310
PARTISAN REVIEW
In
Fontamara,
to explain what Fascism was, or rather what the
relation was between the state and the
cafoni,
Silone used the example
of the brook closed to the village people by the despotic Prince TorIonia.
In
Bread and Wine
the question was the relation between the Party
with its dogmas and "slogans," and peasant life. Silone illustrated this
with the journey of Pietro Spina, militant Communist, through his na–
tive countryside and his encounters with the local "dead souls" plus
a few living men. When his journey was over the dogmas and slogans
had vanished without leaving a trace, leaving him only a fidelity to
the people and the land. In
The Seed Beneath the Snow
Silone sought
to find once again an expressive symbol for his hope, and he imagined
it
ironically in the figure of the dumb
cafone
and his donkey. But in
reality he had no need to search for a symbol; it had always existed
in
the peasant community. In his latest book the theme is simply the per–
manence, amidst all the changes, of this tenacious society-the con–
gruence of its customs compared to the incongruence of any present
or future bureaucratic order.
This essential theme is developed by Silone with a calm assurance
that makes of
A Handful of Blackberries/
his new book, his most dense
and significant apologue. To the principal theme Silone wished to add
a description of the habits and customs of the Communist Party; and
he does so in the story of the clash between the Party members Rocco
and Stella on the one side, and the machine of the post-Fascist Com–
munist Party on the other. For more than one reader this story will be
plausible, but ultimately of secondary interest. The clash that truly ex–
cites Silone is not the one between the Party (which is certainly in the
wrong) and the heretics (who are right only insofar as they reject
the Party), but rather between the senseless artifices of the hierarchy
and the incorruptible simplicity of collective hopes-a simplicity that is
the reflection of the law that rules all things.
In
A Handful of Blackberries
Silone's plot has the same simplicity
as the one he chose for
Fontamara.
Here he writes of the forest which
more than a century ago belonged to the community, but which through
trickery came into the possession of the Tarocchi family. The
cafoni
have never forgotten this, and since then have always measured the
reality of the "changes" that have taken place by what has happened
to the Tarocchi woodland. Nothing happened to the woodland through–
out a hundred years; it remained securely in the hands of the Tarocchi.
The "changes" then have changed nothing. Nor, in this respect is the
"change" that took place after the fall of Fascism different from any
1 Harpers. $3.50.
