Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“MASON – The Life of R.A.K.Mason” by Rachel Barrowman (first published by Victoria University Press, 2003)

“POET TRIUMPHANT – The Life and Writings of R.A.K.Mason (1905-1971)” by “Asclepius” [John Caselberg] (first published by Steele Roberts 2004)

           

            I’ve just been considering a new edition of an old biography of William Colenso. I noted that there are now a number of books available about the man. As a sometime biographer (James Michael Liston – A Life, VUP, 2006 etc.), I am often haunted by the question of how much any new biography can add to biographies of the same person that have already been published [see the posting “Why Write a New Biography?” on the index at right]. Yet I am aware that different biographies on the same person can present radically different perspectives, and this in itself can be valuable.

            As an example, consider two biographies of the New Zealand poet Ron Mason, which were published within a year of each other, Rachel Barrowman’s Mason and John Caselberg’s Poet Triumphant. (Why Caselberg chose to have his book published under the pretentious pseudonym “Asclepius” is anyone’s guess.)  In one of them, a bibliographical note says that they began as part of the same biographical project, but the two authors’ views of what really constituted a biography diverged so much, that two separate books emerged.

            Any biographer of R.A.K.Mason has to consider a major awkward fact. Mason’s fame is as a poet, but his real poetic writing dried up relatively early in his life. He died at the age of 66, but in his last 30 years he wrote only one or two things that he chose to include in the slim volume of his collected poems. He was poet enough to realize that the occasional agitprop piece he had written in those 30-odd years didn’t really qualify. When you pick up Mason’s collected poems, you are [with only a couple of exceptions like his Sonnet to MacArthur’s Eyes] reading things written by a young man – a teenager or chap in his twenties.

Here then is a key question for biographers. Why did Mason in effect dry up so soon? Even before these two biographies were written, essays and articles on Mason had noted that his poetic silence coincided with his devoting himself more to political and trade union work, left-wing causes and sometimes editing the newspaper of the Communist Party (of which he was on the fringes).

            So did the politics kill the poetry? Or was the politics a substitute for a poetic inspiration that had already died?

            In their very different ways, both Rachel Barrowman’s Mason and John Caselberg’s Poet Triumphant have to accommodate this question. Indeed Barrowman explicitly asks the question “Did the poet fail because of the politics; or did politics fill the space when poetry had failed?” (Pg.15)

            Let me make it clear at once that Barrowman’s is far and away the more detailed, scholarly, cross-referenced, footnoted, documented and thoroughly academic of the two biographies. This being the case, she is able to give a very nuanced answer. She shows that, even as a young man, Mason was aware that it was no good writing poetry that was merely propaganda. From his mid-twenties, she quotes him writing mockingly to another poet “I may have radical sympathies, and write articles for the N.Z.Worker, but I don’t write ‘rhymes of the under-dog’ (dedicated to all who toil, 3^rd edition, price 3/6 post free). Get me?” (Pg.101). Later, Mason edited an issue of the much-mythologised university magazine Phoenix, which he wanted to make a platform for left-wing polemics. On his watch it included left-wing articles and editorials. But, Barrowman notes, even under Mason’s editorship the magazine’s literary content (poems and stories) was not noticeably left-wing. Again, Mason was poet enough not to confuse political sympathies with poetic achievement and he clearly had not found any ardently left-wing or proletarian writers who were producing the poetic goods (see pp.174 ff).

Barrowman is under no illusions about the tensions between artistic creation and affiliation with an authoritarian political movement. She notes: “To describe the [Communist] Party as rigorous, dour, prone to factionalism and suspicious of students, poets and intellectuals is a cliché, but largely true.” (Pg.184) She documents fully (pp.262 ff.) the tensions of 1939-41, when, because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, New Zealand Communists and their fellow-travellers were instructed to regard the war against Hitler as a mere scrap between rival capitalists. She gives a full and detailed account of changes in CP policy, including the events of 1956, which split the tiny New Zealand Communist movement and really signalled the beginning of the end of its wider influence. She notes that Mason’s enthusiastic views on Mao’s China were the product of one carefully-supervised tour.

I am simplifying grossly the perspective given in Barrowman’s book. But I can say that she gives a detailed and documented account of the ideological sea in which Mason was swimming and she is fully aware of how incompatible his enthusiasms were with real poetic creation. Late in Mason’s story, she quotes Denis Glover addressing him as: “you silly old bastard – Carpenter’s Union, Friend of the World, Inc., failed Socialist, Incompetent Communist, Good Gardener, Wonderful Friend, Silly Bloody Sucker….” (Pg.356). Loudmouth blowhard though Denis Glover often was, one can’t help but see this as a fairly comprehensive description.

Having focused on these political matters, I should make it clear that Barrowman is every bit as interested in Mason’s poetry as in his politics. She analyses his poems. She notes scrupulously the genesis of all Mason’s written works, including the later ones, which she recognises as less worthy of the canon than the earlier ones.

Now let’s turn to Caselberg’s Poet Triumphant.

I’m not comparing Hyperion with a satyr, but it is extraordinary how different the interpretations of the two books are. Poet Triumphant is slimmer, less fully-documented and far less academic than Barrowman’s Mason.

In the political field, Caselberg is aware of at least some of the naivetes of 1930s leftism. When, for example, he is discussing a pro-Soviet pamphlet Mason once wrote, he adds the footnote that “No ‘Ernst Toller’ escaped from Russia to apprise and undeceive humanitarians in the West of the long-maintained Stalinist terror” (Pg.176). So he knows there was such a thing as “actually-existing Communism” which was nothing like the rosy daydream that Mason and his mates had. Yet at the same time, Caselberg really buys into much of the old myth. The Spanish Civil War is simply “democratic forces” opposing “fascist invasion” (Pg.164). Whenever Caselberg is faced with the prospect of having to write about something embarrassing in Mason’s political life, he omits it and rushes on to less controversial matters. In Chapter 14, where he is dealing with the years 1939-41, he avoids mentioning the Hitler-Stalin Pact and all the tensions among Mason’s friends that this caused. Even more amazing, there is no mention whatsoever of 1956 and its aftermath and everything that it meant for Mason and his former Communist comrades.

Caselberg quotes deadpan, and apparently without realizing the fatuity of it, a comment Mason made in his China-New Zealand Friendship Association days. On his one and only guided tour to China, Mason addressed an Agricultural Producers’ Co-operative, saying  “I am not a peasant but I work like one as a landscape gardener, and I know what work on the land every day means” (Pg.222). In the same po-faced fashion Caselberg serves us (pg.292) a kitsch account of Mason meeting Mao and the “two poets” communing. So determined is Caselberg to separate Mason from his naïve Stalinism (and later Maoism) that he quotes none of the many articles in which Mason clearly approved of Stalinist policy.

Again, I’m concentrating on political matters in these comments, but there is a reason for it. In the course of his text, Caselberg quotes in full nearly all of the poems that Mason chose to include in his collected poems – and quite a bit that he didn’t. (If you don’t have the collected poems, Poet Triumphant would be a reasonable substitute.) In each case, the poem has its literary analogues listed and explained in a rather simplistic way. Caselberg’s purpose is quite evident. He wants us to believe (as the very title Poet Triumphant implies) that Mason never lost his touch as a poet.

Therefore, his answer to the awkward question that haunts Mason studies is to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

The later agitprop and pieces written to order are presented as if they are the equals of Mason’s best. Caselberg refuses to recognise the dismalness of Mason’s stereotypical monologue Squire Speaks and he builds up Mason’s Strait is the Gate as if it were a great literary achievement. He quotes the guarded and polite reviews of the time as if they are critical vindication. The final section of the book is an angry reply to those critics who have dared to criticise Mason.

To put it bluntly, Poet Triumphant is a naïve biography – basically a chronology of Mason’s life interspersed with enthusiastic comments on the poems and evasive comments on the politics. It is the work of an admirer and enthusiast, not of a methodical biographer.

Yet there is something very likeable about Caselberg’s enthusiasm, just as there is sometimes something a little too precise and dry in Barrowman’s account. I was glad to read both these books. I do not believe either of them tells the whole truth about the man – but then no biography ever does. And in this case, at a certain point, I feel the absurdity of writing many hundreds of pages about a poet whose entire readable corpus is one slim volume. Put Barrowman and Caselberg together, and you have as much biography as need be written of Mason.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

B.S. INDEED

Throughout the world, women are being harassed by men with evil intentions.

These men ostentatiously open doors for women; offer to carry women’s luggage when the women haven’t asked for help; keep enquiring after the women’s health and suggesting a lie-down when women do the least demanding things; and generally behave as if women are incapable of doing anything for themselves.

You might be fooled into thinking that these are simply polite, solicitous men.

But beware  - oh beware – of these evil men. They are manipulative male chauvinists whose main purposes are (a.) to get into the women’s knickers; and (b.) to treat women as subordinates and sex-objects. Their apparent good manners are a charade. They soften up unsuspecting women in order to dominate them.

They are really practitioners of Benevolent Sexism!!!!

Thus ran a recent cover-story in the New Zealand Listener, which posed for readers the leading question “Are relationships being ruined by traditional attitudes?” (The “traditional attitudes” in question being opening doors for women, offering to carry their bags etc.)

Not to beat about the bush, let me admit at once that my chief reaction to the article was a guffaw and snort as I considered how the article made so much out of so little.

In short, it was a journalistic beat-up, replete (oh the shame of the Thought Crime!!) with the news that “up to 80% of people” have some sexist attitudes.

Doubtless there are men whose extravagant politeness is a stratagem to ensnare and suborn women. But doesn’t an article like the Listener one really imply women are so stupid that they don’t already know this? Further, do such devious men pose any more of a threat to the wellbeing of women than the treat-‘em-rough Bad Boys for whom, we are constantly being told, some women fall? And are narrowly-defined “traditional attitudes” any more of a threat to relationships than selfishness, materialism, hedonism, a sneering attitude towards marriage (unless it is gay marriage, in which case it is to be promoted) and a culture which says that individual autonomy is more important than commitment to somebody else?

Wanna see really screwed-up, badly-hurt people in bad relationships? I doubt if many of them are victims of Benevolent Sexism.

As for the phrase Benevolent Sexism itself, it was made up by two sociologists, who (according to the Listener article) said they were proud of the fact that the phrase had the same initials as BullShit – B.S.

Tee hee hee.

The value-loaded “research” they recounted at once suggested crap sociology, while the name they had devised suggested pre-determined attitudes as well as a fairly primitive sense of humour on the part of the sociologists. So it is not as if we are dealing with penetrating, decisive and indisputable conclusions. We are dealing with partisan, loaded and fairly dodgy commentary.

Okay. Enough with breaking a butterfly on a wheel. If this singularly silly article annoyed me, it was because, like so many others in the field, it committed two obvious errors.

First, it was designed to flatter its readers. Women whose chief worry is over-solicitous and potentially manipulative men, are women who do not have many real worries. An article of this sort allows them to see themselves as persecuted sufferers in the cause of gender equity.

  

 Second, like so many such articles, it had a reductionist view of human relationships. There are times in any good, healthy relationship when he will go out of his way for her; and she will go out of her way for him. If doors are sometimes unnecessarily opened, if bags are sometimes unnecessarily carried, it can be a sign of real love and concern. If these were the only signs of love and concern, then in all probability it would indeed be a superficial relationship. But to rail at “Chivalry’s dark side”, as the heading of the article did, is to suggest that all politeness and good manners are to be shunned. What really seemed to rile both the sociologists and the author of the article was the evidence that some people – including many women – actually appreciate being treated with consideration.

If any woman feels a man is showing special consideration to her merely as a means of manipulating her, the advice is obvious: tell him to bugger off. Most women are perfectly capable of doing this. Those who are not – those who fall most easily for polite blandishments – are just as likely to fall for any other sort of manipulative behaviour. Or for b.s. sociology.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“A SECOND LIFE - APRICA TO SALVATION IN SWITZERLAND 1943” by Alan Poletti (privately published, may be bought directly from author at 330 Pt Chevalier Road, Point Chevalier, Auckland or website www.resourceroom.co.nz $NZ38)

            It is not my habit on this blog to review self-published works. But a friend of mine in the publishing trade is most insistent that, with established publishers in various ways limiting their range of product, the self-published book is becoming a more and more respectable phenomenon. It’s the only way that some worthwhile, but offbeat and perhaps non-commercial, works can see the light of print.

            All of this is by way of saying that I’m happy to take notice of Alan Poletti’s A Second Life, a project dear to Poletti’s heart, which documents a small but significant historical incident.

            Dr Poletti is a New Zealander of Italian descent – a physicist who, for over thirty years, taught at the University of Auckland. Some years ago, he took a trip to Italy to verify details of his family’s ancestry that his grandpa had told him. The family had come from the Villa di Tirano region in the alps of Italy’s far north, right next to the Swiss border. Alan Poletti confirmed things he wanted to know about his pedigree, but in the process he met the priest Don Cirillo Vitalini and unearthed a more dramatic story than the family one.

            Basically, it was the story of how sympathetic Italian border guards, and two anti-fascist priests, helped to smuggle two hundred Jewish refugees into Switzerland during the Second World War. This was at the time when the Nazis were about to invade Italy and Italian Fascist round-ups of Jews were becoming more common. On 8 September 1943, the Fascist grand council had deposed Mussolini and made an armistice with the Allies, hoping thus to take Italy completely out of the war. Instead, German forces invaded Italy, now treating the country as an enemy state, and the Allies had to fight long and hard to gain control of the peninsula.

            As soon as the September 1943 armistice was made, perceptive people understood what the Nazi reaction would be. This included the Jewish community who were living as refugees in the north Italian town of Aprica.

These people had fled from Croatia, then under control of the homegrown Croatian fascist Ustashi regime, which was in alliance with the Nazis. Poletti makes it clear that the refugees had been able to reach comparative safety in Italy in the first place, partly because many Italian border guards (on the border with Croatia) were either sympathetic to them in their suffering – or were willing to take bribes to enable them to flee. Once in Aprica, the Croatian Jews had hoped to survive the war unmolested. They were organised in part by the Jewish relief agency Delasem, which had had to work covertly in Italy ever since Mussolini had been foolish enough to pass anti-Semitic laws in 1938.

The fear of deportation to a death camp became more urgent when three Italian Jews managed to escape from Treblinka, made it back to Italy and made known what the camps’ real purpose was. In mid-September 1943, Delasem moved, in collaboration with the priests Cirillo Vitalini and Giuseppe Carozzi. The priests knew that the Fascist militia (MVSM), which sometimes patrolled the border, would be only too willing to turn escaping Jews back and hand them over to the Germans. By contrast the regular border patrol, the Guardia di Finanza whose main purpose was to stop smuggling, contained many officers who had never taken to Fascism in the first place and some who actively opposed it. Treating with two Guardia di Finanza officers in particular, Bruno Pilat and Leonardo Marinelli, the priests organized the unopposed moonlight flit of the refugees into Switzerland. Clearly there is more to the story than this – not least the dangers of the mountain paths and the bureaucratic problems of being accepted into Switzerland – but that is the heart of the story.

            Dr Poletti writes his story in the form of a dossier. He says in his Preamble :

“I am a scientist who is used to writing academic papers. I had initially intended this to be another such paper: an objective and dispassionate discourse based on archival records and published accounts, full of references and footnotes. As I worked on the material, however, the characters of the people who were involved slowly insisted on being heard. What was more, some of them have been able to give me their story directly….”

This means there is much directly-quoted testimony from both aged survivors and their children. Some of it is very touching. We hear, for example, Iva Federbusch confess the naivete of some Jews in Croatia when they were first given marching orders:

 “When the Ustashi established camps for Jews in Croatia, the Jewish community sent out a pamphlet explaining how to dig wells in case of water shortage in the camps! My mother and I discussed which blouse to pack for the camp; one that doesn’t need too much ironing.” (Pg.34)

Repeatedly, Poletti attributes the goodness of the two priests to the nature of the men themselves – not to the institutional church in general. Indeed, while he notes that many Italian priests performed similar acts of mercy, he makes a number of waspish comments about the Vatican’s lack of action and lack of leadership at the time of the refugees’ distress. He also confirms what others have noted of Italian officials in the Fascist years – many of them were Fascists only by convention and really wouldn’t have a bar of the Fascist ideology. Numerous acts of kindness and humanity are credited to people who were officially Fascist party members. Of Tenete Comandante Bruno Pilat of the Guardia di Finanza he writes:

“It is certain that he carried the Fascist party card. At that time, you did not get to be a brigadier in the carabinieri without one. But as with all members of the armed forces, his oath of loyalty was to the king and the kingdom of Italy. In the chaos, following the armistice, there were no longer orders to follow. He acted upon what he considered to be the best interests of the internees. Not only did he tell them they could go, but he arranged for the men he commanded to assist them.” (Pg.56)

 I enjoyed the direct style with which Poletti told the narrative part of this story, although I do note that this book is as much an assemblage of documents as it is a narrative. Pages are devoted to reproducing passports and official papers; giving thumbnail photographs of all the refugees; documenting with colour photographs a return journey to the area many years later by one refugee, Vera Neufeld; and describing exactly what local geographical features were. If I were to be critical, I would say that it is more the raw materials that have yet to be shaped into a history than it is the history itself.

Even so, I’m very happy to pass on a report in the newsletter of the Dante Alighieri Society, which tells me that the book has been translated into Italian. The Italian edition is prefaced with a letter from the current mayor of Aprica, giving his recommendation that it be put into the hands of all local high-school students.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“FONTAMARA” by Ignazio Silone (written in Italian in 1930-31; first published in a German translation 1933; English translation 1934)

           

            Allow me to say a word about a novel that is an Italian classic, but that, in the last two decades, has been reassessed anxiously by its author’s admirers, for reasons unknown to its first readers.

I’ll make the reasons clear at the end of this notice.

“Ignazio Silone” (pen-name of Secondino Tranquilli, 1900-79) was Italy’s best-known anti-Fascist novelist at the time of Mussolini’s dictatorship and Fontamara is the classic Italian anti-Fascist novel. It was written when Ignazio Silone was in exile in Zurich, having left Italy in 1930. Fontamara was first published in a German translation in Switzerland, and appeared in the original Italian only when it was published by an émigré press in Paris. One of the two people to whom Silone dedicated the novel was his brother Romolo Tranquilli, who died (after repeated beatings) in a Fascist jail in 1931. When American and British forces were fighting in Italy in 1944, they circulated Italian-language copies of the novel to local civilians as a propaganda weapon.  I read Fontamara in an old Penguin paperback published in the late 1930s. The Penguin translation of 1934 was the first English language translation.

Fontamara is almost plotless in any conventional sense. It is both protest novel and documentary novel.

Fontamara (translation “bitter spring”) is the name of a small impoverished village in the south of Italy. In the late 1920s, its peasants have a way of life that is one step away from the feudal. As southerners they have memories of having, in effect, been conquered by the Piedmontese and other northerners at the time that Italy was unified in the nineteenth century. Hence they regard carabinieri and other representatives of the central government as their natural enemies.

At the opening of the novel, electric power has been cut off in the village because the villagers can’t pay for it. As there are strict laws against internal migration, it is harder for men to move to more prosperous parts of Italy to find jobs or to better themselves. Should peasants go to the city to seek work, they will be forcibly returned. The clergy are corrupt. The local priest will not come to the village to say mass or bury the dead unless he is paid exorbitantly.

In Fontamara, Fascism is depicted as a racket, which unites profiteers, landowners, corrupt clergy and carabinieri in a conspiracy against the peasants. The only poor people who support Fascism are the landless and the skill-less thugs or (in the city) the gullible Lumpenproletariat, who simply make up the numbers in Fascist demonstrations or provide the muscle when socialists and others have to be beaten up. In the novel, one peasant returns to the village after having been absent for years, telling how he was hired as a Fascist bully-boy and rewarded at first; but was dumped after Mussolini was safely in power. Thereafter he was reduced to begging or procuring whores for a lustful priest.

As far as “story” is concerned, the main issue at stake is a profiteering speculator’s plan to divert a stream away from Fontamara. This would deprive the villagers of a basic necessity. The villagers protest. But the old feudal landowners, who would once have taken a paternalistic interest in their wellbeing, no longer feel the need to do so. To teach the Fontamaresi a lesson for daring to protest, truckloads of blackshirts descend on the village, smash up houses and rape women.

In the last chapters, the rebellious peasant Bernardo Viola goes to Rome. He is arrested. To save somebody else’s life, he accepts responsibility for having edited an underground anti-Fascist newspaper. He is therefore executed for something he did not really do. But at least he has learnt the lesson, which Silone is eager to teach, that the peasants should show solidarity in the face of Fascism, rather than fighting among themselves.

The villagers try to set up a newspaper as a voice for protest, but the novel ends with Fascists again invading the village, smashing the peasants’ printing press and committing massacre. Some survivors flee, to tell their story.

The last words are the villagers’ plea :  “After so much strife and anguish and tears, and wounds and blood, and hatred and despair – what are we to do? ”

Obviously this was the key question at the time the novel was written.

On the dust-jacket of the old Penguin edition I have (yes, paperbacks did sometimes have dust-jackets then) there is a quotation from a review, which H.E.Bates wrote of the novel. Bates remarked: “Silone has rightly realised that one of the greatest weapons of the propagandist is ridicule, and the way in which he has used that weapon in Fontamara is smashing. ”

Quite so.

Much of the novel operates with a sort of Socratic irony. It is supposedly narrated to Ignazio Silone by the surviving peasants of Fontamara. They therefore speak in the first-person plural “we”, which makes them, in effect, a collective hero. They are also mainly illiterate and ignorant of the great world beyond their little village. They deflate the pretensions of Fascism by their deadpan account of events and their simple ignorance. In a way, the irony of the novel is a distant cousin to the irony of The Good Soldier Schweik, often grimly funny but with a deadly serious purpose. I could say that there is no character developed in depth and nothing like psychological detail in Fontamara. But that would be to ignore what the novel is up to and what it intends to be up to. After over eighty years, it is still a powerful protest novel. It is quite understandable that, with this novel and with his next novel, Bread and Wine, Silone was regarded as Italy’s most forceful anti-Fascist voice.

But now we come to the problem that has caused anxious reassessments of Silone since the mid-1990s.

Silone had been a member of the Italian Socialist Party, then was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party in the early 1920s, just before Mussolini gained power. He left Italy in 1930 and did not return until after the Second World War. Quite soon after leaving Italy, Silone broke with the Communists, reaffirmed his Socialism and denounced Stalin. For a while he was a Socialist deputy in Italy’s post-war parliament. He later contributed a good essay to the 1949 collection The God That Failed, a book of essays rejecting Communism, all written by former Communists. (Naturally the book is loathed by many old lefties and seen by them as mere Cold War propaganda, but the essays are still worth reading).

Told like this, Silone could be seen as the Italian equivalent of George Orwell – the conscientious leftist who came to hate Communism.

But controversy has recently dogged Silone’s reputation.

In the 1990s, two Italian historians Dario Biocca and Mauro Canalli dug up information, which seemed to show that throughout the 1920s, and even while he was a leading member of Italy’s clandestine Communist Party, Silone was acting as an informer to OVRA, the Fascist secret police. He provided inside information on Communist Party meetings and actually dobbed some fellow Communists in to OVRA. At first, this revelation was seen as a piece of left-wing scuttlebutt. But by now nobody doubts the authenticity of Biocca and Canalli’s revelations. There are many discussions of the affair available on-line, one of the best being John Foot’s “The Secret Life of Ignazio Silone” which appeared in the New Left Review of May-June 2000. (As a leftie, John Foot inevitably and foolishly refers to The God That Failed as a “notorious symposium”, but we can forgive him his prejudices.)

All this leaves us with a number of interesting questions.

How do we read the novel when we know that the author himself was implicated in Fascist misgovernment? How on Earth could somebody who so persuasively wrote against Fascism harbour such a secret? Do we write Silone off as a mere hypocrite?

I first read Fontamara before I knew anything of this problem. I accepted it as the forceful and effective protest novel that it is and that it has been for generations of readers. I still think this is the only way to read it. I do wonder if Silone was ahead of the crowd in realizing that Communism was at least as inhumane a system as Fascism; but I’m aware that this does not justify the treachery he practised in the 1920s. I am left with the image of a writer who was obviously tormented by his own duplicity and I make all sorts of speculation on how much the arrest and mistreatment of his brother may have eventually led him to break with his paymasters, leave Fascist Italy, and become a sincere anti-Fascist after all.

But above all, I’m driven back to my own basic aesthetic.

You judge a book by the book itself, not by extraneous material you know about the author and his circumstances.

Seen in these terms, Fontamara still deserves its high reputation, regardless of what may have been tormenting Ignazio Silone’s soul when he wrote it.