Though the origin of the ban would seem to be the fact that Mr. Labat is a Negro and Mrs. Johansson a white, the larger significance lies elsewhere. What is at stake is a fundamental issue of cultural freedom—the freedom of one individual to correspond with another. The recent history of the world has provided us with too many tragic examples of similar kinds of censorship—families cut off from families, prisoners held for years in a circle of total silence—to allow this symbolic event to go unchallenged. We firmly believe that any section of that area which thinks of itself as “the free world,” and particularly in the United States, where the present racial situation lends a somber overtone to the whole affair, such infringements can and must be looked into and corrected wherever and whenever they arise.
(Labat was eventually removed from death row and, in August 1966, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ordered him released, citing that his trial had been prejudged by an all-white jury.)
Silone’s influence could even be felt far from the literary circles. The journalist and critic Nello Ajello recounts how, on visiting a Navaho reservation in the United States, he was questioned about Silone. Evidently, the Italian writer’s works had struck a chord with those Native Americans.
Curiously, it was America that brought Silone to the defense of another leftist Italian intellectual, Pier Paolo Pasolini. When his 1966 essay “Altra America” appeared in Paese Sera, Pasolini was criticized by many leftists in Italy. Although Pasolini was very different from Silone, in the Communist, atheist, homosexual Pasolini Silone recognized a kindred anticonformist spirit. “To discover what is being born new and authentic in American society, Pasolini has had the courage to overcome the old European sociological schemata and to look around with a clear vision [occhio nudo]. The pacifist and nonviolent demonstrations in which he took part made a deep impression on him and left him with an irresistible feeling of fraternity. Those demonstrations were no flash in the pan but transformed those who participated in them.”
In June 1969, three years after his initial trip, Silone was back in America for the thirty-fourth annual PEN conference, where he continued a public battle on behalf of the Soviet writers Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel. Sinyavsky and Daniel had been arrested in the fall of 1965 and charged with “anti-Soviet activities.” Silone wrote a manifesto calling for their release, signed by Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Bo, E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, and Günter Grass, among others. The trial of February 1966 witnessed the extraordinary scene of the two writers declaring their innocence to no avail: They were sentenced to seven (Sinyavsky) and five (Daniel) years in Soviet labor camps. The verdict had been handed down by the Soviet Supreme Court: There could be no appeal.
Four months later in New York, as head of the Italian delegation of PEN, along with Ugo Stille, Paolo Milano, Piero Chiara, and Mauro Calamandrei, Silone charged his fellow writers with moral laziness and failure to speak out on behalf of the Soviet writers. He was particularly incensed with left-wing writers such as Pablo Neruda who refused to condemn the trial. Neruda responded: “I thought that the time of the Cold War was over, but here is an eminent colleague who has rudely awakened me from my dream.” After having traveled widely in Socialist countries, “which capitalists define as totalitarian,” Neruda continued, he found happy writers and unhappy writers. “But I must add,” he concluded, “the happiest writers I have found in the socialist countries.” Silone asked how a writer could be happy in a country where the state had absolute and arbitrary power, controlling every aspect of the lives of its citizens, which could decide what is beautiful and what is not, or what is true and what is false.
Silone always seemed to be fleeing something or someone. Guglielmo Petroni recalled a trip to Paris for a conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, during which Silone was feted by Gide, Faulkner, and others. When Petroni found himself seated in the audience next to a man known to have been a Fascist spy and in the company of the Rosselli brothers just before their assassination in June 1937, Silone, from the stage, was horrified and sent Petroni a hasty note: “Change your seat immediately.” Petroni recalled the incident with some amusement, but there remained a disturbing sense that Silone always felt tormented, “almost as though there were a shadow over his face.” He was used to behaving as “someone who is fleeing peril and must constantly watch over his shoulder.”
*Madonna santa, a rather odd term to use in a Communist publication.
SIX
COLD WAR CULTURE
The final struggle will be between Communists and ex-Communists . . . One cannot fight communism without having assimilated all the good it contains.
—SILONE, “Emergency Exit”
As early as 1942, Silone was contemplating his role and responsibility as a former Communist activist and intellectual in a postwar Europe. In “The Situation of the ‘Ex,’ ” he outlined a cultural and intellectual program for former members of the various Communist parties—men and women who had been expelled as heretics from the Marxist church. In a way, they could consider themselves fortunate. They had escaped the monstrous Moscow show trials and the labor camps of Siberia; they had avoided the fates of Voja Vujovic, founder of the Communist Youth Group in Yugoslavia (assassinated); Lazar Shatzkin, leader of the Russian Communist Youth Movement (suicide); Andrés Nin and Camillo Berneri (both assassinated by Stalin’s agents in Spain); or the general secretary of the Communist Youth International, Willi Münzenberg, whose hanging in a forest near Marseilles in 1940 appeared to be a suicide but was perhaps the work of Stalin’s secret police. Again, Silone compared the situation of the ex-Communist to the ex-monk. And the exes had “a painful duty to perform.” It would not be pleasant to admit “mistakes, stupidities, and moments of hysteria”; it would be agonizing to “relive those nightmare years, even in memory.” At a time when the Soviet Union was bearing the brunt of the Nazi assault on Western civilization, Silone would insist that the ex-Communists had to “bear witness.” They were “directly involved” and “could not remain silent.” They were “both martyrs and mercenaries, fighters for liberty as well as inquisitors, rebels, and police spies.” What were they to say to the world? “Simply the truth.” Truth was not the “scandalous revelations” devoured by the sensationalist press but “the tragic reality which lies behind the façade of Communism.”
On March 5, 1953, the world learned of Stalin’s death. By September, with the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev, the shock had still not worn off the PCI. By the end of 1953, the feared Lavrenty Beria, chief of the secret police, had been reported executed and the first signs of a thaw emerged. Stalin’s death released some party members from a trance; others, such as Togliatti, refused to countenance an anti-Stalin backlash. To Anita Galliussi, who had briefly been Togliatti’s secretary in Moscow, Silone gave this piece of ambiguous advice when she and Giulio Seniga left the party in the summer of 1954: “Friends, remember that a militant outside the party is like a foot outside a shoe: every kind of deformity is possible.”
A few weeks after Stalin’s death, Silone received an invitation from an obscure graduate student at Harvard University to write for Confluence, a journal of foreign affairs that carried essays from both liberal and conservative scholars such as Ralph Ellison, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., McGeorge Bundy, and Russell Kirk. The editor, Henry Kissinger, had come across “Emergency Exit” in The God That Failed and declared it “the only compassionate and human statement among a galaxy of technocrats and manipulative intellectuals.” Whether he was referring to Silone’s fellow contributors in that collection or a wider range of thinkers was not clear.
In February 1956 at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev made his infamous “secret” speech denouncing Stalin, his crimes, and the “cult of personality” that had developed around the former Soviet leader. A few months later, Soviet tanks crushed the rebellion in Hungary. Silone fired off essays at a fur
ious pace and traveled throughout Europe challenging leftist intellectuals to face the truth about the Soviet Union. He founded a new journal created to give voice to the Hungarian uprising, the Giornale Ungherese d’Italia, published in Italy, in Hungarian, by Hungarians.
In light of Khrushchev’s speech and the invasion of Hungary, the PCI sent Giancarlo Pajetta to answer questions from journalists and attempt some damage control at a news conference. Pajetta had been born in Turin in 1911, joined the PCI as a youth, spent eleven years in Fascist prisons, and been released upon the fall of Mussolini in July 1943. Leaving prison, he immediately joined the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi underground and participated in many military operations. At the news conference, the questions from the journalists were becoming pointed and difficult. Pajetta found himself in an embarrassing position, increasingly under hostile fire. Finally he lost his patience and erupted: “What do you want from us? After all, our comrade Silone denounced these things a long time ago!”
In March 1956, Silone was in Venice to welcome four writers from the Soviet Union who had been invited by the Société Européenne de Culture. The SEC had been formed in 1949 by Umberto Campagnola to foster a dialogue between Western and Soviet intellectuals. Silone was joined by Stephen Spender, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Soviets sent officials who had, among other things, persecuted Boris Pasternak and Andrey Sinyavsky, and refused to publish Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. Poland sent the writer Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz and Yugoslavia sent their ambassador to Paris, the essayist and poet Marko Ristić. Accompanying Spender, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, the West was represented by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth and the Italians by Guido Piovene, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Carlo Levi. The Soviet writers were “escorted” by a government official, in continuous contact with the Russian ambassador in Rome, who never left their side. Silone refused to play the part of the gracious host, and in his speech lamented the disappearance of the great Russian tradition of nonconformist literature. His most pointed question—why had the revelations of Khrushchev’s “secret” speech at the Twentieth Party Congress not been incorporated into Russian literature?—left the Soviet writers speechless. Thus began what was to be an “impossible dialogue” with Soviet writers, best reflected in Silone’s acrimonious exchange with Ivan Anissimov.
Deeply disappointed with the meager results of the Venice meeting, Silone and Maurice Nadeau, editorial director of the journal Lettres Nouvelles, organized a second encounter in July of that same year in Zurich. Joining Silone and Nadeau were Georges Bataille, then editor of Critique, Stephen Spender, Nicola Chiaromonte, and Jean-Paul Samson. But the Zurich meeting was as much a fiasco as the Venice encounter. While Silone approached the Soviet writers in a spirit of fraternity, seeking to hear from them what men and women liberated from terror had to teach the West, he was met with either bureaucratic pleasantries or stony silence. While Silone called for nonconformity, individual decisions, and safeguarding the rights of the intellect, he realized that the Soviet writers were still trapped in the intellectual nightmare fostered by Stalin’s “culture czar” Andrei Zhdanov, even though Zhdanov had been dead since 1948.
Before leaving Zurich on September 28, 1956, Silone drafted a series of questions for the Soviet writers, hoping that on their return home, temporarily freed from the censors, they might begin an honest and open exchange. Confessing that the West was often misinformed about circumstances in the Soviet bloc, Silone prefaced his questions with assurances that they contained no evil intentions and no ulterior motives and made himself available to answer any questions they might have about the West.
Silone’s first question: In light of the Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, when he denounced recent Russian literature as a “literature of dead souls” because of party directives, were cultural directives still emanating from the state? The second question asked whether there had been any literary or artistic works that had been cited as “abuse of the cult of personality and a violation of Socialist legality.” The third query was whether, in light of the “thaw,” it was now time for the Soviet public to become acquainted with works by independent Socialists from the West. Hinting at the recent dark history of the gulag system, Silone asked his counterparts if it was time for them to make available works by authors in the West who had direct experience of the “objective reality of the recent past.” He cited specifically the works of Alexander Weissberg (Hexensabbat), Józef Czapski (La terre inhumaine), Elinor Lipper (Eleven Years in Siberia), and Gustaw Herling (A World Apart). “If you are not familiar with these books,” Silone asked slyly, “would you like me to ask the publishers to send them to you?” Silone’s last question was whether the changes that had been applauded and embraced in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia had been equally accepted in Russia.
Silone had his first response not from Anissimov but from the Russian tanks that rolled into Hungary on November 4, 1956. Later that month, from the pages of Tempo Presente, he publicly added a question to the list: “What do you think of the massacre of Hungarian workers and intellectuals carried out by your army?” Anissimov took three months to reply to Silone’s provocation; his letters were reprinted in two issues of Tempo Presente. But as Silone made clear, the supposed “dialogue” between East and West was fundamentally flawed. A true dialogue demanded that the interlocutors were free in word and thought. Anissimov’s letters (the first dated January 5, 1957; the second, April 3) convinced Silone that they were not. “Under these circumstances, Mr. Anissimov, you are correct: Dialogue between us is not possible and would have no sense. Censorship demands you to play the role of a person feigning deafness.”
Anissimov and other Soviet writers shackled to the state were not the only targets of Silone’s pen. His speech at the March 1956 congress in Venice, “The Writer Against the State,” had Sartre (seated in the audience) in its sights as well. In arguing that “the writer belongs to society and not the state,” and that a resignation before unpleasant facts rendered both culture and intellectuals “a dead language, a sepulchre,” Silone had in mind the French writer’s defense of the Soviet Union and his recent attempt to explain away Khrushchev’s “secret” speech a month earlier. Sartre’s flaw, according to Silone, was caused by an “ideological hypertrophy” that forced him to reduce everything to “two irremediably opposed camps.” Sartre’s vision, therefore, violently distorted reality (fa violenza alla realtà) and was mistaken from any vantage point: political, economic, sociological, ideological. Sartre’s sectarianism, according to Silone, made him appear a “victim of the neophyte’s zeal.” Comparing the vast panorama of socialism to the development of Christianity, Silone argued that the movement simply could not be reduced to the Manichaean vision proposed by Sartre and others. Echoing what the heretical Rosselli had written in the 1920s, Silone insisted that socialism could not be equated with Marxism; “one can refute Marxism and accept socialism.” More critically, no raison d’état could be identified with man’s fate.
Sartre was dumbfounded by the critique, which would only intensify after the invasion of Hungary later in the year. With striking sarcasm and irony, Silone again besieged the French philosopher in L’Express and Tempo Presente: “Just as no well-raised child is permitted to contemplate the nudity of his mother, no good Western Communist is permitted to see Russia as it really is. Sartre, who is a libertine existentialist, is still not resigned to this, but for true Communists it is a rule that is beyond discussion. In the place of critical inquiry, they have for some time substituted the cult of a certain number of fetishes.”
Silone was convinced that Khrushchev’s speech revealed more than just Stalin’s past crimes. Stalin, in Silone’s interpretation of the unfolding events, was being recast as a scapegoat. The “Man of Steel” would be sacrificed to ensure the continuity of the Soviet system. But neither the condemnation of the “cult of personality” nor the “rehabilitation” of thousands liquidated as traitors and “enemi
es of the people” would resolve the fundamental political problem that lay at the base of the Soviet state. Abandoning the grosser forms of political and cultural oppression that Stalin had inaugurated and perfected in a so-called thaw was merely a palliative of little importance, even if such “reforms” were announced with great demagogic flair. The secretary-general of the Communist Party may change, he may surround himself with more collegial and less brutal followers, but this would in no way change the anachronistic character of the Russian dictatorship. Sooner or later, Silone predicted, “we will witness other episodes similar to Khrushchev’s speech while the underlying crisis remains.”
On December 7, 1956, Silone’s response to Sartre’s stance on the invasion of Hungary appeared as “The Lesson of Budapest” in the Parisian L’Express. Mocking the French writer’s stance as master of engagement, Silone satirically asked to whom Sartre felt committed after having criticized Khrushchev for revealing and condemning Stalin’s “cult of personality.” And Sartre was emblematic of a whole community of Western intellectuals who “preached the most absolute faith in Stalin and his dictatorship in the West. You have put at the service of Russian propaganda your prestige as writers, philosophers and dramatists.” Now these same intellectuals expressed shock at Russian tanks invading Hungary. But Silone would have none of it. “No one has deceived you; you deceived yourselves.” A rare figure such as the French writer Vercors had the honesty to confess: “It is not true that we knew nothing.” The worst tyranny, Silone commented bitterly, is one of words.
Bitter Spring Page 26
