Death of a humble prophet
Ahern, John
ruzzi, and organizing demonstrations against the war. He attended the meeting at Livorno in 1921 when Gramsci and others founded the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Under Mussolini he edited...
...Some envied him the praises of William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Czeslaw Milosc, Graham Greene, Bertrand Russell, etc...
...W., and his secret political advisor, Professor Pickup, on a pre- election tour of Europe stop in Zurich to learn from Thomas the Cynic how modern dictatorships operate...
...Although other writers praised and admired him, he was never really a writer's writer...
...Rereading the book today one wonders how they failed to see that it was a two- edged sword...
...Even liberal intellectuals like the poet Eugenio Mon- tale, and fight-wing journalists like Indro Montanelli belittled and denigrated him...
...Silone grew up in this tradition and never forgot it...
...In Unitd the Communist literary critic Carlo Salinari said he was "impotent" as a man and as a writer...
...He refused that role to become, in his own words, "a spiritual factor...
...Religious concerns occupied Silone as he grew older...
...A LTHOUGH the socialist press claimed Silone after his death they proceeded with great caution...
...By hanging all on the truth, sincerity and actuality of his message, Silone violated a central tenet of the literary craft...
...His fidelity to socialism raised such serious questions about theirs that the sincerity of their debate on Leninism was called into question...
...wooden characters...
...He loved to repeat that socialism was a"faith" and not a "science...
...Someone in the State Department knew that Silone knew too much and was too outspoken to be a politically useful visitor...
...This explains the crack that Italians love to repeat: as a writer he was a great politician, and as a politician he was a great writer...
...When Silone had raised these ques- tions thirty years ago they drove him out of the party...
...But when the war broke out they obstructed the book's sales...
...For years the PSI courted the PCI so assiduously that it was difficult for a member to criticize Stalinist Communism...
...An American presidential candidate, Mr...
...The Ambassador to Italy, Clare Booth Luce, declared that no European writer, save Homer, had done so much for the American people...
...The American government also tried to exploit Silone, but found it necessary to keep him at a distance...
...What was it Commonweal: 683 in Silone that offended and frightened the Soviet and American governments, Catholics, Liberals, Communists, Socialists and Fascists...
...When Italian socialists sold out to the Communists after the war, he resigned again...
...He was a Christian Socialist long before he had heard of Marx or thought of leaving the church, and he remained one to the end of his life...
...From the early '30s Silone enjoyed enormous prestige among American intel- lectuais on the left...
...They can be engaged only on moral or religious teri'ain where the literary critic runs the risk of coming under judgment himself...
...They presented it correctly as a satirical attack on the dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin...
...But the central issue was his condemnation of Soviet Communism and Pal- miro Togliatti, who led the Italian Communist party after the war...
...What does it mean to give up a sign that no longer signifies...
...Furthermore, Silone was not technically a member of the Socialist party (PSI...
...When Stalin liquidated Trotsky (whose rigid dogmatism Silone loathed), he resigned from the Party...
...His fidelity to this tradition explains his awesome ability to foresee the future and_anticipate the movement of history...
...Americans still thought of themselves as saving the world for democracy...
...Driven out of Italy, he represented the PCI in Moscow and was present at the famous meeting of the Comintern where Stalin, with the connivance of Togliatti and others, expelled Trotsky from the Party...
...It almost seems as if the conditions that required Silone to adopt his isolated, prophetic stance no longer pertain...
...One can not help wondering whether there was not one single reason that explained the hostility of such divergent men...
...Silone had every qualification of the "committed" writer which Italian intellectuals admired so much after the war, yet they ignored and despised him...
...Silone observed that traditionally Italian writers have served as "ornaments" of their society...
...After the war they looked to the party as the natural leader of lay, or non-clerical, culture...
...When Fascists destroyed public and private liberty in Italy, he resisted, eventually going into exile...
...His isolation from the church was a message to the church...
...Events, however, proved him right...
...He had quit his job with Avanti after a year and had followed Pietro Nenni out of the party when he founded the Social Democrats (PSDI...
...At his death he was working on a novel called The Sufferings of Sister Speranza...
...When questioned, he defined himself as a Christian but not a Catholic...
...McCarthyism (which Silone had foreseen) made the visit of this useful anti-Communist socialist inopportune...
...The Story of a Humble Christian is the result of careful research into the murky history of the Spiritual Fran- ciscans of the Thirteenth Century...
...The tempta- tion should be resisted...
...When Sartre tried to justify the Soviets, Silone minced no words condemning that act of cowardice, thereby losing Sartre's friendship...
...On two occasions the government tried to use his works to gain support for its policies, particularly among intellectuals: both times they found him an uncomfort- able ally...
...S ILONE'S moral stature as a man makes him difficult to evaluate as a writer...
...The cost of Silone's freedom was high: twenty years of exile in the prime of his life, and once at home ostracism from his country's cultural and political life...
...One ingenuous com- mentator in Italy used the same phrase to describe Pope Paul's funeral and Pope John Paul's Inaugural Mass...
...After imagining all sorts of coups d'dtat and analyzing the subtleties of modern propaganda, the two men plan to return to the United States where they will "seize power" in a legal election...
...Tempo Presente, the journal he founded and edited so ably, was later revealed to be funded without his knowledge by the CIA...
...They found Silone's warnings preposterous and inopportune...
...It is hard now to understand why Silone, who had not visited the United States, should have made his would-be dictators Americans...
...His serene, carefully considered refusal of communion in the church was, like everything else in his life, a prophetic act for the benefit of the community at large...
...Silone scared others because he was a free man...
...When: the church demanded high standards of private behavior, while tolerating lower standards of public behavior, he left...
...Silone was more a prophet or a reformer than a pure writer...
...After the war he returned to Italy where he was one of the principal collaborators on the party's newspaper, Avanti...
...Catholic intellectuals either ignored him or described his books as subtle attacks on the church...
...Under Mussolini he edited socialist newspapers, both legal and il- legal...
...Avanti attacked Silone mercilessly, as did Unitd, the Communist paper...
...Resigning in protest (1930), he went into exile in Switzerland where he worked as an anti-Fascist, anti-Communist journalist, founding newspapers and acquir- ing an international reputation as one of socialism's most articulate spokesmen...
...He was a reader's writer...
...Some ex-Fascists recently converted to Communism envied him his personal integrity...
...His life and works brought to light the secret betrayals that daily life seems to exact frotn men and institutions...
...Many did not know his work which circulated in translation for ten years before it could be printed in Italy...
...Nevertheless the American government throughout the '50s continued to exploit him...
...It is strongest among poorer Italians, and is centered in the rural areas of Southern and Central Italy...
...stilted dialogue...
...One by one truly creative men like Elio Vittorini, Pasolini and Italo Caivino resigned the party...
...1 T WOULD be tempting to see the election of Pope John Paul, hisrenunciation of the tiara, his socialist forebears, his I startling simplicity of style as harbingers of the New Age of the Spirit which Celestine V longed for and died for...
...He had learned a radical devotion to the Gospel, an unshakable courage in speaking the truth at all costs that conferred on him a prophetic capacity unrelated to "scientific" analysis of his- torical conditions...
...Many Italians see the current socialist challenge to the Communists as a ploy to facilitate another coalition with the Christian Democrats...
...Togliatti lost no time in denying the independence of the "committed" intellectual...
...He refused to sacrifice a principle or a human life to save an institution...
...They accused him of not knowing Italy, of giving it a bad name, of writing poor Italian that for some quirk translated well, of artistic incompetence, of being in the hire of foreign governments, etc...
...No man had better credentials as an authentic, non- Communist socialist...
...In praising Silone's fidelity to socialism the PSI exposed its own infidelity...
...Critics could not help viewing his success with suspicion...
...His sober prose was at its best in his autobiographical writings...
...Certain weaknesses appear in all his works: poorly con-structed, melodramatic plots...
...Prophets refuse measurement by aesthetic yardsticks...
...No man had a livelier appreciation of what is genuine in the church, or was better informed about its teaching and history...
...When Russia invaded Hungary in 1956 he condemned both them and the Americans who failed to act...
...It would be a mistake, however, to classify Sitone with the strong anti-clerical and materialist tradition that has always existed in Italy...
...The book is full of unsettling bits of clairvoyance.~ When the ingenuous Professor Pickup asks how the country can be saved from the threat of Com- munism if no such threat exists, Thomas the Cynic tells him simply to invent one...
...He narrated his political odyssey in a famous essay, "Emergency Exit," that appeared in The God That Failed (1949...
...In the early '40s he directed the PSI's Foreign Center...
...In a country of many Catholics and few Christians sucha definition is not surprising...
...Not only Marxist critics saw such a definition as disqualifying him from serious consideration as a writer...
...Despite a certain originality of form in Fontamara (1933), where Marxist and peasant visions of the world are subtly married, Silone had no real interest in aesthetic problems...
...Silone the prophet is best understood within the difficult and at times invisible tradition of Catholic dissent in Italy, The failure of the Reformation in Italy, and the triumph of the Counter Reformation stifled the radical evangelical strain of Catholicism that begins with Joachim of Flora and Francis of Assisi, and includes Jacopone of Todi, Dante, Savonarola and Silone's beloved Celestine V. (The recent success of the Jehovah's Witnesses in Italy testifies to the vitality of this native apocalyptic Christianity...
...Both the British and American governments gave The School for Dictators wide publicity when it appeared in ~ 1939...
...Thus belated socialist praise of Silone was as suspect as their belated doubts about Leninism...
...It is well represented among tl~ lower clergy and Franciscan friars...
...Translated in over 27 languages, his books evoked a passionate response in Navajo Indians and urban intellectuals...
...Although he wrote carefully, revised much, and kept manuscripts for years before publishing them, he had little interest in language as such...
...Forty years ago the CIA, the Red Menace of the '50s, the Shah of Iran, General Pinochet, and the various assassinations all lay in the future...
...Its ffmst violent manifestation is the spontaneous rural uprising in the name of Justice and Love...
...His visa was not issued until 1963...
...The existence of this tradition is obscured by the all-too-evident institutional church which tries to redirect and defuse its explosive energy...
...At the height of the Cold War Silone's disenchanted account of his experiences as a Communist, "Emergency Exit," gave the Americans a handy stick from the Left with which to beat the Russians...
...Despite her unconditional support, the American government denied Silone's request for a visa...
...He turned increasingly to the study of Italy's religious past...
...Silone's life and work illustrate the social force of the renunciation of power...
...Catholics rediscovered his works...
...Yet nothing indicated that he ever regretted his break with the church half a century before...
...Many intellectuals learned to admire the leadership and moral courage of the PCI during the Resistance (1943-1946...
...The vindication of Silone's analysis only infuriated intellectu- als on all sides...
...He renewed contacts with the Jesuits who had educated him...
...He called them 27 October 1978:684...
...His life showed that fidelity to the truth and resistance to evil were possible, even though the consequences were terrifying...
...And in the late Pope's renunciation of power there is something unconvincing...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 21
