Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  In 1954, Silone had submitted to a “40 Questions for . . .” interview, and his answers were a combination of sarcasm and sincerity. Asked why he wrote and what he offered his readers, Silone responded simply, “to communicate . . . and to give a bit of companionship.” His ideal readers were men and women who were “solitary, worried, and disposed to reflection.” When asked about literary critics, he smiled and offered that in this world “there is a place for everyone.” As to their influence on his work, he answered with a single word: “none.” His favorite novelists were Cervantes, Tolstoy, and Giovanni Verga; his favorite painter, the Fauve and Expressionist Georges Rouault. When asked if he might return to active political life, he solemnly answered, “If freedom were endangered.” As to the most important personal encounters in his life, they were Don Orione, Antonio Gramsci, Leon Trotsky, and Leonhard Ragaz. The most important Italian historical figures were Joachim of Fiore, St. Francis of Assisi, and Tommaso Campanella. From their own epoch: Simone Weil. He confessed to a belief that a third world war would create the premise for a fourth and that he had no belief in the idea of inevitable progress. Was man a free and responsible agent? Man could be responsible “only insofar as he is free.” He did not believe in a perfect political order or in the possibility of perfect laws or institutions. As to the possibility of a Christian state: “It would be a contradiction in terms.” But a Christian society was one in which love substituted for laws. His concept of a Socialist revolution was one in which present economic and social obstacles were eliminated to permit the freedom of men and women. Would man then be happy? Not necessarily. Ancient concerns would survive and new ones would arise. Freedom could not come about without certain socialist measures. This was not the case in the Soviet Union, where socialism did not exist but rather its contrary: “capitalism of the State.” He denied being a pessimist as he was often portrayed. “I have faith in man who accepts sorrow and who transforms it into truth and moral courage,” he concluded. “I think that from the tremendous polar night of the labor camps of Siberia there may come forth Someone who will return sight to the blind.” “Someone?” the interviewer demanded. “Who?” “His name,” Silone answered, “doesn’t matter.”

  In 1953, Silone, as a former member of parliament, sent an inquiry concerning Romolo to Carmelo Camilleri, former vice commissioner for public safety in Milan at the time of the fatal bombing in 1928. Refusing to confirm at the time the “official” inquest that Communists and anarchists were responsible for the deadly bombing, Camilleri was eventually removed from the police force and sentenced to five years of confino because of his contacts with Italian anti-Fascists. In 1953, Camilleri was president of the national union of retired police officers. From his office in Rome, Camilleri sent Silone a report that revealed “without any evasiveness, the truth about the assassination attempt in Milan and places the martyrdom of your poor brother Romolo in its true light,” affirming the police’s first suspicion that dissident Fascists were behind the bombing.

  Thirty-three years after Romolo’s death, Silone was still adamant in maintaining some control over the narrative of his brother’s arrest, trial, and death. When Don Gaetano Piccinini, also from Pescina and taken in by Don Orione after the earthquake, wrote an article commemorating Romolo, Silone responded with a stinging letter, outlining eleven misstatements. These ranged from the relatively harmless (Romolo was four years younger than Silone, not seven or eight; Silone never attended university; Romolo entered into Don Orione’s schools at the ginnasio level, not the elementary) to the more substantive: Romolo was sentenced to twelve years in prison, not six. More seriously, Silone was offended that Piccinini seemed to downplay the gravity of Romolo’s predicament. Silone reminded the priest that the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, on Mussolini’s orders, was transferred from Rome to Milan especially to pronounce a death sentence on Romolo. It was only after the tribunal was presented with irrefutable evidence that Romolo had not been in Milan at the time of the bombing that they were compelled to convert the original charge of attempted regicide to membership in the PCI and change both verdict and sentence. Most disturbing for Silone was the complete lack of context in Piccinini’s reconstruction of events: The priest’s “euphemisms” and “abstract allusions” failed to convey to the reader the reality of the Fascist regime and left Silone with “a great sadness.” Although he detested those who rallied over the corpses of the dead, why, Silone asked, couldn’t the good priest “call things by their proper name”?

  Calling things “by their proper name” had become Silone’s literary touchstone. Although he briefly experimented with surrealism and symbolism in some early short stories, he soon came to reject both the florid conservative style of the Fascist period as well as the more experimental writing of the European avant-garde. Silone’s realism was his only method of “bearing witness” to the lives and tragedies of the Mezzogiorno.

  *Code name of Camilla Ravera.

  SEVEN

  The PAINFUL RETURN

  I cannot imagine a life that does not contain within itself a radical antithesis.

  —SILONE, “Fiction and the Southern Subsoil”

  The art of storytelling, Silone once remarked with a smile, is similar to the culinary arts: When the pasta is al dente it is time to remove it from the stove. Similarly, it is necessary to learn when to stop writing. Silone found this particularly difficult. Like any writer, he came to live with his characters and often found it difficult to send them out into the world of readers. In a letter, he criticized the literary agent and translator Barthold Fles as one who “talks too much. Unfortunately, he knows only the Old Testament, and not the New, where it is written that after death, one must offer up an account of all useless words.” While sensitive to the necessity of knowing when to stop writing, Silone confessed to being unable to “give up our quest for understanding.”

  In his last two decades, after the publication of The Secret of Luca, Silone spent less and less time on active politics and withdrew to a more contemplative life. “Certainly not because of any misanthropy,” he insisted. “Those who know me know that I am very sociable.” He criticized what he saw as a never-ending Italian “literary carnival” of prizes, pageants, and paparazzi. Convinced that the highest and only dignified ambition a writer could cultivate was to “be and remain oneself, not to alter one’s voice,” he advised young writers “not to sing in falsetto, not to wish to be something they were not.”

  He was drawn to the simple spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi and the modern order he inspired, the Little Sisters of Father Charles de Foucauld. Added to this was a deep and abiding interest in Simone Weil. Although Silone never publicly acknowledged it, it was Darina who introduced him to both Weil and de Foucauld. Although he was less inclined to travel, he was in Paris in 1957 for the Congress for Cultural Freedom when he visited the mother of Simone Weil. Thus, the seed was planted for an idea that was to bear posthumous fruit in Severina. (It was to Weil’s mother that Camus, on his way to claim his Nobel Prize, had confided that it was really Silone who deserved the award.)

  For Silone, the death of historian Gaetano Salvemini in Sorrento on September 6, 1957, was cause for reflection on a passing epoch. Salvemini had been born in Molfetta, in the province of Bari, the eldest of nine siblings. In the earthquake of 1908, Salvemini saved his own life by standing in the architrave of a window but lost a sister, his wife, and five children. In a letter to the idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, he painted a self-portrait that could also describe Silone: “I move ahead, work, give lectures, prepare conferences, and throw stones at those who do not seem honest or sincere to me. People think me strong . . . In truth I am a miserable wretch, without home or hearth, who has seen the happiness of eleven years destroyed in two minutes. I have here on my table a few letters from my poor wife, my sister, and my children. I read them little by little. I seem to hear their voices. And after having read a few, I stop, because a desperate sadness overwhelms
me, and I want to die.”

  Salvemini was buried beside his beloved students Ernesto Rossi and the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli, in the Trespiano cemetery overlooking his adopted city of Florence. In November 1957, a commemoration was held in the Teatro Eliseo in Rome. (The Eliseo had been the first theater in Italy to stage Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge, both directed by Luchino Visconti.) Organizers had billed the tribute “Il socialismo della povera gente” (the socialism of the poor), and Silone, picking up on the theme, took the podium, describing himself as a “cafone from Pescina” come to pay tribute to the “peasant from Molfetta,” both outside the official Socialist parties, both intimately tied to a lost world of peasant values. “His speeches fell upon the ears of the deaf,” Silone said mournfully, “but it is likely that the socialism of the poor and the oppressed, being rooted in the hearts of the honest and in their thirst for justice, will not be extinguished.” Salvemini, a die-hard mangia-prete, had surprisingly requested on his deathbed to be buried with a simple crucifix. In Salvemini’s work and final gesture, Silone discerned a kernel of truth: the essentially religious nature of socialism. Although Salvemini had ceased to believe at the age of eighteen (approximately the same age as Silone), he forced himself to follow “the moral law of Christ,” a Christ refigured in the sorrowful expressions of Silone’s own peasants.

  In the early fall of 1958, Silone found himself surrounded by boring politicians and intellectuals in Vienna. From there he wrote to a friend that he would soon go to Rodi for an international conference of third world leaders, hoping that “they will be less political” than their European counterparts. Composed mostly of the leaders of the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa (among them India, Pakistan, Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, Nigeria, and Indonesia), the Rodi conference was grandiosely and hopefully titled “Representative Governments and Public Freedoms in New States.” Silone’s speech was just as much a warning to the new states as it was a critique of contemporary events in Europe. The return of Charles de Gaulle in the face of the Algerian uprising was of particular importance: Those arguing for Gaullism as the lesser evil would eventually regret their weak argument. The “investiture” that de Gaulle had secured from the French parliament was seen as the “chrism” of democracy. (Silone’s use of the ecclesiastical term signifying “gift” was not casual.) “How can we forget that most totalitarian governments had the same consecration?”

  Decades before the word came into common usage by political scientists and journalists, Silone described Italy as a “partitocrazia,” that is, a society that thinks itself a democracy but where real power lies not in parliaments or representative institutions but rather in the executive committees and subcommittees of the various political parties that parcel out the spoils of the state among themselves.

  The year 1959 was dedicated to his last novel and the only one set outside the Abruzzo, The Fox and the Camelias. From the Swiss canton of Ticino, Daniele must decide how to deal with a Fascist spy who has penetrated both his study (where compromising papers were kept) and his daughter’s heart. The novel was an expanded version of a short story that had appeared in the collection Viaggio a Parigi. On the first Thursday of May, Silone made a trip to the town of Cocullo (population five hundred) in the Abruzzo, famed for its sacred procession in which a statue of St. Domenic is carried through the town covered with live, writhing snakes. The townspeople were honored to have such a distinguished person attend their feast, but Silone was dismayed at how the sacred and pagan aspects of the original feast had already been commercialized and abused. Silone was sardonic, feeling that the original meaning of the snake-covered saint had been lost.

  The so-called economic miracle in the Italy of the late 1950s and early 1960s and its accompanying consumerism often were subjects of Silone’s essays. He cautioned against an “irrational exuberance” in the wake of material prosperity.

  The social conditions of the southern Italian peasant are in a phase of rapid transformation, as in Italian society in general. I am of course satisfied . . . I wouldn’t say, though, that the new situation is Paradise on Earth . . . There are no reforms that can substantially modify the problematic character of the human condition: the contrast between the collective and the individual, between society and the State, the imbalance between sorrow and the search for happiness.

  With most of the myths of communism laid bare—from the liberating spontaneity of the proletariat to the power of class consciousness to the inevitability of progress to the cleansing power of violence—Silone became more concerned with what he called the “sphinx of affluence” in Western societies as more and more people bowed down before the gods of consumerism. Silone often bitterly commented on what Thorstein Veblen had pointed out as the conspicuous consumption of a savage society. “Many respectable people can go without food to diet, but not to feed a starving man.”

  While postwar Europe had been disillusioned with the “myth of Progress,” it had to deal with an unexpected prosperity sooner than anyone had anticipated. No political party in the West could ignore “the categorical imperative” of prosperity. The paradox was “the spectacle of human beings who have reached the last stages of personal alienation even though all their wants are satisfied.” The most distressing aspect of a materialist and prosperous society, for Silone, was the loss of all spontaneous generosity, where social relations tend increasingly to be dominated by consumption rather than production. How could sociologists, writers, or politicians explain the grotesque paradox of a nation like Italy, obsessed with soccer betting pools and the lottery, a nation that used cafoni! and morto di fame! as derogatory exclamations yet which embraced St. Francis, the “poor man of Assisi,” as its patron saint? This was the “sphinx of affluence.” On another occasion, he noted that in a very precise and not paradoxical sense, it was capitalism that destroyed private property, not socialism.

  Christmas 1961 found Silone and Darina in the Near East, first for a conference in Beirut, then traveling to Jordan and Damascus. In Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Silone was struck by the bitter antagonisms among the various Christian sects. At Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Jews exterminated in the Holocaust, Darina, overcome with emotion, knelt to kiss the ground. Silone, as usual more reticent, did not imitate her gesture. After meeting with the Samaritans, a Jewish sect that today numbers fewer than one thousand souls, and leaving a small donation, husband and wife took a cab from Jerusalem to Jericho, passing by Bethlehem. The arid, dusty, naked landscape caused Silone to withdraw into one of his melancholy moods.

  He appeared less in public, and his lifelong aversion to conferences and conventions approached a mania. In a 1970 letter to Don Piccinini—like Silone and Romolo, taken in by Don Orione after the 1915 earthquake and educated in Orione’s schools—Silone refused an invitation to participate in a radio commemoration of their beloved teacher. His reasoning was bizarre: “Dear Don Piccinini, I am sorry to say that I cannot accept your invitation to tape a commemorative radio program on our dear Don Orione. For some time now, I have renounced entrusting my thoughts to the radio. It is a diabolical machine, an irremediable form of alienation.” And then, with his usual mordant humor, and expecting his own demise in the near future, he concluded sardonically: “I’ll explain it better personally to Don Orione.”

  To the journalist Annibale Gentile, who had invited Silone to Avezzano in celebration of Natale del Fucino, Silone dryly replied that “by instinct I am allergic to celebrations.” Yet he could still be moved by personal experiences as when he sent a telegram to Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem, thanking him for introducing Silone to S. Y. Agnon. Silone called that introduction to Agnon, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, “a great privilege and an unforgettably moving experience.” Agnon’s death in 1970 caused Silone “a profound sense of bereavement.” Agnon’s books for Silone recorded “a world now vanished.”

  Georges Rouault

  When asked in an interview to name
his favorite painter, Silone answered without hesitation: Georges Rouault. Rouault was perhaps the most tortured religious painter of the twentieth century, similar in some ways (though not politically) to the German Expressionist painter Emil Nolde. Rouault was born in the cellar of the family home as the neighborhood near the Père-Lachaise cemetery was being bombed by government troops in the 1871 Paris Commune uprising. Rouault’s father was a disillusioned follower of the Catholic democrat Félicité Lamennais, who sent his young son to a Protestant school. In 1903, Rouault was one of the founders of the Salon d’Automne. He was poor for most of his life—his work was kept out of the public eye by an eccentric patron/dealer. It was not until 1937 that forty-two of his paintings were shown at the Exposition des Artistes Indépendants. In November 1948, he dramatically burned more than three hundred of his old works in a public auto-da-fé. In the days after World War II, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work; another followed a year later at the Tate Gallery in London. Honored late in life, promoted to the rank of commander in the Legion of Honor, he was given a state funeral when he died in 1958.

  For Silone, Rouault’s paintings captured the raw emotional power of life with all its misery and hope. Silone was particularly attracted to Rouault’s continuing depiction of the Holy Countenance. When Silone wrote that he would happily spend his life writing and rewriting the same book, the way medieval artists painted the face of the Lord over and over again, always the same yet always different, surely he must have had Rouault’s paintings in mind. The French painter’s Christ is sometimes depicted mocked by Roman soldiers, sometimes alone, always with a mournful visage, as if reminded of man’s capacity for cruelty to his fellow human beings. Silone often spoke of Rouault and the influence the French painter had on his own work. Although he never wrote about Rouault, all his friends knew of his appreciation for the painter and often gave him birthday presents of Rouault prints and reproductions. For Silone, Rouault’s paintings were an antidote to the so-called economic miracle and resulting consumerism of the 1960s and 1970s.