The Man Who Ruled Italy

...Where Kirkpatrick is most detailed and valuable, naturally, is in his accounts of diplomatic and government maneuver...

...This one-sided view, leading to serious misunderstandings, much reduces the value of The Day of the Lion...

...The latter means nothing to any Catholic, of course...

...Reviewed by SARAH GAINHAM Correspondent for "The Spectator," London In a book review by a London colleague some years ago I read the profoundly true complaint, "There is too much official history...

...On the contrary...

...To suppose for a moment that Hitler's purge of the Sturm-Abteilungen (SA) in June 1934 had to do with Italy or Mussolini, or anything at all apart from Hitler's fear of any rival power in the State and his concern for the attitude of the Wehrmacht to the Nazi party, is quite absurd...

...His objectivity and honesty, especially about the muddle that led to the Abyssinian adventure by Italy, are admirable...

...The Italians went with him largely out of immature nationalism, though this nationalism was not fruitless in every respect...

...Nonetheless, The Day of the Lion, especially when read just after Kirkpatrick's book, has an immediacy in its brash, rather headlong fashion which is a relief to the reader...

...He forced issues which should have been left alone, and he left untouched, or largely untouched, whole areas of power affecting internal politics where he could have achieved lasting results...

...He makes clear the conspiratorial atmosphere in which Mussolini's supposed wishes were "read from his eyes" and, as so often, were taken too far...

...and the narrative is perfectly clear —no easy matter...

...It is a little-known matter of fact (which Kirkpatrick does not make clear) that the Italians were very good colonists in their North African "possessions" and did much agronomical work of value which has been almost entirely abandoned since their departure...

...In one place "so" for "no," and again "arms" for "aims...

...kings and popes temporize...

...What causes the complaint about official history is the coldness and lack of insight the book shows about human beings...

...Yet to understand what brought Mussolini and Hitler, as well as others, to popular acclaim and power with all their half-educated Philistinism and vulgarity in highly civilized nations, we need to know much more about the structure, the social climate and the economic situation they acted upon, and which, in turn, produced them...

...Politicians maneuver, diplomats unfold their devices, statesmen are uninformed or misinformed and anything but statesmanlike...

...The real lack in both these accounts is much the same...

...On the other hand, where Hastie, who has lived in Italy for many years, deals with outside matters, he is often ludicrously mistaken...

...This opaqueness about human beings gives the whole book a rigid and unreal atmosphere, which is increased by a stiff style, some awkward phrases and a pompous syntax that often obscures meaning...

...Roy MacGregorHastie has written what Sir Ivone would certainly have called a journalist's book—and it should be borne in mind that "journalist" is, for the British, almost always a pejorative epithet...

...How could a man of Kirkpatrick's experience accept Signora Mussolini's own throw-away remarks about this event, remarks obviously inspired by a desire not to admit her concern at her previously dubious position—obvious, that is, to any woman and certainly to anyone who knows Italians...

...It has to be recalled a generation later that the FrancoBritish alliance was then of the greatest international importance...

...The mistakes that lost Italy to the Franco-British alliance, thus allowing Hitler to cover his southern flank for freedom in other directions, is beautifully set forth...

...It had been well planned before...

...Where accounts vary, however, Kirkpatrick is almost certainly right...

...A striking example is the apparent surprise shown at Rachele Mussolini's assent to a religious marriage years after her at first illicit and then civil marriage...

...Finally, something these two books lack in common: There is no believable account of Italian society to explain how this magnetic jackanapes of a man could ever rise to power and stay there for 20 years...

...Vanity, the desire to assert himself on the stage of the world—a desire which came from a childish resentment at social inadequacy— and a sorry ignorance of economics led Mussolini into adventures beyond his powers...

...These two new books about the man who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 are, as it happens, at the opposite poles of official and unofficial history...

...here and there the wording is so wooden that it reads like a translation...

...Kirkpatrick's Mussolini is a study, not of power really, but of a man who stumbled into power and quickly lost any freedom of action his situation might have offered precisely because he seems never to have understood the nature of power...

...Sir Ivone would have rejected it wholesale as unreliable...

...The account of the murder of Matteotti seems to me to be better done in MacGregor-Hastie's book...

...If only because it was so well organized, the purge could not have been mounted between the 18th and 30th of June...

...It was a wretched period in British as well as French government, and Sir Ivone makes no bones about British fumbling then and later...

...Hitler probably went to Venice in order to be able to say afterward that the "night of the long knives" had not been plotted well in advance...

...What is left of Mussolini's era is his involvement in the disastrous War...

...Neither of these books give us much of a clue...

...There is no doubt which is the "important" work...

...it is a pity he cannot be remembered by the serious work he at least began with the draining of the Pontine marshes—a project that had worried Roman rulers back to Julius Caesar and before...

...But the book does contain a mass of detail and personal observations from contemporary sources and newspapers which give in some ways a clearer, if a less studied, picture of what the Mussolini period must have been like...

...We know in general, as the Swedish minister Oxenstierna wrote of the Thirty Years' War, "You do not know, my son, with what little wisdom the world is governed" (I quote from memory...

...he would have been justified, but this kind of gossip-history is not always as worthless as the Kirkpatricks think in their official view of the world...

...Ivone Kirkpatrick's posthumous volume will probably become the standard biography in English of Mussolini for some time, and is firmly based in all those sources open to distinguished retired ambassadors but to few other contemporaries of their biographical subjects...

...But we learn nothing of the conditions of societies, the state of peoples which produced in several countries men so notably lacking in wisdom, honor, dignity or serious character, and gave them vast power...

...Possibly because the book was prepared for the press after Sir Ivone's death—I am guessing—there are some extraordinary mistakes in it, apparently typist's errors copied by the printers...