A decade after his expulsion, he could look back and recognize that in himself and in the movement “side by side with love and respect for man resided hate and contempt, and that a vocation for tyranny nestled next to the desire for liberty.”
While he recognized it as a liberation—an “emergency exit”—his expulsion from the party was in truth, he wrote eighteen years later, “a very sad day for me, a day of mourning, of mourning for my youth. And where I come from, mourning is worn longer than elsewhere.” He would not renounce his participation in the underground movement. Looking back after a half century of political life, Silone would reflect that “the rashness of my judgment was equaled only by my sincerity.” He would later claim no “superior moral virtue” but only the “naïve spontaneity of the provincial subversive not yet corrupted by cold political calculations.” And although during World War II and in the immediate postwar period he would collaborate with various currents of the Italian Socialist tradition, he remained aloof from party politics, never forgetting that liberty was dear to him precisely because of what he had “suffered to recover it.” Silone never forgot the wounds he received in his participation in and expulsion from the revolutionary underground. But he recognized in those wounds a great source of strength for himself and others, like Tasca, similarly expelled. “There are many of us,” he later wrote with defiant pride, “outside all parties and all churches, who carry these burning stigmata in secret.”
THREE
WRITING in/and EXILE
In Switzerland I became a writer; but, more importantly, I became a man.
—silone, Memoir from a Swiss Prison
For a Communist denied by his party, it was difficult to find a home in the 1930s. Great Britain several times refused Silone permission to enter. “Finally, the English consulate has called to grant me a visa. The moral of the fable is this: If I was perhaps a Fascist, I would have no need to go to the British consulate for a visa; being an anti-Fascist, there is immediately the presumption that I am a scoundrel.” France denied him permission to enter the country; his friend Léon Blum could not arrange permission even when he was prime minister of France in 1936. Evidently, in the eyes of the authorities, being an anti-Fascist was not a badge of honor, but rather a stigma.
Deprived of a passport, in poor physical and mental health, wracked by his conflict with the party and guilt over his relationship with Bellone, Silone settled in Switzerland in late 1929. He would not return to Italy until 1944. In Switzerland, he initiated a two-front “private war against Fascism” as well as a “fight against the danger of totalitarianism.” It was in Switzerland that he became fully cognizant that “our fate depends on ourselves alone.” Notwithstanding occasional arrests, harassment by the police, and more than one stint in prison, Silone became fond of the country. In 1940, in an autobiographical portrait, he wrote that he would like to spend the rest of his life in Zurich, which had become, in that time, “my second homeland: Here I have many friends, and where one has friends is one’s true homeland [patria]. The day that Italy is liberated from the gentlemen who now rule her, I must naturally return there, I must live in Rome; but I am certain that I will live there as a sad Zurich refugee. What I like most about the Swiss, to tell the truth, are their defects. May God help the Swiss to keep them.”
There is some indication that Silone turned to the new science of psychoanalysis in Switzerland. After the war, in an autobiographical essay, he compared his expulsion from communism to psychoanalysis: “One is cured of communism the way one is cured of a neurosis.” He corresponded with (and was perhaps treated by) Dr. Ch. Strasser in Zurich. Dr. Strasser’s stationery identifies him as a specialist in Nerven und Gemütskrankheiten (neuroses and depression). After thanking Silone for a copy of Fontamara, Dr. Strasser added ambiguously, “So far, I have kept you out of the rumors and gossip that has surrounded me and from which I intend to extricate myself.”
In a letter to Romolo, written in Berlin, Silone complained about the inclement weather that “delays my convalescence, especially the treatment of nervous disorders.” Letters to Gabriella Seidenfeld and Romolo in 1929 refer to serious mental or nervous disorders (gravi squilibri nervosi). The arrest of his brother, his increasingly acrimonious relationship with the PCI and the international organs of communism, and an exchange of letters with a Fascist police official were proving too much to bear. On August 7, 1929, he wrote to Gabriella:
I have been cured, that is, the psychoanalysis is finished . . . There is nothing else to analyze, everything is clear. I feel well. Now for the time that is called reconstruction: to reaccustom myself to normal collective life, forget the past, etc . . . Every symptom of phobia and fear has disappeared; I have a memory of past fears, but I am not afraid.
Assuring Gabriella that his doctor was competent and that the treatment wasn’t very long (from an initial prognosis of six months to completion in three), he continued:
The important thing is that the analysis is finished, and that I am already at work, that I no longer have a crisis. We have a simplistic and infantile idea of psychological matters; they are made up of incredible minutiae that have their own importance. The unconscious has a tremendous slowness and laziness; it is unaffected by any influence, neither the will nor reason. One must be patient.
A year later, on September 1, 1930, he was still mentioning psychoanalysis in his letters to Seidenfeld. “I continue to go to the doctor. I am cured. But the doctor still finds in my dreams things of the past, which must be eliminated to be tranquil until I am ninety years old.”
In Switzerland, Silone tried to make ends meet as a typist and a translator, even by teaching Italian. He began an affair with Aline Valangin, a pianist and psychiatrist (a former patient, then assistant, of Carl Jung) eleven years younger than he. Valangin and her husband, the successful lawyer Wladimir Rosenbaum, had created an oasis of peace and serenity for artists and writers at their home in Zurich and country estate in Comologno, dubbed “La Barca” by Silone, to praise its similarity to Noah’s Ark. Valangin and Rosenbaum hosted intellectuals persecuted by the Nazi regime: Thomas Mann, Ernst Toller, Kurt Tucholsky, Joseph Roth. A contemporary writer penned this portrait of her:
The beautiful young lady who lives in the small, ivy-clad palazzo on top of the hill is regarded as a little strange or eccentric. The sciora,* as they call her in the small village of Comologno in the Ticino, receives lots of visitors: men and women in outlandish costume, artists who laugh loudly and seem to have little respect for tradition. Hans Arp is among them, Ignazio Silone and Kurt Tucholsky, too. With some she takes trips to the countryside, with others she has love affairs. Everyone in Zurich knows her name; she is interested in all things new, exciting, and unconventional. Aline Valangin belonged to the most ardent initiators of the artistic avant-garde. She knew them all: James Joyce, Elias Canetti, Max Ernst, and Meret Oppenheim. And they loved this woman, her energy, her intelligence, and her boundless zest for life.
Silone spent much of his life in writing sporadic letters to Aline (the last is dated 1971). They were a strange mixture of banalities and searing images and words. One, from September 25 (no year, but from 1931 or 1932), slips, without any preamble or explanation, into two lines of the “Ave Maria”:
I hope that in spite of the bad weather—here it is terrible—you had a good trip. I thank you for the letter from Florence.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus
Et benedictus fructus ventris tui . . .
Truly, we have no need to be together to feel ourselves one within the other [per sentirci l’uno nell’altro].
Bon voyage, dear, and be careful with the car.
On December 23, 1932, he penned a charming and irreverent alternative account of Genesis, recounting how Noah’s Ark had been the scourge of Turks, pirates, and sharks, and how a certain “Remonda” of Comologno had “acquired the rights” to the ark, which was subsequently brought to her villa, where it was colloquially called “La Barca.”
Silone was irresistibly drawn to the idyllic world Valangin offered but was tormented by his attraction to a “bourgeois” lover. Valangin reflected on their relationship nearly sixty years later in her memoirs:
We wrote to each other often. How many words flew between us! But in fact, he was always reluctant in his love for me. Despite his intelligence he always saw me as a bourgeois, an enemy, in every sense as a pleasurable appendix without any importance. I could not really reach him. For sure, his feelings for me, such as they were, were passionate. He was more disposed to revealing his feelings in writing. I received from him letters that would have made any woman happy. A certain letter, very long, a kind of litany of love in which he praised me as the mother of sorrows, I sent back. I couldn’t accept it, it was simply too much: too fantastic, too beautiful. And yet, I don’t think it was just an exercise in writing; the letter was sincere, but it was the fruit of a particular state of mind [stato d’anima]. It didn’t belong to me and so I wrote him. Other letters failed to make me understand him. It was not clear if he accepted or rejected our relationship. Probably he didn’t know himself. He was always plagued by the idea that I had nothing to do with his world and his fate . . . This dissent of his created many problems for me. His attitude was fickle: at times passionate adoration, at times superficial rejection. This hesitation seemed futile to me. I was absolutely sure of one thing: Except for him, there was nothing and no one. Everything that regarded him, regarded me as well. I was never so liberated, partaking in the burning present, and I would never feel so again.
Since Silone confessed to being unable to speak on the telephone (April 25, 1932), their stormy relationship can easily be reconstructed from their explicit correspondence, ranging from the banal to the erotic to the sublime. On April 11, 1932, from the Central Hotel in Zurich, Silone, in French, wrote that he would write her un nouveau Magnificat. He had a “Virgilian” motif in mind, “a variation on the ancient oration on disinterested love.” But when Valangin suggested psychoanalysis for Silone’s melancholy, he responded with ire:
Instead of making love, you wanted to do psychology and have forced me, innocent that I am, to undergo psychology while I would have preferred to make love. I would rather abandon psychology and embrace love. If you only knew, my friend, how sweet, gentle, and terrible is love without psychology, terrestrial love, a goatlike [l’amour chevresque], animalistic love, that one does one, or two, or three, or ten times in a night without ever tiring, after the mind rests (after reason, psychology rests).
When Silone, who had rather traditional notions of gender relations and the “proper” comportment of adulterous affairs, heard rumors that Valangin had other lovers, including Rudolf Jakob Humm, he penned a long letter breaking off their relationship. “I cannot have,” Silone crudely wrote, “a nymphomaniac as a friend.” Claiming that his decision had nothing to do with jealousy, he insisted that he could not remain in a relationship where love led to “impoverishment” rather than “enrichment.” His fury was unrestrained: “When you caressed me and kissed me, I had to turn my head so as not to smell your breath . . . It was as if a whitened sepulchre had opened. Moritur et ridet . . . Your words had the same perfume. Your lies had the same smell.”
After he had learned of Valangin’s relationship with Humm, Silone had left her house and walked along the banks of the Limmat River in Zurich, “feeling the seduction of the water.” (As he would later occasionally do with his wife, Darina, vaguely threatening suicide.) When he returned to his rented room, for “the first time in fourteen years, I fell to my knees at the foot of the bed and I called for assistance of Life against death, against corruption, against chaos.”
Although Zurich was home to a large emigrant Italian population, Silone was at first reluctant to assimilate into a new society and met socially only with Fernando Schiavetti and his family. Schiavetti, prominent in Italian republican circles, had fled to Switzerland in the wake of fascism. His daughter, Franca Magnani, recalled that Silone left her with a vivid impression on their first meeting in 1933:
The man was tall, with brown hair and an olive complexion. He wore a strange black felt hat with a wide brim; it was unusual in that the top was reinforced with metal to form a kind of bowl. This framed his face in a strange manner that vaguely brought to mind a halo. The little boys in the town square would look at him and laugh . . . I did not like him at first, but I was soon intrigued. I was struck by his drawn out, muffled way of speaking, his cough—little coughs barely emitted but continuous, short, and hoarse—the incessant movement of his eyes and his blinking eyelashes that showed his moist eyes. His slow movements that reflected a cautious man. Silone’s manner of shaking hands disturbed me. One found in their hand a limp, weak hand incapable of squeezing the other, as if he was lacking in strength.
Magnani recalled that the Swiss were surprised by the presence of Italians seeking refuge in their country. Italy’s northern neighbors had insisted that “Aber de Duce hät Ornig bracht” (The Duce has restored order!) and that “dass d’Italiener en Duce bruchet, d’Schwizer nöd” (the Italians need a Duce, the Swiss don’t). But with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, political dynamics and foreign relations changed radically in Switzerland. Magnani noted this at the cinema: When Hitler appeared in newsreels, the audience was “profoundly silent,” scrutinizing him attentively, afraid. When Mussolini appeared, the audience would burst out in “liberating laughter”: Italy simply wasn’t taken seriously. Apparently, the Swiss and the Italian anti-Fascist exiles there had more sense than the French who, Magnani recalled in shock, took to the streets of Paris in 1936 chanting, “Plutôt Hitler que Blum!”
The scholar Deborah Holmes has recently demonstrated that Silone eventually established a complex network of colleagues, writers, intellectuals, and editors in Switzerland. Among the most noted were Thomas Mann and Robert Musil, but also important were his friendships with lesser-known men such as Leonhard Ragaz, a proponent of Christian Socialism, who later inspired the character of Franz the carpenter, derisively called “Agnus Dei” in The Fox and the Camelias. By all accounts Silone at first retreated into a melancholy exile, far from the glamour of Paris, the capital of Italian anti-Fascists. In the rather more austere setting of Zurich, Silone developed a reputation as a solitary and sorrowful man, broken in health and spirit. And yet his Swiss exile was a turning point in Silone’s life; it afforded him an opportunity to be reborn, the promise of refashioning himself, of transforming himself from a Communist Party member into what Gramsci had first seen in him: a writer, first and foremost. The process of “reinvention” as Elizabeth Leake has called it, was a painful one.
It was in Switzerland that the “exile trilogy” of Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and The Seed Beneath the Snow restored Silone to physical and mental health. He called the three novels “the victory of my soul in its struggle against that which was vulgar and merely instinctive in my earlier life.” Claiming that his books did not possess “great literary value,” he admitted, “I myself know full well their formal defects.” For Silone, the exile trilogy was “human testimony” and he confessed that “there are pages in those books that were written in blood.”
Fontamara
“Driven by homesickness, and by a passion for politics that could find no other outlet,” thinking that he had not long to live, tormented by his position within the PCI and his relationship with Bellone, S
ilone retreated to a sanatorium at Davos, the Swiss alpine resort, and began writing what was to be the most powerful and influential work of anti-Fascist literature of the 1930s. It is an extraordinary achievement—sui generis—especially considering Silone’s lack of formal literary and writing experience. He once described himself as one who did not write as a trade or profession but “obeying at all times a strong internal impulse, an authentic necessity.” The result is there on the page in Fontamara. Thirty years later, reflecting on the genesis of the novel, he confessed that “writing for me was a need, a way to converse and to remember; to resuscitate in me memories of my people, to share a common sorrow.” Memories of his infancy and adolescence were “my only strength, because in them there was a moral and I would even say religious source with which I could face and confront the adversities of life.”
Bitter Spring Page 13
