Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  The School for Dictators was accorded wide acclaim when it appeared on the eve of World War II. Some critics hailed Silone as a contemporary Machiavelli in forging a whole new way of thinking about politics. In the New York Herald Tribune, Alfred Kazin placed Silone in the pantheon of Machiavelli, Bodin, Grotius, and Montesquieu. More interesting, though, is Kazin’s sense of a “modern melancholy” that suffuses the book. Irving Howe included an excerpt in his collection The Essential Works of Socialism. Writing in The New Yorker, the novelist and critic Niccolò Tucci pointed out that this was a dangerous book because “Silone knows too much.”

  Among those who nurtured Silone’s image of himself as a writer were Robert Musil and the publisher Emil Oprecht and his wife, Emmie. Silone recalled that at their first meeting, in Zurich in March 1939, Musil pointed to Efraim Frisch, who had written an insightful review of The Man Without Qualities, and said, “He is the only one who understands me.” And then, almost whispering, to Silone: “Unfortunately, not even I am able to understand myself.” Musil was bitter about his Swiss exile, writing to Silone that “today they ignore us. But once we are dead they will boast they gave us asylum.” To Emmie Oprecht, Silone wrote from the mountains of Sils Maria on January 2, 1934, that 1933 had been a “chaotic” year. But starting a new year in the mountains was a very good thing; he was now able to think and work and find some order and clarity in his life. The mountains were more congenial to his work, far from the distractions of Zurich. “Here I truly feel myself to be young and well. A new springtime in my life has begun.”

  By 1933, he had settled in Zurich at the home of Marcel Fleischmann at 53 Germaniastrasse. Fleischmann, a wealthy grain merchant turned art dealer, reveled in his patronage of emerging artists and writers, furnishing his home with an impressive library and contemporary works of art. He placed a wing of his villa at Silone’s disposal. Years later, when Silone had established himself as a writer of international fame, he penned an extraordinary letter to his benefactor on his birthday. Typically, what he could not express in person, he committed to the page:

  13 January 1941 To Marcel Fleischmann

  My dear friend,

  It is often the case, and it is easily explainable, that those who, deserving very little, receive the most, do not know how to express their joy and gratitude. At celebrations they remain near the stairs or at the edge of the table, silent, because words cannot express the inexpressible, happy only if their embarrassment does not attract any attention. Even so, if I write to you, my dear friend, it is not to express the inexpressible, but to hide behind a sheet of paper the words that emotion would prohibit me from speaking face-to-face. I do not know if you are aware that January 13 was, until my arrival in your house, always a day of mourning for me: the day in which, at the age of fifteen, I lost my family* and my house. When, as an orphan, leaving my native village, my grandmother spoke certain words to me, which, at the time, I thought were prompted by pity: “Very often,” she said to me, “the good Lord closes a window and opens a balcony.” I could not have known at the time that on this very same mournful day of January 13, a man was already born through whom, later, I was to rediscover my own home and abandon my nomadic life; I could not know at the time that the good Lord, in place of the window that was closing, already prepared a magnificent balcony for me. And since I have no merit, and there is no external reason, no tie of race or political solidarity, nothing in common that could sufficiently explain the hospitality that I enjoy in your house, your kindness toward me has the same character that is normally attributed to saints and whose greatest praise was written by the apostle Paul. Separately I will copy for you the small verses of the apostle that are a hymn to pure, trustworthy, patient, gratuitous love. I beg you to find the invisible signatures of all the other friends whom you have helped and who are now scattered in every corner of the world, the signatures of all those to whom, like me, you have given both the bread of your table and the courage to go on living.

  Yours,

  S. Tranquilli

  Silone divided his time between Fleischmann’s home and the libraries and museums of Zurich or the Caffé Odeon, which attracted German and Austrian refugees from Nazism. Zurich, Silone discovered, was an ideal location to carry out research: In addition to the canton library, which was connected to the other cantonal libraries of Switzerland, he used the Zentralstelle für Sozialliteratur and the great Museumgesellschaft, open from morning to late at night, with its popular salon fumoir bringing together scholars for conversation, gossip, and, at least in Silone’s case, an opportunity for romance. It was in the Museumgesellschaft that he would meet a young Irish student who would eventually become his wife, Darina Laracy.

  As a consequence of his Swiss exile, Silone’s antifascism and intellectual evolution was shaped far more by the German and Austrian emigration than the Francophile antifascism of Italians in Paris, Marseilles, or Toulouse. But Silone’s difficult personality often led to friction and misunderstandings.

  One of these difficult relationships was with the German refugee Bernard von Brentano. During the 1930s, Silone and Brentano saw each other almost every day, either at the Caffé Odeon or the reading room of the Museumgesellschaft, where both were members. Brentano’s relationship with the other German exiles in Zurich was often strained: He chastised them for repudiating only Nazism, not Germany as well; they accused him of a hidden anti-Semitism and philo-Nazism. His conduct during the war estranged him from even Silone, who broke off their friendship. Silone thought him a tragic figure.

  Another writer whose relationship with Silone was fraught with tension was Arthur Koestler, who met Silone for the first time in the mid-1930s. “I very much admired Fontamara,” Koestler wrote in his autobiography, “and I wanted to meet Silone. I found him polite but very reserved, closed in himself, wrapped in an impenetrable fog of melancholy and depression. To my great disappointment, I was incapable of finding any real personal contact with him.” Koestler recalled that he, Silone, and André Malraux were often grouped together by the critics as a kind of triumvirate of ex-Communists of continental writing.

  Silone could never accept Koestler’s rabid communism early on (“he was a fanatical Stalinist”) nor his anticommunism after the war. When they found themselves, together with their wives, in a Roman restaurant in 1948, Koestler was put off by Silone’s behavior. For the entire meal, the Italian writer buried himself in a newspaper and barely spoke a word. Koestler had failed to note what the critic R.W.B. Lewis perceived was “the sorrowful comedy” of their meeting: Koestler wished to meet Silone based on what he thought was common ground that Silone never shared with him; Koestler saw the rejection of communism as a joyous moment, whereas Silone always thought of his break with the movement as the great trauma of his youth.

  Even with intellectuals and anti-Fascists much closer to his own way of thinking, Silone could be difficult. From his own exile in Paris, Carlo Rosselli tried several times to convince Silone to collaborate with a new anti-Fascist but non-Marxist movement, Justice and Liberty, based on Rosselli’s heretical concept of a liberal socialism. When Fontamara appeared, Rosselli wrote that it was “a beautiful and painful book,” the work of “an authentic writer.” Rosselli recommended it to all anti-Fascists and anyone who sought “a reflection of humanity in a work of art,” recognizing that the protagonist of Silone’s novel was not an individual but a social category—the peasantry. No revolutionary program, wrote Rosselli, could ever be as effective and convincing as Silone’s book. It was, in short, probably “the best Italian social novel.”

  Rosselli shared with Silone a conviction borrowed from Piero Gobetti that “fascism did not fall from the sky,” nor was it inevitable. The reasons for its appearance and success could be found in the pre-Fascist past and the passivity of the political parties. Rosselli recognized in Silone a kindred spirit and in shared exile a correspondence began. Rosselli wrote urging Silone to participate in Justice and Liberty. Silone usually responded with a
ffirmations of solidarity but pointing out that he had withdrawn from active politics and propaganda. Silone refused to write about tactics or political programs; his experience with the Communists was still too fresh in his mind. The expulsion from the party was a liberation, “una vera fortuna,” and “not even Christ could make me speak” on things better said by others. Instead, Silone agreed to write on cultural issues such as the historical problems of the Italian revolution or the general crisis of socialism, even if, as he himself admitted, the “schoolmarmish presumption and arrogance of a Leninist functionary” had marred his previous writings on these subjects.

  More important, Silone had come upon a profound revelation: Not everyone wishes to be preached to, but almost everyone enjoys listening to a story. Fontamara had been read by hundreds of thousands of foreigners who would otherwise have never read a political treatise or a party tract condemning fascism. “Besides, there is a large part of reality that lives within me, which cannot be extricated except in fictional form and since this is not easy for one who is completely taken with party militancy, it is only right that he who is alone intervenes to reestablish the equilibrium and in solitude entertains himself with the phantoms of his interior world.”

  Rosselli responded to Silone: “I understand perfectly. Your experience in the party has been too serious and tragic to transcend your reservations. On the other hand, with your books you have served and continue to serve our cause with an efficacy that your modesty causes you to underestimate but that we appreciate for its real value.” Rosselli recognized Silone’s fate as tragic yet insisted on his collaboration, since Fontamara had served the cause of freedom better than all abstract theories. Silone contributed several short pieces to Rosselli’s Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà but retained his distance from active antifascism. Silone was much closer to Rosselli’s position than has been acknowledged; when he returned to active politics during World War II, he wrote that “today [1942] the usual term, in Italy and abroad, to define our thinking and to distinguish it from traditional social democracy is liberal socialism.”

  Viaggio a Parigi

  At the request of a friend, Silone sent several short stories to a Swiss newspaper in 1934; these were published as Die Reise nach Paris that same year and promptly translated into three languages. Feeling the stories to be lacking in development, Silone refused to have them published in Italy after the war. They appeared in Italian only in 1999. The title story concerns a peasant named Beniamino whom some critics have seen as a version of Berardo of Fontamara. “The Fox” was the basis for the novel The Fox and the Camelias, Silone’s only novel that takes place outside of the Abruzzo (in this case the Ticino canton of Switzerland). The five stories are sarcastic and satirical, with elements of surrealism and eroticism that Silone would soon abandon.

  In the prison of La Santé in Paris, Silone came to know a young worker who had made a voyage to Paris traveling by rail in a dog crate. Having lost consciousness, the young man awoke at the Gare de Lyon. Attracting the attention of some gendarmes and lacking a passport, he was promptly arrested. After a brief stay at La Santé, he was sent back to Italy. This became the basis for “Viaggio a Parigi.” Twenty years later, Silone was stopped on the streets of Rome by the young man, who took him by the arm and asked, “What, don’t you remember me? I was the one who traveled in the dog kennel.”

  Viaggio a Parigi garnered the praise of readers as diverse as Béla Kun and Bernard Berenson. From Moscow, the Hungarian Kun had read Fontamara in Russian and now tried to have the short stories translated into Russian as well, to no avail. Berenson recounts in his postwar diary that he invited Silone to lunch at his villa only to have the Italian writer not say a word for the entire meal.

  Bread and Wine

  Although Fontamara has had more commercial success, most critics would argue that Bread and Wine (Pane e vino) is Silone’s best work. The Swiss writer Rudolf Jakob Humm wrote Silone that “a book like yours is an equation of all the forces which govern the world.” Silone, though, with his characteristic self-deprecation, claimed not to have been “deceived” by the book’s exceptional and “to me entirely unexpected success,” for he was “well aware that the success of a book can sometimes owe more to its defects than to its merits.” Written in 1935–36 and published in Zurich (as with his first book, in a German translation) in 1937, it was followed by an Italian edition the same year and translated into nineteen languages. During World War II, the Allies printed twenty thousand copies of an imperfect edition to distribute among Italian POWs. A decade after the war ended, Silone’s Italian publisher issued a new edition, sufficiently revised that Silone felt it necessary to switch the objects of the title and render it as Vino e pane.

  Bread and Wine is the story of Pietro Spina, a Communist returning from exile to gauge the possibility of revolution in his native Abruzzo. Hunted by the Fascist police, he dons the robes of a priest, takes the name Don Paolo Spada, and is welcomed by the town of Pietrasecca (Dry Stone), a place where “it’s impossible to do so much as draw a breath without being misunderstood” and so poor it cannot maintain a priest of its own. The townspeople are quickly convinced of his sanctity, even though (or perhaps precisely because) he refuses to carry out the duties of a local parish priest. Without meaning to, he eventually comes to see himself as more a priest than a militant Communist, questioning his long-held political beliefs, and gradually develops a passionate but platonic relationship with the young and idealistic Cristina.

  To Cristina, he secretly pens his thoughts in a journal that revealed Silone’s own process of self-analysis.

  The cause of my pain is the question of whether I have been faithful to my promise . . .

  Is it possible to take part in political life, to put oneself in the service of a party and remain sincere? Has not truth for me become party truth and justice party justice? Have not the interests of the organization ended up getting the better of all moral values, which are despised as petit bourgeois prejudices, and have those interests not become the supreme value? Have I, then, escaped from the opportunism of a decadent Church only to end up in the Machiavellianism of a political sect?

  A curious incident in Cristina’s childhood would foreshadow her tragic end. Still an infant in her cradle, Cristina was left one winter’s day in the sheepfold for the warmth it afforded. A wolf entered the sheepfold but left without disturbing either the sheep or Cristina, who joked self-deprecatingly that even the wolves didn’t want her. Spina, unknowingly speaking as an oracle, foretells her fate: “Perhaps the wolf realized she was still a baby and decided to come back for her when she was bigger.” When Spada/Spina flees from Pietrasecca in a snowstorm, Cristina, who has found the journal and discovered his secret longings for her, attempts to follow, only to be devoured by a pack of wolves in the mountain pass.

  Earlier in the novel, a meeting with Uliva, a bitter party functionary, drives Spina to despair. Uliva insists that the party, now persecuted, will, in turn, persecute its enemies. When Spina replies that it is not their ideal, Uliva is withering in his reply: “It’s not your ideal, but it’s your destiny.” Spina attempts a humanist response, “Destiny is an invention of the weak and the resigned,” but Uliva has the last word: “You’re intelligent, but cowardly. You don’t understand because you don’t want to understand. You’re afraid of the truth.” Spina comes away from their meeting deeply troubled. He is not surprised to learn that Uliva is later killed in a bomb blast that may have been an act of suicide.

  A major figure in the novel is Don Benedetto, Pietro Spina’s old teacher, now forced into retirement for his theological heresies and for refusing to bow before the Fascist regime. Don Benedetto represents for Spina (and Silone) an uncorrupted spirituality. Silone, through Don Benedetto, solemnly concludes that the essence of modern tragedy is that one doesn’t become what one wishes.

  Revealing his identity to an old school friend who is now a prominent local Fascist, Spina tells him, “We live the whole of our
lives provisionally . . . Freedom is not a thing you can receive as a gift.” To which the friend, thoughtful and troubled, replies, “You are our revenge. You are the best part of ourselves.”

  But the focus of attention since the revelation of Silone’s correspondence with Bellone has been on the character of Luigi Murica, a party member. Murica has become ensnared into spying for the Fascist police and goes to Don Paolo Spada to confess. “An insuperable abyss opened up between my apparent life and my secret life . . . I became obsessed with the idea that my situation was irremediable. I felt condemned. There was nothing I could do. It was my destiny.” Yet by an inexplicable stroke of luck, Murica went first to see Don Benedetto, who told him that “nothing is irreparable while life lasts, and that no condemnation is ever final.” The good priest pointed out that “though evil must not of course be loved, nevertheless good is often born of it.” Murica is told by Don Benedetto that he might never have become a man if not for the “infamies and errors” through which he passed. Don Paolo Spada, touched by this confession, offers one of his own and reveals his identity to Murica as the hunted Pietro Spina. Murica, now in possession of a very valuable piece of information that might save his life, refuses to pass this along to the Fascists, even under torture that leads to his death. His broken body is brought back to the town for burial, and as Spina enters the house Murica’s father turns to the mourners and says, “He helped me to sow, hoe, reap, thresh, and grind the corn of which this bread is made. Take it and eat, this is his bread . . . He helped me to prune, spray, hoe, and gather the grapes of the vineyard from which this wine came. Drink, for this is his wine.” When the grieving old man notes that it takes nine months from planting to reaping to make bread, and nine months for the grapes to ripen, Murica’s mother notes that it takes the same nine months to make a man.