Between private matters and public engagement: Conflicted partisan fighters in the resistance novels of Vittorini and Fenoglio

Introduction

In the preface to her collection of essays Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt (1961: 3–15) articulates an analysis of the French Resistance against Nazi-fascism, based on the words of poet and partisan fighter René Char: “If I survive, I know that I shall have to break away with the aroma of these essential years, silently reject my treasure” (Char, 2007: 58). ¹ She argues that the “treasure” resistance fighters had found in their actions constituted in their challenge to totalitarianism, which prompted a reconstitution of the public realm in their newly formed resistant community. What partisans initially thought a necessity, that of engaging in first person in political life, took the form of an unexpected gift, the apparition of freedom which had long been lacking from their existences. For Arendt, the poet/partisan's anxiety about having to return to the “weightless irrelevance of personal affairs” at the end of the war demonstrates a keen awareness of the irreparable separation between private and public life in the modern age, a gap that had been exploited and magnified by totalitarianisms. A similar awareness of the tension between public and private at the dawn of the fascist regime was also present in Italy during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Resistance against Nazi-fascism. Historian Claudio Pavone (2013: 622) writes that “for the majority of the combatants of the fascist war the “private” had been a refuge – memory, nostalgia, prefiguration of the return home – against being overwhelmed by a “public” that they felt extraneous to them. In most resistenti the positions tended to be inverted, and the private, initially an instrument of salvation, became a risk of perdition”. The choice to join the armed Resistenza catapulted Italian partisan fighters into an unknown public dimension, in which they were active protagonists of the political life. According to Pavone, the private dimension, that of personal affections, family, and love, in which they had almost exclusively existed during the years of fascism, represented its opposite polarity, threatening to compromise their ability to fully commit to the cause of Liberation. As Arendt (1961: 4) interprets it, upon discovering the freedom of the public sphere, partisans were forced to face “the weightless irrelevance of their personal affairs […] separated from the world of reality by an épaisseur triste, the “sad opaqueness” of a private life centered about nothing but itself”.

However, a more complex portrayal of partisans’ struggle to reconcile the private and public dimensions of existence emerges from the works of literary authors and former partisans Elio Vittorini and Beppe Fenoglio, who had themselves experienced a “return to the public” between 1943 and 1945, with their choice to join the anti-fascist Resistenza. In their most emblematic Resistance novels, Uomini e no (1945) and Una questione privata (1963), these two authors problematized the canonized figure of the heroic partisan committing his life to the public cause, a figure who had been risen to the role of holy martyr of the nation in post-war collective memory (Perry, 1998). By highlighting the ethical implication of engagement in armed conflict, and the clash of personal beliefs and interests against political necessity, Vittorini and Fenoglio expose and problematize the rationale behind the attractiveness of the “risk of perdition” implicit in the “private” within the historical context of the armed Resistance. Given the substantial literariness of the two novels, against the trend of neorealist novels and memoirs on the Resistance, literary critics have tended to overlook the realistic psychological construction of the two semi-autobiographic main characters, intellectual partisan Enne 2 in Vittorini's Uomini e no, and rebellious partisan Milton in Fenoglio's Una questione privata. However, their inner conflicts, shaped after the authors’ own experiences in the Resistance, can provide a counterargument to Arendt's formulation of the private as a “sad opaqueness” separated from the treasure of public life.

Writing about Italian citizens’ necessity to choose on which side to stand after September 8, 1943, and the collapse of the former fascist state, historian Giuseppe Filippetta writes:

La fuga del re e il rifiuto degli alti ufficiali di impartire ordini frantumano lo stato monarchico e ne dissolvono la sovranità […] gli uomini e le donne restano privi di ogni protezione sovrana, soli con se stessi, con le proprie vite. La loro solitudine è una soglia: di qua sta la nuda vita di chi può solo subire l’arbitrio e la violenza dei nazifascisti, di là la sovranità di chi prende su di sé la responsabilità di dare la morte per ordinare il mondo e per allontanare la paura dalle vite di tutti. Basta un passo, un gesto, basta prendere un fucile, e si è di là, in banda, in un presente di autonomia e di libertà che è già il futuro. (Filippetta, 2018: 9)

On the solitary threshold where all Italians found themselves in the absence of national sovereignty, a deeply felt choice had to be made – whether to get involved in the armed conflict or to hide from it. As the national entity shatters, individuals become sovereign in “un pulviscolo di scelte individuali, di esistenze che insorgono facendosi sovrane, che accorrono ai fuochi e si mettono insieme per dare ordine e libertà alla vita in comune” (Filippetta, 2018: 72). What the historian highlights as the crucial moment in which several individualities come together to reclaim collective sovereignty against the totalitarian rule imposed by Nazi-fascist forces, also appears to be at the core of the inner conflict between public commitment and private interest narrated by two of the most prominent authors of the novelistic sub-genre known as the letteratura sulla Resistenza (Fortini, Pavone and Rondolino, 2016).

In contradiction with Arendt's take on Char and the sad opaqueness of a private life completely detached from the public, Vittorini and Fenoglio display partisan characters whose desire to fulfill their private ambitions (personal desire for a fulfilled extramarital love relationship for Enne 2, and interior longing for a fantasized relationship for Milton) can only take place within the freedom provided by public commitment against totalitarianism, and motivates such engagement to the point of overwhelming and eventually jeopardizing it. Moreover, by displaying the ethical question related to the use of violence as a necessity against the totalitarian enemy, Vittorini and Fenoglio provide commentary on how public engagement constitutes a psychological burden for partisans. Ultimately, while the pursuit for public freedom constitutes the necessary condition for their private ambitions, Enne 2 and Milton suffer its unbearable weight and long to find refuge, respectively, in their personal and interior dimension.

Elio Vittorini, Uomini e no

The first edition of Elio Vittorini's novel Uomini e no was released on June 21, 1945, less than two months after the liberation of the city of Milan, where the Sicilian writer resided during the 1943–1945 period. According to Brigatti (2017: 23), the original manuscript was redacted between March 1944 and April 1945 – a year in which the writer was actively collaborating, albeit not in military operations, with the local anti-fascist Resistance (Bonsaver, 2008: 111–113). This suggests that the author was reworking his own lived experience, and the present events of his time, towards a narrativization intended as a post-war retrospective. Several episodes in the novel are in fact based on events occurring on the streets of Milan at the time, but unlike the vast majority of contemporary Resistance accounts, the author's literary narrativization does not take the form of a canonical Neorealist chronicle. Vittorini's novel acts therefore as a conjunction between the literature of the Resistance – produced during the war – and literature on the Resistance – focused on its events from a future-meaning perspective.

Part historical novel, part autobiography, and part docufiction (Re, 1990: 13), Uomini e no is set in Milan in the “mite inverno” of 1944. The plot centers around partisan fighter Enne 2, whose nom de guerre refers both to a topographical aspect of the city of Milan (“Naviglio 2”, canal number 2) and to the character's tormented quest for his own identity (“Niente Nome”, No Name). The protagonist is torn between his tormented love for Berta, a married woman, and his commitment to the cause of the liberation. While he tries to make his extramarital relationship with Berta work, he organizes a successful operation against the occupiers, taking down four German soldiers and a fascist magistrate. The German retaliation against this operation leads to the execution of forty prisoners, despite Enne 2 and his partisans’ attempt to avert it. Witnessing the dead bodies of the executed, including a child and an old man, Enne 2 and Berta find consolation in each other, although their love is not destined to work out. Enne 2 organizes another attack, this time against the fascist general Cane Nero, but he is identified and tracked down by the fascist police. He accepts his fate, and the impossibility of love between him and Berta, ultimately deciding to ambush his nemesis Cane Nero, knowing he will also die in the attempt. The last chapters of the novel abandon Enne 2 to his destiny and focus on the character of the operaio. ² After receiving a gun from the death-bound protagonist, he promises to join the Resistance. Setting out on a mission with partisans Orazio and Metastasio, he is committed to learning “how to kill Germans,” but he ultimately refuses to shoot one of them, as he recognizes a common element of humanity in his enemy's eyes. This double-ending is mirrored by the two-folded experimental structure of the novel: divided into 136 chapters, the predominantly dialogic narrative ones (reminiscent of Hemingway's writing style) are interspersed with 23 sections in which the narrator deviates from the main plot to elaborate on Enne 2's past, conversing directly with the protagonist about his desires and expectations, and stretching the framework of the events narrated, both geographically and temporally. A stylistic feature already adopted by Vittorini in his previous novel Conversazione in Sicilia, these italicized passages constitute a meditative re-elaboration of the narrated events, offering the reader a “novel-in-the-novel” which expands the characterization of the protagonist Enne 2 beyond his struggle for national liberation (Andreini, 1997).

Vittorini's novel is hardly an unequivocal celebration of the Resistance. Nor is it a black-and-white evaluation of both sides involved in the civil war. For this reason, it spurred criticism and negative reviews, especially from left-leaning literary critics. ³ Explicitly triggering in the reader a value judgement between “men and non-men” in the novel, Vittorini eventually questions the opposition between human partisans and inhuman Nazi-fascists as a rationalization of evil. His reflection starts by calling attention to the inherent duality of human beings:

L’uomo, si dice. E noi pensiamo a chi cade, a chi è perduto, a chi piange e ha fame, a chi ha freddo, a chi è malato, a chi è perseguitato, a chi viene ucciso. Pensiamo all’offesa che gli è fatta, e la dignità di lui. Anche a tutto quello che in lui è offeso, e ch’era, in lui, per renderlo felice. Questo è l’uomo […] Ma l’offesa in se stessa? È altro dall’uomo? È fuori dall’uomo? Noi abbiamo Hitler oggi. E che cos’è? Non è uomo? Abbiamo i tedeschi suoi. Abbiamo i fascisti. E che cos’è tutto questo? Possiamo dire che non è, questo anche, nell’uomo? Che non appartenga all’uomo? (Vittorini, 1965: 157)

Vittorini expands here on the theme of the mondo offeso already explored in Conversazione in Sicilia, but while in the previous novel, written in 1941, he stated his focus was not on a specific location or social context to avoid possible censorship, ⁴ in Uomini e no, free from fascist censorship and moving beyond the symbolist and hermetic rhetoric style of “dire senza dichiarare”, the author gives a political and historical contextualization to both sides of the offense. In Conversazione Vittorini explored the concept of the mondo offeso, which encompasses all suffering victims regardless of their political and social status. ⁵ The major distinction between offended and offenders overlapped with that between men and non-men, as the defining trait of humankind in Conversazione was the suffering derived from persecution. ⁶ In the Sicilian novel, the struggle of the mondo offeso was timeless and apparently a-historical, as its suffering was never explicitly defined as the material consequence of a conflict or injustice. The conversations between the protagonist and the suffering people of rural Sicily were intended to generate new knowledge, but the lack of action, and the limiting of what Falaschi (1976: 88) calls “la realtà recuperabile nel suo aspetto fenomenico” to the book itself, did not allow for an effective analysis of the material causes of suffering. The author elaborates on this aspect in Uomini e no, where the theoretical reflection taking place in the italicized passages is built upon the material conditions of war narrated in the diegetic chapters. While the struggle between the offenders and the offended remains timeless, Vittorini takes a step forward in his argument, suggesting that both components are embedded in the nature of humankind: every human being contains the potential for humanity and for inhumanity.

Noi non pensiamo che agli offesi. O uomini! O uomo! Appena vi sia l’offesa, subito noi siamo con chi è offeso, e diciamo che è l’uomo. Sangue? Ecco l’uomo. Lagrime? Ecco l’uomo. E chi ha offeso che cos’è? Mai pensiamo che anche lui sia l’uomo. Che cosa può essere d’altro? Davvero il lupo? Diciamo oggi: è il fascismo. Anzi: il nazifascismo. Ma che cosa significa che sia il fascismo? Vorrei vederlo fuori dell’uomo, il fascismo. Che cosa sarebbe? Che cosa farebbe? Potrebbe fare quello che fa se non fosse nell’uomo di poterlo fare? Vorrei vedere Hitler e i tedeschi suoi se quello che fanno non fosse nell’uomo di poterlo fare. Vorrei vederli a cercar di farlo. Togliete loro l’umana possibilità di farlo e poi dite loro: Avanti, fate. Che cosa farebbero? Un corno, dice mia nonna. (Vittorini, 1965: 163–164)

In the passage quoted above, the narrator underlines how the offenders, Nazis and fascists, are also human – or, following the translation of the title of the novel, men – as much as their victims. Fascism itself is then a structuralized expression of the offending component of humankind – and only by enabling the oppressing instinct of its combatants could Hitler impose itself. In Vittorini's historicization, Hitler and the lunacy of Nazi-fascism become yet another manifestation of the “offending” component of humankind – something that belongs to it as much as the offended humanity of victims. The potential for inhuman action is present in every human being, even in those who do not belong to the political faction identified as inhuman. Indeed, in a letter to the French translator of his novel, Michel Arnaud, Vittorini writes:

Il titolo italiano di questo romanzo Uomini e no significa esattamente che noi, gli uomini, possiamo anche essere “non uomini”. Mira cioè a ricordare che vi sono, nell’uomo, molte possibilità inumane. Ma non divide l’umanità in due parti: una delle quali sia tutta umana e l’altra tutta inumana. (Vittorini, 1977: 124)

Vittorini argues that each human being, regardless of their political militancy, contains the potential for both human and inhuman action. Significantly, in his letter to the translator he underlines that humankind cannot be divided in two opposite factions, a human and an inhuman one – his investigation has to take place inside an individual human being, since each and every one can act in different ways and fulfill both potentials. But how is the distinction between human and inhuman meant to be interpreted then, in the context of an anti-totalitarian involvement in the realm of the public? Thinking of Char's “treasure”, it can be argued that the decision to get involved in political life provides the means to fulfill one's humanity, donating oneself fully to the public cause. For Arendt (1961: 17–40), political thought since its origins with Plato told us that truth could not be found by engaging in the public, but rather in the realm of ideas, therefore only in thought. Only with Marx this tradition came to an end, as he argued that the philosopher must finally turn away from philosophy and get involved in society through action. Moreover, she explains that for Marx violence is the leading force that guides human relations, while for Plato and for traditional thinking it is the most disgraceful of human actions. However, she also writes that:

When it began to dawn upon modern man that he had come to live in a world in which his mind and his tradition of thought were not even capable of asking adequate, meaningful questions, let alone of giving answers to its own perplexities […] action, with its involvement and commitments, its being engagée, seemed to hold out the hope, not of solving any problems, but of making it possible to live with them without becoming, as Sartre once put it, a salaud, a hypocrite. (Arendt, 1961: 9)

As Arendt points out, the existentialist impasse leads to engagement in political action as a way to avoid hypocrisy, not to solve problems. Vittorini seems to take an oblique position towards the value of action itself.

In Uomini e no, the Sicilian author, through the categories of human and non-human, adds a layer of complication to the distinction between the private (personal) and the public (political), questioning instead whether violence can be justified in the latter, or whether it is most disgraceful, and ultimately inhuman, even when it is done on the side of the engagement. This is what leads him to make an initial distinction between the war fought by regular soldiers and the one fought by partisans. In an early episode in the novel, partisans Gracco, Coriolano, and Mambrino are portrayed having a frivolous conversation before an attack on the fascist commando. The narrator compares them to soldiers before battle, but partisan Gracco is left wondering what the implications of their individual choice to fight against the oppressor are:

Ma i bravi soldati vanno a una battaglia dove la morte è a somiglianza di loro, brava come loro, ed essi invece andavano a una battaglia dove la morte non era affatto brava. I bravi soldati hanno davanti altri bravi soldati. Combattono contro uomini che sono anch’essi uomini, anch’essi pacifici e semplici. Possono darsi prigionieri. Possono sorridere se sono catturati. E poi, i bravi soldati hanno dietro tutto il loro paese, con tutta la gente e tutte le cose, le città, le ferrovie, i fiumi, le montagne, il foraggio tagliato e il foraggio da tagliare; e se essi non tornano indietro, se vanno avanti, se uccidono, se si lasciano uccidere, è il loro paese che li costringe a farlo, non sono proprio essi a farlo, lo fa il loro paese […]. Questi uomini non avevano dietro niente che li costringesse, niente che prendesse su di sé quello che loro facevano. Restava dentro a loro quello che loro facevano. Come accadeva che fossero semplici e pacifici anche loro? Che non fossero terribili? Il Gracco era curioso e se lo domandava. Perché, se non erano terribili, uccidevano? Perché, se erano semplici, se erano pacifici, lottavano? Perché, senza aver niente che li costringesse, erano entrati in quel duello a morte e lo sostenevano? (Vittorini, 1965: 50–51)

The comparison between the involvement of regular army soldiers, who fight in war on behalf of their country following commands from above, and that of partisans, whose decision to get engaged in the struggle and use violence against the enemy is voluntary, leads the partisan Gracco to question the ethical implications of his own – and his comrades in arms’ – violent actions. The repetition of the words bravo/i, the accumulations through listing of both nouns and verbs, and the list of unanswered questions concluding the paragraph suggest the character's anxiety about ethical acting, and the lack of institutional support behind the partisan movement which makes each individual responsible for their own actions. Particularly significant is the repetition of “niente che li costringesse” as the young partisan considers the apparent lack of material cause-consequence relations in his (and his comrades’) choice to take arms against the Nazi-fascist oppressors. Gracco's disorientation reflects the status of the Italian people after the armistice of September 8, 1943. As the State retreated its sovereign position, leaving the population at the mercy of foreign armies, individuals found themselves responsible for choosing how to act, without an institutional apparatus justifying and motivating the behavior of the collective (Filippetta, 2018: 11). Once the institutional frame of reference that provided meaning and ethical guidance had been removed (and we shall not forget the authoritarian form it took in Italy for the previous 20 years), each and every person in the country was left with a crucial choice to make: what side should I stand with? The question of whether the ultimate motive guiding that choice could justify the use of violence, the act of killing, and the sacrifice of one's own life, could not be answered through reference to a categorical imperative imposed by a sovereign, national ideology. Each and every person in the Resistance was re-claiming their own individual sovereignty in the apparent absence of national sovereignty (Filippetta, 2018: 20–21). Nonetheless, the lack of shared communal values translates to the internal fracture expressed by Gracco: why are we fighting, and are we in the right? Vittorini's novel is primarily a search for answers to this question – the attempt to understand and define what is human, and what is not, on each side of the war, takes the form of a quest for an ethical justification (or lack thereof) for partisans’ violent involvement in the Resistance.

Enne 2 is the protagonist of Vittorini's novel – an intellectual, a partisan, and a conflicted man whose pursuit of an impossible love for Berta collides with his political engagement. The autobiographical elements were immediately pointed out by the early critics of the novel – who focused on Enne 2 as a literary example of the intellettuale militante mirroring Vittorini's own participation in the Resistance. However, as Guido Bonsaver (2008: 146–148) notes, there are two other aspects of Enne 2's personality that closely reflect Vittorini's own experience during the Resistance: his reluctance to use weapons and to kill, and his desperate love for a married woman (Ginetta Varisco, his future wife, who was married at the time to the literary critic Giansiro Ferrata – one of Vittorini's closest friends). The internal conflicts experienced by Vittorini during his participation in the Resistance are reflected in Enne 2's own struggles. The character also resembles the author in terms of class, being marked as the only one in his partisan group who belongs to the bourgeoisie. In his dialogues with the protagonist, the narrator explores the question of whether “the partisans could achieve the tactical goal of the Resistance (victory over the Nazis and the fascists) only at the expense of nullifying their ethical goal (the advancement of humanity)” (Leavitt, 2020: 38). In Enne 2 the contrast between humanity and inhumanity is played out on the grounds of a just public cause – the Resistance against the Nazi-fascist oppressor – upon which an array of violent and in-humanizing actions take place – from politically-motivated murder to the indirect sacrifice of innocent lives. This internal fracture is further reflected in the double structure of the novel, which is constructed around objective descriptions of actions, and subjective internal reflections. Moreover, Enne 2 himself, as his name suggests, is a double character, living both in the past of his childhood and in the present of his engagement as a partisan. His dialogues with the narrator, and the latter's ability to travel back and forward in time with him, reveal the potential for an alternative course of action that could have led him to a fulfilled love with Berta, and the non-renunciation of his humanity for the sake of the liberation. In the past time evoked through dialogues with the narrator, Enne 2 experiences a different life where he meets Berta as a young child, and their future together is imagined. However, this alternative timeline appears exclusively in the italicized sections, where Enne 2's human aspect is developed, whilst in the regular sections he acts and talks in the reality of the Resistance, where his main objective is taking out Nazi occupiers. The italicized sections also rely on the use of solemn language, placing Enne 2's personal reflection on the use of violence on a lyrical plane that hardly matches the gritty and quasi-cinematic atmospheres of the non-italicized, realist chapters. It shall also be noted that the relationship between Enne 2 and Berta occupies a central role in the novel, and that she is the strongest, and perhaps last, connection to what he perceives as his human, non-violent side. Yet, Vittorini does not develop Berta as a character in her own right in the novel. Instead, he utilizes her as a prop for the male partisan's internal duality to unfold. Furthermore, a synthesis between the two sides of the main subject – the man and the partisan – does not take place in the novel. Enne 2's humanity is developed and cultivated in the past of the italicized passages, while his actions in the present of the narration lead him to “get lost”:

Non c’era che resistere per resistere, o non c’era che perdersi. Non c’era sempre stata sugli uomini la perdizione? I nostri padri erano perduti. Sempre il capo chino, le scarpe rotte. O erano perduti dal principio; o resistevano per resistere, e poi lo stesso si perdevano. Perché ora sarebbe finita? Perché vi sarebbe stata una liberazione? (Vittorini, 1965: 173)

Fighting for the liberation of his country from the materialization of inhumanity that is Nazi-fascism, Enne 2 struggles with the inhumanity inside himself. As he reflects on the consequences of his actions while organizing an operation against the local fascist officials – knowing that it will cost the lives of his fellow partisans, and eventually of innocent victims – he concludes that the inhumanity of violence is what will eventually lead to the Liberation, but also the reason that eventually cause him to lose his way. In the first passage quoted above, the narrator connects Enne 2's struggle with the timeless one of his forefathers, or what in Conversazione was the “mondo offeso”. The inevitable outcome of this struggle is getting lost, despite all attempts to resist. The language of the paragraph is solemn, circling around words such as perdizione, principio, i nostri padri, that evoke a timeless repetition, a curse on the fate of the “mondo offeso”. The liberation from Nazi-fascism as a historical event does not seem enough to Enne 2 to break this cycle of eternal loss. Eventually he comes to accept that his fight will lead him to this inevitable conclusion, as it did for his fellow partisans Spagnolo and Figlio-di-Dio. The final acceptance of this outcome allows the partisan Enne 2 to accept the challenge he is about to face, giving his own life to take out that of the fascist leader Cane Nero. Partisan Enne 2 must therefore accept his own inhumanity, and the violent actions it enables him to perform, in order to become an effective fighter and champion of antifascism. Embracing the spotless image of the partisan as hero would mean ignoring the necessity for the partisan to commit violence in order to achieve his heroic mission. Leavitt (2020) correctly suggest that the novel refrains from answering the ethical question it poses in the first place, whether such a personal choice in favor of inhumanity is acceptable and necessary if its goal is defeating the structured system of inhumanity embodied by Nazi-fascism. However, Vittorini constructs his main character around this fundamental moral doubt in order to flesh it out in its full extent.

Enne 2's regrets and self-doubt stem from his desire for love – his female counterpart, Berta, is a married woman who supports the Resistance with auxiliary actions but does not actively partake in the violent missions organized by the protagonist. While Enne 2's actual present is characterized by inhuman violence and forced repression of his own desires (as portrayed in the non-italicized passages), in the direct dialogues with the narrator he imagines an alternative timeline in which he can choose humanity, in the form of a love relationship with Berta, over the war. This emphasis on the sentimental theme brought some critics such as Noventa (1960) to classify Uomini e no as a love story, as opposed to the prevalently ideological reading proposed by early critics. The internal fracture of the partisan appears to be a fundamental opposition between political action and love. Political action draw Enne 2 towards his inhuman side, with the inherent necessity to kill, while love grounds him in the human side, as he can find refuge in the private dimension. In the actual present described in the narrative chapters, the two aspects of the partisan's life cannot avoid influencing each other. On the one hand, the love story between him and Berta follows the ups and downs of the Resistance in Milan; on the other hand, Enne 2's own commitment to the political cause wavers several times in the face of his sentimental desire. However, it is only in the italicized passages that the love story is explored, actualized, and its potentialities fulfilled:

E mi guarda. “Lo sai che cosa vorrei?” “Che cosa?” io gli domando. “Un giorno della mia infanzia.” “Non è difficile averlo.” “Metterci dentro la testa.” “Non è difficile,” gli dico. “Lo vuoi?” “Ma con una differenza.” “Che differenza?” “Con la cosa tra me e lei.” “Come?” gli chiedo. “La tua infanzia e questa cosa insieme?” “La mia infanzia e questa cosa insieme.” “Ma non è reale.” “È due volte reale.” “Tu di allora?” gli dico. “E tu di ora?” “Io nella mia infanzia,” egli mi dice. “E nella mia infanzia anche lei. La cosa nostra in un giorno di allora.” “Ma tu,” gli dico, “non conosci lei bambina.” “Io conosco tutto di lei.” “Tu eri in Sicilia e lei in Lombardia.” “Io ero anche in California.” “Ma non vi siete mai incontrati, nella vostra infanzia.” “E non possiamo incontraci ora?” “Proviamo,” gli dico. “Possiamo vedere.” (Vittorini, 1965: 25–26)

This early dialogue between the narrator and the main character is emblematic of the alternative reality constructed in the italicized passages. The human aspect of the protagonist is entirely constructed through his wishes and desires, in an a-temporal dimension that Enne 2 himself refers to as “due volte reale” (doubly real). Vittorini had already used this concept in Conversazione in Sicilia, to indicate a fourth dimension in which present and memory intertwined, allowing the character's alternate consciousness to approach his own (past and present) experience with a heightened sensibility. ⁷ However, in Uomini e no the “due volte reale” is requested by the main character rather than evoked. The narrator/ghost has the power to create an alternative and entirely fictional reality in which memory is shaped after present desire and becomes an escape for Enne 2. The world lived by the character is real but unsatisfying. He is destined to perdition in it, just as every other “offeso” before him in history. Rather than overlapping with his reality and providing him with a heightened sensibility, as was the case for the main character in Conversazione, this fourth dimension is an “other” place where the man Enne 2 desires to be, and the only one where he would be able to express his human component. The implication is therefore that the “man” is not fulfilled in the armed struggle of the Resistance, where only the “partisan” can find his place. This tension between the private and the public sphere – fundamentally irreconcilable for the protagonist – is ultimately carried out in the last moments of his life as, alone in his room, he awaits the fascist general Cane Nero to murder him:

Questo è l’uomo Enne 2. Steso sul letto, al buio, con la notte fuori dai vetri in una prima luna, le pistole in pugno, pensa ancora che Berta potrebbe arrivare, e pensa che mai potrebbe arrivare. Io sono con lui […] “Non vuoi la tua infanzia?” “Crepa. Aspetto gente.” “Non vuoi la tua infanzia e insieme lei?” “Ti dico che aspetto gente.” “E non vuoi la tua infanzia? Non vuoi lei bambina nella tua infanzia?” […] Si solleva sul letto, vede l’oscurità fuori dai vetri e su tutto il mondo; sembra, come già un morto, che possa vedere in tutta la terra e in tutti i tempi […] “E lei bambina?” dice. “Lei bambina.” “Cristo,” egli dice “l’aspetto da un secolo, e mi viene ancora bambina!” “Sss,” gli dico “non è lei soltanto.” “È bambina, ed è anche un’altra? Non è lei soltanto?” “È anche un’altra” gli dico. “Anche chi? L’inferno anche?” “È sulle tue ginocchia” gli dico. Egli siede, siede lei sulle sue ginocchia; e nessuna cosa del mondo è una cosa sola. Anche la notte fuori dai vetri non è una cosa sola; è tutte le notti. E Cane Nero, quando entra, è tutti i cani che sono stati, è nella BIBBIA e in ogni storia antica, in MACBETH e AMLETO, in Shakespeare e sul giornale d’oggi. Ma lui di sette anni, io lo porto via. Non altro rimane, nella stanza, che un ordigno di morte: con due pistole in mano. (Vittorini, 1965: 189–191)

The narrator has the power to separate the man and the partisan in the character – while the partisan awaits his death, becoming nothing more than a “tool of death with two guns in his hands”, the child/man is carried away into the a-temporal dimension in which his love with Berta, and his humanity, can be fulfilled. The narrator remarks that “nessuna cosa del mondo è una cosa sola” (not one thing in the world is one thing only), summarizing the fracture experienced by Enne 2 between his human component, ultimately transposed into Enne 2-child in the alternate reality, and the inhuman one which remains in the “real” world to complete his mission as partisan. The disclosure that “not one thing in the world is one thing only” asks the reader to accept the split – deconstructing the unambiguously heroic partisan fighter of the celebratory memorialization to show how it does not adhere to the actual psychological reality of the man embodying it. In the novel, the internal fracture of the partisan Enne 2 is indeed carried to its extreme consequences: his “inhuman,” violence-prone part remains in the room to complete his mission to take out Cane Nero, while his “human,” suffering part gets eternalized in a space that is only accessible to the protagonist and to the narrator and quintessentially personal. With the main character, the fundamental conflict between the private sphere (the one concerning the “man”, his personal affections, and his childhood) and the public sphere (the one concerning the “partisan”, his political engagement) remains unresolved. This crucial dichotomy lies at the heart of Enne 2's ultimate demise. Hannah Arendt (2000: 185–188) writes that:

The distinction between a private and a public sphere of life corresponds to the household and the political realms, which have existed as distinct, separate entities at least since the rise of the ancient city-state; but the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private nor public, strictly speaking, is a relatively new phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modem age and which found its political form in the nation-state […] In the modem world, the social and the political realms are much less distinct […] the two realms indeed constantly flow into each other like waves in the never-resting stream of the life process itself.

In the modern world the social has canceled out the previous distinction between the public and the private, with the consequent restriction of the public sphere of action and speech. Totalitarianisms prospered by exploiting such blurring of the boundaries, socializing the private while simultaneously limiting the possibility of public expression. Enne 2 suffers the consequences of living a moment of transition and clash between totalitarian occupation and democratic reappropriation of the public thing – his political engagement, which ultimately aims at re-appropriating the public sphere, conflicts with his desire in the personal sphere, because his extramarital love for Berta takes place outside the accepted social boundaries and can only be fulfilled in the fantasy of an evoked past. His effort to keep the two spheres separate echoes Arendt's analysis of pre-modernity, enabling the interpretation of Enne 2 as a pre-modern character (also supported by the literary comparisons proposed by the narrator).

The “due volte reale” in which Enne 2 can live his childhood together with his beloved Berta is the fourth dimension of Conversazione in Sicilia, ⁸ here contrasted with the scenario in which the Resistance takes place – fictional because literary, but nonetheless realistic and historically accurate. In the previously quoted passage, the literariness of the world recounted by the narrator is made explicit through references to ancient and pre-modern works of literature such as the Bible, Macbeth, and Hamlet. On one hand, what Vittorini hints at is the recurring battle between good and evil, the “mondo offeso” of the victims and the offending executioners. Cane Nero is abstracted here as the incarnation of a timeless evil that still represents the predominant menace for humanity, demonstrating that Enne 2-partisan's struggle to defeat fascism, yet another instantiation of the eternal struggle, will not be enough to overcome the duality of humankind. On the other hand, by exclusively adopting literary terms of comparison, Vittorini reminds the reader of the literariness of his narrative construction. Enne 2 is a paper partisan, his two components (man and partisan) only exist within the narrative world the author himself constructed, and both him and Cane Nero represent the latest instantiation of the timeless archetypes of the hero and the foe. All the light and dark aspects of the hero type are shown in Enne 2, who is ultimately stripped of his human component leaving only an “ordigno di morte” (death device). The choice to include Hamlet and Macbeth among the literary references is also a reflection of the narrator's ghost-like presence in the novel as a device to guide the protagonist's decisions (reminiscent of Hamlet's father, and Banquo in MacBeth), and a hint at the tragic interpretation of Enne 2's personal trajectory, wavering between humanity and inhumanity until finally turning into a death-bound murder machine. Stuck between thought and action, between public commitment and personal desire, Enne 2 is a pre-modern hero not meant to provide a resolution to the conflicts he embodies. However, Uomini e no does not end with Enne 2's death. After having unfolded the internal ambiguity of the main character, and fundamentally rejected the idea that the armed struggle of the Resistance offered a resolution to the eternal conflict between humanity and inhumanity, Vittorini puts forward another character whose connotation is more aligned with the celebratory political mythologization of the Resistance, reflecting the author's postwar ideological credo: the character of the operaio.

The first edition of Vittorini's novel included a final note by the author:

Non perché sono, come tutti sanno, un militante comunista si deve credere che questo sia un libro comunista […]. In arte non conta la volontà, non conta la coscienza astratta, non contano le persuasioni razionali; tutto è legato al mondo psicologico dell’uomo, e nulla vi si può affermare di nuovo che non sia pura e semplice scoperta umana. La mia appartenenza al Partito Comunista indica dunque quello che io voglio essere, mentre il mio libro può indicare soltanto quello che in effetti io sono. C’è nel mio libro un personaggio che mette al servizio della propria fede la forza della propria disperazione d’uomo. Si può considerarlo un comunista? Lo stesso interrogativo è sospeso sul mio risultato di scrittore […]. “Imparerò meglio” è tutto quello che posso aggiungere, come il mio operaio dell’epilogo. (Vittorini, 1965: 199)

Arguing against a political reading of his novel, Vittorini characterizes Enne 2 as someone who puts his desperation at the service of his faith. Indeed, as we have seen through the analysis of the protagonist's duality, his character comes under scrutiny for his choice to use “inhuman” individual violence to fight the systemic inhumanity of fascism. At the beginning of the note, the author reclaims his own communist engagement, and he significantly concludes by comparing himself to the character of the operaio. This character is crucial to understand Vittorini's own attempt to resolve the private/public ambiguity after having analyzed the fractured partisan-intellectual Enne 2. The operaio initially appears as a secondary character, reporting to Enne 2 that the local tobacconist gave the location of the partisan's hideout to the fascist police and that Cane Nero was coming for him. The last conversation of Enne 2's life takes the form of a hand-over, as the operaio expresses his desire to contribute to the cause of the Resistance. Enne 2, before bidding farewell, gives him the address of his fellow partisan Orazio. In the last pages of the novel, the epilogue as Vittorini defines it in his note, the operaio is shown with partisans Orazio and Metastasio, driving on the road between Pavia and Milan, when they come across two German soldiers riding a sidecar motorcycle:

Giunsero all’incrocio, guardarono la motocarrozzetta che veniva, nella nebbia lieve, dritto sulla loro strada, e si guardarono “Hai visto?” “Ho veduto.” […] L’operaio mirò. “Allora a chi guida?” “A chi guida.” Tirò un colpo, e subito un secondo colpo. “Cavolo,” disse Orazio. “Non lo prendi.” Partì il terzo colpo. “Non lo prendi.” “Devo averlo ferito.” “Vedi come si volta? Non l’hai ferito.” Partirono un quarto e quinto colpo. “Accelerano,” disse Orazio. “Cercano di scappare.” L’operaio tirò ancora. “Porca bestia,” disse. […] Oltrepassarono una macchia di sangue ch’era, larga e lucida, sull’asfalto della strada. “Dài dentro una scarica ora che passiamo,” disse Orazio. Ma videro che la motocarrozzetta bruciava, e che i due corpi erano immobili, con fuoco di benzina sulla faccia. Non occorreva dar dentro scariche. “Cani,” disse l’operaio. “Carogne, ormai,” disse Orazio. “Mica è andata male.” “No? Non è andata male?” (Vittorini, 1965: 192–194)

Orazio pushes the operaio to begin becoming a partisan by learning how to cold-bloodedly kill enemies. In what is presented as a straight-forward action scene, the two German soldiers are barely shown as human beings. Merely reduced to targets, they are scornfully referred to as “cani” and “carogne” by the operaio and Orazio, and the only reference to their physical presence is made once they are already dead, motionless corpses with faces on fire. Throughout the novel, Nazis and fascists are indeed consistently shown in their beastly inhumanity, setting them on the side of the “not men” and Enne 2 ever barely bothers about their individual fates. The operaio picks up where Enne 2 left off. As he begins his path as partisan accompanied by Orazio and Metastasio, he is eager to learn how to kill enemies – how to suppress his own humanity, to behave inhumanely, since “humanity is a liability in wartime” (Leavitt, 2020: 38). However he soon shows signs of discomfort, not being used to handling weapons and targeting other human beings. Falaschi (1976: 93) argues that the handing over of the task of the Resistance to the operaio from Enne 2, from whom he took up the baton on the moment of his death, shall be read as Vittorini's ideological proposition that workers, rather than partisans, are now responsible for the progressive movement of history. Moreover, Falaschi's reading, following Asor Rosa's, connotates Enne 2 as a failed partisan because of his internal fracture, being an intellectual while a fighter, and a lover while a killer. The operaio has the potential to overcome this impasse. In times of war, the ethical dilemma faced by Enne 2 appears inevitable: how can human beings reappropriate the public sphere when it has been stripped by totalitarianisms without recurring to violence? In the last two chapters of the novel, Vittorini shows an alternative modus operandi: the operaio eventually resists the forced process of in-humanization requiring him to become comfortable with the use of violence, by recognizing an element of humanity in the enemy. This recognition is what keeps him from becoming another Enne 2:

A un nuovo incrocio, c’era una bettola. “Guarda!” disse l’operaio. Indicò una moto, targata WH, ferma, ma a motore acceso, nella solitudine davanti alla casa. “È la Wehrmacht?” disse. “Wehrmacht,” Orazio rispose. E frenò, si fermarono. […] L’operaio prese, di sotto il sedile, una pistola. “Attento che stavolta è faccia a faccia.” “È questo che voglio imparare.”

As he is presented with the opportunity to murder a German soldier in cold blood, the operaio is suddenly struck by the commonalities he shares with his potential victim. For the first time the apparently inhuman enemy is seen in his human traits, triggering a recognition of humanity that had so far been denied. Even in the systemic inhumanity of Nazism, in the individual components of the Nazi-fascist machine, the operaio can recognize one person's humanity, triggered by the perception of a common social class. The German soldier appears to him as just another worker, another man, not a soldier or an enemy to eliminate. This gives him the chance to construct a shared identity through class consciousness. The operaio is the first character to face the non-specificity of the offended condition, seeing it as a human condition rather than as a political or national one. Vittorini appears to suggest that the impasse experienced by partisan Enne 2 can be overcome through the acknowledgment of a universally shared condition of human suffering, experienced by the working class in its “lavoro umano”. The discourse appears to shift from war of liberation to class struggle. Significantly, violence is rejected as a mean to further political goals, with a shift towards peaceful engagement in public life by means of class solidarity. Recognizing the German soldier as a worker and empathizing with him on the basis of his past soldier experience, the operaio reduces the differences between himself and his enemy. The apparent irreconcilability between opposite sides in the war is overcome through such recognition. At the same time, the respective causes for which they are fighting are not equated. Being a soldier is something the operaio himself experienced, and (reminiscent of Gracco's earlier reflection), something radically different from being a partisan.

This moment of altruistic identification on part of the operaio offers a reconciliation between the private and the public. While Enne 2 operated on two distinct levels, ultimately failing to be successful at both, the operaio bases his political actions on his personal experience of struggle. In a manner consistent with modernity's blurring of the distinction between personal and political he recognizes a similarity with the other on the base of the social dimension of work; he therefore prospects a future society constructed around such mutual recognition beyond other factors of political dis-alignment, effectively reflecting the author's political beliefs. The novel ends with an ambiguous statement by the operaio – whether learning better means learning to kill without hesitation, or rather learning to be a better partisan (moving beyond the inhumanity impasse that got Enne 2 stuck) remains open to reader's interpretation. The only certainty appears to be Vittorini's suggestion that the only possible continuation of the Liberation effort has to come through class solidarity – a conclusion the author himself attributes to his political beliefs in the final note to the novel – in alignment with one of the prevalent post-war interpretations of the Resistance, which would eventually lead to the leftist historicization of the rivoluzione mancata (Pavone, 2013: 375–493).

With the character of Enne 2, Vittorini problematizes the heroic figure of the partisan fighter by exposing its inherent contradictions and ambiguities. His struggle between public and private dimensions leads to his ultimate demise, which takes the form of a martyrization. The operaio is presented as an alternative to the semi-autobiographical partisan/intellectual model of Enne 2. After having de-structured the subjectivity of the partisan martyr, showing his ultimate inability to reconcile good and evil, human and inhuman, Vittorini proposes an ideological resolution which contains the potential to resolve such ambiguities. The wholeness and integrity of the operaio, certainly not unproblematic and perhaps naively put forward by Vittorini, will however find less of an echo in subsequent novelistic repurposing of the partisan figure. Indeed, the lack of psychological construction makes the operaio more of an impervious ideological statement, than an attempt to explore the ambiguities and contradiction of partisans’ involvement in the Resistance. Instead, the Enne 2 partisan/intellectual fighter figure will be reworked by other Resistance novelists interested in investigating the partisan's own internal struggle between public and private, and human and inhuman, rather than his military and political contribution to the liberation of the country from Nazi-fascism. Vittorini's influence in the literature of the Resistance went beyond the novelistic model he offered with his Uomini e no, given his crucial role in the Italian editorial world during the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, he played a major role in the first publication of Beppe Fenoglio, still today considered the main writer of the Resistance.

Beppe Fenoglio, Una questione privata

When the Armistice of Cassibile was made public, on September 8, 1943, 20-year-old Beppe Fenoglio was in Rome, training as a recruit in the army. When news of the disbandment arrived at the military quarters where he resided, he slowly made his way back to Alba, his native hometown in Piedmont. Only in the Summer of 1944, after having been briefly detained for their connection with local partisans, Beppe and his brother Walter decided to join the local Resistance, on the hills surrounding the city of Alba (Negri Scaglione, 2006: 47–88). The nine months spent as a partisan in the Resistance would provide Fenoglio with numerous experiences he employed as source for various novels and short stories, until his posthumous recognition as “the writer of the Resistance” (Calvino, 1987). In the Summer of 1950, the Piedmontese writer and former partisan pitched his first novel, La paga del sabato, to Einaudi, the publishing house where Elio Vittorini was curating the editorial series I gettoni. The novel, which told the story of “veteran” partisan Ettore and of his struggle to reintegrate in civilian society after the trauma of war, was rejected by the Sicilian editor on the ground of its excessive cinematicity and weak conclusion. In a letter to Italo Calvino, who proposed Fenoglio's novel for publication, Vittorini writes:

L’ultima parte del Fenoglio mi persuade meno. Diventa film sempre di più, e non sa più essere altro che film. La fine poi non è resa necessaria da niente che sia nella situazione o nei caratteri. Che dobbiamo fare? Se non ci fossero i primi capitoli, e soprattutto il rapporto teso tra madre e figlio, direi di non farne niente. (Vittorini, 1977: 354)

The novel would eventually be disassembled and reworked by its author, who included two short stories drawn from the first chapters in the 1952 short stories collection I ventitre giorni della città di Alba, ⁹ still published for Vittorini's Gettoni. This exchange was just the beginning of the tortuous editor/author relationship between the two writers. Fenoglio's first published novel, La malora, was in fact released in 1954 for I gettoni with a harsh editorial introduction by Vittorini himself:

Racconta di rapporti umani in campagna ridotti alla nuda spietatezza (anche tra marito e moglie, e anche tra padri e figli) del rapporto di lavoro. Ma ci conferma in un timore che abbiamo sul contro proprio dei più dotati tra questi giovani scrittori dal piglio moderno e dalla lingua facile. Il timore che, appena non trattino più di cose sperimentate personalmente, essi corrano il rischio di ritrovarsi al punto in cui erano, verso la fine dell’Ottocento, i provinciali del Naturalismo, i Faldella, i Remigio Zena: con gli “spaccati” e le “fette” che ci davano della vita; con le storie che ci raccontavano, di ambienti e di condizioni, senza saper farne simbolo di storia universale; col modo artificiosamente spigliato in cui si esprimevano a furia di afrodisiaci dialettali. È solo un rischio ch’essi corrono. Un dirupo lungo il quale camminano. Ma del quale è bene che siano avvertiti. (Fenoglio, 1954)

Vittorini's stylistic criticism was directed at Fenoglio's realist approach and his supposed inability to make an individual's own experience universal. Cinematicity, artificial use of dialect, excessive naturalism – all crucial features of literary neorealism that Vittorini had himself rejected in Conversazione in Sicilia and Uomini e no – came under scrutiny in his evaluation of the young writer's early works. But the core of his criticism against Fenoglio – whose writerly talent he nonetheless openly recognized – was against the particularity, the non-universality, of the human experiences portrayed on the pages of his books. Indeed, Fenoglio's characters did not engage with the ethical conundrums of an Enne 2 or reflect on the timeless struggle of the mondo offeso as Silvestro in Conversazione, being involved instead in the immediate roughness of everyday life. It can easily be argued that, rather than taking aim at Fenoglio himself, Vittorini was perhaps being critical of the new tendency emerging among young Italian authors after the end of the war, which we could widely identify with the explosion of literary neorealism. Vittorini's editorial project I gettoni was indeed conceived as a workshop for these young writers, whom he intended to form and train rather than promote. A generational conflict, perhaps, that marked the distance between authors such as him and Cesare Pavese, and the new generation of Italo Calvino, Carlo Cassola, and Beppe Fenoglio – all writers whose first works were directly inspired by their personal experience in the war. The Piedmontese writer who, like Vittorini, had initially developed his literary skills through the translation of British and American poems and novels (as thoroughly analyzed in Pietralunga, 1987) had however never been in close contact with other neorealist writers, nor with the cultural circles that started emerging around the publishing house Einaudi. This earned him the reputation of being an isolated and rather unique author. Nonetheless, Vittorini's criticism on the pages of his own first published novel certainly left a mark on the self-esteem of young Fenoglio, who considered himself “uno scrittore di quart’ordine” (Fenoglio, 1978: 201). When he started working on Una questione privata in 1960, he had entirely reconsidered his approach to the Resistance novel. While struggling with the writing of the libro grosso that would posthumously be published as Il partigiano Johnny, Fenoglio set out to write a story about the Resistance in which the Resistance would not occupy the centerstage. Moreover, he was determined to break away from the stylistic features of neorealism that had characterized many Resistance novels in the previous fifteen years, from Italo Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, to Renata Viganò's L’Agnese va a morire (Re, 1990: 76–154). As Pedullà aptly noted:

In Una questione privata, dove in principio è la trama romanzesca e i personaggi ci vengono presentati solo in funzione dell’implacabile meccanismo narrativo che li trascende tutti, il rapporto tra la piccola storia del protagonista e la grande Storia collettiva assume invece una configurazione completamente inedita. (Pedullà, 2014: XV)

And indeed, the relationship between story and history – with the protagonist's personal circumstances overshadowing the historical reality of the civil war he is engulfed in – is what makes Una questione privata one of the cornerstones in the evolution of the genre of the Resistance novel. In it, the author managed to redefine the figure of the partisan by offering the “universal experience” Vittorini found missing in Fenoglio's early novels. It was Calvino who, in the introduction to the second edition of his own Resistance novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, crowned Fenoglio's posthumous Una questione privata as the novel that encapsulated the experience of the Resistance more than any other:

E fu il più solitario di tutti che riuscì a fare il romanzo che tutti avevamo sognato, quando nessuno più se l’aspettava, Beppe Fenoglio, e arrivò a scriverlo e nemmeno finirlo (Una questione privata), e morì prima di vederlo pubblicato, nel pieno dei quarant’anni. Il libro che la nostra generazione voleva fare, adesso c’è, e il nostro lavoro ha un coronamento e un senso, e solo ora, grazie a Fenoglio, possiamo dire che una stagione è compiuta […] è costruito con la geometrica tensione d’un romanzo di follia amorosa e cavallereschi inseguimenti come l’Orlando furioso, e nello stesso tempo c’è la Resistenza proprio com’era, di dentro e di fuori, vera come mai era stata scritta, serbata per tanti anni limpidamente dalla memoria fedele, e con tutti i valori morali, tanto più quanto più impliciti, e la commozione, e la furia. (Calvino, 1987: 25)

At the center of the novel stands Milton, a twenty-year-old university student from Alba who joins the Resistance in the Langhe hills around his hometown among the ranks of the “blue” monarchist brigades. Milton is secretly in love with his friend Fulvia, a girl from an affluent Turinese family displaced in Alba during the war. After Fulvia's departure from Alba and after having spent several months in the mountains with his partisan group, the protagonist returns to the mansion where he and Fulvia used to meet to listen to American jazz music, read Milton's translations of English literary works, and keep each other company. In the mansion he meets the old housekeeper, who mentions a secret relationship between Fulvia and Giorgio, Milton's best friend who introduced him to Fulvia, now a fellow partisan among the ranks of the “red” communist brigades. Shocked by the revelation, Milton sets out to find Giorgio and to discover the truth about him and Fulvia. When he finds out that Giorgio has just been made prisoner by the local Black Shirts, Milton decides to seek a fascist soldier to seize for a prisoner-exchange with Giorgio before the latter is executed. After wandering around the Langhe hills visiting several partisan hide-outs without success, Milton manages to capture a fascist officer, but when the prisoner tries to escape Milton is forced to shoot him. Having lost all hope of freeing Giorgio, and therefore his chance to discover the truth about Fulvia, Milton returns to the mansion. A fascist commando surprises him when he arrives there, and Milton is chased and shot. Probably injured and utterly spent, he collapses on the ground in a nearby wood. The ending leaves open the question of whether Milton has been killed or not.

Critics such as Alfano (2003) have argued that Milton goes beyond the political (fighting for liberation from fascism and the creation of a new Italy) and the biological (fighting for the family and the land) of the author and other writers’ previous novels on the Resistance. By adopting a different cultural imaginary (rooted in references to Anglo-American literature), Fenoglio is able to create a new space for Milton's action, based on a different set of ethics and therefore allowing “immoral” deeds and unorthodox thinking to be reported. However, such space is not made entirely available to the reader, who can only experience it vicariously through the rare introspective moments in which Milton reminisces about his pre-war life. Fenoglio refuses (as he does in his other works) to portray the Resistance as a collective struggle. For Milton, it is exclusively “a private affair,” an individual mission to seek a higher truth detached from any political or ideological meaning. But the privateness of his affair is rooted in personal imaginary rather than ethics, and ultimately only takes shape in his interior sphere. In the novel Milton acts first and foremost as a literary emulator, isolating himself from the other partisans around him to enact an imagined and desired romanticized version of himself. His private affair nonetheless has real consequences for the reality of the civil war surrounding him; he wishes to be detached from it, but as an individual immersed in a historical reality, he cannot escape. With the character of Milton, Fenoglio presents a partisan fighter that unambiguously privileges the private over the public, and for whom the private is interior rather than interpersonal. The dimensions of hero, fighter, and martyr of the nation are all extraneous to Milton, as the political connotation of the Resistance appears to be removed from his involvement. Fenoglio makes his partisan protagonist a flawed human being who pursues his sentimental affair at the expense of his own well-being. While Enne 2's involvement with Berta did not prevent the partisan from sacrificing his own life for the cause of the Resistance, Milton's misdeeds and ethical conundrums unfold entirely in the private sphere, to the point of damaging the cause of the Liberation.

In Una questione privata, as the title suggests, the Resistance struggle takes the form of a patchwork of individual subjects, with a protagonist who fights for reasons that belong to the private. As Pedullà (2001: 135) aptly noticed, political discourse only appears in the novel as a superficial and virtuous addition to individual motives. In the very beginning of the novel, before finding out about Giorgio and Fulvia's secret relationship, Milton thinks to himself that Fulvia is “lontana da me esattamente quanto la nostra vittoria” (Fenoglio, 2014: 3). This shows an initial conjunction between private and political purposes. It is expected that the final Liberation will coincide with Milton and Fulvia's reunion. This initial standpoint coincides with what historian Pavone (2013: 621–656) identified as a peculiar characteristic of several youths who joined the Resistance between 1943 and 1945, “a commitment to reunifying conscience and making action coherent with it”. In Una questione privata, public and private are initially displayed as a necessary unity in the partisan's existence, until an unexpected event breaks it. After the old housekeeper reveals what might have happened between Fulvia and Giorgio at the mansion, and as he plans to go talk to Giorgio and find the truth, Milton grows insufferable to, and intolerant of, his fellow partisan Leo and his talk of war. Milton thinks to himself:

“Non ne posso più, – pensava. – Se mi fa ancora domande io… Io lo…! E si tratta di Leo. Di Leo! Figuriamoci con gli altri. Il fatto è che più niente mi importa. Di colpo, più niente. La guerra, la libertà, i compagni, i nemici. Solo più quella verità.” (Fenoglio, 2014: 24)

The protagonist's sudden realization that the only motive driving his actions are now his feelings for Fulvia detaches his personal story from the history unfolding around him in his present time. War, freedom, his comrades, and his enemies, do not matter anymore to Milton, who is now entirely dedicated to discovering the only truth that matters to him – a private one, and a truth that lies in the past. Before the revelation from the old housekeeper that sets the plot in motion, war appears to have been the fulcrum of Milton's existence – a just war, with a clear distinction between good and evil, friends and enemies, and a separating line that coincided with the protagonist's private affections. Yet, this phase is only featured in the very first lines of the novel, and Milton is enmeshed from the second chapter in his desperate and entirely private quest, in which allies and enemies alike are purely instrumental to his personal goal. ¹⁰ Arendt (1961: 9) states that, if one were to write an intellectual history of the twentieth century as the biography of a single person, “this person's mind would stand revealed as having been forced to turn full circle not once but twice, first when he escaped from thought into action, and then again when action, or rather having acted, forced him back into thought”. While Vittorini's Enne 2 displayed the complications implicit in the first turn, Milton embodies the second; in Arendt's analysis the latter would have taken place after the end of the war, but Fenoglio's historically distant perspective led him to construct a character who refuses to continue his public engagement from within the war itself. Milton never fully processes his betrayal of the partisan nomos, which remains unspoken for the entirety of the novel. Nonetheless, the ghost of such betrayal looms over the protagonist, who appears to be unable to utter, or think, the words to rationalize his own actions. The novel is punctuated with frequent ellipses, evoking suspension and uncertainty, a feeling of untold truths keeping the reader in the dark as much as the characters. In the passage quoted above, the ellipsis prevents Milton's thoughts of imagined violence from being completed – omitted verbs point to a motionless, demotivated, and ultimately actionless subject.

When doubt about Fulvia and Giorgio's relationship is instilled in Milton's mind, what matters is no longer the distinction between different sides of the Civil War. As the literary reference in the name of the protagonist hints, the investigation moves towards the “original sin” of consummated love – “il male” as the housekeeper refers to it. ¹¹

– Con lei io stavo più tranquilla, tanto tranquilla. Parlavate sempre, per ore. O meglio, lei parlava e Fulvia ascoltava. Non è vero? – È vero. Era vero. – Con Giorgio Clerici invece… – Sì, – fece lui con la lingua secca.

[…] – Ultimamente veniva troppo spesso, e quasi sempre di notte. A me francamente quelle ore non piacevano.

[…] – Non dico che abbiano fatto il male… (Fenoglio, 2014: 15–17)

The sudden revelation of what might have happened during those nights between Fulvia and Giorgio overshadows the facts of the war, and Milton's mind moves from an historically situated conflict, to another one that is simultaneously private and eternal. Literary critics (Harrison and Stewart, 2002) have indeed argued that Milton's triangular relationship with Fulvia and Giorgio is a form of mimetic desire – as the partisan protagonist apparently longs for Fulvia, but ultimately desires to be Giorgio, with his impeccable style, composure, and success in civilian life. Nonetheless, in the novel we come to learn that Milton is a much more effective and successful partisan than Giorgio, who is even berated by his own companions for his sophisticated manners and detached attitude; but this does not hold Milton back: his mission is now completely detached from any logic internal to the Resistance struggle. While in his external behavior he continues to adhere to the rules of the conflict – in fact seeking a prisoner for a fair exchange with Giorgio – his inner motives are generated from pre-war events and relationships. Again, in this passage the use of ellipsis signifies an untold truth on the part of the housekeeper, a taboo that she is not able to disclose to others, and fully admit to herself. The reader is placed in the same position as Milton, as the crucial part of her revelation is hinted at but not revealed. Milton is compared to and contrasted with the other members of his generation, the generation of partisans and collaborationists who commit their lives to a political cause:

Non poteva più vivere senza sapere e, soprattutto, non poteva morire senza sapere, in un’epoca in cui i ragazzi come lui erano chiamati più a morire che a vivere. Avrebbe rinunciato a tutto per quella verità, tra quella verità e l’intelligenza del creato avrebbe optato per la prima. (Fenoglio, 2014: 26)

War is a time in which young men like him were called to die rather than to live, a death-bound generation that Milton wholly belongs to (Pedullà, 2001: 117–150), but from which he now takes distance in terms of purpose. The protagonist's whole being is now projected towards the one truth that would justify his actions, the truth that would allow him to fight for the future he wants: a future with Fulvia. While the other partisans fight for a “public” cause, Milton sets himself apart as an individual fighting for himself, a selfish hero in desperate need to recompose his lost pre-war paradise.

In fact, throughout the novel the specificity of the Resistance – with its ethical questions that had tormented Enne 2 in Vittorini's novel – is progressively abandoned in favor of a predominant emphasis on the romantic anti-heroism of the protagonist Ethical reflections are apparently left unwritten, and moral judgements suspended. Milton never questions whether his self-imposed mission is justifiable from a political or ethical point of view. His driving force throughout the novel is a desire to discover the truth about a past event that hinders his ideal post-war future – an idealized future of fulfilled love with Fulvia. As Milton's companions notice his pensive behavior, partisan Ivan underlines the separation between life before and during the Resistance:

“Sì, è proprio il tempo e il posto di perdere la testa per una ragazza. Un partigiano serio come Milton. Le ragazze! Oggi! Fanno ridere. Fanno schifo e pietà. Comunque, è sicuro che era una cosa della vita di prima, e tornare su queste cose fa più male che bene. Con la vita e il mestiere che facciamo si va in crisi come niente. Le cose di prima a dopo, a dopo!” (Fenoglio, 2014: 21)

Ivan distinguishes between “la vita di prima,” in which girls – a metonymy for love and relationships, not devoid of derisive and slightly chauvinist undertones reflecting the lack of female subjects in this representation of Resistance – were an actual presence, and “la vita che facciamo” which revolves exclusively around the “job” of being a partisan. The Resistance appears to be a parenthesis in time, between the past and the future, and a period in which only the armed struggle can take place – a suspension of life, beyond the sole goals of fighting and surviving. Life will resume after the war, and Ivan concludes that unresolved matters from before the war shall be taken care of after its end. Milton is portrayed by Ivan like a subject in crisis because of the nerve-wracking occupation of being a partisan, implying that he has not been able to halt his civilian existence for the sake of the (historical) time being. For Milton, the temporal linearity of his individual story trumps the historical situation of emergency he finds himself in. What happened before the war flows into his participation in the Resistance, which he shared with the friend/rival Giorgio; and he looks towards the future after the war, when he hopes to reunite with Fulvia. Nonetheless, oftentimes throughout the novel the reader is presented with realistic war situations, and characters whose take on the war strongly counters Milton's “private affair”, reiterating the historical and political stakes of the Resistance.

War, and specifically the civil war between partisans and black shirts, is only a backdrop for the protagonist. Nonetheless, it remains the main preoccupation for those who surround him. Ivan's reflection is presented in chapter 3, one of only two moments in the novel narrated from the perspective of someone else besides Milton – the second and last being chapter 12, about the fascist execution of two underage staffette, Bellini and Riccio, as a retaliation for Milton's murder of a fascist officer, Rozzoni. These two chapters provide the reader with an external perspective on Milton's private affair. While Milton, entirely absorbed in his mission, is unaware of the indirect consequences of his actions on the unfolding of the civil war, Ivan gives voice to the other partisans” explanations for Milton's obstinate private mission; the killings of Riccio and Bellini show its undesired consequences. The moral necessity of the Resistance is not questioned by the narrator or any of the characters; it is actually reiterated, by contrast, when hesitant fascist militants are forced to carry out higher orders in the execution of Riccio:

– Io sono d’accordo di vendicare Rozzoni. Figuriamoci se non lo voglio vendicare. Ma vorrei vendicarlo su uno di quei grossi bastardi che se ne stanno liberi e superbi in collina… – Non c’è niente da fare. – Questi sono due ragazzini, questi due erano portaordini, ragazzini che credevano di giocare […] – Non c’è niente da fare, – ripeté il tenente. – Il comandante ha ordinato così. (Fenoglio, 2014: 117)

The chapter on Riccio and Bellini's execution is crucial in showing how the frame of the civil war creates space for Milton's private mission through the freedom of choice the Resistance aims to establish – a liberty not free of ethical issues. Milton is himself guilty of murder, for he shoots his fascist prisoner Rozzoni; he does so, however, as a personal choice for which he holds responsibility at the public level. The execution of youngsters Riccio and Bellini is a retaliation that follows the rules of the civil war, but that is forced on the personal will of the executioners – “non c’è niente da fare” reiterates the fascist official, as the sergeant voices his personal reservations about the execution of two innocent staffette. That he can do nothing to save the lives of Riccio and Bellini is a consequence of his choice to join the Black Shirts at the start of the civil war.

While Hannah Arendt did not consider fascist Italy as a totalitarian regime – an interpretation that has been criticized by historians such as Gentile (2008) for the flimsiness of the evidence it was based on – her reflection on totalitarianisms can help us understand the stakes of Milton's choice to pursue his private affair, and how it is itself a claim for public freedom. According to Arendt (1973), the organization of the totalitarian state, in continuity with the disposition of totalitarian movements, heightens the condition of social atomization leading its subjects to become hostile towards reality. By constructing fictions, in the form of conspiracies against internal and external enemies, totalitarianisms can weaponize such hostility. In the last stage of totalitarianism, “total domination”, the regime launches a frontal attack on the one remaining obstacle to the infallible consistency of its fictional world – the capacity for human freedom itself: its subjects cannot question any element of the fiction, at risk of being deemed internal enemies. At this last stage, the pretense of logically possible crime is abandoned, and victims are chosen completely at random (Arendt leads this analysis on the account of the concentration camps). While historians have been debating whether the Repubblica Sociale Italiana functioned as a puppet state for Hitler's Germany, or had its own decisional autonomy, what matters for our understanding of Milton's oppositionality is that in the novel it is configured as an authoritarian entity. The repubblichini encountered by Milton, just like those described in the Riccio and Bellini chapter, do not display any autonomy nor individuality, acting as wheels of the authoritarian machine. They enact the violence requested by the entity supervising them, to which they gave up their freedom in the moment they chose their side of the civil war. On the other hand, Milton, who is also hostile towards reality and (as we will see in the next paragraph) lives his own private one, made the choice to rely only and exclusively on himself. By joining the Resistance, he took on himself the burden of choosing what is right and what is wrong, as well as the terrible “responsabilità di dare la morte per ordinare il mondo” (Filippetta, 2018: 9).

The contradictions of totalitarianism emerge in this penultimate chapter, as a subtle reminder that Milton's apparently selfish and unethical behavior must be contrasted not only with the ideal (and artificial) image of the spotless partisan fighting for freedom, but also with the reality of the oppressive fascist regime. The fascist sergeant is not free to choose the destiny of Riccio and Bellini according to his personal values, because by joining the army of the totalitarian Social Republic he accepted to relinquish his private liberty. On the other end, Milton's behavior is a manifestation of freedom long denied by structural oppression under the totalitarian regime. He is only given the possibility to reclaim his own existence, choices, and mistakes, in the framework of personal liberation provided by the anti-fascist Resistance. In the everlasting tension between private and public, Milton's freedom consists in choosing to separate the two spheres, in contrast with the unescapable domination of the public over the private under the totalitarian regime. ¹²

Fenoglio's passion for Anglophone literature and culture informed not only his writing style and the language he used, but also his personal demeanor and imaginary. Milton, as several other characters from Fenoglio's writings, is a literary transposition of the author's cultural formation – to the point that critics (Bigazzi, 2011: 209–211) have highlighted the similarities between the love triangles in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which Fenoglio also adapted for a theatrical play, and in Una questione privata. Moreover, the onomastic reference to the seventeenth-century author of Paradise Lost unequivocally sets the protagonist as an “Italianman disguised as an Englishman” (Pedullà, 2001: 16). Besides onomastics, the character is steeped in British culture and his relationship with Fulvia is constructed around and nurtured by the shared consummation of Anglophone cultural products – the two spend hours listening to American jazz songs (“Over the Rainbow”, “Deep Purple”, “Covering the Waterfront”, Charlie Kunz's sonatas for piano); Fulvia's first invitation to him to come to her mansion was driven by her desire to have him translate the lyrics of “Deep Purple”. Listening to jazz music was itself an act of cultural resistance against fascism, as American cultural products – and black music specifically – were despised and often censored by Mussolini's regime (Merolla, 2017). In a letter to the editor Livio Garzanti dated 8 March 1960 (Fenoglio, 2002: 133), the writer proposed as a working title for the novel: Far Behind the Clouds – a clear reference to the lyrics of “Over the Rainbow” that, the author writes, constitutes the musical leitmotif of the novel. In the flashback scenes, Milton progressively attempts to lure Fulvia into his own literary taste by gifting her his translations of poems and short stories by Robert Browning (Evelyn Hope) and Edgar Allan Poe (Morella) and a copy of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Significantly, Milton expresses his disapproval for Fulvia's own literary taste:

A leggere si metteva quasi sempre lì, a filo dell’arco centrale, raccolta nella grande poltrona di vimini coi cuscini rossi. Leggeva Il cappello verde, La signorina Elsa, Albertine disparue… A lui quei libri nelle mani di Fulvia pungevano il cuore. Malediceva, odiava Proust, Schnitzler, Michael Arlen. Più avanti, però, Fulvia aveva imparato a fare a meno di quei libri; le bastavano, pareva, le poesie e i racconti che a getto continuo lui traduceva per lei. La prima volta le aveva portato la versione di Evelyn Hope. “Per me?” fece lei. “Esclusivamente”. “Perché a me?” “Perché… guai se tu non sei il tipo per queste cose”. “Guai a me?” “No, guai a me stesso”. “E che cos’è?” “Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead/Sit and watch by her side an hour”. Dopo, le luccicavano gli occhi, ma preferì abbandonarsi all’ammirazione per il traduttore. “Proprio tu l’hai tradotta? Ma allora sei un vero dio. E cose allegre non ne traduci mai?” “Mai”. “E perché?” “Nemmeno mi vengono sott’occhio. Credo che scappino da me, le cose allegre”. La volta dopo le portò un racconto di Poe. “Di che parla?” “Of my love, of my lost love, of my lost love Morella”. “Lo leggerò stanotte”. (Fenoglio, 2014: 6–7)

Before being a partisan, Milton is first and foremost a reader and a translator. His preference for Browning, Poe, and Hardy's works suggests that his imaginary of reference is tied to nineteenth century Victorian literature and post-Romanticism. Significantly, the pieces of literature he provides Fulvia with are deeply tragic. They all involve – in different forms – the death of a young female outsider/heroin and the desperate yearning of her male lover. In contrast, Fulvia is initially fond of modernist novels that investigate the psychological complexities and hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie – a much more modern and anti-romantic literary genre, proposing strong and independent female protagonists. Milton's continuous flow of translations for Fulvia functions not only as an attempt at literary re-education, but also as an imposition. The male protagonist filters reality through his literary imaginary, and similarly hopes to shape their emotional bond by turning her into one of his literary heroines. That Fulvia ends up falling for Giorgio – “il più bel ragazzo di Alba ed anche il più ricco, ovviamente il più elegante” (Fenoglio, 2014: 13) – has been interpreted by some critics as a reaction against Milton's attempt. Porciani (2016) states that Milton's apparent sense of intellectual superiority towards Fulvia is an inferiority complex derived from his shyness and his dissatisfaction with his physical appearance. However, Fulvia only appears indirectly in the novel, in flashbacks of the time before the war in which the narrator does not report anything more than her dialogues with Milton and the protagonist's reflections on her behavior. The only other character who can speak of Fulvia's inner thoughts is the old housekeeper, who barely has access to her private life. Milton is the teller of his own tale. In it, Fulvia becomes an external object of longing without agency. Throughout the novel he succeeds in making himself into the romantic hero of his readings. But he is also aware of the paradoxical dimension of his private affair:

“In che stato sono. Sono fatto di fango, dentro e fuori. Mia madre non mi riconoscerebbe. Fulvia, non dovevi farmi questo. Specie pensando a ciò che mi stava davanti. Ma tu non potevi sapere che cosa stava davanti a me, ed anche a lui e a tutti i ragazzi. Tu non devi saper niente, solo che io ti amo. Io invece debbo sapere, solo se io ho la tua anima. Ti sto pensando, anche ora, anche in queste condizioni sto pensando a te. Lo sai che se cesso di pensarti, tu muori, istantaneamente? Ma non temere, io non cesserò mai di pensarti”. (Fenoglio, 2014: 124)

In the concluding chapter, as he escapes the fascist squad chasing him, Milton pauses to reflect on his state of being. In one of his rare introspective moments, the protagonist acknowledges that the Fulvia he is fighting for only exists in his mind – should he cease thinking about her, she would indeed instantly cease to exist. His heroic effort consists in never ceasing to think about her, despite the consequences he experiences. Milton acknowledges he is now “made of mud, inside and outside,” having become one with the muddy ground he has been stepping on for days looking for Giorgio. Schmitt's definition of the “telluric character of the partisan” (2007: 92), referring to the relationship with land that makes the true partisan always a defender of local territory, takes on a different connotation for Milton. His mission is not defending the land, but rather defending the image he constructed of his own future self, an image that involves a “literarized” Fulvia whose soul shall belong only and exclusively to him.

Milton's private affair is made even more private by this sudden recognition, by his severing of the pretend connections with the real Fulvia that underpinned his mission. The third vertex of the love triangle, Giorgio, is demystified throughout the novel by the other partisans who recalled his odd fixations (for example, partisan Maté derisively calls him “Giorgio Pigiama di Seta,” in reference to the silk sleepwear Giorgio puts on every night before laying down on a straw bed). This makes the reader conscious of the distance between Giorgio as Milton thinks of him – a charming, handsome, cultivated, unreachable friend/rival – and Giorgio as others see him – a spoiled and selfish daddy's boy. When, after finally admitting to himself that the Fulvia he is fighting for exists in his imagination more than in actual reality, Milton still refuses to let go of his idea of her, he provides the key for understanding the phantasmatic nature of the private affair that pushed him to take his distance from the other partisans in the organized Resistance (triggering a series of events that led to real life consequences, e.g., the killing of the fascist officer, and the executions of Riccio and Bellini). Rather than individualistic, he is utterly lonely in his interior projection of the world around him – a projection that cannot be shared by the only two other individuals who are portrayed in it, and who seem to store the ultimate truth Milton needs to resolve the desperate love triangle of his literary heroes. As Bigazzi (2011: 192–234) points out, Milton's narrative is entirely shaped by the imaginary, by memories, and by internal reflections of the protagonist that are not shared with and by others, thus making it a hallucinatory experience. The realization of his loneliness hits Milton unexpectedly during his last, desperate escape, which also functions as a wake-up call for the reader:

Poi, mentre ancora correva, in posti nuovi o irriconoscibili dalla sua vista svanita, la mente riprese a funzionargli. Ma i pensieri venivano dal di fuori, lo colpivano in fronte come ciottoli scagliati da una fionda. “Sono vivo. Fulvia. Sono solo. Fulvia, a momenti mi ammazzi!” […] Aveva bisogno di veder gente e d’esser visto, per convincersi che era vivo, non uno spirito che aliava nell’aria in attesa di incappare nelle reti degli angeli. (Fenoglio, 2014: 127)

Throughout the novel Milton keeps wandering around the Langhe hills like a ghost, himself haunted by the ghosts of Fulvia and Giorgio, who only appear as characters in his memories. Only at the very end, when his life is truly danger for the first time and he is being chased by a squad of fascist militiamen ready to shoot him, Milton awakens to the present reality he is living, the reality of the Civil War. He blames Fulvia for almost getting him killed, but the earlier recognition of her imagined nature reflects the blame back on himself, on his own imagination. Most significantly, he desperately needs to see and especially to be seen by others, to make sure he is still alive and not a ghost. Having avoided sharing his hallucinatory experience with other partisans, having moved from partisan hideout to partisan hideout, all by himself and constantly refusing to get involved with anything outside of his own private affair, Milton finally caves and recognizes he needs to be seen by others in order to exist, for his interior experience to be validated. The plot of the novel folds on itself at the end, closing circularly as Milton returns to the place where his quest began and where he had initially spoken for the first time with the Fulvia of his imagination:

“Fulvia, Fulvia, amore mio”. Davanti alla porta di lei gli sembrava di non dirlo al vento, per la prima volta in tanti mesi. “Sono sempre lo stesso, Fulvia. Ho fatto tanto, ho camminato tanto… Sono scappato e ho inseguito. Mi sono sentito vivo come mai e mi son visto morto. Ho riso e ho pianto. Ho ucciso un uomo, a caldo. Ne ho visti uccidere, a freddo, moltissimi. Ma io sono sempre lo stesso”. (Fenoglio, 2014: 8)

The description of the partisan life he lived before the novel began perfectly mirrors all the actions he takes in the novel itself: he walked, he ran, he chased, he felt alive and dead, he killed a man and saw more being killed. But after having gone through the entirety of his private quest, Milton is not the same anymore – not the same he was before the war, nor the same as he was at the beginning of the novel. His interior sphere, built around his self-image and a reality filtered through literature, progressively erode until his final realization: on the verge of death, after his aimless circular wandering brought him back to Fulvia's old mansion, he realizes that he needs to see people and be seen by them in order to be sure he is alive. Seeing people and being seen by them is indeed the opposite of what he pursued during his private affair, which led him astray and far from the public and shared dimension of the Resistance. Having abandoned the public to fully embrace the private, Milton ends up completely isolating himself, to the point of questioning his own existence. He does not, at any point, consider his private dimension an épaisseur triste, the sad opaqueness perceived by Char after his return to civilian life; however, he never managed to encounter the “treasure” of a reconstituted public space, having spent the entirety of his quest within the limits of his own fantasy.

The novel ends with the notoriously ambiguous image of Milton ending his escape by collapsing right in front of the “wall” constituted by the trees of a small wood:

Correva, con gli occhi sgranati, vedendo pochissimo della terra e nulla del cielo. Era perfettamente conscio della solitudine, del silenzio, della pace, ma ancora correva, facilmente, irresistibilmente. Poi gli si parò davanti un bosco e Milton vi puntò dritto. Come entrò sotto gli alberi, questi parvero serrare e far muro e a un metro da quel muro crollò. (Fenoglio, 2014: 127–128)

Critics have long debated the significance of the last lines of the novel, from its existentialist undertones (Pedullà, 2001: 131–150) to Milton's blindness as reflective of his ultimate inability to see reality without the filters of memory and literary imaginary (Bigazzi, 2011: 208–216). The Civil War and the secondary characters who accompanied Milton throughout the novel entirely disappear in the last pages, leaving us with just the protagonist – perhaps no longer a partisan, perhaps already a ghost, certainly alone and hopeless. Milton had abandoned the political scope of the Resistance in the very first chapter, and during the rest of the novel pursued his own private affair, slowly consuming his imaginary until the final realization of its fictionality and his self-delusion. He is ultimately disillusioned by both his public and private reasons for engaging in the Civil War. All that is left for him is emptily performing the role of partisan fighter in the oppositional sense – to the point that while escaping the fascist squad he considers killing himself by running on a mined bridge, rather than letting himself be captured. Having flirted with but ultimately discarded the option of suicide, Milton embraces his being in the present moment as an unescapable necessity, not dissimilarly from Enne 2 who fulfills his destiny as partisan fighter with an honorable death in open confrontation with the enemy.

Conclusion

Arendt's claim that the private constituted a weightless and irrelevant “sad opaqueness” for those who had reappropriated the public realm through the antitotalitarian resistance, is counteracted by Vittorini and Fenoglio's psychological explorations of their partially autobiographical partisan characters. The private sphere, in the form of sentimental relationship for Enne 2, and of interior desire and imaginary for Milton, overtakes their commitment to the public cause of liberation. Nonetheless, the two partisans take on themselves the responsibilities derived from the initial choice to engage in the political struggle, including the unbearable weight of bringing death to others; it is indeed the weight of this absolute choice that leads them to the temptation to retreat into the private. While ultimately fulfilling, and never betraying, their mission as partisans for the liberation from totalitarianisms, Enne 2 and Milton illustrate the inner conflict inherent in the choice to engage in the public realm.

Furthermore, that the partisans’ pursuit of private affairs takes place within the context of the reappropriation of the public, is compatible with Filippetta's formulation of the Resistance as a cluster of individual sovereignties getting together to reconstruct the collective; both Enne 2 and Milton make choices and act as individuals who are fully responsible for the consequences of their actions in both the private and public sphere. With the fall of fascism, and the leviathanic national entity crumbled, individuals return to a pre-statal natural state in which not only the public order needs to be reset, but the private realm is also freed from the all-pervading tentacles of totalitarian rule. In this space Enne 2 and Milton move as free individuals, although fractured between their commitment to the public cause, and their desire to fulfill their private aspirations.