The Underground in Italy: A Novel Which Prophesies the Uprising Ahead

THE SEED BENEATH THE SNOW. By Ignazio SiloneTranslated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye. Harper & Brothers. $2.75

Bread and Wine, to which The Seed Beneath the Snow is a sequel, was the story of Pietro Spina, a young revolutionist who slipped back into Italy to carry on the underground work in his native province. It was also the story of Ignazio Silone himself, when he was still Secondo Tranquilli and one of the leaders of the Communist Youth organization. Silone later broke with the Party, retired into political obscurity in Switzerland, and emerged after a long period of sickness into literary life.

In this later novel Pietro Spina, Silone’s alter ego, goes through a similar crisis inside Italy. His dowager grandmother who shelters him represents continuity, or civilization itself: the family virtues in their most rigid and ancient style. She cannot understand Pietro, for she still thinks in terms of the pre-political world. Pietro is " her boy,” and something of a saint; and she, in turn, brings him to realize that he needs more than a political faith to bridge the gap between his caste and the eternally oppressed.

But there is no going back to “law and order,” for Pietro knows only too well there is no law and order left: the knowledge gives him a deeper realization that he must give up party creeds, “the unhealthy joy of commanding,” even revolutionary popularity. He must go back to the real underground to find his natural companions, not only wise Simone the Polecat, but the deaf-mute and the donkey, and the silence of the suffering earth — and he does: —

For weeks my horizon was bounded by the clod a few inches away. This was, in the true meaning of the word, my discovery of the earth. . . . My whole being, my whole heart began to concentrate around a seed of wheat in the process of sprouting. And, since I too relied for drinking-water upon the little snow that I could gather from the cat-hole, the little seed and I partook, in a way, of the same food and became true “companions.”

The Seed Beneath the Snow is a “true myth,” and not to be judged as a novel. The semblance of plot need not be taken seriously. But the artist’s vision of the two worlds, above and underground, has all the essentials of truth.

The well-established world above ground, business and power, the State, its servants and intellectuals (whom Silone has cruelly and accurately caricatured in the caste of the " orators,” both old-school and German), including the hierarchy of the Church — all that is the world of the lie and the devil. Here Silone’s capacity for comedy finds full scope. But the essence is tragedy. As one of those very men says, “there are no friendships left anywhere, there are only ' connexions.’” The last shred of simplicity or sincerity has been weeded out with modern thoroughness, and what is left is the empty release of emotional engineering, Italian style: —

. . . a cold, funereal sort of world but a world without suspicion and promissory notes, a mythological world decked with laurels and bronzes, with vast deserted stairways and resounding arcades, with imperial trophies and eagles and chariots.

On an entirely different level, protected only in that it leaves no relevant trace or structure on the surface, is the underground world of men who are trying simply to rediscover friendship. They are the survivors of the shipwreck of society. Pietro finds most of them “stultified from long misery, hardship, persecution, and loneliness, oppressed by vague fears.” Once their diffidence is overcome, strange stories begin to take shape in the mountain villages, about Our Lord walking on earth. " A child has been born again in a poor attic, who will set us all free.” “My wife has heard the same thing, but can you believe it?” " Well, it’s not the sort of thing you see in the papers. But Francisco from Prezza came here just to tell a friend about it.”

The book makes one dream of the good old times. What happy kindergarten lives, single-hearted and single-minded, were those of the unflinching apostles of the nineteenth century, a Mazzini, a Bakunin, even a Lenin. The man who has lived the tragedy of society in our days must needs have died many deaths, and of this, the fundamental spiritual process that is taking place, we have only the first documents in men like Koestler and Silone. The unfolding of the thought of Ignazio Silone presents one of the most important stories of modern times. His is the only voice that represents dozens of unknown millions in fascist countries.

GEORGE DE SANTILLANA