"Mussolini," by R.J.B. Bosworth

He fought duels, seduced women, crashed planes, allied with Hitler, lost a war and ran Italy into the ground, but at heart Il Duce considered himself an artist.

By Paul Festa

Jul 9, 2002 | One would think that the man who introduced fascism to the world, tried to convince the swarthy inhabitants of the Italian peninsula they were Aryans, showered his African colonies with chemical weapons, fought duels, drove his convertible through Rome accompanied by an adolescent lion, survived multiple assassination attempts and a plane crash (he was the pilot), played the violin, read philosophy, wrote books and translated Italian poetry, was wounded in one world war, held power for a generation, executed his son-in-law, lost a second world war, and finally was shot and strung upside down in a public square with his mistress by an angry mob whose behavior was not necessarily unrepresentative of Italian public opinion at the time -- one would think that such a man would automatically qualify as a legitimate subject of human interest. But Oxford University Press has deemed it necessary to introduce to the press its new biography of Benito Mussolini, by Australian historian R.J.B. Bosworth, with the following note:

"Mussolini's Reputation Is Enjoying a Renaissance in Italy ... why? Tourists visit his (now guarded) tomb and his granddaughter is a major player in national politics. Few Americans know the slightest detail about his rule -- which spanned twenty years -- and much less about the man himself. Surprisingly, there are few original biographies written in English about this important figure in twentieth-century music."

It happens that I studied 20th century music fairly seriously, at the Juilliard School among other places, and to the best of my recollection Mussolini's name never came up. So I approached Bosworth's biography with even keener interest than I would have were its subject merely the man who ran Italy into the ground with the century's most corrosive and consequential ideological invention and, for his last act, forged with Germany an alliance whose exploits permanently disfigured the world.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bosworth's book does not live up to its publisher's claims. As a violinist, Mussolini was probably qualified to play trios with Einstein and Louis Farrakhan, and that's about the extent of his musical contribution. But even if Oxford's contention is the product of an underpaid and overcaffeinated editorial intern combined with one of those treacherous word-processing templates, it has something of the Freudian slip about it nonetheless.

The reason is that part of what makes Mussolini so weird and worth reading about is that he, like that painter of rather pretty watercolors and oils Adolf Hitler, considered himself an artist. Fresh from combat in World War I, Mussolini declared that what Italy could really use was "a man who has when needed the delicate touch of an artist and the heavy hand of a warrior." He befriended writers and painters, including (rather disastrously for the friend) Ezra Pound, and claimed that government could not function properly without art and artists. He let it be known that he started off each day reading a canto of Dante.

As with American professor of history Newt Gingrich, Mussolini's current crackpot reputation cannot alter the fact that he was a credentialed academic (however much it may diminish the academy). In times of crisis, he would retreat first to his mistresses and then to his intellectual hobbies. He published more than 44 volumes in and out of office, including the anticlerical bodice-ripper "The Cardinal's Mistress" and a critique of the Russian novel; he likened the creative rush of newspaper publishing to motherhood. In a brief period of exile before his return to power and subsequent execution, Mussolini passed some of his final idle moments translating Giosuè Carducci's "Odi Barbare" into German.

Alas, he also ruled Italy for 20 years. In Bosworth's account, the art at which Mussolini excelled during his dictatorial tenure was that of ideological bullshit. Fascism began as a notoriously slippery creed, uniting a band of agitators who were sometimes racist, sometimes anticlerical, sometimes antifeminist and sometimes antifamily. (Bosworth describes Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, one of fascism's founding fathers, as "the bold advocate of phallocracy and the end of marriage.")

The one thing that united all the fascists when they started out was a twin opposition to socialism and to Italy's liberal republican government. What united them later was Mussolini's propaganda machine, but Bosworth portrays Il Duce faking his way through policy and ideology behind an elaborate façade of omniscience and control. When it came time to lead a barely industrialized nation into the Second World War, Mussolini not only couldn't make the trains run on time, but couldn't even make the trains.

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