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Ignazio Silone Elizabeth Leake. The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. viii + 200 pp. $56.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8020-8767-6. Stanislao G. Pugliese. Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. 448 pp. $27.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-374-11348-3. Reviewed by Richard Drake Published on H-Italy (October, 2009) Commissioned by Dora M. Dumont With Fontamara (1933) and Bread and Wine Communism. Silone had been one of the founders (1936), Ignazio Silone became one of the leading in 1921 of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), anti-Fascist writers of the decade. Both novels which looked to the Bolsheviks in Russia for in‐ dealt in part with the negative impact of Fascism struction and guidance. Then, as he explained in a on the peasant world of his beloved native Abruz‐ famous memoir essay that appeared in Richard zo. He voiced other concerns as well, but the read‐ Crossman’s God That Failed (1949), the culmina‐ ing public of that day focused on his anti-Fascist tion of Soviet Communism in Stalinism disillu‐ themes. Published originally in German transla‐ sioned him. In 1931, the PCI expelled him, and tion, the two books would appear in Italian much from that point on, he had to face opposition from later, and then to a much less enthusiastic re‐ both the Fascists and the Communists. sponse than elsewhere in the West. The post- Silone found a new home in the Socialist Par‐ World War II Italian literary establishment, ty (PSI) and continued to write voluminously. Al‐ deeply influenced by the Communist cultural though none of his later novels or plays found fa‐ hegemony, found him objectionable for his anti- vor equal to the success of Fontamara and Bread H-Net Reviews and Wine, he enjoyed a celebrity achieved by very in a book that he coauthored with Mauro Canali, few Italian writers of his generation. Always a L’Informatore: Silone, i Comunisti e la Polizia man of controversy, he attacked Fascism and (2000) and in his Silone: La Doppia Vita di un Ital‐ Communism as irredeemably totalitarian ideolo‐ iano (2005). Around the world, these newspaper gies. After the Second World War, he thought it reports and scholarly publications produced only a matter of time before Communism would shock, dismay, and anger among Silone support‐ follow Fascism into the dustbin of history. He ers, while his adversaries greeted the revelations equated democracy with socialism, arguing that delightedly and with a sense that history at long economic inequalities would always be politically last had brought his reputation to the bar of jus‐ decisive wherever they existed. Communism, tice. Elizabeth Leake and Stanislao G. Pugliese however, aggravated the deplorable socioeconom‐ both use the Biocca revelations as the starting ic conditions under capitalism by depriving peo‐ point for their books. ple of all freedom. Leake, a literature specialist, reveals in the ac‐ Although Silone sided with the United States knowledgments and frst chapter--“Silone and the in the Cold War, he nevertheless characterized Fascists”--that she holds Biocca’s work in high re‐ American consumer society as a soul-destroying gard. She does not question the authenticity of contradiction of the Christian Socialism that he es‐ Biocca’s documents or raise probing questions poused. The United States made use of his anti- about his interpretation of them. Indeed, in de‐ Communism, but he proved to be an unpre‐ scribing her research experience in Rome’s dictable ally. George Orwell, who admired Silone Archivio Centrale dello Stato, she comments with and shared many of his ideological viewpoints, some exhilaration about “working at that time in thought of him as an independent-minded man tandem with the historian Dario Biocca” (p. 9). naturally inclined to go against the grain of every Elsewhere, she expresses gratitude for the efficacy orthodoxy. The British writer’s appreciative char‐ of his insights, vouchsafed to her during the acterization of Silone captured the main outlines course of “many discussions” (p. vii). In her mind, of the preponderantly positive image that he en‐ Silone stands guilty as charged by Biocca of be‐ joyed at the time of his death in 1978. traying his party by working as a paid informer Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, some for the Fascist regime. For a comparable scandal disquieting newspaper reports about Silone began in the annals of American literature, one would to appear. The Italian archives were said to con‐ have to imagine a scenario in which incontrovert‐ tain incriminating documents concerning his al‐ ible proof had been found to demonstrate Mark leged longstanding collaboration with the Fascist Twain’s secret collusion with the Republican ad‐ police during the 1920s. Dario Biocca, the re‐ ministrations he publicly excoriated in the impe‐ searcher who discovered these documents, pub‐ rialist aftermath of the Spanish-American War lished an initial report of his fndings in the May- even while giving them damaging information June 1998 issue of Nuova Storia Contemporanea, about the Anti-Imperialist League in which he “Ignazio Silone e la Polizia Politica: Storia di un held high office. What a fall would be there. And Informatore.” Biocca claimed that the evidence in so it has been for Silone, once the shining anti- the archives showed that Silone had led a double Fascist hero now transformed into a venduto, a life. While serving the PCI in key leadership posi‐ term that carries an especially heavy freight of tions, he had furnished damaging information condemnation in a land described by Niccolo about the party to a Fascist policeman, Guido Bel‐ Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini as the lone. Biocca’s full indictment of Silone appeared 2 H-Net Reviews home of the most exquisitely ruthless betrayals in analysis for her theoretical guides, most notably history. Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. Antonio Gram‐ Taking a psychoanalytical approach, Leake sci’s ideas receive attention from her primarily examines three key Silone texts. She begins with a for the ways they are diminished in favor of the collection of his early short stories, Viaggio a Pari‐ theoretical supplements provided by psychoanal‐ gi (published in 1934, though written in 1929), ysis. which should be seen as the frst installment of The novelist’s reinvention of himself achieved “the quiet confession Silone rehearsed throughout definitive expression in Bread and Wine, with the his literary career” (p. 15). In short, the docu‐ character of Pietro Spina “the prism through ments discovered by Biocca confirm Silone’s art‐ which we view Silone” (p. 122). By this Leake fully hedged autobiographical portrayals of his means that in the public view Spina’s heroic anti- own acts of spying, dissimulation, and betrayal. Fascist and humanitarian Marxist story replaced Beniamino Losurdo, the central fgure of the col‐ the embarrassingly messy one that Silone had lection’s title story, stands out in the Silone canon lived, with all of its moral failures and political as an anomaly. Leake comments on the stylistic ambiguities. She sees in the character of the in‐ singularities of Silone’s maiden literary effort: its former Luigi Murica “a sanitized version of overt eroticism, irreverence toward holy images, Silone’s decision to spy for the Fascists” (p. 135). mockery of peasants, and the inclusion of poetry The central meaning of Bread and Wine unfolds in the narrative. Yet the theme of deception that against the background of Silone’s anguished life would always hold Silone the writer in obsessive and times. Silone’s reinvention now complete, all thrall appears here. Silone would disavow this of his subsequent protagonists followed in Spina’s book as a substandard literary performance, but footsteps, with each new work further substanti‐ Leake effectively makes her case in this chapter ating the author’s image as a lonely existential “that Silone’s early writings perform a therapeutic hero in dubious battle for the common man function for the author” (p. 86). against egotistical exploiters, corrupt institutions, Bernardo Viola in Fontamara represents the and perverted ideological systems. next stage in “the fctionalization of Silone’s self- Having provided a reading of Silone “that documented experience” (p. 107). Leake inter‐ takes place from within the nexus of his personal prets the book in the light of “a psychoanalytical and political life, the historical period in which he reading that incorporates a Gramscian reading” wrote, and ideological debates in the air at the (p. 114). It is not entirely clear what this combina‐ time,” Leake has, in quite traditional terms, made tion of theoretical approaches means in practical a valuable contribution to our understanding of terms. Here, The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone his work. Her statements about theory in the fnal calls to mind the highly imaginative but ultimate‐ chapter, however, do not inspire confidence and ly futile attempt by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and fall very far short of the book’s actual achieve‐ Civilization (1955) to unite Karl Marx and Sig‐ ments as a work of research and analysis. After mund Freud. Marcuse addressed Freud’s obliter‐ following her densely packed argument regarding ating dismissal of Marxism for its infantile ideas the abundant connections between literary texts about human psychology by agreeing with him. and biographical-historical contexts, it comes as a Marxism, to be plausible, had to be turned into a severe anticlimax to read that “professional and theoretical amalgam that Marx never would have non-professional readers alike would be well- recognized or acknowledged as his own. Similarly, served, I would argue, to reintroduce into our in‐ Leake relies primarily on proponents of psycho‐ terpretive toolkit the notion of curiosity, of em‐ 3 H-Net Reviews barking on a reading in order to learn something” but we never learn why.
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