Il Caso Silone.

• Author: McDonald, Michael P.

NEMO PROPHETA acceptus est in patria sua. The novels of Ignazio Silone are full of biblical symbols and citations, the latter often appearing in the lapidary cadences of the Vulgare. Reading through the Pleiade-like, two-volume set of Silone's opera omnia, which Mondadori released as the centenary of the writer's birth approached last year, one is struck by the extent to which Silone's creative vision sprang from and remained rooted in Scripture.

Of his near contemporaries, perhaps only Andre Gide matches Silone in the obsessive way he conscripts biblical sayings and stories to serve his fictional needs. But whereas the Bible was a psychological sounding board to Gide, a means to plumb the paradoxes and perversities of human nature, to Silone it was less a means to promote greater individual self-awareness than a hallowed reminder of the perennial want of human solidarity.

For most of his life, Gide was an apostle of aesthetic detachment and hedonistic self-absorption; Silone, in contrast, was one of the most engage of 20th-century writers. And yet it is Gide whose recourse to the Bible sounds more ponderous and trite. That Silone avoids this fate is due, in no small part, to his abiding sense of irony. In his novels, Scripture is more likely to slither approvingly from the mouths of the Pharisees of his day--greedy landowners, spineless prelates, corrupt bureaucrats--than from heroes or truth-seekers. Silone is loath to preach. Curiously, of the many biblical sayings scattered throughout his work, one line--from Luke 24:4, quoted above: "No prophet is accepted in his own country"--is conspicuously missing. More than strange, the absence of this citation is fittingly ironic inasmuch as no other verse is more apposite in defining Silone's own reception as a writer in his native land.

If it were possible to poll Italian intellectuals of the last half century; the reactions one would most likely encounter at the sound of Silone's name are hatred, incomprehension and studied indifference. Silone's early involvement with and apostasy from various revolutionary movements forever branded him as much a political as a literary figure. Inevitably, this meant that anyone with the intellectual wherewithal to shape public opinion--journalists, academics, businessmen, party hacks and parish priests--held strong opinions about him. And excepting a cluster of liberals and democratic socialists--a discrete minority in Italy--it was not favorable. The question is why?

The hatred Silone provokes in extremist political circles is easiest to explain. With the publication of his first novel, Fontamara (published first in German in 1933 and, later that same year, in a truncated Italian version), Silone did more to discredit fascism than any other Italian-- and perhaps even European-writer of his day. The book, a searing denunciation of institutional injustice set in his native region of the Abruzzi during the early years of Mussolini's dictatorship, rapidly achieved international celebrity and ended up being translated into 27 languages. The same, mutatis mutandis, may be said of Silone's unmasking of communism after the publication of his 1949 essay, Uscita di sicurezza ("Emergency Exit"), later included as part of The God that Failed, Richard Crossman's famous postwar collection of confessional testimonies by disillusioned ex-communists.

Though they meet under different party labels these days, there remain significant numbers of unreconstructed fascists and communists in Italy whose graying ranks have been bolstered by the addition of younger Italians with no memory of the war and, as a twenty-something bartender made clear to me on my last visit to Rome, no great love of parliamentary democracy. This is particularly true of the neo-fascists who, having relegitimized their political presence under the polished leadership of Gianfranco Fini, gained even greater public acceptance this spring thanks to the impressive electoral success of Fini's free-market front-man and newly installed Italian president, media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. Neither the fascists nor the communists have forgotten how Silone, an active voice in Italian politics until shortly before his death in 1978, discredited their respective causes. And the vendettas they bear keep the hatred alive.

The incomprehension that other, less ideologically inclined Italians feel toward Silone is also readily diagnosed. Silone himself provided the best explanation when, in a 1961 interview published in the Parisian magazine L'Express, he defined himself memorably, as "a socialist without a party, a Christian without a church." Postwar Italian politics was (and remains) a partitocrazia--and a man without an identifiable political affiliation was a man destined to have his motives questioned.

Silone, in short, was a political loner, a trait which suited his dour temperament. Worse, he never wavered in reminding ordinary Italians of the heavy responsibility they themselves bore first, for having created fascism, and later, for having failed to construct an honest form of democratic socialism after the war. Hence the prevalent attitude of studied indifference to his writings and his life in Italian society at large. Silone could not help but be aware of and affected by the hostility and suspicion he provoked in his fellow countrymen. "When, as occasionally happened, I caught a glimpse of him on the streets of Rome", the novelist Antonio Debenedetti told me recently, "the sense of solitude that clung to him was overpowering." Given the events of his life, it could not have been otherwise.

SILONE WAS born in the town of Pescina dei Marsi, in the hardscrabble Marsica region of the Abruzzi, near Rome, on May 1, 1900. His father, who died when he was eight, owned a small farm in the region, and the boy's life, growing up poor in this provincial backwater, was simple and austere. When Silone was fifteen, a severe earthquake destroyed his native town and left over 30,000 people dead, including his mother. Homeless and virtually destitute, Silone and the sole remaining member of his immediate family, a younger brother named Romolo, were forced to rely upon private charities to survive. Moving about from one religious institution to another, Silone eventually made his way to Rome, where the political agitation that erupted in Italy near the conclusion of the First World War soon captured his imagination. In 1917 he dropped out of school and gravitated to the Socialist Youth Movement. Then, in 1921, having grown increasingly dissatisfied with the Socialist Party's reformist tendencies, the young revolu tionary, together with leftist intellectuals Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, broke with it to found the Italian Communist Party. Silone's native intelligence and his talent with a pen quickly made him indispensible to the nascent party's organization, diffusion and propaganda. As a leading communist intellectual, Silone attended various international conferences on its behalf and often traveled abroad on clandestine missions. When the fascists, who had achieved power in 1922, succeeded in banning opposition parties in 1926, Silone risked imprisonment to stay in Italy to ensure that l'Unita and other communist papers continued to circulate clandestinely.

Beginning in 1927, however, Silone began to doubt the virtues and values embodied by the Communist Party. In May of that year, Silone and Togliatti had traveled to Moscow to attend a meeting of the International Communist Executive at the Kremlin, where Stalin sought to have Trotsky condemned on the basis of secret evidence. As recounted in Uscita di sicurezza, Silone refused to serve as an accomplice in Stalin's plan on the basis of blind faith in the higher historical purpose he purportedly served. In succeeding years, Silone's doubts about and refusal to embrace "Communist morality" persisted to the point where the party formally expelled him in 1931.

At that time he was living in Zurich, where he would remain until he returned to Rome in the fall of 1944. During these years of exile, Silone launched a new career as a writer and fastened on the pseudonym of Ignazio Silone to replace his baptismal name of Secondo Tranquilli. It was during this period of exile that he wrote the Abruzzi trilogy of novels Fontamara, Bread and Wine and The Seed Beneath the Snow; an important essay on the origins of fascism, Der Faschismus; and a political dialogue entitled The School for Dictators. The publication of these books catapulted Silone to the forefront of engage political literature, alongside such prominent figures as George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, who were leading the fight against totalitarianism of both the Left and the Right. They brought Silone an international readership along with fame and admiration--except, that is, in Italy, where his life as an exile and an outlaw inescapably tainted his reception.

More than that, fascism had successfully interposed a barrier of censorship between the Italian reading public and the rest of the world's appreciation of Silone's originality as a writer. To earn a living, Silone had been...