Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  Until Tasca’s collaboration with Vichy, Silone never abandoned him, and even then, Silone’s criticism was muted. If Silone’s “original sin” was his own collaboration with the secret police, he could not bring himself to condemn his friend outright. Instead, he wrote a moving commemoration after Tasca’s death in March 1960.

  Silone and Tasca found themselves on similar terrain: a rejection of state socialism, reform socialism, democratic socialism, and Marxist orthodoxy, and an attempt to reestablish the moral and ethical foundations of a humanistic socialism. They approached this task from different perspectives: Tasca returning to the writings of Marx and Engels and Francophone Marxism, Silone from a Christian socialism developing from the Germanic milieu of Zurich and contacts with Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Martin Buber, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Toller, Jakob Wassermann, and Leonhard Ragaz. Notwithstanding their different places of exile, Silone’s and Tasca’s intellectual itineraries were so similar that one Italian scholar has written about their parallel fates (vicenda parallela). The necessity of finding their respective voices in exile, in foreign lands, did not go unremarked by Silone. “The young people of my generation,” he wrote many years later, “were forced to find an echo of their most intimate anxieties in foreign authors . . . and we wondered as to why there was such a silence regarding our contemporary problems in contemporary Italian authors. It was not just because of censorship, but rather self-censorship.” For Silone, Italian writers from the Renaissance on, with precious few exceptions, were “an ornament of society,” not an essential fact of reality. “The fundamental themes of conscience were avoided.”

  Between Tasca’s expulsion in September 1929 and Silone’s in June 1931, the two men exchanged letters between Paris and Zurich that would lay the foundation for a thirty-year relationship that ended only with Tasca’s death. “Whatever decisions you make on the political terrain,” Tasca wrote in March 1930, “you can count on my solidarity.”

  Much of their correspondence was devoted to helping each other find publishers, editors, and paying venues for their writings. Silone openly confessed to Tasca that he had undertaken his theoretical analysis of fascism for purely financial reasons, desperate for money. “Buying paper is already a sacrifice. For ten days, I haven’t bought a newspaper.” He dashed off Der Fascismus in a matter of weeks. Tasca had introduced Silone to Paul Nizan, the French writer and philosopher, but Nizan, under pressure from Maurice Thorez and the French Communist Party, managed to put Silone off. (Nizan would later resign from the party at the announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 and was killed fighting at Dunkirk.) The French Communist Party had also pressured Henri Barbusse, editor of Le Monde, to fire Tasca from the journal. Silone was adamant that he would earn his living rather than be supported by the party. “Even at the risk of croaking (crepare), I want to earn my own living, like most men. At the beginning, it will be difficult, but I’ll manage. If I don’t, it means I’m inadequate to living.” Yet he was still able to maintain his sardonic sense of humor. While waiting for a signed contract from Nizan for the fascism study (which never arrived), he could write with wry humor to Tasca that “eating every day is a necessary precondition to work.” More seriously, they discussed Silone’s impending expulsion from the party, which was technically delayed for some months because Silone had enrolled in the Swiss Communist Party.

  On June 20, 1930, Palmiro Togliatti (“Ercoli”) sent Silone (“Pasquini”) a letter stating that the party had decided to ask Silone for a public declaration. They demanded that Silone publicly break with the three “deviationists” (Ravazzoli, Tresso, Leonetti); condemn Trotskyism; and state “absolute fealty to the party and the International.” Togliatti’s threat was not subtle: “I hope you don’t want to follow the road the others have taken.” Two months later, after failing to receive a reply, Togliatti tried again: “So far we have not received anything from you, neither a declaration nor even a suggestion of a declaration . . . The struggle against the opportunists, the enemies, and disintegrators of the party is something that is beyond any possible discussion.”

  To another party member, Romano Cocchi, Silone quoted Stendhal: “Dream of not spending your life in hate and fear.” Silone boasted of having no fear “of any kind,” only of a “horror of creating victims” with his expulsion. He asked Cocchi, “Don’t you understand that your zeal is, at the very least, inhuman and sadistic?” Perhaps Cocchi did—belatedly—understand, for he later condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and was himself expelled from the PCI. Arrested while fighting with the French maquis, he was sent to Buchenwald, where he perished.

  In January 1931, six months before his official expulsion, the following declaration from Silone appeared in the Communist publication Falce e Martello (Hammer and Sickle):

  Certain comrades have asked what is my position with regard to the Communist International and the PCI. To clarify this question I hereby declare:

  1. That I am in agreement with the general line of the Communist International and PCI;

  2. That I have never had, and have, nothing in common, neither politically nor organizationally, with the “group of three” [Leonetti, Tresso, Ravazzoli] expelled from the party, who have now passed over to the Trotskyist opposition;

  3. That I condemn this group, their positions, and their activities, and am in solidarity with the struggle that the Communist International and the PCI carries out against them and against the Trotskyist faction;

  4. That I accept without any reservations the discipline and the decisions of the Communist International and the PCI.

  Togliatti and Ruggero Grieco struggled for more than a year to keep Silone in the party; when it became obvious that their efforts would bear no fruit, they turned to threats. Silone walked out of a meeting of a commission chaired by Grieco to examine his case. During this session, Silone was accused of myriad offenses: a refusal to collaborate with the current direction of the PCI; an inability to work with the party apparatus; his “arrogant and impudent” bearing; the fact that he burst into scornful laughter at every mention of the doctrine of “socialfascism”; that he was not an “internationalist” but an “Italian” and, worse, a southern Italian; in fact, his “contadinismo” (advocacy of the peasants) was a grave theoretical error. “These were the charges against me,” he wrote to Tasca, “but they probably won’t be the public charges against me in the act of expulsion. Those are not difficult to imagine: traitor, deserter, etc.” The only thing that Silone and the commission could agree upon was that he had a different ideology from the party, that even his language was different from that of the party, “that we speak and yet we fail to understand each other.” But by the summer of 1931, the case, as far as the party was concerned, was closed. Silone was fully prepared now for the consequences. Fully conscious that one never freely resigned from the party but could only be expelled, he wrote to Tasca that he now felt “ripe” for expulsion.

  Summoned one last time before the PCI in July 1931, Silone admitted, according to the official party communiqué, to being an example of the “political underworld,” an “abnormal politician,” and “a clinical case.” “There is no place in the ranks of the party,” thundered the announcement, “for softheaded intellectuals” such as Silone. The vote to expel him was unanimous.

  As Silone and Tasca discovered together, expulsion from the PCI was both a blessing and a curse. As Silone had compared joining a revolutionary party to entering a monastery (“An outlawed revolutionary,” says Pietro Spina, “is in the ideal state of a Christian in a monastery”), he likened the “traumatic” situation of the ex-Communist with that of the ex-monk. Leaving the Communist Party, he wrote, “is like a small death” (una piccola morte). Ironically, Silone rediscovered what he had been seeking in the party—“a genuine rapport with others”—only after being expelled. With the passage of time, he could reflect on how he had misconceived politics. There were limits to what one could achieve through politics, “on that score I
had no illusions.” Equally important perhaps was his cynical conclusion that to work in politics “for any motive other than the pursuit of personal power must surely, I think, demand a certain measure of self-deception, of deliberately closing one’s eyes to certain aspects of the truth.” Again he turned to the metaphor of wolves in searching for answers. The fate of socialism, he wrote, was comparable to the hunter who went hunting for quail, only to find wolves. “In the struggle with the wolves, to save ourselves some of us were obliged to . . . rediscover our paleo-Christian heritage.” The fate of Marxism convinced him that there was no revolutionary theory that could not be used for reactionary ends. What had survived of Marxism was its ideological critique, which was paradoxically both “a tragically cold technocracy” and “essentially humanist.” But as History was the mother of Irony, Silone speculated that one day we would arrive at the aphorism that “Marxism is the opiate of the people.” More than thirty years after his expulsion, it was still painful for him to recount that period in his life. The slow realization that the Soviet regime was the exact opposite of what it claimed (and what Silone believed it) to be came almost as a sickness, a medical crisis, as well as an intellectual one. When oppression, censorship, “absurd persecutions and ruthless tyranny” became obvious and no longer aberrations but systemic, Silone found himself in a “tragic dilemma.” It was impossible to remain subject to such degradation but also impossible to cut the ties with men and women of good faith who were struggling against fascism.

  “My entire world had collapsed,” wrote Gabriella Seidenfeld on Silone’s expulsion. She turned for help to Willy Trostel, secretary of the Soccorso Rosso, and his wife, Käthe, but soon begged off to spare them the hostility of the party apparatus. (Trostel and his wife were later victims of Stalin’s terror.) Seidenfeld eventually found lodgings in an apartment in Zurich put at her disposal by Albert Einstein’s ex-wife, Mileva. Silone returned from Davos for a brief visit to Zurich, not completely cured, and to earn some money typed manuscripts for the Socialist libertarian Dr. Fritz Brupbacher.

  Brupbacher was a physician ministering to the workers in Zurich. He had an international orientation and extensive contacts with Socialists, anarchists, Communists, writers, and artists. Originally a member of the Swiss Social Democratic Party, he was expelled because of his anarchist sympathies and joined the Swiss Communist Party in 1921. He had married Lydia Petrovna Kochetkova in 1901. With his companion, Paulette Raygrodski (“Russian women are one of my erotic fetishes,” he once confessed), he scandalized Protestant Switzerland with bold advocacy of sex education, birth control, and abortion. At a conference on these matters in Rheinfeld, Brupbacher and Lydia were arrested and jailed overnight. On leaving the next morning, he reached into his pocket, extracted a five-franc coin, and left it on the desk of the warden as a tip.

  Instead of paying Silone, Brupbacher offered his typist tea and biscuits; Silone would drink the tea and bring the biscuits home to Gabriella. In addition to the tea, Brupbacher supplied Silone with something far more precious: political cover to keep the Italian exile who possessed no official papers out of prison or safe from another round of expulsions. The good doctor’s home was a welcome refuge for European anti-Fascists of all political persuasions. He was particularly attracted to the charismatic Italian and Russian anarchists and a great admirer of Mikhail Bakunin, whom he crowned “the Satan of the Revolution.” In the Brupbacher home, Silone and Seidenfeld met the Hungarian count Michael Károlyi, who had turned over his vast landholdings to the Hungarian peasants to liberate himself from a sense of guilt.

  It was Brupbacher who, in his inimitable style, arranged a “solution” to Gabriella Seidenfeld’s precarious political status: marriage to a Swiss citizen. Urging her to look through a photo album, the two settled on a Mr. Meyer, an elderly man “with a beard like Karl Marx,” who, notwithstanding his devotion to bachelorhood, could not refuse a request from “Dr. Brup,” as he was affectionately called. On the day of the wedding, bride and witnesses (Silone and Brupbacher) were left standing alone at city hall when the groom failed to appear. Brupbacher was not going to let his plan go awry: Two weeks later, he and his wife showed up at the groom’s door, dragged him from bed, dressed him, and escorted him to the town hall. After the ceremony, they all retired to a local pastry shop. Thus Gabriella entered into a “normal” life as far as the Swiss authorities were concerned. In reality, she found an apartment rented out by two radicals and continued her conspiratorial life.

  In January 1937, Gabriella was in Davos with Silone (where they rented two rooms in a pensione). On March 7, Silone abruptly ended their physical relationship, although the two remained lifelong friends. In keeping with his character, he gave no reason to acquaintances or even to Gabriella herself. Gabriella continued to live in Zurich, and when she opened a small bookstore, the Libreria Internazionale on the Langstrasse, Silone, with profits earned from the publication of Fontamara, lent her some of the money necessary to acquire stock. (The idea of the bookstore was his.) Thinking that the Italian emigrant population in Switzerland would welcome the diffusion of Italian literature and culture, the two were disappointed when the results proved “catastrophic.” In the first few weeks, not a soul entered the bookstore. People came only on Sundays to purchase the tabloid newspapers; others asked only for the writings of Carolina Invernizio (a romance novelist whose books had been placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Vatican). One client would come in asking for books “that would make me cry.”

  Gabriella Seidenfeld had given Silone a chance to be reborn after the first terrible years of clandestine politics. In a letter to Gabriella on her birthday in 1924, Silone credited her with saving him from despair:

  Two years ago, I was completely dried up, withered. Two years ago, such a letter would have disgusted me. To endure the horrible life I had previously lived, I had burned everything in me that was from Pescina: rural, from the seminary, familial, etc. To better endure, I had become deaf and dumb in spirit. Nothing mattered to me. What happened? My interior destruction had not been complete, neither physically nor morally. Then you arrived. Certainly, I am now no longer what I once was. I am physically reborn, that is, newly born. Even the desire to work has returned. Indeed, here’s a curious fact: Reborn, I am returning to what I once was, that is, Pescinese. This should not displease you because at Pescina with Mamma I was truly a darling child, educated and so studious that Mamma was proud of me. At bottom, everyone has his own temperament and I realize that all I believe now I already thought at the age of fifteen. So that you, red Jewess [ebrea rossa], have brought me back to my spiritual condition when I entered into the seminary.

  Nor had Silone forgotten Seidenfeld toward the end of his life. In the second codicil to his last will and testament, Gabriella was one of only four people other than Darina Silone who is mentioned. “To a small number of people, toward whom, for diverse reasons, I feel tied by affection and gratitude, I intend to leave some tangible sign of memory, unfortunately measurably limited because of scarce resources.”

  After his expulsion from the Communist Party, Silone was invited to join the Union Internationale des Écrivains Révolutionnaires and write for its review, La littérature de la Révolution Mondiale, but declined both invitations. (Publishing in French, English, German, and Russian, the union and its review were based in Moscow and Leningrad.)

  By 1934, Tasca was urging Silone to return to active politics. “I propose to remain, as I am, independent of parties,” Silone replied. Tasca shot back, surely thinking of the changed equation with Hitler in power, that while he too did not want to be ensnared in party politics, “I think, though, that it is truly the moment to begin to draw on our experiences, which give us every right, except that of being silent.” Angela Balabanoff wrote to him comparing the current situation of Stalin’s show trials and the continuing civil war in Spain with the fate of the young idealist Cristina devoured by wolves: “The truth is so sad, as sad as the ending of Bread and
Wine.”

  On the Stalin show trials and the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial in particular, Silone’s English translator, Eric Mosbacher, wrote to Silone that the whole Socialist movement suffers, noting that the New York–based Communist paper Daily Worker had issued a call to “shoot the vipers!” Just months after Fascist Italy’s defeat of Ethiopia in 1936, Mosbacher had declined an offer to translate Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s book about the conquest of Ethiopia.

  Carlo Rosselli, leader of the Justice and Liberty movement, continued his earnest entreaties for Silone to rejoin the anti-Fascist cause, arguing that “it is necessary to de-provincialize antifascism and bring it in contact with the European public.” Silone refused.

  Notwithstanding his refusal to return to official party politics, Silone maintained close contact with many exiled left-wing intellectuals. To Balabanoff he wrote, “Give my regards to [anarchist Carlo] Tresca, whose name I have known since I was fourteen. Tell him that at the Ospedale degli Incurabili in Naples I was cared for by one of his sisters, a nun; she was a good old lady, cheerful, and not at all ashamed of having an anarchist brother.”

  There was to be no return to the fold, no return of the prodigal son. Try as he might, Togliatti failed in each and every attempt to bring Silone back to the PCI. In public, he was chastised, criticized, and denigrated. In his own hometown, where the local Communist Party cell had turned Romolo into a martyred saint, Silone was often derided and scorned. Some, in private, were sincere enough to admit that they had lost one of the party’s best minds. But Silone had been one of the first to discern the ultimate fate of communism in the West and the Soviet Union. “After the death of Lenin, it appeared clear that the State was not going to escape what seems to be the fate of every dictatorship: the gradual restriction of the influence of those who participate in the direction and control of political power.” Once the party had suppressed all rival political parties and established itself as the sole source of power, “every difference of opinion among the leaders was destined to end up with the physical extinction of the minority.” Whether a tragedy of epic proportions or one of the many ironies of history, the revolution that had defeated its enemies “began to devour its favorite sons.” The “thirsty gods,” Silone realized, “permitted no truce. Marx’s optimistic phrase about the natural decay of the Socialist State was revealed to be a pious illusion.”