WORLD WITHOUT SHAMS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 510, 1 April 1949, Page 10

WORLD WITHOUT SHAMS

CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI. By Carlo Levi. (Translated by Frances Frenaye). Cassell, London (through Roy Parsons, Wellington.) New Zealand price, 11/9. ARLO LEVI, a political prisoner of Mussolini, was banished in the thirties to southern Italy; and his account of a year among the Lucanian peasant peoples is, at first sight, the sort of book one may be excused for being cautious about. But this is one of those Tare cases where caution turns out to be quite unnecessary. Well to do, an Italian of the industrial north (he is a doctor turned painter and writer), Levi went to his exile with preconceived notions about the peasant south. He soon lost them; he was too intelligent, too sensitive, not to; he saw for himself, and he felt what he saw; and his book is as different from the usual piece of documentation as is, say, Stendhal’s famous account of the battle of Waterloo com- | pared with what you may read in the history books,

Much of the book is epitomized in the title. The peasants of the villages where the author lived feel that no message, human or divine, has ever penetrated into their land. Their civilization is virtually a pre-Christian one. It is founded on mountainous, de-forested, barren soil, scorched by the summer sun, and snowcovered in winter. The main scourge, apart from stubborn, never-ending poverty, is malaria. Yet amid such a scene you find human beings who, sad and resigned and dressed in black as they may be, are nevertheless unfailingly hospitable and sympathetic. Because they are ever conscious that death comes to all, and each has his fate that he must accept, they live throughout their lives in a world that is without any shams. Yet beneath it all there is a profound feeling for human justice. (We are told about a brigand chief, of former times, who said that if the world had only one enormous heart he’d tear it out-and such a man might very well be distinguished from the Roman emperor who wished the Roman people had only one head. There is a frustrated feeling for justice in the one statement; only the madness of the desire for power in the other.) Nor are expressions of hope entirely lacking. The author never saw any pictures or images except two in peasant houses. They were always the same -the one, a Madonna whose scowling black face suggested something of the ancient origins of the people (Levi couldn’t help thinking of the goddess, Persephone); the other, more pathetic, a coloured print of President Roosevelt. As a profoundly human story, the book can, I think, be strongly recommended. It is as well to be reminded, while a precarious, power-seeking, urban civilization spreads over the world, that there are people who survive with very little aid from the cheaper and more pitiful illusions. As for the nobler ones, it is a fact that some of them have long been preserved among the Italian and Mediterranean peoples generally. One can’t think of: Levi’s peasants without being reminded of Sacco and Vanzetti (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) those two simple and courageous believers in original goodness, and the possibility of human justice. My only complaint is that I imagine Carlo Levi to be a considerably better prose writer than his translator has made him appear.

Frank

Sargeson