Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

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 to a “mass of excrescences.” With exquisite pacing, Starkie here reintroduces the subject of Ireland. The night before his interview with Mussolini, Starkie learns that Kevin O’Higgins, 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