La vita brutta
Philip Hensher
THE MORO AFFAIR by Leonardo Sciascia
Granta, .#7.99, pp. 176, ISBN 1862075220 W atching Nanni Moretti's sublime film, La Stanza del Figlio, last year, it occurred to me how very long it's been since we've seen an Italian film or book which discussed its own society in its own terms. Most of the cultural products of Italy these days seem to be extended advertisements, funded by the Italian Tourist Board; a portrait of a place where the little boy has his tears dried by a clown and everyone in the village loves the postman. This unspeakable oeuvre, from the merely fatuous Cinema Paradiso to the actively deplorable La Vita e Bella has somehow managed to kill off what, for decades, was one of the liveliest and most engaged cultures in Europe.
Such a flourishing of a national culture can't always be explained by looking at the public life of the society, hut in some cases it certainly can. The question What is to become of us?' was posed so insistently in Italy in the decades after the war that it seemed to inspire a generation of writers and film-makers to make a start on an answer. Most of the best work of this period has a public aspect. Perhaps it was the unresolved tensions and ambiguities so near the surface of Italian life, so oddly embodied in the patterns of Italian politics: on the surface, extreme instability as prime ministers came and, a month or two later, went. In reality, the power relations were always stable to the point of inertia. The single unbreakable rule of Italian governments was simply this: no communists. For decades, guided by this rule. Italy was effectively a Christian Democrat parish. It didn't do a great deal for the country, but the all-pervading atmosphere of corrupt, complacent inertia and a constant, superficial instability produced a generation of dashingly committed storytellers.
Perhaps the tensions and ambiguities were most painfully obvious in Sicily. Certainly, there, the question of 'What is to become of us?' seemed never far away. There was a perfectly serious political movement, after the war, devoted to the proposition that Sicily should become part of the United States, and, with its cherished Arabic heritage and impenetrable dialect, it never thought of itself as entirely Italian. Sicilians speak, like the English, of 'the continent', and, quite unselfconsciously, of the Allies having 'liberated' them at the end of the war, as if from an occupying power. There was, too, the question of the mafia, which was not the simple issue it later became; many Sicilians, for many years, accepted the proposal that the mafia had played an important role in resisting fascism. A confused but widespread idea in the popular imagination linked the Resistance with Don Tutu in his gated villa, and Don Tow with the American liberators who came in 1944 — because, after all, everyone knew that Don Tot° had cousins and business in America. It was all the same thing. Probably only in the 1970s was the mafia clearly and universally seen for what it was,
Sicily is a brutal and unique society, its private manners, snobbery and devotion to hierarchy unrivalled in modern Europe, but its street life is as incorrigibly vulgar as a parrot. It is an extraordinary anthology of cultural glories, but all left by invaders — Greek, Roman, Norman and Arab. It is hard to indicate anything indigenous. A society which lives, literally, on a volcano, will readily find something close at hand to talk about, and the list of great Sicilian writers is a long one Pirandello, Verga and Lampedusa are justly celebrated; Vitaliano Brancati's lethally funny satires on Sicilian morality ought to be better known; and Federico de' Roberto's sumptuous and sardonic epic, I Vicere, is an account of a Sicilian aristocratic family which I personally prefer even to Lampedusa's II Gattopardo.
Leonardo Sciascia is in the very first rank of Italian writers, and among Sicilian writers I think he is supreme. His books are both lucid and mysterious; they address complex, public subjects with clarity and
elegance; they move with the pace of thrillers, and have the resonance of poetry. It's odd that he isn't better known here. It might be that he lacks all conventional sentiment — there is not much about love in Sciascia, and a great deal about the structures of public institutions. He hasn't attracted the attentions of ambitious critics, since he doesn't play ingenious textual games, his surface is classical to the point of anonymity, and criticism hasn't found a way to describe his powerfully individual structures. His books are all very concise, and perhaps we prefer major novelists to produce at least one long book. Might it be, even, that English readers are not quite sure how to pronounce his name, so don't ask for him in bookshops or recommend him to their friends? It's Shasha, by the way, so now you have no excuse.
Sciascia's books cover a good deal of ground, and everyone will have his favourite. Sicilian Uncles is a dazzling set of four novellas, glimpses of the trauma of Sicilian history through minutely assembled individual lives; the finest of them picks apart the cherished 'Mafia-America-rich relatives-US Army-free chewing-gum' set of ideas, while never venturing away from a particular and very real family. Some of the hooks, like the brilliant To Each his Own, look like bleak, inconclusive thrillers, and slowly turn into grand indictments of the abuse of power. Candid° is a ruthless and horrible transcription of Voltaire, and no one could have done it better; Sciascia, with his commitment to public writing and public responsibilities, a prose style which aims more at elegant euphony than idiosyncrasy, and a thoroughly disenchanted view of life, was very much like Voltaire. The Wine-Dark Sea is a completely bizarre collection of stories, sonic refined and suggestive as Chekhov, others deliberately embarrassing, coarse urban myths about credulous peasants and comic village vendettas. They are all very different books, united by a ruthless, unsparing gaze, and a common subject in power and its abuses. He is a very dark writer: the sun is oppressive and cruel, and if a postman ever stopped to pat a little boy's head in Sciascia, it would not he long before his war record and debts of honour were brought up.
The Moro Affair, which is now republished in English in a fuller version than before, is at the heart of Sciascia's public writings. It is about a terrible crime, the kidnapping, 'trial' and murder in 1978 of Aldo Moro, one of those Christian Democrat politicians who got to be prime minister from time to time. The people
responsible were the Red Brigades, a fanatical far-left groupuscule. It was one of the most wicked crimes of the period, and very much of its time. This is not the story of the ease, but an excoriating polemic about the way Moro was left to his fate.
Sciascia was not just a writer on public matters, but a public figure, a deputy in the Italian parliament. This remarkable polemic grew from a 'minority report' Sciascia submitted to the official parliamentary inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Aldo Moro's kidnapping and murder. A minority report, by definition, is something that no one within earshot is prepared to agree with, and this is perhaps the point to say that Sciascia, fine as he is as a writer, was a conspiracy theorist to an unhelpful degree, a man almost invariably wrong about everything. One drops that in casually, because it doesn't ultimately affect Sciascia's merits; after all, Dickens was usually wrong, and Swift was wrong from beginning to end. The Moro Affair is, I think, utterly misguided, but it is a dazzling piece of invective.
Sciascia's case, at root, is that Moro was deliberately abandoned by his colleagues. That is, of course, the case. Soberly, one has to conclude that Sciascia has not considered the consequences of any other path of action. If the Italians had agreed to the Red Brigades' demands that various leftist terrorists he freed from prison — a demand which Moro, pathetically and desperately, repeated in some of his letters — a terrible escalation would automatically have followed. The police operation was remarkably inept, but probably not deliberately so, as Sciascia comes close to implying. Sciascia was always perverse, and if you try to imagine the response of the parliamentary committee when presented with this 'minority report', you will see the limited applicability of the perverse imagination.
But that perversity was what made him so remarkable an artist, and The Moro Affair is a magnificent piece of grave, funerary rhetoric. The opening is a superb coup de theatre; a bare timetable of the events leads into this startling and very unparliamentary gambit: 'Out for a stroll last night, I saw a glow-worm in the cracked plaster of a wall.' Of course, the glow-worm proves to carry a political moral in the end; but it is a beautiful piece of novelistic indirectness. And brilliant, too, to embed the text with Moro's dreadful, almost unreadable letters. Sciascia is scornful of the temptations of rhetoric — the speech-makers were quick to turn Mrs Moro into a sort of stoic Roman matron — but his own rhetoric and sense of when to let the central figure speak for himself contribute to an awesome escalation. Moro's murder was a dreadful crime, and will not be forgotten quickly, but in the end, like the subjects of Bossuet's funerary orations, he will be remembered largely as the subject of this great master's greatest polemic.
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