BOOKS

Sicilian Virtue

BY KARL MILLER

r‘VER two million people in Sicily are destitute kjor nearly so and in places in the west eight out of ten men have been in prison. Un- employment and overcrowding are intense and the variety of slow and sudden death does nothing to check the steep rise in population. Sections of the countryside are politically extinct—if you've been in prison you can't vote. Western Sicily still abides by very ancient traditions of feeling and behav- iour and it is still radically different from anything we have known in the West for a great many years. The pickpockets in Palermo live like those in Fagin's East End, and the country life, with the animals. in the cottages, comes very close to the eighteenth-century Ayrshire of Robert Burns. It is. for us, an amazing society and these two books by Danilo Dolci and Gavin Maxwell,* both based on transcribed autobiographical statements, pro- vide an amazing picture of this society and of its desolations. -

Dolei's work in Partenico as a social reformer is now celebrated, and To Feed the Hungry is a condensed version, admirably translated by P. a Cummins, of his Inchiesta in Palermo, for which he was prosecuted on grounds of obscenity by the • Christian Democrat government. His emphasis is social and economic; he confines himself to those at the point of destitution or past it and a lot of his depositions have a left-wing flavour. Mr. Maxwell, on the other hand, is a writer and travel- ler whose vivid, somewhat soldierly evocations are also familiar and his book includes his own curt sense of the beauty, the botany, the agriculture of the island. Where the harvests of grain, grapes and olives are received as the three prime 'mani- festations of divine goodness.' It opens wonder- fully with his stay at a tuna-fishing post where the shoals are led by an intricate system of under- water nets, dating back to the Saracens, towards the imerfariza, the final slaughter. But his interest in Sicily involves, as any serious interest in the place probably must, a concern for the social dillictilties, in their most practical aspects, of the men and women there. This shapes nearly every one of the stories he tells and while there are differences between the books and while he went in for a Wider range of types than Dolci—he has a doctor and a nun, who eats well 'partly for prestige, the effect of them both is very similar.

Dolei's witnesses turn out to be as rich a source as Maxwell's, in fact. The crippled beggar's narration is hard to forget and so is the frail and touching pantheism of the man who is forced to live by collecting frogs, eels, snails and `greenstuff' —fennel, 'wild asparagus and the like. The story of his life by the shepherd boy who is in gaol for stealing two bunches of herbs is especially moving. ile has scarcely ever met anyone outside his family. he loves the animals he looks after, he inhabits a shining, Chagall-like world of moon and wind and the goats, and his pagan ignorance seems genuinely innocent and tender. His life Shows at least one of the meanings of the Christian

.* To FEED THE HUNGRY. By Danilo Dolci. (Mae- Gibbon and Kee. 30s.) THE TEN PAINS OF DEATII. By Gavin Maxwell. (Longmans, 30s.)

religion, of which he has only dimly heard, better than the Church itself : 'It would be fine to live

amongst Christians but . . . they do dread- ful things to you—arrest you, put you in prison, exile you. If you're a scarecrow like me, they won't bother their heads about you, but they all run after the rich and powerful high-ups.'

Both of these books are practical. steeped in the schemes and shifts of everyday life. And Dolci is a practical man, far more of one than the rhetoric he has naturally attracted, the references to St. Francis, would lead one to suppose. When he landed recently at London Airport he talked not about holy matters or even about how `to feed the hungry,' but about manure—how to stop the peasants burning it and get them to spread it on their land. At home he works chiefly with the destitute, and the road he prevailed on them to repair without official leave, which also had the authorities up in arms, is characteristic of his approach. He is trying to introduce certain irriga- tion projects, to teach the farmers new techniques and to persuade them to co-operate,on the assump- tion that it is too early to hope for large accessions of industry to the island. His book is a living record of the employment situation; it re- veals the factors which help to maintain the situa- tion in its present state—the wiles and gerry- manderings of the Christian Democrats, the use of the Mafia as a vigilante organisation for the 'high-ups' or middle-class, the Church, the birth- rate, the systeni of land tenure; it reveals the artificial nature of the crime rate; and it reveals by implication the nature of the solutions embodied in his work in Partenico.

The bridges that will have to be crossed before .these conditions are transformed are, of .course. formidable. To be restored to decency, one man said, Sicily needs to be submerged in the sea for a thousand years. If any ever was, this is an unjust society in which people prey on each other and in which quite decent people are corrupted. The carabiniere who spoke to Maxwell seemed a sympathetic man. But the prison in Palermo where the tortures make 'even fishes talk' is an integral feature of Sicilian life.

Another crucial feature of the situation is the attitude to cliarity professed by the Church and accepted by scores of the witnesseS. The very word 'poor:. which seems right for Sicily and for almost nowhere else ie th. West. implies this attitude to charity, implies inertness and supplication. One shepherd boy saw the stars as 'a queer sort of eyes' and for Millions of the islanders these eyes are God's, the eyes of a charity often inscrutably deferred but alWays about to rain clown its blessings.

God lights the stars his candles

And looks upon the poor.

There were those who told Dolci that God was dead or 'in league' with the government, but Yeats's lines are a reality for the vast majority. Dolci has been at great pains to bring them to reconsider their attitude and it is ironic that his efforts should strike foreigners as those of a further charitable saint of the kind which the West

continues to cherish. As Aldous Huxley points out in his foreword, Dolci is a scientist, a reformer of practice and opinion, no more a mystic than he is a Communist—despite the Stalin Peace Prize.

The effect of these books is to place the blame for the backwardness of Sicily squarely on the Christian Democrats and the Church. This poverty is partly due to the island's historical status as a province and a dependency, but the Church has a deep and undoubted interest in keep- ing things as they are. This would hardly need saying, though these books give ample grounds for saying it, except that time and again it is not said at all, In the West these sufferings are felt to be terrible, a fit and beautiful object for the onslaughts of charity, but to mention the Church's part is sometimes felt to be in poor taste or even vicious. When Gavin Maxwell did mention it in public. a few months ago, a large man was able to spend the rest of the meeting attacking him as a subtle blackguard, someone playing politics where benevolence alone should reign. One or two readers, who are no more scourges of the Vatican than Maxwell seems to be, may certainly feel that the behaviour of the Don Camillos of Sicily is the worst possible warrant for putting your trust in God. One of the fishermen in The Ten Pains of Death longs for a huge mattanza of drowning priests. In his worshipful post-campaign biography of the new Pope,t The Pope from the Fields,' Father Murphy answers 'a resounding "Yes"' to the Paris taxi-driver who inquired if John XXIII was 'aware of the poor.' There are plenty of poor for him to be aware of, a little to the South.

These books will also be read, anxiously scanned perhaps, for signs of the virtues which are occasion- ally thought to be inherent in primitive and simple lives, for signs of what we imagine we have lost. And some of the virtues are thought to be heroic. Gavin Maxwell may have been drawn earlier on to write about Giuliano in the prospect of encoun- tering elements of barbaric heroism, and his curiosity carried him eagerly through his account of the bandit's life and death, through their darkest complexities—who killed him, was he the Mafia's man or whose? And Giuliano was heroic; he had guts and leadership; from the mountains above Montelepre he tired a shot that echoed into foreign countries and gave them a rough inkling of the Sicilian predicament. With his separatism aria his hand-outs to the poor, a sort of violent charity, he had that predicament at heart, besides being an embodiment of their code of honour. Here was a help for the poor people created by the poor people themselves, All this was bound to . appeal to the West, where the saint and the bandit seem to occupy facing niches in the hall of heroes, as types of obsolete greatness. Giuliano's heroism, however, was obsolete all right, and doomed—an expression of Sicilian life, but not its cure; and the cure, if there is to be one, is Dolci, or his methods. In his present book Mr. Maxwell recognises this : Sicily is more comprehensively presented, the social .background completed, and the futility of Giuliano's 'charitable' rearguard revolt is entirely clear.

In neither of these books are there any Giulianos. There is pride and a taste for revenge. But the only true heroism is of a different order. The most impressive thing in the experience of these men is their way of sticking at the job of making a living and a home in the face of the most crucifying want and humiliation. The quality that cleans up their stinking slums and puts flowers in the window. There is nothing archaic about this kind of virtue, though it is ancient enough.

JOI1N XXH.I, By Francis X. Murphy. (Herbert Jenkins. 16s.) There is no evidence here either for the view that the simple, unhygienic life, with faith and without amusement, is the nurse of all the virtues. Those who favour such researches into vanished powers will have to go to societies which are less cheated and demoralised than Sicily is. Sicily, per- haps, is too primitive. So many of these Sicilians are suicidally bored and embittered. So many of them are utterly sceptical of religion in any form. The only passages in the books which suggest the possibility of loss, of impairments of vision and feeling, belong to the shepherds.

Both books chase away most of the usual notions of primitive virtue. But two kinds of virtue remain. There is the courage of these unemployed men and of Dolei, who works for them. And there is the virtue of rational forethought, of planning —not very heroic and a bit unfashionable in the West, but Dolei has made it real.