“You believe you go into politics to carry out some reform, while at the ministry there are all these old Fascists who force you to do what you don’t want to do, so that in the end, you are their prisoner.” But perhaps equally true was what he confessed in an interview: “I was not really fit to carry out political activity in the normal sense of the word. For politics in that sense, I had no aptitude.” It was Darina who continually reminded him after these political defeats that he was, above all else, a writer, a goad to the conscience (un pugno alla coscienza). With the 1953 loss, Silone left active party politics for good. A decade later, he could still be bitter about mass politics in Italy. “There are many childish things about contemporary Italy,” he lamented, but also tenacious distortions from the past. The Italian parliament was a hopelessly incompetent and barren arena where political parties ruled their fiefs not very differently from organized crime bosses or Renaissance condottieri. Parliament was not the culmination of politics; in fact, Silone considered “this excessive importance” given to elections a sign of the “decadence of democracy.”
Herling recounts how one day he came across a particularly troubled Silone. Apparently, Silone had spent the day making the rounds of the various offices of the political parties in Rome and had come home in a state of profound depression. He recognized that the modern mass political party—of whatever ideology—had become a voracious machine to acquire and devour funds and was divorced from the everyday lives of its constituents. Silone had discerned the first inklings of what was to explode in the early 1990s as Tangentopoli, the massive corruption scandal that brought down the major political parties in Italy. “In my day,” Silone would recount nostalgically, “everyone made his contribution to the party and when there was something to discuss, we all went to a tavern to drink a glass of wine.” Surely Silone could not have forgotten that ideological debates within the PCI could and did lead to expulsions, exile, and even assassinations, yet he stubbornly refused to forget that the life of the underground political radical also could summon forth moments of sublime companionship and amicizia.
On one thing many of his associates could agree: Silone could not rein in his biting sarcasm. Herling recounts in his diary that when Silone was introduced to Edward Ochab, the president of Communist Poland, Ochab’s face lit up and he said, “How happy I am to personally meet you! I devoured your books in the prisons of reactionary Poland before the war.” To which Silone responded with his characteristic deadpan delivery, “I am flattered, Mr. President. Since that’s the case, couldn’t it be possible to reprint my books in the progressive state of which you are the head, if not for the readers in prison, at least for those who are free?” In 1956, reflecting on the role of intellectuals in European society, Silone commented, “I have never been tempted by the ivory tower, even though I have been told that it has no lack of tranquillity and pleasant warmth.”
America
After twenty days on the steamship,
we landed in America;
we lived on the bare ground,
we feasted on bread and dried fish;
we had tough work of it, but
we made Italy, built her cities.
Silone never entertained the vision of America that had sustained many Italian intellectuals and workers such as the Turinese writer Cesare Pavese in the 1930s. For Pavese, America was a wild and free land, a bit savage but mercifully free of the burden of history and individual self-consciousness shouldered by Europeans. In language and subject, American writers embraced a freedom that was lacking in Europe. Translating John Dos Passos, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Whitman, and others into Italian, Pavese developed a personal mythology about America, a topography of political, sexual, and spiritual liberation. Not so for Silone. Although he felt strongly attached to Italian immigrants to America, especially those from the Abruzzo, America in his mind was decidedly an ambivalent and contradictory place. For the peasants of the Abruzzo—indeed, for the peasants of the Mezzogiorno—America had acquired in their minds the status of a myth. Letters and remittances from relatives convinced them that America was truly a country whose streets were paved with gold. But for Silone, America represented a rootlessness and a propensity for corruption and solitude that could not be overcome.
Although Silone prided himself on his supposedly flawless French and passable German, he refused Darina’s repeated entreaties to learn English; he equally resisted America. A letter from Anthony Buttitta of the Federal Theatre Project for New York during the Depression cemented Silone’s negative image of the New World: “America is no land to come to. It’s disappointing . . . America is a crude, stumbling boy. Behind every tall building, every monument, [there is] envy.” But for every negative image of America, Silone received a communication such as the following from the Reverend Cornelius Greenway of the All Souls Universalist Church on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, who read Bread and Wine “with tears in my eyes and with floodlights in my heart rekindled.” Or a letter from Carmelo Zito in San Francisco: “No conventional platitudes: I too am a Calabrese cafone who ran from the mountains of Aspromonte to escape the wolf. I feel myself to be your brother, one of many such brothers who one day will answer the call from all the corners of the world. My friends and I pass your books amongst ourselves hand to hand like the sacred books of antiquity.”
In Bread and Wine, a local peasant travels to America only to find himself nothing more than a beast of burden for another Italian immigrant who has changed his name from Carlo Campanella to Mr. Charles Little-Bell. Whenever the new immigrant would complain about the low wages or brutalizing labor, Mr. Little-Bell would tell him to “sciatàp” (shut up). This would be the only English word the peasant immigrant took back with him to Fontamara and he repeated it on every possible occasion, so often that the fellow villagers took to calling him “Sciatàp.” For Silone, America silenced its immigrants. Those who somehow became successful, like Mr. Little-Bell, known as the prominenti among Italian immigrants, were, as described by Sciatàp, “a cursed race that reveled in the sorrow of poor people.” At the tavern, he is asked what there was on the famous Forty-second Street. “The pleasure [divertimento] of the rich folk,” he replied, closing his eyes and sniffing the air. “Beautiful women who walk around, perfumed women.” While Sciatàp and the others imagine America as a sensual paradise of perfumed women, Silone was repulsed by what he saw as its open sensuality and vulgarity.
Of the few returning immigrants who found some success in America, Silone noted that they returned unchanged; only now they were able to succumb to the eternal tendency toward envy and build themselves grand mausoleums so that—at least in death—they were “equal” to the town’s gentry and lords. In Fontamara, the peasants remark that the Impressario, the representative of the “new dispensation” (i.e., the Fascist regime), had managed to acquire enormous wealth in a short period of time. The peasants, in their cynical wisdom, said that “he had discovered America in our part of the world.” Perhaps unfairly, for them the easy and unscrupulous acquisition of wealth was synonymous with America.
As Ferdinando Alfonsi (himself a displaced Abruzzese and former professor of Italian at Fordham University) has perceptively discerned, Sciatàp’s moral abasement derived not from an inherent natural condition but from his contact with Italian Americans who, in their desperate striving for wealth and “sickened by the American dollar,” had lost any qualities of human compassion and comprehension, or morality and moderation. America, therefore, was a land that dehumanized its immigrants by their attachment to material things, to wealth. America is a land of solitude, destructive of the sacred sentiments of friendship, understanding, love, and family. In The Seed Beneath the Snow, the simple, Christ-like figure of Infante is confronted by his father, Giustino, recently returned from America, having lost both an arm in an industrial accident and all his money after being swindled by fellow Abruzzesi. Giustino, humiliated by his experience, beats his son mercilessly, so brutally that Infante, in self
-defense, murders his own father. America, for Silone, is responsible for the patricide.
American readers embraced Silone. His books were critical and commercial successes before they were accepted in Italy. Fontamara was adapted for the New York stage as Bitter Stream in 1936, and a year later Bread and Wine was a Book-of-the-Month selection, beating out John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
When, in 1936, a new American edition of Fontamara was to be published, it was to contain a letter by Silone to Italian immigrants in America, especially those from the Abruzzo. The “Note to the Present Edition” in a letter to Girolamo Valenti, a trade union leader and editor of the anti-Fascist newspaper La Libera Stampa in New York, began by saying that if the book didn’t already have a dedication, Silone would have been happy to dedicate it to the Abruzzesi immigrants in America, many of whom he knew personally and who were far from their homeland for the same reasons that had pushed Silone to emigration. (Here Silone was wrong: Most Italian immigrants in America were fleeing the abysmal economic conditions in the Mezzogiorno, whereas the writer had fled for political reasons.)
For those who found themselves far from Italy, Fontamara represents “a recent echo of what our country has suffered and still suffers.” (Fascism is never mentioned by name in the book.) But more important than the terrors of any particular regime, readers in America would find something more tragic: “our inhuman destiny on this earth.”
Silone noted that besides the original German edition of Fontamara, the book had been translated into French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Flemish, Slovenian, and even Yiddish. As he was writing to the Italian Americans, notice came that in India the book would soon be translated into Bengali. “Such a vast interest in the history of a small Abruzzese village, which in reality does not even exist, cannot have a literary explanation.” Nor was the book’s success due to politics. Silone noted with pride that the book had been criticized by Fascists as well as Communists. Silone realized the secret to the book’s success only when he discovered that certain translations had encountered difficulties with the censors. The authorities in Poland and Yugoslavia, for example, refused to believe that this was a book originally written in Italian but rather was an elaborate ruse that was actually exposing the reality of some forsaken Polish or Slavic village. Many in Galicia and Croatia had seen in Fontamara their own village and fate. For Silone, this could only mean that Fontamara, “this invented Abruzzese village that doesn’t even exist in Abruzzo, is a reality in every country.” (A curious document in the police archives shows that the Fascist authorities had sent an expedition to the Abruzzo to track down this “Fontamara.”) “Everything that you recount in Fontamara,” the Indian translator had written to Silone, “happens right here, with us, every day.”
So if Fontamara has any value, Silone continued, it was that it demonstrated the universality of the human condition of the peasants. Suffering is the same in all countries. “Beneath the rags of folklore there is above all the same human creature who sweats blood in bestial labor, who is oppressed, defrauded, exploited, derided, kept in ignorance by a dominating class that is ever more rapacious and parasitic.” Silone’s deepest hope was that every Italian laborer would ponder this truth as he finished reading the book. Knowing that their deep love of country and native towns was exploited by the prominenti, they could still combine a love for the paese (city/country) with a compassion for their fellow workers around the world suffering the same fate. The real task before us, Silone wrote to the Italian Americans, was to dig beneath the colorful folk costumes and customs, the regional and local dialects, the age-old rivalries and the traditional feasts, where they would find a greater imagined community of workers around the world. Only in recognizing the terrible shared sorrow of the memories of their native lands could they fully realize their humanity. “That sorrow, which is like a deep and bloody wound in the heart of every one of us southern Italians abroad, is not something individual and particular, but a great, universal sorrow. It joins us in fraternity with Negroes, Indians, Romanians, Poles, Portuguese, Slovenes, Jews, and all the others.” It is only in overcoming “our inherent modesty” (vincendo il nativo pudore) and simply and truthfully recounting a universal story that we are telling our own story. “This is the message of Fontamara. This is its secret truth. You will be faithfully and truly Abruzzesi, Pugliesi, Calabresi, Siciliani, only if you are courageously rebels and internationalists.”
Fontamara did not affect only Italians in America. As the historian John Patrick Diggins has noted, “After Fontamara, no American writer of social conscience could remain indifferent before Italian fascism.” In 1940, Sumner Welles, acting on behalf of Eleanor Roosevelt, offered Silone a visa for the United States; Silone thanked him but refused. Even so, Silone’s outspoken denunciation of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s and his support of the civil rights movement landed him on the State Department’s list of “undesirable” visitors. At the urging of Darina and others, he finally accepted an invitation to the United States in 1963. The visit both confirmed and challenged Silone’s image of the country. Falling ill, he was taken to George Washington Hospital in Washington, D.C. From his hospital bed there, he wrote to Nicola Chiaromonte with his customary blend of irony and satire:
All things considered, I am happy to have come; I now understand how important it is to see certain things. The part of the trip that I have had to renounce (California) was merely tourism and so I’m not very sorry. I’m more interested in speaking with the people than in seeing panoramic vistas. I am forced to stammer in English with doctors and nurses who know no other language. As an Italian, I have been asked to accept condolences on the death of Pope John XXIII.
Introduced by the philosopher Sidney Hook, Silone spoke at Columbia University to a packed lecture hall, warning intellectuals young and old of the two most insidious temptations of their vocation: nihilism and idolatry. The first was defined by its “rhetoric of boredom, nausea, and the absurd” (surely a not-so-veiled criticism of Alberto Moravia, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the early Camus); the second, by “an unconditional acceptance of totalitarian dogma, whether of the right or the left.” But Silone was no puritanical defender of the old aesthetic order; he praised Michelangelo Antonioni’s film La Notte and Camus’s The Stranger as truly great works of art, “imbued with a serious existential analysis.”
Silone was honest in his criticism of America. He often used the pages of his journals to denounce American imperialism, McCarthyism, and censorship. In July 1952, he published a note of protest drafted by the American section of the CCF against a decision by authorities in Washington to deny a visa to the writer Alberto Moravia. Silone was particularly sensitive to the issue of race; in fact, he often used the pages of Tempo Presente to denounce racism in the “advanced” countries and its influence in maintaining colonial empires. In 1948, he had met with Richard Wright on the publication of Native Son in Italy. At a conference in West Berlin in June 1960 celebrating the tenth anniversary of the CCF, in addition to noting the various fomenting crises (repression in Poland and Hungary, post-Stalinist Russia, developments in Mao’s China, and a criticism that elections did not seem to be forthcoming in Castro’s Cuba), Silone denounced apartheid in South Africa and made particular mention of the burgeoning civil rights movement in the United States. “The General Assembly expresses its deep admiration and sentiment of fraternity with the youth of the United States, men and women, white and of color, who struggle to eliminate the barriers of segregation and who fight for the right of all to participate in the privilege of citizenship in a democratic society.” American officials took note: At least one biography claims that Silone was refused a visa to the United States because of his position on civil rights.
In 1964, it came to his attention that a black man, Edgar Labat, was on death row for having raped a white woman in Louisiana in 1950. While in prison, Labat had begun a co
rrespondence with a white woman, Solveig Johansson, a widow with a young child, in Stockholm, who had become interested in his case. On learning of the correspondence after four years, prison officials in Angola, Louisiana, confiscated the letters and banned any further contact between the two, citing an existing rule that “correspondence is not permitted unless the correspondents are of the same race.” When pressed, the ban was upheld not because of race but because of an unspecified law in Louisiana that “limits access to condemned prisoners.” Perhaps thinking of Romolo in Fascist prisons for four years and how much (or how little) his own letters may have relieved his suffering, Silone drafted a letter signed by Denis de Rougemont, chair of the CCF, the philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aaron, the sociologist Edward Shils, Manes Sperber (who left the German Communist Party in 1938), former mayor of Bombay Minoo Masani (imprisoned for two years for his leading role in the Quit India movement), and the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. They found the entire scenario “shocking.”
Bitter Spring Page 25