Silone noted that Weil had discerned what had already been implied by Engels: the naturally oppressive nature of modern industrialization, no matter what class owned the means of production. Marx’s colleague had once written that above the gates of every factory there should be written “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Weil, less dramatically, had simply noted the humiliation and suffering endured by the workers, whether in capitalist or Soviet factories.
For Silone, Weil occupied an intellectual position in the West equal to Camus, Orwell, and Sartre. Weil was not so much a revelation as the discovery of “a spiritual itinerary” very similar to his own. Shortly after having read Attente de Dieu, he wrote an essay for the Swiss journal Témoins in which he argued that the crisis of the age was both moral and religious. Metaphysics and religious dogmas had lost all relevance and the spiritual drama of this unknown French Jewish intellectual was also “our own.” And while one cannot claim that Severina = Weil, nonetheless it is clear that the figure of the young initiate shares many of Weil’s traits. Darina, who pulled the novel together from Silone’s notes after his death, was clear: “If Silone had not encountered Weil’s thinking, I don’t believe he would have been able to create the character of Severina in that last desperate attempt to communicate his last message.” In order to complete the manuscript, she immersed herself in Weil’s work and biography to be able to better imagine Severina. Darina paid particular attention to those passages in Weil’s books marked by her husband. Among his notes for the novel, Darina found this: “The sense of life according to Severina: love truth.” It was this shared itinerary that pushed both to refuse all illusions and to embrace the moral duty of recognizing a painful and sorrowful reality without falling victim to inertia, skepticism, or nihilism. On the contrary: “It was precisely this love of truth, intimately joined to a love of justice, which forced Silone and Weil to act positively and courageously.”
Simone Weil had read Silone. Selma Weil, her mother, confirmed that her daughter had been profoundly affected by Bread and Wine. Silone had made a pilgrimage of sorts to Paris to visit Selma, whom he met with Boris Souvarine, Robert Schuman, and a young French scholar who was to write a biography of Weil, Simone Pétrement.
It was Pétrement’s two-volume biography of Weil, published in 1974, that may have planted the seed for Severina in his mind. After reading the biography, Silone wrote to a friend that “the two volumes have done wonders for me. Thanks to them I have begun again to write a little. And they have convinced me that there exists a communion of souls.”
In failing health, physically frail, conscious of losing some of his mental and creative powers, Silone retreated into painful memories and nostalgia. He was well aware of how memory could deceive and recalled a story about Tolstoy’s writing of War and Peace. It seems that when the Russian writer was composing his great novel, he heard of an old peasant who had witnessed Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. After much searching, he found the old fellow, who promptly told him that the French emperor was “as tall as a giant with a great white beard.” Tolstoy smiled, thanked the peasant, and returned to his writing.
Silone often thought of Pescina, Romolo, Switzerland. Just before he died, he spoke candidly about his brother: “The loss of my mother in the earthquake was a terrible pain, but it was caused by a natural calamity. The imprisonment and death of my brother have remained my personal torment, because they would not have happened if it weren’t for me. That’s why I rarely spoke of Romolo. It’s a type of pain that is difficult to communicate.”
Occasionally he would make a painful return to his hometown, traveling by train, often at night. Anyone who has made the trip by train can still recognize Silone’s description of 1965: “Through the glass I could see the countryside, preserved for many years like a presepio [crèche] in my memory, coming toward me: the stony little fields and the dark, bare, deserted mountains. I saw the little stations appear and disappear, their doors and windows bolted, their walls falling down. In the darkness I could tell the peasant origin of the men and women in the compartment by the bitter smell.” These brief returns to Abruzzo and Pescina tormented Silone with a biting sense of nostalgia and loss. “It is not easy to return to the place of one’s childhood as a grown man, if one’s thoughts have never broken away from it during one’s absence and if one has continued to live through imaginary events there. It can even be dangerous.” Typical were the obligatory receptions of ordinary citizens and public officials that were often waiting for him, causing him much anxiety. As a politician for a time in the early 1950s and a world-renowned writer, Silone was expected to embrace publicity and contribute to the bombastic rhetoric of these occasions. Instead, he felt “burdened with the saddest possible memories” and often fled or avoided the receptions altogether. The disappointed townspeople, he later learned, attributed his strange behavior to extreme political intransigence and a morbid misanthropy.
On his daily walk to Piazza Bologna to mail letters and visit the local newspaper kiosk, he was a rather pathetic figure. “When, as occasionally happened, I caught a glimpse of him on the streets of Rome,” the novelist Antonio Debenedetti told Michael P. McDonald, “the sense of solitude that clung to him was overpowering.” He was increasingly remote and brusque with Darina, often silent for days. After one such period he noted that “for me it is a good experience, not unpleasant,” and perhaps thinking of his beloved Celestine, “but it is too late to flee to the mountains.”
Early in 1973, Silone received another of the innumerable requests for an interview. As usual, he was torn between a desire to reach out to new readers and his natural hesitancy as well as physical infirmity. Unlike many other writers, Silone came to his craft rather late. “I was already thirty years old when I realized that writing books was for me the only possible activity in the conditions I had been reduced to. I found myself a political exile in Switzerland, completely isolated, without a real and true profession, and besides, with an intense internal burden that gave me no peace or rest.” The unforeseen and unforeseeable success of Fontamara made him a writer. Now, forty years after that first book appeared, Silone could discern a thread that tied the books together, even if he could not say that they all corresponded to a preordained plan. They have in common that which binds the children of the same mother, “even if they demonstrate external differences in height, coloring, or even intelligence. Every book of mine corresponds clearly to a necessity of mine . . . every book was an immensely tiring work and at the end of each I repeat what many mothers say after giving birth: ‘That’s it, I don’t want any more.’ But the laws of life prevail and others arrive.” Even though some critics had defined him by the environment of his books as a “southern” writer or a “peasant” writer, Silone insisted that the dominant theme of his work was elsewhere: the fate of Christianity in a society that was, essentially, insincere (in malafede). That which tied him to the poor was not their psychology, not their ideology, but the situation they occupied in society, the position to which they were bound, even after the so-called political revolutions of the last two centuries. For this reason “I think a writer must never place himself in the service of a state, nor an ideology, but must remain faithful to the humbled and the oppressed.”
He proudly claimed allegiance to no system of philosophy, no ideology, no orthodoxy. “I think that all ideological systems inherited from the last century are at present in crisis, as is the society that gave birth to them, which is not to say that they do not contain some partial truths.” All metaphysics had lost their “proofs.” Still, “I have remained a Socialist . . . Only socialism can create a true democracy.” His socialism was close to that of the anarchist Proudhon; his conception of “man” came from the popular Christian tradition of the Abruzzo.
In the foreword of the 1960 edition of Fontamara, Silone wrote that if it were in his “power to change the mercantile laws of literary society, I might well spend my life perpetually writing and rewriting the same story in th
e hope of at last understanding it and making it understood, just as in the Middle Ages there were monks who spent their whole lives painting and repainting the Savior’s face, always the same face, yet always different.”
His last years were, according to Darina Silone, “sad, agonizing, and cruelly unproductive.” He often thought about his past, but without taking Darina back with him in his thoughts. Once, they were visiting the Pieve di Corsignano, a twelfth-century church near Pienza where Pope Pius II had been baptized, with Iris Origo. “When we came out we saw on the rough grass besides the church a group of cold, scrubby seminarians who . . . were kicking a ball about. Silone stood still in silence, with his hands in his pockets. The sun went down, it grew colder and colder, and Darina suggested repeatedly that we would all like to go home. When at last we got Silone to the car, I said to him, ‘Were you looking at the sunset?’ ‘No,’ he replied, “I was watching my youth.’ ”
In one of Silone’s last public interviews, Gino De Sanctis found a man who “hid behind the allusion of a smile.” Seeking to read the author’s face, De Sanctis found a grave, almost sad visage, one “completely permeated by a doubting grimace” yet moved by “a hidden source of humor.” The answers to the questions he had asked in his novels and essays were still to be answered, still to be sought out. Ill and sensing his own end, Silone remarked that it was quite possible that when answers to those questions would be found, he might no longer be around to hear them. “But who knows; it might very well be that the questions themselves, instead, are the answers.” One thing was certain: At the advanced age of seventy-two, he was returning to the radical questions he had posed to himself at age fifteen, to a radical Christianity that had little or even nothing to do with the institutionalized Catholic church. His political commitment, his youthful militancy in the PCI, his encounters and dissension with Russian Communists, Fascist persecution, exile and the hatred of Communists, his literary fortune—all of these, he now realized, “were well-meaning distractions from those famous unanswerable questions.” With the passing of years and much suffering, he had arrived at a point of indulgence and an understanding of everyone; perhaps it was already a rapprochement with “love and death.”
At the Hour of Our Death
“I have no fear of dying,” Silone once confided to Darina, “only of not being conscious when the moment comes. It’s the last moment of life, the most solemn of all: I don’t want to miss it.” In October 1977, he was admitted to the Pio X clinic in Rome. Doctors there failed to properly diagnose the kidney disease that would eventually contribute to his death. In a letter to Mary McCarthy, Darina mentions the medical mistakes as “the grisly horrors of Rome.” Silone became increasingly difficult with his doctors and especially with Darina. Fifteen years of mistaken diagnosis culminated in a “fatal mistake” in October 1977, causing him much needless suffering. Darina had sought for years to take Silone to Geneva, but it was only in March 1978, when Silone himself realized that his doctors in Rome had abandoned hope, that he permitted Darina to make the necessary arrangements. Although Silone showed signs of improvement, abandoning the black cane given to him by their devoted Sardinian housekeeper and writing daily, Swiss doctors had told Darina that an operation was, by this time, too dangerous for the patient. In Geneva, Silone regained some measure of lucidity and productivity. On August 12, 1978, Darina even wrote McCarthy that he was regaining his health in “miraculous ways.” Yet in ten days he would be dead.
Darina had confessed to McCarthy that she intended to use Severina to keep Silone alive. More practically, she revealed that upon return from a trip to India just after Easter 1977, she finally discovered the full implications of their disastrous finances. Darina then made it a point over the next year and a half to protect Silone from any knowledge of their precarious situation. (McCarthy sent Darina some money—at least two checks were waiting for Darina when she arrived in Geneva.) “I have to consider his dignity and have not yet decided to beg for him from friends. I did discuss . . . the possibility of appealing to some zillionairish source but still can’t bring myself to do it. I am trying still to find a dignified solution.”
In an extraordinary seven-page handwritten letter after Silone’s death, Darina mysteriously confided to McCarthy that she had been suffering from a yearlong hand injury “acquired, let us say, in Silone’s service.” It was the writer, activist, and photographer Dorothy Norman who had first passed along to McCarthy that Ignazio and Darina Silone were in grave financial trouble.
Their financial situation was “indeed desperate,” as she confessed in a letter to McCarthy. McCarthy was instrumental in securing a grant of $5,000 from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, which arrived just after Silone died. (Upon the death of his wealthy father, the American poet James Merrill established a foundation to assist writers and artists.)
Kidney failure was causing irreparable damage to the arteries in Silone’s brain. Although he seemed to recover somewhat, Silone sensed the inevitable. “How many years lost,” he lamented to Darina. Now his thoughts turned, not for the first time, to the management of his archive and papers. So concerned was he about the future sistematizzazione of his written legacy, correspondence, and papers that he insisted that he and Darina travel on different planes for their many voyages.
From the Clinique Général in Geneva, Silone granted a final interview in July. When asked about Solzhenitsyn’s speech at Harvard University criticizing the West’s materialism, he replied, “I greatly admire Solzhenitsyn, even if I do not always agree with him. It is not true that spiritual strength today survives only in the East.” Shortly before his death, he was asked if he was nostalgic for his Abruzzo. He shrugged his shoulders. “My Abruzzo can be anywhere.” He did have several months of mental lucidity in Geneva and “his joy when he realized that he was retrieving his mental and creative faculties was unforgettable.” But the doctor told Darina that now there was no hope, the brain lesion was too deep. They could keep him alive artificially, but Darina knew that Silone would not want that. Upon reflection, she asked the doctor to keep him alive long enough so she could make arrangements. Writing to McCarthy, Darina described the scene: “He was writing up to the last moment—frantically, as if to finish what he was doing. It was a beautiful day but he was so intent on writing that he refused both his customary siesta and his walk in the garden.” Suddenly, around 6:30 p.m., “very calmly and slowly, he put down his pen and carefully lifted the writing table away from him.” Moving to an armchair, he sat down “and said very clearly and distinctly, in French—I don’t want to quote the exact words because I haven’t told them to anyone, I want to write about them one day—that everything was finished now, that he was dying. So he did have the moment of consciousness of death that he had always wanted.” In another version of this scene, Darina recounted how the personnel of the clinic had brought him his supper but not hers; he was concerned. While eating, he simply moved the table away from himself and made his way to an armchair and clearly and loudly said, “Maintenant c’est fini. Tout est fini. Je meurs.” Darina wrote that Silone died as he wished: “with dignity and conscious.” But he lingered almost four days. Darina, when she took his hand, felt that he seemed to respond; the doctors and nurses told her it was only a reflex. Silone opened his eyes only once, on hearing the doctor call his name several times. His heart finally gave out at 4:15 the morning of August 22, 1978. A dying patient’s final words in a foreign language, the doctor told Darina, was something he had never witnessed before. She, remembering an old promise, recited the Our Father at his deathbed. On the desk in the room lay the pages of his unfinished Severina.
Italian president Sandro Pertini, who had called from Rome a month earlier to ask about Silone, sent his condolences: “With Ignazio Silone’s death we have lost one of the most representative figures of the struggle for freedom, for democracy, for social justice; a noble, rigorous, inflexible democratic conscience of contemporary Italian culture. I express my great sorrow for thi
s loss that wounds the entire Nation.” Telegrams and condolences arrived from all over the world, from every corner of Italian political and cultural life, perhaps the most poignant from Aline Valangin and Francine Camus. But in truth, Silone had been as alone in death as he had been in life. As he explicitly requested, his body was cremated and the ashes brought to the cemetery of Pescina and placed in the family chapel. There was no religious ceremony, only the recitation of some passages of his work (as he specifically requested, without a microphone). A year later, a roughhewn tomb was crafted from the rocks of the mountain and his ashes were laid to rest overlooking the place he never really left.
In November 1978, three months after his death, Darina was still outraged that the incompetence of Silone’s Italian doctors had failed to spot uremia while the doctors in Geneva had diagnosed it on the first day of his stay at the Clinique Général de Florissant. Swiss friends paid the clinic and the funeral home. Darina returned to Rome, frantic about how to repay the debts that were piling up at a rapid rate. A royalty statement from Harper’s in New York, Silone’s American publisher, granted Darina the princely sum of 10¢ for the first half of 1978; another, from Stockholm, stated that Silone owed them money. Their insurance company refused to pay for the clinic’s medical bills on the grounds that Silone was dead. Silone had put all the first editions of his novels in storage in the garage; by the time Darina went to find them, they had been destroyed by dampness and mold. A year earlier, their apartment had been robbed (Darina suspected the portiere) and the few things she had of value had been stolen. Darina was worried about “people stealing even more of his things than have already been stolen.” She hated the apartment in Rome, “everything here is horrible and macabre.” Their beloved Sardinian housekeeper had died just four days before Darina had left Rome to join Silone in Geneva. Darina could not go to Pescina (an enmity had sprouted long ago between the Pescinese and Darina). “I am (with a few exceptions),” she lamented alone and frightened in their dark apartment, “experiencing the Italians at their worst.”
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