the increasingly authoritarian minister of justice of the Irish Free State, has been assassinated by the IRA: “I, like many of my countrymen, saw in him the strong leader of the future, for Kevin O’Higgins was only in his early thirties. His short career had been full of promise. I recalled the incisive quality of his speeches, his mordant sarcasm, his moments of passionate seriousness, his flashes of malicious wit. I visualized him standing before the crowd, dominating them by his lucid mind and slow, precise voice.”82 This assassination served for many on the Irish right as a bleak reminder of the state’s instability and lack of programmatic commitment to dramatic reform. Particularly in retrospect, O’Higgins represents for Starkie the alternative to de Valera. In this reverie of O’Higgins’s “promise,” Starkie thus locates Ireland between Italy and Britain, a third entity drifting inexorably, though not yet finally, away from the leader’s unifying personality toward destructive atomization.
This Yeatsian vision of O’Higgins’s power leads immediately to the description of entering into Mussolini’s presence, which now reads like something more appropriate to the final chapters of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. Brought by an usher to the threshold of Mussolini’s chamber, Starkie feels himself shrink in the face of authority: “At first I thought the room was empty, but then in the far distance, seated behind a diminutive table, I saw a small man gazing at me. As I advanced towards the table I felt myself grow smaller and smaller and the man behind the desk grow larger and larger, for his eyes gazed straight through me as I walked timidly towards him. Before I reached the table Mussolini rose and came forward and extended his hand.”83 Yet in this testimony to Mussolini’s unimpeachable, larger-than-life presence, Starkie’s own authority is better apprehended by way of O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, for reasons that Saerchinger’s contemporaneous account of interviewing the dictator makes plain: “The usual routine, which has been frequently described by others, now followed. The smiling flunky opens the door; you perceive the Duce at the other end of the enormously long, dusky room, sitting behind a massive, cornered desk, dressed in a morning coat, gray trousers, and the conventional wing collar and gray tie—a stocky man of rather less than medium height, of swarthy complexion and earnest, almost weary mien. He rises, greets you with outstretched arm, and holds it till you are near enough to shake hands; then you sit down, opposite him at the desk.”84
It is now difficult to gauge how recognizable such generic “borrowing” would have been to common readers, but, like the “personalizing” of stock propaganda images, this technique serves Starkie’s purpose of explaining Mussolini’s appeal. Dressed for their interview in a blue serge suit, Mussolini charms Starkie not as the snarling prophet of “Life,” but as an intellectual. Neither “arm-chair critic” nor jaded pressman, Starkie is, in turn, the sympathetic listener, from whom the movements and “tempo” of Mussolini’s voice receive a fair hearing. Although the Duce offers to conduct the interview in Italian, French, or English, they speak Italian, in order that Starkie may catch the “spontaneity of [Mussolini’s] native expression” while delivering a comprehensive roll call of achievements. More than “impressions,” the disquisition is narrated as a deep contextualization of Mussolini’s philosophy, with Starkie marveling at the dictator’s unification of theory and practice: he discourses about Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Sorel; he works studiously and tirelessly to overcome historical impediments; he loves architecture. Silently reintroduced, Starkie’s professional credentials enable him to legitimize Mussolini’s program of national development as more than mere policy—as, indeed, a philosophy. The bare-chested drainer of swampland becomes no manual laborer, but the thoughtful architect of national destiny. This scene of face-to-face immediacy transforms Starkie as well: no longer the alienated and distanced consumer of mediated “distortion,” no longer the passionless, desiccated intellectual, he becomes a communicant, at once receiving the dictator’s voice and imparting its “spontaneity” and “tempo” to readers. As a unified “personality,” he becomes an auratic listener.
In the context of the face-to-face interview, this transformation occurs in the immediacy of Mussolini’s presence. What is therefore especially striking is how Starkie’s sense of the Duce’s commanding personality is narrated through an invocation of radio transmission and reception. Sitting across from Mussolini in the dark room, Starkie seems instead to face a receiver set, its dials glowing as the intervening space fills with the dictator’s voice: “To-day I was hypnotized by his large dark eyes which sparkled when his voice became animated. That voice had still a trace of metallic harshness and the words poured out in jerky, rapid sentences which jabbed at my sluggish mind.... His dark, vivacious eyes seemed to light up his face as he spoke. There was harmony in his face and movement, as though the thoughts in his mind set up an unending rhythm which sent numerous tiny electric currents of luminous strength through his frame.”85 As a catalog of keywords (voice, harmony, rhythm) meant to correlate Mussolini’s technique to social organization, this extended figuration of the dictator as radio set is crucial to Starkie’s address to his readers, yet the implications of this writerly sleight of hand are deferred at this point in the text. In keeping with the “waveless” immediacy that characterizes his presentation of fascist Italy, Starkie gives a distinctly tactile and more recognizably aesthetic impression of Mussolini’s authority:
He possesses the power of adapting himself to other men. He knows their moods, and being a virtuoso he knows how to play upon them, awaken them, and extract their inner thoughts. It is part of his greatness that he feels an intense interest in other men, no matter how humble they may be. His knowledge of life has not been derived from books but from living personalities, both those with whom he can sympathize and those against whom he can sharpen his tusks in battle. I then recalled the early story which he had written describing the wild violinist who raises his public up to an orgy of excitement—a significant story, when we remember that he himself is a violinist. As I looked at his broad white hands with well-padded fingers I said to myself that he had the touch of the violinist, the natural vibrato, which is a source of power when added to his supreme mastery of rhythms.86
Rather than manipulation, with its ideological connotations of lost autonomy and sinister depersonalization, Mussolini’s “hands-on” sympathy releases potential in “other men” that is otherwise latent or unrealized. Always live, this performance of mutual cooperation is made total in the “touch of the violinist,” the manual feel combining “natural vibrato” and rhythmic mastery that draws listeners to the virtuoso by first transforming them into listeners. Whereas fascist propaganda often portrayed Mussolini as a sculptor shaping the unformed masses into a unified people, Starkie offers in this passage an aural equivalent: at once expert amateur and impassioned maestro, Mussolini is the “wild violinist” playing to “his public.” With its natural, powerful resonance, this vibratory sympathy belongs to what Douglas Kahn has called “a vibrational scheme found throughout modernism, whereby communication occurs through the correspondence of internal and external vibrations, the sympathetic identifications of different vessels, often bridging different perceptual registers and always attempting to elude cultural mediation.”87 On a totalized scale, then, Starkie’s depiction of Mussolini as violinist, playing on his people’s sympathies, presents an organic polity achieved through and organized by sound.
It is notably in the context of this virtuosity that The Waveless Plain first broaches the re-creation of Rome as an imperial center. Given the unpleasant colloquial associations of fiddling Roman emperors, it is perhaps wise that Starkie focuses his text at this point on the dictator’s radiophonic presence. Having been commissioned to write the book in the heat of the Ethiopian crisis, Starkie uses the East African war to explicate the “numerous tiny electric currents” of Mussolini’s personality, by facing the radio at this decisive moment. In his description of Mussolini’s announcement of the invasion, Starkie quotes three passages from the speech, one of which pointedly echoes his sense of the Duce’s virtuosity:
Black Shirts of the Revolution! Men and women of all Italy! Italians scattered throughout the world and beyond the seas: listen!... For many months past the wheel of destiny, driven by our calm, determined purpose,
