He was bom as Secondo Tranquilli, the son of a poor family of peasants and weavers in the Abruzzi town of Pescina, on May 1,1900.. .a date that even the most absent-minded would remember. His alias as a revolutionary and his nom-de-plume as a writer was perhaps derived from an Abmzzi mountain rebel named Quintus Pompaelius Silo who led a successful insurrection against Rome in 90 b.c. on behalf of the rights of the Marsers. In any case, we know how deep are his historic roots in his native region from one of his later works, a success both as a book and a play, The History o f a Poor Christian, which deals with the tragedy of the Abruzzian pope, Coelestin.
His mother and five other children, perished in the earthquake of 1905. A brother died in a fascist prison. But no less strong in his memory remains the picture of those “cafoni,” the poor workers in the fields, who lived in the villages around Pescina, came to town to market and passed by his childhood house.
Silone’s career as an Italian communist and his break with the Stalinist Comintern has often been described, and nowhere better than in his own still valuable account in Crossman’s volume called The God that Failed. The occasion—and it is a detail that one forgets—was his refusal to sign a docu ment that he had not been given to read. He fought for the honor of his signature, even for the dignity of a name which was not originally his own. In the Mussolini years he lived in exile in Switzerland (1930-44), mostly in Zurich. In a sense he was “doubly alienated,” having broken with both com rades and country, and it left literature as his only home. It was his very loneliness and isolation, deepened by illness, which gave a special character to his novel Fontamara and possibly gave it a note, which in those days facilitated its immense popularity. It was translated into several dozen lan guages, enjoyed both literary and political favor (and Leon Trotsky, himself a refugee, hoped it would be circulated in millions of copies).
Still, his essential temperament—for all his political commitments and ideological polemics—was far from abstract word spinning. It was that of a teller of tales, as any one who has enjoyed hearing an anecdote from his lips knows; and he continued as a fabulist, a writer of stories, plays and novels.
Even in his non-fiction his mind turns always to the specific example, the human fact, in setting out an analysis, as in his very early and still Marxian book on “Fascism, Its Origin and Development” (Zurich, 1934). In his subse quent work entitled The School for Dictators (reissued some years ago by Gollancz) this trait was reinforced by his distaste for his countrymen’s habit of grandiloquent rhetoric. His anti-fascist bitterness was tempered by his ironic wit.
In our Italian literature there is the figure of Don Ferrante, a Milanese ideologue of the 18th century, who reflected long and deep over the cholera epidemic which had been sweeping through the Northern provinces. According to Aristotle, as he well knew, there could only be two categories: accidental things and substantial things.
But inasmuch as the cholera symptoms and consequences appeared to fit into neither of these fundamental categories, it could therefore not exist. This conclusion, how ever, did not prevent him from being infected and passing away....
I felt for a long time that Fontamara (1933), Bread and Wine (1936), and the other novels centered around the revolutionary Pietro Spina constituted the real heart of Silone’s body of work. Reconsidering his career, I wonder whether that place should not rather be given to his autobiographical contri butions, his personal memoirs as well as his general reflections (Encounter once published his long memorable essay on “Re-thinking Progress” [March/ April 1968]); for they do, taken together, constitute something of an “Uscita di sicurezza,” an emergency exit for twentieth-century man.
Silone always preferred to be an old-fashioned, rather than a fashionable, writer. Yet he always appeared to be spanning a vast arc from the ancient past to the imminent future, from a bygone world of feudal and Christian values to the “Post Industrial Society.” When I first met him he was only forty, and I remember being so struck by his capacity to maintain long silences, punctu ated every now and then by sudden bursts of reminiscence. His withdrawal was not indifference or timidity but modesty; and his communication was, when it came, deeply personally felt. It was, as I came to know, the very rhythm of a master, and the special quality that bound him to all his readers as a “compagno.” His companions greet him on his seventy-fifth birthday in Rome.
August 1975
from the book European Notebooks New Societies and Old Politics, 1954-1985 (François Bondy, Melvin J. Lasky)
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