October 1959
These books are both about Western Sicily: the first is entirely, the second principally, concerned with the lives of some of the thousands of families who exist without regular work or the prospect of it, actually starving or on the edge of starvation, in rooms or cellars (few families have more than one room) where more and more children are born into disease, despair and violence. It is almost impossible for a man to escape a criminal record, and in some places one man in three has committed murder. Much of both books contains verbatim stories - in both cases excellently translated - but in spite of the similarities, these two books do not simply repeat, they confirm and strengthen each other and are well worth reading consecutively.
Danilo Dolci went to Sicily in 1952 to study the causes and effects of poverty, and started a settlement for the destitute. His activities (which included the ‘reverse strikes’ when he organised unpaid road repairs) and the publication of verbatim material roused official antagonism which has led to his arrest and imprisonment on the most trivial charges, and he is at present awaiting review of a second sentence. His book is divided into three parts: the first and second consisting of the witnesses’ accounts of their lives in Palermo and the surrounding province respectively, and the third a survey, where the people’s widespread answers to five main questions are given. It is an overwhelming testimony, and more striking because Dolci is simply recording what these people have said - excepting in a brief introduction by Aldous Huxley about his work, he does not appear in the book at all. He is speaking for over two million people - mostly of whom are entirely, or almost entirely, illiterate - whose destitution and utter hopelessness of any honesty or justice prevailing result in fathers being imprisoned for a year for stealing food for their children, and mothers working the streets in some quarter where they will not be known. There is no law or order above these people which is not stinking of corruption: in Dolci’s book this is implicit, but when one reads Maxwell, it becomes inescapably plain, for he, after his fishermen and peasants, gives us verbatim accounts by a doctor (whose father had to pay a great deal to the examiners to procure him his degree), and a nun - a ‘Sister of Divine Compassion’ - who says, among other things, ‘We can’t take thought for all the poor - they give us alms and so we can’t give them alms’. In her account of nine pages there is no mention of taking thought for any of them, although she is extremely concerned with every kind of material value. Then there is a priest who is perfectly prepared to pray for his poorest parishioners if they will pay for it (they could get honest jobs if they tried), and meanwhile he can’t be expected to worry about the poor beyond teaching them a few ‘religious laws - introducing superstition here and there’. It is not simply a question of charity: the Church expects - and gets - peasants to work their extensive lands for no wages or food. In a community which is largely illiterate, the doctor and the priest are persons of power and responsibility: here the people are cheated and the power entirely abused - what is above the doctor and the priest? In this case the Christian Democrat Government and the Vatican, in powerful collaboration - the symbol for the former is also the Cross.
Leaving aside any questions of morality or curiosity, why should you want to read these books? Will they not simply shock and depress you, leaving you rather uncomfortably glad that you live in England? There seems to be one good reason. These people, who do not read or write, have a language which is strikingly strong, direct and fresh, and this - through honourable translation - conveys a truth with which, for their different reasons, neither Dolci nor Maxwell have tampered, and somehow or other the truth, however hard and harrowing, has not got the deadweight of depression attendant upon lies.