Old Fox and New Camellias:
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS and WRITING Old Fox and New Camellias By Stanley Edgar Hyman There is something peculiar about Ignazio Silone's new short novel, The Fox and the Camellias (Harper, 139 pp., $3.50). It...
...He introduces information in crude parentheses: "Daniele was fascinated by his elder daughter fa second daughter had been born a few years later...
...It has a diffuseness of intention, a flabbiness of texture, a hollow portentousness, as though it were the inflation of some smaller and tighter work...
...Forced to choose between esthetic and ideological criteria, Silone has always made it clear that he will choose the latter...
...Silone's plotting in the novel is weak and diffuse, particularly in a long digression that tells us of Daniele's parents, and how he came to inherit the farm and return to his native countryside after working as an engineer in the town...
...I would guess that Silone, who has hinted to interviewers that invention comes hard for him, decided that he had wasted the makings of a novel in the earlier short story...
...We see him at the beginning of the story trying to help his sow litter, giving her "a strenuous castor-oil enema," and when the first three pigs are born, they look "like three enormous rats emerging from a bloody flask...
...The compressed dramatic effectiveness of the story, culminating in its powerful end, is produced by a masterly dovetailing of every incident into the total pattern...
...and the spy, in commenting on railroad wrecks, is allowed to provide the story's ironic moral: "Every day a tragedy," he says, "but the most tragic thing of all is the way in which men go to meet their tragedies...
...Certainly he is now very far from his sources of strength, the peasants of the Abruzzi, like Antaeus held away from his mother the earth by Heracles...
...If he noticed that his present views blunted the story's point, he must have been prepared to see it blunted for the sake of setting the ethical record straight...
...Once determined to expand it, he naturally made it accord with his present views...
...The carpenter Lucca, in the story a minor figure, becomes the carpenter Franz (St...
...the "musty smell" of law books becomes a symbolic comment...
...Politics in the story is bluntly anti-Fascist and Marxist...
...When Silvia comments, "How beautiful, and how simple," Daniel replies, "Trout, my dear girl, don't go to church...
...Similarly, a story about a wealthy priest who hoarded grain and eventually found it full of snakes becomes a Biblical parable...
...it is killed with much less brutality and gore, and the scene is no longer the end of the work...
...What could have been in Silone's mind...
...walking in the rain Daniele gets a symbolic "cold douche from some defective gutters...
...Where the story is coarse, the novel is squeamish...
...Francis...
...When he is identified, Daniel protects him as his guest...
...Daniel is a real farmer, and bis actions have a coarseness and physicality that carry conviction...
...and so forth...
...There are no longer any villains in his fictional world, but there is no effective dramatic conflict either...
...In the novel too, Daniele traps the fox and beats it to death when he believes that he has been betrayed, but it is no longer a "little beast," it is a "magnificent fox...
...But there has been no accompanying gain in power as a writer...
...a five-line speech by a lawyer becomes six windy pages...
...Perhaps Silone doesn't care, or is willing to sacrifice his craft to his quest for truth and value...
...One can only hope that Silone's next book gets back to our common mother the earth...
...One sentence explaining the appearance of the spy in the Swiss village is expanded to a wordy conversation of two pages...
...The story is a small masterpiece, tight and vivid...
...The "strenuous castoroil enema" becomes "a dose of castor oil" and the piglets are born "like three mice out of a wineskin" (although I have not seen the Italian original, I cannot believe that Eric Mosbacher is translating the same words that Putnam rendered as "three enormous rats" and "bloody flask...
...The camellias might be love, compassion, hope, brotherhood, loyalty or anything good...
...The moral of the story is a hard realism: Daniel's code of hospitality is a scruple he cannot afford...
...A Fascist spy, beaten up by one of Daniel's comrades, is by coincidence carried to Daniel's house to recover...
...Since Silone can no longer believe in his story about Fascist evil and anti-Fascist weakness, he is forced to find other meanings, and what he finds most often, I am sorry to say, is vaguely portentous symbolism...
...Even Silone's style is unusually clumsy in The Fox and the Camellias...
...Francis...
...Daniel's comrade Agostino suggests that one of the newborn piglets be named "Benito," and Daniel lectures his family and the guest on Marx's concept of alienation, in which "the vast majority" of mankind "are separated from and set against the fruit of their own labor...
...In the story, Silvia helps her father care for their fruit trees by killing woodworms with a wire...
...With power and economy, in 38 pages, "The Trap" tells the story of Daniel, a farmer living in Switzerland near the Italian border, who is active in the anti-Fascist underground in Italy...
...When Daniele (Mosbacher keeps the Italian spelling) explains the trout spawn to Silvia, the question of their church attendance does not come up at all...
...He had made the sign of the cross and walked calmly into the water to his death, a martyr to the conflict between love and duty...
...He explains his scenes with equal crudity: "Ludovico had taken off the tattered old dressing gown that had made his granddaughter mistake him for a broken-down servant...
...Everything is symbolic and portentous, including the names...
...In place of the life-giving earthiness and cleansing bitterness of the early books, we are given mysterious symbolic affirmations and vague Christian hints of sanctity...
...in the novel, he is unmarried and in love with Silvia...
...On his return, the spy discovers Daniele's incriminating papers almost by accident, gives every sign ot disturbance, and flees...
...In place of the story's hard political moral, there is now a softer Christian message...
...as he later feels compassion for the Fascist, and as he compassionately goes to comfort Silvia at the book's end...
...In the later world of Silone's fiction, as his autobiographical character is Pietro Spina (Peter the Thorn) and Paolo Spada (Paul the Sword), so his other heroes become St...
...Afterward, Daniele collapses out of compassion for the fox...
...And snatching up an ax which lay beside the henhouse, as if he were hewing at an oak, he began raining terrible blows upon the animal's head, its back, its belly, its legs—blow after blow, the blows of a madman, deathdealing blows continued to rain down, even after the little beast had been hacked to tiny bits and reduced to nothing more than a puddle of blood-soaked mush...
...his betrayal of his comrades is marked by a cock crowing three times...
...Silone's vision of Daniele's Socialist comrades in The Fox and the Camellias sees them as "tired and depressed," foolishly doctrinaire and futile...
...In his progress from Roman Catholic to Communist to Socialist to Christian Socialist to social Christian, Silone has often seemed to be a representative and admirable figure for our time, almost its conscience...
...No pigs are named Benito...
...In the story, Agostino is married...
...but the festival unites us...
...and we have earlier been told: "Politics divides us...
...I KNOW OF no comparable example of a distinguished writer going back many years later to turn an excellent short story into a poor novelette...
...So much that is right in the story is wrong in the novel...
...Hemingway has reworked the theme of such fine stories as "The Undefeated," changing the rules to turn defeat into victory, in The Old Man and the Sea, but at least he did not touch the stories themselves...
...In the novel, she asks: "Isn't it cruel...
...In a symbolic subplot, a fox had been raiding henhouses in the neighborhood, and Daniel had set a trap for him...
...It is, in fact, an expanded short story...
...It reads, in short, like an expanded short story...
...Where "The Trap" is economical, The Fox and the Camellias is flatulent...
...She falls in love with the Fascist spy as soon as he appears, they plan to get married, and this enables the spy to go away and return, dragging the action out indefinitely...
...Silone, who once let the critic Nettie Sutro say for him in Fontamara that "Nothing is further from his purpose than to excite compassion," now overflows with compassion for mankind, for all that lives...
...He is believed to have given away the anti-Fascist underground, but at the end of the novel he is discovered to have nobly (and preposterously) committed suicide without betraying his host...
...Aristotle, translated by Samuel Putnam in 1935...
...Immediately after the discovery of the spy's escape and his destruction of the anti-Fascist underground, the fox is caught...
...Luke or St...
...Later in the story Daniel's daughter Silvia discovers trout spawn in the stream, and Daniel explains the spawning and fertilizing process to her...
...The story, "The Trap," was published in Silone's collection of stories, Mr...
...An unnecessary, contrived and distracting triangle is the principal device for expanding the story by a hundred pages...
...Silvia remarks with mysterious significance, "This year our camellias are late," and she later appears wearing in her hair a "magnificent red camellia" (like the "magnificent" fox...
...the family of the Fascist makes "church candles...
...Thus the camellias that the novel adds to the story's fox...
...at the end of the book an allegorical float for the village festival shows "a fox holding a dove in its paws under a camellia bush...
...He is called "Agnus Dei," the Lamb of God, he has "reconciled Karl Marx and Jesus Christ...
...This compassion, which is of course his creator's, extends beyond the human...
...and Daniele comes to recognize that Franz's gentle nonviolence issues from strength rather than weakness, and is inspired by him...
...The story ends: "'At last!' said Daniel in a ferocious tone of voice...
...in the novel, and its moral focus...
...In fact, there has been a steady loss...
...It is hard to say just what the camellias stand for...
...That night the spy flees with Daniel's papers, and Daniel's confederates in Italy are promptly arrested and his underground ring smashed...
Vol. 44 • June 1961 • No. 24
