Communism, though little discussed now
and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable
straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a
great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy.
—Heinrich Heine, June 20, 1842
Ignazio Silone liked to say that every author writes different versions of
the one book singular to him. In his own case, this book was the
novel Fontamara, published inauspiciously in Switzerland in 1933.
At the time Silone was poor, in exile, solitary, and on top of
everything else suffering, as a result of consumption, from
chronic ill-health. A couple of years earlier, he had
broken with the Italian Communist party. He had been one of its
eight most senior leaders. Palmiro Togliatti, the party’s
secretary general and a subtle interpreter of Stalin’s every
whim, had himself come to Switzerland to warn Silone that only
someone of great strength could survive the break with the
party. Silone was one such; he persisted and went on to literary
fame.
Fontamara is a village in the Marsica region of the Abruzzi—not so far from
Rome—modelled closely, perhaps exactly, on Fucino where Silone himself had
been born in 1900, the child of a small landholder.
His real name was Secondino Tranquilli; Ignazio Silone was only
one of a number of pseudonyms he adopted in the course of
his
career. When he was fifteen, his whole family, with the exception of
his younger brother Romolo, was killed in an earthquake. In its
aftermath, he saw a relation stealing the wallet from the corpse
of one of the victims. Once coming out of church, he had been
present when a minor aristocrat set his dog on a seamstress. When
she took this man to court, the magistrate found against her and
made her pay costs. How was a human being to come to terms with
violence, great or small, natural or unnatural? Silone received a religious education and repaid it in his
fiction with more than one characterization of priests as humble
to the point of saintliness. His own idealistic and rather
priestly nature had its roots in the unhappiness, hardship, and
injustice in which he had grown up.
Soon after the First World War, the Italian socialists split, and the young Silone
joined the breakaway Communist faction almost at once. Quickly making a name
for himself, he was sent to work for the Comintern in Spain and Germany. In
1927 Mussolini’s secret police, the OVRA, virtually destroyed the party
organization, whereupon Silone went underground, adopting some
of his several pseudonyms. But that same year, he was present in
Moscow when Stalin rigged the vote to expel Trotsky from the
party as a prelude to the eventual exile and murder of this
rival. Silone refused to vote on the issue as instructed. By now,
he had learnt all he needed to know of both Communism and fascism
in action, and he was to spend the rest of his life defending
humane values against totalitarianism.
A writer of that generation could still use his background to conjure up a
whole world that would be true to itself and yet unfamiliar, as in the novels
of François Mauriac or Isaac Bashevis Singer. Fontamara is just such a
self-contained microcosm, with a prince as its absentee landlord, devious
lawyers, assorted busybodies, and
above all peasants or cafoni, men and women
who have no choice but to accept injustice and fate with as much wisdom and
humor as they can muster. Nothing much has ever changed in their lives, and
they are unaware of the political calamity about to strike. Mussolini is
nowhere mentioned in the novel, and the word “fascisti” appears only once by
my count. “Those men in black shirts” arrive by night, and in groups, “evil,
malicious, treacherous.” A series of brilliantly plotted events, complete
with trickery and misunderstanding, leads to confrontation and finally the
massacre of innocent villagers. “What are we to do?,” the survivors ask, in the
novel’s closing words.
Anti-fascist and pro-Communist fiction in the Thirties as a rule staked out
ideological positions and was therefore still-born, today ludicrous as
literature. Fontamara is free from propaganda; its drama is allowed to speak
for itself and therefore depicts a generalized struggle of good and evil.
That is its strength. At the time, it was not clear whether Mussolini would
align himself with the democracies or with Hitler. The left immediately
used Fontamara to recruit for the anti-fascist cause. Leon Trotsky and Karl
Radek were among its admirers. Graham Greene, whose own early novels were full of
“the usual left-wing scenery” as George Orwell put it, in a review
described Fontamara as “the most moving account of Fascist barbarity I
have yet read.” It was a great deal more than so reduced a schema implies.
During the war, in an act of black propaganda, the Allies flooded Italy with
reprints, incidentally sealing Silone’s reputation as Italy’s foremost
writer.
Building on this first novel, Silone wrote Bread and Wine
(1937) and The Seed Beneath the Snow (1941), comprising what is
known as The Abruzzo Trilogy, which has been newly reissued
by Vermont’s Steerforth Press.[1]
In the
trilogy, the character of Pietro Spina is evidently a projection of Silone
himself, a Communist on the run who disguises himself as a priest. He
believes himself to be organizing a revolution, but the villagers take him to
be a genuinely holy self-denying man of God. “Honor poverty and
friendship,” says Pietro in a sentence that amounts to the moral
of the trilogy, “and be proud.” But he also observes of himself,
troublingly, “I’m not one of those whose kingdom is of this
world.” In the manner of Gogol, new characters are constantly
popping up to hold the center of the stage for a moment, and
wonderfully lively they are too. To give just one example of the
idiosyncrasy and economy of his style, Silone describes an
old maid: “She had the mauve-green coloring of persons who can’t
stand flies.” But the trilogy seems slowly to lose its way in
diffusion and Silone’s own self-examination, sailing on like a
great liner unable to put into harbor.
As the Cold War set in, Silone began employing the phrase “ex” for former
Communists. In an essay in the famous and influential collection
The God That Failed (1949), he explained how Exes like himself had
originally hoped to redress social wrongs. Instead he had found
that in the Communist movement “a vocation for tyranny nestled
next to the desire for liberty.” The Soviet Union was “a system
of oppression and exploitation of a new kind.” He felt “an urgent
need to testify.” Silone participated in the Congress for Cultural
Freedom and was an editorial advisor for its Italian
publication, Tempo Presente. Like his contemporary Primo Levi, he seemed
to certify that it was possible to live through the ideologies
and horrors of the century and emerge as a human being through
force of will and love of the truth.
One of his friends, Iris Origo, herself a perceptive and high-minded writer,
wrote a biographical sketch of him, to which she gave the title “A Study in
Integrity.” His greatness, she thought, lay in his “persistent
pre-occupation with human suffering.” He was pale, slight—as though he did
not want to take up more space than was his due—
and evidently introspective.
When once I had lunch with him, all those years ago on a summer day in Rome,
I was struck that he kept the three buttons of his suit formally,
protectively, done up. “He carried within him wounds,” Iris Origo wrote,
“which he knew to be unhealable.”
Expiring in its final few incarnations, such as China, Cuba, or North Korea,
the experiment of Communism is set to pass into history for what it was, a
tide of oppression and murder so immense that nothing like it had ever before
happened, and nothing like it should ever happen again. There remain
intellectuals in the West, nonetheless, who argue that the evils of “really
existing” Communism in practice do nothing to vitiate the underlying dogma.
Not many in number, this is the last moment for such intellectuals to salvage
the mystique of Communism, and leave it loitering in the garret of history
for some future role.
The vilification and marginalization of anti-Communists is the
best means available to this end. Long ago, the climate of
opinion was put in place whereby anyone and everyone opposed to
Communism was beyond the pale. Whether far-fetched or trivial,
accusations were conjured up to pick off opponents and suppress
their dissent. Albert Camus, for instance, could be written off as a
reactionary when he failed to support the Moscow-backed Algerian
revolution because his mother was a pied noir still living in Algeria.
George Orwell and Arthur Koestler were labelled traitors to
humanity, no less, and party publications and meetings used to
call regularly for death sentences to be passed on them.
Defamation continues posthumously. At the suggestion of a
friend with connections to British intelligence, it has lately
been revealed, Orwell wrote out a list of Communist and
fellow-traveling intellectuals. Some might think that this was an
obligation at the onset of the Cold War, but left-wing
commentators at once trashed him as a police stooge. Koestler,
according to his latest biographer, was a serial rapist. By
definition, the opinions of such delinquents on any subject must
be permanently discredited.
And now it is the turn of Ignazio Silone. Two Italian academics, Dario
Biocca and Mauro Canali, in recent years have published a book and various
subsequent essays accusing him of being a fascist spy and denouncing Communists
to Mussolini’s secret police.
In the light of documents they have discovered
in the archives, they claim that Silone was a regular informant of a senior
OVRA official by the name of Guido Bellone. Under the pseudonym
Silvestri, he is accused of passing on details about other
clandestine Communists, their whereabouts and travel plans, over
a period starting in 1923 and perhaps even earlier. On April 13,
1930, while he was breaking with Communism, he wrote to Bellone
that he found himself “at a moment of truth,” when he had either
to abandon active politics or kill himself: “I cannot carry on
living ambiguously.” Also in the official files is a
correspondence from October 1937 in which Mussolini asks OVRA
for information compromising to Silone and his anti-fascist
novels. The OVRA reply states that at one moment in the past
Silone “seemed to have repented of his anti-fascist past and had
attempted a rapprochement with the Italian authorities.” Nothing
further developed, however, from this exchange.
In Italy, as elsewhere in continental Europe, the anti-fascist legacy is
exaggerated to serve as a buttress to national self-respect.
If Silone really were a police informer and not the honest
man he seemed so patently to be from his writings and his
conduct, then the anti-fascist legacy is compromised. Today’s
reconstructed fascists stand to gain from that, but so do the
Communists, reconstructed or not, for they can claim that Silone
was a fraud who forfeited all right to be taken seriously.
Throughout the media, gleeful extremists have used Biocca and
Canali’s work to stamp on his reputation. The controversy has
seemed factitious, not to say incredible. The doyen of Italian
journalists, Indro Montanelli, summed it up when he countered
that “even if Silone himself rose up from his tomb to tell me
these accusations were true, I would still not believe them.”
A new book, Processo a Silone, goes over all the evidence.[2]
Declared, even
militant, socialists in the Pietro Nenni tradition, the three authors,
Giuseppe Tamburrano, Gianna Granati, and Alfonso Isinelli, are out to refute
Biocca and Canali once and for all. The book’s preface immediately questions
whether Silone’s two critics have been displaying “the slap-dash reading
typical of journalists, or ‘ideological’ prejudice.” The tone is outright
polemical. At times, assertion is met with counter-assertion, leaving the
reader is something of a quandary. Nonetheless, there are some firm markers.
Silone did indeed have contact with Bellone, maybe even as early as 1919, at
the outset of his political commitment. In the book’s main
section, Tamburrano analyzes their rather shadowy relationship.
What, if anything, happened between them in the early 1920s
remains obscure. Here was a game, he observes, in which we cannot
be sure who was the cat, who the mouse. A quite different and
highly personal drama began when Silone’s brother Romolo was
arrested on a charge of having placed the bomb that exploded in
the Milan Trade Fair in April 1928, killing eighteen people. To
this day, the culprit and the motive remain unknown. Romolo was
judged innocent. But for the offense of going under a false
identity and possessing other papers thought to be compromising,
he was sentenced to a long term in prison. Probably not a formal
party member, Romolo seems to have romanticized Communism and the
example of his brother. Tortured in prison, he wrote to ask his
brother for help. Another consumptive, he was soon to die in
prison.
Out of a sense of responsibility and guilt, Silone sent a telegram to Bellone
to find out whether anything could be done for his brother.
Older than Silone, Bellone had started his police work before the
First World War and rose to be General Inspector of Public
Security in Rome, finally dying in 1948 as the inmate of an
lunatic asylum. Silone found him decent enough and told him so. But
Bellone saw the opportunity for blackmail. Something could be
done for Romolo if Silone were to furnish information about the
Communist party and its organization. Tamburrano concedes that in
the months between Romolo’s imprisonment and the final letter of
13 April 1930 Silone did pass “generic” information to Bellone,
in other words knowledge that was already widely available. The
proper response to Silone’s dealings with Bellone, Tamburrano
argues passionately, is pity for the plight into which Romolo had
got him, and admiration for the way he emerged unscathed.
In The Abruzzo Trilogy a character by the name of Murica is a Communist who
turns to denunciation of his comrades. Silone treats Murica with
understanding, which allows Biocca and Canali to infer that Silone was
writing about himself. “Proof” of that caliber quickly earns inverted commas
from Tamburrano. He also notes that police files contain many lists of
informers, and Silone’s name features on none of them. Is it likely that
Bellone ran Silone as his own agent without informing anyone else
in the OVRA hierarchy? But his best point derives from the
Mussolini request in 1937 for material with which to blacken
Silone as an anti-fascist, and the OVRA response that he had
once attempted a rapprochement with the authorities. By then,
Mussolini was sending arms to Franco in the Spanish Civil War,
and Italian Communists including Togliatti were active on the
Republican side. Had Bellone really extracted compromising
material, this was the moment to go public with it, demonstrating
that Communists could not be trusted. Nothing of the kind
happened. The OVRA reponse also explicitly stated that Silone
had approached the secret police “with the intention of helping
his brother.”
It is essential to Biocca and Canali’s case against Silone to establish that
he had an ongoing relationship with Bellone through the early Twenties, and
that the intervention on behalf of Romolo was not the response to a sudden
crisis but the calling-in of a favor due. To that end, they have published
quite a lengthy series of documents discovered in the police files, dated
between 1923 and 1927. These are all anonymous letters giving details about
the whereabouts of Communists and their proposed movements across frontiers.
A “T” crops up, and they assume that the initial stands for his
real name of Tranquilli.
In their view, the dates of the letters, and the
places where they were written, correspond to Silone’s movements,
and so damn him completely as a long-term informer.
This is all speculation, Tamburrano now replies, and it ought to be rejected
wholesale. These letters are incomplete, full of
gaps, and scribbled all
over so that they are hard to decipher. In their separate
contributions, in effect scholarly appendices, Gianna Granati
and Alfonso Isinelli examine the two critics’ interpretation of
these letters, one by one. It is easy to show that
Biocca and
Canale have made all manner of sloppy errors and that Silone
could have been be in the right city to write some of these
letters on some of the dates, but by no means all of them.
The case is not proven, as they say on doubtful occasions in Scottish courts, but
common sense suggests that Tamburrano and his colleagues are right, and
Silone deserves sympathy for helping his brother at a certain cost to
himself. Biocca and Canali make no allowance for the totalitarian context,
but strikingly and invariably place the ugliest possible interpretation on
everything to do with Silone. Whatever its source, their animus is
pointless. If beneath appearances, Silone was a real secret police informer,
then that would be only a comment on the hateful demands totalitarianism
makes on the individual—or to put it another way, some wounds to the human
soul go deep, too deep to be understood, let alone healable. Outwardly Silone
lived his life as an anti-fascist and an anti-Communist. The personal
example stands. The writing speaks for itself.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
The Abruzzo Trilogy, by Ignazio Silone, translated by Eric
Mosbacher; Steerforth Italia, 800 pages, $27.
Go back to the text.
Processo a Silone, by Giuseppe Tamburrano, Gianna Granati, and Alfonso
Isinelli; Piero Lacaita Editore, 161 pages, 20,000 lire.
Go back to the text.
