The Italian writer Ignazio Silone (1900-1978) is best known, at least in the English-speaking world, as the author of the Abruzzo Trilogy: Fontamara (1930), Bread and Wine (1936), and The Seed Beneath the Snow (1941). The trilogy takes its name from its setting: the mountainous, earthquake-prone region east of Rome where Silone was born and raised among the despised cafoni (as the landless peasants were known). It was in Bread and Wine, his most enduring and probably his best novel, that Silone introduced his most famous character: Pietro Spina, the exiled leader of the anti-fascist underground, who, disguised as a priest, returns to his native mountains. The entire trilogy, translated into English by Eric Mosbacher and revised by Silone's widow Darina, is now available in a single volume published by Steerforth Italia (2000).

The novels that make up the Abruzzo Trilogy were all written during Silone's long exile in Switzerland (1929-1944), the result of his opposition to the Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. For that reason, they were not published in Italy until the end of World War II, by which time Silone had garnered international fame as an anti-fascist writer, along with Malraux, Camus, and Orwell. In fact, Silone had joined the Italian Communist Party when it was founded in 1921, becoming a close associate of Palmiro Togliatti, the Party's long-time Secretary. It was only after his break with the Communists in 1931—memorably related in his contribution to The God That Failed (1949), the influential Cold War collection of "confessions" by ex-communist writers—that Silone embarked upon his second career as a novelist.

What distinguished Silone from the other anti-fascist and ex-communist writers of his generation was the medieval intensity of his spiritual longing, his reverence for the saints of his native region, and his conviction of the need to recover Christian values. One critic who recognized Silone's spiritual restlessness early on was the late R.W.B. Lewis of Yale, who coined the term "picaresque saint" to describe the representative hero of contemporary fiction, exemplified by Pietro Spina as well as the protagonists of Silone's later novels. Lewis—himself the son of an Episcopalian priest—was a friend of Silone's, having discovered the Italian writer as a young soldier stationed in the Abruzzi during the winter of 1944. His admiring profile of Silone in The Picaresque Saint (1956) was indebted to their conversations during his subsequent visits to Italy.

Near the beginning of his new biography of Silone, Stanislao Pugliese, Professor of Modern European History at Hofstra University, praises Lewis' half-century-old profile as "still the best critical analysis of the writer." Pugliese's own interest in Silone, however, is more historical than literary, his academic specialty being Italian anti-fascism. In that sense, his biography of Silone is a sequel to his earlier biography of Carlo Rosselli, the exiled socialist who was murdered, evidently on Mussolini's orders, in 1937.[1] In fact, the idea for a biography of Silone came to him, Pugliese reports, when he was visiting Silone's tomb in Pescina, where he had gone to receive the International Ignazio Silone Prize for his book on Rosselli.

Surprisingly, Bitter Spring (English for "Fontamara") is the first full biography of Ignazio Silone to have been written in English. For that reason alone, the book will fill a void in American libraries. In fact, Silone's success as a writer owed a good deal to English and American socialists like George Orwell and Irving Howe, who wrote enthusiastic reviews and introductions to his novels. Even Time magazine—hardly a socialist rag—published favorable reviews of Silone's books, including a 1942 review of The Seed Beneath the Snow that was probably penned by Whittaker Chambers, himself a card-carrying member of the tragic brotherhood of ex-Communists. "In Ignazio Silone's judgment," Chambers wrote, "the price [of being human] has not changed since Gospel days: he who would gain his own soul must first lose the world."

Pugliese, too, is evidently sympathetic to Silone. Inevitably, though, his biography is also shaped by the ongoing controversy that surrounds Silone in Italy, known as the caso Silone. As Pugliese explains, the original "case" had to do with the fact that Silone, hailed as the greatest Italian writer of his generation in Europe and America, was ignored for a long time by the Italian literary establishment. To this slight was added the charge that Silone's political activities during and after the war were funded by the American Office of Strategic Services and its successor, the CIA. Then, two decades after his death, came the incredible accusation that Silone had collaborated with the Fascist police during the 1920s.

In the case of Silone's links to the OSS and the CIA, the record is straightforward enough. His association with the Americans began in 1942 with the arrival of Allen Dulles, the wartime station chief of the OSS, in Switzerland. Dulles cultivated Silone as a "source" (complete with a code name and number) and authorized the transfer of U.S. funds to the Italian Socialist Party, which Silone had rejoined after breaking with the Communists. It was Dulles who arranged to have Silone and his wife flown back to Italy in October 1944, a year after the fall of Mussolini. In 1946, Silone was voted into the Constituent Assembly as a member of the new anti-Communist Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, representing his beloved home town of Pescina.

After declining to run for reelection in 1948, Silone joined the new Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization designed to combat Communism in Europe on the cultural front. In 1956, he and Nicola Chiaramonte launched the journal of the Italian branch of the CCF, Tempo Presente (the counterpart of Encounter, the CCF's English-language journal). Silone remained a leading figure in the CCF until 1967, when he resigned following the revelation that the organization had been funded all along by the CIA. It's hard to believe that an experienced ex-Communist like Silone was ignorant of the CIA's involvement in the CCF. On the other hand, it's equally hard to imagine that a man as stubborn as Silone would have allowed the agency to dictate his editorial policy.

The most serious accusation against Silone, however, did not surface until 1996, when his incriminating correspondence with Guido Bellone, a high-ranking official of the Fascist police, was leaked to the press. The correspondence, which had been discovered in the Central State Archives in Rome, seemed to prove that Silone had been a police informer for at least two years in the late 1920s, and quite possibly for the entire decade. While it is possible to challenge Silone's authorship of some of the letters—which are signed "Silvestri," evidently his code-name—most scholars, including Pugliese, have accepted the fact that Silone had a relationship with Bellone. The question is why—a question that, Pugliese admits, may never be answered.

For some readers, evidence of Silone's collaboration with the Fascists has been there all along, thinly disguised as fiction. Readers of Bread and Wine, for example, will recall the character Luigi Murica, the unfortunate young man who is "broken" by the Fascist police and agrees to become an informer. Near the end of the novel, Murica "confesses" to Pietro Spina, still in his guise as a priest. Once Murica has finished his story—including his recent spiritual renewal—Pietro demonstrates his trust in the informer by revealing his true identity. They proceed to share a meal of bread and wine, dipping the bread, sacramentally, in the wine. Shortly thereafter, Murica dies a Christ-like death at the hands of the Fascists. Judas the informant becomes Jesus the martyr.

Bitter Spring is not a conventional birth-to-death biography. Organizationally, it represents a combination of the chronological and thematic approaches. It includes chapters with titles like "Writing in/and Exile," "Cold War Culture," and "Silvestri," each delving into a different aspect of Silone's life and career. The "Silvestri" chapter, for example, comes at the end of the book, even though the events it narrates took place early in Silone's life. Inevitably, this mixed approach results in a certain amount of repetition. The reader who reads the biography straight through may find this slightly annoying at times. On the other hand, the repetition of essential facts allows each chapter to stand on its own as a semi-independent essay.

The book is beautifully designed and easy to read, full of information but free from academic jargon. It includes eight pages of photographs as well as reproductions of two of the infamous "Silvestri" letters. Pugliese himself is thoroughly familiar with both Italian and English scholarship on Silone; scholars will appreciate his bibliography and notes. He has examined archives in Italy and elsewhere, and he even interviewed Silone's widow Darina before her death in 2003. The fruit of his labor is a must-read volume for admirers of Silone as well as students of modern Italian history and politics.

As Pugliese admits, the Silone who emerges from Bitter Spring remains an enigma. But he is an enigma as intriguing as one of his own characters.

Mark Walhout teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.

1. Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).

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