FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL
early training as a physician, he discovered for the Italians themselves
the most impoverished and beaten section of the peasantry; and now
postwar Rome, out of which he protrudes with undiminished force, and
every aspect of whose life he makes seem as local to his own as
if
he
were the neighborhood scribe, writing letters for all the peasants in
the village.
Curious to watch Silone and Levi together-both men of the same
generation, both formed entirely outside the shell of Fasdsm and char–
acteristically better known in other countries than in their own, funda–
mental types of the writer "engaged" to action, yet so different in mind
and temperament that the extremes of the Italian character have been
called on to produce them-the one awkwardly self-conscious, soured with
political and literary disappointments ("He has been told so often he
is a bad novelist," M. says, "he is ready to believe it"), but a man who
defends sadly the most creative urgings of our age; the other riding the
crest of the wave, hearty and ineffably self-assured, relying on his
Italianism for every experience. In the "outside world" people are
beginning to compare them, to find in them tokens of the "new" Italy;
here the formula simply doesn't operate-the Silone one knows is not
to be found in a crazy-quilt evening, but in his work, with its scruples,
its awkward tenderness, and its humor-and the work is no longer
1
separable here from Italy; it is one more chapter in the inner history
of the Italian masses.
And afterwards, toiling home through the cold, stopping for an
espresso,
admiring the nymphs in the Piazza del Popolo, a bag of chest–
nuts from the old woman on the corner warming herself at the fire,
while in the faint light of the lamps
in
the park, just beyond Michel–
angelo's gates, that Roman god and emperor whose name I have never
learned still stands with his arm half-raised, beautiful and indifferent.
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