REFLECTIONS ON ITALY
65
situation always begets its own positive thesis of reaction: this time
among the Communist intellectuals, who are preaching a form of cultu–
ral nationalism (!), exhorting painters to return to the great Italian
tradition: "It's time for painting to speak Italian again, it's spoken
French too long."
In Milan, to be sure, there are more signs of the modern world in
letters. Here the resistance to the Germans and the Fascists-much more
perilous and exhausting than the resistance in France to the Germans
alone-did not permit literary men even the leisure to produce anything
comparable to the French
"literature de la resistance,"
but it did beget
a quickened sense of the dangers of life, society, and the togetherness
of human beings; which may help to bring Italian writers out into the
open air, break the shackles of Italian aestheticism that have retarded
Italy culturally during this century.
Silone himself seems to have become infected, since his return, by
this Italian syphilis the cult of "fine writing." At any rate, he is now
engaged in rewriting all his earlier books-in order, evidently, to reply
to the persistent and vicious attacks upon him for his rough unpolished
Italian. An astonishing exhibition of this disease, as also of the cult of
timelessness
in Italian writing (a parallel vice, which the political sup–
pression of Fascism helped to foster), were the remarkable pages of
Corrado Alvaro's journal in a summer number of
Mercurio.
During the
German occupation of Rome Alvaro hid out in a small town in the
Abruzzi, posing as a country schoolteacher; here he could observe the
goings and comings of Germans, Fascists, the petty thieving of local pre–
fects-in short, the dissolution of the whole Fascist world within one
closed intimate cell. But the journal is written outside of history, no
political or historical idea ties the author to this struggle, the things at
issue in this small scale cataclysm never appear. Apart from the fact
that we know what war it is, in what campaign the Germans and Allies
are thus lunging at each other through Italy, the diary could have been
written in the nineteenth century (not earlier,
it
has at least a nineteenth–
century consciousness), and the final effect is of something very literary
and selfconscious, as if the nineteenth-century masters who wrote jour–
nals were continuously peering over Alvaro's shoulder as he wrote. This
journal might have shone unobtrusively among the pages of some of our
own little reviews tranquilly engaged in their endless and placid pursuit
of poetry as a timeless essence.
These shackles are broken by a remarkable inversion of values in
Curzio Malaparte's
Kaput,
the most notable book to appear in Italy
since the arrival of the Allies, which manages to unite itself to the his–
tory of Europe at this moment through the fact of its sheer corruption.
A document in human abasement-Malaparte's perhaps more than any–
one else's-it thereby conveys a sense of the internal sickness, decay,
