Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  The search for truth could not be subordinated to the interest of class, party, or state. Silone mocked Sartre for his facile teleology: A true writer, Sartre argued, can identify only with progress; progress, in the modern age, is identified only with the working class; the working class, in turn, is identified with the Communist Party; the Communist Party is identified with the Soviet Union, which is identified with History. Hence the intellectual who is “against” any of these entities is against History. “The true revolutionary spirit,” Silone contended, “prefers to seek differences, not identities.” And in a devastating image he pointed out their “cruel awakening”: These intellectuals “thought they were marching with the youth of the world, in the vanguard of History, while actually they were nothing but flies decorating a hearse.”

  Sartre was not the only leftist intellectual singled out for criticism. It had now been seven years since Silone’s “Emergency Exit” had first appeared, and he did not let pass an opportunity to revisit Togliatti on the page. Togliatti had “known the temptations of heresy” but had forsaken them for “the necessities of his career.” One of the few from the interwar period to have survived Stalin’s purges, Togliatti had revealed a propensity for being “cynical, pitiless, and cruel, especially against intellectuals who do not allow themselves to be tamed.” And while Silone could admire Antonio Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis” as a “philosophy of human activity which leaves many doors open,” he was to challenge the “special cult” that had developed around the sainted and martyred Sardinian. Although the authorities in Moscow had discerned “serious heresies” in Gramsci, the wily Togliatti had managed to wrestle a special dispensation for Gramsci’s thought (but only in Italy).

  Still, after all the crimes, after all the false steps, after all the bitter disillusionments—from the purge trials of 1936, to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, to the present crisis in Hungary—Silone refused to see these events as evidence that the left was morally bankrupt. He insisted that there were men and women of good faith in the ranks of communism. A “new era” had dawned in the Communist world and it began not with Khrushchev’s speech but with a little-known strike by the slave laborers in the gulag camps at Vorkuta. There, in 1937, Stalin exterminated the last of the Trotskyist opposition. Three years before the Soviet invasion of Hungary, inmates staged a massive uprising. The cracks in the system were there for all to see: “The Russians we have always loved,” Silone cheered, “are beginning to awaken: the grandsons of Herzen, Tolstoy, Bakunin, and Vera Figner; the students who distribute forbidden books according to the noble tradition of underground activity; the farmers who hide and feed those who have escaped from detention and exile.” But Russia was only a symptom. There were no longer “geographic frontiers of peace, liberty, and truth. These frontiers are within every country and within every one of us.” The lesson of Budapest, Silone concluded, was to learn the truth from the people, “even hidden truths, and make ours known to them.”

  The Fox and the Camelias appeared in May 1960, dedicated to Marcel Fleischmann, and is often considered one of Silone’s “minor” works; even his publisher, Alberto Mondadori, thought so and registered his disappointment with its author. But The Fox and the Camelias is now read by some as part of Silone’s “confession” regarding his relationship with Bellone. The story takes place in the Ticino Canton of Switzerland, the only novel that unfolds outside of Abruzzo. There, Daniele, a Socialist, is the son of an Italian expatriate who has returned to his father’s farm. Daniele is involved in the anti-Fascist underground, and his assistant on the farm, Agostino, is an exiled anti-Fascist. Daniele would like his elder daughter, Silvia, to marry Agostino, but the girl is enamored of a young man who is taken into the house after an automobile accident. This “victim,” named Cefalù (like the city in Sicily), turns out to be a Fascist spy. On entering Daniele’s studio, Cefalù realizes the father is an anti-Fascist and flees. Daniele and Agostino are torn by the need to protect others in the underground and their desire not to wound the love-struck Silvia. Days of intense anxiety are resolved when it is discovered that Cefalù has committed suicide. This gives consolation to both father and daughter that the man chose suicide rather than betray the father of the girl he loved. The ambiguous depiction of Cefalù, who carries out a selfless and even noble gesture, confused many readers. But just as Silone could never be a virulent, hate-filled anti-Communist, so too he could see the humanity on the “other” side. In an interview with the journal Encounter (the English counterpart to Tempo Presente), Silone said that “when I look at a fascist I naturally view him as a human being.” In the wake of the spying scandal, some have suggested that just as Silone painted a self-portrait as police spy in Luigi Murica, he confessed to his role in the character of Cefalù. In truth, Silone saw himself more in the character of the mild-mannered Christian-Socialist carpenter Franz, nicknamed “Agnus Dei,” based on the Swiss theologian and proponent of Christian Socialism, Leonhard Ragaz.

  On August 21, 1963, while most Italians were enjoying their traditional summer vacation at the beach or in the mountains, Palmiro Togliatti died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Yalta. (He too was on vacation with his companion, Nilde Iotti.) The wily Togliatti had managed to survive four decades as leader of the PCI, making it the largest communist party in Western Europe. Although at times he had been more conservative than the party base (he had chartered a postwar alliance with conservative political allies and argued successfully for the inclusion of the Lateran Accords into the new Italian constitution), his death was met with an extraordinary deluge of praise. Silone could not remain silent. In Tempo Presente, he criticized what he called the “laudatori funebri” for going beyond the prescribed norms of praising the dead. Silone argued that a figure like Togliatti had no need of party propaganda to claim a place in history. Togliatti had tried, without success but with apparent sincerity, to keep Silone in the PCI in 1931. For that Silone was grateful, and no matter how vitriolic their differences later, he never thought of Togliatti as a personal enemy, just as he did not conceive of Mussolini as a personal enemy. But it was necessary to combat the “irrepressible mythmaking impulse” of the party apparatus. (Ironically, Silone himself was to be a beneficiary of a smaller but no less devout impulse after his own death.) In pointing out the obscenity of the operation, including the recounting of a fictional episode where Togliatti supposedly escaped death during the Fascist “March on Rome” in October 1922—an episode that Togliatti had once confessed to Silone was made up out of whole cloth but necessary to maintain the heroic image of Communist resistance to fascism—Silone did not intend to denigrate the memory of his old comrade but to unveil the mechanisms that permit a political party to bring about the apotheosis of a human being.

  The death of Togliatti and the naming of Luigi Longo as the new secretary of the PCI led some to believe that a new era was arriving for the party. Silone dissented. Hopes for a different sort of party were “unjustified illusions” because the PCI was a fragile colossus. “The reform of communism,” he solemnly wrote two years later, “will not take place.” Even the evolution of Eurocommunism in the 1970s was not enough to overcome Silone’s skepticism on the ultimate fate of the movement. On reading a history of the Italian Communist Party by its official historian, Paolo Spriano, he felt a sense of “self-alienation.”

  Emergency Exit

  In 1965, Silone published a collection of autobiographical essays, using the 1949 “Emergency Exit” as anchor and title. As with Fontamara and Bread and Wine, it thrust the author back into the cultural and political arena. His publisher, Mondadori, refused to take on the book; instead, it was published by Vallecchi in Florence. For the thirty-sixth edition of the Premio Viareggio, one of Italy’s most prestigious literary awards, Emergency Exit was excluded from consideration, thereby igniting yet another caso Silone. The exclusion had been paved by negative reviews by Communist literary critics such as Luigi Russo and Carlo Salinari. An anonymous j’accuse appeared in
one of the country’s leading literary journals denouncing the trading of votes that was common on literary juries and calling Silone the bête noire of the Viareggio. The writer troubled the conscience of all those who, “degrading the toga of the impartial judge, annually maneuver within the Viareggio panel to affirm, without any concern about the means, Marxist supremacy in the field of culture.”

  Today recognized as one of the most important memoirs of the twentieth century, the book acted as a catalyst for a reexamination of the caso Silone. The regret of many Italian intellectuals was that they came around to the book and its author so late. Carlo Bo attempted a “rehabilitation” of the writer and began the process of auto-critique on behalf of left-wing literary critics when he pointed out that the vast gulf between Silone’s reputation abroad and his slights at home depended on Italian leftist critics who were not able or not willing to appreciate a “writing that did not hide its moral roots.” The most clamorous change of opinion was voiced by the dean of Italian journalism, Indro Montanelli, in the pages of the nation’s most influential daily newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera. Montanelli had been a devoted Fascist, serving in the Ethiopian War. He was the first to offer an outright confession that he had misread and misinterpreted Silone for three decades. When Silone was in exile, Montanelli thought him to be a “professional anti-Fascist,” having found in others’ aversion to the regime “a comfortable shortcut to success” with books denouncing fascism. Montanelli had thought Silone disagreeable (antipatico), but it was only now that the Italian journalist realized it was because of his own mistakes and not those of the writer. “He was not the character I had imagined,” Montanelli conceded; “in fact, he represented the flagrant contradiction.” As a human document, Montanelli wrote of Emergency Exit, he knew of none other that was as noble and passionate. “A Dominican [severe] with himself, Silone is a Franciscan [compassionate] with others and therefore resistant to involve others in his own self-critique. There are no recriminations or accusations. There is one accused: Silone; one judge: his own conscience.”

  Giancarlo Vigorelli wrote that certain passages of Emergency Exit cried out like pages from Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. For Vigorelli, the publication of the book would put an end to Silone’s “second exile”—this one in Italy.

  Christian Democratic literary critic (and later senator for life) Carlo Bo also penned a mea culpa after the publication of Emergency Exit. Bo returned to the book after the scandal of the book’s neglect by the Viareggio jury. In a bitter essay, “Hanno avuto paura” (They Were Afraid), he offered an insight into the mentality of the Italian literary establishment and the larger society. Silone had been excluded from the Viareggio just as he had been excluded from “our concerns and our daily reflections because his case disturbs us but above all because to confront him would require another commitment and would end by colliding with our entire intellectual and spiritual framework.” Better, then, to leave him aside, ignore him, or at most offer him some minimal honor and continue to treat him as a “secret guest” (un ospite segreto).

  The jury for the Marzotto Prize in its official announcement stated: “We know of no other work today where sorrow and poverty have spoken a more powerful and sincere language than in these pages.” In his acceptance speech, Silone could not resist unleashing his stinging irony. Referring to the “by-now boring question” of why his works were so appreciated abroad but neglected in Italy, Silone slyly reminded his audience, “My books were not publishable in Italy, because—I don’t know if everyone remembers—back then there was fascism and my books were not exactly benevolent toward it.” He then addressed the theory that his books were popular abroad because they were published with the help of foreign governments hostile to Italy. “That would be an offense against the truth. The truth is the opposite . . . I have been expelled from every European country in which I lived, including Switzerland, where I was permitted to remain (for some time interned) only because there was no other country that was disposed to accept me.”

  When the book was translated into English by Harper & Row in 1968, it generated considerable comment and praise. Bertrand Russell was typical. When asked to identify his favorite Italian authors and artists, Russell rounded up the usual suspects: Dante, Petrarch, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, Leopardi, but he concluded: “Among living writers I very much admire Silone.” In December 1968, Irving Howe wrote that if given one thousand anonymous books and only one of Silone’s, he would be able immediately to pick it out. “His every word seems to have a special quality, a stamp of fraternal but undeluded humaneness.” To Howe, it was truly a mystery that literary criticism “with all its solemnity, had not been able to understand Silone.” And in comparing Silone with Orwell, and acknowledging the latter’s superiority as an essayist, he held that Silone was the better novelist.

  The question must be asked why it was only with Emergency Exit in 1965 that Silone finally was accorded the kind of critical recognition in Italy that he had enjoyed abroad. Perhaps it was Silone’s autobiographical account of his personal purgatory through class betrayal, abandoning the church, membership in the party, and his eventual expulsion that shamed Italian intellectuals.

  The novelist and critic Luce d’Eramo discerned three broad periods of Silonian criticism: The first, from 1945 until about 1950, was marked by silence; the second, from around late 1949 until 1965, was when the caso Silone was first posed; the third, which she called the “recognition phase,” unfolded with the 1965 publication of Emergency Exit. While the Communists struggled with Silone, Catholic critics, before the Second Vatican Council, often considered his writing bordering on “Protestant” and failed to engage him. Silone’s books acted like the proverbial grain of sand in the eyes of Italian critics who were often forced to reconsider their initial critical stances on Silone, so much so that in the end, they oftentimes placed into discussion the very act of reading itself. There was a tendency to place Silone’s oeuvre in the context of “exile literature,” and, the exile being over, their concern with his writings was subsequently therefore to cease. Alfred Kazin remarked in his “Italian Journal” from Rome on September 3, 1947, that “it is almost impossible to find one of Silone’s books . . . In Italy, Silone is considered a bad writer, more a politician than a writer.” For Kazin, this was because of “Silone’s love of the people which cannot be appreciated by the Italians.”

  As early as 1945, the American critic Edmund Wilson had paired Silone with Malraux. The Catholic writer Michael Harrington also placed Silone with Malraux and Koestler in a 1955 essay correct in seeing Joachim of Fiore as a main inspiration but perhaps less convincing when he writes that Silone was the “Robert Frost of the Abruzzi.”

  On Intellectuals

  If Silone was severe in his moral judgment of his fellow politicians, he was no less critical of his fellow writers and intellectuals. As president of the Italian section of the PEN Club, his speech at the International PEN Congress in Basel in 1947 echoed across Europe and deep into the Soviet Union and was subsequently published as “Sulla dignitá dell’intelligenza e l’indegnità degli intellettuali” (On the dignity of intelligence and the unworthiness of intellectuals).

  When asked to explain his concept of “intellectual” in the Parisian magazine L’Express, Silone offered a Gramscian definition: “all those who contribute to the formation of a critical consciousness within their era.” Perhaps thinking of Sartre and others in Italy and Germany, Silone took intellectuals to task for conceiving of themselves as an elect caste entrusted with a guiding role in History. For Silone, being an intellectual was a function and a personal vocation, not the imposition of an ideology or doctrine.

  He was, as pointed out by several biographers, “un intellettuale scomodo,” a troublesome intellectual. He has even been compared to a modern Don Quixote astride a sharp and stinging pen. This trait was recognized by Giovanni Spadolini, historian and professor of history at the University of Florence between 1950 and 1970. The Fl
orentine Spadolini, twenty-five years Silone’s junior, was editor of Bologna’s daily newspaper Il Resto del Carlino (1955–68) almost exactly coterminous with Silone’s editorship of Tempo Presente. In 1962, after years of prodding and pleading by Spadolini, Silone finally agreed to collaborate and write for Il Resto del Carlino. This would give him a venue different from the novels or Tempo Presente. In fact, as Spadolini confessed years later, the only way he could get Silone to write for a “bourgeois” daily was to pay him enough so that he could keep Tempo Presente afloat.

  On September 11, 1949, Silone delivered the opening speech to more than five hundred distinguished writers at the PEN Club in Venice. With W. H. Auden, John Dos Passos, Stephen Spender, and Julien Benda in the audience, he argued for the privileged role of the writer in contemporary society but warned that it was not enough that writers not submit to the power of the state, not succumb to being mere vassals of those in power. Recognizing the temptations of totalitarianism, he charged that writers and intellectuals had a moral obligation to resist the corruption of mass media and communications.

  An incidental item in a newspaper caught Silone’s eye in the spring of 1950. Fifty-two anti-Communist Russian refugees who were being held in the Fraschette displaced persons’ camp fifty miles southeast of Rome had gone on a hunger strike to protest their imminent repatriation to the Soviet Union. The hunger strikers were protesting the “pressure of the Soviet authorities” who had gone to the DP camp trying to “persuade” them to return to the Soviet Union. The strikers claimed that the official Soviet repatriation mission in Rome was making daily visits to the camp and trying to indoctrinate them with communism. The refugees were the pathetic remnants of eighty-three Russians whom Italian authorities had seized at the end of World War II. Soviet authorities were demanding their repatriation as “war criminals,” and evidently the refugees had some idea of the executions that were then taking place in the USSR. A Roman tribunal examined their cases individually and “acquitted” them.