Martin Clark’s books include Modern Italy 1871-1995 , The Italian Risorgimento and Mussolini: Profiles in Power.
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1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1946-1949, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1950-1959, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1960-1969, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1970-1979, Europe, Southern Europe, Italy, Literature and literary criticism, Fiction, Novels
Vol. 23 No. 15 · 9 August 2001
pages 7-8 | 2464 words
Who was Silvestri?
Martin Clark
- L'Informatore: Silone, i Comunisti e la polizia by Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali
Luni, 275 pp, lire 9,999.99, March 2000, ISBN 88 7984 208 0
Ignazio Silone was one of Italy’s most respected 20th-century novelists. His best-known work, Fontamara, is a dramatic account of peasant life in the Abruzzi, where he was born in 1900. He was always a political, or perhaps an anthropological, novelist, portraying the values of his cafoni with a wonderful, sympathetic realism; but he also had a very sharp eye for the way political power was used, and for the impact of the Fascist regime even on remote Southern villages. His early novels, particularly Bread and Wine, are centred on an anguished debate about the possibility of maintaining one’s integrity in a corrupt, self-seeking society that demands lies and collusion. Written in exile, these books were strongly anti-Fascist in tone, and, when translated, contributed to making Mussolini’s regime less popular abroad in the mid-1930s than it had been ten years earlier.
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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 16 · 23 August 2001
From Leo Abse
In the very last days of the war in Europe the roulette of military postings took me, as a young RAF sergeant, to Rome. There I had a memorable meeting with Ignazio Silone, about whom Martin Clark wrote in the last issue (LRB, 9 August). It was a chastening encounter. Silone was for me, as for many teenagers in the 1930s, an anti-Fascist icon; the humanity, courage and stoicism that informed his novels, the directness and freedom from rodomontade that enveloped them, the innocence and simplicity that pervaded them, all found resonance in the political idealism of our adolescence; we were enchanted.
I immediately told Silone how indebted I and many young men and women were to him. He did not modestly brush aside my obeisances; on the contrary, when I told him I would be filing an account of our meeting in Tribune, he encouraged my encomiums. I winced as I observed him lapping up praise with such eagerness, and was embarrassed by the histrionic style in which he addressed, rather than talked to me. Silone then launched a diatribe against the Italian Communist Party which was so vicious, so out of kilter with the mood of hope and tolerance among the young Italians with whom I was then associating. His young Irish wife realised the appalling impression he was making on me and plied me with charm, tea and pastries; but there was no stopping him. I felt there was something sick in his politics, something overdetermined, unbalanced, and reflecting personal travail rather than political reality. He was everything his novels were not, arrogant and narcissistic. After detaining me longer than I had anticipated, he called our meeting to an end with a final flourish and a display of name-dropping: he was leaving that evening for Paris to meet the recently released Léon Blum. I was happy to escape.
Leo Abse
London W4
