Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  Silone viewed imprisonment, “which I accept as evidence of my love of freedom,” as a badge of honor, “as would any other decent human being.” He accepted “the entire moral and political responsibility” of all activity carried out under the aegis of the Foreign Office of the Italian Socialist Party. While not doubting the integrity of the investigating officers, he charged them with failing to understand the political and historical context of his work on behalf of the Centro Estero of the PSI. And here Silone shrewdly used Swiss history to frame his defense. For the authorities were far too concerned with the technical aspects of the case rather than “the spirit that animates it.” The fact that a group is forced to make use of certain “organizational tools” is not adequate proof of criminal intent. Where political freedom has been denied, as in Italy, all opposition parties were, by nature, heretical and “criminal.” This was too important an episode to leave to future historians.

  Surely the Swiss authorities recognized that Silone and his three colleagues were “resolute partisans of democracy and liberty.” The police themselves had evidence—in the form of confiscated letters, testimony, and published works—that Silone was neither a Communist nor an anarchist, but a defender of liberalism and democracy. And here, Silone wrote, was the “paradoxical and painful consequence” of the police operation: Both the accused and the accusers “clearly fight for the same ideal, the latter to defend democratic institutions in their own country, the former to introduce those very same institutions in their wretched country.” This was one of the many “painful contradictions” of wartorn Europe. It was “a tragic, objective, real contradiction,” due to the unequal development of the various European countries. The Swiss had indeed been fortunate; they had a “miraculous” advantage over the Italians in that their confederation had been born 750 years ago, while true liberty and freedom had never taken root in Italy. Noting the absurdity of a struggle between the police of a democratic state and those working for democracy, Silone wryly noted his sympathy for the Swiss police: The most difficult role was not going to prison but imprisoning those who struggled for democracy.

  In the present historical context of war, Silone argued that men of goodwill could no longer remain silent. As Yahweh said to the prophet Isaiah (42:14): “For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and have held myself back. But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out.” When God loses his patience and cries out into the soul of a man, one can only stand trembling in awe. The experience, Silone wrote, was not something that could be explained; it must be experienced to be understood.

  Prison afforded Silone the occasion to reflect on his turbulent life. In December 1930, twelve years previously, Silone had been “a guest” in the very same prison. Looking back on the time he passed in Switzerland since then, he marveled at the transformation of his inner self. At the time of his first arrest, he was thirty years old, had just recently left the Communist Party, to which he had sacrificed his youth, his studies, and every personal interest. He was gravely ill and without any means of support, without family, and had been expelled from France and from Spain. He could not return to Italy. “I was,” he confessed, “on the threshold of suicide.”

  That terrifying crisis, though, granted him salvation. Recalling a passage from Saint Bernard, Silone reflected on how there are men whom God chases, persecutes, searches out, and, “if he finds and grabs them, he mangles them, he tears them to pieces, he bites them, chews them up, swallows and digests them, and he creates them as entirely new creatures, creatures that are entirely his own.” Reflecting on his own sufferings, it seems that he had that very same “painful and privileged experience.”

  “In Switzerland I became a writer; but, more importantly, I became a man.” He had finally freed himself from the “Bolshevist nightmare.” In his daily encounters with the free, democratic, and peaceful Swiss people, Silone had discerned something that he had previously thought impossible. Moreover, he rediscovered a “Christian and divine aspect to the very meaning of man’s existence on earth,” a meaning that he had glimpsed in early adolescence but that he had lost as he grew older. This “interior rebirth” corresponded with a rejection of any ambition or desire for power. “It appeared evident to me that the highest aspiration of man on earth must be above all to become good, honest, and sincere.” His work as a writer had been “the testimony of this struggle of mine and its internal maturation.”

  Perhaps too magnanimously, he credited the Swiss for his “rebirth and resurrection.” His moral debt was so great that he had no hope of ever repaying it. He could only modestly offer gratitude, nostalgia, love. Therefore, as dark clouds gathered over Europe and then war broke out, Silone, unlike many other European intellectuals, did not abandon Switzerland. Vaunting an invitation from the Association of American Writers and President Franklin Roosevelt himself, Silone proudly pointed out that “among the refugee writers then in Switzerland, I was the only one who did not abandon the country.” He stayed not only because he had come to think of Switzerland “as my second patria, as the homeland of my spirit,” but because he would have considered it cowardly. He would have been proud to defend the small country, if not as a soldier, at least as a writer, for it would have been “an honor to share the same fate of this free people.”

  Silone maintained that he had kept his promise to the Swiss Police for Foreigners not to engage in political activity. He kept his silence during momentous events: the Abyssinian War, the Spanish Civil War, the anschluss of Austria, the outbreak of the present world war. His silence derived not only from his promise to the Swiss authorities but also from an understanding of contemporary events that “superceded that of a superficial and simplistic politics” and that gave greater significance to “other causes, more profound, more concealed, more fundamental.” His books until that point (Fontamara, Bread and Wine, The School for Dictators, and The Seed Beneath the Snow) were “the sincere expression of a man who remains radically opposed to fascism and to every form of dictatorship, but for human and ideal reasons that transcend those of political antifascism.”

  After this impassioned defense, Silone continued with an acute analysis of the Fascist regime and its present situation. He reminded the Swiss that from the very beginning of fascism, Mussolini had to contend with political opposition. To counter this opposition, fascism had acquired the consent of large swaths of Italian society: from the monarchists to the Catholics; from the industrialists to the major part of intellectuals; from a large stratum of the rural population to certain categories of workers. But sometime around the spring of 1941, a rupture seemed to have taken place. The “triumph” of the Ethiopian War in 1936 had marked the apogee of “consensus.” But beginning with the Spanish Civil War and continuing with the “Pact of Steel,” the Rome-Berlin Axis, and now the humiliating military defeats in Greece, Albania, and North Africa, that consensus had unraveled. “The latent contrasts within the heart of the dominant political class,” Silone dryly noted, “have been aggravated.” Accordingly, the Fascist regime had “entered into a phase of internal decomposition.” By December 1942, the final outcome was “no longer in doubt.”

  Silone had come to this conclusion based on correspondence with Italian writers, intellectuals, and workers. Some had even managed to seek him out in his Swiss exile. They did so because they found in his books “an echo of their own intimate sufferings” and “a sublimation of that suffering in a modern, humane, and Christian conception of man, society, and the state.”

  Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and The School for Dictators had circulated clandestinely in Italy “because of the initiative of persons totally unknown by me.” (Tellingly, Silone did not mention his Marxist-inspired Der Fascismus.) It was, Silone claimed, the repetition of an old phenomenon. “The Spirit blows where it chooses and Habent sua fata libelli” (Books have their own destiny).

  Turning his thoughts to the postwar scene, Silone examined the question of whether Italy would finally choose freedom an
d democracy. Here he argued against the framing of the postwar settlement as a false dilemma: fascism or bolshevism.

  The postwar fate of democracy and liberty, he argued, would be determined by the working classes. Silone had returned to active politics, breaking his promise to the Swiss Police for Foreigners, partly to prevent the fusion of the PSI with the PCI. Workers, activists, and writers had appealed to Silone to articulate their fear of the submersion of the PSI within the PCI. He acceded to the “categorical imperative of my conscience,” which demanded he “translate the concepts of autonomy, responsibility, and dignity into a more immediate and comprehensible language.” The goal was to “vaccinate” the Italians against the “Communist psychosis,” which Silone defined as “a species of red fascism.”

  In a famous open letter of August 1936 sent to the editorial board of the journal Das Wort in Moscow, while the Stalin purge trials were unfolding, Silone vehemently criticized the Russian Communists for having betrayed the workers’ cause: “What is the worth of your protests against the Fascist police and tribunals? What worth are all your magnificently eloquent tirades on the basic rights of man, on the dignity of man, and your defense of culture? What moral validity does your self-styled humanism have? . . . I am in fact convinced, and I have tried to express this in all my writings, that to resist fascism we have no need of material means, nor of arms, nor great bureaucratic apparatuses, but above all we need a completely new way of thinking about life and men. Without this ‘new way of thinking about life and men,’ we ourselves, dear friends, will become Fascists. I mean to say red Fascists. Now, I must tell you, I refuse to become a Fascist, and especially a red Fascist.”

  But the nature of the present crisis went beyond fascism, which merely pushed the underlying symptoms to the surface. There had always been a fatal flaw of the Italian nation-state since its unification in the nineteenth century: the failure to “bring together the political organization of the state with the real and living development of Italian society.” The postwar order had not only to dismantle the present elephantine totalitarian state but, more difficult, substitute for it a political organization that is the direct expression of the people—“a state at the service of society and not vice versa.”

  In his first contacts with those who were fighting fascism in Italy, Silone saw a “spiritual hunger for truth.” In particular, he recalled receiving a letter from someone in Italy: “I’ve been thinking of [these ideas] too, in secret, but . . . I was afraid that . . . they could be heretical.” Silone pointed out that from the point of view of a certain Marxist orthodoxy, his ideas were “heresies, but heresies pregnant with life and painful truths.”

  Citing from memory passages from his letters to those in Italy, Silone crafted a new vision of socialism alloyed with the ethical and moral impulse of Christianity:

  The pain provoked by the persecutions ceases to be a useless expenditure of energy when the pain, with the aid of conscience, is capable of renewing and purifying . . . The persecutions can be beneficial to socialism if socialism is capable of freeing itself from the dross that over the course of its development has been superimposed on its primitive spiritual nucleus and if socialism is capable of once again becoming a movement for liberty . . . Fascism has taken from socialism its negative and materialist aspect; fascism appropriated many things from socialism that seemed essential to socialism but were not. We must leave them behind. In traditional socialism there lived, side by side, one within the other, the two figures of Christ and Barabbas. Fascism (and National Socialism) has chosen Barabbas. It is the dictatorship of Barabbas, imperium Barabbae. We must leave Barabbas to fascism and recognize ourselves in Christ.

  Silone argued that his socialism and antifascism were not “classist, materialist, or intellectual in origin” but “essentially ethical.” The traditional bifurcation of socialism into warring camps of “reformism” and “maximalism” was now anachronistic. Reformism had failed because it wished to paint “a rosy veneer over a society whose crisis was organic and structural.” The revolutionary maximalists had “dreamed of a gloomy and antihistorical apocalypse.”

  In place of the centralized state, Silone advocated a federal democracy as “the only form capable of assuring self-governance of the people.” There would be no nationalization of industry nor a state-run economy, but a pluralistic economy allowing power to devolve to the workers, producers, and consumers through guilds, cooperatives, and unions. Silone considered this activity “an imposition of the exceptional circumstances” and the “irresistible obligation of my conscience” to combat the Communist attempt to conquer the Italian Socialist movement.

  His arrest put an end to an episode of his life that “I myself have always considered accidental or transitory.” He was not, nor did he wish to be, a politician “in the meaning ordinarily given this word.” “I am, and I want to remain,” he wrote, “a writer, tied to no other discipline except that which my thinking and conscience master.” Once the investigation was closed, Silone predicted that he would return to his work writing what was to be the counterpoint to The School for Dictators, a work he had tentatively titled “The School for Liberty.” “I will complete it in prison or an internment camp . . . the place is not very important. Perhaps prison, for my spirit, is the most propitious place.” He knew that the most “vivid, living texts of Italian freedom have been written in prison”: from the Consolations of Philosophy of Boethius to the books of Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella. His arrest, which forced him to abandon politics (“a line of work for which I am not at all cut out”), had obliged Silone to return to the solitary pursuit of writing. Was it not, Silone asked, “a blessing in disguise”?

  Silone was not above implying a sly threat in case he and his colleagues were actually put on trial. If that were to happen, he warned, it would be fascism on trial before public opinion. “It would be,” he warned, “a most instructive trial.”

  Before ending this memoir, Silone had to deal with a painful subject, one that had caused him “sleepless nights.” He was referring to the fate of the materials confiscated by the Swiss police. Among the papers were the names and addresses of anti-Fascists living in Italy. These had been kept against all rules of underground and conspiratorial life by a colleague whom, Silone argued, suffered from a particular form of mental illness: “archival madness.”

  Surely thinking of his own epistolary exchange with Bellone and the never-ending guilt it had implanted in his soul, Silone pleaded with the Swiss police to recognize the “tragic consequences” that would fall upon the Italian anti-Fascists if the Italian police came into possession of the names and addresses. These were “courageous men, convinced idealists, in whom the passion for liberty burns as in the purest heroes of the democratic revolutions. For the future of Italy and democracy, these are precious men.” Silone, perhaps recalling his own experience, reminded the Swiss of “the diabolical means of penetration and corruption” used by the Italian Fascist police services in Italy and abroad.

  He concluded by quoting St. Bernard: “I have spoken and freed my spirit,” and asserted his utter sincerity. “I hope to be read not by a policeman,” he wrote, “but by a man and a Christian. That he may receive my message as a Christmas gift. If he fails to understand it, perhaps those who a hundred or two hundred years from now search through these miserable papers will understand enough to seize a spark of the great struggle of our time.”

  He spent Christmas 1942 in prison. A few days later, in another round of questioning, Silone confirmed the existence of the Foreign Office of the PSI, that it consisted of a total of four people, that they were in communication with the Centro Interno or domestic office of the PSI within Italy, and that the four in Zurich were in possession of a Gestetner copying machine. When asked if he had any ties with “Italian terrorist groups,” Silone was offended. External relations existed with the Swiss Social Democratic Party, the Swiss Socialist Party, the Labour Party of Britain, and the American Labor Federation.
All these organizations (except the first) had sent the Foreign Office of the PSI approximately 50,000 Italian lire and some 1,000 Swiss francs. From various Swiss labor unions, the Foreign Office had received another 6,000 francs. All of the lire and some of the francs, Silone admitted, were sent to the PSI in Italy.

  Silone then turned his attention to more personal matters, pointing out that he had suffered from tuberculosis in the past and that at present his health was poor, that the evening before (December 28), he had spit up blood and had a high fever. He acknowledged that he had been notified by the Swiss authorities that any further political activity would result in his expulsion from Switzerland and pleaded to be allowed a cure in the mountains, preferably at Davos, where he had written his first book, Fontamara. He promised to abandon political activity (a promise perhaps made in poor faith).

  Suffering from a pulmonary hemorrhage and high fever, Silone was released from prison on December 30, 1942. Darina was waiting for him; together they went to Davos, where he was kept under surveillance and was again called in for questioning before the Swiss courts issued a sentence on February 11, 1943. Arrested supposedly in violation of article 299 of the Swiss penal code, the Swiss judge forged a creative interpretation of the facts. The article in question charged that it was a crime to use violence to challenge the public order of a foreign state or to advocate a violent overthrow of a foreign power. Arguing that the activities of Silone and his three colleagues at the Foreign Office of the PSI constituted “a grave threat to the external security of the Confederation,” nonetheless he found that the activities were “effectively limited to an ideal preparation and a distribution of advice.” That is, the call to civil disobedience was directed toward individual behavior and passive resistance and was “not an invitation to violence.” The Italians were guilty of illegal political activity and Silone was officially to be expelled from Swiss territory. In light of his fame as a writer, his ill health, and the impossibility of expulsion (all Swiss borders had been sealed on account of the war), he was to be placed under house arrest. Silone would indeed get back to Davos, and he was to get medical attention. But his phone calls, correspondence, and visits would all be monitored and recorded by the Swiss police.