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government, churches, ideological constructions. The truth of the
cafoni
is rustic and inarticulate. But they remain and everything else changes;
they are composed of necessity, all else of doubt and chance. Their truth
has no value outside their isolated communities where nothing foreign
to them can influence them; it is a monotonous truth, stubborn, seIf–
enclosed, expressible only through irony. And it is this irony that Silone
explains and develops in the form of novels.
To take Silone for a regional writer would be a crude simplification.
He began to write not in order to describe his native Abruzzi but be–
cause he wished to assess for himself and for others what remained of
the socialist faith once the hope of realizing it through state power had
been crushed by events. Nor was Silone ever just an "anti-Fascist"
writer; from the beginning he has been a socialist writer, or better, a
writer
about
socialism. He was a refugee from Mussolini's Italy, but
especially from the Communist Party and Stalin's Russia-from the
International, in the full meaning of the word. This made him from the
very start an eminently cosmopolitan writer. And that is probably why
he was better understood abroad than in Italy where the full import
of the Communist question was not realized until recently. Of all the
refugees from Communism, Silone is the only one who has remained
faithful to the original problem, that is, the transformation of the world
according to justice, and more concretely, the redemption of the poor.
The same cannot be said of Arthur Koestler, for whom the question of
Communism has been ideological from the first: a debate of the modern
intellectual with himself (and this is how Koestler handles it). Neither
can it be said of George Orwell, who ended in the Swiftian misan–
thropy of
Animal Farm
and in the universal nausea of 1984.
Certainly we may say that it was the memory of the Abruzzi peas–
ants that kept Silone from the quagmire of abstract arguments, the
battles of sects and splinter groups, in short from the typical desperation
of the contemporary intellectual. Essentially it was the contrast be–
tween the mechanism of Soviet bureaucracy and the reality of com–
munal living that impelled him to throw Communism overboard. But
there is more than that. Once the conflict arose, Silone never for a
moment indulged in the abstractions of political ideology; never for
a moment did he appeal from the ill-informed Party to the well-informed
Party. His choice was not between the Church and heresy but between
the Church and "the substance of things hoped for"; to believe and
remain in the Church was henceforth impossible, since faith was now
replaced by orthodoxy and orthodoxy has need not of faith but of
obedience.
