FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL
relics of the Second International who have decided, after years of
futility, to float to success on the Stalinist wave of the future. L. finds
Nenni's stubbornness on the Communist issue typical of the Romagna–
Mussolini's region-and draws many parallels between their attitudes
toward Italian Socialism. But why make it a question of personal traits?
Nenni is only another expression of the long, inner defeatism of Euro–
pean socialism, and obviously scared by the prestige and the mass base
the Communists built up during the war. According toP., who recently
talked with him, Nenni's pro-Communist line is a gamble. Privately
Nenni says: "Sooner or later the Russians are going to take over. It's
in the cards. I'm for us to become a Czechoslovakia rather than a Poland
or Bulgaria." The Communists dominate the largest section of the work–
ing class-if the Socialists separate themselves from them, Nenni says,
what happens to their mass base? Half the workers in the Milanese
factories hold cards in the C.P. Probably the greater part of the crowd
this morning was Communist, to judge from the yells and cheers that
went up whenever Nenni flattered the party. Yet I noticed that easily
the most popular part of his speech was his strong declaration that
Italy should remain neutral in any war between Russia and the U.S.
Nenni has to keep a lot of people happy at once.
R. drove us out to Settignano to see the Bernhard Berenson villa,
I Tatti.
In the courtyard, which might have been the entrance to one
of the retreats at which the storytellers in the
Decameron
flourished
during the plague, there was a row of neat little lemon trees, each set
in its black bucket with finicky care. The lemons all drooped in a plane,
exactly at an equal distance from the ground-with what immense and
induced art it was not difficult to imagine. The elaborated niceness of
the symmetry introduced me to Berenson's mind even before I met him.
The butler seemed uncertain whether to admit us, Berenson being
away, but Leo Stein,* Gertrude's brother, whom R. knows slightly, came
out of the library and offered to show us around. Stein is a tall, gentle,
gangling old man, now seventy-five, who looks like a Jewish Uncle Sam
-very rustic, nervous, deaf, but full of talk and little wisecracks, all of
them delivered in such a flat, uncompromised Middle Western twang
after his thirty or forty years of Italy, that it was strange in that braided
garden to take in his mussed, blue serge suit and hearing aid, the knap–
sack over one shoulder. He sounded out like the authentic voice of
Allegheny, Pa.
*
He died later in the summer, some weeks after our meeting.
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