Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Oddly enough, the story of this bizarre and influential figure winds up being a little tedious in Bosworth's telling. Dwelling too long on the trivia of party politics and government administration, first-time biographer Bosworth seems to lose touch with the human aspect of the life as Mussolini's power waxes spectacularly and then quickly drains away. Particularly off-putting is the degree to which Bosworth assumes knowledge of 20th century European history and politics. Quick: What was the Beer Hall Putsch? The Ribbentrop-Molotov pact? What was campanilism? Who was Marshal Lyautey and why should we care? Bosworth expects you to know.
He also employs a sadistically eccentric vocabulary. It's one thing to remind readers how dim they are by using 75-million-lira words, but Prof. Bosworth keeps rapping us with his ruler by using each of the following, among other Latinate clunkers, repeatedly: lucubration, condign, irredentist, rumbustious, rusticate, pullulate. In the post-Doris Kearns Goodwin future, every history book will have too many notes, but Bosworth's decision to enter nearly 3,000 endnotes for 433 pages of text ensures that all but the most dexterous and patient of readers are going to miss out on juicy rumors and entertaining tidbits (including the speculation that the ever sickly Mussolini suffered from hepatitis C) buried there like 8-point-font needles in a textual haystack. Together with chronic stylistic intonation problems and grammatical wrong notes, these missteps suggest that our overcaffeinated intern who wrote the press release -- probably in a series of all-nighters pulled in order to catch the tail end of the recent Hitler publishing boomlet -- also edited the book.
Bosworth's larger failing, though, is in not giving us a more vivid portrait of such an intriguingly messy subject. He is self-consciously preoccupied with providing a corrective to the 6,000-page Renzo De Felice biography, produced in seven volumes between 1965 and 1997 and thought by most anti-fascists to be overly sympathetic to its subject. He carefully weighs the two sides of a succession of historiographical questions pertaining to Mussolini studies and sometimes comes down on one side or the other, but never manages to make the history or his subject cohere or come to life.
Was Mussolini a sort of artist of politics or statecraft? Was he some mad, megalomaniac revolutionary who shared his beloved Beethoven's ambition not merely to shape what he inherited but to create the future whole with his own hands? Surely Beethoven, along with Mussolini's contemporaries Picasso and Gertrude Stein, spent their creative lives cheerfully burning down everything that came before them. But granting Mussolini the identity he coveted, that of artist, of one possessed by this kind of murderous appetite for creation, gives him altogether too much credit.
The best way to sum up the Mussolini catastrophe is probably with a sexual metaphor. Il Duce was, like the more recently impeached American president, capable of inspiring the sexually charged affections of women a fraction of his age and of maintaining a busy extramarital sex life. Early on in the Mussolini administration, the international press described his foreign policy as "virile." He was muscular and athletic, dwarfing the Italian king; he fought his duels with a sword, fenced with a saber, and made it known he eschewed effete pajamas in order to sleep in his underwear. Did Il Duce wear boxers or briefs? Italy between the wars was all too eager to find out. In psychosexual terms, he was a classic top, and geographically, economically and politically, post-World War I Italy was a bottom badly in need of one.
"Italy wishes to be treated by the great nations of the world like a sister and not like a waitress," Mussolini said, parroting a nationalist slogan current at the time. But once he assumed power, Mussolini's attitude toward his country and the world turned out to be anything but fraternal. He raped his colonies and took advantage of his popularity to tear up his marriage contract (i.e., the republican constitution that made him prime minister). He is frequently caricatured as a strutting, macho prick, and why not? That's exactly what he was.
Mussolini's fall from power followed directly from his obscene courtship with Adolf Hitler and a typically male overestimation of his own potency. Is it any wonder he wound up Adolf's bottom? Is it any wonder Italy wound up getting screwed? The new wave of fascist nostalgia and revivalism that Oxford refers to is nothing more than the actions of a scarred, abandoned lover sentimentalizing the memory of her abuser and dialing his old number in the middle of the night. Expect similar results.
