How to Laugh at Communism

DON CAMILLO'S DILEMMA (255 pp.)--Giovanni Guareschi--Farrar, Straus & Young ($3).

For seven years Camillo the priest and Peppone the Communist have been meeting in combat for the souls and minds of the inhabitants of the now famed (if unnamed) village in Italy's Po River Valley.

With a few rare exceptions, tough, quickwitted Don Camillo wins each engagement over earnest, bumbling Mayor Peppone and his comrades. But who wins the elections and continues to preside over the municipal affairs of Don Camillo's flock? Communist Peppone and the party. This is Don Camillo's--and Italy's--dilemma.

Fierce-mustachioed, fiercely anti-Communist Author Guareschi* does not try to plumb the curious complex of politics, economics and emotional contradictions that causes millions of Italians to pray devoutly to God. confess to their priests, and cast their ballots for Communists. To solve this dilemma in fiction would be to do more than Italy has accomplished in reality. Some of the 25 sketches in this volume, like those in its two predecessors (The Little World of Don Camillo, Don Camillo and His Flock), show the marks of haste; all were written originally for a right-wing humorous weekly that Writer-Cartoonist Guareschi ordinarily edits and supplies with half its material. Some are forced. But no more amusing satire has come out of the essentially humorless battlegrounds of the cold war.

Polemic & Chuckle. Author Guareschi regards Communism as a formidable evil, but at the grass-roots level he treats it as more of a joke--tricky, unpredictable, often violent and sometimes hurtful, but essentially a joke perpetrated by clumsy bunglers who do not know that the laugh is on them. This may be both oversimplification and underestimation, but in Guareschi's hands the theory bears up entertainingly well. Communists hate to be spoofed. Guareschi, in his halfway perch between angry polemic and soft chuckle, makes fun of them. Peppone, for example, advises Comrade Lungo not to be alarmed because so many of the villagers believe in Jesus Christ.

"That doesn't matter at all," .replies Lungo. "The trouble is that some people insist he was the son of God. That's the ugly part of it."

"Ugly?" Peppone responds. "I think it's beautiful, if you want to know. The fact that God chose a carpenter and not a rich man for a father shows that He is deeply democratic."

Lungo sighed. "Too bad the priests are mixed up in it," he said. "Otherwise we could take it over."

Kings & Queens. The good don, on the other hand, does not always stick to the saintly, and is not above stooping occasionally to the Communist notion that the end justifies the means. One day Peppone, to recover from a bad psychological-warfare defeat inflicted by Don Camillo, launches a big "Poker Tournament for the Peace Crusade." Peppone personally wins for the Communists. To neutralize the Red victory, Don Camillo challenges the mayor to an extra poker match, not in the tavern, of course, where it would be improper for a priest to loiter at cards, but across the tavern's windowsill. Peppone slips in a marked deck. But Don Camillo wins--by slipping in his own marked deck in place of Peppone's.

Later, in the rectory, Peppone appears and the deceit of the cards is found out.

Don Camillo apologizes to the mayor and they throw the marked decks into the fire.

After Peppone has gone, Don Camillo stares morosely into the fire. Christ on the Crucifix, to whom the priest often turns for advice or argument, berates him: "Don Camillo . . . you .[are] in the service of the King of Heaven, not of the kings of clubs and diamonds. You ought to be ashamed." "Lord, I know I'm in the wrong," confesses Don Camillo. His eye turns to the fireplace, where the last of Peppone's marked deck is beginning to burn. The priest sighs--but he sighs not so much for his wrongdoing as for the realization that now, as the flames spurt up, it is too late to learn how an expert like Peppone marks the kings and queens.

* A Monarchist who sometimes seems to dislike Italy's center-democrats almost as much as the Communists, Guareschi is currently serving a year in jail for libeling Christian Democratic Party Leader and ex-Premier Alcide de Gasperi.

Guareschi accused De Gasperi of having urged the Allies during World War II to bomb Rome.

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