PARTISAN REVIEW
Uomini e no
claims to be the novel of the Italian resistance and
partisan war: the Italian counterpart of
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Vittorini has come out of the war a blossoming Communist, the
editor of the Communist review
ll
Politecnico
which tries to imitate
Russian weeklies even in the external appearance. Vittorini and
another Sicilian, the painter Guttuso, both proletarian artists, are,
together with Silone, the only names international literary correspon–
dents have got hold of in present-day Italian art and letters. In a
recent English miscellany
New Road
(no. 4), I read with no little
amusement the title of an essay by Paul Potts, "Not since Dante:
lgnazio Silone, A Footnote," explained in the course of the article
by the curious statement that no one has done so much as Silone to
lead Italian literature back towards that glory it has not known since
the days of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti. And when Stephen Spender
came to Rome, the only name of a young Italian writer he seemed
to have heard was that of Vittorini: he and Guttuso were the pro–
minent figures in a gossipy piece on Italian art and letters which ap–
peared in
Vogue.
The reader has not long to search in
Uomini e no
to discover
its secret. The lyrical tone obviously goes back to Saroyan, but the
continuous dialogues, the tough manner, the delineation of charac–
ters, the crudity of certain episodes, could not have existed without
the example of Hemingway, particularly of
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The minute narration of the torture of the peddler Giulaj, on whom
a German officer sets his dogs, finds a counterpart in the description
in Hemingway's novel of the massacre of all the fascists of a small
town, done to death between two lines of peasants armed with
flails.
Enne 2, the protagonist of Vittorini's book, is in love with a girl,
Berta; they go to the house of an old woman, Selva, who belongs
to the movement. Now Selva's behavior to the lovers reminds one
immediately of the behavior of elderly Pilar, the partisan woman, to
the couple, Robert Jordan and Maria. Both elderly women push the
young ones into the arms of the young men, and at the same time are
jealous of their youth and beauty. A passage from Vittorini's novel
will also illustrate the peculiar mannerisms of his dialogue, a sub–
ject to which I shall have to return in a moment:
"Do you think it is odd?" Selva said. "It isn't odd. We've never
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