Autumn Books
The new Machiavelli
Michael Foot
When Ignazio Silone died a few weeks ago (at the age of seventy-eight, in a Geneva hospital), he was given respectful English tributes in a few obituary columns. Perhaps in Italy more was said and written, although for some reason not easily discernible he is one of the prophets who was never accorded proper honour in his native land. Yet taking the man and his books together, and they can never be separated, he is one of the great men of the last half-century, of the whole Fascist-Communist epoch in human history. Machiavelli died penniless, was condemned to do most of his work in exile and never sad' his great writings published in his lifetime; and yet his became a household name the world over. Ignazio Silone may achieve a similar posthumous conquest in Italy and beyond; his greatness, I believe, is on the same scale. He shows a comparable combination of insight into the tumult of his own age, together with an enduring vision of the heights and depths which human nature can attain, and he combines with it too a splendour and fortitude in his own character which, in some degree, Machiavelli had too.
Silone's first novel, scarcely more than a short story, Fontamara, published in 1934, told how Mussolini's Fascism came to a medieval Christian village in the Abruzzi, the scene of all his writings from which he never wished or sought to_ escape. The plain picture of poverty and cruelty, of the heroism of the rebel and how resistance is born, survives better than most of the rhetoric and poetry of the 1930s. Unlike loftier exponents of the anti-Fascist case, Silone never had anything, not a single syllable, to qualify or retract. He never forgot what poverty meant in humiliation of the individual. Years later he was still asserting, with all the passion at his command, that the claptrap about the virtues of poverty is an odious falsehood. In any case, there were no words to spare in Fontamara. Only a great mind dares to express itself simply, said Stendhal, and Silone, himself a student of Stendhal, is the best modern exponent of the latter's practice and precept.
The same lack of any necessity to disavow his earlier words and deeds applies to Silone's disillusion with Communism, which he explored in his later novels and expounded best of all in that little-known classic, The School for Dictators., the one among his writings which truly deserves its place alongside Machiavelli's Prince. Silone at least did see his masterpiece published, but the precise moment and method of publication were wretchedly devised. The School for Dictators first made its appearance in 1939, just after a British Prime Minister had been toasting Mussolini in Rome, and just before Stalin made his Pact with Hitler. Most political leaders of that pusillanimous age did not want to learn the truth from anybody, least of all from an Italian exile, an ex-Communist denied entry into Britain.
Moreover, Silone fitted easily into no party or definable group; his every sentence bristled with his own brand of independence. Most members of the legion of literary ex-Communists beat their breasts, and deserted the revolutionary camp altogether, following a well-smoothed track to comfort and complacency. Silone instead purified his Socialist faith, made it an instrument of sharper metal, and never lost the dignity and ardour which he had seen in his peasant heroes. Indeed, even in this restricted category of anti-Communist literature, it is too easy to forget what an originator he was. He first found the path which writers like George Orwell and Arthur Koestler were to follow later, and both of them, to their credit it should be quickly added, were later to acknowledge his example. None of Silone's anti-Communist writings, taken singly, ever achieved the success of Orwell's Animal Farm or Koestler's Darkness at Noon; none of them could lay claim to the same artistic triumph. But taken together they stated, no less effectively, the Socialist answer to Stalinism, and some of the scenes he has described will never fade from the history books. It was, according to his own description, way back in 1922, as he was leaving Moscow on one occasion, that Alexandra Kollontai had jokingly warned him: 'If you should read in the papers that Lenin has had me arrested for stealing the Kremlin's silverware, it will mean simply that I have not been in full agreement with him on some problem of agricultural or industrial policy.' And it was a year or two later again that another ineffable exchange occurred in Moscow which should surely have shaken the universe. Confronted with a dilemma of tactics posed by the British Communist Party, a Russian expert offered a simple if Jesuitical solution, whereupon the British Communist delegate interrupted: 'But that would be a lie.' Then follows Silone's great scene 'This naive objection,' he wrote, 'was greeted with a burst of laughter, frank, warm, interminable laughter, the like of which the gloomy offices of the Communist International had certainly never heard, laughter which rapidly spread all over Moscow, since the Englishman's incredibly funny answer was immediately telephoned to Stalin and the most important offices of State, leaving new waves of astonishment and hilarity in its wake, as we learned later. -In judging a regime it is very important to know what it finds amusing," said Togliatti, who was with me.'
But why and how, after moments such as that, did it take so long for the world to unearth the truth? Silone was the most incorruptible of witnesses. Togliatti was a politician of genius. And both, incidentally, had been trained on Machiavelli and Mazzini as well -as Marx. A host of the most intelligent and selfless men and women of that age or any other saw what happened in the Kremlin until, for example, Silone was prompted to ask Togliatti: 'Do you suppose that's the way they do things in the Sacred College of Cardinals? Or in the Fascist Grand Council?' How could Stalinism survive such an inquisition, pressed at a time, be it noted, when Trotsky was still alive and kicking in Moscow?
Silone's simple answers ring truer than any elaborate treatises. He understood why the Communist Party was 'school, church, barracks, family'; he knew that 'consciences are not synchronised like traffic signals.' And he knew why his own brother, tortured to death by the Fascists, proclaimed himself, falsely, a Communist, to honour the creed of defiance, learnt in the Abruzzi. Even when he was risking his life to swear eternal war on the monstrous evil unmasked before him, Silone could not or would not forget the human face of Communism which had first inspired himself and his young comrades.
He once wrote a fierce criticism of modern British writers, accusing them of shirking the great themes, and whether that stone was well-aimed or not, no-one can reply that it was thrown from a glasshouse. Silone himself could breathe only on the highest altitudes. He was obsessed by the perpetual interaction of morals and politics, thought and action, ends and means, the flesh and the spirit. He could not stoop. He would castigate not only the gaolers and executioners of totalitarian states, but the literary tradesmen who pandered to the lowest tastes, particularly those who trafficked in eroticism in the name of liberty. For the liberty he treasured, in his work and with his life, was something inexpressibly richer and nobler. Since it had had to be wrested from Fascist thugs and Communist dogmatists, how could it not be? It was not a word but a thing. Indeed, in Silone's hands, many other dusty abstractions regain, like polished silver, a gleaming brightness and purity: honour, conscience, courage, faith. And on a similar reckoning, he saw, as Orwell saw, how human misery can derive from the debasement of language, what stark horror can breed beneath Byzantine pomposity, how words like poverty and slavery must not be allowed soft edges, just as freedom must keep its revolutionary force.
The words and the man perpetually merge; every Silone aphorism seems sharpened by his personality. He was truly a saint, and yet saints who devote their lives to politics can prove to be the most dangerous persecutors of all. Silone knew that better than any of his potential critics, and had devoted his wit to expose the peril. 'The ordinary man,' he wrote in The School for Dictators, 'is a hotch-potch of desires. He likes eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping, keeping a canary, playing tennis, going to the theatre, being well-dressed, having children, stamp-collecting, doing his job, and many other things besides:This is the reason he remains a nobody; he spreads himself over so many little things. But the born politician wants nothing but power and lives for nothing but power. It is his bread, his meat, his work, his hobby, his lover, his canary, his theatre, his stamp album, his life-sentence. The fact that all his powers and energies are concentrated upon one thing makes it easy for him to appear extraordinary in the eyes of the masses and thus become a leader, in the same way as those who really concentrate on God become saints and those who live only for money become millionaires.'
Fortunately, this man who guarded his cherished ideas from all assaults with such saint-like fanaticism also possessed the mordancy of a Machiavelli, and he brought this quality to its peak in The School for Dictators. Here Thomas the Cynic explained to an aspirant from the United States how to establish a dictatorship in that country ('How can I save America from the Red Menace, if the menace doesn't exist?'). The aphoristic arrows are fired off in all directions and few escaped unscathed: No dictator has ever had trouble finding Civil Servants; if a party calls itself 'radical' its bound to be moderate; the height of the art of government for our contemporary democratic statesmen (1939, don't forget), seems to consist in accepting smacks in the face to avoid having their posteriors kicked; America, as you know, never had an Age of Enlightenment, and was therefore spared socialism and the struggles of political ideologies; a sincere orator only feels inconsistent when he is silent.
And yet it is his imagination and his courage, even more than his wit, which will make him so powerful a voice in the years to come: especially for Socialists, to whom he continued to the end to address his strictures, his warnings, his invocations, and his hopes. Socialism, he was convinced, would outlive Marxism, and he said that as one who knew how humariand inspiring, no less than corrupting and explosive, Marxism could be: 'I cannot conceive of Socialism tied to any particular theory, only to a faith.
The more Socialist theories claim to be 'scientific', the more transitory they are. But Socialist values are permanent. The dis tinction between theories and values is still not clearly enough understood by those who ponder these problems, but it is fun damental. A school or a system of propaganda may be founded on a collection of theories. But only a system of values can construct a culture, a civilisation, a new way of living together as men.'
A few have sought, like Silone, to remodel their faith in democratic Socialism in the light of the experience of Soviet Communism which has afflicted the East and what Silone calls 'the leprosy of nihilism' which has afflicted the West. But no other Socialist writer has refashioned the call to action so nobly as Sibne. He never allowed himself to be overwhelmed by cynicism or lassitude; he kept to the end just as he had infused all his writings with the spirit of resistance he had learned in the Abruzzi. 'I don't believe,' he said, 'that the honest man is forced to submit to history,' or, again: 'No predicament, however desperate, can deprive us of the power to act.' The kinship between the old Machiavelli and .the new one looks closer still. The old Machiavelli refused to submit to history, much in accordance with Ignazio Silone's admonition, and yet his books survived to play a foremost part in re-shaping the Italy he loved.
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