Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  Darina maintained a ferocious watch over her husband’s literary and personal estate. She spent the rest of her life in two pursuits: requiting her love of India and promoting Silone’s literary and ethical reputation with a missionary’s zeal. She often fled Rome for India: “I simply had to clear out of Rome,” Darina wrote to McCarthy, “disappear, before I lost the remnants of any sanity. I need it all, such as it is.” For Darina, Silone’s death was his final gift to her. “Despite everything,” she wrote six months later, “his death was and still is a very great gift to me. In Geneva he had changed, become extraordinarily sweet and—at last—very close to me.” For that gift, Silone had charged her, verbally and in writing, with the care of his immense archive, “and in this,” she wrote defiantly, “I am determined not to fail him.”

  Silone had stipulated in his will that his archive and editorial correspondence were to be administered by Darina with the understanding that they be made “available to future scholars,” preferably in an American university. But the Italian government immediately declared Silone’s archive part of the “national heritage,” thereby erasing any chance that they would be removed from the country. In one of the documents making up his last will and testament, he bequeathed all his possessions and wealth (such as it was) to Darina. More important, his rights (and royalties) as author went to her. On her death, these would revert to the city of Pescina for “cultural purposes” such as a communal library and scholarships for worthy students.

  Silone spent his life seeking utopia in two currents of history: Christianity and socialism. For him they meant the same thing: an attempt to find redemption through liberation of the body and the spirit, and freedom from oppression and injustice. He took up both crosses, mindful of his many painful stumbles (despair, betrayal, Bellone, adultery, contemplating suicide) yet was left with hope. He approached his end if not with a firm conviction, at least with a living hope that men and women of good faith would share in a third age of humanity as announced by Joachim of Fiore: governed by neither church nor state, without coercion, a sober, humble, benign, and egalitarian society entrusted to spontaneous charity among men. Our only hope, he felt, lay in the peasants, the much-maligned cafoni, and their spiritual brethren in poverty all over the world: not so much in a particular political or spiritual program but rather in an acute awareness of a moral tension that animates their daily lives. In an interview shortly before his death, he confessed, “I am a Christian in my own fashion.”

  In April 1977, when Silone’s Rome doctors had told Darina privately that he had not long to live, she found the following document in his desk, in an envelope addressed to her.

  At the hour of our death

  (Creed) I trust that I am unfettered by any consideration of the opinions of my fellow men or any other ulterior interests in declaring that I do not wish for there to be any religious ceremony, either at the time of my death or afterward. This is a sad and serene decision, thoughtfully considered. I hope not to wound or disappoint anyone who loves me. I feel that I have sincerely expressed, at various times, all the duty I feel toward Christ and his teachings. I recognize that, initially, it was selfishness in all its forms, from vanity to sensuality, that led me to stray from him. Perhaps the loss of my family at an early age, poverty, my physical infirmities, and certain natural predispositions toward anguish and desperation facilitated my errors. It was however through Christ, and his teachings, that I recovered, even as I maintained my distance from him. Several times, in painful circumstances, I have simply fallen to my knees in my room, without saying anything, with only an overwhelming feeling of abandonment; a few times I recited the Lord’s Prayer; once or twice I remember making the sign of the Cross. But the “return to the fold” has not been possible, even after the “modernizations” of the recent Vatican Council. I have already given an explanation for failing to return, and it is sincere. It strikes me that over the course of centuries there has been constructed a theological and liturgical elaboration—historical in origin—upon essential Christian truths that has rendered them unrecognizable. Official Christianity has become an ideology. It would be a violation of my deepest beliefs and nature to declare that I accept it; and if I did, it would be in bad faith.

  “In his will,” Darina revealed in 2000, “Silone asked that all his personal correspondence be destroyed, and I, for my part, destroyed it, without regret because I knew that no one could ever understand it.” Many years after his death, Darina reflected that there were aspects of his personality that always remained a mystery to her, she who knew him best. She sent flowers to his grave in Pescina three times a year: May 1, August 22, and All Souls’ Day, November 2. Among his notes to Severina she found two fragments in a shaky hand revealing his increasing concern about his own end. One, from Rainer Maria Rilke: “O Lord, grant each his proper Death.” The other, from Benedetto Croce, was more irreverent: “When it comes, may it at least surprise us at work.”

  Silone had embraced Carlo Rosselli’s dictum that “the only serious way to be anti-Fascist is to be heretical.” It had cost him severed ties with his family; immersion in and then expulsion from a radical, outlawed political movement; the postponement of his true vocation as a writer; and infinite sorrow. As Irving Howe perceptively noted, “Everything Silone wrote was motivated by rebellion against social injustice and . . . by a need to define the condition of humanity for those who had chosen to rebel.” But that heroic stance has been undermined by some dark shadows of Silone’s past, which have only recently come to light.

  EIGHT

  “SILVESTRI”

  Everything conspires to confuse.

  —the Fascist spy ALDO SAMPIERI on Silone

  Silone’s life and literary career were often marked by bitter controversy. The first was his expulsion from the PCI in 1931; another was his scandalous (mis)reception by the literary establishment in Italy; late in life he was (again) accused of collaborating with the CIA. When, in March 1996, the Italian historian Dario Biocca presented archival documents implicating Silone as a former Fascist police spy, another caso Silone exploded in literary, political, and cultural circles.

  The documents are letters purportedly written by Silone—some signed “Silvestri,” others not—to a high-ranking Fascist police official in Rome, Guido Bellone. Biocca’s bombshell was primed by a scoop two days earlier when Italy’s most authoritative daily newspaper published his initial findings. A month later, an official of the Central State Archives leaked a letter that he had surreptitiously removed from the files to a rival newspaper in Rome. The letter is a powerful and poignant document that testifies to a political and emotional crisis. Most scholars have now accepted the authenticity of this letter (as have I). Biocca was eventually joined in his research by fellow historian Mauro Canali, a specialist on the Fascist secret police. For more than a decade, in Italy, France, Britain, America, and elsewhere (even Japan and Afghanistan), a tidal wave of ink has been spilled in a heated and often acrimonious debate: Are all the documents authentic and, if so, what is their significance in revising our conception of Silone as a moral exemplar of the twentieth century, committed to fighting both fascism and communism?

  The spying charge is not new. Seemingly forgotten in the current controversy is the fact that for decades Silone had been accused of spying for the Fascist secret police. A day after Silone’s death on August 22, 1978, the Italian journalist Giorgio Bocca wrote that he had met Silone late in life (1972) but was aware that accusations of all sorts had been raised against the writer. “There were already continuous slanders against him,” recalled Bocca, “during the armed resistance: [that he was] a traitor, a social democratic friend of the CIA, an informer for [the Fascist secret police] OVRA.” Or, as University of Cambridge scholar Robert Gordon has dryly written, Silone has so often been accused of spying—either for the Fascists or the CIA—“that he risked being turned into a spy for all seasons and for all sides.”

  The earliest charges date back to Worl
d War II. In the Silone Archive in Florence there is a curious document, undated (but from 1946) and approximately the size of a large postcard. It reads in full:

  Press Collect Via ITALRADIO

  Gottfried TIMEINC New York

  Director of TIME has stated that the text, charging T [Tranquilli] with personal responsibility for betraying Socialists to Italian police has been a misunderstanding. The necessary correction should be made clear that it was a question of Communist policy to denounce to the public all Socialists as betrayers of the cause of social justice and labeling them enemies to be treated like the Fascists.

  Fifty years later, in 1996, Biocca’s claims were initially met with skepticism, incredulity, and outright shock. The battle lines were quickly drawn. Biocca and Canali, along with a host of Italian journalists and some historians, were labeled “colpevolisti” (those believing Silone to be guilty), while Silone’s defenders were called “innocentisti.” Silone’s supporters claimed at first that the documents were forgeries. The Fascists were not beyond such tactics. A short story by Bruce Cutler demonstrates the ingenious and creative tactics the Fascist police could devise. A young student and partisan must undergo a rather unorthodox “Final Examination”:

  He’s lucky.

  He’s a young partisan who has been captured, not by the German SS, who have just arrived at the outskirts of Naples, but by the Fascist police.

  He undergoes the usual beatings. The police commissioner holds an adjunct professorship in the university law school, and after a few hours, hearing that the young partisan is a university student, he steps in and personally takes over the interrogation. After three days of questioning, the young partisan still remains silent, so the police commissioner makes him an offer. He tells him that this will be his “final examination.” To complete it, he must choose between two alternatives. One: if he betrays the hiding places of his comrades, he will be sentenced to death. But the sentence will not be carried out; he will live, and eventually have his freedom. If the young partisan chooses this alternative, the police commissioner promises to plant false documents in the files proving that the information came from other sources. In this way, his reputation will remain untarnished, and in an anti-fascist victory, he will be in line for all the honors due a hero of the resistance.

  On the other hand, if the young partisan refuses to give him the information about his comrades, the police commissioner tells him he is confident that in a few days, as a result of the terror caused by the arrival of the German SS, all his comrades will be rounded up. After which, they will be shot. Then the commissioner will plant “proof” that it was information from him which had betrayed his comrades and thereafter everyone will look upon him as a traitor and spit on his grave.

  It is for him to choose. Which will it be? The young partisan asks for a day to consider, and goes back to his cell.

  Sixteen hours later, he hangs himself.

  Cutler’s vignette—besides its masterful compression of pathos and tragedy in a mere eighteen sentences—forces us to reconsider the status of documents in the archives and the role of memory in the reconstruction of historical narratives. As Jacques Derrida has pointed out, the archive is the locus where memory, history, fiction, technology, power, and authority all intersect in increasingly complex ways. The very word “archive,” from the Greek “archeion,” connotes authority and origin, a commandment and a commencement. As users of some European archives can attest, archivists often seem to conceive of themselves as custodians whose vocation it is to prevent the uninitiated from having any profane contact with the sacred texts. In Silone’s case, because of a national privacy law, many of his personal papers from the last forty years, deposited by his wife Darina Silone at the Fondazione di Studi Storici “Filippo Turati” in Florence, cannot be consulted by scholars. The question of the malleability of history and the manipulation of memory has been the subject of several fine scholarly works. Most impressive, for both the methodological questions it raises and its eloquent style, is Alessandro Portelli’s examination of the Ardeatine Caves massacre outside Rome.

  Creative as the Fascists may have been, most scholars have either abandoned or rejected the defense that the letters are forgeries. This, though, does not resolve the myriad questions raised by the documents. Having seen the letters, I had to conclude that at least some do appear to be in Silone’s handwriting. But even those documents that appear to be written by Silone are not signed, often have no addressee, and might not be interpreted as spying reports. Several letters are definitely not in his hand, referring to “Silvestri” in the third person. In examining some of the documents, the handwriting expert Dr. Anna Petrecchia of Rome has concluded that they are “all different from Silone’s other handwritten works . . . [The writers] are two different people.”

  The recipient of these letters was Guido Bellone. Born in 1871 in Florence, Bellone was a career police official at the Questura (police headquarters) in Rome who, in the wake of World War I, had been assigned to combat political subversives in the nation’s capital. In 1926, he was reassigned to the Ministry of the Interior and his brief as inspector general of the political police extended to surveillance of domestic and foreign radicals. He was considered an expert on the various left-wing political movements and charged with politically delicate missions abroad. As one scholar has aptly framed the story, Bellone plays the role of the shadowy yet omnipresent and omniscient bureaucrat, mysterious and pervasive, while the narrative of the spying scandal is a cross between Dostoevsky and Kafka, between Crime and Punishment and The Castle.

  If Silone was indeed a spy, he was extraordinarily audacious. In an essay published in the official theoretical journal of the PCI, in April 1928, just as his brother Romolo was being arrested, he wrote:

  We don’t risk being accused of lying when we affirm that the PNF [National Fascist Party] has received the support of solid groups of all Italian political parties except the Communist Party. There have been a very limited number of low-ranking members of the Communist Party who have gone over to fascism, notwithstanding the opposite fairy tale diffused by the [Socialist] reformists. But those elements, among which there was no party leader, went over to the Fascists as one goes over to the police. Their betrayal had no political importance.

  Was Silone implying that contact with the police (i.e., Bellone) was not as morally corrupting as collaboration with the Fascists? Whatever the case, he was simply wrong on this point, as any history of the period can demonstrate that several political leaders of all parties, including the PCI, threw in their lot with fascism (an exception was Justice and Liberty). An interesting piece of philological detective work by Mimmo Franzinelli demonstrates that when Silone republished this essay in 1962, he omitted this passage, even though claiming in an editorial note to having reproduced a version faithful to the original, “with only the omission of some anachronistic and polemical digression.”

  Biocca published his research in an academic journal in 1998. It did nothing to quell the controversy; in fact, the tone of the debate descended from academic to contentious to acrimonious. Even the timing of the publication and the nature of the journal became grist for the controversy: The essay appeared when many people were preparing for official ceremonies to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Silone’s death, and some noted that the essay appeared in a journal that was founded by Renzo De Felice, the dean of historians of fascism, often accused of a “rehabilitation” of Mussolini and his regime.

  The central document—the urtext of the controversy even if it was written last—is a letter of April 13, 1930 (two years to the day after Romolo’s arrest), signed “Silvestri.” The letter was removed from Silone’s file in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome and leaked to the national newspaper La Repubblica, which published it in 1996. It is a classic example of the way a single document can be interpreted in different ways. For the colpevolisti it is the smoking gun of Silone’s guilt; for the innocentisti it is proof of Si
lone’s moral crisis in attempting to mitigate the fate of his younger brother in Fascist hands.

  13.4.1930

  Forgive me if I haven’t written you any more. What you were interested to learn is no longer a mystery (the press already talks about it). I don’t know what my friends and I will do. My health is terrible but the cause is moral (you will understand if you remember what I wrote to you last summer). I find myself at a very painful moment in my existence. The moral sense that has always been very strong in me now dominates me completely; it doesn’t let me sleep, it doesn’t let me eat, it doesn’t allow me the briefest respite. I find myself at the resolution of my existential crisis, which allows only one way out: the complete abandonment of militant politics (I will seek some intellectual occupation). Aside from this solution, nothing was left but death. Continuing to live an equivocal life was impossible to me, is impossible for me. I was born to be an honest landowner in my village. Life has thrown me down a slope from which I now want to save myself. My conscience tells me I have done a great harm to neither my friends nor to my country. Within the limits of the possible I have always avoided wrongdoing. I must tell you that, given your position, you have always behaved like a gentleman. For that reason, I am writing this last letter so that you won’t prevent my plan, which will take place in two phases: first, eliminate from my life everything that is falsehood, duplicity, equivocation, mystery; second, begin a new life, on a new basis, in order to repair the wrongs that I have done, in order to redeem myself, to help the workers, the peasants (to whom I am tied with every fiber of my heart), and my country.