Fontamara

Fontamara, Silone’s first novel, portrays the injustices suffered by a mountain village at the hands of the Fascist state. In one sense, the entire village is the hero of this work, with its collective sorrows and bewilderment serving as the focal point of the action. While the emphasis rests on this common tragedy, the novel also reveals its author’s interest in the reactions of individuals caught up in the aggregate patterns of human fate. Thus, the fortunes of the village of Fontamara are interwoven with the private destiny of one of its sons, Bernardo Viola. Viola’s hopes for a better life, a life enriched by love and freedom from poverty, are dashed on the rocks of the times in which he lives. Having journeyed to Rome to seek his fortune, Viola is betrayed by the false promise of urban life under Fascism and, upon hearing of the death of the woman he loves in Fontamara, he confesses to crimes he has not committed in order to allow a young revolutionary to go free.

Viola’s personal sacrifice, though certainly noble, is less than redemptive as far as Fontamara is concerned. The young revolutionary who has been freed because of Viola’s sacrifice makes his way to Fontamara and sets up a clandestine newspaper, which the villagers decide to call What Must We Do? When the authorities trace the paper to Fontamara, the village is attacked and many of its inhabitants murdered by Fascist militiamen. The few survivors are described at the end of the novel as asking the same question that had served as the title for their newspaper: “What can we do?” The novel thus closes on a highly ambiguous note, for the villagers’ query is never answered. This ambiguity deepens the tragedy that befalls the village and Viola, who ends his own life in a jail cell. Fontamara thus portrays the defeat of human hope on both the collective and the individual levels. It seems content with alerting readers to the dangers of Fascism and to the tragic triumph of history over human desire. The bleakness of Fontamara presents a challenge to Silone’s basic faith in the resilience of the human spirit, and it was only in his later works that he could clearly respond to the haunting question with which this early text ends.

Bread and Wine

In Bread and Wine, his second novel, Silone discovered resources on which he could draw for the remainder of his literary career. These resources were both thematic and technical: The title of the novel suggests the power latent in the communion of humankind and the dynamics of literary symbols that point beyond the present moment to a better future.

Pietro Spina, the novel’s hero, returns in disguise to his native Italy from exile in Belgium. Because he is still a hunted man, Spina assumes the identity of a priest and calls himself Paolo Spada. As a “priest” of the secular gospel of brotherhood and social reform, Spina feels himself bonded to the lives of the humble rural folk through breaking bread and drinking wine with them. As the plot progresses, the terms of this secular Eucharist become more and more explicit, until in the episode of the funeral meal for a young Socialist, Luigi Murica, who has been killed by the Fascist authorities, the full meaning of the novel’s title is revealed. The many grapes needed to make wine and the ears of grain necessary for the production of bread speak of the merging of individual human lives into a common identity. It is the strength of this new corporate identity that provides the hope that beyond the present misery lies a brighter future.

This dominant theme is even hinted at by the novel’s time scheme, a span of approximately nine months, to which the period needed for the maturation of grapes and grain and that allotted for human gestation correspond. The motif of gestation applies to subtle changes undergone by Spina himself during the novel. The limitations of his devotion to political principle are suggested by the hero’s growing interest in people rather than in doctrine and by the episode of the apparent suicide of the embittered revolutionary Uliva in Rome. For belief in causes, Silone substitutes a compassion rooted in the experience of human solidarity. Lest the novel seem blindly optimistic, however, the fate of the old Don Benedetto, priest and teacher of Spina, is included. Don Benedetto attempts to maintain his faith and personal integrity in the face of the progressive corruption of Church and state and is finally murdered when he drinks poisoned sacramental wine while saying Mass. The figurative implications of the old priest’s death mitigate the hope inspired by the novel’s central image of communion by reminding the reader that wine also symbolizes blood, sorrow, and death.

In the novel’s two most prominent women, Bianchina Girasole and Christina Colamartini, Silone presents both the two sides of human nature, body and soul, and a dual vision of Italy dominated by Fascism. Bianchina, a rural girl who eventually becomes a prostitute in Rome, represents the physical degradation endured by the oppressed Italian people. Christina, the daughter of an aristocratic old family, is devoured by wolves after following Spina into the mountains as he tried to escape capture by government authorities; her fate represents the death of the human spirit under Fascism. At the close of the novel, then, the promise of human solidarity suggested by the image of communion is imperiled. Spina’s flight to the mountains may be read as an allusion to Moses on the mountain or Christ at Golgotha, but in fact the text of Bread and Wine is silent concerning his fate. This ambiguous closure, though it recalls the end of Fontamara, also transcends it, for Spina, unlike Viola, is still alive and thus may return to reestablish his communion with the peasants of the Abruzzi. For this reason, and for many others, Bread and Wine is a more satisfying and affirmative novel than Fontamara.

The Seed Beneath the Snow

The Seed Beneath the Snow is designed as a sequel to the message of Bread and Wine. It picks up the thread of Pietro Spina’s story but does not address the question of what happened to him after his flight to the mountains. The reader knows only that Spina has survived and is searching for a means by which the promise of human solidarity may be sustained. As in the previous novel, the direction of this hope is implied by the metaphor of its title. The respect for the earth and agrarian life, which is implicit in Silone’s earlier fiction, evolves into a complex reverence in The Seed Beneath the Snow.

In addition to Spina, this novel focuses on two figures, each of whom is rather extraordinary. The first is “Aunt” Euremia, a strange old woman whose supposed wealth is coveted by the inhabitants of the village where she lives. She is a skewed version of Silone’s image of Italy as woman, and her sexual indeterminacy suggests again the distorted nature of this nation under fascism. The “wealth” of Euremia consists of chests full of her own excrement, which may be taken as another sign of the corruption of Italian culture.

The second figure is the village deaf-mute, Infante, whom Spina tries to teach to speak. The first word he attempts to have Infante pronounce is “manure,” which provides a curious link with the figure of Euremia. In dedicating himself to Infante, Spina suppresses his love for Donna Faustina. This sacrifice seems to come to naught when Infante, who has murdered his own brutal father, must flee the village to avoid arrest. In one final, dramatic gesture of self-sacrifice, Spina himself confesses to the crime, and the novel ends with the police leading him away. The grand hope with which the novel began has thus been reduced to a single gesture of sacrifice, the value of which is at best questionable.

The “seed” of new life does not bear the sort of fruit that the reader might have expected from The Seed Beneath the Snow, but it does anticipate Silone’s later interest in gratuitous gestures of self-sacrifice, which stand at the center of works such as The Secret of Luca and The Story of a Humble Christian. In a sense, The Seed Beneath the Snow brings to a close that phase of Silone’s thought that emphasized a radical reordering of individual lives and of society according to the prophetic hope for political reform. Hereafter, Silone’s hope is more circumscribed, focusing on gestures of the individual rather than grand movements that seek to change society as a whole.

A Handful of Blackberries

A Handful of Blackberries, published more than a decade after the appearance of The Seed Beneath the Snow, reveals the contours of Silone’s new priorities. Its hero, Rocco de Donatis, returns to his native Abruzzi and becomes a leader in the local Communist Party. He gradually loses faith in its promises, however, as did the author himself at one point in his life, and turns instead to the twin virtues of love and endurance, the first exemplified by Stella, a Jewish refugee—whom he marries—and the second by the figure of the old peasant Lazzaro. Lazzaro, whose name associates him with the Lazarus who was raised from death in the Bible, represents the new life, which has been the object of the quest of Silone’s heroes since the novel Bread and Wine.

Metaphorically, Lazzaro is associated with that bread which sustains human hope, for he is at one point in the novel compared to a cart loaded with wheat in a starving village. In him, symbolically, the reader may see the fruit of the seed planted in the Pietro Spina novels. The figure of Lazzaro is also the embodied answer to the question posed at the end of Fontamara. What must be done is to root oneself in the enduring virtues of the earth itself, in its serene endurance and fruitfulness, drawing from it a sustenance more real than that provided by any commitment to abstract political ideals. The emblem of this simple manner of living is found in the novel’s title: The handful of blackberries suggests a humble rural meal rather than a sacramental feast of bread and wine, and the modulated symbolic overtones of this new image are in keeping with the character of the final phase of Silone’s works. Rocco de Donatis has adopted the virtues of Lazzaro’s life as the novel ends; he is shown passing his days quietly in the company of friends while serving in a movement whose goal is to improve the lot of farm laborers. The same rhythms of provincial life, which seemed tantamount to imprisonment in Fontamara, lend to life its true worth in A Handful of Blackberries. Such is the transformation of thought that distinguishes Silone’s final works.

The Secret of Luca

The culmination of the evolution of Silone’s vision of life may be observed in his last major novel, The Secret of Luca. The plot of the novel centers on Andrea Cipriani, a young man recently released from prison after serving twelve years for anti-Fascist activities, and his attempt to understand the aged Luca Sabatini, who has also been released from prison after having spent forty years there for a crime he did not commit.

Both men return to the mountain village of Cisterna, and Cipriani begins his search for the truth behind Luca’s refusal to testify in his own defense at his trial years earlier. The only other villager who seems at all concerned about Luca is the priest Don Serafino. The rest of the people seem to resent the old convict’s very presence. Luca’s secret involves his devotion to a woman whom he could never possess, and his suffering stems from his steadfast refusal to compromise her reputation. Here again is the act of gratuitous self-sacrifice, an act akin to Pietro Spina’s confession to Infante’s crime in The Seed Beneath the Snow and to Bernardo Viola’s confession for the sake of the young revolutionary in Fontamara. Yet Luca’s motives are purer than those of his precursors by just so much as love is superior to despair and desperation. In this novel, Silone seems to discern beauty and truth in two contradictory modes of human existence: the integrity of love and the enigma of sacrifice. In the case of Luca, these forms of truth intersect. The old man’s virtue stands as a mute rebuke to the selfishness and pettiness of his fellow villagers, and they smart from it.

Luca stands as an emblem of the power of renunciation to purify the human spirit; in him, the reader can glimpse some of Silone’s own willingness to sacrifice public acclaim to remain true to his principles in the latter part of his career. With Luca, as with Lazzaro in A Handful of Blackberries, Silone accomplished what he could not do with Pietro Spina, the hero of the first phase of his literary vision. These older men seem to have returned from the mountain having seen the promised land of social justice and human dignity, which seems to have eluded Spina. They realize, as perhaps Spina did not, that the kingdom sought by the Silone hero, like the Kingdom of God in the Gospel of Luke, lies within the human spirit. The heroes of Silone’s final works possess quiet and determined spirits, and these spirits produce the seeds of virtue that may be planted in the lives of those who recognize the Lucas and Lazzaros of this world. In this way only, spirit by spirit, can the field of human society bear the long-awaited harvest of brotherhood, which was the central concern of Silone’s life and art.

No discussion of Silone’s writing would be complete without reference to the author’s revision of his first three novels some twenty years after their original dates of publication. Silone commented that he wished to render these novels more enduring works of art by deleting elements that he felt in retrospect to be too subjective or dated. This impulse bears witness to Silone’s development as an artist. The changes made in his works preserve their original thematic emphases for the most part. The structure of Bread and Wine is changed by the division of its plot into twenty-nine short chapters instead of the twelve of the earlier version, but the effect on the action is minimal. Of greater import is the suppression of the murder of the old priest Don Benedetto, a modification that relieves the darkened atmosphere of the novel’s final chapters. The revisions of Fontamara and A Seed Beneath the Snow are of similar character and effect.

Perhaps the most suggestive remark contained in the author’s “Note on the Revision of Bread and Wine” is the one dealing with the reversal of the words of the title from Pane e vino in 1937 to Vino e pane in 1955. Silone states that it is his impression that wine plays a larger role than bread in the new version of his novel. While his words may be taken in a number of ways, they certainly point to the author’s sensitivity to the symbolic import of his writing. One possible reading of his emphasis on wine is that while pane could easily summon up thoughts of collectivist worker and peasant slogans from the 1930’s, vino may more readily suggest the cup of personal destiny from which every human being must drink alone. Hence, Silone may be alluding once more to ascendency of the solitary hero in his later work.

Be this as it may, the author’s note to the revised version of Fontamara contains a passage in which he compares himself to certain monks in the Middle Ages who spent their whole lives painting the figure of Christ over and over again. Like these monks, Silone’s portrait of humankind becomes more delicate and finely detailed with each successive canvas. This devotion is another dimension of Silone’s personal integrity. Never satisfied with seeing life darkly in the mirror of art, he constantly strove to create an image of truth beheld face-to-face.