Bitter Spring

by Stanislao G. Pugliese

  When Boris Pasternak was forced to renounce his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, Silone responded by sending copies of Doctor Zhivago to all the branches of the AILC. Pasternak’s novel had been published by the left-wing publishing house Feltrinelli in Milan a year earlier, notwithstanding the pressure brought to bear by both the PCI and the Soviets. In the pages of Tempo Presente, Silone and Chiaromonte published verbatim the Union of Soviet Writers’ condemnation and expulsion of Pasternak. “It was,” Herling reported, “one of the most important moments of the journal.”

  But in 1966, rumors began circulating that the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journals were being funded by the CIA. For the next two years, Silone and Chiaromonte struggled to keep Tempo Presente alive, but it was an exhausting endeavor. From a CCF conference in Paris in the spring of 1967, Silone wrote to a friend that the rumors were again in the newspapers. “In the past we had always indignantly denied any such accusation. Now the executive director of the movement [Josselson] has confessed the truth: For several years the funds came from so-called foundations behind which was the notorious CIA.” There were renewed accusations that Silone had been a spy for the CIA. Silone once again became the focus of scandal, innuendo, rumor, and political vendetta. For those in power on both sides of the Atlantic, he was a dangerous character. While SIFAR (Italian military intelligence) had warned authorities in 1957 that Silone was an informant for the American embassy, responsible for “underground anti-Communist initiatives,” American intelligence thought him a subversive leftist. So rooted was this fear that the FBI asked no less than Ronald Reagan to spy on the supposed Italian spy!

  This was not Silone’s first inkling of the provenance of the funds coming from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Ebe Flamini, secretary of the Italian branch of the CCF, recounts that in 1959 she was pressured by the novelist John Clinton Hunt to publish material in the Italian association’s bulletin. “He came from America and I told him to his face what I thought of American policies and the CIA, which for me were equivalent to Soviet politics. Then I resigned.” Even earlier was an episode recounted by an assistant, Antonietta Leggeri: “One evening a very upset Silone told me of having received an offer of money from some American trade unions. Smashing a fist on to the table, he was furious and added: ‘Do you know who’s behind this? It’s the CIA!’ ”

  Silone was now trapped by his own past. During World War II he had indeed “collaborated” with the OSS, not as a spy but to offer advice and information to defeat fascism, rebuild Italy, and prevent a Communist victory. As director of the Centro Estero of the PSI in Zurich, he did indeed receive funds (from the OSS) that had been “laundered” through American trade unions. Although it may be hard to believe since it was the precursor of the CIA, at the time, the OSS was considered a “leftist” organization (“Oh, So Socialist” was the witticism among more conservative intelligence agents both in America and Britain). And it was the OSS that flew Silone and Modigliani to Italy in October 1944. Yet a careful reading of the hundreds of documents now available on Silone’s relationship with the OSS demonstrates quite clearly that he was no spy.

  There is no evidence that Silone knew that funds for Tempo Presente originating from the CIA were being laundered through the CCF. He may have suspected; he may even have entered into a Faustian bargain, preferring not to ask and not to know. When Silone finally inquired about the source of funds for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he was reassured by Sidney Hook: The money was from an American millionaire, Julius “Junky” Fleischmann. Ironically, the CIA was funding a journal that condemned many aspects of American society from McCarthyism to Jim Crow segregation to American intervention in Vietnam and South America. Even a cursory examination of the journal reveals its biting critique of American domestic and foreign policy. And although Darina claimed it was simply because he never applied for one, Silone, until 1963, had been denied a visa to visit the United States. Paradoxically, in Italy, Silone was an agent of the CIA; in America, a dangerous, subversive leftist.

  As it was, the journal was always short of funds, even with money coming in from the CCF, and so Silone and Chiaromonte closed the offices on via Sistina in 1968. Silone remained bitter the rest of his life over the demise of Tempo Presente. It had represented for him a way out, another “emergency exit” from the internecine struggles over culture and politics in postwar Europe. “Silone loved this journal like nothing else in the world,” recalled Giovanni Spadolini. Looking back, Silone and Chiaromonte could point with pride to the extraordinary galaxy of writers they had published: from the Calabrian Corrado Alvaro to Hannah Arendt; from Raymond Aron to Isaiah Berlin; Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges; Albert Camus and Danilo Dolci; François Fejto, Ennio Flaiano, and Carlo Levi; Czeslaw Miloscz and Elsa Morante; Alberto Moravia and Guido Piovene; Ferruccio Parri and Ernesto Rossi; Denis de Rougemont and Gaetano Salvemini; Leonardo Sciascia and Stephen Spender; Angelo Tasca and Giuseppe Ungaretti; Leo Valiani and Franco Venturi; Elio Vittorini and Tommaso Landolfi.

  Silone resigned from the CCF in 1967. As Darina Silone pointed out thirty-three years later, Silone had been an unwitting pawn in the cold war, a fact that threw him into an “incredulous despair,” perhaps recalling—without anyone else knowing, not even Darina—his past with Bellone. Silone “cannot be said to have had any relationship with the CIA at all,” she wrote, “because until the spring of 1967 he did not know that it was funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” (Repeated requests, through the Freedom of Information Act, to examine CIA records relating to Silone were politely answered with forty-one pages of previously released documents. Of this material, only one page, consisting of four paragraphs of 150 words and several errors, concerns Silone. The CIA “can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of further documents, based on section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949.)

  Although Tempo Presente had folded, Silone’s relationship with Chiaromonte had not. Silone’s continued ostracism from the lofty realms of the Italian literary establishment was noted by Chiaromonte, who discerned the real reason behind it: “Your problem as a writer is always a problem of simplicity and truth that completely isolates you from the world of the ‘letterati’: lucky you.” When asked to contribute an essay to a volume in honor of Silone, Chiaromonte elaborated on this theme of Silone as “a writer as isolated as he is eminent.” Silone’s distance from the established literary firmament meant that, with the passage of time, his originality was increasingly pronounced. In a literary age marked by artifice, ideological posturing, and an aggressive courting of the latest fad, Silone simply wished to be a writer of eternal truths, much like Chiaromonte’s beloved nineteenth-century Russian writers. Silone’s characteristic irony was inseparable from his concept of justice; it was also to inform his belief that the roots of socialism were to be found in Christianity. For Silone conceived of socialism as sharing the poverty, misery, and suffering of the peasants that led inevitably to not only their resignation but also their sarcasm and cynicism, as well as their eternal aspiration for a simple and concrete justice. Silone’s cafoni are neither romanticized nor forced to carry the burden of being the vessel of History. Their “truth” is rustic and inarticulate. That truth remains while all else is transitory, transient. That truth is based on necessity while the rest is ambiguous and arbitrary. It is a truth that is humble, not triumphant; from the outside it may seem “monotonous, stubborn, closed in on itself.” It is this search for that which is permanent that nourishes the roots of Silone’s religiosity and, in consequence, his socialism. Although Chiaromonte knew that Silone had described himself as hunted down by God, Chiaromonte sensed that the Abruzzese writer was “a Christian who seeks, not one who has found.” What exactly was he seeking? “The sense of that which, through the turbulent changes of our time, endures and is worthy of enduring.”

  Notwithstanding the Italian literary establishment’s silence and even scorn regarding Silone, it was not above using him for its own ends. Si
lone became president of the PEN Club in Italy (the futurist poet and literary provocateur Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had been president until Mussolini banned PEN in Italy). By nominating Silone, Italian writers and critics, many of whom had arrived at a comfortable arrangement with the Fascist regime, could ease their conscience and their way back into the postwar literary scene. Silone was above moral reproach, thus lending some much needed moral stature to Italy’s postwar cultural stance. Italian writers were eager to avoid the fate of their German counterparts. Even with their nomination of the morally impeccable Thomas Mann, the Germans were originally prevented from participating in PEN by the objections of French and Israeli writers.

  If Silone could ask impertinent questions of the Polish president and publicly chastise France’s greatest living philosopher, he could also place his considerable prestige at the service of those outside the realms of official power. One such person was Danilo Dolci. A writer from northern Trieste trained in sociology, Dolci had somehow got the outlandish notion of assisting the most miserable and downtrodden peasants and fishermen of Sicily. After he was arrested in February 1956, it soon became apparent that the judges were in no way willing to dismiss the trumped-up charges and that the authorities were preparing what would amount to a political trial. When Dolci was denied the provisional freedom on bail before trial, the public was outraged.

  Although Silone had retired from politics, he could not retire from cultural politics. He accepted a position as head of the jury of the Venice film festival of 1954. The festival exploded into an abrasive confrontation between the supporters of Federico Fellini’s stark and haunting La Strada and Luchino Visconti’s luscious Senso. In their Solomonic decision, the jury awarded the prize to Renato Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s not known how Silone voted.

  The independence of India and the French wars in Indochina and Algeria turned his attention to the problems of colonialism, racism, and Europe’s waning empires. Even before World War II had ended, Silone had called for the liberation of subject peoples and the dismantling of Europe’s colonial empires. “Colonialism,” he wrote to Rudolf Jakob Humm in 1957, “is a wretchedness [un’abbiezione] that every intellectual must condemn.” But he recognized that a Western (and particularly American) desire to dissolve colonial empires based on the idea that “free people produce and consume more” was to be replaced by a financial colonialism no less (and perhaps more) insidious. One of the thorniest problems of the era was precisely how to “assist the former colonial peoples in such a way as to not endanger their economic and political independence.” He was also willing to lend support to such figures as Diego Rivera in a campaign against nuclear war.

  He was often prepared to say things that others perhaps were not prepared to hear. He criticized French intellectuals for their support of the Algerian War. In Israel to accept the Jerusalem Prize for literature in 1969, he asked permission to speak on the current situation.

  We defend the right of Israel, but we are and intend to remain lay people [laicisti] and internationalists. The ethnic heterogeneity of the population of all countries is an irrefutable argument against national or confessional states that reduce the minority to second-class citizenship. We hope that certain aspects of domestic Israeli policy are provisional, due to the transitory necessity of defense. We have no hesitation in declaring the fundamental right of the Israeli people to a unified, national life, in peace and harmony with the men of other origins and faiths . . . The Hebrew people have had a destiny incomparable to any other . . . Israel has been formed through an organic bond of nation, tradition, and land and it would be blindness to deny it. Christianity is unfortunately guilty if this historic event has only come about with such tardiness . . . Fortunately, Catholicism has in recent years begun to become conscious of the fact, but perhaps some time is still needed before it arrives at a complete mea culpa without any mental restrictions.

  While not hesitating to criticize the Catholic church, he also felt a need to speak on behalf of those displaced by the creation of the new nation:

  Our meeting here is based on the relation of peoples and not of States. But a duty toward sincerity stronger than any caution induces me to speak to you of the Palestinian refugees. You know better than everyone else the most unhappy fate of the Arab refugees of this land, aggravated and pushed to the extreme limits of desperation by the political exploitation of nearby countries and the immense hypocrisy of the United Nations. Many of us hope that the Israeli people, who have known such bitter sorrow, will eventually propose an equitable and generous solution to this sad situation.

  More personally for Silone, in February 1954, he heard of the plight of the peasants in a small Sicilian town who were protesting the lack of water for their fields and homes. Mussomeli, an ancient town whose Arab origin is revealed in its name, was under the control of the local Mafia chieftain Calogero Vizzini. In a scene that could have been drafted directly from Fontamara, three women and a child were killed while protesting.

  As television was making inroads into Italian society and culture in the 1960s, Silone could not remain unconcerned. In 1961, he declined the political plum job of director of RAI, Italian state television, just as he had declined the offer to be Italian ambassador to France. (RAI would eventually be split into RAI 1 under the direction of the Christian Democrats, RAI 2 for the Socialists, and RAI 3 for the Communists; all three offered ample opportunities for political patronage and corruption.) Although RAI would go on to produce dramatic performances of some of Silone’s novels, he was not so cowed that he could not criticize the state monopoly or television in general. Two years earlier, when RAI had broadcast a special on Italian history in the twentieth century, Silone, as president of the AILC, had fired off a letter to the president of RAI, complaining of the depiction of the early years of the Fascist regime and its defining crisis, the assassination (in 1924) of the reform Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti. What most offended Silone and the AILC was the “a-critical and un-nuanced acceptance of traditional hagiography,” which the director had appropriated directly from Fascist propaganda, “using the same photographic and cinematographic documents and even the very same trite slogans” put into circulation by the regime to exalt Mussolini and the regime.

  When the people of Berlin woke up one morning in August 1961 to find their city cut in half by the wall, Chiaromonte and Silone published Willy Brandt’s anguished cry of protest in Tempo Presente. Joined by Raymond Aron, Denis de Rougemont, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen Spender, and others, Brandt’s appeal, based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, was published in the bulletin of the AILC. A society that forced millions of its citizens to flee elsewhere, that prevented people from fleeing, that blocked flight with barbed wire and concrete walls, bayonets and rifles, treating its people “as though slaves fleeing from prison,” was surely a failed society.

  Equally fatal to the Soviet system was its lack of irony. Speaking with Alexandra Kollontai, the former people’s commissar for social welfare and Soviet ambassador to Norway (and thus the first female ambassador in the world), in Moscow in 1922, Silone noted that she had “acquired her sense of irony in the West, and she used it only in conversation with Westerners.” Kollontai was a fierce internal critic of the Bolsheviks and challenged socialism’s continuing patriarchal oppression of women, but her critique was effectively muted, first by Lenin, then by Stalin.

  More tragic was the case of Lazar Shatzkin, leader of the Russian Communist Youth Federation. Silone met him in Moscow in the early 1920s and described him as one of his best friends. One day they were walking together in Red Square and came across Lenin’s tomb (still a wooden structure at the time). The Italian was touched by the young Russian’s lament that he had been born too late to participate in the revolutions of 1905 or 1917. Silone sought to console his friend by assuring him that “there will be other revolutions . . . There’ll always be need of revolutions.” The Russian inquired—whether with skepticism or hope i
s difficult to determine—“What kind of revolutions, and when can we expect them?” Silone pointed to Lenin’s tomb, which attracted long, interminable processions of poor peasants every day: “You must admit that this superstitious cult of his mummified body is an offense to his memory and a disgrace to a revolutionary city like Moscow.” Silone facetiously proposed a little revolution of their own with some gasoline and a bonfire of Lenin’s tomb. Shatzkin was horrified and, trembling with fear, begged his friend not to repeat the suggestion to him or anyone else. Togliatti had once suggested—and Silone agreed—that in judging a regime it is very important to know what it finds amusing. Ten years after their encounter by Lenin’s tomb, hounded by Stalin’s police in the Great Purge, Shatzkin committed suicide.

  Even during World War II, Silone was already challenging one of the myths of the cold war: that in countries where all the means of expression were monopolized by the state, men and women could no longer think freely and courageously. “The truth,” he claimed paradoxically, “was the contrary.” The most burning thoughts of freedom arrived from the countries in which there was no longer any freedom. The human mind would not permit itself to “be transformed into a machine. Liberty and human dignity are concepts that will never perish.” In Bread and Wine, Silone—through Pietro Spina—had argued:

  One can be free even under a dictatorship on one simple condition, that is, if one struggles against it. A man who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is a free man. A man who struggles for what he believes to be right is a free man. You can live in the most democratic country in the world, but if you are lazy, callous, servile, you are not free, in spite of the absence of violence and coercion, you are a slave. Freedom is not a thing that must be begged from others. You take it for yourself, whatever share you can.