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The Remediation of Waves

In early August 1935, the government of the Irish Free State lodged an official protest with J. H. Thomas, the British secretary of state for the Dominions, over a detail included in an imperial report on conditions in the Horn of Africa. Signed by Eamon de Valera, who was acting in his capacity as the Irish minister for external affairs, the protest took the form of a short note. Although conveyed in the stilted niceties of procedural communications, it registers with particular force the dismay felt in the Irish diplomatic service at the appearance of an unfortunately familiar figure:

I have the honour to refer to the Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the people of Somaliland, 1934, (Colonial Report No. 1707) printed and published by H.M. Stationery Office.

2. On page 26 of this report, in the second paragraph, the following two sentences occur: “In this condition the Somali may be compared with the traditional Irishman when well primed with the liquor of his country. The latter brandishes his shillelagh and looks for heads to crack; the Somali sharpens his spear and begins to think of blood-feuds to settle and flocks to loot.”

3. My Government feel obliged to protest that such an example of extreme bad taste and mean racial propaganda in relation to this country should have been allowed to appear in an official British report.

4. The Government of Saorstát Éireann had believed that the attitude revealed by this quotation belonged to another age, and they hope that the Government of the United Kingdom will take steps to discourage the spirit of which the offending sentences are a manifestation.¹

Possessing an administrative demeanor that was “lazy to the point of inertia,” Thomas was perhaps not the best mediator in this dispute, and it is unclear how, or even whether, he officially responded to the protest.² The invocation of this figure belonging to “another age” could not have failed to conjure for the Irish the repertory of Victorian anti-Irish caricature, from capering stage Irishmen to menacing simian grotesques, while unambiguously demonstrating the residual power of past relations still operative in the present.³ Even so, the offending item had an all-too-contemporary referent, one that inspired political misgivings in the Irish beyond any ethnic sensitivity. In a newly pressurized international context, the recrudescence of “mean racial propaganda” was not the idle residue of another age, but an exacerbating and intensified factor in reemergent antagonisms. Far from manifesting an exceptionalist sense of grievance, the Irish were protesting something more than the latest entry to the catalog of British “extreme bad taste.” At a moment when the great European powers were ready to return to outright military competition for colonial and strategic advantage, nowhere more dramatically than in East Africa, the force of the protest could not be fully registered within the strictly bilateral frame of Anglo-Irish relations. If racial or ethnic propaganda remained dangerously vibrant, the conditions animating its production and circulation outstripped the representational continuities of its images. In miniature, the Irish note marks the complex position of postindependence Ireland in a world of uneven development, rival ideological appeals, and renewed imperial antagonism.

This chapter examines the political dynamics driving both the intensification of “mean racial propaganda” and the Irish response to its deployment by attending to how they became manifest during the crisis provoked by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. As the juncture at which a number of disparate forces coalesced, the Ethiopian crisis was a stark turning point during the interwar years, representing not only an early confrontation with fascist aggression but a truly global conflict conducted among various publics organized and mobilized through international media services. Although the Spanish Civil War attracted greater attention from European observers (a fact reflected in modernist scholarship), the Ethiopian crisis constituted on a much wider scale the confluence of political, ideological, and technological pressures that later swelled in the Second World War. As a war of colonial conquest, the Italian invasion was a belated and noxious finale to the “scramble for Africa” unleashed by the Berlin Conference in 1885, nominally orchestrated to advance civilization in every corner of the globe. Yet Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations, its sovereignty guaranteed by the collective security policy instituted in the League Covenant. Italian designs on the East African state were thus also an attack on the protocols of international arbitration fashioned in the wake of the First World War. With its unilateral resort to overwhelming military force (including the use of poison gas) to vanquish local resistance, the fascist state flouted international conventions and public opinion in a manner that was genuinely innovative. Whereas Italian belligerence could appear as the residue of “another age,” it was in retrospect the harbinger of a more recognizably modern phase of imperial aggression. For many at the time, these Janus-faced lineaments were simply the gauge of common sense, an attitude most famously articulated for English readers by Evelyn Waugh:

It was evident, within six years of [the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1928] having been made, that the Abyssinians had no intention of maintaining the spirit of that treaty. Italy had expected tangible commercial advantages. Her ambitions were clear and, judged by the international morality of America, Japan or any of the League Powers, legitimate. Abyssinia could not claim recognition on equal terms by the civilised nations and at the same time maintain her barbarous isolation; she must put her natural resources at the disposal of the world; since she was obviously unable to develop them herself, it must be done for her, to their mutual benefit, by a more advanced Power. By the 1928 Treaty, Italy believed that she had been chosen for this office.⁴

In its conflicted mix of residual and emergent forces, then, the crisis was a signally modernist event.

For the Irish Free State, the crisis marked a definitive shift in its orientation toward the world. Since admission to the League in 1924, it had used the forum to work and “align” with the bloc of small nations in advocating for international relations based on judicial equality among states and diplomatic negotiation in matters of communal disagreement. Particularly after de Valera’s election as prime minister in 1932, national self-determination was linked to international cooperation, a relationship most expressly practiced through firm support for the League’s (stated) policy of collective security, which was believed to offer a mechanism for protecting national independence. Spurred in part by mounting postcolonial disenchantment with the conditions of Irish life, a vocal collection of domestic critics castigated these democratic policies as outmoded and archaic, instead endorsing the image of the fascist state as the modernizing force that could fully and finally realize national freedom. Against this background of internal dissatisfaction, the growing confidence of fascist agitation and surging appeal of dictatorial leadership around the world could not be dismissed by the Irish government as “nonnational” affairs. Even as it became clearer that the League could not quash the ambitions of great powers bent at once on escalation and containment, Geneva nonetheless remained a post crucial to Irish autonomy. When the League proved unable to safeguard, by whatever means available, the integrity of one member state against attack by another, the Irish government lost what lingering faith it had in the ability of collective security to uphold national sovereignty, as Michael Kennedy notes: “Before the failure of sanctions on Italy, de Valera had decided that Ireland would de-prioritise Geneva if the League could not effectively solve the Abyssinian crisis. Abyssinia was not a turning point in itself[;] the decision had been reached sometime beforehand. It was a testing ground. The League’s failure in Africa turned de Valera away from the League as an institution that could provide for Ireland’s security.”⁵ With the acquiescence of Britain and France to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, the League ceased to represent in any real sense the political aspirations and practical stance of the Irish state. Only through the Ethiopian crisis did the Irish state come to base its foreign policy on absolute self-preservation, a bearing most acutely registered in the neutrality policy made legal in the 1937 Constitution and strictly enacted during the Second World War. If neutrality is still frequently regarded as the expression of an inward-looking, exceptionalist propensity characterizing Irish independence, it is important to appreciate how it was in fact a rational response to the state’s precarious position in a world all too prone to misrecognize belligerence for necessity.

In its three-part organization, this chapter aligns a series of instances in which national trials were actively mediated through international exchanges. In doing so, it follows the circulatory networks of printed propaganda, diplomatic communications, and radio transmissions along an itinerary ranging from Dublin and Addis Ababa to Geneva and Rome. Its first section outlines several interlocking crises of internationalism that materialized with particular force as Italy launched its campaign to justify the annexation of Ethiopia. By aligning geopolitical strategic rivalries, newly viable possibilities for long-range radio broadcasting, and the institutional workings of the League of Nations, the section establishes the political context for the remainder of the chapter, which explores two divergent Irish conceptions of the singular voice made manifest in the disquiet of international hostilities. The second section attends to the work of the Irish delegation at Geneva during the Ethiopian crisis, when de Valera emerged as an especially strong critic of the abandonment of the East African state in favor of balances of power. While long presented as the sole voice of Irish politics in these years, de Valera acted on the canny advice of the civil servants permanently stationed in Geneva, a relationship evinced through comparison of internal diplomatic documents and his formidable speeches during the crisis made in the League Assembly and on the radio. Rather than the caricature of a neurotic strongman, de Valera’s leadership as it played out in front of the microphone demonstrates a resolute commitment to democratic process. In its final section, the chapter reads Walter Starkie’s Waveless Plain, an autobiographical travelogue in which he presents fascist Italy as the harmonious realization of individual freedom and social organization. In conjuring a state of unalienated immediacy predicated on Mussolini’s personality, Starkie mystifies the institutional remediation underwriting his validation of the dictator’s voice. Unlike an item belonging to “another age,” this mystification of institutional formations instead exhibits an emergent tendency.

The Crisis of Internationalism

In 1935, Ethiopia was one of the few areas on the continent of Africa not under direct or nominal control by European powers. Located at the intersection of Near Eastern, North African, and Equatorial African spheres of interest, the kingdom occupied a geographical location that made it especially attractive to outsiders in the first decades of the century. Surrounded by British, French, and Italian territories, Ethiopia was a diffuse polity that had only recently centralized its governmental administration, though it was still largely dependent on international cooperation for material and technological assistance. Despite being denied access to the sea by its imperial neighbors, the nation was largely understood in relation to water. With its strategic proximity to the sea route between Europe and Asia, Ethiopia was drawn into the geopolitical rivalries that structured political and economic relations from the Straits of Gibraltar through the Suez Canal and Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. Sitting atop the headwaters of the Nile at Lake Tana, it was further pulled into the orbit of Mediterranean tensions because of British interests in Egyptian cotton production. During the mid-twenties, in fact, Britain, France, and Italy had agreed to divide Ethiopia into spheres of economic influence, a move determined at least in part to dissuade Japan from continuing to invest in the kingdom’s development and modernization. If nothing else, this maneuvering was a sign of growing unease at challenges to the balance of power established at the end of the First World War, a relationship that was apparent even as it was playing out:

Under post-war conditions too, as resulting from the change in the balance of sea-power and the Washington and London Treaties, the position of Abyssinia is exceptional. Supremacy in the oceans of the world has come to be divided between the United States, Japan and the British Empire, the United States controlling the Western Atlantic and the Eastern Pacific, Japan the Western Pacific and Great Britain the Eastern Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Supremacy in the waterways that connect these oceans naturally forms part of this scheme. Thus Abyssinia lies within a region where the police-power of the League [of Nations] would, in the event of trouble, naturally fall to be exercised mainly by Great Britain. In accordance with the spirit of the collective system she would not wish to exercise it alone; but it could not be exercised at all without her active co-operation.⁶

For many contemporary observers, including the one just quoted, the truly “exceptional” fact of Ethiopia’s position was its continuing independence.

Given the drift of international relations in the early thirties, trouble was not long in coming. For the Italian government, changes to the balance of power were merely overdue recognition of Italy’s claims to the colonial spoils the British and French had promised it in return for joining the Allied nations in World War I. The consolidation of Italian East Africa was viewed as a means to enhance Italy’s prestige among world powers, while imperial expansion would help to fulfill the promise of the fascist regime. Directed toward both domestic and foreign audiences, this message portentously announced Mussolini’s designs for an empire in the greater Mediterranean region, which would alleviate Italy’s chronic problems of underdevelopment and emigration by securing the geopolitical platform on which to stage the nation’s renascent power. However rosy its alignment of political desires and practical realities might be, this thrust effectively linked fascist ideological policy to the regime’s strategic objectives, and in doing so provided a unified rhetorical focus to its multifarious propaganda campaigns. The implementation of this policy was decisive in hardening the politics of the decade’s second half:

Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 threw British and French Mediterranean policy into disarray and compelled the two democracies, as well as Nazi Germany, to reconsider their views of Fascist Italy. What is often dismissed as “the Abyssinian diversion” actually started the chain of events that brought Italy into armed conflict with Britain and France in June 1940. Beginning in 1936 Germany and Italy developed the basis for a mutually advantageous partnership, which encouraged Italy to engage in proxy wars with France in Spain and East Africa. Yet the British government firmly believed it could entice Mussolini away from ever-closer ties to Hitler. That diplomacy only created friction between London and Paris, while Fascist Italy took what it could from the British and continued to strengthen its ties to Nazi Germany.⁷

Although the Italians offered diplomatic, legal, and moral grounds for their actions against Ethiopia, the final justification for conquest was simply, and blatantly, that Italy was in urgent need of colonial expansion.

This “watery” strategic context to the Ethiopian crisis had its medial equivalent in the ideological struggles of the international airwaves. One of the major developments in international relations during the interwar period was the advent of national radio services designed for foreign listeners. While some cross-border reception of domestic programming was unavoidable among the densely packed nations of Europe, economic and political tensions encouraged the use of radio as an offensive instrument, with deliberate transmission across national frontiers increasingly employed as a central implement of ideological competition. As technological advances in transmission and reception made during the First World War were adapted to civilian use in the twenties, national and commercial radio services relied primarily on long and medium wave signals to broadcast within circumscribed geographical areas, offering programming that addressed national or regional audiences in much the same way that daily newspapers addressed and cultivated particular domestic readerships. Although the potential for international broadcasting had been recognized, radio in its first decade of widespread civilian use was mostly directed at national communities of listeners, and states and their broadcasting authorities asserted a monopoly of address within their jurisdictions, free of internal dissent and external critique. Whereas newspapers, books, and films were subject to customs regulation and seizure, and thus could be denied entry to one state from another, radio waves did not respect geopolitical borders. In their earliest manifestation, radio hostilities centered on frontier stations built along national cleavages in order to transmit to audiences straddling the demarcations between states. At times, these stations broadcast domestic programs that foreign listeners, by their proximity, could pick up; at others, they expressly broadcast to listeners across the frontier. Civilian radio service might have been new, but it was enfolded without difficulty into the fluctuating political equilibrium of the postwar world.

In their next phase of escalation, radio hostilities again centered on national frontiers, if from another, newer set of stations. In a widely cited article of the time, the American broadcaster César Saerchinger described this definitive step: “Since 1933 border warfare by radio has gone out of date, [and] this is not because the nations have abandoned the most modern of all weapons, but because the advent of the super-power station has made frontier stations superfluous.”⁸ As electrical phenomena, long and medium wave radio signals are disturbed by natural and artificial environmental features, such as mountain ranges, meteorological conditions, and infrastructure, which can markedly delimit the range of their effective reception. To mitigate interference, powerful transmitters were used to boost signals, although the cost of building such immense transmission facilities initially impeded the proliferation of high-powered stations. In the first half of the thirties, ideological and political considerations began to trump these economic constraints—Saerchinger notes that in 1930 there were no 100-kilowatt transmitters in operation, while seven years later there were seventy stations transmitting at this strength or higher. Here was an “arms race” measured in kilowatts, rather than ships or guns.⁹ These powerful transmitters covered huge territories, at once consolidating the ability of national services to monopolize their hold on domestic listeners while extending the capacity to address listeners far outside national boundaries. This contradiction was at the heart of radio hostilities, as transmitting power made it harder to maintain a clean distinction between domestic and foreign programming or to regulate the difference between national and international broadcasting services.

A final stage of interwar radio hostilities both confirmed and shifted their course: this was the rise of shortwave broadcasting, which “turned a European into a world problem.”¹⁰ Whereas all transmitters emit two kinds of signals, what are called “surface waves” and “sky waves,” long and medium wave broadcasts travel on the former, moving from the point of transmission to receivers on a straight line along a horizontal axis. Traveling on sky waves, shortwave transmissions reach the point of reception at a diagonal angle, after having ricocheted across great distances between earth and ionosphere and back to earth. With improvements to directional antennas, this property allowed engineers to aim shortwave programming at relatively specific areas around the world, but with far less transmitting power than was required for medium wave broadcasting: “The effectiveness of [directional] antennas is illustrated by the fact that a 5-kilowatt station with a highly directive antenna will put as strong a signal into England from the east coast of the United States as a 130-kilowatt station operating without directional antennas. Thus the analogy of waves undulating in widening concentric circles, used to describe long- and medium-wave transmission, should be replaced for short-wave transmission by one of ripples of radio energy that proceed outward and upward—in only one segment of the circle.”¹¹ By the mid-thirties, long-range broadcasting had therefore become a feasible enterprise. Yet the potential of shortwave broadcasting was not solely realized by the great powers, as the technical requirements for shortwave transmissions allowed even the smallest, remotest, or poorest nations to broadcast to the world. Ethiopia was, in fact, a prime example of this new opportunity:

The Abyssinians’ little short-wave station near Addis Ababa—at an altitude of some nine thousand feet—operating on the ridiculously low power of one kilowatt, had made itself heard throughout the western world. Here was a romance of engineering, indeed. The Italians, who years ago built this station for the Abyssinians merely as a commercial telegraph terminus, little suspected that it would one day be used against them by their dusky enemies. It had no speech panel and no speech-input amplifier, though for some remote contingency there was an old-fashioned carbon microphone lying about. With this meagre equipment a Swedish engineer named Ernst Hammar, employed as director of communications by Emperor Haile Selassie, managed to rig up something that could actually make itself heard, first in London and then in New York.¹²

With cooperation from American networks, the station in Addis Ababa eventually became the source not only of Ethiopian broadcasts, but eventually of eyewitness reports from the nation by the Western press. This use of the station was one of the first instances of what quickly became a familiar wartime use of the medium. On a new scale, a “world” scale, radio waves could now be directed at specific groups of listeners.

While each of these phases of radio hostilities was distinct in its elaboration, the initiation of a “new” phase did not end or supersede the last, but instead represented an added dimension to the decade’s tensions as they were played out over the question of reaching listeners. A quick catalog of developments gives some indication of the additive nature of this escalation. Far from being outmoded, border stations remained especially potent in localized points of friction, many of which were located along the frontiers of Germany, from France to Austria to Czechoslovakia to Poland. Shortwave broadcasting enabled the establishment of empire broadcasting in France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom; the introduction of “diasporic” services from Italy, Japan, and Germany; and the opening of international airwaves to small nations such as the Irish Free State and Ethiopia. International broadcasters, such as the stations operated by the Vatican and the League of Nations, vied with the stridently internationalist programming of the Soviet Union, while the construction of mammoth medium wave transmitters capable of blanketing vast geographical areas created zones of ideological conflict conducted simultaneously through medium and shortwave transmissions. One of the most dramatic of these centered on the Mediterranean and Near East, where the Italians and British (and soon the Germans and French) jostled for influence in several languages. Indeed, the British Foreign Office requested that the BBC begin monitoring English-language news bulletins broadcast by foreign stations during the Ethiopian crisis, in order to gauge international opinion and keep abreast of developments that might affect diplomatic and strategic planning.¹³ In one of the first surveys of international political broadcasting, Thomas Grandin could already look back from 1938 at the role played by radio hostilities in the decade’s tumultuous course:

Our planet, potentially, has become an open forum, where a frank exchange of ideas could take place, on a scale never known before.

The plain fact, however, is that broadcasting, instead of developing into an agency for peace and better international understanding, serves often to incite hatred throughout the world, and is often used, for motives which obviously are not disinterested, and by men in conflict, to dominate, rather than to enlighten, the public mind. Science once again has made a gigantic stride forward, with the result that relations between nations are becoming more embittered.¹⁴

In a world of motivation, interest, and unashamed displays of power, here, in fact, was the dissolution of a “romance of engineering.” Rather than alleviate or counteract the connivances and brutalities of mundane political circumstances, technological advances in the field of communications had instead amplified them. As a potentially “open forum” of exchange, the international airwaves existed only insofar as they were produced in the interaction of grounded transmitters and receivers, a situation less of celestial intercession than embedded realization.

As an institution driven by the “particular blend of pragmatism and hope that became known as the ‘spirit of Geneva,’ ” the League of Nations embodied an entirely unique forum in which issues of national competition and international cooperation, remote disputes and disparate publics, could coalesce in “frank exchange.”¹⁵ While still now largely discredited as an idealist association prone to bureaucratic stalemate and appeasement, the League nevertheless offered a setting for national agency and international arbitration where none had previously existed. For small or powerless states in particular, it provided the opportunity to form alignments outside the orbit of powerful states, while participating as judicial equals in confronting issues of international concern. However compromised its power was by the entrenched national self-interest of its most powerful members, the League was a crucial site at which interwar crises of internationalism were registered and debated. Susan Pedersen gives a useful account of this “Geneva-centered world”: “Other cities between the wars were much more polyglot and cosmopolitan: it was in Geneva, however, that internationalism was enacted, institutionalized, and performed. That internationalism had its holy text (the [League] Covenant); it had its high priests and prophets.... There was an annual pilgrimage each September, when a polyglot collection of national delegates, claimants, lobbyists, and journalists descended on this once-placid bourgeois town. But for all its religious overtones, interwar internationalism depended more on structure than on faith: a genuinely transnational officialdom, and not visionaries or even statesmen, was its beating heart.”¹⁶ That the League was ultimately unable to contain or overcome the conflicts between rival blocs should not diminish attention to what it represented during the contentious years of its existence. By specifying a convergence point of governmental claims and a variety of forms of mobilized public opinion (disarmament lobbies, nascent anticolonial formations, anti-trafficking and labor societies), the League presents a cross-section of the dilemmas faced in these decades. As a forum of “enacted” internationalism in the interwar years, the League at least has the virtue of marking a failed promise, rather than the habitually repeated false promise of a technologically determined global village.

Both the Irish Free State and Ethiopia had been admitted to the League during its Fourth Assembly, which sat in session between September 1923 and August 1924. While each country ultimately received unanimous votes, neither case was without contention, for they embodied distinct forms of uneven development. The Irish faced questions about the size of the Free State Army, which was considered to be large relative to the state’s population and therefore to pose a threat to stability. The Irish government responded that the Civil War had ended only months earlier and that mass demobilization without adequate employment represented a greater threat to stability.¹⁷ Like the Irish, who saw the League as a forum in which to exercise national autonomy and a guarantor of small nations’ rights, the Ethiopians believed that “in the League of Nations there existed a body that could throw a cloak of protection over the smaller states, and might therefore be a useful aid to Ethiopia against her three powerful neighbors, who had already given evidence that they would not be averse to absorbing Ethiopia into their own territories, or at least into their spheres of influence when the time was ripe.”¹⁸ They were met with far stronger opposition, particularly from the British, than were the Irish. The most serious objection raised to Ethiopia’s candidacy involved the issue of slavery, as F. P. Walters, the former deputy secretary general, noted: “For the last two years a League Committee had been engaged in accumulating information concerning the survival of slavery, in various forms and in various countries. The reports on Ethiopia were appalling, in regard not only to the institution of domestic slavery but also to slave-raiding and the slave-trade.”¹⁹ This matter was hotly debated both in the Assembly and in the western European press, where vocal anti-slavery activists advocated that the nation become a mandated territory overseen by an imperial power. In response, the Ethiopian government declared that it was in no position immediately to free every domestic slave without an adequate employment infrastructure in place, but that League membership would foster these structural changes. It further noted that slave trading was an international problem: the largest markets for slaves were on the Arabian Peninsula, across the Red Sea from Africa; yet Italian, French, and British colonial territories denied Ethiopia access to the sea. Only international cooperation, it concluded, would eradicate the practice.²⁰ Ethiopia pledged to abolish slavery and eliminate slave trading within its borders, and the government created a department—with the man who translated Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Amharic as its head—to administer its efforts.²¹ Domestic slavery remained a contentious issue at the League throughout the twenties and into the thirties, when it was increasingly handled within the ambit of labor commissions. For the great European powers, skepticism and self-interest dominated perceptions of Ethiopia and its sovereignty.

As it was, slavery offered the pretense for Italian aggression in late 1934. Decrying slave-raiding incursions across the indistinct border between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, the Italians mounted an all-out propaganda campaign to justify its territorial ambitions in East Africa. Citing the Ethiopians’ slow progress in confronting slavery, the fascist regime labeled Ethiopia an anachronism, a feudal leftover in the modern world. It presented its own imperial designs as a crusade to liberate the Ethiopian people from the barbarism of their rulers, drawing on antislavery discourses to argue that occupation was a necessary and progressive step toward modernization.²² That Ethiopia was a member of the League due the rights and obligations afforded by the Covenant only highlighted its inability to function as a civilized nation, as one Italian pamphlet explained:

Ethiopia’s admission to the League of Nations was a political act, inspired by confidence that the country could be led to make the efforts required gradually to attain the level of civilisation of other nations belonging to the League, by participating in the system of international cooperation established by the Covenant. The assumption that the League of Nations in itself is a system for the promotion of progress of member nations, does not correspond with reality, unless the essential [capacity] for admission to the League be the capacity of a country to develop its own civilisation.

All countries do not possess this capacity in equal degree. The League of Nations should take this into due consideration. Ethiopia has shown that she is unable to find in her membership the impulse to make a voluntary effort to raise herself to the level of other civilised countries.²³

In another pamphlet, the Italians portrayed the League as abetting Ethiopian backwardness in the name of misguided idealism. Juxtaposing photographs of Ethiopia and the Italian East African colonies, the images create a narrative of brutality opposed by humanitarianism: slaves, lepers, wastelands, and desolate villages stand opposite smiling natives, caring medical workers, cultivated fields, and planned cities. This disparity is, in the words of the pamphlet’s title, “what Geneva does not want to see.” Each photograph is accompanied by a caption printed in six languages (Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese), as though the photographic arrangement were not plain enough.²⁴ A third pamphlet branded Ethiopia “the last stronghold of slavery,” a corrupt, premodern vestige whose reform was a moral duty of civilized nations. Even its ancient Christianity was identified as ludicrously archaic: “But who can take seriously the Christianity of the Abyssinians? It is a coarse mixture of primitive superstitions, ritual Judaic [giudaiche] practices, and superficial and beggared Christian assimilations.”²⁵ Whereas the Ethiopians have been pandered to even while continuing to squander their land’s natural richness, the Italians have made the most of “a country which is naturally poor”: “The Italian people, who have given such a formidable contribution to western civilisation and progress, have a general standard of living unworthy of their past and of the position they have gradually acquired in the modern world through science, art, culture and social reform.”²⁶ By insisting on Italy’s unequivocal right to colonial expansion as a vital matter of national self-determination, Mussolini’s regime announces itself without apology:

Those who oppose Italian expansion are hardly loyal to the cause of peace nor do they favour political balance of Europe [sic]. There can be no peace or political balance without justice. Economic penetration, concessions, spheres of influence, are inadequate means to solve such far reaching problems as those entailing the whole future of a people. No enterprise, especially colonial, is either lasting or safe, unless it is protected by the national flag.

New Italy refuses to submit to impositions such as mortified and humiliated the Italy of old, which had not acquired full consciousness of its value and position among independent and united nations.²⁷

In this imperial guise, the fascist was cast in the role of modernizer.

This propaganda campaign met with mixed success. More candidly than others, one European delegate at Geneva stated, “The Italians want us to eat shit. All right. We will eat it. But they also want us to declare it is rose jam. That is a bit much.”²⁸ More characteristic of diplomatic opinion was John Maffey’s report for the British Foreign Office on British interests in Ethiopia, which in June 1935 saw Italian conquest as inevitable (a year before it was accomplished), but reasoned that Ethiopian independence offered little that Italian control took away.²⁹ The Last Stronghold of Slavery shrewdly quoted Maffey’s report to support its claims, and the pamphlet had an especially large distribution in Britain. In addition to copies printed in Rome, at least fifty thousand were printed in London at the height of the crisis, and the text was highly influential among Mussolini’s admirers in the liberal democracies.³⁰ The most concerted resistance to Italian aggression came from the black diaspora, for whom Ethiopia’s ancient sovereignty, guarded for centuries against incursion, offered a symbol of the future, its continuing self-determination a principal coordinate of racial internationalism. When it became clear that the nation was only a “pawn in European diplomacy,” the implications of the crisis could no longer be sequestered as a peripheral affair, as Ernest Work, an African American educational adviser in Ethiopia, powerfully declared: “Evidently Ethiopia is to be sacrificed in an effort to maintain the peace of Europe. If such is the case the sacrifice is too great and instead of securing the peace of Europe this utterly unrighteous bartering of a weaker brother among the nations of Europe may easily prove to be the rock of offense upon which Europe herself shall be broken.”³¹ Work’s bitterly unambiguous reference to chattel slavery was in turn echoed by W. E. B. Du Bois in “Inter-Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis: A Negro View,” a stinging and cautionary analysis published by Foreign Affairs in October 1935. Examining the “changes through which the color problem has passed” in the preceding two decades, Du Bois sees the crisis as a regression to prewar conditions of racial domination.³² Without qualification and with only the barest rhetorical finesse, Italy has announced its intention to subjugate Ethiopia because it has the power to do so. It is a lesson he knows will not go unnoticed: “The results on the minds and actions of great groups and nations of oppressed peoples, peoples with a grievance real or fancied, whose sorest spot, their most sensitive feelings, is brutally attacked, can only be awaited. The world, or any part of it, seems unable to do anything to prevent the impending blow, the only excuse for which is that other nations have done exactly what Italy is doing.”³³ For Du Bois, the aggression against Ethiopia and the seemingly inevitable assent of the white world to imperial domination are the latest, and gravest, manifestations of a long-standing relation of oppression to rationalization.

Ensemble and Microphone

Within the more delimited sphere of Irish foreign relations, “the spirit of Geneva” is almost exclusively associated with the figure of Eamon de Valera, whose highly visible participation in the League during the thirties marks a definitive turn in Irish politics between independence and the Second World War. While the validity of this association is unquestionable, the singularity of its focus misrecognizes not only the institutional character of the League, but the extent to which de Valera relied on the canny insight of the Irish delegation at Geneva. As Michael Kennedy argues, “[De Valera’s one-man-show] might not have been an ensemble piece on stage, but behind the scenes the solo performer was prepared, advised and initially supervised by the staff of the Department of External Affairs. De Valera was certainly not their mouthpiece, but neither was he performing all his own work. A solid base to work from, de Valera’s inspiration and the Department of External Affairs[’] perspiration and expertise, were the significant factors behind Ireland’s position in the League in the 1930s.”³⁴ As the foregoing section outlined, internationalism was at once encouraged and challenged by the vertiginous rise of competing forums of exchange during the interwar years: new voices in new media, old forms reinvented as new configurations, new articulations of old relations. Against this background, de Valera’s performance remains no less impressive, insofar as it records a specifically Irish variation on the decade’s themes. At the same time, however, this variation reveals dynamics within the larger context of international tensions that are otherwise inaudible.

De Valera’s election as prime minister in 1932 coincided with the start of Ireland’s term in the rotating presidency of the League’s Council. This coincidence disquieted the great powers, which feared he would use the position to denounce Britain and thereby disturb the body’s procedural equilibrium. Regarding him as an intransigent revolutionary and anticolonial firebrand, the British worried that de Valera would be unwilling to cut off discussion of imperialism and instead be too inclined to favor pointed talk of historical grievance and present inequality. At some level, there was truth behind this worry, in that Ireland used its membership to articulate an independent foreign policy derived as much from its postcolonial identity as from its weak position within Europe; indeed, this conjunction was the essence of its anomalous place in the League. The worry was misplaced in its obsession with de Valera as demagogue, the fanatical strongman leading a phalanx of disciples. As Brian Farrell memorably characterized it, “De Valera’s style of chairmanship, in government and party alike, was provokingly patient with opposition, agonisingly tolerant of the irrelevant, overwhelmingly understanding of the stupid. He used exhaustion rather than coercion to secure maximum consent to, and preferably unanimity in, decision-making.”³⁵ In Geneva, where he could only sporadically be present, de Valera relied on the civil servants of the Irish delegation, whose reports from the city demonstrate an astute sense of the machinations and compromises driving outward shows of diplomacy and cooperation.³⁶ If de Valera’s strong speeches during the Ethiopian crisis display his own qualities of ethical appeal, they would have been impossible without the Irish delegation. Its skill made Geneva into “Dublin’s continent-wide European listening-post.”³⁷

In the present context, this aural dimension to the leader’s skill and power is fundamental, even when it was clearly the product of tightly managed techniques of presentation. While most easily understood in relation to the figure of the dictator, this auditory quality could be readily personified in any charismatic authority. Hitler’s screaming and Mussolini’s verbal swagger, both counterpointed by fevered crowds, represent the extremes of this practice, new in its deployment and critically dependent on the broadcasting microphone. Some radio professionals recognized this relationship at the time, and their explanations are instructive. In Saerchinger’s Hello America! a book detailing his work in transatlantic radio during the thirties, personality is framed as “giv[ing] content to an otherwise soulless machine.”³⁸ As Saerchinger is quick to point out, however, radio does not always give back. In examining the “old-fashioned demagogue, the political rabble-rouser of pre-war days, whose technique is that of the stump,” he offers David Lloyd George as a prominent example of a speaker not served by the microphone: “Unsurrounded by his admirers, with nothing but his voice to convey the workings of his agile mind, Lloyd George’s eloquence simply does not come off.... On the ether, all his charm seems to evaporate: of all the speeches that woo the coy citizen sitting at his loud-speaker at election times, Lloyd George’s are the dullest and least effective, because the histrionics—the winning smile, the half-closed eyes, the clenched fist, and the hands toying with the golden spectacles—are simply of no use.”³⁹ In contrast, Saerchinger presents de Valera as both an intransigent and a democrat, a combination he discerns in the latter’s use of the microphone. Saerchinger had facilitated de Valera’s first broadcast to the United States in 1932, which was relayed by NBC from the Radio Éireann studio in Dublin’s General Post Office. Having walked in “as though he were going to buy a stamp,” de Valera faced “an incredibly primitive-looking microphone contraption” to address his foreign listeners: “His delivery, in his faint and attractive brogue, was quiet and matter of fact, almost casual, seeking to convince by the strength of argument alone.... He was fully aware of the value of talking to America... but he refused to make any emotional appeal, just as he refused to abandon that ‘obligatory’ opening paragraph in laboriously perfected Gaelic, no matter how many thousands of listeners, with American impatience, might tune out.”⁴⁰ If the dictator depends on mastery of the crowd, and the demagogue on “histrionic” intimacies, de Valera occupies neither of these positions. Hitler and Mussolini were rarely heard apart from a chorus of supporters, a relationship that was visualized in the leader’s commanding position over the masses. In the most common image of de Valera during these years, he is the public servant alone at his desk, soberly attending to the people’s business. While many domestic and foreign commentators, for a variety of reasons, had an interest in labeling him as a “unique dictator,” the mechanisms of his leadership ran contrary to this perception.⁴¹ Like his vocal delivery, his authority was formal and precise.

This relationship was paramount in the Irish response to the Ethiopian crisis. At the beginning of tensions, a memo circulated within the Department of External Affairs diagnosed the growing influence of fascism at the League, but nonetheless discerned a potential brake on its progress: “Fascism as a rule of organization for international society is impossible for a very good reason. The element common, and indeed essential, to all the internal regimes based on Fascist principles is the confidence reposed in the leader, and the willing obedience accorded him in consequence. That essential element is conspicuously lacking, for very good reasons, as between the smaller states and the Great Powers.”⁴² In this passage, the spread of fascism is linked to its appeal, but additionally to the willingness among non-fascist states to appease fascist demands in the interest of maintaining the balance of power. As a weak state, Ireland recognized this problem as one inhering not with fascism per se, but with a more pervasive question of material inequality. The civil service memo argued therefore that judicial equality among states within the League represented more than simply an effective check on fascism’s spread, for the League Covenant provided a mechanism to redress the material conditions driving military escalation the world over:

With all its defects, the Covenant has this virtue that it put an end to international feudalism, and initiated the era of international democracy and international government with the consent of the governed. The Saorstát, like all the other smaller members of the League, has a vote and a veto at Geneva. It may be hard to get the League to take positive action in cases in which it should do so; but at least the Covenant enables the smaller and weaker states, by using their veto, to prevent unjust action being clothed with the mantle of legality, and to put states which follow certain courses in the position of violators of the law and rebels against the international order.⁴³

Sensing the drift toward a tiered League governed by a “might makes right” ethos, the memo is terse about the future: “Certainly the Saorstát would leave the League rather than pledge itself to abide by the decisions of a body composed exclusively of Great Powers.”⁴⁴ Written at some point in 1935, this document provides the blueprint, or score, for de Valera’s subsequent actions during the crisis.

As they played out, events steadily eroded the ideals of international cooperation and arbitration that had given rise to the League. Already evident in the External Affairs memo, this loss of faith is the crescendoing note in de Valera’s speeches during the Ethiopian crisis, as developments slid from outrage to disgrace. In a broadcast to the United States on September 12, 1935, over Radio-Nations, the League’s shortwave station, de Valera stressed the danger of unchecked aggression by one member against another: “The theory of the absolute sovereignty of States, interpreted to mean that a State is above all law, must be abandoned. In a community, if the individual held himself free at every moment to act as his selfish interests might prompt, irrespective of the rights and interests of his neighbour, it is clear that order within such a community and peace would be impossible. So are peace and order impossible within the world community of States if States may hold that self-interest is for them the supreme law, and that they are subject to no other control.”⁴⁵ Arguing that the Covenant must become more flexible in order to address the increasing militarization of politics, he sees the League as an imperfect, but significant, effort to “order international affairs by reason and justice instead of by force.” To ignore reform is to abdicate the possibility of a collectively secured future: “To destroy [the League] now would be a crime against humanity. To maintain it we must live up to its obligations.... The alternative, so far as Europe is concerned, is a return to the law of the jungle. What philosophy of life can make us believe that man is necessarily condemned to such a fate?”⁴⁶ This statement is a stern rebuke not only to militarism but also to Italian fascism, a political ideology cloaked in the mantle of a “philosophy of life.” In turn, it upends Italian claims that Ethiopia must be liberated from barbarism, by denying the equation of technological superiority with the realization of justice.

In that radio address, de Valera had called for “some means” by which the League’s principles could be enforced against states in violation of them.⁴⁷ When Ethiopia was invaded on October 2, it took a week for the League to impose economic sanctions on Italy. In the interim, de Valera broadcast the government’s reaction to the outbreak of war on Radio Éireann, explaining that, as a member state, the Irish Free State would fulfill its obligations if sanctions were to be mandated; should “more rigorous measures” become necessary, he continued, the matter would be brought to the Dáil. While wary of being drawn into armed conflict, he nevertheless states that the “difficulty with the League, then, is not that the obligations it imposes are too strict, but that they are not strict enough to be effective.”⁴⁸ In treading this delicate line between national self-determination and international commitment, de Valera adeptly used the radio to frame Ethiopia’s plight as linked to Ireland’s place in the world, as Cian McMahon has noted: “His speeches and radio addresses during the conflict in Abyssinia largely set the tone of discussion amongst the Irish population—a tone that was reflected in the newspapers. The tenor of these addresses was based very strongly on the context of membership in an international community founded on justice.”⁴⁹ By tracking the coverage garnered in a number of Irish newspapers, McMahon identifies this moment as an important point, when public discourse “transcended partisan political divisions and clerical influence during the crisis to envisage the Free State not as a passive or outside observer, but, rather, as an active player in the global community.” As articulated in de Valera’s addresses, the League served for the Irish public as “an alternative source of moral authority,” distinct from both the Catholic Church and traditional nationalism: “Far from insularity, the Abyssinian crisis highlights a surprising level of interest amongst the Irish reading public in the wider world.”⁵⁰ That radio broadcasting was central to the constitution of this reading public cannot be underestimated.

Because of this worldliness, the termination of the crisis was especially bitter. When the Italians announced military victory in May 1936, it came after the League’s stance had been definitively undermined by the French and British, who were by now focused on German rearmament. In an address to the League Assembly on July 2, facing the prospect that sanctions were about to be dropped (as, indeed, they were), de Valera directly connected Irish self-determination to Ethiopia’s troubles: “Perhaps, as representatives of a small nation that has itself had experience of aggression and dismemberment, the members of the Irish delegation may be more sensitive than others to the plight of Ethiopia. But is there any small nation represented here which does not feel the truth of the warning that what is Ethiopia’s fate to-day may well be its own fate to-morrow, should the greed or the ambition of some powerful neighbour prompt its destruction?”⁵¹ This linkage is not simply a gesture of solidarity, nor is it an example of rhetorical overstatement; it instead articulates a correlation born of shared fear. Whereas Du Bois had been concerned with the interracial implications of the crisis, de Valera remains fixated on its international implications, which he finds similarly unwelcoming and unavoidable. When Haile Selassie had addressed the Assembly three days earlier, it was in part through de Valera’s intercession. Advocating for the emperor’s right to speak under the Covenant, de Valera listened to his appeal on behalf of his people:

I ask the fifty nations who have given the Ethiopian people a promise to help them in their resistance to the aggressor. What are they willing to do for Ethiopia?

I ask the great Powers, who have promised the guarantee of collective security to small states—those small states over whom hangs the threat that they may one day suffer the fate of Ethiopia: What measures do they intend to take?

Representatives of the world, I came to Geneva to discharge in your midst the most painful of the duties of the head of State. What answer am I to take back to my people?⁵²

In its futile attempts to control aggression, the League answered by announcing its ineffectiveness as an institution. For de Valera, the conclusion to draw was that small nations, including Ethiopia, would never receive justice from the great powers and must instead act toward their own protection.

What made this conclusion notably galling was the fact that such action would not be collectively and democratically achieved, but compelled by atomized, defensive, and increasingly acute necessity. What collective action that remained, de Valera pointedly observed, was an astringent one: “Over fifty nations, we have now to confess publicly that we must abandon the victim to his fate.”⁵³ This represented a decisive turn from mutual cooperation toward individual self-preservation, a shift de Valera specifies at the end of his address of July 2: “Despite our juridical equality here, in matters such as European peace the small States are powerless. As I have already said, peace is dependent upon the will of the great States. All the small States can do, if the statesmen of the greater States fail in their duty, is resolutely to determine that they will not become the tools of any great Power, and that they will resist with whatever means they may possess every attempt to force them into a war against their will.”⁵⁴ Although now contracted to include only Europe, this stage represents the potential “to-morrow” to Ethiopia’s “to-day.” De Valera had already deliberately echoed Haile Selassie in his tabulation of League members, but this invocation of “to-day” and “to-morrow” was for all intents a direct quotation of the emperor, who had icily muttered in front of the Assembly, “It is us today; it will be you tomorrow.”⁵⁵ With the League’s ultimate failure to confront or counter Italian aggression, and the recognition by most member states of Ethiopia as an Italian colony, the Irish Free State lost what remained of its faith in collective security. It instead began to formulate the policy of neutrality that would soon be enshrined in the 1937 Constitution and strictly practiced during the Second World War.⁵⁶ After the shattering of trust in the League’s ability to safeguard its independence, the only choice left to the Irish Free State was that which was no longer available to Ethiopia: self-preservation.

Auratic Listener and Fascist Violin

In his autobiographical travelogue The Waveless Plain, Walter Starkie quotes a remark made to him by an unnamed “Italian friend” in Ethiopia: “Cavour made Italy; Mussolini made the Italians; sanctions united Italy.” Explaining that his “visit to Abyssinia had been made, not so much for the purpose of visiting that strange, Oriental country, as for studying the task achieved by 14 years of Fascist Rome,” Starkie validates his anonymous interlocutor’s epochal sense of the conquest as the final stage in Italian national destiny initiated with the Risorgimento and completed by the fascist revolution.⁵⁷ Rather than break Italian will, League sanctions had occasioned the overcoming of the last impediment to national renewal. To combat sanctions, women donated their wedding rings to the regime and turned to largely vegetarian “Sanctions cooking,” men put aside regional loyalties to enlist in the armed forces, scientists made clothing and flags from a milk-based wool substitute called Lanital: these actions give Starkie “a curious feeling of the continuity of history” and embody a modern vision of “the ancient Rome of the Republic.”⁵⁸ While presented as his firsthand impressions, these spectacles of struggle and renewal are essentially copped, like his unnamed friend’s slogan, straight from the fascist regime’s propaganda campaigns. By never mentioning, for example, that the mass exchange of gold wedding rings for steel was the centerpiece of the Giornata della Fede (Day of Faith) organized on December 18, 1935, or that references to local and regional attachment (including dialect) were banned from the fascist mass media, Starkie can stage these events as both spontaneous and preordained, as the unplanned expressions of collective unanimity.⁵⁹ In presenting Musso­lini’s Italy as the paradigm of self-determined national development, The Waveless Plain is much more than a crass narrativization of administrative dictates, reading instead as a cultural anthropology of fascist charisma. This is most evident in Starkie’s authorial position, particularly when he faces the radio.

Starkie was born into a distinguished Catholic Anglo-Irish family in County Dublin in 1894, and became a professor in Romance languages at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1926; one of the students with whom he worked was Samuel Beckett.⁶⁰ Shortly after this appointment, he was made a member of the Abbey Theatre’s board of directors, a position he would hold until 1942. These professional activities were balanced by a lifelong love of music, and Starkie, a trained violinist, maintained an abiding interest in the social role of traditional music in Ireland and on the continent. With its mix of credentialization and passion, professional rationalization and romantic abandonment, Starkie’s scholastic devotion to languages and music formed a foundational productive tension throughout his life. At one level, Starkie was a throwback to the Anglo-Irish antiquarians of the previous century, a man of leisure invested in the cultural preservation of traditional or premodern forms; at another, he was an international cosmopolitan, able to move with ease between Ireland, Britain, the United States, and the continent. As a member of Dublin’s cultural administration, Starkie gravitated toward its dominant, and decidedly right-wing, poles, combining a belief in cultural nationalism with a desire for the importation of continental strands of political authoritarianism. In 1927, he became a founding member of the Centre International d’Études sur le Fascisme, based in Lausanne, Switzerland; and the following year wrote an essay for its inaugural Survey of Fascism on the appropriateness of corporatist social policy for Ireland.⁶¹ While not exactly describing the emergence of the fascist new man, Starkie claimed that corporatist fraternal associations would eliminate the remaining vestiges of colonial servility and free individuals to enter into closer harmony with the national spirit. Yet this process could not be an insular or purely “national” endeavor. Having married an Italian woman, Starkie returned to Italy every summer to visit her family outside Genoa. As described in The Waveless Plain, it is his violin that facilitates mutual understanding between him and Italians, the tunes he plays never failing to draw around him an enthusiastic crowd of passionate listeners. As much as he is prone to attribute this relationship to an innate Italian or Mediterranean sensibility, it is important to recognize these scenes as indicative of the book’s explanation of Mussolini’s Italy. In bringing together a group of listeners who are bound by their recognition of his expert playing, Starkie presents an organic polity achieved through and organized by sound.

Although it is not yet possible to specify its radiophonic features, the relationship of sound and social organization is central to The Waveless Plain. During the Ethiopian crisis, Starkie published a handful of admiring articles about Mussolini’s Italy, which represented the dictatorship as an attractive model of modern national renewal for the Irish Free State. In the early phase of the crisis, he argued that League sanctions might induce the regime’s fall, thus removing the strongest barrier to a communist Italy; in its later phase, he contended that international pressure on Italy’s colonial expansion would only drive the nation toward alliance with Hitler.⁶² Published in the Fine Gael–aligned Irish Independent, these articles reflect the contradictory elements at work in Irish right-of-center politics, from pro–British Ascendancy conservatives to extreme Catholic chauvinists to right-revolutionary fellow travelers, all united only in their opposition to de Valera. Flipping the terms of the government’s stance, Starkie characterizes the Covenant as an apparatus “based not on right or justice, but on force,” an instrument designed to serve the status quo by denying national progress.⁶³ While these articles made little headway with Irish readers, the Italian government nevertheless commissioned Starkie to write a book justifying its case.⁶⁴ By the time The Waveless Plain appeared in 1938, it was 504 pages long and hardly delivered the kind of propaganda coup initially envisioned by the Italians, who by this time were no longer interested in vindicating decisions made years earlier. Even with the bungled circumstances of its publication, Starkie’s idiosyncratic travelogue is an important index to the appeal of fascism. In its closing pages, he stares at the Palazzo del Littorio (Palace of the Lictors), the newly built headquarters of the Fascist Party in Rome, finding it “a fitting symbol of the modern idea which must harmonize with its ancient surroundings.”⁶⁵ Throughout the book, it is the realization of this “harmony,” as an orchestration of unity and difference, which commands his attention.

In order to convey the various notes comp0sing this “harmony,” Starkie outwardly makes little of his professional credentials in the travelogue, instead presenting himself as a worldly amateur. This posture is central to the book’s authorial address, for it establishes a rhetorical position from which to offer observations of Italian society and the international rivalries underpinning the text’s composition.⁶⁶ Although Starkie is not shy about mentioning official negotiations and diplomatic intrigue, these matters are often refracted through images of himself as a distanced and passive consumer of media reports, gotten from either newspapers or radio broadcasts. In this, he demonstrates his removal, even his alienation, from events as they are happening, a condition of simultaneous dispersion and massification created by liberal democratic institutions. His shorthand for this condition is “public opinion.” In contrast to this combination of atomization and aggregation, he narrates international differences through “localized,” face-to-face scenes of conversation, in the participatory exchanges to which his amateur status grants him access. This authorial pose takes two related forms, depending on his interlocutors. When moving within British circles, Starkie plays the role of patient intermediary, explaining to those too caught up in their own prejudices the nuances of Italian society and fascist policy. These exchanges work most often by showing him being dismissed or ridiculed as a dilettante: “Carefully I tried to explain to those [British] arm-chair 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 former, where the majority (or the “many”) rules, Italy is where organic social relations still exist, precisely because the dictatorship is committed to this “real freedom.” While 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 delivering a comprehensive roll call of achievements. More than “impressions,” the disquisition is narrated as a deep contextualization of Mussolini’s philosophy, with Starkie marveling at the dictator’s unification of theory and practice: he discourses about Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Sorel; he works studiously and tirelessly to overcome historical impediments; he loves architecture. Silently reintroduced, Starkie’s professional credentials enable him to legitimize Mussolini’s program of national development as more than mere policy—as, indeed, a philosophy. The bare-chested drainer of swampland becomes no manual laborer, but the thoughtful architect of national destiny. This scene of face-to-face immediacy transforms Starkie as well: no longer the alienated and distanced consumer of mediated “distortion,” no longer the passionless, desiccated intellectual, he becomes a communicant, at once receiving the dictator’s voice and imparting its “spontaneity” and “tempo” to readers. As a unified “personality,” he becomes an auratic listener.

In the context of the face-to-face interview, this transformation occurs in the immediacy of Mussolini’s presence. What is therefore especially striking is how Starkie’s sense of the Duce’s commanding personality is narrated through an invocation of radio transmission and reception. Sitting across from Mussolini in the dark room, Starkie seems instead to face a receiver set, its dials glowing as the intervening space fills with the dictator’s voice: “To-day I was hypnotized by his large dark eyes which sparkled when his voice became animated. That voice had still a trace of metallic harshness and the words poured out in jerky, rapid sentences which jabbed at my sluggish mind.... His dark, vivacious eyes seemed to light up his face as he spoke. There was harmony in his face and movement, as though the thoughts in his mind set up an unending rhythm which sent numerous tiny electric currents of luminous strength through his frame.”⁸⁵ As a catalog of keywords (voice, harmony, rhythm) meant to correlate Mussolini’s technique to social organization, this extended figuration of the dictator as radio set is crucial to Starkie’s address to his readers, yet the implications of this writerly sleight of hand are deferred at this point in the text. In keeping with the “waveless” immediacy that characterizes his presentation of fascist Italy, Starkie gives a distinctly tactile and more recognizably aesthetic impression of Mussolini’s authority:

He possesses the power of adapting himself to other men. He knows their moods, and being a virtuoso he knows how to play upon them, awaken them, and extract their inner thoughts. It is part of his greatness that he feels an intense interest in other men, no matter how humble they may be. His knowledge of life has not been derived from books but from living personalities, both those with whom he can sympathize and those against whom he can sharpen his tusks in battle. I then recalled the early story which he had written describing the wild violinist who raises his public up to an orgy of excitement—a significant story, when we remember that he himself is a violinist. As I looked at his broad white hands with well-padded fingers I said to myself that he had the touch of the violinist, the natural vibrato, which is a source of power when added to his supreme mastery of rhythms.⁸⁶

Rather than manipulation, with its ideological connotations of lost autonomy and sinister depersonalization, Mussolini’s “hands-on” sympathy releases potential in “other men” that is otherwise latent or unrealized. Always live, this performance of mutual cooperation is made total in the “touch of the violinist,” the manual feel combining “natural vibrato” and rhythmic mastery that draws listeners to the virtuoso by first transforming them into listeners. Whereas fascist propaganda often portrayed Mussolini as a sculptor shaping the unformed masses into a unified people, Starkie offers in this passage an aural equivalent: at once expert amateur and impassioned maestro, Mussolini is the “wild violinist” playing to “his public.” With its natural, powerful resonance, this vibratory sympathy belongs to what Douglas Kahn has called “a vibrational scheme found throughout modernism, whereby communication occurs through the correspondence of internal and external vibrations, the sympathetic identifications of different vessels, often bridging different perceptual registers and always attempting to elude cultural mediation.”⁸⁷ On a totalized scale, then, Starkie’s depiction of Mussolini as violinist, playing on his people’s sympathies, presents an organic polity achieved through and organized by sound.

It is notably in the context of this virtuosity that The Waveless Plain first broaches the re-creation of Rome as an imperial center. Given the unpleasant colloquial associations of fiddling Roman emperors, it is perhaps wise that Starkie focuses his text at this point on the dictator’s radiophonic presence. Having been commissioned to write the book in the heat of the Ethiopian crisis, Starkie uses the East African war to explicate the “numerous tiny electric currents” of Mussolini’s personality, by facing the radio at this decisive moment. In his description of Mussolini’s announcement of the invasion, Starkie quotes three passages from the speech, one of which pointedly echoes his sense of the Duce’s virtuosity:

Black Shirts of the Revolution! Men and women of all Italy! Italians scattered throughout the world and beyond the seas: listen!... For many months past the wheel of destiny, driven by our calm, determined purpose, has been moving towards the goal: in these hours its rhythm is more rapid and henceforth its course cannot be checked. Not only is an army marching toward its objective, but forty million Italians are marching in unison with this army. They are united because there is an attempt to commit against them the blackest of all injustices, to rob them of a place in the sun.⁸⁸

This excerpt is the ideological center of the book, so readily do its rhetorical notes chime with Starkie’s entire presentation of his impressions of modern Italy: everything else in his travelogue functions as an explanatory gloss for these words. It is at this point in the text that the deferred consequences of figuring Mussolini as receiver set become manifest, for Starkie does not witness the dictator speaking from the balcony of the Piazza Venezia in Rome, but listens to him on the radio in Dublin. Where Ireland had once been beyond the “wizard’s magic circle” in the textual realm of bad translations and intervening political “excrescences,” the expansion of medium wave service and the advent of shortwave broadcasting have now broadened the “magic circle,” allowing for the long-distance reception of the sound of the dictator’s voice. Starkie’s account of listening to the broadcast stresses this new possibility: “Sometimes the sound faded and sometimes it blared on my ear, mingled with atmospherics and the sound of cheering. Then I heard the inexorable voice continue.”⁸⁹ As a description of dynamics, pacing, and tempo, Starkie’s report demonstrates the unimpeded power of rhythmic mastery, the ability to organize affective energy through the domination of sonic content. The immediacy of Mussolini’s “natural vibrato,” his sympathetic handling of latent “moods,” would not seem applicable to long-distance reception; yet this “source of power” is silently incorporated into Starkie’s text by transferring this mystified manual dexterity to the auratic listener. By this writerly sleight of hand, Starkie relocates Mussolini’s tactile virtuosity to the front of the receiver set, where the dial’s interface becomes the counterpart to face-to-face exchange.⁹⁰ Replacing the “touch of the violinist” with the touch of the dialer, Starkie tunes in the broadcast of the dictator’s voice, but receives it as though listening to a point-to-point transmission. In contrast to broadcasting’s dispersion, this singularized process of transmission and reception, occurring simultaneously millions of times over, is the realization of harmony. As a combination of aural, visual, and tactile practices, this synesthetic event locates Starkie in ideological space less by his choice of station than in mystifying the regulated world of allocated frequencies as the resonating harmony of sympathetic vibrations. While Marshall McLuhan would later infamously characterize radio as a regressive “tribal drum” possessing the “power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber,”⁹¹ Starkie presents the medium as a fascist violin, the vast resonator that brings together passion and specialization, wildness and expertise. In doing so, he misrecognizes intellectual liberty for political autonomy, a relationship made concrete in the emblem that appears on the front cover, spine, and title page of The Waveless Plain: a violin wreathed in laurels. To ask whether these are the laurels of learning, poetry, or martial victory is to misunderstand harmony.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, which he spent in Madrid as the British Council representative to Spain, Starkie recanted his support for Mussolini, stating that a fear of communism had caused his admiration for the dictator. Writing in the second volume of an autobiography left unfinished at the time of his death in 1976, he treats this misplaced attention as a condition of auditory overload: “The Abyssinian War monopolised our attention and my ears were deafened by the slogans shouted by militarists and war-mongers. Instead of the Red Star, the Hammer and the Sickle, and the Communist slogans of Red Revolution my ears were deafened by cries of Duce! Duce!”⁹² When the first volume of this autobiography had appeared in 1963 as Scholars and Gypsies, it covered, all but identically, many of the same events first presented in The Waveless Plain, although it concludes with Starkie’s engagement just before the March on Rome. The signal difference between these texts, however, is Starkie’s replacement of Mussolini with Gabriele D’Annunzio, the “poet-condottiere” whose magnetism and technique would later be appropriated by his less capable rival: “The voice of the poet rose sharper in tone in continual crescendo. He played upon the emotions of the crowd as a violinist upon a Stradivarius. The eyes of the thousands were fixed upon him, as though hypnotized by his power, and his voice, like that of a shanachie, bewitched their ears.”⁹³ As a textual revision, this image hardly constitutes a reconsideration of listening either as a critical faculty or (with the insertion of the seanchaí, the traditional Irish storyteller) as an essential aspect of transmission and reception: indeed, an identical laurel-wreathed violin emblazons Scholars and Gypsies. Representing the revision of conditions that had been realized with particular force during the thirties, its reappearance visualizes an ideal remediation and has implications extending beyond Starkie’s case. Now absent its martial note and figuring only the relations of learning and poetry, this emblem is instead a meeting point of Cold War anticommunism and the postwar normalization of the literary field, a compression effected alongside the canonization of literary modernism.