Left v. Right v. Wrong

THE Fox AND THE CAMELLIAS (139 pp.)--Ignazio Silone--Harper ($3.50).

In the late 1920s, two young Italian Communists received a directive from Moscow. The Kremlin's order: Italian Socialists, though they risked their lives to fight Fascism, were sabotaging world revolution and must be liquidated; the Communists must deliver the secret roster of Socialist leaders to the Fascist police. For days the two friends debated what to do. One of the men, Palmiro Togliatti, bowed to Moscow and with that act of trusty treachery began rising through the upper echelons to head the Italian Communist Party. The other, Ignazio Silone, refused and later left the party to write Fontamara and Bread and Wine, world-famed novels that incarnated both the plight of humble Italians and the soul of man under tyranny.

Divided Loyalties. The moral of the episode--that it is more honorable to betray one's party than one's fellow man--underlies The Fox and the Camellias, though Silone gives it a new twist. The setting is a Swiss farm near Brissago, where the novel's hero, Daniele, maintains a secret outpost for the Italian anti-Fascist underground, as Silone himself did in the '30s and early '40s. The farm is really Daniele's first loyalty, and his teen-aged daughter Silvia is his chief joy. Amid the cycle of the seasons, Silone fashions a triptych of father, daughter and nature, linked in a timeless rural idyl.

The worm of factional politics corrupts this Eden. A handsome young Fascist operative appears in the neighborhood and high-pressures a pitiable old spinster to inform on the local Italian colony. A militant anti-Fascist friend of Daniele's beats the Fascist agent bloody. Unbeknownst to Daniele, the wounded agent is brought to the farm, and in 48 hours of nursing him, Silvia falls wildly in love with the stranger. He represents himself as a respectable accountant, and Silvia's mother is all for a wedding, but the story ends instead in an agony of divided loyalties, with each character losing what he loves.

Beyond All Isms. A heavy interplay of curious coincidences and a shallow depiction of character place this book with Silone 's frailer fiction. However, the fact that the main sacrificial act in the novel is performed by a Fascist is significant as well as startling. It marks how much the world and Silone have changed from the 1930s, when left-v.-right politics was not only the ruling international passion but a kind of immutable moral law. The Fox and the Camellias is a book beyond Fascism, Communism, socialism or even humanism. It is a Christian statement, arguing essentially that all men are fallen creatures, but that none is beneath the redemptive grace of God or above the pale of his own conscience.

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