Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

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 necessities of life by the scrape of his bow, Starkie imagines a world of organic relations, in which every juggler and clown has a place in the harmonious order 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