The political novel

by Joseph Blotner

Fascism through Italian Eyes

Collectively, the novels of Ezio Taddei, Alberto Moravia, and Ignazio Silone present a history of Italy during the years that saw Mussolini’s rise, reign, and ruin. Taddei’s The Pine Tree and the Mole (1945) is set in Livorno in 1919. On one social level the novel follows the career of Michele Pellizari, whose political odyssey leads him from the Italian Socialist Party to the Fascist Party, and eventually to a return to the land of his peasant people. On another level the novel relates the rise of Rubachiuchi from jailbird to Fascist agent provocateur and party official. There are many long passages throughout the book in which Taddei drops his characters to go directly to a recital of the events which led to the triumph of the Fascists. He describes the return of war veterans filled with unrest and plagued with unemployment. He records the failure of the Socialists as the Fascists deliberately fill their Black Shirt squads with convicted criminals. He sets down the workers’ capture of the factories and finally the Fascist march on Rome.

In The Conformist (1951) Alberto Moravia is more concerned with a psychological portrait of Marcello Clerici than he is with the description of the period. But in analyzing the trauma-inspired desire for conformity which led to his job in Mussolini’s secret police, Moravia tells a good deal about the political climate of Italy of yesterday—from the palmy days of the Ethiopian campaign to the time of the retribution which leaves Marcello and his family dead by the roadside from the bullets of a strafing Allied plane.

Three of Ignazio Silone’s powerful novels, Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and A Handful of Blackberries, deal with Italian political history from the middle thirties to the years immediately following World War II. Writing from exile when the Fascists were in power, Silone consistently dealt with the repression of the Italian peasant. Although he always focuses on small places such as Fontamara, Pietrasecca, and San Luca, his characters are in a sense generic, representing the non-Fascists who want only enough bread and wine to live life decently with a little comfort and security. Silone describes the regimentation of Italian life in the city as well as the village. He also shows, as does Koestler in Darkness at Noon, the destruction of the Communist Party after the rise to power of a dictatorship of the Right. A Handful of Blackberries has as its background the resurgence of the Italian Communist Party after the fall of Mussolini. But Silone preserves a continuity with his earlier books by a continuing account of the struggle of the peasants against the landed families. In this book the Tarocchi family is the equivalent of Prince Torlonia in Fontamara. Fascism has been crushed, but the great landowner is still the force which the peasant must fight to keep his small plot.

Alan Paton: The Trek of the Boers

Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope detail the bases of South Africa’s explosive contemporary political life. The anti-Negro legislation, the segregation, the police control of the native peoples are all set forth. Paton’s moving novels record the individual tragedies which transpire in this climate of tears and violence. They also show their historical antecedents. The red flashes which Pieter Van Vlaanderen wore on his shoulders during the war meant that he would fight anywhere in Africa. To some this made him

a Smuts man, a traitor to the language and struggle of the Afrikaner people, and a lickspittle of the British Empire and the English King, fighting in an English war that no true Afrikaner would take part in.

Here is a historical fact that illustrates the division between the peoples of South Africa. Another is the Immorality Act of 1927, which typifies another great source of conflict and causes Pieter’s ruin.

Richard Kaufmann: The Third Reich

Richard Kaufmann’s Heaven Pays No Dividends (1951) is one of the better books to come out of post-war Germany although it is not, as its cover enthusiastically declares, the “modern All Quiet on the Western Front.” Roderich Stamm is a completely non-political young art historian who drifts into Nazi organizations because life is made rather unpleasant for one outside them. His father, however, is an economist who becomes attracted to the Nazi movement, lectures at meetings, and eventually rises to an important post in Hitler’s Foreign Ministry. As a gunner in a flak battery, Stamm fights in France, Russia, and Germany. He emerges from the war minus several teeth, an arm, and all his illusions. Each of the girls he has loved has married or died. Through his eyes the reader sees the events leading to victory in Paris and defeat on the road from Stalingrad. But one also meets Gestapo men like Alfred Karawan and officials like Heinrich Himmler. This novel chronicles the sound and fury of politics and war as it explores the effects on the German people of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Less political than most novels in this study, Kaufmann’s book has a good deal in common with many of them. The lives of its people are played out against a backdrop of local, national, and international affairs. And the novelist records not only the comings and goings of the individuals he creates, but also the events of the world in which they live.