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Ignazio Silone - Bread and Wine with Geoffrey Kurtz · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: In 1955, the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone published a second and revised edition of a novel he had first published in 1936.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: In his author's note to the second edition, he tells a funny story of sitting on a train in the same compartment as a woman who was reading the German edition of his book.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: She didn't realize who was spying her.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: But that moment, in part, started him thinking about this revised edition.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what he wrote in his author's note.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: A strange uneasiness came over me.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: The page she was reading did not satisfy me at all.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, at that moment it struck me as actually absurd.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Why had I written it?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: If I had foreseen that a person like this was going to read the book, I said to myself, I should certainly have cut that page as well as others, besides giving much thought to certain expressions.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Why, I said to myself, do most authors have in mind colleagues and critics who read a hundred books a year instead of strangers to whom the book may have a personal message.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Later on in this author's note, he also said, I have also had occasion to confess that if it depended on me, I should gladly spend my life writing and rewriting the same book.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: The single book that every writer has within him that is the image of his soul, and of which his published works are only more or less rough fragments.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a new podcast from Mere Orthodoxy.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: I am Nadia Williams, and today I'm talking with Jeff Kurtz, who is Associate Professor of Political Science at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: He's the author of Jean Joress, The Inner Life of Social Democracy, and he has written essays for a variety of publications, including Current and Front Porch Republic.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, this season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary this year.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: But Jeff, I want to open with a more abstract question before we get to bread and wine proper.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: What is a classic?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Is it enough that we're still reading this book 70 years after publication and actually almost 90 years after the first edition?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Or what other criteria might you add?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, Nadia.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be part of this conversation.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good question.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is a good place to start in thinking about what is a classic, just the fact that we're reading a book a long time after it was written and right.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And just that fact alone, I suppose, means that the book had the capacity to speak to people, resonate with people at that time, at that time and place where it was written, and that it has the capacity to speak to people beyond.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, what is it?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: What is it that allows a book to do that?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I guess I would say I recognize a c a book as being potentially a classic if I notice that it in some way what renovates, helpfully renovates my ability to see the world, feel, think about the world around me.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and if the book has done that for people across time or across places, then it's probably a classic.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's see.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: My instinct is to see what answers to that other question, you know, what allows a book to do that, see what answers emerge as we talk.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess the place to begin would be with that lovely bit of Salone's introduction that you read, where he talks about wanting to write, wishing he could write the same book over and over again, which is, in a sense, is what he did.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um if the book comes profoundly from the writer's soul, then it's going to be very particular to that writer, and it's going to speak to something profound, something fundamental in other people too.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: And just the idea of bringing the soul into the conversation.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: I guess we don't think about that enough as writers, that like it is something that involves the innermost part of who we are, of our essence as human beings, to put something on a page.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: And a book cannot help but have that relationship to its creator.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so let's dive into who Ignazio Silone was, since that is obviously relevant.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: And he has this complicated personal story, which is why the novel does as well.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: So who was Silone?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Silone was, well, first of all, it's a pen name.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's not his given name, uh, but I'll get to that later on.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he was born in 1900 in the Abruzzo or Abruzzi region of, I guess it's kind of south central east Italy on the Adriatic coast, although he was born in the inland mountainous area, which is a very, it's it's an agricultural region or has been historically, but it's not great for agricultural.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's really arid and rocky.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So peasants there tended to be extremely poor.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there are frequent earthquakes in the region.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: He lost family members in an earthquake when he was very young.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: So he grows up with a powerful sense of the horrors of poverty and the frustrating injustices of large institutions, government, but also sometimes the church, that are indifferent to the suffering that people experience.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he says it happened naturally, almost seamlessly, but for whatever reason, whether it was seamless or not, when he's a teenager, he becomes politically rebellious and he does what seemed to him like the obvious thing to do, which was to join the Italian Socialist Party.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he becomes a leader in the youth wing, the youth organization of the Socialist Party.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: In 1921, when a big chunk of the Socialist Party breaks away to form the Italian Communist Party, he becomes part of that.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And in his writings later on, um, the impression I get, and he never quite puts it this way, is that at the time he was hungry for the most profound form of rebellion he could find?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, given a society that professes values of love and brotherhood, this is right, an ostensibly Christian society, Italy in the 1920s and teens, uh, in a society that professes values of love and brotherhood, but that flagrantly violates those values every day.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: What's the biggest, most rebellious thing you could do?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1921, for him, it felt that means you become a communist, capital C communist.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And through, and just a year later, by the way, um, listeners may have done this math already, Mussolini takes power.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so Italy has a fascist government.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Through the 1920s, Salone is very active in the communist uh underground organization.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: He spends quite a lot of time out of Italy.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: He's in, I think, Spain for a while, France for a while.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: He goes to Russia often on kind of diplomatic missions on behalf of the Communist Party.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's at meetings with Stalin and Trotsky and all those guys.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: But by the end of the 1920s, he has become both physically unhealthy.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: He has tuberculosis, chronic lung problems.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's exhausted, physically exhausted, but he's also realized that this political movement to which he has devoted a decade or more of his life is either not what he thought it was or it's become something different.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: He he realizes that the spirit of rebellion against injustice and hypocrisy that led him to become first a socialist and then a communist is now driving him out of the Communist Party.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and he tells some wonderfully vivid stories in some of his later writings about how this came to be.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: So he's in exile by the early 1930s, he's in exile in Switzerland, physically broken, brokenhearted because of his departure from this movement to which he dedicated himself.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he starts writing.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is really the fascinating thing about Salone, that when he's completely demolished by these experiences he's had, he becomes a writer in order to look at the world in a new way, in order to understand his own life in a new way, in order to deeply rethink his political perspective.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Biographers differ about whether he may also have been in psychoanalysis at the time, but whether or not he was in psychoanalysis, he certainly engages in deep introspection in and through his writings.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so he writes a novel called Fontamara, which is a story about peasants in his native Abruzzi region or Abruzzo region rebelling.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then a few years later, 1935-1936, he writes this novel.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: In Italian, it would be Pane Evino, bread and wine, but because he's living in Switzerland, it's first published in a German translation, and then in Italian and English, you know, within the next couple of years.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then, jumping ahead, of course, a lot happens between 1935 and 1955, but we'll skip that for now.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: In 1955, in post-war Italy, because of the kind of experiences that he summarizes in that wonderful uh train compartment story that you read, Salone decides to thoroughly revise the novel, even giving it a new title.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: The English translators kind of obscure this because they kept the same title, bread and wine, for the English translations of the first and second versions of the book.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: But in a but it was a deep enough revision that in the Italian edition, he flipped the terms.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was now vino epane, wine and bread, signifying that this was for him a really new book.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to admit I have not read every page of the original edition, but I've read around in it a bit.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: You, it's almost impossible to find a physical copy, but it is available on that wonderful website that almost justifies the existence of the Internet, the Internet Archive.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at the two books side by side, you can see that what Salone did in revising was that he made the book much more subtle.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, in the original book, there's a moment when one of the characters uses the phrase, my brother's keeper, and then another character jumps in and says, Oh, something about Genesis and Cain and Abel, just sort of hitting the reader over the head with how they're supposed to interpret this.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and he does that a lot in the original novel.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Both the Christian and the political significance of the book is didactic.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in the revised book, it's not.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, all the meaning is there, but it is exploratory and tentative, no, no, no, tentative is the wrong word.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, open-ended.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: In in it's an invitation rather than a didactic experience reading the book.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And my guess this is a the kind of counterfactual guess that historians hate, but I'm not a historian, so I'm gonna do it.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: If he had never revised the book, if we only had the original edition, we would not now be talking about it as a classic.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: It would have, it would be an interesting political and literary document of the mid-1930s, and we would read it if at all we would read it in order to understand what it was like to be alive in the mid-1930s.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: But it's the new book, the one that we're recognizing today, that really I think is worthy of the name classic.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: So he's realized that he needs the reader to do more work to really appreciate his ideas.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or even that he's inviting the reader into something like the kind of introspection and revision of perspectives that he himself has experienced.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: And as a historian, I'm thinking, like, well, in 1955, probably a lot of people were doing a lot of introspection about like what happened to our country in the last 20 years, what happened to Europe and the world.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're I think that's exactly right.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's get into the novel itself.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't want to spoil the ending for the readers.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um if somebody wants to pick up this novel after uh listening, which I hope will be the case, but let's set up the basic story.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: So where are we?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: When are we, and what is happening?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the novel takes place in Italy, almost entirely in the Abruzzo region, although there's the little bits that happen in Rome or elsewhere.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's clear that the novel is taking place in 1935.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: It takes place between a spring and winter, or maybe summer and winter of a particular year, and it's the year in which Italy invades Ethiopia, which in real life is 1935, the year that Salone is writing this.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So he's making it contemporary as he writes the original version.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: The main character is a member of a revolutionary party named Pietro Spina, uh Peter Thorne, if we translate it literally into English.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: He often gives his characters very blunt as the wrong word, since his name is Thorne, but you know what I mean, sort of clear-cut, almost fable-like uh names.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's a sort of vacillating relativistic character in Fontamara named Mr.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Circumstance, for example.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a lot of names like that.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So Peter Thorne, Pietrospina, is a member of a revolutionary party who has been in exile and who returns to Italy, apparently with a mission to either spark a peasant rebellion against the fascist government or at least suss out the prospects for a peasant rebellion.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Silone is always a little bit coy about proper nouns in the novel.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we're never told directly that this is the communist party that Spina belongs to, but it's obvious that it is.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, he never uses names like Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, although people like that are referred to in obvious ways.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: So Spina is a member of a revolutionary party.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: He arrives in Italy physically sick, he has a lung infection, probably tuberculosis.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: He manages, he loses touch with his party comrades, he's some ends up in the countryside having fled from the police.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And uh an old friend with whom he gets in contact comes up with a plan.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to cart Spina way up into the mountains to a village not far from where he's from, but far enough that nobody's gonna know him, far enough from the center of police activity in Rome that he's unlikely to get caught, and we're gonna disguise him as a priest.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get him priestly clothes and get him a nice little stack of the kinds of books you might expect a priest recovering from illness in the country to have with him.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he'll be safe.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So Spina goes to this mountain village.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um at first he's frustrated by his solitude and inaction.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm gonna want to come back to that theme of solitude because I think that's really important.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he has a period of solitude.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um eventually he gets to know the people around him.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: At first, he's trying to have the kinds of quiet conversations you would have if you wanted to build a little revolutionary cell of activists, but that's not what he ends up doing.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: He ends up having a network of what I think we would just call friends, people with whom he doesn't necessarily share formal, official, ideological, political ideas, people with whom he doesn't try to formulate something that's easily recognizable as a strategy.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And by the end of the book, Spina has broken with, or I guess been expelled from his political party and has begun to think about politics, political membership, um, connection, human connections in ways that are not like how he thought before.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: One thing I really appreciate about this novel is just the depth of character development.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's one of the things, by the way, that changed from the first to the second edition.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: The characters in the first edition, my impression is that they tend to be much more wooden or two-dimensional.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: And now we have more three-dimensional characters in the classic version of the book.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: That is fascinating.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder to what extent it also reflects uh Silona's growth as a writer.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: So he was still like this was still an early experiment when he wrote in 1935, but now by 1955, he's a seasoned novelist, and this becomes part of a trilogy.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: But also, I wonder to what extent he's more comfortable putting himself into it.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm wondering like what your thoughts are.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is Pietro Spina meant to be Ignazio Silone himself?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Or is it overly simplistic for us to say like that's it's a one-to-one?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, the short answer is no, he's not.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: But of course it's more complicated.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: No, but um, no, but there are definite resemblances between them.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, superficial things like tuberculosis, right?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the fact that Spina is a communist who is in exile, although Silone does not return to Italy during the war, right?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, in that very important sense, they're different.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in some of it, as far as I know, Silone was never disguised as a priest.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, right.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's not autobiographical.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: But it's clear that uh Spina by writing about Spina, Silone is reflecting on his own life.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we could say Spina is a kind of uh imaginative extrapolation from Silone's experiences or an imaginative guise through which Silone reflects on himself.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that concept of guises or disguises is maybe the central motif of the book.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: So what does it mean?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: And again, here I maybe uh want to leave things for the reader and not try to say too much, but uh tracing the way that Spina's disguise uh comes to be part of himself or uh changes who he is is one of the most subtle and fascinating things in the book.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess I should say when he's in disguise, he has a new name.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um so Silone himself had taken a new name.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: His original name was, I believe it was uh Secondino Tranchili.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um he took the name Inazio Silone as a party name.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this was not unusual in those days for members of revolutionary parties to take a pseudonym.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and after the war, he legally changed his name.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was the name by which he was known as a writer, and he eventually adopted it as his real name.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: So he knew personally something about shifting names and shifting identities.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: So when Spina, the character, is in disguise as a priest, he go but goes by the name Paolo Spada, Paul's sword.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Salone, in writing the book, refers to the character at on any given page by the name according to which people around him know him at the time.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and just tracing Salone's use of the two names is itself complicated and fascinating because he does switch back and forth.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I've lost track of the question you asked, but I hope that was at least a little bit of a.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, I appreciate that.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it's uh um as a historian, I always appreciate the answer that things are complicated.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: People are complicated, and that's um we see that.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so to get into another aspect of both the writer and his protagonists that make it complicated.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: So bread and wine is clearly political, as we've talked so far, but it also has very deep religious overtones, already starting with the title.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but also there's of course Pietrospina's disguise as a priest.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we could just keep going.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like the religious elements in this novel are quite profound.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: So who would you say readers should especially pay attention to?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And how should Christians particularly read this novel, say, in 2025?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, these are great questions.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, so maybe the place to start is just by note pointing out that, or recognizing that any reader who's at least a little bit familiar with the Bible and with Christian traditions is going to notice some things, starting with the title, Bread and Wine, um, and and Spina's disguise as a priest.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: There are a number of occasions, a small number of occasions in the book when characters talk about religious faith or loss of faith or what it means to believe in God.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Those tend to be brief conversations, but they're they're interesting and important.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Peters often have approached this book as being about a tension between, on the one hand, Salone's, I want to say his Christian faith, but that's actually complicated too.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say his feeling of being pulled toward Christian faith, on the one hand, and on the other hand, his political commitments, right?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Which so I think I forget your exact words, but you described it as both a political and a Christian novel.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's true.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: But what I would want to add is that for Salone, it's not ever entirely two separate things.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: The impulse, the moral impulse that leads him to want to be a rebel against injustice is for him the same as the moral is probably not a big enough word, but I'll use it for now for lack of a better word.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: The moral impulse that might lead someone to desire to live a Christ-like life.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's that sense that the life I want to live, ought to live, am called to live is a life in imitation of the Christ who suffers with and for others.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Silone's vision of politics is if you begin with that, you will be horrified by poverty, you will be horrified by political repression or oppression.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you will want to do something about it.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um you will want to take the side of people who are poor, people who are in any way oppressed.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so the political and religious, the that's the first thing to say, the political and religious dimensions of the novel are have a common root for Salone.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, okay, but then the next thing you might notice in thinking about the novel with these sorts of questions in mind is the character of Don Benedetto.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: So Pietro Spina, or Paolo Spada, as he is sometimes called, is clearly the protagonist.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I think, and I have to admit, I this was something that I thought of or noticed after on maybe the third or fourth time reading the book.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: I did not notice this right away.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: I want to argue that the character of Don Benedetto, whom we haven't mentioned yet, is really the key to understanding what Salone is trying to teach in this book.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: So uh Don Benedetto, Father Benedict, is Spina's old teacher.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: He was a priest who ran a little school.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time the novel begins, he's been basically fired by the church from his teaching and pastoral responsibilities.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: He's, if not a troublemaker, then at least someone who's insufficiently willing to be harmonious with the political regime.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: So he's living in the countryside with his sister, his unmarried sister.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: They have a little house where he does the gardening and she does the sewing and cooking.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: They each have their tasks.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's got some time every day with his books and his studies.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the novel opens with Benedetto's former students showing up for a reunion, but Spina, being a fugitive, you know, from the law, doesn't show up.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then towards the end of the book, Spina Spada finally manages to visit Don Benedetto, and they have a really remarkable conversation, which I want to come back to in a moment.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but this unlocks, noticing Don Benedetto, I think unlocks another dimension to what Salone is trying to do here.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's well, let me put it this way: if there is a tension in the book between Spina as a revolutionary and spada as a priest, or between political commitment and religious faith, or between the strategic and instrumental calculations that seem inevitably to be part of political life, and the personal experience of love that is central to Christian practice?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: If there's a tension there, it seems that Salone is hinting that there may be a way to bridge this tension.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's not an accident that Don Benedetto is named Don Benedetto, right?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is Saint Benedict who's being referred to.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: What if there are ways of life in which people have uh uh communities constituted by shared work, time for quiet or solitude, an interweaving of community and solitude, an interweaving of action and reflection.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: What if that's possible?
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: It seems to me, and and Salone did have a lifelong fascination with monastic communities.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um I he I don't think he ever had the illusion that he had a call to live in one, but he was interested always.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems to me that he's questing after some way of fusing those elements, action and solitude and work and contemplation.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and Don Benedetto in the book represents that for Salone almost wistful sense that maybe this tension doesn't have to be a tension.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: But I like that other question you asked, like what how might Christian readers approach this book in particular?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it does seem to me that despite all the overt Christian references and imagery of the book, in some ways Salone doesn't make it easy to answer that question, which doesn't mean he makes it impossible.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I want to read a little bit, actually.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna follow your lead here in reading a passage.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: In that conversation that I mentioned, this is maybe like, I don't know, 80% of the way through the book, when Pietro Spina finally manages to visit his old teacher, Don Benedetto.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: A little ways into the conversation, Don Benedetto says something about God, not surprisingly, and so so as not to mislead his old teacher into thinking that they share more than they really share, Spina feels that he needs to explain something.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna read a little bit.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: I lost faith many years ago, he said quietly but distinctly.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: The old man smiled and shook his head.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: In cases such as yours, that is a mere misunderstanding, he said.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: It would not be the first time that the Lord has been forced to hide himself and make use of an assumed name.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, he has never attached much importance to the names men have given him.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: On the contrary, one of the first of his commandments is to not take his name in vain.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: And sacred history is full of examples of clandestine living.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever considered the meaning of the flight into Egypt?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And later, when he had grown up, did not Jesus several times have to hide himself to escape from the Pharisees?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I have a suggestion here.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: What if Silone is inviting his readers to expect that God's presence in this story will be clandestine?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: Or let me say it another way, um, kind of to rephrase your question.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Something that a Christian reader might do with this book is to ask, where is God in this story?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or where do I see characters in the story experiencing the presence of God or being touched by God's presence or something like this?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think Silone is inviting us to think that that is going to happen in the book, and it's going to be disguised or hidden or not obvious.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: The characters aren't going to notice that it's happening, maybe.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it might not be, there might not be big flashing neon, you know, God is here, lights, but it's gonna happen.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um and here's where I want to go back to that theme of solitude.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this is very much a book about relationships and memberships.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Spina's membership in the Communist Party, his abandonment of that membership, his membership in his circle of old school friends, his membership in a circle of new friends as he's living in disguise.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it's also a book about solitude.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of the fact that all of Pietro Spina's reconsiderations of his political perspective begin with a period of unwilling solitude, but still solitude that he eventually settles into.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: He has time for contemplation.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And everything else stems from that.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: None of the transformation of his character in the book is possible without an extended period of solitude.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: Does Salone say that he's praying?
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Spina tells us at some point that he doesn't believe in God, he doesn't know how to pray.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: But could we think that God is that he is encountering God in that solitude, that God is present to him?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're invited to think that.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then later in the book, as Salone, not as now I'm mixing up the author and the and the character, just like I said, I didn't want to do, as Spina um abandons his instrumental vision of politics, in which he's going to try to, as a good communist, move peasants around like chess pieces on a board, um, as if they are, you know, pieces in a game, as he abandons that perspective and begun begins to recover his what must have been his childhood or youthful ability to connect with people as people, to appreciate them for who they are, to love them in their weakness and not for their potential political power.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: As Spino recovers that, his relationships with people take on different characters.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of the at times very funny themes in the book is that when he's in his priestly disguise as Don Paolo Spada, everyone wants to make confession with him, which I guess makes sense, right?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you have especially embarrassing sins and you don't want to talk to the local priest because he knows your mom and your grandmother and your neighbors, the stranger priest who's passing through town would be ideal.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: So lots of people want to make confession.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: But Spina is honorable enough.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: And as a, you know, even though he's no longer a formally a believer, he takes the church seriously enough to not want to offer fake confession and absolution.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, no, no, no, I can't, I can't, I can't.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: But late in the story, again, I'm gonna avoid giving too many details because these are some of the most moving and important moments in the story.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: There are some times when people tell him their stories and when he reveals things to them in response.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that capacity to have what I forget if it's Spina or one of the other characters says, uh, a maskless, you know, as if we've taken off our masks, a maskless openness with others in the face of weakness, suffering, wrongdoing, um, that capacity for listening and for forgiveness.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it comes out of nowhere.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think if we're looking for God's clandestine presence in the book, we would look both at Pietro Spina's experiences of solitude and at this surprising to him development of a capacity for listening and presence with others.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it turns out to be one of the most fascinating themes in the book.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: But you but you have to, you know, you don't see it unless you expect it to show up in surprising places.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's what Silone is inviting us to see in the book.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he may be, he may be inviting us to see that sort of pattern, you know, beyond the book as well.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: I really like that.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much there that is relevant to our lives too, that um just the idea of the epidemic of loneliness in America right now.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: Just um and realizing, like, well, here are villagers who are very uh like on the surface, very plugged in into the local membership.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: And yet you realize like people are so desperately lonely, um, which is another part of why they're so drawn to this, like visiting priest, somebody who seems who seems like a safe, loving person.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um the things, the question also like, what do we expect from church?
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems like people really do crave that membership from religious figures.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious about readers' reception to this book.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um obviously, this was so controversial in Italy that it was not published in Italy until 1955.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: That part is obvious, but I'm curious.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do we know?
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um did a lot of Italians read it when it first came out?
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: But also how did Americans read it when they came out um on this side of the pond?
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: And how did they respond to it?
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know I don't know a lot about the Italian reception of the book, although I know that scholars of Italian literature have written about this.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um interesting fact is that because it is so obviously and overtly an anti-fascist novel, the Allies during the war printed up a cheap paperback Italian edition and distributed it.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm I'm not sure how they distributed it.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: Was it you know airdrops or giving it to POW?
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but that's a fun detail.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I know a little bit more about the American reception.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was widely read among Americans on the political left, broadly defined, uh, in the 1930s, 40s, and into the into the post-war period as well.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I first learned about Salone from my interest in the writers associated with dissent magazine, writers like Irving Howe and Michael Walzer.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Howe being part of that earlier generation, um, the generation who were what, I guess he was probably a teenager when the book came out.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then Walzer being part of a later generation.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um And in fact, Howe wrote the introduction to this, uh, to the revised edition that I have, this classic.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Signet Classics, there are two editions of bread and wine that are in print in English, that is.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one is the Signet Classics, which has the introduction by Irving Howe, and the other, more recent edition, is from a small publisher in Providence, I believe in Providence, Rhode Island, called Clooney Media, which specializes in putting out books by Roman Catholic authors, in Salone's case, defining the term generously, since he had a complicated relationship to the church.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they've put out beautiful editions of all three of the novels in this trilogy, Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and the third book, The Seed Beneath the Snow, which continues Pietro Spina's story.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so in the 30s and 40s, if you were a young American with some sort of radical political ideas, it my impression is you would have been reading this.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I know about this from reading the Descent magazine writers.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, for them, Silone was part of what I think of as their house canon.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of years ago, um, I was talking with a friend, a family friend who is a longtime uh member of resident at St.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph's Catholic Worker House in Manhattan.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he mentioned something that I hadn't known, which is that bread and wine, Salone's works broadly, but especially bread and wine, was also part of the house canon, so to speak, at the Catholic Worker, and that Darthy Day, who along with Peter Morin, had founded the Catholic Worker in the 1930s, uh, around the time that Silone was writing this book, was a big fan of Silone.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I found and continue to find this absolutely fascinating.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got at the same time, let's say, you know, some year in the 1940s, you've got Irving Howe of Descent magazine on the upper, I forgot if at that point if he lived on the Upper East or Upper West side of Manhattan, and up farther up in Manhattan, um, an ex-Trotskyist socialist, trying very hard to be a good secularist, although he had a kind of complicated relationship with religion too.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he was trying hard to be thoroughly secular anyway, whether or not he succeeded.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then down in the Bowery or the Lower East Side, you have Dartie Day, a radical Roman Catholic, um, hard to define politically, but radical certainly fits the bill.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: These two, in some ways, very different people being fascinated by and loving this same book.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and to some extent, they saw different things in it.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Howe, who wrote about, he wrote, as you said, an introduction to it.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: He also wrote about it in his uh late 1950s book, Politics and the Novel.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he has a wonderful little study of Salone in there.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: Howe saw in this book a call to a socialist politics, a firmly left-wing politics that was grounded in a moral commitment rather than in the kind of, I'm gonna annoy my Marxist friends and say pseudoscientific uh arguments that you get with the Marxist tradition.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: But Dorothy saw in it, and and so and Howe saw uh thought that the tension, there was this, there was this really irreconcilable tension in Silone's writing between the moral impulse and the political need to have organizations and institutions and strategies.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Dorothy Day didn't see it that way.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: She thought that there was, she said, a Christian message.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Salone, she says, in one essay she wrote about the book, um, may not be a practicing Catholic, but he conveys a consistent Christian message.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a message of the individual moral person being able to recognize human dignity and say no to oppression and injustice.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a moment in the novel, which I'm not going to describe in detail, not wanting to, as you said, spoil everything for the readers, uh, where Pietro Spina makes an individual gesture of defiance against the regime.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: And this sets off, you know, sets in chain a bunch of events toward the end of the novel.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's an interesting moment.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: For Dorothy Day, that was the central event of the book.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: How can one individual or potentially a tiny group of people make a nonviolent witness against war and injustice?
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what's interesting to me is that, as at least from all the things that I've run across that Dorothy Day wrote about Salone, she mentions him often in her writings, usually referring to that story.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't get interested in the aspect of his writing that in my mind most directly relates to the way she lived day to day, which was that she and other people at the Catholic worker houses she she helped to start, did live in small communities that wove together contemplation and action, like Don Benedetto.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but she saw that individual, highly non-strategic kind of nonviolent moral witness as being the lesson of Salone's writing, and Irving Howe didn't.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so Salone's readers disagreed about what he meant, but they tended to all agree that he saw uh he wanted an approach to politics.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess this becomes very important in the post-war, in the era of post-war reconstruction of representative democracy in Europe.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he wanted a political, an approach to politics that was rooted in and bounded by a commitment to the commitments to love or brotherhood or caretaking that, I mean, he wrote in one of his later essays, and I'm gonna have to paraphrase this because I don't have it in front of me and I don't have it memorized, that within the family and within the local circle of friends, or within the teachings that happen within the walls of the church, he learned this ethic of love and brotherhood.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it was outside the walls of the home, outside the walls of the church, that the that the that ethic was violated.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so he the question he asks is what would it be like to have politics that extends that?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Ethic or ethos beyond the walls of the home and the church.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he always struggles to answer that question.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he was, after the war, he was in and out of formal political involvement, never quite satisfied.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: And in one interview in the 60s, early 60s, he tells a report, he describes himself to a reporter as a socialist without a party and a Christian without a church.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: He was just really uncomfortable.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's an understatement with the way that institutions, political or religious, tend to corrupt or violate or spin away from the moral core of what they ought to be or how they began.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he never, and I have to say, this is where I get frustrated with Salone.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't seem to have confidence that we can ever have lasting stable institutions or organizations that don't betray their moral foundations.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to grab him and shake him and say, but we need institutions.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: We need organizations.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: What are we going to do?
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he doesn't have an answer.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: He just provokes me to keep thinking about it.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: He provokes me to keep wondering.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's maybe that's useful.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: It is useful.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it's actually a very relevant modern problem, too.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: That like the faith in institutions in America right now is at an all-time low.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: Which is why we need institutions.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: Which is why we need institutions.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: I disagree.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: But the reasons for discomfort, perhaps, especially for Christians, I guess I think about that.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like we can't have ultimate faith in institutions.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: We need institutions, but like they will never replace God.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's a moment in the book where one of Spina's communist colleagues is saying, is saying, it seems like you're about to leave the party.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're you're in danger of breaking with the party.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um and Spina says, Look, what you're asking me to do would be like putting the church before Christ.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not Wow.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna ask you a more uncomfortable question now, because you have a complicated intellectual story of your own, um, as I've gathered from just reading a little bit of your writing.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you're a scholar of democratic socialism.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: So how did you come to be interested in this academically?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: But also you live in New York City, where um I guess democratic socialism is in the news now in connection with New York City.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: I noticed that too, yes.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: You want to talk about this?
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: How does it all fit fit into Jeff's life?
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's see.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, where should I start?
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I was raised in the Mennonite church.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um I did not know that.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: I did not know.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, keep going, sorry.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, those who know would know by my last name because it's but uh in in in the 70s and 80s, when I was a kid, like in a lot of American denominations, there was a strong peace and justice, I don't want to say wing, but sort of current in within the Mennonite church, with this, of course, a distinctive, you know, Anabaptist flavor.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so I grew up with that and with kind of the larger um peace and justice Christianity, you know, world around.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my mother was always and still is a subscriber to Sojourner's magazine, for example.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that that sort of stuff was just in the air.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: But with a kind of Mennonite averse to politics flavor.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: And somehow, and this would be, I don't know, I should probably sort out for myself sometime how this happened, but at some point as a teenager and young adult, in my mind, that that particular wall broke down.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the wall between, on the one hand, thinking poverty, hunger, obvious forms of injustice are a concern for a Christian.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that very Mennonite wall of saying, yes, but we have an arm's length relationship to, at best, to the sorts of things people usually call politics.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: Service is something we do, politics is something we are uncomfortable with.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: And in my mind, that wall somehow broke down.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um and studying history, reading voraciously in history as a teenager, I realized that there was a long history of people who called themselves democratic socialists who were intent on forming a political response to the problems of poverty, disconnection, lack of solidarity, lack of community, and doing so in a way such that the ideals, the goals of democratic community are also the means, the methods.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I'm sure in I would like to think that in some ways my thinking has changed since I was a teenager.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: I would like to think that I'm, you know, more sophisticated or something by now.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: But that that core of commitments for me has not changed.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's how I became interested in writers like those associated with Descent magazine and the academic study of the history of social democratic and democratic socialist thought.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that I that and then that somehow gets me to where I am today, I suppose.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: I see the two terms kind of used.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, are they the same thing?
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: So if you say democratic socialists versus socialist democrat democrats, is that the same thing or is there a difference?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think that you can use terms like those to you can define such terms in order to make a distinction, but historically the distinction between democratic socialist, social democrat, and other similar terms tends to be pretty circumstantial and shifting.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I wouldn't, I wouldn't make, I wouldn't make too much of the distinction.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's fair.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: So what else are you like reading and thinking about this summer to get to books and all of that?
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm certainly hoping to do some more writing about Salone.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I wrote one short, like mini essay that is going to be published in uh The Catholic Worker, you know, uh invited by my friend there to write that uh sometime this fall, probably, touching on some of the things we've talked about.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm working on a longer, I'm not sure if it's gonna be like a conventional academic journal article or more of an essay about the questions of membership and solitude in Salone's writing.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm working on that.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of other things, um, you know, the other author I've been reading a lot lately is Wendell Barry.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: I had been a fan of his essays and poetry for a long time, but I'd, for whatever reason, kind of put off reading his fiction until this year, until the past several months.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, sort of like, why did I put it off?
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: Sort of like the way you save the last cupcake in the batch or something, this vague sense that I was saving it for later.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, later has arrived, and I'm reading Barry.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to say, Barry and Salone are remarkably kindred.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in some ways, obviously, they're in superficial ways, they're different.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, geographically, they're very different, and that they wouldn't use the same political labels for their thinking.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm sure that Wendell Barry has never referred to himself as a socialist.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: But that's superficial.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: In so many ways, I'm just delighted and surprised, although maybe I shouldn't be surprised by how similar they are, in the sense that, I mean, both of them are writers who write almost exclusively, whose fiction is almost exclusively set in an imagined version of their home place.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they're both place writers.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: But more importantly, they're both writers who uh whose moral vision comes from that attachment to a particular place and its people.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, each of them in his own way is convinced that a sound moral perspective has to be rooted in real relationships.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't begin with abstractions.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's just been a wonderful experience to be reading them side by side.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's wonderful.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, uh, there's a new Barry novel coming this fall.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the first one in 20 years.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's amazing.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: He is amazing.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so one final question for you as we conclude.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: What classic book, whether fiction or nonfiction, do you wish you had written?
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: And why?
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: The why you have to explain yourself.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but first I'm going to take the liberty of complaining about the question because of that wonderful thing.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to answer it.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry about it.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: That wonderful thing that you read from Silone at the beginning in his introduction or preface to bread and wine, where he says the uh, what is it?
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: I should gladly spend my life writing and rewriting the same book, the single book that every writer has within him, and that is the image of his soul.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I couldn't write somebody else's classic book because it's an image of their soul.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or what makes it a classic is that it comes from them.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but that's that's but that's an annoying, lazy, cheating answer, and I'm not going to stop there.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, okay, here's an answer.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, I'm maybe cheating a little bit because I don't know how widely people would recognize the book I'm about, the books I'm about to mention as classics.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: But another thing I've read recently, uh just finished reading the second book, actually, is Patrick Lee Fermer's account of his trek across Europe when he from Rotterdam to Constantinople.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is when he was 19 years old.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it was actually, now that I think about it, right around the time that Salone was writing these books in Switzerland.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um the first book is called, there are three books.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: The third published published posthumously, which I haven't read yet.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is A Time of Gifts, and the second one, which I just read, is called Between the Wood and the Water.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: These are just remarkably sensitive descriptions of the places he travels and the people he meets, and what's it, what is it like to sleep in a haystack in Romania in, you know, in the middle of the summer, or walk through a snowstorm in was he in Austria when the snowstorm happened?
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: I forget, you know, farther up the Danube when the earlier in the year.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and here's why I wish I'd written it.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, Fermer is traveling through a world that doesn't exist anymore.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I wish I'd gotten to see it.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so when I say I wish I'd written this book, I guess I mean I wish I had had, I wish I could have the experience that allowed him to write it.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he's right, he's writing about a world that is lightly touched by industry and automobiles, a world in which every valley he passes through seems to have its own microculture and its own complicated relationship to Europe's tumultuous past.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we don't have that, right?
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_00: In our, I don't want to exaggerate and say that our world has been completely flattened by globalization, yada yada, yada, because it's not completely flattened, but it is a whole lot flatter.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the second reason that I wish I had written this book is that Fermer's um perspective on the people and places he writes about.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in some ways, this is the polar opposite of someone like Silone or Wendell Berry, who always writes about the same place, because Fermer is writing about many places, and he's a traveler, a visitor in every one.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: But with every place he visits, he's supremely attentive to and perceptive about and appreciative of the, I don't even know what to call it, the the thisness, the thingness of each place, the specificity of each person, of each locale, of each building.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um he doesn't treat his travels as a series of screens on which to project his own ego.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: He drinks in the world and loves it for being what it is.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I would love to develop in myself something like that.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I will ever have it to the extent that Patrick Lee Firmer did, but a little bit more of that capacity to love each thing and place in the world for being what it so exquisitely individually is.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: He's amazing.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now I want to read him.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you should.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's run, don't run, don't go get it.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you so much, Jeff.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: This has been so much fun.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: This has been