Books
THE SPIRITUAL UNDERGROUND
The Seed Beneath The Snow•. By lgnazio Silone. Harpers. $2.75.
lgnazio Silone invokes the Zeitgeist in all his works. Whereas most
contemporary writers ·approach their subject matter by way of literary
tradition, Silone has actually transposed into the dimensions of fiction
the social and moral problems of the day. This is not to deny the resources
of his talent, but his chief interest for us does lie, it seems to me, in the
fact that he has given a literary status to the crises of our time.
What other novels have cut so deeply into the cross-currents of faith
and scepticism that marked the deterioration of the socialist ideal? Even
so spectacular a novelist as Malraux, operating within the same genre
and with ostensibly the same subject as Silone, eventually became the
prisoner of his earlier enthusiasms, with the result that his later characters
merely raced over the surface of events. And how manY.
oth~r
novelists
mistook topical banalities for social realism? Silone's first book,
Fonta–
mara,
was, to be sure, simply a very moving parable of suffering, rarely
extending beyond the limits of class conflict; but it should be remembered
that it -appeared at the height of socialist elan, and it did satisfy the
demand of the time for a more complete revolutionary
persona~ity
in
left-wing fiction.
Bread and Wine,
however, took as its starting point
the conflict between belief and conscience in those disillusioned socialists
who could no longer exorcise their scruples about power politics by
the argument of expediency. Harried by this dilemma, Silone's revolu·
tionary hero, Spina, attempted to recapture those ethical values he had
found lacking in socialist practice-or was it socialist theory, too? His
discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven at the close of the novel seemed
at the time to be no more than a symbol of irresolution.
Now, in
The Seed beneath the Snow,
a spiritually and historically
older Spina, completely stranded by the failures of the Left, sets out to
rediscover the "truth," the irreducible facts, that is, of human existence,
and to salvage from the wreckage of crushed lives and broken hopes
man's natural, indestructible, moral self. The narrative, largely static,
revolves chiefly about Spina's efforts to reestablish himself in his native
community. All that seems to have remained of his Marxist philosophy
is its ideal of brotherhood, which he conceives to be the rightful heritage
of the momentarily beaten and shell-shocked peasantry. And in a counter–
point of moral and physical drives, Spina spreads the gospel of his inner
life at the same time that he moves about the countryside hiding from
the police.
At first, Spina tests his new faith in a series of dialogues with his
grandmother, who is a noble vestige of Christian good will. Gradually
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