After the Earthquake

Tim Parks

BITTER SPRING: A LIFE OF IGNAZIO SILONE by Stanislao Pugliese.

Farrar, Straus, 426 pp., $35, June, 9780374 II348 3

THE LIFE STORY of the Italian writer and political activist Secondino Tranquilli, alias Ignazio Silone, is both disquieting in itself and a serious challenge for anyone who believes that the value of a work of literature can be entirely separated in our minds from the character and behavior of the person who produced it. Essentially, there are two versions of the Silone story. In the first he is an Orwell-like figure, a man who, following an idealistic commitment to Communism during the 1920S, reacted against its totalitarian inclinations and used his writing to promote freedom and democracy. In the second version, he was a police spy throughout his ten-year involvement with the Communist Party. In this account his repudiation of Communism was not, or not only, a matter of conviction but arose from his need to end a double life that had become too exhausting and too dangerous. The writing that followed allowed him to reconstruct his past and create an impression of courageous moral integrity.

The heroic Silone was the standard figure until 1996, when researchers uncovered documents indicating he had collaborated with the Fascist police. In his new biography, Bitter Spring, Stanislao Pugliese clearly wants to believe Silone was not a collaborator; he repeatedly mentions the possibility of a neo-Fascist smear campaign and describes the documents as 'supposedly proving that Silone had been spying for the Fascist police'. Assuring us he will avoid hagiography, Pugliese presents a generally sympathetic Silone: he frequently praises his political courage and rather oddly delays consideration of evidence about his involvement with the police until the penultimate chapter. Obliged, then, to accept that some of that evidence is hard to refute, Pugliese thinks of every possible reason to doubt the bulk of it, leaving the reader confused and dissatisfied.

Interest aroused, one is more or less obliged to turn to Dario Biocca's Silone, La dappia vita di un italiana (2005, not available in translation); here any doubts as to Silone's collaboration are quickly dispelled. Biocca has meticulously researched Silone's early adult life. The difference between the two biographies is the difference between a neutral professional historian and a romantic, politically engaged literary biographer. For those interested in literature, the historian's approach is more useful and, for all Biocca's doggedly dry accumulation of detail, more moving.

 

Why would a man who always emphasized the importance of morality regularly betray his friends and his cause for so many years? Money may have changed hands, but this is not, in Silone's case, sufficient explanation. All his biographers agree that, in so far as an answer is to be had, it must lie in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck central Italy in 1915.

The third child of small landholders, Secondino Tranquilli was born in 1900 in Pescina, a poor village in the rugged mountains of the Abruzzi, about halfway down the Italian peninsula. In 1911 his father died; two months later his elder brother followed. There had been other deaths. Of the seven children born to his parents, Secondino and his younger brother, Romolo, were the only two still alive when an earthquake destroyed Pescina on 13 January 1915. Secondino, who was living in a seminary close by, saw his family home reduced to rubble. Five days later he dug out his mother's body; Romolo was also buried for some days but survived.

The village had been flattened; in the surrounding countryside thousands were dead. The Tranquilli orphans were taken into state care and sent to separate church boarding schools in Rome. For Secondino, trauma and insecurity were exacerbated by the school's strict regime and classmates who mocked his provincial manners. After trying to run away, he was expelled and eventually placed in the care of Don Orione, a charismatic priest dedicated to rescuing orphans. Don Orione accompanied Secondino on the long train journey north to a new school in San Remo. The fascinating correspondence between the two over the next few years was driven by Secondino's evident need for a parental figure. Don Orione was willing to play that role but required in return that the boy not stray too far from the faith. When Secondino was unhappy in San Remo, Don Orione had him moved to Reggio Calabria. This time Secondino found the atmosphere 'corrupt': his letters speak of a battle between good and evil; reading between the lines one senses the boy's need to please the priest and at the same time his desire to be loved unconditionally. 'I'm very afraid of myself,' he writes in 1916, 'and would like to be in an isolated environment, but there's an irresistible fire in me that pushes me to do good and I'd like to be out in the midst of the world.'

This conflict between withdrawal and engagement, coupled with a fear that he would not make the grade morally, characterized Tranquilli/Silone's entire life. In 1918, Secondino left school without taking his final exams and wrote to Don Orione explaining that he had lost his faith and become a socialist. But the letter was also an appeal for help and attention: 'In the huge flock you are following, take care of the little sheep who is tottering on the brink.' When he then went to Rome to work for the revolutionary Young Socialist Party, Don Orione broke off the correspondence. Tranquilli was dismayed.

On the extreme left in every debate, Trannquilli rose rapidly through the ranks of first the Socialist, then the Communist Party. Pugliese sums up the early years:

In August 1919 ... he was elected secretary of the Unione Giovanile Socialista ... two months later, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Gioventù Socialista Italiana; a few weeks after that, Silone was named to the Communist Youth International; in Jannuary 1920, he assumed direction of the Socialist weekly newspaper L’Avanguardia; at the Socialist Party congress a year later, he represented the Socialist youth wing and brought it to the newly formed Communist Party of Italy and was named to the central committee; in June, he participated in the Third International. Almost as soon as he set foot in Rome, a police file had been opened in his name. In September 1919, he was already marked as 'subversive' and 'dangerous'.

According to Biocca, however, 1919 was also the year in which Tranquilli started passing information to a police inspector called Guido Bellone, a courteous, well-respected, unmarried man in his late forties, a possible replacement father figure. This was three years before Mussolini's March on Rome and the formation of the first Fascist government.

It seems that belonging to an extremist political group gave Tranquilli a surrogate family and a purpose. 'I was a cynic,' he later wrote of himself. 'I cared nothing about others or myself, my health, my future, my studies. I had no plans, no ambitions.' Political activism changed that. Tranquilli was good at it: an effective organizer, compulsive conspirator, writer of fiery articles and convincing speaker. But it was a radical and dangerous choice: he had to follow the party line and live in a precarious milieu in which arrests were frequent and the pressure to inform considerable. As Biocca remarks, Silone's fiction includes various accounts of a young activist being arrested, beaten up, then 'saved' by a parental figure who encourages him to spy, turning his idealistic commitment into a nightmare of duplicity from which it seems impossible to escape.

A word about the evidence for Trannquilli's long collaboration with the police. At its heart is an anguished letter to Bellone dated 1930 and signed with the codename Silvestri; it describes an existential crisis, a return to Christianity and the writer's pressing need to escape from his 'equivocal' position, something he hopes will be permitted if he abandons all political activity. The letter, Pugliese concedes, 'appears to be' in Tranquilli's handwriting. However, the bulk of the communications between informer and policeman, in particular a letter of 1929 which speaks of the impossibility of maintaining the relationship the pair had ten years before, are either not in Tranquilli's hand or are typewritten police transcripts. Nor are they in the first person; Tranquilli is referred to throughout in the third person. As a result Pugliese says it can't be proved that Tranquilli wrote them. But even when communicating with different factions of his own party, Tranquilli sometimes got others to write down sensitive information so that its source could not be recognized, and in his private letters sometimes referred to himself ironically in the third person. Perhaps the habit satisfied a psychological need to split the writing self from the betraying self, as if he were a novelist inventing an unattractive alter ego. Later, in the 1940s, Tranquilli was admired by the American secret services for the extraordinary precautions he took to disguise his identity while collaborating with them. Pugliese's account of his youth, it should be said, is largely drawn from descriptions Tranquilli himself offered much later in life and warned might not be factual. They sometimes seem less reliable than the evidence of collaboration that the biographer doubts.

Countering Pugliese's reluctance and unease is Biocca's painstaking reconstruction of events. During the early years of Fascism, as Tranquilli was given more and more important roles in the Communist Party, he had to go into hiding and then into exile, moving from Berlin to Moscow to Paris to Spain to Switzerland. In every case the information from the spy called Silvestri comes from the place where Tranquilli was. He was frequently separated from his girlfriend, Gabriella Seidenfeld, herself a Communist activist, and there was no single person with him throughout this period who could have given the same information.

On one level Tranquilli was giving the police hard facts: where the party had its bases and printing presses, when and how wanted activists crossed borders. But there is also something exhibitionist about these police reports, as if the young informer wanted to show how much he knew to impress his older minder with his writerly skills and powers of observation and analysis. Throughout the 1920S the relationship between the Communist parties of Europe was fraught and complicated. The hegemony of the Russian party was not seriously questioned, but things were changing rapidly in the Soviet Union, and Italian Communist leaders had different ideas about how to respond to the situation there and how to deal with the rise and consolidation of Fascism. Often called to negotiate between the different national parties, close to the Italian party leader, in Moscow at key moments and touted as a future leader, Tranquilli clearly enjoyed being at the centre of conspiracy and upheaval. He was extremely active in party infighting and at the same time analyzed everything that was going on for the benefit of the police, often very coolly and critically. Indeed, there is an evident continuity between his criticism of the party in these reports and his aggressively anti-Communist journalism years later, as if this secret space in which he could say frankly what he thought (something he couldn't do in party newspapers) had been useful to him. In any event, the unloved orphan was now in urgent demand on both sides of the political divide.

The position was as unsustainable as it was exciting. On a number of occasions other activists were arrested while Tranquilli escaped or was inexplicably released. Dispatches to Bellone suggest his anxiety about possible exposure. But what must ultimately have made the situation intolerable was his brother's arrest in spring 1928. Secondino and Romolo had spent hardly any time together since 1915. Less talented than his older brother, Romolo had been unable to hold down a job and was acting as a Communist courier on a trip to Como via Milan when a bomb exploded in the city, apparently an attempt to assassinate the