Books: Keeper of the Flame

EMERGENCY EXIT by Ignazio Silone. 207 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

At 68, Ignazio Silone is one of the world’s few gainfully employed freelance socialists. He adopted this rubric 40 years ago, after a series of political and moral crises persuaded him that Russian-dominated Communism was a perversion of Marxist and humanitarian ideals. He had been a founder of the Italian Communist Party, a shadow person in the anti-Fascist underground, a delegate to Moscow convocations of the faithful and an exile from Mussolini’s Italy. In 1930, he settled in Switzerland, and stayed for 14 years, writing novels. His best was Bread and Wine (1937), the story of an idealist’s struggle against Mussolini. It ranks with Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon as an expression of the moral ambiguity that seizes men of principle and sensitivity who enter politics.

Silone now lives in Rome, nurturing his aversion to politics, as well as rewriting and reissuing his novels. To ex-Communists and younger, unencumbered New Leftists, he is a veteran saint of the revolution for social justice and individual dignity. Yet, as keeper of the flame, Silone is an exceedingly human presence: Columnist Murray Kempton once described him as looking and talking like a tobacconist.

Sap v. Roots. Unlike many socialists, Silone cares less for the transitory causes and effects of history than for the preservation of the human values that he believes are part of “our paleo-Christian heritage.” In essence, he says, “this consists of the permanent validity of certain moral values designed to rescue mankind’s communal living from the laws of the jungle.” Though the statement slides over the instinctual courtesies that wild animals extend to one another, Silone clearly believes that man is the animal fated to strive for perfection. Perfection is objectified in ideals, and to Silone the ideal of communal living is socialism. He defines it as “a permanent aspiration of the human spirit, which thirsts after social justice.” This ideal, Silone says, has taken many forms in the intellectual history of the West: Plato’s concept of Socratic virtue, the Christian expectation of the kingdom of God, the 18th century Utopian philosophy of natural law, and Marx and Engels’ analysis of capitalism. Silone’s socialism is not an ephemeral system but an amalgam of unchanging values.

Emergency Exit, a collection of autobiographical essays that was first published in Italy in 1965, deals basically with Silone’s belief in the enduring relevance of these values. In this regard, it is a work of optimism that avoids the sap of positive thinking and goes directly to its roots. As the essays reveal, these roots are inextricably bound up with Silone’s own—with his youth among the landless peasants of the Abruzzi mountains, with his early religious training, with the earthquake that left him an orphan at 14, and with the Fascists, who killed his sole surviving brother. Many of these details appeared in Silone’s contribution to The God That Failed (1949), a collection of confessional essays by ex-Communists, including Koestler and Richard Wright.

Satiety v. Socialism. At 16, Silone was already in revolution against the oppressive system of absentee landowners. Of the empathy that underlay his emerging social consciousness, he says: “In my rebellion there was a point at which love coincided with a refusal to co operate.” And he writes of his decision to move from passive to active resistance: “The step from submission to subversion was very short; all I had to do was apply to society the principles that were considered valid for private life.”

This simple yet powerful sentiment springs from Silone’s rural background. The peasants he grew up with had no use for political systems, dictatorial or democratic, that interfered with the natural order and rhythms on which their survival depended. Silone’s contemporary and countryman, Carlo Levi, examined that theme brilliantly in his book Christ Stopped at Eboli. He saw that progress was impeded not only because peasants were backward, but also because politicians were “unconscious worshipers of the state.”

Silone’s fear of the mindless true believer is implicit throughout Emergency Exit. Having been betrayed himself by the religion of Stalinism, Silone distrusts any government that prostrates itself before a set of pseudoscientific techniques—for these techniques become self-ratifying, self-gratifying and self-perpetuating at the expense of the governed. In the concluding essay, “Rethinking Progress,” he is particularly concerned that growing affluence, especially in socialist countries, is making production and consumption ends in themselves. An irrepressible revolutionary, Silone is confident of man’s ability to revolt under conditions of satiety as well as under poverty and oppression. Yet he is not altogether sanguine: “Of course, no law, divine or human, can guarantee that man’s revolt will end in victory. But this is one of the risks it is his duty and privilege to take.”