LETTER FROM ITALY
95
signature of Signor Scelba himself. But there is plenty more. For all
their crimes and their shrewdness, Giuliano and his gang appear to have
been finally the victims of an inextricable political and police intrigue.
Once again, bandits in Italy will be proved not only more romantic,
but also closer to ordinary morals than the powers that be. The
proceedings of the Viterbo trial are being followed feverishly all over
Italy. There, at least, politics comes to life.
Political doldrums are, of course, accompanied by intellectual
listlessness. Italian literary production remains on a fairly high level,
certainly not inferior to the French. In addition to the many short
stories he writes for newspapers and magazines, Moravia continues to
produce a novel regularly every two years. His last one,
The Con–
formist,
which has just been published in the States, is the first attempt
by
this writer to deal with fascism directly. In that, the book is hardly
successful. For all his obsession with reality, Moravia is not at all a
naturalistic novelist. Extremely able in the creation of psychological
involvements and plots, when it comes to society and social facts, he
seems curiously color-blind. Except for the clever (but too openly stated
and reiterated) notion of the "conformist" as a man who, because he
wants to
be
like everybody else, is led normally and prosaically to
treachery and crime, Moravia's fascist hero does not belong to any
particular time, place, or situation, but only to a Moravian atmosphere.
A good deal of the fascist atmosphere, and more specially of its
oppressive weight on an intellectual's conscience, can on the contrary
be
found in Corrado Alvaro's
Qu.asi una vita
("Nearly a whole life..."),
which
is
the journal of a writer under fascism from 1927 to 1943 and
after. I suppose Alvaro has not published everything he wrote in his
journal during those years. But such as it is, the book is a significant
document of what living under fascism meant to an Italian intellectual
who, while hating the regime from its very beginning, tried again and
again to get along, to be prudent, to avoid trouble and remain inde–
pendent. Until, in 1943 after Mussolini's fall, Alvaro resolutely stuck
his neck out and accepted the job of chief editor of an anti-fascist
newspaper in Rome. Forced into hiding by German occupation, when
the liberation came Alvaro went back to journalism, in Naples this
time, as the editor of a democratic daily. He was soon forced to abandon
the job because the paper was bought by a famous neo-fascist plutocrat,
shipowner Lauro. Typically enough, Alvaro's political activity ended
in
1947, soon after the proclamation of the Republic, which is also
