Silone and the Radical Conscience

...SIMPLY AS A NOVEL, A Handful of Blackberries has large, obvious faults: it reads more like a scenario than a realized work, it is occasionally flabby in structure and scratchy in style, it betrays a tone of great weariness, (but from that weariness also comes a kind of greatness...

...Hemingway's heroic virtues are realized in situations increasingly distant from the social world, among bullfighters and hunters and fishermen...

...The underground revolutionary brings to the peasants a miniature printing-press, a product of urban technology, and the peasants print one issue of a little paper called What Is To Be Done...

...Whatever the ideological hesitations of Silone's novels, they remain faithful to the essential experience of modern Europe...

...He takes off his priestly frock but we are not to suppose that his experience as Paolo Spada the false priest has not left a profound mark upon him...

...They do not surrender the trumpet...

...People have been misled by slogans too long and too often...

...One of his finest strokes in Bread and Wine is the scene in which Spina takes off his priestly frock—this occurs, significantly as soon as some possibility for political action appears...

...Silone has here come up against a central dilemma of all political action: the only certain way of preventing bureaucracy is to refrain from organization, but the refusal to organize with one's fellow men can lead only to acquiescence in detested power or to isolated and futile acts of martyrdom and terrorism...

...His continued rejection of the traditional elegance of "literary" Italian confounds and disturbs the conventional critics...

...Nor is he at all sentimental about the peasants, for the sardonic humor that twists through the books is often turned against their coarseness and gullibility...

...Bread and Wine is a book of misery and doubt...

...When will the trumpet blow again...

...What makes Fontamara so poignant as a political legend—despite the apparent failures, upon occasion, of Silone's language to equal in richness his gift for anecdote—is that he is a patient writer, one who has the most acute sense of the difference between what is and what he wishes...

...The question echoes, not accidentally, the title of Lenin's famous pamphlet, in which he first outlined his plan for a disciplined revolutionary party...

...YET IT Is precisely from these scrupulous examinations of conscience and commitment that so much of the impact of Bread and Wine derives...

...For Silone, heroism is a condition of readiness, a talent for waiting, a gift for stubbornness...

...And his politics—for in some vague but indestructible way he remains a socialist, indifferent to party or dogma, yet utterly committed to the poor and the dispossessed —annoys those Italian writers who have tied themselves to a party ma chine or the greater number who have remained in shelters of estheticism...

...not the liberal lawyer, Don Circostanza, who betrays them with his windy rhetoric...

...those who have turned to religion, whether it be the Catholic Church or the crisis theology of Protestantism, cannot help realizing, with a discomfort in proportion to their sensitiveness, that Silone's struggle for the ethic of primitive Christianity has nothing in common with the religious institutions and doctrines of the 20th century...

...A man who shows what a man can be...

...Pelino, comes to gather their signatures for a petition that, as it happens, has not yet been composed, one of the peasants tells him a marvelous little fable: "At the head of everything is God, Lord of Heaven...

...To refute the government propaganda is pointless since no one, least of all its authors, believes it...

...What is to be done...

...The political theories behind the book resemble the lines signifying longitude and latitude on a map...

...his turn to pastoral does not imply social resignation but is on the contrary buttressed by a still active sense of social rebelliousness...

...Even after he wrote The Seed Beneath the Snow, a novel in which he exemplifies a kind of Christian passivity and mute fraternity, he continued to participate in the quite wordly Italian socialist movement...

...Abstracting this political view from its context in the novel, as Silone virtually invites us to, we reach mixed conclusions about its value...

...they are not ready to sacrifice themselves...

...Spina believes not in the resurrection of Jesus, only in his agony...

...The duality between Spina and Spada—between the necessity for action and the necessity for contemplation, between the urge to power and the urge to purity—is reflected in Silone's own experience as novelist and political leader...

...Silone's next novel, Bread and Wine, is entirely different in tone: defeat is now final, the period of underground struggle at an end, and all that remains is resignation, despair and obeisance before authority...

...Simple but not simpleminded, unable to generalize very well from their suffering yet aware that they must learn to, they show a deep insight, through their complicated jokes and sly stories, into the nature of the social hierarchy...

...He asks—in the words of Albert Camus—"is it possible to become a saint without believing in God...

...neither of which is an adequate response...

...In the intellectual world of Italy he is seldom honored or admired...

...Yet each man, if he is to remain one, must go his own way...

...If we compare his view of heroism with that of Hemingway, we see the difference between the feelings of a mature European and, if I may say so, an inexperienced American...

...Once again, as in Fontamara and Bread and Wine, the city is counterposed to the country: neither can understand the other, and given the inequity of social arrangements it can hardly be avoided that the one should exploit the other...

...nor is it an accident that both Lenin's pamphlet and the paper of Silone's peasants are written in times of extreme reaction...

...it is merely to question Silone's belief, as it appears in Bread and Wine, that political goals can be reached without political organization...

...the one work of modern fiction in which the Marxist categories seem organic and "natural," not in the sense that they are part of the peasant heritage or arise spontaneously in the peasant imagination, but in the sense that the whole weight of the peasant experience, at least as it takes form in this book, requires an acceptance of these categories...

...no other 20th century novelist has so fully conveyed the pathos behind the failure of socialism...

...And so long as this remains true, Silone sees no reason to make his peace with the world as it is...

...Then comes Prince Torlonia's armed guards...

...In Ignazio Silone's first novel, Fontamara, the image of the unity of worker and peasant, which had achieved a symbolic elevation in Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, appears in a state of decomposition, its two parts split into figures of hostility...

...What is to be done...

...Pelino...

...For Fontamara is the one important work of modern fiction that fully absorbs the Marxist outlook on the level of myth or legend...

...That is the sole concrete problem worth considering nowadays...

...At the end of the novel, a union has been achieved— hesitant, not fully understood and quickly broken—between peasant and worker...

...and most important of all, he employs the pastoral theme not to make a literal recommendation but to suggest, as a tentative metaphor, the still available potentialities of man...

...Spina rejects the duality between means and ends which is common to all political move ments...

...But while it may be true that the peasants are unable to act positively in their own behalf, they do have experience in resistance...

...From their bloody experience the peasants must learn that they need the help of the town, and one way of reading Fontamara is as a series of explorations into, or encounters with, the town where the peasants try to discover their true allies—not the priest, who is corrupt and bloated...

...unwilling to stake anything on the future, he insists that the only way to realize the good life, no matter what the circumstances, is to live it...

...Maybe next year, or twenty or five hundred years from now...

...answers the peasant Lazzaro...

...asks the Hon...

...the book is both concrete—wonderfully concrete— in its steady view of peasant life, and abstract—a brilliant paradigm— in its placing of peasant life in the larger social scheme...

...The following article is part of a much longer chapter from a forthcoming book on "The Political Novel," to be published by Horizon Press in 1956...

...This is not, of course, to deny the validity of specific organizational rejections...

...and to the harsh milieu of political struggle they bring a cleansing freshness, a warmth of fraternity...

...It doesn't depend on me, you know...

...As he wanders about the countryside, the sick and hunted Spina gradually abandons his Marxism, but not his social rebelliousness: the priest's frock that he has adopted as a disguise begins to be more than disguise: he must fulfill the responsibilities of his public role or what appear to be his public role, and must adjust his private emotions to this necessity: he becomes or aspires to become, a revolutionary Christian saint...

...Then come the peasants...

...Ponzio Pilato interrupted to explain that the authorities were divided between the third and fourth categories, according to the pay...

...To live as a Christian without the church means, for Spina, to shoulder the greatest possible insecurity before man and God...

...One of the few modern novels that has the genuine quality of a folk tale, or perhaps better, a comic fable, Fontamara tells the story of a peasant village in the Abruzzi resisting in its pathetic way the onthrusts of the Mussolini regime...

...But he sees even further than Camus: he dimly envisages, and in The Seed Beneath the Snow tries to realize, a fraternity beyond sainthood...

...The priests won't bury our dead...

...He has reached almost, but not quite, the position of the serious artist whose very seriousness causes him to shed the forms in which he has scored his greatest successes...

...they are not the reality, not the mountains and plains and oceans...

...How can I know...

...They rape our women in the name of the law...

...neither the declaration of the republic nor the rise of the Communists has brought them material relief or a growth of consciousness...

...and Shone, in his clumsy uncertainty, his humorous irritability, his effort to speak without rhetoric or cant, has become a kind of moral hero for those of us who have been forced by history to put aside many of the dogmas of social radicalism but who remain faithful to the rebellious and fraternal impulse behind the dogmas...

...The fourth category (that of the dogs) was a very Iarge one...

...What is to be done...

...Have not party interests ended by deadening all my discrimination between moral values...

...The novel's hero, Pietro Spina, who partly reflects the opinions of his creator, is a revolutionary leader who from exile has returned to the peasant areas of his native Abruzzi in order to reestablish ties with his people and see whether his Marxist theories will hold up in experience...

...No word and no gesture can be more persuasive than the life and, if necessary, the death of a man who strives to be free, loyal, just, sincere, disinterested...

...The peasants are shown in their non-political actuality and the political actuality is shown as it moves in upon them, threatening to starve and destroy them...

...his is the heroism of tiredness...

...Then nothing at all...

...And that's all...

...Then nothing at all...

...it moves slowly, painfully, in a weary spiral that traces the spiritual and intellectual anguish of its hero...

...it is courage and energy that they lack, not understanding...

...Silone's most recent novel, A Handful of Blackberries, has been received with some conventional appreciation and more conventional depreciation...

...Then nothing at all...

...This last factor may also account for the decline of Silone's reputation in the United States...

...What is to be done...

...Silone does not assume the desired relationship between the two, though he shows the possibilities for a movement into that relationship...

...and then that movement would be open to bureaucratic perils similar to those of the Marxist party which Spina has rejected—bureaucratic perils that would be particularly great in an atmosphere of saintly, even if not apocalyptic, Messianism...

...Before coming to these conclusions Spina had already been uneasy about his political allegiance: "Has not truth, for me, become party truth...

...It does not propose a full analysis of Silone's writings, but tries to present him in a certain intellectual-literary tradition...

...Then comes Prince Torlonia's armed guards' dogs...

...Has not something of the sort happened to Christianity itself, in its transition from primitive rebel liousness to a number of accredited institutions...

...The characteristic turning of the political novelist to some apolitical temptation is, in Silone's case, a wistful search for the lost conditions of simple life where one may find the moral resources which politics can no longer yield...

...One soon suspects that Silone, like many other novelists for whom writing is not merely portrayal but also a form of implicit prophecy, has become a little impatient with the mechanics of literature, the art of creating illusions...

...but they are indispensable for locating oneself...

...People know the truth well enough...

...Bread and Wine is a work of humility, unmarred by the adventurism or the occasional obsession with violence and death which disfigures the political novels of Malraux and Koestler...

...Don Circostanza is a bastard...

...Only when the most violent of the peasants, Berardoit is significant that he owns no land and is therefore free from the conservative inclinations of even those peasants who have nothing more than a strip of rock or sand—only when he goes to Rome does he meet, after a series of tragi-comic blunders, the agent of the revolutionary underground...

...Like Malraux, he appreciates the value of action, but he also realizes that in the age of totalitarianism it is possible for an heroic action to consist of nothing but stillness, that for Spina and many others there may never be the possibility of an outward or public gesture...

...But in Silone's work it acquires a unique validity...

...not the old landowners, who are being squeezed by Mussolini's agents yet remain as much as ever the enemies of the peasants...

...When a minor government flunkey, the Hon...

...FONTAMARA ends in defeat yet it exudes revolutionary hope and elan...

...It is, however, entirely to Silone's credit that he recognizes this dilemma and embodies it in the action of his book...

...Spina feels that what is now needed is not programs, even the best Marxist programs, but examples, a pilgrimage of deeds: men must be healed, they must be stirred to heroism rather than exhorted and converted...

...Soon after arriving in the Abruzzi, Spina decides that the usual kinds of political propaganda are, irrelevant in a fascist country...

...And the authorities, where do they come in...

...The surface action of the novel traces the disillusion of a young engineer who begins as a local leader of the Communist Party and comes gradually to realize that he must choose between the peasants who trust him and the party machine, which is as inhuman and repressive as the machine of the fascists...

...The memory of his refusal to accommodate himself to the fascist regime stirs feelings of bad conscience among literary men who were more flexible...

...Much of what Silone says is undoubtedly true: anyone trying to organize a political underground would have to demonstrate his worthi ness not only as a leader but as a friend and confidant...

...they instinctively distrust all phrases...

...he is aware that a return to simplicity by a man like Spina must have its painful and ironic aspects...

...But the trumpet remains...

...in fact, the significance of Jesus is that he is the first, and perhaps the last, fully human being...

...To the peasants, the political problem first presents itself as one of city against country, town against village—and they are not entirely wrong, for they, the peasants, are at the .very bottom, suffering the whole weight of Italian society...

...Silone's novels contain the most profound vision of what heroism can be in the modern world...

...But here we reach a difficulty...

...Perhaps as a sign of the drift of our age, Silone has gradually become one of the most isolated among modern writers...

...Those American intellectuals who have settled into social conformism or a featureless liberalism find in Silone's politics little more than sentimental nostalgia—or so they would persuade themselves...

...they are what give the geography of society meaning and perspective...

...But they are his, by adoption of blood, and he remains hopeful, with a hopefulness that has nothing to do with optimism, that from the hidden inarticulate resources of the poor, which consist neither of intelligence nor nobility, but rather of a training in endurance and an education in ruse—that from all this something worthy of the human may yet emerge...

...In his own practice as an Italian socialist, he has been forced to recognize that the vexatious problem of means and ends involves a constant tension between moral standards and practical behavior which can be resolved, if at all, only in practice...

...This pastoral theme, winding quietly through the book and reaching full development only in its sequel, The Seed Beneath the Snow, is not an easy one for the modern reader to take at face value: we are quick, and rightly so, to suspect programs for simplicity...

...So deeply opposed is this book to the moods, the assumptions, the values of our time, so thoroughly is it imbued with the forgotten emotions of humaneness, that one can only assert that in years to come it will be looked back upon, if anything is, as a cultural and spiritual act helping to redeem a terrible age...

...Once Silone's militant and saintly rebels acquired followers, they would have to be organized into some sort of movement, even if it claimed to be nonideological and were not called a party...

...The inner action of the novel is a fable enriched with Silone's marvelous anecdotes—a fable about a trumpet by which the peasants, when their misery becomes unbearable, called one another together and which the Communist Party, in its false claim to be their spokesman, now wishes to appropriate...

...Yet these matters, though they have an intrinsic interest, are as nothing beside the overwhelming fact to which the novel testifies: that in an age of faithlessness Silone has kept faith...

...For Hemingway heroism is always a visible trial, a test limited in time, symbolized in dramatic confrontations...

...The life of the peasants remains as miserable, as buried in darkness, as ever before...

...he does not try to pry his way out of it with some rusty formula...

...He has remained with the cafoni, the landless peasants in whose name he first began to write, and in this novel he tells us that, through the noise and the muddle of shifts in regimes and parties, nothing has changed for the peasants except the names of those who exploit them and the catch-words by which their exploitation is rationalized...

...After him comes Prince Torlonia, lord of the earth...

...Silone's heroic virtues pertain to people who live, as Bertolt Brecht has put it, in "the dark ages" of Europe, at the heart of our debacle...

...As one of them explains with a truly masterful grasp of political method, the question must be asked again and again, after each statement of their plight: They have taken away our water...

...Jesus figures for him entirely in human terms...

...he knows peasant life intimately and, perhaps because he does not himself pretend to be a peasant, seldom stoops to pseudo-folk romanticizing...

...The political doubts prompting these questions, together with his feeling that the Marxists in exile have lost touch with the realities of Italian life, lead Spina to the ethical ideal, the love concept, of primitive Christianity, which for him becomes "a Christianity denuded of all religion and all church control...