Yet Silone’s life and experience are reflected in many of his characters, not just Pietro Spina/Paolo Spada. There is the peasant Berardo Viola in Fontamara, Thomas the Cynic in The School for Dictators, the disillusioned party intellectual Rocco De Donatis in A Handful of Blackberries, the doggedly persistent Andrea Cipriani in The Secret of Luca, the compassionate Daniele of The Fox and the Camelias, self-effacing Pope Celestine V in The Story of a Humble Christian. But there is always a clear, explicit, and sincere identification with the poor Christ, the suffering Christ, the peasant Christ who figures in the mythology of the rural poor. And in his last, unfinished work, Severina, Silone for the first and only time identifies himself with a female protagonist. Severina, a young convent initiate who refuses to give false testimony in court even though ordered to do so by her mother superior, grew out of Silone’s fascination at the end of his life with Simone Weil. A member of the French underground, a writer, and a Jew who died by self-starvation in 1943, Weil inspired Silone to create Severina as bystander to a crime, thus embodying what writing meant for him: “the absolute necessity of bearing witness.”
Representativeness was imposed on Silone, wrote R.W.B. Lewis in a profile that, now almost a half century old, is still the best critical analysis of the writer. “He scarcely had a chance to be Italian.” Further complicating his portrait is the essential paradox that defined him: his entrance into politics because of an essentially religious conception of the world. “He became a socialist,” Lewis writes, “because he wanted to become a saint.” As a priest says of one of Silone’s characters, “socialism was his way of serving God.”
Silone is a particularly difficult subject for the biographer because of the labyrinthine meanderings of his own identity and his enigmatic autobiographical comments. He believed that the true nature of any person could not be known because—following the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico—he insisted that man is not nature. “Every man,” he wrote, “is much more complicated than what he appears and that which he believes himself to be . . . to hell with psychology and facile suppositions.”
Did Silone knowingly encourage a misreading and a conflation of his heroic and morally pure main characters with his own biography? Is it true, as others now insist, that Silone offered a confession for his transgressions as a police spy in a minor protagonist? The transfiguration from Secondino Tranquilli to Ignazio Silone was neither the first nor the last of his many self-transformations.
When I asked Silone’s widow about his fate in Italian literary circles and why no biography on him had been written in English, Darina Silone replied, “That situation was Silone’s own fault; his—to say the least—extremely difficult character.” When I noted the challenge of tracking down documents in various archives and trying to fashion an identity from them, she was quick to respond. “There are things that are not found in any archive,” she insisted. “Silone’s character was difficult; his personality very complex. Of the few people alive who knew him personally, I am perhaps the one who knew him best, even if certainly not completely (no one ever knew him completely).”
Where, exactly, does identity lie? C. H. Cooley’s “looking-glass” theory of self (“I am not who I think I am; I am not who you think I am; I am who I think you think I am”) doesn’t help us in Silone’s case, for he simply did not care what others in the Italian political and literary establishments thought of him. But the biographer has a fertile mine in Silone’s own writings. Rarely has an oeuvre been so autobiographical. All of Silone’s novels except one take place in the Abruzzo region of Italy, as do his two plays. Rarely has so cosmopolitan a writer been so closely identified with the place of his birth. “Look at Silone,” said Albert Camus, noting the paradox in an interview after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, “he is radically tied to his land but is the most European of writers . . . Silone speaks to all of Europe. If I feel myself tied to him it is because he is incredibly rooted in his national and even local tradition.” Not that Silone engaged in any sentimental or nostalgic mythmaking of his origins. Indeed, one is struck by his complicated and ambivalent relationship with his hometown of Pescina. Notwithstanding all the autobiographical detail in his work, the problem of uncovering his identity still remains almost insurmountable for the biographer. “There is no single truth about Silone,” Darina Silone once said, “only many truths.”
The writing is deceptively simple and presents the biographer with multiple challenges. Silone recognized himself in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s dictum that writers are a human category for whom writing is more difficult than it is for anyone else. “I live in a close communion with the characters in my stories that cannot be broken from one day to the next,” Silone wrote. So close was that identification that the necessity of actually finishing a book was “an arbitrary and painful act, an act against nature, at any rate, my nature.”
The flawed, tragic hero is only one possible trope in crafting a biography of Silone. Like an ancient Hebrew prophet or one of the early persecuted Christians, Silone insisted on a moral vision of the world. His writing—“bearing witness”—was to become the testimony of an age. This is related to what might be called “the Christian quandary” or Silone’s “wrestling with the Lord.” He refused to take the more facile path of an easy atheism or agnosticism. Christianity for Silone was both a historical movement, tied to a certain place and time, and a transcendent, timeless moral force. This conflicting tension between an adamant historicism and a desire for transcendence are ever-present in his thought and writing. Silone and his main protagonists are not so much searching for a hidden God as being hounded by the Lord. A doggedly persistent deity haunts Silone and his characters, seeking them out in desolate landscapes and humble farmhouses, donkey stalls, and empty churches. The moral and ethical impetus is more St. Augustine’s Confessions than Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. There is, as Irving Howe noted, an irreducible tension in all of Silone’s writings between the secular promise of Socialist liberation and the Christian promise of spiritual transcendence. Despite his identification with both Christianity and socialism, Silone indelibly defined himself as “a Socialist without a Party, a Christian without a Church.”
Silone was honest enough to recognize the potential and contemporary failure of the Catholic church just as he fearlessly recognized the potential and failure of orthodox Marxism. There was no Dantean “comedic” vision of Christianity in Silone; he confessed to being an “absurd Christian.” Theologically, orthodox Christianity cannot accept absurdity or nihilism, yet for Silone, these must be confronted before they can be transcended. For Silone, the promise of Christianity as embodied in the Easter Resurrection has not come to pass. Instead, for the peasants of southern Italy—indeed, for peasants and workers around the world—it is, he insisted, still—and always—Good Friday. While the writer felt himself hounded by the Lord, Silone’s peasants ask, like Christ on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Surely the most anguished and—for the Christian—the most disturbing line in the Bible.
Nor could Marxism offer salvation or redemption. In an early work he concluded: “The future belongs to Socialism.” Years later, Silone repudiated that sentiment and the entire work in which it was written and strictly forbade its reprinting. Just as he could not bring himself simply to accept a comedic teleology of Christianity, he eventually came to question and then reject Marxist eschatology and teleology.
William Faulkner thought him Italy’s greatest living writer, and intellectuals as diverse as Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, and Edmund Wilson agreed. Yet even his most astute readers, focused on his moral and political seriousness, often fail to note Silone’s irony and humor. He once wrote that since pathos cannot be eliminated from human life, “a touch of irony is required to make it acceptable.” Silone’s irony could indeed be bitter, but it was always moderated by a critical spirit and an independence of judgment. Although tragedy and sorrow were inherent in the human condition—he ofte
n wrote of “our inhuman fate upon the earth”—there remained the possibility of hope. His politics could be described as a humanistic socialism combined with a compassionate libertarianism. He was an admirer of the anarchists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, and Camillo Berneri (the last assassinated by Stalin’s agents during the Spanish Civil War). When Berneri’s widow, Giovanna, in her journal Volontà, implied that Silone was an anarchist, the writer responded, saying he would be honored to be counted as an anarchist, if only to distinguish himself from the various forms of socialism then current in Italy. “But a great respect toward those who have studied, struggled and suffered to give the anarchist ideal a precise shape” prevented him from identifying himself as such. Nine years later, in a sympathetic response to the student uprisings of 1968, Silone commented that “democracy has a duty to respect utopia.”
By nature silent, meditative, and melancholy, Silone belied the stereotype of the gregarious, outgoing, extroverted southern Italian. In The Seed Beneath the Snow, a sympathetic character remarks to Pietro Spina’s grandmother (modeled on Silone’s own maternal grandmother): “There’s a kind of sadness, a subtle kind of sadness that must not be confused with the more ordinary kind that’s the result of remorse, disappointment, or suffering; there’s a kind of intimate sadness and hopelessness that attaches itself for preference to chosen souls . . . That kind of sadness has always been very prevalent among sensitive individuals in this part of the world. Once upon a time, to avoid suicide or madness, they entered monasteries.”
Unable or unwilling to enter a monastery, Silone gravitated to politics at an early age. But painfully shy, uncomfortable in the public light, and perpetually doubtful of himself, Silone never had any of the qualities necessary for a successful political career. He was a difficult husband, an exasperating friend, a mediocre politician, an aloof acquaintance, a morose presence in public, a distant and cool relative, often manic-depressive, sometimes suicidal, and he carried out an epistolary exchange with a police official that has shadowed his reputation for the last decade. Yet, starting in the 1930s, he crafted a body of work that testifies to a searing political and spiritual crisis and still bears fruitful reading. Silone offers us today a critical commentary on everything that we as human beings experienced in the twentieth century: from the failed promise of political utopia to the disillusionment with art; from the nihilism of totalitarianism to the moral temptations and seductive corruption of an affluent but savage, consumerist culture.
Curiously, Silone has never been the subject of a biography in English. Even in Italy, when not neglected by the literary and cultural establishment, he was often the object of scorn and derision, accused of writing “bad Italian.” Awash in a sea of hagiographical works, there is some discerning, insightful scholarship on Silone in Italian for the serious reader. But considering the ethical dimensions of his writing and the wide range of his literary production, it is surprising that his work has not attracted greater attention in America. While known mainly for his novels, Silone mastered the art of the essay (Emergency Exit), the theoretical treatise (Fascism: Its Origins and Development), political satire (The School for Dictators), as well as drama (And He Hid Himself; The Story of a Humble Christian). When The School for Dictators first appeared in 1938 (with dictators ascendant), Silone was acclaimed “a second Machiavelli” by some overly enthusiastic critics, as, conversely, his Manifesto for Civil Disobedience of December 1942, in which he urges the peoples of Europe to rise up against the Fascist and Nazi dictatorships with nonviolent public resistance, makes one think of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Critics and readers of twentieth-century Italian literature are now familiar with the so-called caso Silone (Silone case), first broached in the postwar years: Why was Silone so beloved and read abroad and so neglected at home in Italy? It was only late in his life that the Italian literary establishment issued a collective mea culpa and showered Silone with literary prizes. Robert Gordon has concisely delineated Silone’s postwar critical reputation:
Ironically, the foreign writers and critics who had championed Silone in the 1930s and 1940s as a great writer gradually lost interest in his later work, unable or unwilling to stomach his increasingly intense libertarian Christianity. For them Silone would always be a standard-bearer of the cause of anti-Fascism and of the necessity for moral enquiry in literature. As such, he was to be set alongside Camus, Koestler, Malraux, Orwell, and others, and to be remembered principally for his earlier works, including Fontamara. Other critics more open to his later work did emerge, but in turn they tended to neglect Fontamara, where the themes of introspective morality and crisis are muted and poverty and politics are to the fore. They tried to fit Silone into another company of writers, of Christian moralists such as Bernanos, Péguy, and Greene. Despite their best efforts, however, it is undeniable that Silone’s international reputation faded somewhat, along with that of the anti-Fascist or existentialist generation.
By 1967, Iris Origo could write that admiration for Silone “has now become not only the fashion, but almost a certificate of integrity.” Almost as soon as Origo had penned these words, another “Silone affair” exploded: It was discovered that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of which Silone was a leading member, and his beloved journal, Tempo Presente, were being indirectly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency with funds laundered through the Ford Foundation. Silone immediately resigned from the CCF and in 1968 closed down the journal, but the allegations that he was a spy for the CIA persisted. Documents from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., however, demonstrate that during World War II Silone was working with the OSS in trying to overthrow fascism and establish democracy in Italy. His fervent letters and telegrams depict a man who was desperate that the Italian people, victims of fascism for more than twenty years, should not have to pay the price for the sins of Mussolini’s regime. A careful reading of these documents reveals that Silone was no spy. It hardly seems likely that Silone was a spy for the CIA when, despite the intervention of both Adlai Stevenson and Clare Boothe Luce, he was denied a visa to visit the United States until the mid-1960s. (He had, during World War II, been offered asylum by no less a person than Eleanor Roosevelt.) In light of his beleaguered circumstances—denied by both the right and the left—Silone was adopted by the democratic socialists of the United States and lauded by the intellectual and literary circles of Partisan Review, Dissent, and The Nation. Critics and writers such as Clement Greenberg, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe worked to bring his work to the attention of an American audience.
Slowly but surely Silone’s reputation survived all these charges. After his death in 1978, it seemed that his place in the literary establishment was secured, especially after the distinguished publishing house Mondadori published much of Silone’s oeuvre in its prestigious Meridiani series in two deluxe volumes. But over the last decade another caso Silone has darkened his reputation. In 1996, an Italian historian uncovered documents supposedly proving that Silone had been spying for the Fascist police. Over the next few years, new revelations appeared in the press and academic journals. Apparently, Silone had spent a decade in an epistolary exchange with a high-ranking police official in Rome. Once again, Silone was at the center of political, literary, and cultural scandal.
This latest caso Silone did not arise in a vacuum. Silone had not been a stranger to controversy in life. Perhaps the ur-scandal was his class betrayal: For although he and his family were petite bourgeoisie, owning some properties in the Fucino plain of the Marsica region in the Abruzzo, he cast his lot with the cafoni all over the world in their myriad guises. As his alter ego Pietro Spina muses in a letter, “Perhaps the real cause of my distress is my defiance of the ancient law, my way of living in cafés, libraries, and hotels, my having broken the chain that for centuries linked my forefathers to the soil.” Later, there followed another scandal in his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1931 and his subsequent exile in Sw
itzerland. Although his 1933 novel, Fontamara, was a critical and commercial success, there was the scandal of his writing’s critical reception in Italy, where, upon returning from exile in 1944, he faced a domestic literary ostracization that was no less devastating than his physical exile. For decades, the classically trained literary establishment refused to countenance Silone’s work. It was said that he didn’t write “proper Italian.” He was often passed over for major literary awards. His subject matter—the rural Abruzzo and the cafoni—was considered beneath “proper” literature by the conservative establishment while the cultural elites of the left, dominated by the PCI, could not forget his expulsion from the party in 1931 or forgive his criticism of communism during the cold war. When his account of disillusionment with communism, “Emergency Exit,” appeared in Richard Crossman’s anthology The God That Failed in 1950, Silone was mercilessly criticized by his former comrades, and when that essay became the central piece in the autobiographical volume Uscita di sicurezza (Emergency Exit, 1965), the Communist-dominated committee of the prestigious Viareggio Prize refused to accept it for consideration, thus generating further controversy (the book was awarded the Marzotto Prize instead). Italian critics began asking themselves why it was that Silone was so esteemed abroad and so derided at home. As the American scholar Michael P. McDonald has written, it was a classic case of Nemo propheta acceptus est patria sua (No prophet is accepted in his own country). Contemporary neo-Fascists (or post-Fascists, as they like to fashion themselves) as well as paleo-Communists are loath to forget Silone’s “betrayal”: his effective demolition of their precious myths.
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