BIOGRAPHY: Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone by Stanislao Pugliese Farrar Straus and Groux 426pp, €35 - An examination of the life of an Italian writer who remained an enigma, even to his Irish wife
LATE IN life the Italian writer Ignazio Silone was asked if he missed his native Abruzzo, the poor mountain region between Rome and Pescara where he had grown up. “My Abruzzo,” he answered, “is everywhere.” Meaning anywhere the impoverished had to deal with power and fate.
By then his novels Fontamaraand Bread and Winewere in translation, from English to Hindi. He was giving speeches on cultural freedom in Moscow and Washington. His name had become synonymous with something beyond literature, a simplicity nearer the Gospels than to Marx or Lenin.
And yet, as Stanislao Pugliese illustrates in his fine study of the writer, a less simple human being could scarcely be imagined. Everything about Silone, from his name (a pseudonym adopted when he was active in the Italian Communist movement) to the exact nature of his politics (was he a double or even a triple agent?) to his sexuality (the suggestion that he had had a homosexual relationship with a Fascist police officer) remains problematic.
Nor, it would seem, was he an easy person to be around. “He had no talent for human relations” his Irish wife, Darina Laracy, said after his death, adding that to her, too, he remained an enigma. Dour, self-absorbed, depressive to the point of being suicidal, intelligent to the point of being wickedly sarcastic at the expense of anyone within range, the best of him would appear to be in the books and writings. The rest, as he seems to have wished, is oblivion.
He was born in 1900, in the town of Pescina overlooking the Fucino plain, an old lakebed drained in the 19th century and the landscape of his finest work. By the age of 17, he had lost five of six siblings, his father had died after a failed attempt at fortune-seeking in Brazil, and his mother had been crushed to death in the earthquake of 1915 that killed, within two minutes, 3,500 of the total population of 5,000 townspeople. A mixture of poverty, politics and natural disaster had led to the kind of spiritual orphanhood immortalised in the poem With a Pure Heartby the Hungarian poet Attila Joszef:
I have no father and no mother
I have no country and no God
I have no lover in my bed
I won’t be buried when I’m dead
Like Joszef, and millions all over Europe after the first World War, that orphanhood led Silone to the false warmth of the international Communist movement, to love as comradeship, to the Party as family. A poor but intelligent boy, who had slept under bridges in Rome, found himself swept, by the early 1920s, into a murky revolutionary zone between Communism and Fascism, though always with the folk Catholicism of his Abruzzo childhood in the background. There was a companion, Gabriella Seidenfeld, part lover, part substitute mother. There were prisons in Spain, clandestine visits to Paris, meetings with Lenin in Moscow – a life out of Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, yet strangely abstract, leaving no human trace.
The crisis came in the early 1930s with the death of Romolo, his one remaining brother, at the hands of the Fascists, and with his own expulsion from the Communist Party – the emotional impact of which it would be hard, perhaps, for this generation to understand. He was sick, penniless, in exile in Zurich, on the edge of suicide. Swiss patrons, themselves exiles, seem to have intervened, crucially, to create a subsidised space for introspection, enabling him to reach inside himself to his Abruzzo childhood. And so began the trilogy of novels – Fontamara, Bread and Wine, The Seed Beneath the Snow– written through the 1930s, that were to shift his image from activist to writer.
For an Irish reader, the novels of Silone might best be compared to the Aran fiction of Liam O'Flaherty or The Islandmanby Tomás O'Crohan. Essentially plotless, shot through with natural disaster, earthy folk wisdom and stoic philosophy, holding at arm's length the hostilities of church and state. What they are not is, in Czeslaw Milosz's ironic phrase "the literature of erotic complications".
What they are, on the other hand, is an opportunity for ethical religious debate against a background at once local and universal. Disparaged by the Italian stilnovistias "not a real writer" on his return from exile, he had the backing, nonetheless, of the ones who mattered. Albert Camus, for example, or Eugenio Montale for whom he was "one of the few Italian writers with something real to say".
Silone gave as good as he got, sarcastically characterising writers as "ornaments of the age", court flatterers ingratiating themselves with whatever regime was in power. As this biography shows, however, there was a lot going on behind the apparent simplicity of those woodcuts of peasant life. The communist in priest's garb, Pietro Spina, in Bread and Wine, bespeaks a deep inner conflict. The informer, Luigi Murica, in the same book, is another coded signal.
“There is a secret in my life,” Silone once said. After his death, in 1978, letters were published discrediting him as a one-time Fascist spy. Neither his wife nor his current biographer dispute their authenticity, only the interpretation to be put on them, which remains endlessly open to question. No one will ever know, for no one is left to follow the cold trail of pseudonyms and shifting allegiances to what was once the real person.
His final royalty statement from America, shortly before he died, was for 10 cents. Are his books in print? They are not in bookshops. Which is ironic, of course, given that, in the words of Karl Marx, the capitalist society Silone so abhorred is once again in the process – bookshops included – of “perishing from internal contradiction”.
His socialism was always of the gospel variety, and his life, which as he said himself could so easily have been monastic, was perhaps the only kind of religious life possible in the century through which he lived. The socialism he could still believe in was that of Joachim di Fiore and Francis of Assisi. His final years, with the faithful Darina, were spent researching, in the Abruzzo mountains, a novel to be based on a hermit who refused to become pope.
TODAY THE FUCINO PLAIN, the stage on which the envies, dreams and hatreds of his cafoniwere played out, is a chequerboard of mechanised, corporate agriculture.
A few ruined contadinohouses, an autostradapit-stop or two showing spaghetti westerns behind the counter. Everything, the dreams and disillusionments, is still there to be rewritten. As Silone said "I would like to write the same book again and again, the only book inside me, as medieval painters kept painting the face of Christ."
Harry Clifton's poems of the Abruzzo, including At the Grave of Siloneare collected in Night Train Through the Brenner(Gallery Press). He teaches at the school of English, University College Dublin