for the Irish Free State. In the early phase of the crisis, he argued that League sanctions might induce the regime’s fall, thus removing the strongest barrier to a communist Italy; in its later phase, he contended that international pressure on Italy’s colonial expansion would only drive the nation toward alliance with Hitler.62 Published in the Fine Gael–aligned Irish Independent, these articles reflect the contradictory elements at work in Irish right-of-center politics, from pro–British Ascendancy conservatives to extreme Catholic chauvinists to right-revolutionary fellow travelers, all united only in their opposition to de Valera. Flipping the terms of the government’s stance, Starkie characterizes the Covenant as an apparatus “based not on right or justice, but on force,” an instrument designed to serve the status quo by denying national progress.63 While these articles made little headway with Irish readers, the Italian government nevertheless commissioned Starkie to write a book justifying its case.64 By the time The Waveless Plain appeared in 1938, it was 504 pages long and hardly delivered the kind of propaganda coup initially envisioned by the Italians, who by this time were no longer interested in vindicating decisions made years earlier. Even with the bungled circumstances of its publication, Starkie’s idiosyncratic travelogue is an important index to the appeal of fascism. In its closing pages, he stares at the Palazzo del Littorio (Palace of the Lictors), the newly built headquarters of the Fascist Party in Rome, finding it “a fitting symbol of the modern idea which must harmonize with its ancient surroundings.”65 Throughout the book, it is the realization of this “harmony,” as an orchestration of unity and difference, which commands his attention.
In order to convey the various notes comp0sing this “harmony,” Starkie outwardly makes little of his professional credentials in the travelogue, instead presenting himself as a worldly amateur. This posture is central to the book’s authorial address, for it establishes a rhetorical position from which to offer observations of Italian society and the international rivalries underpinning the text’s composition.66 Although Starkie is not shy about mentioning official negotiations and diplomatic intrigue, these matters are often refracted through images of himself as a distanced and passive consumer of media reports, gotten from either newspapers or radio broadcasts. In this, he demonstrates his removal, even his alienation, from events as they are happening, a condition of simultaneous dispersion and massification created by liberal democratic institutions. His shorthand for this condition is “public opinion.” In contrast to this combination of atomization and aggregation, he narrates international differences through “localized,” face-to-face scenes of conversation, in the participatory exchanges to which his amateur status grants him access. This authorial pose takes two related forms, depending on his interlocutors. When moving within British circles, Starkie plays the role of patient intermediary, explaining to those too caught up in their own prejudices the nuances of Italian society and fascist policy. These exchanges work most often by showing him being dismissed or ridiculed as a dilettante: “Carefully I tried to explain to those [British] arm-chair critics that even if they were correct in their sweeping judgment of Italy in 1918, she had changed considerably since that date: but they pooh-poohed my remarks, saying that I was led astray by my affection for Italian singing, art and beauty.”67 Such staged encounters reinforce the importance of this “affection,” which is sharply distinguished from the aggressive provincialism and skeptical condescension of his British counterparts. As an amateur, Starkie functions as a knowledgeable and worldly guide, rather than as lecturing pedagogue. This guise takes a slightly different form when he engages Italians of all social backgrounds, casting himself as a figure in equal measures straight man and buffone. Entering into conversation, Starkie becomes the foreign naïf, whose misapprehensions and misunderstandings are genially corrected by firsthand testimony to the lived truth of Mussolini’s Italy. When he raises British or League objections to Italian maneuvering in East Africa, these arguments are handily rebuffed and become the occasions for reminders of unreciprocated Italian goodwill toward Britain. Starkie never makes it seem that he has been treated unfairly in these exchanges, which inevitably end in smiles all around and a rededication to mutual understanding. Unlike the opinionated belligerence of the British, the Italians’ passionate devotion to a self-determined life is collective, inclusive, and inspiring.
These two seemingly antithetical authorial poses are resolved by a third identity Starkie assumes, in which patient interlocutor and shambolic buffone are joined in the figure of the wandering minstrel. As an embodiment of itinerant autonomy, Starkie’s third authorial identity is less dependent on Irish (or Celtic) antecedents than on tropes of the spirited “Gypsy” always on the move along the edges of modern civilization. Reflecting Starkie’s lifelong fascination with (and genuine advocacy of) the Romany people, their cultural traditions, and their rights, this self-figuration was nonetheless something of a calling card for him, a persona glimpsed in Micheál MacLiammóir’s remarkable description of a chance encounter with Starkie on Malta in the late thirties:
One day while we were rehearsing on the stage somebody announced that “Doctor Estarka from Dublin” wanted to see us, and into the stalls with a fiddle under his arm, a stick in his hand, and a knapsack on his back, a plump and smiling troubadour, walked Walter Starkie. Was he returning from Barbary or on his way to Spain? Was he searching for gypsies or flying from the gilded fleshpots of Carthage? We could not tell: with Don Gypsy Starkie of Trinity College, Lansdowne Road, and the Albaicín, everything is possible, everything is improbable, everything is majestically unreal. Would he produce a bottle of the wine of Samothrace from his wallet, or a pack of cards painted with the images of Fate and Change and Adventure from his pocket, or a rabbit from his hat, or merely a sheaf of Cooke’s travel cheques?68
Starkie’s performative display should not distract from the work it accomplishes. Janet Lyon has noted how representations of “Gypsy” lawlessness and poverty were the flipside to those deploying the “Gypsy” as “emblem of natural liberty, unencumbered mobility, communal loyalty and harmony, admirably impervious to manipulation by the state and everywhere subverting the disciplinarity of evolving modern institutions.”69 In The Waveless Plain, Starkie recounts in several chapters how he learned the value of the “roving life” among the “Gypsies” of Calabria and Puglia just after the First World War. In this encounter with a form of communality endowed with age-old knowledge and spiritual youthfulness, Starkie first discovers what he later finds incarnated in Mussolini’s Italy.70 While not unrelated to the Yeatsian vision of hard-riding aristocrat and stumblebum peasant-vagrant standing equally (or harmoniously) in opposition to bourgeois mediocrity, Starkie’s connection of “Gypsy” and fascist speaks directly to a desired immediacy between individual freedom and social organization. Against the alienation endemic to liberalism, Starkie finds an authentic sociality animated by personality, a “system” of living that is a philosophy of life.
As “Don Gypsy Starkie of Trinity College,” the wandering minstrel with his traveler’s checks, Starkie is thus the perfect intermediary between the unalienated immediacy of Italy and the rationalized, dissociating systems of northern Europe. Serving in one sense as a rebuke to British “arm-chair critics,” this guise is the positive embodiment of being “led astray by [his] affection for Italian singing, art and beauty.” In another, however, the wandering minstrel is a constitutive element in Starkie’s projection of the prelapsarian social world first encountered twenty years earlier:
One of my good friends was a juggler called Delco with whom I had, before demobilization, performed on many an occasion in the Camp Coliseum. Delco introduced me to many singers, acrobats, and clowns of every variety, who earn their living roaming from Taranto to Reggio. Most of the time, however, I led the life of a lonely minstrel, trudging for miles along the dusty roads, and halting in the cool of olive trees during the heat of the day. At cottages by the way I would buy some bread and ricotta (a cream cheese of Calabria), which satisfied the appetite. As for wine, there was always plenty—delicious, fragrant Calabrian wine full of sunshine and memories. In the evenings I would go to this or that café in the villages and pull out my fiddle. The host would be glad to see me, for in the South of Italy all life is full of song.71
Earning the
