Women’s Work: Umbertina, by Helen Barolini – Part 1 of 2

This novel tells the story of three generations of women in one family, beginning with the Calabrese goatherd Umbertina, continuing with her American-born, unhappily deracinated granddaughter Marguerite, and concluding with Marguerite’s own daughter Tina, a young academic trying to find her way between two cultures. According to Edvige Giunta’s afterward in the Feminist Press edition, the book has had a troubled publishing history: first brought out in 1979, it went out of print after three years; a later paperback edition “misjudged the book to be a romance novel,” with a cover, as Helen Barolini told Giunta, showing “three women, hair streaming romantically” that “spoke of a work the book did not represent.” Over 100,000 copies of that edition were pulped: what a way to break a writer’s heart. Another paperback was brought out in 1988, “but it was so poorly produced,” Giunta writes, “that the author agreed to forgo royalties in order to have the rights revert back to her.”  

I am a firm believer that if the book-jacket designer knows what she’s doing, one should be able to be judge a book by its cover. The cover of the Feminist Press paperback does a reasonably good job of this, although the landscape image looks a lot more like agriculture-rich Toscana or Umbria than a hardscrabble area of Calabria, and the babe on the cover, with her wise, amused look, seems more like a silent film diva playing a peasant than an actual one.  

Francesca Bertini as sturdy peasant?

Each of the book’s three characters is given her own section, titled by name and birth and death dates, giving the novel the air of a biography. The sections are introduced by a prologue, where we meet Marguerite (the author’s alter-ego, to be reductive about it) in her analyst’s office in Rome. Marguerite is cool in the way of that era – “liberated,” smoking, neurotic, mini-skirted – and the era, the late 1960s, is announced in the form of a zebra-striped rug on the therapist’s floor. Marguerite is in crisis, contemplating divorce from her husband of eighteen years, an older Venice-born poet called Alberto Morosini, so that she can, as they say, find herself. Alberto is old-world, complacent, interior; he doesn’t understand his wife’s crisis of identity (“Useless to think of the years with Alberto – years of being anesthetized, of withdrawing while he emerged in his work, in his books of poetry and criticism…”) and her need to have a meaningful existence of her own:  

She had no uniform; she had no official presence with which to impress people and help them recognize her. And yet she did: adult woman, longtime wife, past mistress, mother of two living daughters and one dead son, college grad, family flop, translator and sometime substitute teacher, forty-five typed words a minute, bella presenza, drives own car, Jungian analysand, job applicant, divorce applicant, life applicant. These were the buttons and stripes of her uniform and still no one saw her. She could no more exist alone than does a painting without viewers, or the Grand Canyon without tourists. Her existence depended on others. How could she get them to know, by Jesus, that she was here? 

In the midst of her crisis she thinks of her grandmother, Umbertina Longobardi (“Marguerite wondered if her own fears were worse now than those faced then by that Calabrian peasant…”), and a fairly tortuous plot contrivance involving a dream – which nonetheless has the flavor of tedious, uplotted real life – leads Marguerite back to the woman. “I always fantasized about my grandmother,” she tells her pipe-smoking analyst, Dr. Verdile. “I always thought I wanted to get back to her elementary kind of existence…her kind of primitive strength.” And, as in the distance the great wheels of plot creakingly turn, Dr. Verdile says to Marguerite: “Start with your grandmother.” 

The tone change in the section that follows (“Umbertina, 1860 – 1940”) is extreme, as it should be. We are now in the mountains of Calabria: gestures are big and clear, syntax is simplified, landscape is uncluttered, and social relations are more or less feudal. We are in the land of myth, which allows Barolini to write sentences such as “She was a Calabrian of the mountains and walked erect, unlike the Calabrians of the plains, who were listless and thin, bent by malaria,” or “And they suffered as well from nature’s heavy hand: from earthquakes, landslides, floods, and droughts against which their prayers and processions rarely prevailed.” This is the culture seen from the inside out, without irony or judgment (a long way from, for example, Carlo Levi’s memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli). Writing like this isn’t usually my cup of tea but in Barolini’s hands it’s a very adept conjuring act – believable, uncondescending, and mostly unsentimental; a “knowing” narrator would ruin it. 
 
Instead of marrying her local intended, Giosuè the charcoal maker, Umbertina is courted by an older man, Serafino, a distant relative who has come back from America to find a wife – one of many men who proves the truth of the charmless maxim Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi: Get your wives or oxen in your hometown. I have relatives who have done this very thing and, let’s just say, the woman usually makes out less well than the man – and probably less well than the ox. However, Serafino is a kind person – “an easygoing, gentle man whose movements were slow” – as well as a forward-thinker – in his own youth he had sold off his sheep and joined Garibaldi’s Redshirts – and Umbertina, in that peasant way, accepts “fate” and the couple are married. Hardship follows. Serafino, trying to make a go of it as a farmer, must take out loans at high interest; “Then there was a fall in the price of farm goods on the market, while the dread land tax, the catasto, stayed as high as ever. To that was added the tax on draft animals, and to these taxes that Rome took were added the supertaxes of the provinces and communes.” Things get even worse and so, with their three young sons, like so many Italians of that period, the family emigrates to the U.S.  

The story of their leaving, crossing, and arrival at Ellis Island is well-rendered; there is a bit of the feel of research in it, but Barolini chooses her details nimbly, using them to give the section a realistic texture. Despite all the hardship described, for me – and I would guess for many second- or third-generation Italian-Americans – this section has the charm of familiarity (my mother came in through Ellis Island in the early 1930s). Plus, despite the perils of arrival in a strange country, because of the nature of the book, the reader knows nothing too tragic is going to happen (unlike, say, the crushing section in Charles Reznikoff’s multi-volume poem Testimony – which was based on actual law reports – where a trusting young Italian couple lands in the new world only to become victimized by a thug who kills the husband and robs and rapes his wife). Serafino knows enough to hook up with a padrone – an immigrant boss who knows the American bosses – and the family is brought in a wagon up to Little Italy:  

When they crossed Prince Street the man in the bowler hat gestured around him and said, “Sicilians. The street of Sicilians.” At Mulberry he said scornfully, “This is the street of the napoletani, a bad street – full of fights and bandits.”  

(Neapolitans and Sicilians are, needless to say, perpetually getting a bad rap. A few years ago I had a conversation with a lovely older lady, a theatre person who looked like an elegant version of Betty Boop, who described being in the motherland – Palermo – back in the 1950s, with her new husband. They were high up on a hill, and he was busy taking a photograph with a complicated camera, his back to her, when all of a sudden a scooter zoomed up and the man on it grabbed the bag she had on her shoulder – a bag that held their money, passports, everything. She held on, and the man on the scooter dragged her all the way up to the top of the hill until, exhausted, he let go of her. I held onto that bag, honey, she said to me, even though I ruined my new corduroy velvet pantsuit – the knees were shredded to ribbons and one of the sleeves was ripped clean off. I complimented her on her tenacity and she waved this away. I love them dearly, my people, she said, it’s a shame they’re all thieves. The worst of the whole thing, she said, was that when she walked back down the hill her husband was so engrossed in his camera that he didn’t even realize she’d been gone.) 

Umbertina and her little family are brought to the section where the other Calabresi live:     

They came to Bleecker Street, and at the end of the block where the street terminated in the Bowery they could see the girders and the rails of the Elevated. The house they entered was one of the older ones, a narrow, three-story wooden structure of old New York, once the private home of some well-to-do merchant and his family. The broad brownstone steps were worn; the once-graceful columns alongside the front door were rotted, and the lunette above it the only sign of a once-fine residence. The house was now partitioned off and forty people were squeezed into its spaces.  

This is but a stone’s throw from where I live, and mere blocks away from the Merchant’s House Museum (which is almost identical to this description, except that it’s made of brick) and theoretically on the same block as what is today (and since 1973) the Yippie headquarters at 9 Bleecker Street.

Yippie! 

(However, what’s confusing to me is that, according to that great site the New York Songlines, this building and several others on the block went up in the late 1800s, around the time of the fictional Umbertina’s arrival; their being built there – particularly by noted architects – suggests that this was still a fairly fancy address…but then again, just down the street at that same time [1883], the Florence Home for Fallen Women opened. I wonder if any NYC history/architecture head might have some insight on this?)  

 Umbertina’s block in 1934, compliments of the NYPL. The El is long gone, but the corner building still stands. 

Although they are more or less “mortgaged to a padrone,” the family makes its way; Umbertina is industrious, taking in washing and learning how to live in the new world. She is aided by a visiting nurse from the Board of Health, a sort of snooty type named Anna Giordani:  

Her family had arrived in the earlier, political immigration of 1848 when Garibaldi himself had arrived in America after defeat in the siege of Rome. The Giordanis were northern Italians of the Protestant Waldensian sect; they were educated and had some money. Anna Giordani was a middle-aged spinster who was devoting her life to work among the new Italian immigrants, the southerners, who were as removed from her experience as the Negroes of New York were from the whites.  

Umbertina comes to learn “the American story – money was the key to everything.” When Anna Giordani berates the Italians of the ghetto for putting up with the worst conditions – taking the worst jobs and sending the money home – Umbertina says her money won’t go back:  

“It’s to get us out of here. We are not like the napoletani on Mulberry Street. They came from the slums of Naples and are happy in the slums of New York. But we are country people. We don’t live like this.” 
 
It takes them two years but, despite setbacks – including the theft of their savings when the local Italian banker, Ranucci, runs off to Italy, and Umbertina’s being forced to sell her one prize possession, her coperto matrimonale, a beautiful bedspread she’d had woven back in Calabria – the family leaves the city for a hamlet in upstate New York called Cato, where other families from Castagna have settled. Umbertina is amazed by the richness of the land, as opposed to hardscrabble Calabria: “There farming had been plundering, sacking the dry earth beyond its endurance; here she saw such abundance of wild green that it put her soul at ease – it would never dry out and force them to be uprooted again.”  

From here the family’s fortunes go up, up, up, with Umbertina the author of this success. She starts out making sandwiches for the working men of the town, which leads to the family opening up a small grocery store, which leads to a larger one, and then an importer’s, a travel agency, and a bank. Umbertina and Serafino have many more children (I lost count at some point). Many details of this section in Cato, as in NYC, had me nodding my head, so emblematic of the Italian-American experience are they. For example, Umbertina finds that, to Americans, she’s become one of a solid mass of Italians – her family’s specific identity as Calabrese doesn’t signify. In Cato, the local Italian Catholic church is at first in the basement of the Irish Catholic one, and the Italians eventually get their own building, because the Irish don’t want to mix with the new immigrants (the case for my neighborhood: the Irish St. Brigid’s on Avenue B begot the Italian Mary Help of Christians on East 12th Street [sadly more or less closed now, it was named for a Salesian devotion and familiarly known as “Mary Help,” much to my delight]). There is the occasional lovely Italian-American made-up word like “giobba” and “groceria” (sometimes seen as “grosseria”) though I’m amazed “baccausa” did not come up. And finally there is the inevitable assimilation of the children of immigrants. And, though Umbertina rules the roost and the family is a success story, as her children grow American, Serafino dies, and she grows older, there’s a feeling of: Is that all there is? 

 “Mary Help,” no longer tended by the Salesians, but which still has two Sunday masses.  

Even though the family empire was masterminded by Umbertina, when Serafino dies, “as was customary, his obituary credited him with the business success and his wife only with having been his working companion.” The business is called “S. Longobardi & Sons,” after all. With Serafino’s death, Umbertina’s son Jake takes over, and Umbertina becomes “the grandmother in the kitchen”:

Sometimes in the kitchen she would sit still and think; she would think how strange it was that although Serafino hadn’t worked for years and all the early decisions and planning had been hers, it was his name which triumphed and it was his presence, as a man, which had been necessary to give her the standing from which to command. 

Despite all this, there’s never a question of her own daughters owning the business; all of it goes to the sons – just as it’s the sons who get the education, as well as the adoration of the mother. The daughters instead “would get the finest biancheria possible” – linens for their trousseaux. There is a beautifully written passage describing the wildly inappropriate, overly deluxe biancheria, which I realize is my favorite writing in the book – richly textured, visual, and totally absurd in its implications – which is also much commented on by Giunta in her afterward: “Umbertina’s concern with providing the finest linen for her daughters’ dowry captures her desire to endow her daughters with what they need to be strong, but also her own entrapment within, and collusion with, a world that she has always understood and accepted to be a man’s world.”  

(I’m also reminded of course of all the crazily elaborate linens my grandmothers had – especially my mom’s mom: antimacassars and enormous tablecloths and dresser scarves, one of which, much like the linens Umbertina chooses, has “long strands of flax fringe…[requiring] after laundering, the patient combing-out of fringe strands,” and currently hangs in a dry-cleaning bag in my closet, awaiting a use it will never get.)  

Umbertina’s daughters are mostly faceless in the book, quiescent and acted-upon – as Giunta writes: “Comfortably assimilated and unquestioning, Carla [the mother of Marguerite] is too removed from the central questions of the novel, according to Barolini, to even warrant a section of her own.” Thus we will jump to Marguerite in the next section, but not before Umbertina leaves this world.  

Nearly eighty, at the yearly family picnic which has become the only activity Umbertina looks forward to, she muses on her life, wondering who it is, among her complacent daughters and non-Italian-speaking grandchildren, she can tell her story to. And she realizes what the answer is: “No one.”  

Although she had never “gone around moaning the way the other women had done, and missing the old country,” there is the notion of a great loss, a wound that has never healed. On her deathbed, as her eyesight fails so that her family around her become “dim gray shadows,” there is a sudden bright vision:

…the lost coperta of her matrimonial bed with all the intensity of its colors and bright twining of leaves and flowers and archaic designs in its patterns. “Ah!” she gasped, at its beauty. 

As Jake leaned over to hear her better, she asked for a cup of water from the spring.  

“What spring, Mama?” he asked.  

“Castagna,” she whispered. Then she was gone. 

And she dies with the name of her village on her lips. Subtler folks than I might find this corny, but frankly it had me crying like a baby.  

 Castagna.

(The Abbazia di Corazzo, compliments of Wikipedia.)

Since the length of this post has sprawled – against all my efforts to not blither on and on – I’ll split this in two, and return to Umbertina in my next post.

Bitter Spring, Darina Laracy Silone, the caso Silone

Bitter Spring, with Susan Mitchell’s eye-catching nod-to-George-Salter cover
Darina
Bitter Spring is an excellent biography – agile, detailed, thoughtful and, while full of serious scholarship, a zip to read. (In January, it was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award.) Given Silone’s ultimate unknowableness – his wife Darina herself said that he “was – under certain aspects – a mystery even to me” – the fact that it doesn’t claim to be “the” biography but “a life” seems like the right approach to take. For me, some of the richest parts of the book come from Pugliese’s interviews with Darina who, lucky for us, lived until 2003. Pugliese was able to get amazing access to her, and some of her comments are almost embarrassing in their frankness. Reading the book, I somehow pictured Professor Pugliese buying armloads of fruit and flowers at the Campo de’ Fiori, in the shadow of the brooding statue of Giordano Bruno, to take across town to the widow Silone. (By the way, I’ve not met Professor Pugliese and I’d already read and enjoyed his book when he sent a comment to this blog.)

An amazing person and brilliant mind in her own right, Darina Laracy met Silone in Switzerland in 1941. Dublin-born, unhappily Catholic-school-educated – as a teenager she was busted by the mother superior for reading Pascal’s Pensées – ours is not to think – Laracy was seventeen years Silone’s junior, and in her mid-twenties when they met. She was a student of language, a seeker, a critic of “Irish parochialism,” and invariably described in terms such as “tall, handsome, auburn-haired and vivacious.” In Milan when Italy entered WWII, she was harassed by the Italian police and approached by the Gestapo and British military intelligence, both of which tried to press her into service as a spy. She was eventually expelled from Italy, and landed in Zurich, where Silone first saw her in a library.
Silone ends up inviting her to tea at the villa where he was staying; but when she shows up, instead of rushing down to meet her:

Silone made Darina wait for thirty minutes in the parlor; she passed time petting a large German shepherd guard dog. Silone, watching this scene, was entranced: the dog was usually ferocious around strangers. (Silone later confessed that he himself had at first been terrified of the dog.)

He sounds a little creepy, right? When he finally does show himself, in a blue velvet jacket (!), they have an awkward conversation and she volunteers her services for the Italian Resistance – which Silone really has no hook-up with at this point. He refuses her offer, conversation dies, and he gallantly asks her why she came if she has nothing to say. He ends up thinking she is a spy, while she ends up thinking Silone – whose book Fontamara she had “devoured in one sitting” as a seventeen-year-old back in Ireland – is a “frightful bore”:

“Better to read a writer,” she thought to herself as she left, “than to meet him.”
But something must have gone all right, because they end up marrying three years later. It’s abundantly clear that the marriage was not a very successful one:
Darina believed that Silone married her seeking happiness, but that, in the end, “he was not capable of finding happiness.” He was, she thought, suffering not only from depression but perhaps schizophrenia as well. At times, he could be “horrible,” even when not in a depression; “he had no talent at all for human relationships.” He could often be cruel, as when he would not permit her to renew her passport or when he was casual about his extramarital affairs. He sometimes told people, “I couldn’t leave the poor, mad thing.” With a frankness, and steely resolve in her voice, Darina admitted that her marriage to Silone was “difficult.”

Reading this was all very dispiriting to me; not only hearing how strange and cruel Silone was to his wife, but the chilling words, “he had no talent at all for human relationships” – human relationships being the thing the characters in his books so often seek. There is another particularly deflating couple of paragraphs in Pugliese’s chapter on Darina:
Silone and Darina had many differences. She had an innate love of animals. Silone, like many people from the countryside, had no particular love for animals, except donkeys, and refused her many requests for pets. It became a point of contention that Silone tried to defuse by sending her a photo of a teddy bear in March 1952 with the following on the reverse:
My dearest,
My best wishes for your birthday brought to you by this teddy bear. But, as you well know, he is mute, it’s only an image. If, though, you welcome him warmly and you look at him for a while, you will clearly feel that one ineffable thing [quell’unica cosa indicibile] that he is charged with making you understand.
Yours, I.S.

It must have been some pretty cold comfort, getting not a live pet, nor an actual teddy bear, but a photo of a teddy bear as a birthday gift from your husband, with a note signed “Yours, I.S.” (it reminded me of a scene in the squirm-inducing film The Squid and the Whale, when the hideous writer-dad signs a book for his own son: “Best wishes, Bernard Berkman (Dad)”). Reading Silone’s note, it’s hard not to think that Silone sees himself as the teddy bear in the photo: mute, needing attention; with something to communicate if only you will give him the time! Perhaps like the character in Margery Williams' children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit, he needs love to make him real. Unlike the Velveteen Rabbit, however, Silone did not seem to know how to deal with any sort of love.

Ignazio Silone?

Later in the chapter on Darina there is a jarring, tantalizing moment when Pugliese suddenly slips into the first person:
My first thought on entering the apartment on via Villa Ricotti to interview Darina Silone was that I was trespassing into Plato’s Cave. This feeling has haunted me for years as I sought to distinguish between “truth” and the shadows thrown upon the back wall of that cave. Not that I ever felt Darina Silone was insincere or seeking to hide embarrassing details of their life together: on the contrary, she was quite open in her remarks and willing to answer difficult questions. But I had a sense that memory here could be a tricky ally in writing a biography.
Certainly we should all know about the subjective nature of “truth” by now, having lived through post-modernism, but it’s refreshing to read these words in this era of dead certainties, where people seem increasingly allergic to ambiguity. More on this below, in talking about the caso Silone.

[On a sort of related note, right now I’m reading The Unredeemed Captive, John Demos’ account of an abduction in pre-Revolutionary America. This is a wonderful book – part adventure story, part scholar-detective document, part (do people still say this?) revisionist history. Demos writes delicious, compelling prose that rushes forth in highly textured detail; he can’t wait to tell you this story. (Also, he’s a big fan – like me, for better or worse – of the em dash.) The idea of hard-and-fast “fact” is destabilized right from the start, when Professor Demos leads off his preface with the question: “Where does the story begin?” and then answers this question with a series of sections starting “Perhaps it begins with…”, positing all the different factors that had a bearing on the French and Indian raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts that led to the abduction.


Similar, in a way, is Luc Sante’s memoir The Factory of Facts, which has a thrilling, bravura opening chapter called “Résumé” in which Sante introduces a simple paragraph about the circumstances of his birth and early childhood and then repeats it, with increasingly odd factual and stylistic mutations, nine times.

The Factory of Facts, with its thematically perfect touch-me/buy-me/read-me-now jacket by Barbara de Wilde

Sante, who gets the Susan Sontag prize for having his finger in the pie of everything cool, of course wrote Low Life, a book with the purplest of prose but one very close to my heart. Every last New York hipster read this book when it came out in the 1990s. A story here! A few years ago when my husband Damian and I were getting our wedding bands in one of the jewelry exchanges on the Bowery, I noticed there was an old photo of the place, taken before the El was torn down, hanging in the stall. I admired it aloud to the nice man selling us the rings, a man who reminded me somewhat of a younger version of my Uncle Mim – he of the oddly missing fingers – and the fellow told me the store had been owned by his family for several generations. He had a great old-school accent and it was with this accent, not the kind you might find in, for example, the Brown University Modern Culture & Media Department, that he told me there was a great book about old New York, called Low Life – had I heard of it? And I thought, if Luc Sante knew a guy like you – the real McCoy – read his book, I bet he’d jump for joy.]

God help me for posting this, but this is in fact my uncle.

Getting back to Bitter Spring, and the section that jumps to first-person narration:

Darina had invited me for an interview with warm words of praise for my first book. Our first meeting in the Silone apartment in Rome, though, was not an overwhelming success. Silone’s dark study remained off-limits, a sort of sanctuary where I was not invited to venture. A surreptitious peek revealed it decorated with memento mori: there were photos of Romolo, Benedetto Croco, Martin Buber, Gaetano Salvemini on his deathbed, Lazar Shatzkin (a Russian Jewish friend who had committed suicide), Simone Weil, and Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. When Darina asked whether I spoke French and I answered truthfully that I did not, I caught a glimpse of disappointment in her eyes.

And suddenly we are in something approaching Aspern Papers-like territory, with the author confessing to actually opening a door that had been closed to him. This moment is brief, however, since Darina appears to begin confiding in the author pretty quickly.

She comes across as a complex, moody person in the book; she also seems like she has nursed many wounds for many years and has just been waiting for this moment to talk about them. On one hand, she positioned herself to be the “custodian of [Silone’s] work and memory” after his death; and she also helped translate that work. “Yet in interviews,” Pugliese writes, “she could be frank and even a bit mischievous. Once, when commenting – not for the first time – on Silone’s resistance to learning English and his difficulty with the language, she said, ‘He had trouble understanding and pronouncing certain English words; words like truth, for example.’” At some point in life Darina seems to have located her spiritual home as India, and she traveled there and became friends with Indira Gandhi. “It was only after Silone’s death, which she somehow sensed as a belated gift of liberation, that she then threw herself into various political and cultural movements and repeatedly visited India.” One wonders, given a mind like hers, if she’d wanted to do other things – perhaps even write fiction herself – and the unliberated life she led with Silone made such an idea impossible.

When people wonder in print why there are so few great women writers/artists/composers – besides wanting to counter this tired question with many others, one of them being just who’s keeping score here? – I find it amazing that so few talk about the obvious: that it’s (still) usually the woman who runs the household, cooks the meals and, perhaps most time-consuming, strokes the ego of the man in her life. I had a friend years back who was an editor at Harper’s; one of her writers, a famous dude, was late in delivering something and she called him up. His wife was out, Famous Dude shrieked at her, and he was all in a tizzy – how was he supposed to get anything done? He had to take care of the kids and make the food and the phone kept ringing – just what did they expect of him? On the flip side of this coin, in a 2008 New Yorker Festival interview with Deborah Treisman, Alice Munro – one of my all-time favorite writers, praise her to the skies! – Munro said that when she first started publishing, a local paper ran a story about her with this headline: “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories.”

My husband Damian, grilling up the tofu.

Darina Silone actually finished Silone’s last novel for him, a work published posthumously as Severina. Iris Origo calls the book a “patchwork,” and writes about it at some length in her Silone essay in A Need to Testify. The book was pieced together, “partly in Silone’s own words, partly in those which Darina used, during his illness, to bind together disconnected or incomplete passages” (the process is described in “The History of a Manuscript,” an explanatory section Darina added to the end of Severina – which I don’t think has been translated into English). Silone was very ill, and:

...he wanted desperately to finish [the book] and fortunately did not realize in his nursing home that he was suffering from agrafia – a disease described in a medical dictionary consulted by Darina as ‘an incapacity to express one’s thoughts in writing… The patient retains or recovers the capacity to form single letters or words, but – though he is not aware of this – their combination is meaningless.’ ‘In his last afternoon,’ Darina wrote, ‘he began to write in a great hurry, looking very happy. When, later on, I gathered up my courage and looked at those last pages, I found that he had recovered his own handwriting and the words were all legible…It was almost possible to catch their meaning. Unfortunately, only almost.’

And what a sad way for a writer to go out of this world.

Origo tells us that Darina used some passages from the first Italian edition of The Seed Beneath the Snow to flesh out some of the chapters, while “For Chapter 11 she invented – perhaps unnecessarily – a whole scene.” I find those words pretty tantalizing. Was Darina just suturing up gaps in the narrative; or was she making some point, evening some score? The scent of frustration runs through so much of Darina’s life, from stories about how annoyed she was with Silone for not acknowledging that she had introduced him to the work of Charles de Foucauld and Simone Weil, to her description of the apartment in Rome where they lived out their life together as a “poky, horrible little flat where no sunlight ever comes.” (They had been offered a better apartment by a government entity Silone was working with at the time, but Silone was “horrified when Darina pointed out the fine print in the original contract: After twenty years of paying a mortgage, they could own the property outright. ‘No, it’s impossible!’ Silone raged. ‘Me, a capitalist? Never!’”)
I found myself so engaged by Darina, in fact, that I ended up feeling someone should write a biography about her. Or perhaps Francine Prose will write a second volume of The Lives of the Muses – a pretty profoundly depressing book about (just to be a bit reductive here) men sucking the life out of the women who inspire them – and devote a chapter to Darina, and her influence on Silone’s writing. About such inspiration, Pugliese writes:
One scholar has detected a maturation and fuller development of his female characters between the three “Abruzzo” novels written before 1944 and their subsequent revisions after the war. In the postwar rewrites, the female protagonists are more developed, are more central to the plot, and have their own dynamic function lacking in the earlier version. One cannot help thinking that the indomitable personality of Darina Laracy might have had something to do with this fuller development.

Darina in Davos, young and happy.

The Caso Silone

Bitter Spring also provides a very even-handed exploration of the infamous, and still raging caso Silone.
I well remember the moment in 2000 when I opened The New Yorker and saw a picture of Silone, slumped in a café chair and looking like a defeated Maytag repairman. The title of the accompanying essay was “The Spy Who Failed,” and it was written by the well-respected journalist Alexander Stille. What on earth was going on here? When I got to the second paragraph of the essay, I slumped in my own chair as I read:

In recent years, however, researchers have begun to turn up documents in police archives which strongly suggest that Silone, in the decade before he became a writer, acted as an informant for the Fascist police.
The essay went on to discuss the “incriminating documents,” published in L’Informatore, a book written by Italian historians Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali, and how supporters of Silone refused to even read the documents: “‘I wouldn’t believe in the truth of these documents even if Silone rose from the tomb and confirmed them,’ Indro Montanelli, the highly respected editorialist for the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, has written.” By the end of the essay, however, I was convinced that Silone had been an informant, and I was too disgusted by my paisano hero being knocked off his pedestal to take in any of the nuances of Stille’s essay. I was even ticked off at Stille for writing the essay! (Among many other books, Stille wrote one of my all-time favorite books about Europe in the WWII era, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism – an incredibly moving book that almost stops your heart at times, its chapters syncopating between families who had members who perished in the Holocaust, and families whose members had miraculous escapes.) Stille’s New Yorker essay, in an expanded form, provides the introduction for the Steerforth edition of the Abruzzo Trilogy, and so anyone who reads it will then read the books filtered through Stille’s conclusions about Silone’s guilt.

But after reading Bitter Spring, the issue seems much less easily put to bed. The spying charge is a questioning thread running through the entire book, and culminates in a final chapter, “Silvestri” (Silone’s apparent code name), which provides an exhaustive discussion of the caso Silone. It seems that for every incriminating “fact” there is its counteracting explanation. For one, Pugliese is not convinced that all the letters unearthed were written by Silone (or “Silvestri”); and the letters often have no addressee, and “might not be interpreted as spying reports.” Also, Biocca’s initial essay was published in a journal “founded by Renzo De Felice, the dean of historians of fascism, often accused of a ‘rehabilitation’ of Mussolini and his regime.” The central document, reproduced in full in Pugliese’s book and in a truncated form in the New Yorker essay, is heavy and strange. As Pugliese writes, for those convinced of Silone’s guilt it is the “smoking gun” while for those who believe in his innocence “it is proof of Silone’s moral crisis in attempting to mitigate [by acting as, or perhaps pretending to act as, a spy] the fate of his younger brother” – Romolo, who had been imprisoned for two years at the time the letter was written. In the letter, which was written to police official Guido Bellone, Silvestri is signing off; but signing off from exactly what is of course not clear. One of the most commented-upon sections is the following:
…I am writing this last letter so that you won’t prevent my plan, which will take place in two phases; first, eliminate from my life everything that is falsehood, duplicity, equivocation, mystery; second, begin a new life, on a new basis, in order to repair the wrongs that I have done, in order to redeem myself, to help the workers, the peasants (to whom I am tied with every fiber of my heart), and my country.

From here he would leave Italy for Switzerland, where he would go on to become Ignazio Silone, writer. The Silvestri chapter in Bitter Spring is fascinating and meticulous, and Pugliese leaves no stone unturned in trying to find answers. The play-by-play of reasons for and against is almost like watching a tennis match. He posits theories, unspools them, chases them down, ask questions; and ultimately leaves it to the reader to decide. In the end we are left with no definite answer, no final “truth.” The chapter ends:

Late in life, Silone intriguingly revealed in an interview that “there is a secret in my life; it is written between the lines of my novels.” Was he referring to his relationship with Bellone or something else entirely? With most of the protagonists in this most recent controversy long dead, we may never really untangle the mystery…. The answer – if there is one – lies, like Silone, somewhere in the no-man’s land between hagiography and the archives.


And so we finally leave my cugino del cuore, there in his grave on the hill of Pescina, just about an hour’s drive, if one takes the autostrada, from the place where my Abruzzese forebears hailed. (My favorite leg of the trip as provided by Yahoo Maps being: Make a Sharp Right Turn on STRADA FOSSO DELL'INFERNO.) Darina Laracy Silone is far away from the Ditch of Hell, however. At her request, after she died, Darina’s sisters scattered her ashes over the Irish Sea.

Book Three in the Abruzzo Trilogy: The Seed Beneath the Snow

It’s an old saw that the parent’s favorite child is often the weakest one – and that an author’s favorite book is her worst. I haven’t read all of Silone’s work but The Seed Beneath the Snow is on record as being his favorite among his novels, and sadly it’s kind of an ugly baby.

Well, not completely – but, coming on the heels of Bread and Wine, and continuing the saga of Pietro Spina, it squanders the momentum built by the earlier book so completely that any virtues it does have seem like pretty thin gruel. In The Seed Beneath the Snow, Pietro, still perilously ill but no longer disguised as a priest, spends his time hiding out in various barns, inns, and houses in the Abruzzi, not far from where he’d been in Bread and Wine. Why is the fellow still sticking around? Confusingly – and rather like a bad TV series in which characters’ back-stories are wiped clean, allowing them to start fresh with new hairdos and love interests – there is little musing on those earlier adventures.

The action is stalled right from the start, as we wait for Pietro to show for what feels like hundreds of pages (only forty, in reality). First we meet Donna Maria Vincenza Spina, Pietro’s aged grandmother, being driven in an old-style carriage by her helper Venanzio. There is explication, scene-setting, thick description; characters say sentences like: “Unfortunate woman that I am, I meant to say a few beads of the rosary on the way and now it will be lucky if my prayers don’t turn into blasphemy.” It all feels very nineteenth century in texture, with none of the “muscle” or knowingness of Fontamara, and none of the dash and comparative light hand of Bread and Wine.

We learn that Donna Maria is traveling to the house of her son, Pietro’s uncle Bastiano, to prevail upon him for help in rescuing Pietro – presumed dead by many, he is instead alive and in hiding. But Bastiano is a coward, frightened of the increasingly powerful Fascist government, and full of self-loathing. When his mother asks about his friends, he laughs bitterly:

“Friends? …There’s been no such thing as friendship in our part of the world for a long time, Mother; haven’t you noticed? What we have now is ‘connections.’ Yes, that’s the word: ‘connections.’”

So he has decided to toe the line and, in the middle of his mother’s visit, party bigwigs and their families arrive to watch the blessing of the animals, that quaint local custom, from his balcony. And what follows, unfortunately, is what takes up much of this talky, talky book: a room full of interchangeable bourgeois Fascist-leaning characters, some right from Central Casting – one can readily picture the handlebar moustaches and Margaret Dumont-like bosoms – who deal in platitudes and false flattery, and speechify like crazy. This is the ascendant world that Pietro has rejected, where true feelings and beliefs have no place.

The other milieu we visit again and again in the course of this book is that of the cafoni, who persist in their benighted, chowder-headed ways. As a group they’re less likely to toe the line – they have so little room for hope that one government is nearly interchangeable with another. The reader who has read the first two books in the Abruzzo Trilogy is pretty well tired of the cafoni by now. (As in the earlier two books, reading these scenes I thought, How infuriating these cafoni – my forebears – are. How was this book received in Abruzzi? Did the people hate the way they were portrayed? Or could Silone count on none of these people having access to something as exotic as a book?)


My lighthearted forebears, albeit on the Marchegiano side.

Infuriating as the cafoni are, the seeds of change are contained in them, and it is with them that Pietro will throw in his lot. We finally meet him at his grandmother’s house in the small town of Colle, after she has paid a ransom to a man in Pietrasecca, in whose stable Pietro had been hiding. Pietro is listless, brooding, and appears to be caught in a Hamlet-like paralysis that, unfortunately for the reader, will last most of the book.

And so it is about by Chapter 3 that the plot mostly leaves off. The Seed Beneath the Snow is really more a mood than a novel. There are oddball characters who come in for no specific reason, like the old miser Aunt Eufemia, she of the masculine appearance, who had been sought for military service as a young woman, had to drop her mutande in a humiliating medical examination, and nurses this wound throughout her bitter life. There is the constant talking, endless amounts of it, the dialogue that goes on for whole breathless swathes of text, sometimes punctuated by nothing more than a “Donna Palmira:” or “Don Lazzaro:” as if Silone didn’t want anything to interrupt his/their streams of oratory. And then there are the similes.

The similes, which are really quite dreadful:

The Passionist Father was listening with the hermetic, close-lipped smile of an old woman whose false teeth are at the dentist’s for repairs.

…his Adam’s apple rose and fell like a mouthful of something hard to swallow.

The old man sat distracted….a continual movement of his head and hands was like the persistent, tireless, desperate gesticulation of a man who for years on end has said yes, yes, yes to an invisible interlocutor…

He was shivering all over like an old beggar who had just been hauled out of dirty ditch-water.

…his words slipped out like cherries, in pairs; his signs like onions, in strings.

He seemed like the trunk of a tree sprayed with copper sulphate, an old tree but still capable of bearing fruit, and well armed against seasonal blights. At the top of the tree his clear eyes stood out like two spring buds but his short, bushy hair and his week-old beard were like two unevenly burned fields of stubble, two narrow fields of the kind proper to the Abruzzi mountains –

Oh, shuddupayouface already!!!

So belabored and nearly comical in their length and inappropriateness – or in their cafone-like obtuseness in comparing a thing to something that it is already quite like – these similes do lots of work toward killing this already oddly motionless book. Had the success of his first two novels made Silone self-conscious? In Bitter Spring, the excellent 2009 biography of Silone, author Stanislao Pugliese writes that Silone “…confessed (or boasted) that books did not play an important role in his intellectual formation. No teacher left a lasting impression. When an adolescent, he often took a book with him while wandering the mountainside, but he rarely opened it; books were most often used to sit on the wet grass.” (Sitting on books – vergognati!) In 1954, when Silone was asked who his influences were, his reply was brief: none. But I think that sometime after Fontamara, Silone (perhaps bristling over the charge that he wrote “bad Italian”) must have picked up a copy of I Promessi Sposi – the novel that casts a long, chubby shadow over Italian prose – and, whether he wanted it to or not, Manzoni’s penchant for figurative language crept into Silone’s writing.



The difference here is that Manzoni’s similes are strange and inventive – slow in revealing themselves, unspooling as you read until you have a delighted moment of recognition, like that weird grunt that people give at poetry readings at the end of a particularly good poem. Here Manzoni writes about the cowardly priest, Don Abbondio, having a moment of transformation – weak as he is – after being upbraided by the righteous Cardinal of Milan, a historical figure whose cousin was St. Charles Borromeo:

[Don Abbondio] behaved like the damp and battered wick of an old candle, if we may be permitted the comparison, when it is offered to the flame of a great torch. At the beginning it smokes, drips, crackles, and will have nothing to do with it; but finally it catches fire and burns passably well.

(Such things, as well as Manzoni’s many short asides about life – to which the reader often gives an Ah, so true! – are some of what makes the forbidding-looking I Promessi Sposi, which has the joyless and inert title The Betrothed in English, such a delight to read. I wish I had understood this in high school, when our teacher, Father Mario Bugliosi (one cool cat, and said to be a cousin of that cool cat Vincent Bugliosi), made us translate long, boring chunks of the book until we were nearly bleeding from the eyes. We couldn’t understand why the betrothed pair, Renzo and Lucia, wouldn’t just find another damn priest and get married already. We had no context – or perhaps Father Mario, no slouch, had provided one for us, but I was too busy dreaming about the Gang of Four record I would be dancing around to, in my mutande, at home.

[Similarly, in college, when I was translating long, boring chunks of St. Augustine, I kept thinking my Latin was really disintegrating, because all kinds of strange inconsistencies would pop up: I didn’t understand St. Augustine’s silly fondness for puns. Again, our professor had probably provided a context for us, but my friend Kim and I were probably too busy passing notes about our Latin teacher’s thrilling resemblance to the actor who played Young Törless to properly listen to him.]


Kim and I, some years after officially dropping our Latin minor, and before quitting smoking. I think actually Kim still owns that belt.

If you haven’t read it, everyone should all run out and get a copy of The Betrothed, which has much deliciousness, not least of which is a certain thread of sweetness that runs through the book – Manzoni’s humanism – as well as a thrilling texture rather like The Charterhouse of Parma (though not as quicksilver), and many stirring character studies, among them an amazing set-piece about Gertrude, the Nun of Monza, another historical figure whose lurid life would become fodder for many a Nunsploitation – who knew this was a genre? – film.)


I cannot vouch for this film.

I Promessi Sposi is actually called out by name early in The Seed Beneath the Snow. As a young woman, Pietro’s grandmother is given a copy of it by her future husband; when she reads on the jacket that the book is a novel, she throws it into the fire and writes her husband-to-be a curt note: “Dear Young Sir, you must have a very strange idea of me to have sent me a novel to read.” Besides harkening back to an age when novels were seen as potential corrupters of young ladies, this episode is on hand to show Donna Maria’s contempt for “abstract ideas and other such inventions of the devil” – as well accidentally showing, perhaps, Silone’s anxiety of influence.

Besides Pietro, the other characters rolled over from Bread and Wine for The Seed Beneath the Snow are among the least promising: the deaf-mute man, here called Infante, and Sciatàp, one of the more annoying cafoni – his name being the Italianization of “shut up,” the single phrase learned from a long sojourn in America – who in this book blossoms into a full-blown scoundrel. After lots of dithering Pietro leaves his grandmother’s house – she has actually obtained an official pardon for him, a hard thing to get, but he turns his back on it – and, just when actual action threatens to happen, we meet Pietro again in another stable. Oh, gravy! But it is here that Pietro teaches Infante to speak in some fashion – these are tender scenes, in the way that the Wordsworth poem “The Idiot Boy,” say, is tender – and, along with another character, good-hearted peasant Simone the Polecat, the three create a kind of little family. In a way this is the heart of the book: the three misfits finding a bond of brotherhood, from which might spring seeds of change. But this can’t last long. Sciatàp, who had “sold” Pietro to his grandmother at the start of the book, shows up again, trying to extort more money. Sciatàp and Simone will come to blows, the group will flee, and in time we will meet Pietro again elsewhere in Abruzzo, inexplicably working in a vineyard with Infante in broad daylight. Other things happen to other characters, lots of them, but instead of adding richness, these many small gestures only serve to make the book even more incoherent. Add to this the equally small revelations about secondary characters that happen towards the end of the book – revelations that register as similarly meaningless – and you have an oddly shapeless and inert novel.

In the book’s last episode, Infante’s long-lost father Guistino has come back, after twenty years in Philadelphia. This is a load off Pietro’s mind because he knows he must continue to run and cannot take Infante with him – plus, Pietro has met a young woman, Faustina. But instead of a happy reunion, it’s immediately clear that the father, having lost his arm, has really only come back to reclaim his adult son so that he can live off him, as he would any old pack mule. And so, in the last few pages, unforgivably, the whole thing ends in tragedy – lousy tragedy that has the effect of cheapening the tragedy at the end of Bread and Wine. Pietro arrives at Infante’s house just after the deaf-mute has violently stabbed his abusive father. Pietro hustles Infante out of the room and closes the door on him; the man seems to still be alive, and Pietro calls for help:

But when he went back to the body on the floor, Guistino was dead. The carabinieri found Pietro sitting on a mattress, his head between his hands.

“I killed him,” he said.

Pietro is marched off to jail by the carabinieri; he passes pretty Faustina waiting for him at the train station, from which they were to finally escape – she, who had been so hopeful, must hold onto the bars of the train station window to keep from fainting. And for the similarly abused reader, it’s hard not to think of something like the ha-ha-joke-on-you ending of Le Salaire de la peur: Yves Montand, abruptly dead in a ditch, a Métro ticket clutched in his hand.



There is a disheartening timidity about this book. Silone was writing it while WWII was still raging: so perhaps he was thinking, what if the Axis actually wins? No strong gestures here. (It is, of course, easy for me to write this blithe condemnation by my window in the East Village in 2010.) The feeling of stalled action, the repetition, the boredom of hiding, never lets up; Spina is always caged, always waiting – which must have been pretty much how Silone felt, in exile in Switzerland for nearly ten years by that point. Also, strangely, instead of seeming merely neurotic and prickly, now Pietro is almost unappealingly misanthropic. Despite the title and the little gestures The Seed Beneath the Snow wants to make, there is a real hopelessness in the book. The belief in a different future that Pietro holds out seems (for the first time) sentimental, impossible, like a happy story you tell yourself to get through a long night.

The other thing sadly brought to the fore in this book is Silone’s sexism, and his dealing in the persistent, and persistently boring, virgin/whore dichotomy. If a woman is young, she is described and appraised, as if her body and face are common property to be commented on (“sexless” old women, like the grandmother, are among the few women to be seen as individuals). Faustina is thought to be having an affair with an older relative of Pietro’s; only when she is proved to be a victim of slander, and a kind-hearted person simply caring for an old man, can she have real appeal for Pietro – just as the virginal Cristina, not the “naughty” Bianchina, despite her complete devotion to him, was Pietro’s potential soul mate in Bread and Wine.

All of this only gets more depressing after reading in Bitter Spring about how Silone treated his own wife, Darina Laracy Silone. Which, along with the caso Silone, is something for my next post.