Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  At the centenary celebrations of Silone’s birth, held in Pescina on May 1, 2000, Darina Silone referred to Biocca and Canali’s book as a “black cloud” hanging over the festivities. The authors, Darina noted, were professional historians, and calls to have the book suppressed or sequestered were wrong. Instead, other, “possibly better,” facts and documents were necessary to confront the accusations. Darina mentioned that Diocleziano Giardini of Pescina discovered in Bellone’s files that Bellone had been in Pescina after the January 1915 earthquake and that Silone and Romolo had met him at the time (seven years before the advent of fascism).

  Referring to the letters sent to Bellone, she recognized “Silone’s tendency to exaggerate, to self-dramatize, as, for example, when he wrote that he had undergone psychoanalysis.” In interviews, Darina was far more adamant that Silone had not undergone psychoanalysis than she was in defending him against the charges of spying. On Silone = Murica, as charged by Biocca and Canali: “I find it very much in malafede to quote, as they do, passages from Silone’s novels . . . to prove he was a spy or informer since he wrote about a character who was. Not to dream of comparing Silone to the great Russians, but mutatis mutandis, Dostoevsky did not have to be an assassin to write Crime and Punishment, and Tolstoy did not have to give birth to be able to describe Kitty’s birth pangs in Anna Karenina.” Silone was well aware of the tragedy of police informers within the party; he often spoke to Darina of Guglielmo Jonna, a Communist official turned Fascist informer.

  Darina had a number of long conversations with the historian Paolo Spriano before he died. Spriano, author of a massive, multivolume history of the PCI, had access to the documents pertaining to Silone’s expulsion from the party. In more than two thousand pages of text, Spriano’s definitive history makes no mention of Silone informing for the Fascist police (nor does it mention that Silone may have been spying for the PCI). Unfortunately, Spriano died in 1988, before the allegations first surfaced. He did mention to Darina that Togliatti “hated Silone to death” and would have destroyed him if he could. Why then didn’t Togliatti do so when he was minister of justice after the war? Perhaps because Togliatti was fully aware that Silone was acting on behalf of the party? An alternative explanation is that Silone was a spy and that Togliatti, discovering this in 1945, failed to publicize it, terrified that Stalin would extract his revenge in the form of Togliatti’s assassination for his failure to prevent a Fascist spy from infiltrating the PCI. This possible scenario doesn’t explain why Togliatti didn’t reveal Silone’s spying after Stalin’s death in 1953.

  The historian Mimmo Franzinelli, author of an exhaustive study of Mussolini’s secret police, has pointed out that it would be absurd for a spy of Silone’s caliber to report only to Bellone and not to OVRA. Franzinelli published the complete list of OVRA informants: Silone’s name is not on it; neither is “Silvestri.”

  Equally curious is the reaction of the world press to Biocca and Canali’s allegations. Many are marred by biographical and factual inaccuracies, some minor, such as the oft-repeated “fact” that Silone’s entire family was wiped out in the 1915 earthquake, and some rather strange. One website (with a claim to “tracking the entire world”) cites Silone’s occupation as “Novelist, Spy,” while its “executive summary” of the man reads, in its entirety: “Anti-Fascist novelist, Pro-Fascist informant.” Rory Carroll, writing from Rome for The Guardian, managed to get the year of Silone’s death wrong, claimed that the April 1930 letter was addressed to Emilia Bellone (there is no named recipient), and wrote that “Silone allegedly infiltrated the Italian Communist Party.” In America, a typical reaction was expressed by Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens, both writing in The Nation. Cockburn’s essay, “Even Worse Than Orwell,” relied entirely on press reports in Britain and inscribed Silone onto a “dishonor roll” and guilty of a “considerably greater level of infamy” than Orwell. But Cockburn is simply mistaken and echoing Biocca and Canali when he claims that the April 1930 letter was addressed to Emilia Bellone. Other minor inaccuracies aside, it appears that Cockburn simply accepted the Biocca-Canali thesis without any reservations and even some embellishments. A more nuanced essay a week later by Christopher Hitchens spent more time excoriating Cockburn and trying to defend Orwell than examining the evidence. But Hitchens too accepted the charge that Silone acted as a “spy” as early as 1919. Hitchens is more sympathetic and willing to concede Silone’s sincerity in the April 1930 letter, something that Cockburn merely sneered at as a typical example of “self-serving proclamations of the writer’s character” and Silone as a victim of “habitual high respect for his own moral fiber.”

  To his credit, Hitchens returned to the debate four months later with an admirable mea culpa or, more precisely, a warning to his readers that the charges against Silone were built on shaky evidence. Referring to his earlier piece, Hitchens confessed that he had assumed, “for the sake of argument, that the published reports of Silone’s collaboration were true.” But in the intervening months, the scandal had evolved in ways unforeseen to both Cockburn and Hitchens. Specifically, Mimmo Franzinelli had published a withering critique of Biocca and Canali’s book. “It now appears,” Hitchens wrote, “that we may both have been party, with differing degrees of relish and reluctance, to a widely and prematurely disseminated falsehood.” And, in an exceedingly rare moment of humility, he concluded, “I cannot myself be confident, and I lack the necessary linguistic and historical expertise, but I now feel fairly sure that the first draft in this argument was allowed too much authority.”

  Likewise, John Foot, writing in the New Left Review, simply accepted the Biocca-Canali thesis and repeated some inaccuracies (such as the letter of April 1930 being addressed to Emilia Bellone and that “certainly he was paid for his betrayals over a decade”). For Foot, the evidence compiled leads to the “chilling truth” that Silone was indeed an informer for the Italian secret police from 1919 to 1930, and “the desperate effort to reinvent Silone’s activities as a heroic triple game holds no water.” But Foot acknowledges that “the enigma that remains unsolved is the question of motive” and questions why the regime did not expose Silone in the 1930s. “Beyond the factual mystery of the reasons for Silone’s service as a spy for the regime, the psychological mystery of his emergence from it as literary-ethical phoenix is yet greater.”

  Even Alexander Stille, the most astute and informed observer of Italy writing in America, takes a minor misstep in his otherwise thoughtful examination of the scandal. Quoting from the July 1929 letter, he fails to note that the letter is obviously written by someone other than Silone. Stille calls for a rereading of Silone in light of these revelations, noting, as have others, the figure of Luigi Murica in Bread and Wine and Silone’s play And He Hid Himself. Stille gives what can be regarded as the most sympathetic reading of those who are convinced of the documents’ authenticity. The recent scandals, concludes Stille, “don’t diminish the power of Silone’s writings.”

  If anything, his heroic image may have obscured the darkness and complexity of his books. Readers who approached the novels as straightforward denunciations of social injustice may have missed the undercurrents of deceit and betrayal that now come into relief. And if Silone no longer seems a man of moral purity, one marvels at his ability to remake himself. He went on to do exactly what he vowed in his last letter to Bellone, “to start a new life . . . in order to do good,” killing off Secondo Tranquilli and becoming Ignazio Silone.

  Such is the central conceit of Elizabeth Leake’s intriguing study, The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone. Through the inferno of his collaboration with Bellone and his expulsion from the PCI, “Silone succeeded in orchestrating the complete reinvention of his public image around the shift from professional revolutionary to novelist.” But, continues Leake, “when the contradictions of his life and his fiction are taken into account, there is no way to determine where he lies on the moral spectrum. The paradoxical nature of his identity is thus insurmountable.”
Leake’s book is a study of how Silone constructed those paradoxes in public over the course of his career. Her contention is that, after undergoing psychoanalysis with Carl Jung, Silone reworked Marxism, Christianity, and his own childhood experiences into a narrative where “he no longer distinguished between his fictional accounts of his experiences and his actual experiences.” Silone’s Italian readers colluded in this sleight of hand because “they have always had a particular need for this figure. He fulfills a crucial function in the collective Italian psyche by representing a political stance that transcends party politics and by challenging authority in good faith and without consideration of the personal consequences.”

  A curious effect of this recent scandal is the portrayal of the secret police official Guido Bellone. While Tamburanno makes Bellone out to be a minor version of Big Brother, the press has portrayed him as a caring, understanding, paternal, and sympathetic figure: the “good” Fascist. Several accounts mention his apocryphal death in an insane asylum. Maybe once the PCI had discovered that Silone had broken his relationship with Bellone, it decided the writer was no longer useful and had him expelled a year later.

  This most recent caso Silone also echoes some comparable cases: Alberto Moravia’s fawning letters to Mussolini, Cesare Pavese’s thoughts regarding fascism in his diary, Günter Grass’s revelations that he served with the Waffen SS in World War II, a Polish archbishop and many members of the Polish clergy spying for the Communists, and literally millions of East Germans spying on one another. In Italy, readers were treated to the rare spectacle of two ideologically diverse newspapers, the right-wing Il Tempo and the left-wing L’Unità, which had a long history of denigrating Silone, rising to his defense.

  Robert Gordon, in reviewing Biocca and Canali’s L’informatore, writes that the book “quashes once and for all any attempt to deny that Silone sent these reports to Bellone,” but he warns that much remains unclear. Direct evidence “is still very thin.” Most of the purported letters “give relatively little away . . . low-key nuggets of information that the regime would also receive from several lesser informants. Even when he appears to go in for outright betrayal, he does so in a way that some have construed as practically useless to Bellone.” Gordon argues, somewhat contradictorily, that “Silone’s information no doubt helped the regime immensely in its damaging assault on the clandestine Communists in the early 1930s” and concludes that “abandoning the myth has been a wrench, but the truth of Silone’s double life makes him more, not less emblematic of his century.”

  The most ardent defense of Silone and the most effective critique of the Biocca-Canali accusations in English comes from the writer Michael McDonald. In an elegant and tightly argued essay, McDonald entered the arena after the publication of L’informatore and Tamburrano’s Processo a Silone. McDonald wryly points out that with their book, Biocca and Canali have accomplished what “the fascists and the communists combined had been unable to achieve: level a near deathblow to Silone’s reputation.” In addition to a convincing rebuttal of the Biocca-Canali thesis, McDonald offers a critique of the manner in which the controversy unfolded in Italy and the United States, with a rabid press eager to join in a feeding frenzy. “In the scoop-driven age of journalism, the facts are never allowed to stand in the way of a good news story . . . The press, first in Italy, later in the United States, credulously retailed Biocca and Canali’s story to the public as fact, doing its best to see to it that Silone’s reputation as a man of uncommon integrity and moral courage would be broken once and for all . . . Most of the Italian press accepted at face value the attribution of the espionage reports to Silone, never thinking to question the authenticity of the documents.” But there is another, just as troubling, operation under way in the caso Silone: the discrediting of the anti-Fascist tradition.

  McDonald notes that Biocca and Canali “are careful never to express the slightest moral opprobrium at Silone’s alleged betrayals.” Instead, their neutral tone is meant to convince us of their disinterested scholarship, intent on cutting through the fog of “hagiographical” research that has surrounded Silone.

  The unspoken yet inescapable results of the authors’ method of proceeding and their findings of “fact” are two: first, Silone is made out to be a badly compromised figure whose heretofore penetrating criticisms of fascism must inevitably be devalued; second, the moral stigma of fascist collaboration (either during the heyday of Mussolini or now) is diminished.

  Another defense of Silone in a conservative venue was David Pryce-Jones’s essay in The New Criterion. Although Pryce-Jones makes a few minor mistakes in his essay (confusing the drained Fucino lake with the town of Pescina and repeating—again—that Silone lost his entire family in the earthquake), he is perceptive in sensing that the moral of the so-called Abruzzo Trilogy (Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and The Seed Beneath the Snow) is voiced by Pietro Spina: “Honor poverty and friendship, and be proud.” Pryce-Jones sees the latest Silone scandal as part of the larger denigration of anti-Communists: After Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell, “now it is the turn of Ignazio Silone.” Like McDonald but unlike Cockburn or Hitchens, Pryce-Jones could read the original Italian accusations and Tamburrano’s original reply and does well to lay out the inconsistencies of the charges. Furthermore, Pryce-Jones notes that “here was a game in which we cannot be sure who was the cat, who the mouse.” The Fascists failed to retaliate against their valuable spy when he broke with them, the letters between 1923 and 1928 are anonymous, and “common sense” suggests that the evidence exonerates Silone. Pryce-Jones scores a telling point when he notes that “Biocca and Canali make no allowance for the totalitarian context, but strikingly and invariably place the ugliest possible interpretation on everything to do with Silone.” He concludes that “some wounds to the human soul go deep, too deep to be understood, let alone healable . . . The personal example stands. The writing speaks for itself.”

  The questions persist: Why did Silone report to a police official rather than to OVRA, the state apparatus specifically created by the Fascist regime to combat antifascism? Why, if Silone had been collaborating since 1919, could he not mitigate the circumstances of Romolo’s trial and incarceration? Why didn’t the regime reveal Silone’s collaboration to discredit him and have Stalin eliminate a troublesome character?

  As Diocleziano Giardini of Pescina pointed out to me, the documents attributed to Silone and reproduced in Biocca and Canali’s book carry no signature. Only a precious few documents, all written after April 1928—that is, after Romolo’s arrest—bear the signature “Silvestri.” This was first noted by Tamburrano, and McDonald succinctly summarizes the case:

  The documents Biocca and Canali attribute to Silone invariably refer only to information that the police received from a “source.” The name, pseudonym and code number of the “source” are never revealed. In other words, there is no way to identify who provided the documents to the police. More precisely, the sequence of documents presented by Biocca and Canali runs from January 12, 1923 to March 3, 1930. The name “Silvestri,” as the informer, appears only beginning in April 1928 (and as “Silvestro” not “Silvestri”). In short, the pseudonym “Silvestri” is only attributable to Silone after the arrest of his brother. None of the informational reports attributed by Biocca and Canali from January 12, 1923 to April 1928 contain any reference to “Silvestri” as their author. Biocca and Canali offer no explanation for this.

  Diocleziano Giardini proposed another intriguing interpretation of the documents in Silone’s file. Noting that the alleged letters from Silone to Bellone are far different in content and character from the “official” documents in the file, Giardini suggests that many of the incriminating documents were not letters to Bellone but rather PCI documents that Silone drafted for internal dissemination. As none of the documents in question carry a greeting to Bellone, this makes some sense. It is possible that these documents may be ones that the secret police confiscated in their many raids again
st the party; the handwritten documents were then typewritten and copies placed in files of various dissidents. Giardini even proposed rereading the “smoking gun” letter of April 13, 1930, as addressed not to Bellone but to Togliatti. This is plausible except for the fact that Silone always addressed Togliatti as “Ercoli” and signed almost all his correspondence with Togliatti as “Pasquini,” his party name at the time.

  In the end, with a resolution of the scandal just as ephemeral today as it was a decade ago, it may be necessary to fall back on Primo Levi’s conception of “the gray zone.” Levi, an Italian chemist, anti-Fascist, and Holocaust survivor, warned against wrapping Holocaust survivors in a halo of hagiography. A truly diabolical characteristic of the concentration camp universe was that it erased the “normal” boundaries between “good” and “evil” to such an extent that even its victims were stained. Levi focused on the notorious Sonderkommandos, prisoners who, for better living conditions and camp privileges, carried out the most horrific tasks of herding victims into gas chambers, transferring the bodies to the crematoria (after extracting any gold fillings), and disposing of the ashes. Levi called their formation “National Socialism’s most demonic crime.” After three months, these prisoners were themselves conducted into the gas chambers as others took their place.