Ignazio Silone: A Study in Integrity

by IRIS ORIGO

A FEW years ago, Ignazio Silone and his wife were staying with us in Tuscany for Christmas, and we had driven them to see a primitive little Romanesque church near Pienza. Beside it there is a small green field, and there, on that bleak winter’s afternoon, some boys from the local seminary — their chilblained hands and thin faces blue with cold — were kicking a football about. After a brief glance at the church, Silone stood at the edge of the field, his back turned to us, his hands in his pockets. The sun went down, the air grew colder, and at last his wife called to him, and he joined us. “Were you watching the sunset?” I asked. “No, I was watching my own youth.”

It was, indeed, in just such a country seminary that Silone was educated, in his little native city in the Abruzzi, Pescina dei Marsi — “about a hundred shapeless one-storied houses,” he himself has written, “on either side of a long, steep street, battered by wind and rain,” standing on a stony bleak hillside above the drained lake of Fucino. The plain below is surrounded by an amphitheater of mountains: “a barrier with no way out.” “A village, in short, like many others, but for those who are born and die there, the world.” Here Silone spent his early youth. “For twenty years,” he wrote in the preface to his first novel, Fontamara, “the same earth, the same rain, wind, snow, the same feast-days, the same food, the same want, the same poverty — a poverty inherited from our fathers, who had received it from their grandfathers, and against which honest work was of no avail. The life of men and beasts, and of the land itself, revolved in a closed circle. . . . There has never been a way out. At that time, a man could perhaps save twenty or thirty soldi a month, and in summer perhaps even a hundred. . . . They disappeared at once — in interest on some loan, or to the doctor, the chemist or the priest. And so one began again, the next day. Twenty soldi, a hundred soldi . . .”

In the same novel, he has given an ironic picture of the social hierarchy of the region, of which the greater part was then owned by Prince Torlonia.

“At the head of everything there’s God, the master of Heaven. That everyone knows.

Then comes Prince Torlonia, the master of the land.

Then come the Prince’s guards.

Then come the dogs of the Prince’s guards.

Then, nothing.

Then, still nothing.

Then come the cafoni [the peasants].

And that’s about all.”

An official from the city, who inquired where the local officials were placed, received the reply: “Between the guards and the dogs.”

Silone’s recollections open with a description of the day on which, as a boy, he saw a handcuffed man limping down the road between two guards.

“How funny he looks!” the boy cried. But his father took him by the ear and dragged him indoors, to be shut up in his own room.

“What have I done wrong?” he asked, and received the reply:

“One must never laugh at a convict.”

“Why not?”

“Because he can’t defend himself. And then because perhaps he’s innocent. And in any case, he’s an unhappy man.”

SILONE’S father owned a small farm; his mother was a weaver. He speaks of her and of his grandmother as “two grave, remarkable women, serie e straordinarie,” the predominant influences of his childhood. The simplicity and austerity of his daily life are indicated by the fact that when I asked him for a photograph of himself as a boy, he said that he had none. “At that time, one only had one’s picture taken to get a passport for America.” Once his mother thought of having one taken, but his grandmother disapproved: it was, she said, a frivolous thing to do. In his novel Bread and Wine, Silone has described how he would help his mother at her loom while she told him long parables. It was thus that Christianity first reached him, “firmly rooted in the Franciscan tradition of poverty and humility.” For centuries the whole region of the Fucino has had, as Silone wrote, “no buildings worth looking at but churches and convents, no illustrious sons but saints or hewers of stone. The human condition there,” he added, “has always been peculiarly hard . . . and for those whose spirit has been roused, the most acceptable forms of rebellion against their destiny have always been either the Franciscan or the Anarchist. Even in those who have suffered most, the ashes of scepticism have never entirely quenched the ancient hope of the coming of the Kingdom, the old expectation held by Joachim of Fiore, by the Franciscan Spirituals, and by the followers of Pope Celestine, of the advent of an era of charity, instead of that of the law.”

He was very young when he first began to become conscious of what he has called “the strident, incomprehensible contrast between private life, which was generally decent and honest, and social relationships — very often rough, odious and false.” One day he saw an arrogant local grandee egging on his dog to attack a poor little dressmaker as she was coming out of church. The dog knocked her down, bit her, tore her clothes to pieces. Several people saw it happen. But when the case came to court — for she sued the young man — no single witness came forward on her behalf, nor was it possible to find a lawyer to plead her cause. The only articulate voice was that of the defending advocate, claiming that the woman had provoked the dog, whereupon the judge had little choice but to decide against her.

“I did it very unwillingly,” he said later on to his friends. “I was really sorry. But a good judge must learn to silence his own personal feelings.”

“Yes, to be sure,” Silone’s mother commented, “but what a dreadful profession! Better to mind one’s own business, at home.” And to her son she added: “When you are grown-up, be whatever you like, but not a judge.” But Silone has never been good at minding only his own business.

One of the first disappointments of his boyhood came when, at the age of eleven, he entered the local seminary. In a recent interview, he has given a vivid account of the narrow and sectarian atmosphere in such provincial clerical schools at that time, in a district in which party organizations had not yet been formed and political opinion could find expression only in the church, the school, or the public square. When the first Peasants’ Leagues were founded in the Abruzzi, in 1911 and 1912, their members could meet only in the village squares; but the parish priests would order the church bells to be rung so loud as to drown the speakers’ voices. In Silone’s own school, the bishop himself would address the boys on the theme of private property as a divine institution, and on the sacrilegious attempt of the Peasants’ Leagues to break up some of the neglected and untilled large properties. History was taught with a similar bias, and besides, with a double standard, rendered necessary by the fact that the teachers were all priests, but the pupils had to pass the state exams. “It was inevitable,” Silone comments, “that most pupils came to regard their diplomas and their future jobs as the true realities of life. All my prayers as a schoolboy ended with the words: ‘Help me, God, to live without turning into a traitor.’ ”

It is, of course, the accusation that his enemies have most often leveled against him, from both sides. One should add, however, that Silone firmly refuses to make use of the errors of his education to defend his own subsequent actions. The use of the word “if,” he declared, is almost always misleading. “I cannot guarantee,” he said, “that I would have behaved any less foolishly if my teachers had been more enlightened. These are plays of fancy that get one nowhere.” Moreover, he says, one good thing has remained to him from those years: the habit of meditation. From time to time he still goes into the dusk of a half-empty church and sits there, thinking. “The results are not always very clear — but it’s a habit one cannot lose.”

When he was fourteen and was still in the seminary, a severe earthquake destroyed the greater part of his native town. Like many of his companions, he was saved by rushing to the school windows on the main outer wall, which stood firm. Looking out, all he could see of the town was a cloud of dust, and when at last he could get home, he found nothing but rubble. A week later, his brother was discovered, still alive, in a sort of cave beneath the stones; his mother’s corpse was dug up several days later, and most of his other relatives had also perished. Yet perhaps he received an even greater shock from an action he witnessed one night when he was believed to be asleep: a gross and cowardly theft committed by one of his own relations. It was then that he first realized that the aftermath of great disasters, whether earthquakes or wars, is often worse than the event itself. “If the human race is finally destroyed,” he said, “it will be at such a time.”

IT WAS shortly after the earthquake that he saw a curious scene: a little shabby, unshaven priest wandering about among the ruins with a group of homeless children, looking, since the railway was no longer running, for some vehicle to take them to Rome. Just then a procession of five or six cars drove up, and the King, who had come to inspect the scene of the disaster, got out with his suite. Without asking anyone for permission, the priest began to lift his children into the cars, and when the police protested, told the King firmly why he needed the transportation and drove away. “Who’s that extraordinary man?” Silone asked. “He’s a certain Don Orione, a rather strange priest.”

Two years later, under very different circumstances, Silone met him again. The boy had run away from a grim school to which he had been sent in Rome; after his subsequent expulsion, he had been told that Don Orione had agreed to take him into one of his own schools, and would meet him at the railway station. The encounter started badly. The sulky schoolboy, too self-absorbed even to recognize the little priest he had seen after the earthquake, was asked whether he would like a paper and replied, “Yes, the Avanti” — the anticlerical Socialist paper — and when Don Orione meekly bought it for him, the boy gave him his suitcase to carry. Don Orione smiled and said he enjoyed carrying burdens for fresh little schoolboys — “like a small donkey,” he added. Silone began to thaw and confided that donkeys were his favorite animals, too. “Not the absurd donkeys in public gardens, but the real ones, those the peasants have. They seem apathetic, because they’re very old, but they know everything — like the peasants.”

It was then that a friendship began. Don Orione started by talking to the boy on equal terms, discussing matters of general interest with him, and even reading aloud to him the draft of a letter which he had sent to the Pope; he told him about his own poor and unhappy childhood, and when Silone confided why he had run away from school and asked the priest whether he could understand what had made him do it, Don Orione replied, “Yes, of course I understand.”

They talked all through the night, while the train rumbled up the coast toward Genoa. “I heard in the darkness,” wrote Silone, “the sound of the sea, which was new to me, and the unfamiliar names of the stations. I felt as if I were discovering the world.” What he remembered best, many years later, about Don Orione was “the great tenderness of his expression. His eyes had the kindness and clearsightedness which one sometimes sees in some old peasant-women, who have endured all sorts of things in their lives and therefore can guess one’s most secret troubles.”

During the whole night, Don Orione only once referred to religion. “Remember,” he suddenly said, “God isn’t only to be found in church. In the future you will certainly come up against periods of despair; but even if you think you are alone and abandoned, you will not be. Don’t forget it.”

One is tempted to speculate whether Silone’s life would have taken a different course if he had remained longer under Don Orione’s influence. Instead, having completed his studies, he went back to the poverty and injustice of Pescina, and came to believe that only one choice was open to him: “to become either an accomplice or a rebel.”

He himself has described the origins of his decision: not a formulated ideology, but simply what he has called “the choice of one’s comrades.” “It happened to many of us,” he wrote, “to give up going to Mass one morning, not because its doctrines seemed untrue, but because we were weary of the other people who went there, and attracted by those who stayed away. . . . Outside our village church, stood the workmen. It wasn’t their psychology that attracted us, but their condition. . . . In other words, we first decided to be conservatives or rebels according to motives we bore within us, sometimes very confusedly. Before choosing, we were chosen, unawares.”

The young man who made that choice knew nothing about the theories of Marx, or about Lenin and Sorel. He merely knew of the existence of the recently formed local Peasants’ Leagues, and that he wanted to be on their side. It was then that he moved to Rome, joined the Junior Branch of the Socialist Federation (he was not yet twenty-one), of which he soon became a leader, and was one of the spokesmen at a stormy congress of the partyin Livorno in 1921, which ended with the secession of the left wing of the movement to the newly formed Communist Party. Silone went with them. It was a far more decisive step, he knew, than just joining a political party. “For me, as for many others,” he wrote, “it was a complete dedication. . . . That was still a time when to declare oneself a Socialist or a Communist implied burning all one’s boats, breaking with one’s relations and friends, finding oneself without a job.”And the spiritual experience was even more disruptive. “It was at the moment of the break that I felt I was bound to Christ in the deepest fibres of my being. Yet I would not allow myself any mental restrictions. The little lamp which had been kept alight before the shrine of the intuitions which were dearest to me, was blown out by an icy draught. Life, death, love, good, evil, truth, all changed their meaning. . . . And how can one describe the inner dismay of an ill-nourished provincial boy, in a squalid little city room, at having definitely renounced his faith in his immortal soul? It was far too serious a matter to talk about with anyone. My comrades in the Party would perhaps have laughed at me, and I had no other friends left.”

DURING his first years as a Communist, Silone’s life was entirely identified with that of the Party. It became, as he wrote, “his family, school, church and barracks.” After beginning his political activities in Trieste for a Communist paper, he was sent in 1921 to the Moscow of Lenin, and in 1923 to Spain — then under the rule of Primo de Rivera — to strengthen the Communist organization there. He soon found himself in prison, first in Madrid and then in Barcelona — a part of his experiences which he has not as yet described in writing, but which he once said to me was one of the happiest times of his life. “Why?” I asked. “Because of my companions.”

His companions, as might be expected, consisted largely of dedicated Anarchists or Communists like himself. It was a world in which he at once felt at home. In looks, Silone might well be a Spaniard; his natural reserve and dignity, his quiet, measured speech, his dark, sunken eyes, his expression — which one of his friends has described as “both cordial and impenetrable” — are all very Spanish, and indeed, for some years this was the nationality he adopted. It was in Spain, too, that instead of his real name, Secondino Tranquilli, he first made use of the pen name, Silone, with which he later on signed Fontamara, and which was suggested to him by Quintus Pompaedius Silo, a man of his own region whose victorious battles against Rome in 90 B.C. had helped to lead to the Lex Julia, granting freedom and civil rights to all the allies of Rome.

Owing to the influence of a Spanish professor whom he scarcely knew, Silone was set to work in the prison office. At night, he slept in the infirmary, where, since all the other inmates were seriously ill, his presence surprised the beautiful youngnun in charge of the ward. Gradually, a Platonicfriendship sprang up between them; she lent him her devotional books, but also began to listen, no doubt in some dismay, to his arguments. When the time came for him to be moved to Barcelona, to be embarked on a ship sailing to Fascist Italy, she somehow heard of the danger beforehand and managed to delay his departure long enough for him and his guards to miss the train, thus giving his friends time to prevent his sailing in that ship. His recollections of her have the special flavor of tenderness and nostalgia with which one remembers emotions never entirely fulfilled. But what became of her later on during the Spanish Civil War, he was never able to discover. He must surely have caused a deep upheaval in her monastic life.

After a further period of imprisonment in Barcelona — again “in excellent company” — he was finally extradited, but this time via Marseilles to Ventimiglia, and so was easily able to make his way instead to Paris — and only went back to Italy later on, under another name, to organize the clandestine Communist Press. By then — November, 1926 — the Fascist Grand Council had already approved what came to be known as “the special laws,” by which any member of a political party other than the Fascist was considered outside the law. One of the main Communist leaders, his friend Antonio Gramsci, had been arrested and died twelve years later in prison, while Togliatti and many others went abroad, to strengthen their link with Russia. Silone remained in Italy, a foreigner in his own country, with occasional visits to Moscow.

Many years later (when I was thinking of writing something about Mussolini) I asked him his personal opinion of Mussolini’s character and policy. “The key,” he replied “is inconsistency, both of temperament and ideas, combined with an extraordinary intuitive capacity for improvisation. In every crisis of his career, he swung over completely from his previous attitude, and always successfully. The only constant was his desire for power. . . . You should always bear in mind,” he added, “the suddenness of Mussolini’s emergence as a leader: the result of one successful political speech at a congress of the Socialist Party. He sprang into a sudden prominence, for which he was completely unprepared.”

I asked him whether he considered the theory of fascism to be a serious political doctrine, or one which had been patched up later on. “The latter, undoubtedly. Mussolini had very few and very confused ideas. Even in his early Socialist days, he did not adhere to orthodox Socialist doctrines. . . . You must resist the temptation,” he went on, “of creating a consistent figure. It would always be a falsification. Say, ‘He was like this — and he was also like that.’ ”

With regard to Nazism, Silone said: “The great difference between Nazism and fascism was this, that whereas Nazism absorbed every aspect of German life and thought, in Italy two other institutions went on existing side by side with the Fascist Party: the Church and the family. This was true to such an extent that the Germans used to say that fascism in Italy was not a totalitarian regime at all. This was a matter of national temperament — which Mussolini himself understood.”

THE processes of Silone’s disillusionment with Communism are described at length in the title essay of his autobiography, which first appeared in English in an anthology of similar experiences entitled “The God that Failed.” At first, like many others, he was inspired by the sight of the unswerving faith of his comrades. Then, step by step, he watched what has now become a familiar story: the exploitation of the workers, the suppression of the freedom of the press, the first public trials, confessions, deportations, and executions. In 1927 came the “political liquidation” of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky — “an old lion,” Silone wrote, “enticed into a trap, and about to be killed or captured,” on the basis of a document which many of the men who sentenced him were not even allowed to see. “Is this,” Silone then asked himself, “the true face of Communism? Is this the ideal for which working men have risked their lives or died in prison? Is it for this that we are leading our wandering, dangerous, solitary lives?”

Yet he remained an active member of the Party for another two years, when he at last obtained an indefinite leave of absence on the score of ill health, and it was only in 1931, after he had been required to agree to the expulsion from the International of three of its Italian members of whom he had a high opinion — Leonetti, Ravazzoli, and Tresso — that he told Togliatti that though he would remain in the Party, he could take no further part in its political activities. At the time, Togliatti agreed. But there is no room in the Communist Party, nor in any dictatorial state, for passive supporters. An imprudent letter to Tresso which fell into the wrong hands provided a pretext, and Silone was ignominiously expelled from the Party, under the accusation of having played a double game. “I could have defended myself,” he wrote, “I could have proved my good faith . . . I did not wish to do so. In a flash, I clearly perceived the uselessness of any tactics, of any delay or compromise. After a month, or after two years, it would all have begun again. It was better to be done with it, once for all.”

There was also a personal reason which had delayed his final break with Communism, and which added to it an especial bitterness. More than two years before, in 1928, his younger brother, Romolo, who had had the misfortune to find himself near Milan, on his way to visit Silone in Switzerland, on the very day on which an attempt was made on the King’s life, had been arrested, without a trace of proof, as a Communist, tortured, and sent to prison on the island of Procida, where he died four years later of internal lesions received during his interrogation. The bitter irony of this tragedy lay in the fact that Romolo was not only not a Communist, but had no interest in politics; a good, unquestioning Catholic boy, what he cared for most was sport. When, however, he was questioned, a sense of loyalty toward his brother caused him to say that he was a Communist. “I tried to behave,” he wrote to Silone from prison, “as I imagined you would have behaved in my place.” It is easy to see how peculiarly painful it was for Silone, after this, to deny the convictions which had cost his brother his life.

Before Silone made his final break with the Party, a member of the Communist commission before which he appeared pointed out to him what his future position would be. “Under the Fascist regime,” he said, “you can’t go home to Italy. Without any papers, you can’t stay abroad. You have no means of support and very poor health. Your brother is in prison on account of the Party. . . . If you still have any common sense at all, if you can reflect and behave like a normal man — ”

At this point, Silone interrupted him.

“Listen,” he said, “I don’t know if you can understand me, but in the sense you mean, I have never been and perhaps never will be a politically normal man.”

The remark enabled his former comrades to state, in the decree of his expulsion, that he himself had admitted that he was politically abnormal, a pathological case.

Silone was then living, partly on account of his serious ill health, in Switzerland, which was a refuge for many others in a similar position: men without a passport — “yet who,” as he said, “could not call themselves No-one, like Ulysses” — whose break with Communism had often been a confused, reluctant process, and in whose good faith practically no one believed. Silone kept apart from most of the groups they formed, but like them, he was marked for life. Former Communists, as he himself has said, “constitute a category of their own, like former priests and former army officers — and their number is legion.” “The final struggle,” he once remarked to Togliatti, “will be between Communists and former Communists” — meaning that it would be the Communist experience itself that would in the end destroy its doctrine. “The future Russian revolution,” he has said, “may one day have as one of its slogans. ‘Marxism is the opium of the people.’ ”

In summing up his own experience, he affirmed that “the original mistake was certainly mine, in demanding from political action something that it cannot give.” But, he added, “The day I left the Communist Party was a very sad day for me, a day of deep mourning, of mourning for my youth. And I come from a region in which mourning is worn longer than elsewhere.”

At this point, he had to decide what to do with what was left of his life. To his mind, the first duty for men like him was to bear witness to what they had learned. “It is not pleasant,” he wrote, “to talk about one’s mistakes and follies, about one’s own hysteria; it is not amusing to live those years of oppression over again, even if only in recollection; but it is our duty to testify.” It was, above all, their duty toward the young, who perhaps had joined the Party on their account, or who were still looking for a banner. “What should we tell them? Simply the truth.”

When in 1942 he was approached in Switzerland by Allen Dulles with a request to obtain information for the Allies through his connections with members of the Resistance in Italy, he said that he would do so, but only to transmit political, not military, information. “Our interest,” he said, “is not in victory, but in freedom.” He was then the Political Secretary in Zurich of the Foreign Center of the Italian Socialists, which was in touch with the Resistance movements in Germany, Austria, France, and the Balkans. Repeatedly he affirmed his conviction that only one kind of struggle against fascism had any value — “that which takes place within each country,” without foreign propaganda or aid. In December, 1942, he did broadcast an appeal for civil resistance in Italy, with the result that he spent a short time in a Swiss prison. But that was the extent of his active participation in the Second World War. He considered himself and his friends to be waging “a private war against Fascism, which started long before the one between the states, and will go on much longer, since the struggle against the dangers of totalitarianism will certainly not come to an end with the War.”

After Silone’s return to Italy, he became a member of the Assembly which in 1946 drew up the new Italian Constitution, and again had a short period of political activity as a leader of the Italian Socialist Party, but this was soon broken up by inner dissension and Communist pressure, and brought about his final detachment from party politics. “We had the illusion,” he said frankly in 1949, “that we would be able to renew the traditional parties from within, that we would succeed in preventing the division of Italian politics into two camps, one under the protection of the United States, and one under that of Russia. Our hopes have failed.”

SILONE was possibly never meant, by temperament, to be a party man. He himself has written: “I have never derived any satisfaction from an assessment of my writings in purely sociological or party terms.” Nevertheless, it is not possible to separate his positions as a political rebel and as a writer: both spring from the same patient, persistent preoccupation with the condition and destiny of mankind. He is a moralist who began to write novels because, in exile, that was his only way of bearing witness to what he had seen. When he first wrote Fontamara, in 1930, even his command of his own language, according to himself, was very rough. He had always spoken dialect at home and had only learned Italian, like Latin or French, at school; “like the peasants of my region,” he wrote, “who have learned in the city to wear shoes, a collar and a tie.” The political and controversial echoes that his work has awakened have sometimes obscured, at least until recently, a full realization of his gifts as a writer, yet they cannot and should not be separated. He has himself compared his style to the weaver’s craft he practiced as a boy, “the old art of placing one thread after another, one color after another, tidily, persistently, clearly.” He is weaving a pattern, and the pattern, whether in his novels, his political essays, or his recent recollections, is in a sense always the same: it has always been concerned with men’s suffering, and with their need for brotherhood and freedom.

His first and most striking novel, Fontamara, the chronicle of a village not unlike his own, is not only the story of the bitter injustice suffered by the peasants of the Marsica at the hands of the landowners, but that of every rebel who has come to see the inevitable limitations of revolutionary movements and the recurring cycle by which, sooner or later, all revolutions turn into tyrannies. It is the story of the reactions of free men, rebelling against hypocrisy and violence, and against what has been decided for them “elsewhere.” It is told with an incisiveness and vigor, an irony and immediacy, which are to be found again in a later novel which Silone has once more set within the framework of a village chronicle, with the cafoni as his Greek chorus: perhaps the most accomplished of Silone’s works of fiction, Luca’s Secret. Indeed, in a sense it is true that all his works have the same setting. “Everything I have written,” he says, “and probably everything I may still write, is only concerned with the small piece of land that can be seen at a glance from the house where I was born.” But he also claims that his picture of this little world — that of the peasants of the Marsica — has a universal validity. All the world over, men such as these — fellahin, coolies, muzhiks, peones, cafoni, “men who cause the earth to bear fruit and go hungry themselves” — are alike. “They are a nation, a race, a church of their own.” It is these men whom, in all his books, Silone describes and defends.

One of the dominant themes of his writings is that of the need for brotherhood, the destruction of human loneliness. “Revolution,” says his young student, Murica, “is the need to cease to be alone. It is an attempt to remain together, and not to be afraid any more.” And a similar need is described, with great simplicity and restraint, in Silone’s second novel, Bread and Wine, in the friendship that die protagonist, Pietro Spina, feels for a deaf and dumb workman, Infante, whose food and stable he shares, and who becomes for him, as he painfully teaches him to speak, a symbol of human companionship.

“Companionship, compagnia,” says Pietro Spina, “was the first word that Infante learned from me. He could already say bread, pane, which he pronounced paan, and I explained to him with gestures that two men who ate the same bread became compagni, companions.” The next day Infante showed Spina “some mice burrowing in the straw for crumbs, muttering, ‘Compagni,” — and from that time he began to offer a piece of bread every day to our donkey, so that he, too, should belong to our company.”

Pietro Spina is a young man of Silone’s own region, the Marsica, who, after some years in exile in Belgium during the Fascist regime, returns to his own village under a false name, is disguised by his friends as a priest, and is hidden in a mountain village nearby, where he comes into touch, in secret, with a number of very different people: his own former teacher, an old priest called Don Benedetto, a group of Roman Communists, two village girls, the local Fascist officials, and a young student, Murica. The story ends in tragedy; Uliva, one of the Roman Communists, commits suicide, Murica is betrayed and murdered, old Don Benedetto is killed, and Spina himself has to escape into the mountains, while the girl Cristina, on her way to help him, is attacked by wolves. Indeed (and it was Silone himself who pointed this out to me), all his novels end with some form of self-sacrifice. “A Christian theme?” I suggested. Silone gently smiled, but did not answer.

In both the earlier novels Bread and Wine and The Seed Under the Snow, in which we are very conscious of an autobiographical vein, the protagonist, Pietro Spina, is not so much seeking God as pursued by Him, pursued by the “Hound of Heaven.” We even, in Uscita di Sicurezza, find Silone quoting Francis Thompson’s poem:

The theme has many centuries of Christian tradition behind it, but it is unexpected to find it on the lips of this former Communist.

THE position which Silone has only very recently achieved in Italy is an unexpected one. For many years he was undervalued, both as a thinker and a writer, by the clique of left-wing intellectuals whose influence after the Second World War became predominant in Italian literature; and on the other hand he was also regarded with some mistrust by the Catholic world. But now he has won the respect of almost every faction. In this change there is also, of course, an element of political opportunism: to admire Silone has now become not only the fashion, but almost a certificate of integrity. But there is also a very genuine admiration for a man who has covered such controversial ground and yet has laid the blame upon no one but himself. “Here,” a recent reviewer justly remarked, “there is only one man on trial: Silone. And only one judge: his own conscience.”

I don’t think he attaches any undue value to his sudden popularity. His yardstick is a different one, and he is still, as he started out, a solitary and questioning man, who has suffered a double ideological bankruptcy. Yet strangely enough, the strongest impression when one talks to him is not one of pessimism, but rather, though it may be tinged by sadness, of a quiet but vital confidence. Beneath the mistrust which life has taught him of political frameworks and clichés, of human hypocrisy, cruelty, and opportunism, there is still a stubborn, unquenchable spring of hope. He no longer believes in the possibility of a perfect political order or of any perfect institutional authority, and when asked, “Do you believe in a Christian society,” he dryly replied that there seems to be a certain incompatibility between these two terms. Yet to the more general question whether he still had faith in mankind, he answered: “I feel a certain trust. I feel confidence in the men who accept the inevitable suffering of existence and find some certainties within it. And in the same way I believe that out of the forced labor camps and the prisons of the totalitarian countries, some men may yet come forth, who will cause the blind to see.”

Much of Silone’s recent writing has been concerned with the problems of co-existence with Russia. If it is not necessary, he says, to offer the Russians our own pattern of society as a model, “especially as it does not awaken unmitigated enthusiasm even in all of us”; it is desirable that we should remain constantly aware of the changing elements in that country — just as a countryman standing on the edge of a landslide would watch each crack in the shifting soil — and, in the “difficult dialogue” with the Communist world which many intellectuals and left-wing Catholics are now attempting, “not to consider ‘the other’ as a remote symbol or potential instrument, but rather ‘as a neighbor,’ with whom a mutual sympathetic relationship (in spite of all difficulties) can be established.” However unforeseen, he adds, the future developments in Russia may still be, it is now plain that they are not going to take the paranoid form foreseen by George Orwell in 1984. “The face of Russia,” he writes, “is no longer that of Medusa: it is a human face.”

As for Silone’s own present attitude, he has defined it most clearly in an essay entitled “The Choice of Comrades.” In this, he totally rejects the solution of nihilism, which he defines as “the general tendency to identify history with the victorious, the ignoble cowardice which impels so many intellectuals either toward Communism or toward the extreme Right. Are the weak and the dead then always in wrong? Was Mazzini wrong? And Trotsky only mistaken because he was defeated?” He is fond of quoting, in this connection, Simone Weil’s definition of justice, “that fugitive from the victor’s camp.”

What road should the young then follow? And what is left for such men as himself and the whole “Legion of refugees of the International”? For himself, he has written, the certainties still left are, in spite of everything, “the Christian certainties.” “They seem to me,” he says, “so deeply rooted in human reality as to have become identified with it. To deny them is to disintegrate man himself.” “This,” he admits, “is too little to constitute a profession of faith, but enough for one of trust . . . based on the inner assurance that we are free and responsible beings, that each man has an absolute need to open his heart to another man’s realities, and that it is possible for souls to communicate with each other. Isn’t that an irrefutable proof of man’s brotherhood?”

Yet Silone has not returned to Catholicism, though he would agree that the Church of the Second Vatican Council is a very different one from that of his school days. Perhaps his reluctance has its roots chiefly in his unconquerable distaste for all forms of institutionalism and for any privileges confined to a chosen elite: a sentiment not dissimilar to that which prevented Simone Weil from embracing the Catholic faith. One is reminded of Peguy’s phrase: “What would He say, if one of us came to Him, without all the rest?” What Silone has written about one of his own characters, Rocco de Donati, is perhaps valid for himself, too. “Rocco was born with an instinctive vocation for the same absolute standards as those he would have found in a monastery. But he remained in the world outside. That is why he found himself in a tragic and absurd situation.”

It was only after leaving the Communist Party, he has said elsewhere, that he was able to form a true relationship with other men again. “The true human solitude is the one produced by falsehood, envy, selfishness. . . . To save ourselves from the wolves, some of us have been obliged to overcome our bourgeois, nineteenth-century limitations, and to rediscover our Early Christian affinities.” But he would, I think, be the first to admit that his present attitude is one which offers no universal panacea, no permanent resting-place. It is, in his own words, “like a refugees’ camp in no-man’sland, roofless, set up as best they could. What can refugees do from morning to night? They spend their time in telling each other the stories of their lives. They are certainly not amusing stories, but the chief reason why they tell them, is to try to understand their meaning.” His books — like those tales told under the stars — were written “in order to try to understand.” “I am not at all sure,” he has said, “that I have reached the end of my reflections.”