FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL
superiority both ways-denouncing them first for Fascism and then
laughing at them for its ineffectuality. The modem Italians are, anyway,
oversensitive on every question of prestige, and are now even more so,
with so much of the country's economy pinned to the black market.
They are annoyed with those who approach them on set political lines–
who go around like L., that proverbial American liberal, saying in
effect: "Your country is beautiful and I have the greatest admiration
for your leading writers, Mr. Dante and Mr. Silone. But are
you
quite
free of sin?"
Mrs. C. told me that
Fontamara
was a terrible book and that the
first she had seen of it was an Italian edition sent over especially by
Silone's English publisher-not easy for them to take that! And he is
not a "literary" writer, a deep matter in a country where style works on
writers like a narcotic. ("My greatest pleasure," said
A.,
who is very
intelligent, "is spending a morning polishing my paragraphs.") So
Silone is considered a gross writer, and with so much of his time taken
up with inter-Socialist politics, a curiosity. Yet harsh and peculiarly
personal as so many of these attacks are--essential to Italian self-esteem
-there
is
a curious muddleheadedness to Silone which I can see more
clearly here than I could at home. He has gone through an intense
religious evolution without getting out of the shell of party Marxism.
and up to recently kept up with Nenni and the
anti~Communist
oppo–
sition in the Socialist movement out of some vague idea of reconciling
them. But essentially, as P. says, he is disliked because he personifies
the one type the Italians cannot take-the moral dissenter. "He simply
will not reduce everything to the canonical Italian level of the 'family
affair.' " Similarly one can see that the personal character of his Socialism
represents more and more a longing to get back to the immediate human
relatedness with peasants and artisans he enjoyed in his early days in
the Abruzzi. What I have always loved in Silone is his feeling for the
bottom people-a fact that would be equally admired in Italy
if
he did
not let the intellectuals feel that he is making dour ethical judgments
on
them.
But the peasant types whom Carlo Levi described in
Christ
Stopped At Eboli
with such easy detachment, creatures of )iving
mythology and native farce, are to Silone just those "who do not be–
tray.'' He may be muddled and intolerably gloomy, but he is striking
out for unfashionable values. In Catholic Italy it is very queer to take
Christianity that seriously.
Sept. 5-Rome keeps eluding me, as Florence never did, or even
Assisi-the one almost too perfectly pure in style, the other simply
mysterious, lost to our age like a buried city. I knew in Assisi that I
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