic lesson for us Socialists.” The relationships between the forms of production and the culture of a society are more complicated than imagined; it was, evidently, possible that a system of collective production could lead to a system of “collective cannibalism.” Yet Socialists should not yield their ideal to such a system. Although it was no longer possible to struggle for a simple repeat of the liberal revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—for the task was now immeasurably more complicated and difficult—it would be a mistake to forget or deny the political and spiritual victories of the past. That would be to hand totalitarianism victory.
Many claim that our epoch will be defined in history as that which discovered the disintegration of the atom, but the Russian trials are revealing the existence of another invention, no less important: the technique for the disintegration of the soul. Perhaps we are not in a position to judge which of these two inventions is the more dangerous. One threatens the physical order; the other threatens the spiritual order. Both endanger the survival of the human species on earth.
Silone discerned in the Moscow show trials before and after the war a new (im)moral question: How did the Russians manage to get so many to condemn themselves? The “diabolical secret” that many had speculated upon was as well hidden as the secrets of the atomic bomb. Yet its results were all too clear: the complete annihilation of the self, of persons who, in earlier periods of history, could well have withstood the tortures and depravity of the czarist and Nazi regimes. Thus, the Russian trials posed moral, ethical, and spiritual questions that we were not prepared to answer. Before them, men and women of good faith must not only reaffirm the centuries-old right of habeas corpus, but given the threat now to be confronted, also must go beyond that to a more universal yet more simple and more radical demand: the vindication of the sacred and inalienable character of the human soul. Habeas animam meant nothing less than the right of every creature to his or her own soul.
In October 1950, François Bondy and Georges Altman of the Congress for Cultural Freedom met with Silone in Rome. The purpose was to introduce the CCF to three different circles of intellectuals: the liberals gathered around Il Mondo, the Socialists writing for Adriano Olivetti’s Comunità, and the left Christian Democrats of La Via. Bondy and Altman were disappointed: The liberals of Il Mondo, inspired by Benedetto Croce’s fierce anticlericalism, distrusted the Catholic church more than they did the Soviet Union; although several Socialists privately expressed support, the Comunità group was not enthusiastic; the Christian Democrats seemed the least interested. Nor were meetings with individuals more fruitful: Alberto Moravia, for example, was focused more on the threat of neofascism than the advance of Soviet totalitarianism.
Despite the less-than-enthusiastic reception, the Italian Association for Cultural Freedom was established a year later. A federation of almost a hundred different groups, it was held together by a manifesto written by Carlo Antoni and signed by such luminaries as the film director Roberto Rossellini, the former Communist and editor of Il Politecnico Elio Vittorini, Gaetano Salvemini, the art historian Lionello Venturi, and the writers Eugenio Montale, Guido Piovene, and Mario Soldati. Silone and Nicola Chiaromonte also signed on.
Josselson and others in the CCF were not optimistic. There was friction in the Italian association that was perhaps insurmountable: its innate anti-Catholicism. Croce was an honorary chair and Salvemini shared with the idealist philosopher a reputation as a mangia-prete. Vladimir Nabokov noted in a June 1954 letter to Josselson that the Italians were “drug addicts of anti-Fascism,” a
charge that Silone, in his own way, had made nearly a decade earlier.
A Handful of Blackberries
In his 1951 essay “Il sale nella piaga” (The Salt in the Wound), for the inaugural issue of a new journal proposed by Valdo Magnani and Aldo Cucchi, Silone pleaded for the creation of a socialism in Italy and Europe that was neither the mild reform socialism of the past nor the nihilistic state socialism of Stalinism. The key to this was a psychological rebirth for many Communist intellectuals into free men and women. Magnani and Cucchi were willing to undergo this painful process of rebirth, having lost faith in the USSR and Stalin, turning in their party cards and resigning from the PCI. They were immediately labeled agents of Western imperialism and subjected to a campaign of vilification. The big guns of the party, including Togliatti, were turned upon them. Their experience, recounted in a cowritten book, Crisi di una generazione, painfully stirred up memories for Silone of his own expulsion from the party two decades earlier.
When Togliatti traveled to Switzerland in 1930 to convince Silone not to allow himself to be expelled, Silone heatedly asked, “Don’t you realize that one day the Soviet archives will be opened and then all this filth [porcheria] that is happening—with which we too are involved—will come out?” To which the ever wily Togliatti responded dryly, “If that’s what is worrying you, I can reassure you: No important decision in the Soviet Union is put into writing.” After the war, Togliatti had said (and written) that there could be no evidence of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest during the war because “a piece of paper with the order to execute the Polish officers will never be found.” But in fact, the order—with Stalin’s and Lavrenty Beria’s signatures—was indeed found.
In early September 1951, as Italians were returning from their summer vacations, Silone was peripherally involved once again in a polemic with Togliatti. This was precipitated by an essay by Elio Vittorini in Turin’s paper, La Stampa, in which he declared he was leaving the PCI. Vittorini compared his departure with that of Silone’s twenty years earlier, both based on a crisis of conscience. Togliatti responded in the guise of Roderigo di Castiglia in the PCI’s Rinascita, with some surprising praise for Silone:
Vittorini compares himself with Silone. He is morally wrong because he is a good-for-nothing, but he is wrong for another reason as well. When Silone left, that is, when he was expelled from our ranks . . . the event counted for something. Silone helped us, by debating and struggling, in substance, not only to see many things deeper and better but also to recognize a human, determined, singular type of hypocrisy, of disloyalty, before certain facts and men. But Vittorini is useless.
Togliatti’s fury was compounded a year later when Mondadori published A Handful of Blackberries, Silone’s first postwar novel. Not only was the main character, Rocco De Donatis, clearly Silone’s alter ego, but the obstinate Oscar, a PCI official referred to as the “blindfolded mule,” is a thinly veiled portrait of Togliatti. The PCI was withering in its criticism. Typical of the Communist literary establishment was Carlo Salinari’s review appearing in the party newspaper, L’Unità: “He might be an anti-Fascist . . . but he is certainly no writer . . . Holy Mother of God,* he is just a bad provincial lawyer . . . He has failed in every aspect of his life . . . Politician? No. Writer? No. So what will he have him do, this poor man?
Two weeks later, Salinari rubbed salt into the wound:
The fundamental characteristic of Silone as a writer is impotence. He is incapable, with words, of creating a sentiment, a character, a milieu. There is always something false, calculated, insincere that prevents him from submitting to the rhythm of the narrative. His humor is as forced as that of a seminarian, his characters are as rigid and clumsy as marionettes, their state of mind is registered with the warmth and passion of an accountant; his landscapes are irremediably banal and imitate stereotypes . . . The impotence of his entire personality is reflected in the writer.
Salinari used the occasion of the new novel to dismiss Silone’s entire oeuvre. Going back to Fontamara, Salinari recalled his initial reaction to Silone’s writing in 1933: “I considered him in good faith a Communist. I read him, therefore, in the proper state of mind, but I was greatly disillusioned . . . I had the same impressions, naturally aggravated, in reading this last novel.” The PCI’s Rinascita accused Silone of depicting the Soviet Union as one large concentration camp and the party as one of persecutors, delinquents, and gloomy, sinister figures. Even the Socialists weighed in with Giuseppe Petronio’s review, in which he judged the novel “a failure, an ugly political gesture, and a useless artistic action.” Emilio Cecchi was more perceptive, noting that Silone’s success abroad and his relative critical failure at home were a scandal. Cecchi suggested that there was a fundamental problem of criticism: Either all the foreign readers and critics were mistaken, or the Italian literary establishment could not see the splinter in Silone’s eye because of the beam in its own. A Handful of Blackberries for Cecchi was surely Silone’s “most committed” novel and, he concluded, could be compared in many ways to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Eugenio Montale wrote that “Silone is one of the very few Italian novelists we have who have something to say and who know how to say it with the right means.” (Among Silone’s possessions was a copy of the book inscribed to Darina: “My dear, these humble blackberries as a viaticum for the journey in America.”)
Silone was never the ideological equivalent of a Koestler; the Italian simply could not swing from committed Communist to rabid anti-Communist. Gustaw Herling, who had firsthand experience of Stalin’s gulag, recounts how one time he convinced Silone to meet with a former Communist, the Polish poet Adam Vazyk, who had left the party in 1955. Throughout their meal together, Vazyk used a particular expression: “When I was a Communist, that is, when I was mentally ill . . .” Silone was offended and let Herling know it. “I was once a Communist; I am not ashamed of it, and I write about it.” Like Benedetto Croce, who also passed through a Marxist phase and later in life remarked that he was a better man and philosopher because of it, Silone felt that his Marxist past was not something that could or should be disavowed. Like Carlo Rosselli, Silone insisted that Marx had gained entrance to the pantheon of modern thinkers who have transformed our consciousness of the world, such as Kant, Darwin, Freud. No one could argue that Marxism was not a necessary tool for a proper understanding of the world; no one could escape Marx’s influence. Silone agreed with Croce that the introduction of Marxism into Italy represented a moral and intellectual rebirth. Antonio Gramsci had remarked that “everyone is a bit of a Marxist, without being aware of it.” While recognizing that Marx was undoubtedly part of modern consciousness, that the ideas and precepts of Marxism had embedded themselves in the psyche of contemporary society, Silone felt that the evolution of Marxism during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century had made it an obstacle to the emancipation of the laboring classes. The task for modern Socialists, according to Silone, is not to deny Marx but to emancipate themselves from his thought.
With little faith in ideology, he had even less faith in formal political parties. Yet in the last years of World War II and the immediate postwar years, he clung, perhaps naïvely, to a faith that a “spiritual polyphony” could be possible in the Italian Socialist Party. In truth, that spiritual polyphony was more an ideological cacophony as the Italian Socialists found ever more reasons to divide themselves into splinter groups and perpetuate the degenerative disease of the Italian left, political suicide.
A political party as envisioned by Silone could never survive in a modern nation. He had been influenced by his experience in Switzerland, where it seemed that the average citizen was far more involved in the daily workings of the parties and the cantonal government. For Silone, the modern mass political party had degenerated into rhetoric and proclamations, not discussion and debate.
Aldo Garosci, himself an anti-Fascist exile and later historian of the fuoruscit
i (anti-Fascist exiles), rendered his opinion on Silone: “I wouldn’t have had him guiding the movement because he had a very strong streak of irony. Other than that, Silone was worth more than any of us.” As Herling points out, Silone’s irony did not disintegrate into nihilism; instead, it was synonymous with a critical spirit, an independence of judgment, and a “sharp and cutting humor” that although evident in his correspondence was less obvious in the novels.
It was readily apparent that Silone could not function as a traditional politician. An episode in 1951 clearly demonstrated to him that he was incapable of fulfilling the desires of his constituents. On returning to Abruzzo for a convention with the workers and peasants of the Marsica in Sulmona, not far from his hometown of Pescina, Silone dedicated his speech to outlining a vision of a new type of politician, one who would make available to the citizenry the tools necessary for education, labor, and culture, instead of the ancient conception of the politician as protector and provider of letters of recommendation. The crowd applauded warmly but, at the end of his speech, Silone was overwhelmed by his listeners with private requests for a “favor” for a son, brother, or nephew. “This made me realize,” he wrote later, “that the only thing I could do was not act as a [traditional] deputy, so as not to engage in such practices.” This was to be the basis, in part, of the character of Andrea Cipriani in The Secret of Luca. Not surprisingly, Silone fared dismally in the elections of 1953, losing his seat in the Chamber of Deputies to the Communist Party candidate. In Pescina, where the local Communist Party cell had named itself in memory of Romolo Tranquilli, Silone was jeered and received a mere 320 votes, roughly a third of the votes he had garnered in 1946. Although in one sense devastated by his loss, he perhaps recognized it as another “emergency exit.”
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