PARTISAN REVIEW
mista? Heh, mista? Will you for God's sakes
sell
him something? You
think he hasn't got the money? Takes out a great wad of sweaty lire.
"Listen!" he says disgustedly, about to ride off-"I'll buy anything you
got! ANYTHING!" Funny in that place to hear the long wailing sing–
song of the cigarette vendors, which as the evening drags on becomes
simply: "America!"
Rome, Sept. 3-Almost impossible to find a book of Silane's in the
shops, but everyone goes at him constantly-as if he were not simply
a legend brought from overseas who writes "bad Italian," but a con–
venience to everyone's sense of superiority. It is very tiring to hear him
knocked down with the same contemptuous phrases by every literary
creature one meets. Even C., who does those little articles and cartoons
for the Socialist press, and may fairly be described as an amiable hack
of not overpowering gifts, loves to discourse on the "outside world's"
absurd overestimation of Silone-it puts him right in style, and gives
him the only point of contact he has with opinion outside Italy. "You
people cannot imagine how crudely he writes," and screwing up his
shoulders with that well-worn Mediterranean gesture which denotes
some intractable human error or folly, takes up the argument after
everyone at the table had given it up as hopeless: "Silone! Always
Silone! You people have never heard of anyone else!"
He writes, it seems, badly; he is a "political," not really a man of
letters-a deputy, an active Socialist, editor of his own political weekly,
etc.;
he does not shine in conversation, but is in fact a depressed and
depressing character; his reputation is out of all proportion to the real
situation in Italian writing. The main point, obviously, is that Italian
intellectuals are not disposed to honor a novelist who has been pushed
at them as a symbol of the "real," the anti-Fascist, Italy. Curious situa–
tion: on the one hand there is a certain defensiveness about compliance
with a regime which only the boldest cared to defy head-on, and which,
as they say, "was after all, not so bad as Hitler. You have no idea
how easygoing it was. With us, even authoritarian government is al–
ways a little bit of a joke." I have noticed that even Gaetano Salvemini's
return has aroused mixed feelings-"he criticizes too much." On the
other hand, whatever moral debt some Italians may have incurred for
Fascism, none of them is likely to feel any great repentance now, con–
sidering the misery into which so many have been plunged after being
bombed, pillaged, and cheated up and down the peninsula. They are
understandably furious with those Anglo-Americans who were Musso–
lini's really
sincere
admirers, and then worked their precious moral
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