Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  Silone’s abiding interest in the role of the European intellectual fostered enduring relationships. For Czeslaw Milosz, “Silone and Camus feed our hope in human fraternity.” Silone recognized that Milosz’s The Seizure of Power was not about the struggle for power but rather the struggle for love.

  Perhaps nothing better expresses Silone’s stance regarding intellectuals than his differing relationships with Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. (It might not be too difficult to see the Sartre-Camus debate reflected in the Togliatti-Silone relationship.) Along with Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, Elio Vittorini, and other Italian writers, Silone had contributed to Sartre’s Les Temps modernes, but the French intellectual’s increasingly strident defense of Stalin in the early 1950s put an unbearable strain on their relationship. In the inevitable rupture between Sartre and Camus, Silone had no doubts on whose side he would find himself. In Camus, Silone saw a possible escape from contemporary nihilism. In his earlier works such as The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, Camus had posed the subject of suicide clearly and sympathetically. “Dying voluntarily,” Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, “implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.” The antidote to “this lonely sense of the absurd,” writes Silone, “is offered by compassion.” Just as Silone could not quit the Communist Party—although its policies disgusted him, it was composed of men and women of good faith and sincerity—so he would agree with Camus in The Rebel that although “the world in which we live disgusts me, I feel a solidarity with the men who suffer in it.”

  Their friendship was strained when Camus refused to denounce French tactics in the war with Algeria, but their relationship was such that when Camus went to Stockholm to accept the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, he said that the award should really have gone to Silone instead. Both from outside the traditional literary establishment, both physically from the periphery (Camus from Algeria, Silone from Pescina), both having suffered from tuberculosis, both sharing an awareness that nihilism was the virus left behind by totalitarian ideologies, even after their defeat: Camus and Silone felt a fraternal affinity that was shattered upon the French writer’s death in an automobile accident in 1960.

  Silone’s relationship with important Italian intellectuals was no less fraught with tension. When Pietro Nenni was named recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951, Silone urged Nenni to refuse (Pablo Picasso had been so honored a year earlier). Instead, Nenni traveled to Moscow to accept the award, only to return it in disgust after the events in Hungary in 1956 and donate the $25,000 to victims of Soviet repression. When asked about the possibility of spreading socialism through interventions like the Soviet Army in Hungary, Nenni replied bitterly that it was like burning down your house to fry an egg. Two years later, the prize (now renamed the Lenin Peace Prize after Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956) went to Danilo Dolci, the “Gandhi of Sicily.” Silone tried to persuade Dolci to decline, but Dolci too accepted and used the funds for his various projects in Sicily. Silone then sent the sociologist a scathing letter, pointing to Nenni’s gesture and concluding with an admonition: “In every spiritual vocation, the most dangerous temptation can be that of efficacy. Do you recall the speech made by the Grand Inquisitor? Do you not see what the Catholic church has been reduced to? The great difficulty is for us to remain faithful to our own intuition of what is good, without renouncing it to effectiveness.”

  Tempo Presente

  In April 1956, Silone embarked on a literary and cultural project that was to consume his time, energy, and intellectual vigor until 1968. In a letter of October 11, 1955, to Nicola Chiaromonte, Silone outlined his conception of a new type of journal that would serve as a “clearing” for an exchange of ideas and articles “and nothing more.” There was to be a critique of the current “infatuation” with former Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti (famously labeled by Salvemini as the ministro della mala vita) and the corresponding “infatuation” with Antonio Gramsci. “To describe our method or our ideal, I would avoid like the plague any mention of the words ‘liberal’ or ‘liberalism.’ They are terms that have, in Italy, a conventional historical meaning of which no one can strip them, and to use them with their original meaning or in the American sense today, we would create useless misunderstandings with our readers.” He and Chiaromonte were named editors of Tempo Presente, which was to accompany the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s other literary journals: Preuves in France, Encounter in England, Der Monat of Germany, Cuadernos in Spain and Latin America, and Forum in Austria. Mediating between the two writers, with their vastly different personalities, was the editor in chief, Vittorio Libera. Silone the novelist was primarily concerned with politics and social life, as reflected in his column “Agenda.” Chiaromonte, primarily an essayist, touched on more universal problems, less on contingent concerns. “They were different,” Gustaw Herling observed, “but they complemented each other.” Both could be taciturn, gloomy, closed off from colleagues and loved ones. Both found the writing process difficult. But when they finished an essay or put an issue to bed, they would emerge from the editorial offices content, relieved, as though a cloud had been lifted from above their heads. They might even have been described—briefly—as happy.

  Chiaromonte had been a colleague of Carlo Rosselli’s in Giustizia e Libertà. A 1932 Chiaromonte essay in Rosselli’s journal mapping out a “morphological affinity” among fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism caught Silone’s attention. A meeting with the Russian-born Andrea Caffi moved Chiaromonte to a libertarian critique of fascism and communism, influenced by the Russian anarchist Proudhon. Writing that “the essence of fascism is the negation of politics,” thus creating the “necessity to think outside of politics,” Chiaromonte’s position was similar to Silone’s. For Chiaromonte, a revolutionary elite would have to be not only professional and passionate but also skeptical, tolerant, and humane, and would be drawn from the bourgeoisie, the artisans, the peasants, and the proletariat. Equally intriguing for Silone was Chiaromonte’s equation “fascism = death.” Writing as “Sincero” in the Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà, Chiaromonte insisted that “la morte si chiama fascismo.” The progressive moral, social, and political degeneration of Europe since 1914 had culminated in a new form of politics; Europe was now reaping what it had sown. Chiaromonte was clear in his denunciation of the liberal state before fascism: Mussolini had simply replaced one form of “totalitarianism” with another, for the liberal state had fostered a conception of the nation-state as a “myth of salvation.”

  Chiaromonte had been struck by the power of Fontamara. Writing from his exile in Paris, he praised Silone’s sense of the reality of the peasants’ “universe” and told Silone that he could write a new I Malavoglia, Giovanni Verga’s 1881 realist saga of poor Sicilian fishermen (later made into the 1948 neorealist film La terra trema [The Earth Trembles] by Luchino Visconti). An example of both Silone’s biting humor and his accurate reading of peasant culture can be found in a 1929 memorandum he wrote to party officials. Remarking on the party lexicon, he noted: “Plenum in my town means a pregnant woman.” Hence, a party document titled Silvia:* Decimum Plenum of the Communist International would signify, for the peasants, “Silvia, the tenth woman impregnated by the Communist International.” Surely Silone would have agreed with Chiaromonte’s contention that “for us Italians, socialism began in the twelfth century with Joachim of Fiore and things have remained more or less at that point.”

  Silone and Chiaromonte had first met in Switzerland in 1934. They shared a pessimism regarding the isolation and demoralization of the anti-Fascist movement among both intellectuals and workers. One of the first to arrive in defense of the Spanish republic, Chiaromonte abandoned his pacifism and flew in what Enzo Bettiza dryly called “the antiquated flying coffins of the Malraux squadron.” The figure of Scali, the art
historian who reads Plato at the front in Malraux’s Man’s Hope, is based on Chiaromonte. During World War II he was just one step ahead of the German invasion of France, making his way to the United States via Toulouse and North Africa. By 1941, he was in New York, in the company of Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald and writing for The Nation, The New Republic, Partisan Review, and Politics. In postwar Italy, he, like Silone, found himself either unable or unwilling to participate in the modern mass political parties. A “libertarian stoic” (Peter Coleman), a “Renaissance man” (Leo Labedz), a “sulky son of the earth” (Enzo Bettiza), Chiaromonte refused to write of “the Masses” and “History,” instead focusing on the contingencies of history. In his essays on Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Pasternak, Chiaromonte argued that history was better understood through the imaginative fiction of writers than the systems of historians or philosophers. Chiaromonte was subtly slaying a sacred cow of leftist thinkers: the Hegelian concept of a rational History, comprehensible through a Marxist historicism. History, Chiaromonte wrote, proceeded not by following Hegelian dialectics but haphazardly, with false starts and unexpected stops, refusing to bend to human schemata.

  Chiaromonte befriended Malraux and flew in the latter’s air squadron during the Spanish Civil War but was not reticent in criticizing Malraux’s “cult of action” and obsession with force. Nor could Silone forget that Malraux, in his role as editorial director at the French publishing house Gallimard, had refused to publish Boris Souvarine’s critical survey of the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s legacy. The book, which Silone read and reread many times, was, according to Malraux, a good book, a great book, perhaps even a book of truth, yet it was not yet politically possible to publish it in France.

  Chiaromonte had met Camus in Algeria in 1941 and the two immediately became friends, bound by a common dark vision of the world. On Camus’s death two decades later, Chiaromonte penned a moving tribute to the French writer, focusing on the opposing drives of sweeping history and the seemingly powerless individual. As Chiaromonte saw, this did not necessarily lead to nihilism but to a possible “solution”: the rebel who resists in order to maintain his own clear conscience.

  Even before their collaboration on Tempo Presente, Silone and Chiaromonte had maintained an exchange of letters devoted to exploring themes and topics dear to them both. When Silone sent Chiaromonte the typeset manuscript of A Handful of Blackberries, Chiaromonte questioned the title (“I hope you find one more expressive, this one doesn’t express well enough the essential subject of the book”) and whether or not to include the story of Elinor Lipper. Lipper’s memoir of eleven years in Soviet concentration camps had struck a profound chord with Silone.

  In April 1956, the first issue of Tempo Presente appeared, with essays by Silone (“Ideologie e realtà sociale”) and Chiaromonte (“La situazione di massa e i valori nobili”) and contributions from Albert Camus, Alberto Moravia, Gustaw Herling, Leonardo Sciascia, Isaiah Berlin, Alexander Weissberg, Jean Daniel, and others. There was no acknowledgment of support from the CCF on the masthead of the journal.

  Silone’s commitment to supporting writers and artists was exemplified in his friendship with Gustaw Herling. Born in Kielce, Poland, in 1919, Herling had studied literature at Warsaw University and had read Silone’s Fontamara before the war. He joined the anti-Nazi Resistance in 1939, was sent to Soviet-occupied Lvov, was arrested by the NKVD in March 1940, and spent two years in the gulag system. That experience became the basis for his memoir, A World Apart, which described the inhuman gulag universe a decade before Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In 1942, he was released from the gulag and fought for General Wladyslaw Anders’s Polish Army in Italy, seeing combat at Monte Cassino. After the war, he remained in Italy, first in Rome, where he founded and edited the literary and cultural journal Kultura, then in Naples, where he married Croce’s daughter and lived until his death on July 4, 2000. Herling noted that after the war, the Polish government refused to grant permission to publish Silone’s works, “condemning him to nonexistence, like in Orwell’s 1984.”

  Herling, a great admirer of Italy, was not reticent in penning trenchant critiques of Italian culture. He often criticized Italian writers for being too concerned with style and literary flair to write works of moral and ethical weight. Silone, in his mind, was an exception. Although he found the Italian writer “taciturn and a bit surly,” they became friends. Herling made the trip from Naples to Rome once a month to collaborate with Silone and wrote for every issue of the journal’s twelve-year run. Herling found Silone a loner (un solitario) with the closed and serious temperament of an Abruzzese peasant who finds himself in cosmopolitan Rome. Chiaromonte marveled that the “taciturn” Abruzzese so easily confided in the Polish writer. Herling recalled an encounter with Silone when he was lamenting his fate as a Polish exile in Italy. “He looked at me with astonishment and said, ‘I too am an exile: in my own country.’ ”

  For Herling, Silone’s best work was The Secret of Luca. “He was truly,” Herling remarked in an interview late in life, “a man who did not speak much and who knew how to keep a secret.”

  In Rome at the Accademia di San Luca in November 1996 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Tempo Presente, Herling recalled his great emotion on arriving at the editorial offices of the journal in via Sistina, across the street from where Gogol wrote Dead Souls. In the afternoons, the editorial offices would come to life and everyone would contribute to the ongoing arguments, debates, and discussions. Herling recalled one afternoon’s work being interrupted by a visit from a captain of the Guarda della Finanza, Sergio Quinzio, timidly asking if he could contribute something to the journal. Silone invited the captain to submit an essay. Captain Quinzio had meditated much on Holy Scripture and wished to write about morality and religion. Eventually he retired from the Guarda and spent fourteen years living isolated in the Marche and writing about religion and theology. His first book, Diario profetico, was published (1958) just as his first essay in Tempo Presente appeared.

  Quinzio, like Herling, haunted the editorial offices for the next decade. Twelve years after Silone’s death, he confessed that “the man always remained a bit difficult to understand. Behind that disarming smile that was so characteristic of him, he remained in a sense a peasant, wary, not completely explicit. Certainly, there was in him an authentic Christian sensibility deluded by the institution [of the church], a delicateness, a profound perception of the human dimension.” But Quinzio also discerned a hardheaded practicality, a peasant-bred pragmatism. Later, in La speranza nell’Apocalisse, his last book, Quinzio dedicated the final chapter to Silone, critiquing Silone’s self-definition as a “Christian without a church, a Socialist without a party.” But in Quinzio’s tragic Christianity, in which he delineated a “defeat of God,” he was perhaps closer to Silone’s tragic humanism than he acknowledged.

  For Herling, the appearance of Quinzio in the editorial office of Tempo Presente was in no way atypical: No one and no idea was to be summarily dismissed, even if in military uniform. But Herling could not hide the bitterness of their experience with the journal. After the cold war, it was not uncommon, Herling said, to hear people from all over the political spectrum praising Tempo Presente as the most vivacious, stimulating, and independent journal. “But back then, in an atmosphere of intellectual conformity, of bad faith, of disinformation and moral torpor,” the journal was greeted with “hostility if not repulsion and gnashing of teeth, accompanied by the usual stupid label ‘a product of the cold war.’ ” For Herling, a refugee from Nazi Poland and the Soviet slave labor camps, the journal was “a natural port” and a “gift of fortune.”

  Herling was fully cognizant of his own image in the minds of most Italian intellectuals of the left. “I was just an eccentric, a strange personality who had got it into his head to play the exile, to flee from a country in the East that was making gigantic strides toward a radiant future.” Some considered him to be a Fascist; others t
hought him simply mad. In fact, in the late 1950s, the Communist newspaper Paese Sera advocated expelling Herling from Italy. It was only a fortuitous encounter with Chiaromonte and then Silone that allowed him to work and write in Italy. Everything was fodder for debate; in the editorial offices or the local bar where they might retire for a coffee, “there was no taboo.”

  Tempo Presente marked an important point in the culture of postwar Italy, but its birth was difficult and its life marked by intrigue as well as intellectual brilliance. Writing to Chiaromonte in the summer of 1956, after the first issues had appeared, Silone lamented, “It is, unfortunately, difficult to do anything without trickery or deception.” It was common for Italian Communists of the late 1950s and 1960s to solemnly swear that they “wouldn’t soil their hands” with the review only to discover, in conversation with them, that they had read every issue with great care.

  The first year of Tempo Presente’s publication presented the journal with the Hungarian crisis. Workers’ demonstrations in the summer were followed by outright insurrection in the fall. In late October and then again in early November, the Soviets intervened, the second time with tanks crushing demonstrations (and demonstrators) in the streets. Imre Nagy was arrested and brought to the USSR, where he was executed two years later. The Soviet invasion precipitated a crisis within the PCI with hundreds of intellectuals and thousands of rank-and-file members quitting the party.

  Nor was Tempo Presente averse to antagonizing the established national powers in Europe. In the fall of 1960, Silone and Chiaromonte published a “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination,” signed by 121 European intellectuals, regarding the civil war in Algeria. “The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes in a decisive manner to the end of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men.” Authorities refused to permit publication of the statement in France.