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COMMENT
169
those later writings will stand up is an open question . His book
The
Sleepwalkers,
about Copernicus and Kepler, is a triumph of historical
writing. He was uncannily sensitive to the zeitgeist.
Ignazio Silone had gone into exile when Mussolini came to
power. For a number of years, he directed the Communist under–
ground in Italy and had been, with Togliatti, a leader of the Party .
His disillusionment was registered most sensitively in that marvel–
ous novel,
Bread and Wine.
Thereafter, he was primarily a novelist,
though his book,
The School for Dictators
is a masterpiece about the
manipulation of mass psychology. His novels, largely pastoral in
their settings, sensitive to the concerns of ordinary people, touched
also on the mysteries of religion. With Nicola Chiaromonte (who
died a few years before him), he edited
Tempo Presente
which for many
years was the political voice of anticommunist sanity in Italy. But he
was essentially a brooding, lonely figure who gave the impression of
being consumed by his inner life .
All four men knew each other, had been friends, and despite
their different temperaments and talents, were engaged in a com–
mon intellectual enterprise, initially in the Congress for Cultural
Freedom. Aside from their politics , what all four- Sperber, Aron,
Koestler, and Silone-also had in common, and what distinguished
them from other European writers, was their cosmopolitanism.
They were free of any national parochialisms (though Aron was a
strong French patriot). Three were Jews, which may have much to
do with the shaping of their intellectual outlook. But there was some–
thing else: they were an intellectual and literary generation that had
a political mind. It was a unique combination, created out of the
crucible and horrors of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, the destruc–
tion of an idealistic Communist generation, and the Gulag. Some of
these sensibilities are present in Russian exiles today- in Siniavski,
in Kopelov, and in Solzhenitsyn. But that older generation also had
a freer and larger philosophical range. Against that combination, the
writings and comments of the "academics" and the "experts" under–
standably pale.
One could never wish for such a generation to emerge again at
the cost which the old one had to pay. Sperber, Aron, Koestler, and
Silone were the intellectual survivors. We mourn them with a sad–
ness we can hardly express. We were fortunate to know them. And
we can best serve their memory by telling their story.
w.p.
