ROME LETTER
463
the real inability to comprehend the importance of his subject-matter
for the intellectual history of the '30s. Unfortunately, his play,
Ed Egli
Si Nascose,
an unsuccessful attempt to pay its way on old capital, gave
the conspiracy of his detractors something to work on. Silone's energies
are now being absorbed to a great extent by political activity; his future
as a writer will depend upon whether he can re-establish contact with the
Italian people, whether, that is, there will be a life here to which he can
belong. Certainly, the personal impression of Silone the man (if such
impressions tell anything about the writer) is one to inspire extraordinary
confidence that he has great things left in him.
Among the writers who stayed here under Fascism the two most pro–
minent names seem to be the prose-writers, Alberto Moravia and Cor–
rado Alvaro. Moravia was introduced to the English public many years
ago by Aldous Huxley, but he never caught on, and I rather doubt that
the work of either Moravia or Alvaro would now be of very great in–
terest abroad, except as a case study of the narrow channels into which
talented writers were driven by Fascism in order to avoid any possible
political content. Moravia's talent has, in fact, a certain affinity with
Huxley's, the same brilliant facility and the same brittle unsubstantiality.
Alvaro, although the older of the pair, may· yet be less exhausted as a
writer. He is now writing a novel dealing with Italian life under the
Regime, which he knows intimately, and, possibly, the advent of freedom
in Italy may mean a renovation for him. He has at least risen to the
point of saying that his 25 years under Fascism were wasted as a writer,
which is something of a good augury for the future.
In the plastic arts there is even more activity and perhaps more
promise of a real revival too, both because of Italy's inherited tradi–
tions in this field, and because probably less intellectual reconstruction
after the ravages of Fascism will be required for serious painting than
for serious literature. Of names known in America, Giorgio De Chirico
-now as an artist bankrupt and corrupt, but, fortunately, with very
little influence on the younger painters,-and Leonor Fini, the surrealist,
have both given recent exhibitions. Fini provides another example, this
time in painting, of the exquisite female temperament that we already
know in the literature of England and America: in her polish, precision,
melodramatic contrasts of skulls and flowers, her taste for the fragile
macabre, and in her sentimentality, a kind of Elizabeth Bowen on canvas.
Like most surrealist painting, however, the pictorial and technical values
are retrograde and reactionary, and, in her case, actually accompanied
by a critical program of return to the 18th century. This renunciation
of modem painting since Manet is not only being cried up by the
nostalgic and reactionary, like De Chirico and Fini, who want a return
to the techniques and styles of the 17th and 18th centuries, but also,
from the other quarter of the compass, by the Communist intellectuals,
who are now clamoring for a "realist art." The question of "social real–
ism" in art is, in fact, the polemic of the moment, and Silone has found
