of things. In this non-fragmented social order, he is not alienated from his labor—his brow never sweats “in the cool of olive trees”—because his life is vibrant and imbued with passion. Given the chronic misery of the Italian South, his equation of ricotta and wine, however good they might be, with the good life full stop is telling. By the time Starkie was writing of his youthful tramping, the fascist government had outlawed discussion of the “southern question,” asserting that the regime’s modernization programs had answered it once and for all.72 Although social conditions in the Mezzogiorno had actually worsened since 1922, the regime’s propaganda relentlessly closed the gap between assertion and reality. In 1933, the government founded Ente Radio Rurale in response to complaints from rural teachers that “children in their paesi had never even heard Mussolini’s voice; consequently for many young people Fascism and its leaders lacked immediate appeal.” This agency distributed radios to schools and libraries and installed loudspeakers in town halls and cafes to encourage collective listening, aiming “to expose systematically the inhabitants of Italy’s traditionally isolated rural masses to Fascist propaganda.”73 The year before Starkie’s book appeared, the government had begun producing and selling the Radio Balilla, an inexpensive receiver set designed to put a radio in every home: as a “machine of attention,” the radio would not only inform, but persuade.74 For the South, the regime equated radio with modernization itself. Starkie never mentions these developments, for they are the bureaucratic means behind the enchanting ends to which his attention is drawn. As a place of manufactured immediacy, Mussolini’s Italy confirms his social desire for integration with no accompanying loss of autonomy.
In framing this world of unalienated social interactions as the ground for a true individualism, Starkie thus universalizes not his own position in that world, but his projection of that position—namely, as the wandering minstrel. Nostalgically celebrating his ability to cast off all ties to “humdrum life” and move among “a heap of disreputable friends—street arabs, beggars, hobos,” he nevertheless recognizes in retrospect the element of slumming in this period of his life. Significantly, it is this recognition that reminds him of Ireland: “Now there followed days of real freedom. As soon as I got out in the open country I changed my personality, for my thoughts travelled back to those days in Ireland when I used to go about from fair to fair with old blind fiddlers in Dowras Bay and Cushendun. I remembered the day when one of the Coffeys of Killorglin put a tinker’s curse on me, saying in his wrath: ‘May you tramp the roads till the feet wear off you, and may they find you dead in a ditch.’ ”75 It only becomes clear much later in his text, and then only implicitly, that Starkie believes this curse has come true, but as its inversion: no longer able to wander the roads earning his living with a violin, he now finds himself immobilized and “dead” in the faculty of Romance languages at Trinity. However ostentatious this disavowal of his professional life is, it serves to cue a distinction implied by his comparison of Ireland to Italy. Rather than the depersonalizing parliamentary democracy of the former, where the majority (or the “many”) rules, Italy is where organic social relations still exist, precisely because the dictatorship is committed to this “real freedom.” While once he could change his personality in Ireland, this liberty is now only fully possible in Italy. Whereas Ireland has all but lost its chance to revive itself through the commanding personality of a leader, Italy has modernized the traditional social order through Mussolini’s totalizing charisma.
For Starkie, Mussolini’s voice functions as the index to this charisma. This relationship is most evident in the twenty-ninth chapter of The Waveless Plain, in which Starkie recounts an interview with the Duce he conducted in the summer of 1927. He first heard Mussolini’s voice “blaring through the loud-speakers of the piazzas” in 1919, but offers a quick panorama of visual “impressions” to encapsulate the leader’s subsequent triumphs: “I had watched his gestures of defiance when he was dramatizing a crisis, and I had seen him in the distance winnowing the wheat or ploughing the boundary of yet another Pontine city.”76 However, these “impressions” come from some of the regime’s most conspicuous propaganda campaigns. Beginning in the mid-twenties, live transmissions of sporting events, with the sound of impassioned crowds picked up by mobile microphones, had attracted the attention of fascist propagandists: “The regime quickly recognized the effectiveness of the technique in arousing listener interest, and it was an easy matter to transfer microphones to mass rallies from where enthusiastic cheers of the spectators could be heard by radio audiences.”77 This aural technique was matched by the visual spectacle of Mussolini plumping in front of crowds, with the camera, like the microphone, capturing his ability to give shape to the masses. The visions of Mussolini harvesting wheat and marking reclaimed land are nothing more than stock images of the Battaglia del Grano (Battle of Wheat) and of bonifica integrale (the reclamation of pestilential land for development), two of the regime’s most notable demonstrations of modernizing self-sufficiency.78 By presenting these highly mediated “impressions” as scenes witnessed firsthand, Starkie is able to raise a pressing matter:
My impressions [of Mussolini] group themselves in two-fold series. I saw him beneath the Italian sky, and his personality swept into my view at repeated intervals when I was beneath the sky of England or Ireland. It was difficult at times to balance my Italian with my British impressions. It is said that distance lends enchantment to the view, but the reverse was true of my memories, for whereas in Italy I would feel myself swept along by the Duce’s magnetic personality and his rhythmic mastery of the crowd, when in Dublin, London or Edinburgh my Anglo-Irish caution and watchful prudence would assert themselves. In Northern Europe I was conscious of being outside the wizard’s magic circle and thus beyond his influence. In my own country I lived at a slower tempo and the characteristic Mussolinian rhetoric at times jarred on me because it was so different to the Anglo-Irish habit of understatement.79
In staging this doubled perspective, Starkie can begin to explain why Mussolini does not translate into British, or northern European, society: quite simply, the peaks of his dynamic range are too high, and he goes too fast. Although Starkie identifies this “tempo” with Mussolini himself, he assigns blame for its failure to reach fully into the Anglophone world with the official propagandists who translate the speeches into English. By providing literal renderings of his words, they give false impressions, for the translations fail to convey the speaker’s “magnetic personality” into the context of their foreign reception. They offer only the rhetorical force of his words, at the expense of their formal power. For his part, Starkie wishes he could translate Mussolini’s words: these would be specially prepared for the inclination of Anglophone minds, “in order that the Leader’s message might arouse sympathy among the slow-moving, slow-acting Britons who refuse to consider Life as a series of dramatic crises to be overcome.”80 What the official translations do not capture, then, is the aesthetic dimension of his charisma.
This failure is in turn compounded by what Starkie calls the “distortion” caused by hostile reception conditions in Britain. Again, the ability to counterpoise “northern” and “southern” experiences permits him to identify with the object of critique in order precisely to amplify his critique. If official translations of Mussolini’s speeches fail to consider the competencies and biases of their intended audience, this failure is as equally determined by the fact that these factors are moving targets. Raising the specter of British manipulation, Starkie suggests that the distance between Italy and the British Isles is produced not simply by geography and temperament, but also by motivated intervention: “In England, as a result of the distortion caused by ceaseless propaganda directed against the Dictator in newspapers, books, cinema and radio, his personality, as seen so clearly under the blue sky of the South, became in the North obscured, even obliterated by a mass of excrescences.”81 In other words, Italian propaganda cannot receive a fair hearing in the British Isles because of the intervening presence of British propaganda. The statement’s absurdity is mitigated somewhat by noting the implied correspondence between the “wizard’s magic circle” and the democrat’s invisible net, the former operating openly through the immediacies of personal experience, the latter disguising and legitimizing itself in the social relations of a depersonalized culture: the dictator’s personality is lost
