DEAR EDITOR
DEAR EDITOR SILONE Out of a proper respect for the critic's freedom, writer should never polemicize against aesthetic evaluation of his work. But it is a different matter if what is involved is...
...It is still the same society as that described in Fontamara, hut analyzed more microscopically than anything I have previously atj tempted...
...Whoever practices writing, not as a m?tier, but in response to a strong internal impulse, to an authentic necessity, does not fear criticism of his work, even when it is ostensibly justified...
...Their love was nonetheless "impossible," Why...
...But in this particular instance, I don't think it is...
...If a reading of The Seed Beneath the Snow led them to think that I had abandoned politics and my social and political interests, the reason is that they had « limited conception of the political and the social...
...If I did not wish t? risk being accused of sounding paradoxical, I should say it is the most socially oriented of my books...
...Some American friends have asked apropos of The Secret of Luca whether it doesn't mark, by comparison with my earlier novels, a turning away from social problems...
...In fact, The Secret of Luca is th...
...I did not write the novel to formulate a credo or to draw up directives on how I should behave in public life...
...While I was writing The Secret of Luca, I did not worry about these matters...
...Although, as I have said, a criticism based on political or sociological considerations would be of little interest to me, I maintain that the novel cannot he treated as if it does not deal with social conditions...
...Now I see that the same kind of mistake is being repeated with regard to The Secret of Luca...
...These relations are much less superficial than they may seem to the Americans in question...
...But T do think that the differences between certain liberal American intellectuals and me in the way we envisage relations between the individual and society are worth noting...
...Rome IGNAZIO SILONE...
...They saw conflict and incompatibility in spiritual positions where many of us do not...
...What I think of the relations between art and life, between art and society or politics, I have set forth so many times in polemics with exponents of the ivory tower and of "socialist reali&m," it would be a waste of time to repeat them...
...On the contrary, Luca was normal man who loved a normal woman...
...I wanted to tell the story of a simple man and tell it in the simplest way I knew how...
...They also ask whether Andrea Cipriano, one of the characters in the novel—who is taken to be largely modeled upon the author—is explicitly speaking for me when he forecasts that he will retire from active political life if he cannot remain faithful to his political principles...
...The account of the unevenly developing love, the obstacles to marriage, the growth of an apparently hopeless passion, the trial, the acceptance of imprisonment, the separation of husband and wife, the hostility of the peasants, the course of friendship—all these elements which form the woof of the novel are social facts...
...prehistory of Fontamara...
...In 194-1, when my novel The Seed Beneath the Snow was published in the United States, u number of critics thought they found in it a confession of my definitive break with politics...
...Nor is this the first time that they have made the same mistake with regard to one of my books...
...Indeed I should go further: Not only is there no conflict between a certain type of critical' approach toward politics and a certain conception of values in personal and social life, not only do these values form an integral part of our conception of socialism, they are essential to it...
...This would be true if the novel were the account of Narcissus who continually looked in a mirror, in love with himself...
...strangely, my work on that book coincided with my return to active work in the anti-Fascist underground...
...The literary critics to whom I refer evidently could not know this, but they erred for intellectual reasons...
...But it is a different matter if what is involved is a clarification of certain extra-literary aspects of the creative work...
...Precisely because of that society of which they were the expression...
...Only after the German occupation of France with the resulting dispersion of Italian Socialist refugees, did I agree to take charge of the Italian Socialist party's foreign center...
...In fact, from 1931, the date of my formal resignation from the Communist party, until 1940 I was an independent Socialist...
Vol. 41 • December 1958 • No. 47
