Afterword by David Shonfield

As the Communist Party took power in China and war in Korea threatened, a book appeared in January 1950, that was to have a profound impact on the left. Six well-known writers described in turn how they had become attached to the communist movement, and how they then had ‘lost their faith’. The title of the book was The God That Failed, and it became a catchphrase to describe the disillusion of those, above all the intellectuals, who had joined or supported the Communist Party in the 1930s, only to discover – in some cases rather late in the day – what Stalinism really meant.
Among the contributors to the book was Ignazio Silone. But his essay was quite unlike the others. For Silone was as concerned to justify socialism as to denounce Stalinism. And after describing the vile betrayal of all his hopes and ideals, he concluded:
But my faith in Socialism, to which I think I can say my entire life bears testimony, has remained more alive than ever in me. In its essence it has gone back to what it was when I first revolted against the old social order; a refusal to admit the existence of destiny, an extension of the ethical impulse from the restricted individual and family sphere to the whole domain of human activity, a need for effective brotherhood. . . The more Socialist theories claim to be ‘scientific,’ the more transitory they are; but Socialist values are permanent. The distinction between theories and values is not sufficiently recognised, but it is fundamental. On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilisation, a new way of living together among men.
This moral commitment lies at the heart of Silone’s life, both as an individual and as a writer. It reached its height in Fontamara. Exiled and apparently dying of tuberculosis, it was the crisis of his life. He was preparing to break with the Communist Party, and in the process to sacrifice both friendship and love. But to understand the circumstances in which Fontamara was written we need to understand a little of Silone’s life.
Silone was born on 1st May 1900 in Pescina, a small town in the mountainous region of the Abruzzi. His real name was not Ignazio Silone – he was born Secondino Tranquilli. Pescina was not Fontamara and Silone was not a poor peasant. His father owned a small amount of land; his mother was a weaver.
In 1915 an earthquake shattered central Italy. Around 50,000 people were killed, among them both Silone’s parents. An orphan at the age of 14 he was forced to grow up extremely fast. In 1917, as political agitation against the government and the war grew rapidly, Silone became regional secretary for the rural workers of the Abruzzi. He was arrested on a demonstration against the war. Four articles he wrote for the Socialist Party paper Avanti! resulted in the editions being suppressed by the authorities: he had denounced the diversion of funds supposedly destined for earthquake relief. He was invited to Rome and appointed secretary of the Socialist Youth Federation, editing its weekly paper L’Avanguardia.
Over the next three years, as the revolutionary wave swept across Europe, Silone identified firmly with the militant left of the socialist movement, centred on the factory councils of Turin. It was this group, led by Antonio Gramsci, which split from the Socialist Party to form the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in January 1921. At a stormy conference, the first delegate to declare his support for the Communists was Ignazio Silone, in the name of an organisation which now claimed some 50,000 supporters.
Silone immediately took on important roles in the new party. He was appointed editor of the paper for the city of Trieste and then, as the fascist threat grew and Mussolini came to power, went underground. Over the next three years he was sent as a Communist Party delegate to Germany, France, Spain and Russia. In 1925 he was brought into the publications department of the PCI to work with Gramsci and became responsible for Party propaganda and agitation.
It was just at this point that fascist repression grew most savage. Using the pretext of a plot to assassinate Mussolini, all opposition parties and papers were banned. Gramsci was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The PCI was driven completely underground and into exile. The external leadership was assigned to Palmiro Togliatti. Silone became responsible for the internal Centre.
These were the circumstances in which Silone and Togliatti were summoned to Moscow for a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. It was to be a decisive experience in Silone’s life.
He had already been in Moscow on several occasions, becoming increasingly concerned about the ugly degeneration of the revolution. But on this occasion matters took a wholly new turn. Under Stalin’s control the Comintern was to be used as a means to begin the liquidation of internal opposition, specifically Trotsky and Zinoviev. The pretext was a document by Trotsky attacking the disastrous policies of the Comintern in China, where collaboration with the nationalists had led directly to the massacre of tens of thousands of workers in Shanghai and Wuhan.
The delegates were invited to condemn Trotsky’s document. It was difficult to do so, Silone apologised, since neither he nor Togliatti had read it. Neither have we, came the response.
‘The reply given to me was so incredible’ Silone remembered ‘that I rounded on the translator. "It’s impossible. . . I must ask you to repeat his answer word for word"’.
Outrage followed, with the Stalinists insisting on unanimous condemnation and the Italians (and others) refusing to vote on a document they hadn’t seen. In an atmosphere of intimidation the policy discussions began. One incident summed up the situation: Zinoviev was prevented from entering the meeting by the Russian police guards. He had been excluded by a purely arbitrary decision. Silone recalled: ‘I kept asking Togliatti, "Do you suppose that’s the way they do things in the Sacred College of Cardinals? Or in the Fascist Grand Council?"’
‘The system’s failure was much greater than I had supposed,’ he wrote later. As he journeyed back to fascist Italy from Stalin’s Moscow he once again encountered comrades he could know and trust: ‘I found those traits of generosity, frankness, solidarity and lack of prejudice which were the genuine and traditional resource of Socialism in its struggle against bourgeois decadence and corruption’.
The memory of Moscow seemed ‘like an unreal nightmare’ and when he reported on events to a meeting in Milan, the first reaction was a ‘proposal to print posters reading "Long Live Trotsky" on the walls of Milanese factories.’ In reality there was little they could do, except – Silone believed – to defend the Italian Party from the Stalinist tyranny. But rapidly he realised this was a false hope.
It took less than three years for any hope of resistance within the PCI to the Stalin regime to wither. By that time Silone was in exile in Switzerland and suffering severely from TB. He had in effect taken the decision to withdraw from Party activity, but passivity was not enough for the leadership. To show his loyalty he would have to denounce his former comrades who had been expelled, notably Pietro Tresso, one of the best underground leaders, and those who had allied themselves with Trotsky. The denunciation was typed out and signed for him by Togliatti. Even that was not enough. Silone was expelled for not having broken fully with the ‘renegades,’ with the suggestion that he was also mentally unbalanced.
It was the summer of 1931, 12 months since he had completed the manuscript of Fontamara in the sanatorium at Davos. Years later, when he came to revise the book – Silone revised nearly everything he wrote – he described his state of mind:
‘Since in the doctors’ view I had only a short time to live, I wrote hurriedly, in an indescribable state of anxiety and stress, to construct to the best of my ability the village into which I put the quintessence of myself and the district in which I was born, so that at least I might die among my own people.’
But the anxiety and stress was not simply the result of illness and isolation. Fontamara was his first book and it was also a testament, dedicated to the two people who were closest to him.
One was Gabriella Seidenfeld (‘Serena’) his comrade and lover since they had met in 1921 in Trieste. The ‘red jewess’ as he called her had been his constant companion, at his side in the clandestine work and on his trips abroad. Her loyalty to him was unswerving, but so was her loyalty to the Party. When he left, their relationship could not survive.
The other was Romulo Tranquilli, his younger brother and the only surviving member of his family. Romulo had been in prison since 1928, accused of being a member of the PCI. He was so brutally beaten and tortured at the time of his arrest that he received permanent internal injuries, injuries which led to his death in prison in 1932. Romulo was not a militant; he was, in Silone’s words, ‘a vaguely anti-Fascist young man whose education and feelings were Catholic. . . Why did he confess he was a Communist? Why did he affirm his confession before the judge of a special tribunal which used his confession to condemn him to 12 years in prison? He wrote to me: "I have tried to act as I thought you would have in my place" ’.
So it was that the self-sacrifice of Berardo, the hero of Fontamara, was born.
The manuscript of Fontamara circulated in the exile community in Switzerland without exciting much attention. The renowned Italian historian and critic, Gaetano Salvemini, described it as ‘untranslateable’. ‘The facts are so alien to someone who isn’t Italian – and even many Italians’ he wrote. ‘Who today, abroad, would have the money to risk on a book which would sell so few copies?’
Others were to echo that view. When the manuscript was offered to publishers in Britain it was rejected several times, by Gollancz among others. In the United States the book was rejected 12 times before it found a publisher. But Silone himself had no doubts. ‘There is something new in me’ he wrote in a letter to Gabriella. ‘I am not in the least worried about the judgement which will be made of Fontamara. I have never been so certain in myself. . . (the peasants) are so alive that I speak with them. I think they are the first peasants of flesh and blood who will appear in Italian literature’.
But Fontamara was not to appear in Italian first. It was in the German-speaking community that the book struck home. Thus it was that the ‘untranslateable’ appeared first in translation – a translation undertaken without payment by a woman who had never translated a book before. The costs were underwritten by 800 subscribers, and the book was serialised simultaneously in several German newspapers.
It took three years for Fontamara to appear in print: the years of the slump, the fatal division of the German workers’ movement, the triumph of the Nazis. Fontamara was not the first book about fascism, but it was the first book which showed what fascism was really like, told in the language of wretched of the earth, the cafoni of Italy.
Fontamara had an impact far beyond the dreams of its author. Within a year it had appeared in nine languages. By 1936 it was available in 20 countries, and a stage version – ‘Bitter Stream’ – was showing in New York. Fontamara became the very symbol of the need to resist fascism. It was a book which raised passion to the level of art, and raised art to the level of agitation.
The shift from complete isolation to sudden fame could have ruined Silone. By 1935 he was living in luxury, enjoying the hospitality of a Swiss banker who had befriended him. But although he appreciated the comforts, he was indifferent to them. He remained a self-effacing, rather taciturn figure. And despite his success with Fontamara, and his second novel Bread and Wine, published in 1936, he was not popular with the authorities. He was refused residence in France; while the British Government showed its customary generosity towards political refugees and refused him even the right to visit the country. He was offered the chance of exile in the United States on the personal initiative of Eleanor Roosevelt; he turned it down.
Thus it was that the outbreak of the Second World War found him still in Switzerland. He had rejected all party political activity since 1931, but under pressure from friends he agreed to take responsibility for the Foreign Centre of the Soclialist Party. It was a thankless task and one for which he was not well suited. He again fell seriously ill; and the Swiss authorities, while refusing Mussolini’s demands for extradition, interned Silone for most of the war.
Despite the pressures and the hardships, Silone renewed his commitment to activity. He produced a socialist publication ‘L’Avvenire dei Lavoratori’ (The Future of the Workers) in which he outlined the need for what he called the ‘Third Front’ against fascism. The political platform he drafted in 1942 and published in 1944 shortly before his return from exile shows how his politics had shifted since his years in the Communist Party. The formulations he adopted could be interpreted in a variety of ways, and it was just this tendency to try and straddle quite different political positions which led to trouble after the war. But the platform also shows Silone’s continued commitment to some of the socialist principles of the 1920s. But how were these principles to be put into practice? Silone returned to an Italy where the Communist Party now had enormous prestige as the main organised force which had opposed fascism, not only politically but militarily. In the industrial north the rank and file of the PCI had organised the first mass strikes against fascism. The partisans had huge popular support. Compared to this the PSI had very little,and those forces it did have were in favour of collaboration – at least – with the Communists.
Yet Silone’s principal position as the new editor of Avanti! was to fight tooth and nail against a fusion with the Stalinists. In 1947 the PSI split between left and right: the left in favour of working with the PCI, the right already preparing for the Cold War. Silone attempted to assert an independent position between the two factions. His grouping had some apparent support: the new party he launched in 1949 (the PSU) in an attempt to regroup the non-communist left had the backing of several thousand members, a newspaper, and 15 Parliamentary deputies. But in reality it was a mirage. Those who attempt to stand in the middle of a busy road usually get knocked down. The PSU collapsed almost as soon as it was born. Silone withdrew from organised politics for the second time in his life, this time for good.
It is easy to see the remaining years of Silone’s life (he died in 1978) as one inexorable slide to the right. He played the leading role in setting up the Italian branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organisation which later proved to be largely funded by the CIA. None of the books he wrote in the post-war period remotely approached the quality of Fontamara or Bread and Wine. The religious aspect of his personal faith grew stronger and, as it did, so some of his articles degenerated into superficial moralising. He consistently opposed the idea of any role for the Communist Party in a governing alliance, even though by doing so he in effect aligned himself with the hard right, above all in the early 1970s.
In 1958 he published the ‘definitive’ version of Fontamara. Although most of the changes were slight – unlike Bread and Wine (retitled Wine and Bread) which was a substantially different book.
As he said in a note to the revised version of Fontamara: ‘I retouched the picture here and there. Some characters have become more distinct and others have receded into the background. But they are the same characters and the same story’.
The new edition was more polished, less hewn. One chapter, dealing with the ‘Hero of Porta Pia’ was cut out completely, making for a neater book but depriving the reader of a masterly explanation of how people are drawn into fascist movements. In the final chapter he gave a more central role to Maria Grazia, the victim of the gang-rape by the fascists, by having her draft the text of the newspaper.
Finally there was his decision to delete all mention of the word Unity. L’Unita was the name of the paper founded by Gramsci in 1924 and suppressed by Mussolini in 1926. When Fontamara was written, l’Unita was a word which symbolised resistance. After the war the PCI revived the paper and l’Unita became the most recognisable symbol of the party: from the 1950s every town and village with a significant PCI presence would have its own local Festa dell’Unita – a local fair with a political gloss. It is a sad irony that Silone seems to have felt unable to use the word because it had been appropriated by the Stalinist enemy.
Yet for all his slide to the right Silone did not surrender his principles. Many of the disillusioned intellectuals of the 1950s with whom he mixed became simple apologists for capitalism and the American Way of Life. Their detestation of Stalinism led them to embrace another false idol. Silone was different. For one thing he was expelled from the Communist Party just at the time when many others were joining it. And Silone’s entire experience of the movement was as a militant and a fighter.
This experience marked him out for the rest of his life. In the 1950s he denounced the McCarthy witch hunts. In the 1960s he opposed the American war in Vietnam. When the Hungarian Uprising was drowned in blood by Russian troops in 1956, Silone stood out against those who looked to the USA or the UN for hope. The lesson of Budapest, he wrote, was that the Stalinist system could not survive. The most important fact was that Russian soldiers had deserted and crossed over to the side of the rebellious workers. ‘I must confess’ he wrote ‘that I attribute to episodes of this sort a far greater importance than I do to the General Assembly of the United Nations’. And, he went on, change always comes from below not from above. ‘Let us not forget that the new era in Russian life did not begin with the Twentieth Party Congress, but with the great strikes of slave labourers in the Vorkuta concentration camps’.
Silone’s life was moulded first by the hope of a new world which followed the Great War and the Russian Revolution and then by disillusion and defeat as Fascism and Stalinism reigned triumphant. He saw clearly, and much earlier than most, the consequences of Stalinism. And he depicted what Fascism really meant in a way the whole world could understand. The 1990s are not the 1930s. Fascism has not triumphed. But once again the refrain of Fontamara’s peasants rings out.

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