After a quarrel with Jean Colbert, Tony Maggiore in _Caesar’s Angel_
berates her friend Al Piazza: “You talk so big about it making no
difference between American and Italian girls. You ever hear a good
Italian girl open her mouth about politics? You hear her insulting the
men?” This assertion is contradicted by Stella in Silone’s _A Handful
of Blackberries_, but even were it completely true, it would be one of
the minor differences between American and Italian political behavior
patterns. Immensely different historical antecedents separate the two
peoples. The Italian, with a background of autocratic rule except for
comparatively short intervals, has played his political role on a far
different stage from that of the American. But there is more to it
than just politics. The economic bases which help to form political
groups have produced in Italy a stratification in which the layers are
more widely separated than any in America. The migrant fruit pickers,
the dust-blown Okies, the exploited miners in America seem well off
beside the systematically persecuted peasants and submerged city
_lumpenproletariat_ of Italy. The Italians at the other end of the
scale are just as far from the norm. Gould, Fisk, and Vanderbilt may
have owned railroads, but Prince Torlonia owns immense ranges of the
Roman and Tuscan countryside, together with 35,000 acres of the Fucino
basin worked by eleven thousand farmers. But this great gulf between
classes is only one of the factors which appear responsible for Italy’s
political ills.
Silone concentrates mainly upon the peasantry in his novels. His heart
is close to them, and his description is sympathetic. But he does more
than set forth their sufferings. His books also diagnose the cause of
their problems and suggest solutions. Many of his peasants appear like
credulous, superstitious children. The four-day thunder and lightning
storm which nearly sweeps Pietrasecca off its mountain in _Bread and
Wine_ is blamed upon two lovers who have gone to live in a house
considered damned. Don Paolo watches the gathering of a crowd which is
swept into such a hysteria by its roar of “CHAY DOO! CHAY DOO! CHAY
DOO!” that it forgets to listen to the oracular radio voice it has
come to hear. Silone pities them: “a people whose wisdom was summed
up in a few proverbs passed down from generation to generation, had
been literally submerged and overwhelmed by propaganda.” Don Paolo
also blames this ignorance upon the Church in Italy. Like his teacher
Don Benedetto, who was said to have called the reigning pontiff “Pope
Pontius XI,” Don Paolo feels that Italy needs
A Christianity denuded of all mythology, of all theology, of all
Church control; a Christianity that neither abdicates in the face
of Mammon, nor proposes concordats with Pontius Pilate, nor offers
easy careers to the ambitious, but rather leads to prison....
Silone’s hero is equally dissatisfied with a religious vocation
which withdraws from life. He talks with the beautiful and spiritual
Christina, who devoutly waits to enter the convent:
Do you not think that this divorce between a spirituality which
retires into contemplation and a mass of people dominated by
animal instincts is the source of all our ills? Do you not think
that every living creature ought to live and struggle among his
fellow-creatures rather than shut himself up in an ivory tower?
Although _A Handful of Blackberries_ contains more scenes set in Rome
than the other two Silone novels discussed here, a better view of the
Italian city dweller is given by Taddei and Moravia. Taddei’s _The
Pine Tree and the Mole_ is built about citizens of Livorno who are as
widely separated by wealth and position as are Silone’s Old Zaccaria
and the Tarocchi family. The circle of lawyers and politicians who
exchange wives and party labels are a different breed of men from the
jailbirds, pimps, and informers at the opposite extreme of Livorno’s
social structure. But both groups are equally adrift, both caught in
the same wave of post-World War I exhaustion and economic derangement
which sent so many Italians in search of the answer that Mussolini
seemed to provide. Taddei emphasizes poverty and depression as the main
factors which prepared the way for the Fascist regime, but one senses
something else, particularly among his representatives of the educated
class. They seem to be seeking some sort of order, a stabilizing force
in their political life. Taddei says that the Italian Socialist Party
seemed to offer the solution. But the Socialists failed because
overwhelmed by the favorable-seeming course of events and
overlooking the most important phase of the matter, they lacked the
time to think of many things and, instead, viewed the period with
optimistic eyes; everything appeared to them to depend upon the
number of adherents that any particular event brought into their
ranks. Political expediency thus became, in a manner of speaking,
epidemic, and the deepening crisis in all its amplitude became
apparent in the form of a spiritual crisis that was its reflection.
Marcello Clerici in _The Conformist_ finds his solution in Fascism.
Taddei’s hero turns at last to the same source of strength which Silone
singles out--the land and its people. They both feel, rather like
Orwell, that the masses are the ultimate source of their country’s
salvation. Old Lazzaro, shouting defiance at the Communists,
epitomizes these people: “There’ll always be someone that refuses to
sell his soul for a handful of beans and a piece of cheese.” In this he
is like Conrad’s Giorgio Viola, “the Garibaldino,” an old expatriate
whose divinities are Garibaldi and Liberty.
This small group of Italian novelists portray their countrymen as
members of widely separated economic and social classes. There are the
well-to-do who seem to seek order and get it with a vengeance. And
there are the poor of the cities and villages who are the victims of
this order, squeezed by poverty, by powerful landowners, and harnessed
by a church which renders more than is his to Caesar, a church which
brings politics into the confessional and divorces religion from
everyday life. Something of the spirit of Garibaldi still lives,
however, nourished by the deprived ones who are close to the soil.
Perhaps this is a modern political parable in which the last shall be
first.