Silone and the Peasants
A Handful of Blackberries.
By Ignazio Silone.
Harper. 314 pp. $3.50.
More than ten years ago Ignazio Silone wrote that “a society is renewed . . . when its humblest element acquires a value. Today the Living is to be found among the Negroes, in the Polish ghettoes, among the Chinese coolies, among the peons, among the cafoni, among the proletarians.” In this list it is of course the cafoni, or poor Italian peasants, to whom Silone the novelist has consistently turned, like one of his own heroes seeking his inspiration from that perennial source. A Handful of Blackberries is no exception.
I opened the book with a more than ordinary amount of curiosity. I hadn’t read anything by him for years, since A Seed Beneath the Snow. Before the war he had been a conspicuous figure in international literature, and, in exile in Zurich, the chief representative of free Italian letters. His novels, like André Malraux’s, dealt with Fascism, Communism, and the revolutionary ideal; they had the relevance and pointedness that come from dealing with contemporary world issues. But Malraux’s novels haven’t worn too well, their brilliance turning with the passage of time into something close to meretricious. Would one have to make a similar dispiriting revision of one’s judgment of Silone’s work?
No, I am glad to say. A Handful of Blackberries is an unsuccessful novel, but to see this is not to suffer a disabusement in which all his works are implicated. It is a failure, but an honest failure; one needn’t search back in his earlier novels to find out where the Zeitgeist had taken one in. I re-read Bread and Wine and find it still a good and successful book. The realities with which Malraux seemed to be dealing, turn, when we read his books today, into a French intellectual’s highflown talk. Silone’s realities—the grandeur and misery of the Italian peasantry, the ancient, immovable injustice of Italian rural society, and the searching conscience of the hero—have stayed real.
_____________
The plot of A Handful of Blackberries turns about disillusionment with Communism. This theme figured in Silone’s earlier novels, but only off-stage as it were: the exiled revolutionist hero, having been thrown into a spiritual crisis by his break with Communism, returns surreptitiously to his native countryside, where the wisdom and sufferings of an ancient peasantry teach him to recover his moral clarity and show him the way to rededicating himself to a purer revolutionary ideal. In this present work, however, whose scene is Italy just after the liberation, Communists and Communism figure as central elements. And that is just the trouble, because they lack reality; the center of the novel does not hold. Oscar and Ruggero, two Communist types, are done with a stridency that is a far cry from the fine comedy of the Fascist figures of his earlier novels. Rocco de Donatis, a Communist partisan hero who turns against Communism and is nursed back to moral health by the peasants, weakly echoes the brooding Pietro Spina of Bread and Wine; his reckless driving, as he dashes preposterously up and down the novel in a jeep, indicates the anguish of his soul.
I do not mean to suggest that Silone fails in his understanding of Communism. Perhaps he understands it too well, and is too anxious to make the reader understand. The novel’s very thorough exposure of the character of Communism persuades our minds, but leaves our feelings unmoved. What seems to be the trouble is a want of artistic detachment.
There is also perhaps a too ready acceptance of peasant simplicities. In A Handful of Blackberries, the Communists very significantly join forces with the landlords to frustrate the peasants’ action: Stalinism is not a new, complicated, and revolutionary thing, but only the old reactionary tyranny in a new skin. But this is too easy; the trouble is that Communism is both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary.To simplify in this way is to make a folk tale out of the novel.
Having said this, one can then go on to say that Silone’s rural world is re-created in this novel with much of the old pathos, humor, and shrewdness—much rather than all, because his peasants tend to grow self-conscious and stand for something. They of course always stood for something, but in a completely natural and unforced way; now a little bit too much of the author’s hand can be seen to enter into it.
What is it that they stand for? The Living, as I quoted Silone earlier as saying. Who then are the dead? Not so much the grasping local landowners—who are a kind of natural evil and the traditional antagonist of the peasants— as those all-powerful forces from the outside, from the city, who come into the villages to exploit and betray the peasants and make their ancient yoke heavier: in Fascist days, the Fascists; today the Communists.
The gulf between country and city, between life and death, yawns ever wider in Silone’s stories. A peasant woman gives a piece of bread to a strange soldier knocking at her door. This is treason one day, according to the policeman who investigates the matter, and the next day—after the Fascist regime is overthrown—according to that same policeman, a heroic deed for which the authorities wish to give her a medal. But the woman knows that an act of charity is just an act of charity and shakes her head in astonishment. All this means of course that confusion and absurdity reign “out there” in the world, which seems a million miles away.
_____________
Confusion and absurdity and unreality. There is a funny passage in the book, very complicated in its irony, that perfectly expresses this cleavage between city and country. A Jewish refugee from Vienna, who had been taken in and protected by the mountain brigands of the Roadhouse, is dying. Zaccaria, the brigand leader, a shrewd, hearty peasant, has the local priest, Don Nicola, fetched through a snowstorm to perform the last rites; the laws of hospitality require it. But the priest must decline when he discovers the dying man is a Jew. This incomprehensible scruple exasperates Zaccaria; he tries to bribe Don Nicola, to no avail.
“ ‘What he needs is a man of the Synagogue,’ suggested the priest. ‘He needs a rabbi.’
“Zaccaria asked: ‘Are there any rabbis in the neighborhood?’
“ ‘No, but there are some in Rome,’ the priest assured him.
“ ‘I see you’re in a good humor,’ snarled Zaccaria. ‘You’re good for nothing, but as if that weren’t enough, you want to joke about it.’ ”
Zaccaria—in Southern Italy—thinks it a sensible question to ask if there are any rabbis in the neighborhood, but accuses Don Nicola of levity when he says there are some in Rome. Rome is more remote than a rabbi! The target of the irony here is certainly not the “unworldly” Zaccaria, but Rome, temporal and spiritual, so far removed from the true realm of natural piety that it has virtually ceased to exist.
Silone is a socialist. But the simple fellowship that he celebrates, consecrated with bread and wine and blackberries, is more akin to primitive Christianity than to modern socialism, especially when we consider its anti-urban overtones. In this book his peasants are now clearly not a social class in the Marxian sense, but fall into the ethico-religious category of the poor, who are always with us. There is a resigned quality about Silone’s world, strongly stressed in this first post-liberation work:
‘When one Pope dies, they’ve always made another,’ answered Berardo. ‘That much we know.’
‘If you stole before, you’ll steal again,’ said Giacinto. ‘If you starved before, you’ll starve again. We all know that.’
‘But do you really believe things will never change?’ repeated Massimiliano.
‘Ah, I’d like to see dogs bleating and sheep barking,’ Giacinto told him.
‘They say there are countries where it has happened already,’ said Baldassare. ‘But as long as there are some to do the barking, we’ll always be back where we were.’
From this irremediable injustice, not human history, but only some Second Coming can now liberate Silone’s peasants:
‘To the future Liberation.’
‘Future in what sense?’ Don Nicola asked him. ‘Imminent?’
‘Whenever it comes,’ said Rocco. ‘Next year, or sixty or even two thousand years from now.’
_____________
From being an anti-Fascist novelist, Silone has passed through anti-Communism to an attitude very close to religious. It seems to me that he has given up on the modern world; I cannot go along with him. And this attitude also seems to have landed him in a dead end as a novelist. Yet he remains honest and intelligent —and how superior to all the up-to-date Alberto Moravias of postwar Italy, with their equivocal writings and equivocal careers.
_____________
