Do you not think that this divorce between a spirituality which retires into contemplation and a mass of people dominated by animal instincts is the source of all our ills? Do you not think that every living creature ought to live and struggle among his fellow-creatures rather than shut himself up in an ivory tower?
Although A Handful of Blackberries contains more scenes set in Rome than the other two Silone novels discussed here, a better view of the Italian city dweller is given by Taddei and Moravia. Taddei’s The Pine Tree and the Mole is built about citizens of Livorno who are as widely separated by wealth and position as are Silone’s Old Zaccaria and the Tarocchi family. The circle of lawyers and politicians who exchange wives and party labels are a different breed of men from the jailbirds, pimps, and informers at the opposite extreme of Livorno’s social structure. But both groups are equally adrift, both caught in the same wave of post-World War I exhaustion and economic derangement which sent so many Italians in search of the answer that Mussolini seemed to provide. Taddei emphasizes poverty and depression as the main factors which prepared the way for the Fascist regime, but one senses something else, particularly among his representatives of the educated class. They seem to be seeking some sort of order, a stabilizing force in their political life. Taddei says that the Italian Socialist Party seemed to offer the solution. But the Socialists failed because
overwhelmed by the favorable-seeming course of events and overlooking the most important phase of the matter, they lacked the time to think of many things and, instead, viewed the period with optimistic eyes; everything appeared to them to depend upon the number of adherents that any particular event brought into their ranks. Political expediency thus became, in a manner of speaking, epidemic, and the deepening crisis in all its amplitude became apparent in the form of a spiritual crisis that was its reflection.
Marcello Clerici in The Conformist finds his solution in Fascism. Taddei’s hero turns at last to the same source of strength which Silone singles out—the land and its people. They both feel, rather like Orwell, that the masses are the ultimate source of their country’s salvation. Old Lazzaro, shouting defiance at the Communists, epitomizes these people: “There’ll always be someone that refuses to sell his soul for a handful of beans and a piece of cheese.” In this he is like Conrad’s Giorgio Viola, “the Garibaldino,” an old expatriate whose divinities are Garibaldi and Liberty.
This small group of Italian novelists portray their countrymen as members of widely separated economic and social classes. There are the well-to-do who seem to seek order and get it with a vengeance. And there are the poor of the cities and villages who are the victims of this order, squeezed by poverty, by powerful landowners, and harnessed by a church which renders more than is his to Caesar, a church which brings politics into the confessional and divorces religion from everyday life. Something of the spirit of Garibaldi still lives, however, nourished by the deprived ones who are close to the soil. Perhaps this is a modern political parable in which the last shall be first.
SPAIN: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT
Robert Jordan’s love of Spain is not an abstract emotion. He has a deep feeling for its people, but he is still able to see their faults. Throughout For Whom the Bell Tolls he makes conscious estimates of their national character. He says they are a truly thoughtful and considerate people who are not merely formally polite as are the French. But they are also treacherous:
Of course they turned on you. They turned on you often but they always turned on everyone. They turned on themselves, too. If you had three together, two would unite against one, and then the two would start to betray each other. Not always, but often enough for you to take enough cases and start to draw it as a conclusion.
These characteristics cut across party lines. The Rebel slaughter which left Jordan’s Maria orphaned and violated had an equally brutal counterpart in the Republican massacre supervised by the guerrilla chief Pablo in which twenty Fascists were beaten between two lines of men and then flung over a cliff. Jordan thinks that killing “is their extra sacrament.” Loving them, he tries to understand them:
There is no finer and no worse people in the world. No kinder people and no crueler.... Forgiveness is a Christian idea and Spain has never been a Christian country. It has always had its own special idol worship within the Church.... The people had grown away from the Church because the Church was in the government and the government had always been rotten. This was the only country that the reformation never reached. They were paying for the Inquisition now, all right.