We publish a letter sent by Mauro Canali to the New York Times.  The author of L'informatore: Silone, i comunisti e la polizia (Luni, 2000) criticizes Silone's new biography by Stanislao Pugliese.  Canali also disputes Geoffrey Wheatcroft's review of the biography, entitled Bread, Wine, Politics which was published in the August 21st edition of the New York Times.

 

To the Editor of the New York Times Book Review,

It was with great interest that I read both Stanislao Pugliese’s book, Bitter Spring. A Life of Ignazio Silone, and Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review, “Bread, Wine, Politics,” in the August 23 NY Times Book Review. I am one of the two historians who researched Silone’s 10-year informant relationship with the Fascist regime – in fact I co-authored the book Silone: l’informatore, i comunisti e la polizia with Dario Biocca (erroneously attributed to Biocca alone in Wheatcroft’s review). My archival research triggered the ‘caso Silone.’ In fact, the book’s appendix reproduces scores of informant reports sent by Silone to the Fascist political police (many of which are signed), that I found in the Fascist archives. I published an additional article on the Silone affaire, “Ignazio Silone and the Fascist Political Police,” in 2000 in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. A bitter yet indisputable truth, which has been accepted by the most authoritative members of Italian cultural establishment, emerged from these documents: for almost ten years Silone was a spy in the service of the Fascist regime.
I would like to request that you kindly publish my letter because I feel pressed to point out that, contrary to what Wheatcroft maintains, in my opinion Pugliese’s book represents a step backward in research on the ‘caso Silone.’ Pugliese’s work aims at substantially avoiding the historical verdict regarding the painful truth—that Silone spied for the Fascists for ten long years. Pugliese addresses the issue, interestingly, only in the final chapter of Bitter Spring after having already drawn a hagiographical absolving portrait of the author. Pugliese seems to imply that ten years of ‘collaboration’ with the Fascists represent a marginal coda to Silone’s life, and the biographer offers no reflections on its impact on the author’s subsequent artistic and political development. Esteemed Italian literary critics such as Giulio Ferroni, on the other hand, have been convinced for some time that Silone’s ten-year compromise with the Fascist regime finally provides a missing key to interpreting many of Silone’s literary and political passages that previously seemed ambiguous and indecipherable.
Bitter Spring’s dubious hypotheses have, in my opinion, misled the reviewer, too. By not questioning, as perhaps he should have, the marginality with which Pugliese treats Silone-the-Spy, Wheatcroft, too, ends up dealing with his ten informant years as a detail to mention in passing, merely for the record. Yet Wheatcroft could have availed himself of other articles in English: my piece in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, and a long and meditated article by Alexander Stille published in The New Yorker on May 15, 2000 entitled “The Spy Who Failed,” the conclusions of which are substantially different than Pugliese’s.
Sincerely,

Mauro Canali
Historian and Full Professor of Political Science, University of Camerino, Italy