Bomb or Pearl?

THE SEED BENEATH THE SNOW--Ignazio Silone--Harper ($2.75).

This novel about Fascist Italy is by no means a perfect book, but in some respects it may be a great one. It will mean little to those who use politics to butter their daily bread and not much to those for whom politics is the breath of life. But it will mean much to those who prefer to be human beings despite all politics. They may be appalled by the price. In Ignazio Silone's judgment, the price has not changed since Gospel days: he who would gain his own soul must first lose the world.

The story is simple. In a village in the Abruzzi at the time of the war on Ethiopia, a brave old woman hides her sick anti-Fascist grandson, Pietro Spina, from the police. Recovered, he leaves her, joins his friends in another hideout. An informer forces them to move on. They do a little underground work. Pietro (he was also the hero of Bread and Wine, TIME, April 5, 1937) begins a romance, runs afoul of the authorities as the book ends.

If that were all, The Seed Beneath the Snow would be an ordinary piece of democratic propaganda. But it has indestructible meaning and grandeur, because Silone dramatizes, chiefly within one village, the conflict of two irreconcilable worlds. One is the world of Caesar: petty officials, petty sycophants, sentimental housewives, craven husbands, tame-cat priests, small landowners who "would boil the Sacred Ribs of Jesus in the tears of Our Lady of Sorrows if they could make a broth of them"--in short, the dull, timid, heartless, ambitious mass of whom, in Silone's opinion, life is chiefly made. The other is the world of God: the only world in which fearlessness and friendship are possible, and almost nothing else is. In Silone's cosmography there is also a limbo, the sea-bottom world of the immemorially poor, "stultified by hard labor, underfed, suspicious, cowardly, astute, patient, good or bad according to which way the wind might blow." In a description like an Italian primitive, Silone fixes a segment of this limbo in a tableau on the village square. Peasants crowd their patient, beaten donkeys past a pink-cheeked effigy of St. Anthony of Egypt (patron saint of donkeys) for the ceremony of his blessing. Above stand two stone saints whose faces, under wear of time and weather, have become like the worn, patient faces of peasants.

Caesar's World is the world where cynicism is the last refuge of integrity. There the village druggist, to gain prestige, wedges himself between two fourth-rate party hacks and tries to muscle into the gossip. There, an old horse, forever paretically nodding yes-yes-yes, is named Plebiscite. There, the Fascist party's local orator, Don Coriolano, speaks for that "moderate" faith in God which priests "widely recommend."

Silone's World of God will impartially repel Leftists, Centrists and Rightists. Its chief representative in this book, Pietro Spina, is no party man. He is a kind of religious anarchist. He thinks too well of the poor as they are, and too ill of the rest of the world, to be much interested in reducing poverty. He is Novelist Silone's embodiment of the best that a man of heart and mind can be in this century.

Pietro seldom read the papers. As a friend of his observed, they never printed news worth reading, such as the birth of Christ. He learned to embrace suffering, extirpating only ("as if they were bad teeth") the "sufferings that are impure, caused by wounded vanity and frustrated ambition." He learned, above all, "rejection of our present social order and attachment to the poor," for among the poor--cruel, stupid or treacherous though some were--he found "the last remains of pride, dignity and common sense, the last reserves that our race may hope to draw on."

Pietro was not even violently interested in upsetting those in power. He half agreed when his grandmother said, of God's aloofness to tyranny: "In His most holy eyes, perhaps the heads of governments don't even exist; perhaps they seem to Him mere creatures of our human imagination and so He leaves it to men, if they are able, to free themselves."

But Pietro was quite sure of one thing: "A man who is spiritually a slave cannot work for true freedom." So he learned to outwear the dogmas and dodge the spiritual traps even of the anti-Fascist party.

Later Pietro overcame his fear of death. Loss of that fear gave him an appetite for living which made any wealth beyond that of bare life ridiculous. It also gave him a complete distrust of theory and oratory. "Must I force myself to shout and sing," he asked, "if I have only voice enough for ordinary conversation? A seed of wheat beneath the snow is a poor thing; we might tax it with not having the value of a bomb or a pearl."

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