But the message it contains goes beyond anti-Fascism. For although its protagonist, a revolutionary who has spent years in exile after having escaped from a concentration camp, still finds reasons to hate Fascism when he returns to Italy, he also discovers reasons to doubt. Not his revolutionary faith, of course, but the way in which he has expressed it.
One of the book’s key passages is certainly the moment when the hero, Pietro Sacca, sharing now the elemental life of Italian peasants, wonders whether the theories in which he has travestied his love for them have not simply put a greater distance between him and them. It is in this sense that the work is revolutionary.
For a revolutionary work is not one that glorifies victories and conquests, but one that brings to light the Revolution’s most painful conflicts. The more painful the conflicts, the greater their effect. The militant too quickly convinced is to the true revolutionary what the bigot is to a mystic.
For the grandeur of a faith can be measured by the doubts it inspires. And no sincere militant, born among the people and determined to defend their dignity, could miss the doubt that sweeps over Pietro Sacca. The anguish that grips the Italian revolutionary is precisely what gives Silone’s book its bitterness and somber brilliance.
On the other hand, there is no revolutionary work without artistic qualities. This may seem paradoxical. But I believe that if our time teaches us anything on this score, it is that a revolutionary art, if it is not to lapse into the basest forms of expression, cannot do without artistic importance. There is no happy medium between vulgar propaganda and creative inspiration, between what Malraux calls “the will to prove” and a work like Man’s Fate.
Bread and Wine meets this test. Written by a rebel, it flows forward in the most classical of forms. Short sentences, a vision of the world both naïve and sophisticated, terse, natural dialogues give Silone’s style a secret resonance that comes through even in translation. If the word poetry has a meaning, one finds it here, in tableaux of a rustic and eternal Italy, in cypress-planted slopes and an unequaled sky, and in the ancient gestures of Italian peasants.
To rediscover the road to these gestures and this truth, and to return from an abstract philosophy of the revolution to the bread and wine of simplicity, this is Ignazio Silone’s itinerary and the lesson of his novel.
And no small part of its greatness is its ability to inspire us to rediscover, beyond the hatreds of today, the face of a proud and human people who remain our only hope for peace.
Review published in Alger républicain on May 23, 1939
Intelligence and the Scaffold1
It is said that when Louis XVI, on his way to the guillotine, tried to give one of his guards a message for the queen, he drew the following reply: “I am not here to run your errands but to lead you to the scaffold.” This excellent example of propriety in wording and obstinate perseverance to the job at hand is, it seems to me, perfectly applicable, if not to all the novels in our language at least to a certain classical tradition in the French novel.
Novelists of this genre do indeed refuse to carry messages, and their only concern seems to be to lead their characters imperturbably to the rendezvous awaiting them, whether it be Madame de Clèves to her convent, Juliette to happiness and Justine to her ruin, Julien Sorel to his beheading, Adolphe to his solitude. Madame de Graslin to her deathbed, or Proust to the celebration of old age he discovers in the salon of Madame de Guermantes.
What characterizes these authors is their singleness of purpose; one would look in vain through these novels for the equivalent of a Wilhelm Meister’s interminable adventures; it is not that pedantry is foreign to us but that we have our own particular kind of pedantry, which is not, fortunately, Goethe’s sort. All that can be said is that in art an ideal of simplicity always requires fixity of intention. Hence a certain obstinacy that seems central in the French novel.
This is why the problems of the novel are primarily artistic. If our novelists have proved anything, it is that the novel, contrary to general belief, cannot easily dispense with perfection. Only it is an odd sort of perfection, not always a formal one. People imagine—wrongly—that novels can dispense with style. As a matter of fact, they demand the most difficult style—the kind that does not call attention to itself.
But the problems our great novelists set themselves have not concerned form for form’s sake. They focused only on the exact relationship they wished to introduce between their tone and their ideas. Somewhere between monotony and chit-chat they had to find a language to express their obstinacy.
If their language often lacks outward distinction it is because it is molded in a series of sacrifices. The messages have been omitted; everything is reduced to essentials. This is how minds as different as Stendhal’s and Madame de La Fayette’s may seem akin: both have worked hard to find the right language. Indeed, the first problem Stendhal set himself is the one that has preoccupied great novelists for centuries. What he called an “absence of style” was a perfect conformity between his art and his passions.2
For what gives originality to all [French] novels compared to those written in other countries is that they are not only a school of life but an artistic school: the liveliest flame crackles in their rigorous language. Our great successes are born of a particular concept of strength, which might be called elegance, but which needs to be defined.
One must be two persons when one writes. In French literature, the great problem is to translate what one feels into what one wants others to feel. We call a writer bad when he expresses himself in reference to an inner context the reader cannot know. The mediocre writer is thus led to say anything he pleases. The great rule of an artist, on the other hand, is
to half forget himself the better to communicate.
Inevitably this involves sacrifices. And this quest for an intelligible language whose role is to disguise the immensity of his objective leads him to say not what he likes but only what he must. A great part of the genius of the French novel lies in the conscious effort to give the order of pure language to the cries of passion. In short, what triumphs in the works I am discussing is a certain preconceived idea.
I mean intelligence. But the term needs definition. One always tends to think of intelligence as involving only what is visible—structure, for example. Now it is curious to note that the structure of the typical seventeenth- century novel, La Princesse de Clèves, is extremely loose.
Several stories are launched and the novel begins in complexity even though it ends in unity. Actually, we have to wait for Adolphe, in the nineteenth century, to find the purity of line we are so ready to imagine we find in La Princesse de Clèves. In the same way. the structure of Les Liaisons dangereuses is purely chronological, with no artistic experiments. In Sade’s novels the composition is elementary; philosophical dissertations alternate with erotic descriptions right to the end.
Stendhal’s novels offer curious evidence of carelessness, and one is never surprised enough at the final chapter of La Chartreuse de Parme, in which the author, as if anxious to conclude, with the end in sight, bundles in twice as many events as in the rest of the book. It is surely not these examples which justify the claim that French novels possess an Apollonian perfection of form.
The unity, the profound simplicity, the classicism of these novels thus lie elsewhere. It is surely closer to the truth to say merely that the great characteristic of these novelists is in the fact that each, in his own way, always says the same thing and always in the same tone. To be classic is to repeat one’s self. And thus at the heart of our great works of fiction one finds a certain conception of man that intelligence strives to illustrate by means of a small number of situations.
And, of course, this can be said of any good novel, if it is true that novels create their universe by means of intelligence, just as the theater creates its universe by means of action.
But what seems peculiar to the French tradition is that plot and characters are generally limited to this idea and everything is arranged so as to make it echo on indefinitely. Here, intelligence not only contributes the original idea; at the same time it is also a marvelously economical principle that creates a kind of passionate monotony.
It is both creative and mechanical at the same time. To be classical is both to repeat oneself and to know how to repeat oneself. And this is the difference I see between French novels and those of other countries, where intelligence inspires the fiction but also allows itself to be carried away by its own reactions.3
To take a specific example, it seems to me that Madame de La Fayette’s aim, since nothing else in the world appears to interest her, is simply to show us a very special conception of love. Her strange postulate is that this passion places
