Grande Romanzo

The first and only novel by Signor Benito Mussolini appears this week, translated into English for the first time.

The Dictator is now a ripe 45 and world-great. But he was only a raw 26 and a nobody, when, with galloping quill, he dashed his novel upon foolscap, in weekly installments, for a Socialist newspaper.

Naturally the serial had to have a catch-eye title--one that would help sell the paper--and Young Benito called it, with sonorous sacrilege: Claudia Particella, L'Amante del Cardinalel; Grande Romanzo dei Tempi del Cardinale Emanuel Madruzzo.*

The newspaper which Claudia and her amorous Cardinal helped to sell in 1909 was Il Popolo, edited by the fiery Socialist-patriot Cesare Battisti in the city of Trent, then Austrian, but ceded to Italy after the War. Editor Battisti, always short handed, was assisted by the General Secretary of the local Socialist trade unions, one Benito Mussolini, an Italian youth who had worked for a time as a hod carrier in Switzerland and then picked up enough French to earn his living by teaching it. Helper Mussolini wrote perhaps a quarter of each daily issue of Il Popolo. He cleaned up editorial and publicational odd jobs innumerable. Then he snatched time to write the paper's weekly feuilleton or "feature," which was most often a Socialist tract or homily, occasionally a short story, and only once under Mussolini achieved the serialized splendor of a Grande Romanzo.

Amusing is the tale of how Scribe Mussolini, unused to doing such long pieces, wearied of his novel and threatened to kill off Claudia with intent to bring the Romanzo to a close. "For Heaven's sake, don't!" Editor Battisti would cry. "The subscriptions are being renewed splendidly."

The Story is told by Novelist Mussolini with kinetic gusto, occasional pathos, and incessant priest-baiting, cardinal-baiting and even Pope-baiting. Choosing the 17th Century as his period, he pithily sets scene, sketches characters:

Emanuel Madruzzo, "Cardinal and Archbishop of Trent and Secular Prince of the Trentino" had "a suite of 500 gentlemen splendidly attired in rich and bizarre liveries" and "squandered his wealth, since in him the race [of Madruzzo] would be extinguished and the principality left without an heir."

"He loved Claudia. . . . Between the duties of the principate and the dignity of the purple on the one hand, and on the other, his love for Claudia ... he was lashed into one of those tragic passions which wreck men's lives. . . . He was growing old waiting for the papal dispensation which would permit his marriage with Claudia."

Claudia Particella, whose father was the Cardinal's counsellor, had retired to Castle Toblino, guarded and defended by a group of ruffians in whom the Cardinal placed the utmost confidence. . . . "Beneath her silken robe was visible the provocative outline of her body. . . . Her half-closed eyes understood the sorcery of poisonous passion."

Filiberta Madruzzo, the Cardinal's niece, is "a beautiful and innocent girl" and "heiress to all the family wealth," yet he heartlessly imprisons her, "yielding perhaps to the threats or prayers of Claudia,"

When Filiberta sickens and dies under imprisonment, the fact of her Death although carefully hushed, provides a charge against the Cardinal which is used by rival clerics in stirring up the mob against him and especially against Claudia, who is denounced as a sorceress.

Don Benizio, a priest and the Cardinal's private secretary, "would have sold his soul to Satan ... to possess Claudia . . . now that his virility was nearing its end."

"He was like the bow drawn and aimed, tense to the point . . . [his] lust, born of forced chastity, was flagellated by wanton thoughts and images of bestial unions."

In this critical condition Don Benizio seeks out Claudia, and finds her, writes Socialist Mussolini indignantly: "seated upon one of those antique heavy armchairs, with high backs and exaggeratedly large arms, which formed part of the inherited furniture of noble families."*

Though Don Benizio threatens Claudia with the vengeance of the mob if she does not yield to him, she replies: "The persistence of your affections is certainly remarkable, but I am obliged to tell you that I shall never debase myself to realize a single one of your dreams. At Trent they are saying that I am a sorceress, a courtesan. But I have never practiced sorcery, and I have remained faithful to one man. Many married women cannot say as much.

"I have loved, I have lived, I am still young. I shall know how to die."

Thenceforward Claudia the courtesan becomes gradually idealized into a woman far more sinned against than sinning. Indeed she twice pardons a man who twice tries to assassinate her.

Meanwhile, however, the ignorant mob are deceived into thinking Claudia more and more a sorceress, until finally they stage an unsuccessful revolt. Some of Socialist Mussolini's most graphic and telling passages describe the fray--which would seem to greatly resemble the riots in which he took part as a youth.

Sister Bernardina of the Cross is finally sent by the Pope to inform Cardinal Madruzzo that the Holy Father will not grant him dispensation to resume secular estate and marry Claudia. Sister Bernardina's "eyes shone with a mystic fire which revealed a spirit animated by divine eroticism."

The Cardinal, in a rage, commits the awful sacrilege of tearing up the Pope's letter, thus defying what Signor Mussolini calls "the vengeance of the Vatican, which never pardons."

Thenceforward, as Novelist Mussolini reaches the end of his ability to spin out the plot, his whole tale becomes merely an antiPapist tirade.

Priests come to banquet drunkenly with the Cardinal and, "There were stories ... of the matrons of Trent, who, although enjoying much carnal domesticity with the ministers of God, had taken all the precautions which those ministers recommended to preserve appearances. They were not chaste, these matrons of Trent, but they were careful."

Frothing with secular indignation, Socialist Mussolini declares: "Papal Rome had become a putrid sink of all the vices. The Popes synthesized the universal turpitude. Alexander VI of the Borgia family, sinisterly celebrated as a skilled poisoner, was guilty of incest. . . . Paul III poisoned his mother. Julius III practiced Greek love."

At a revel the priests poison Claudia, "and after her death the Cardinal dragged out the remainder of his existence like a heavy chain. He died on Dec. 15, 1658."

Il Duce v. II Papa. The cold and formal relations existing today between the Government of Italy and the Vatican are due, in no small measure, to that shadow of mutual suspicion still cast by the original anti-Roman Catholic proclivities of Signor Mussolini, which loom so large in the pages of Claudia.

Many a Papist sincerely believes that the Dictator has not changed his spots, and considers him to be a purely secular Despot who tolerates and uses the Church for his own ends. Recently when Signor Mussolini felt himself strong enough to suppress all Italian Papist youth organizations, such as the Roman Catholic Boy Scouts, he did so (TIME, April 9). On the other hand Il Duce extends to Il Papa every formal consideration, professes a strong desire to negotiate a Concordat with the Holy See, and retains in his Cabinet as Minister of Colonies famed Luigi Federzoni, "the Vatican's soft speaker" (TIME, July 12, 1926). Furthermore, Il Papa has evinced a consistent readiness to overlook the youthful blasphemies of Il Duce and always sends a telegram of congratulation whenever an attempt to assassinate the Dictator fails (TIME, Nov. 16, 1925; April 19 and Sept. 20, 1926). Always, however, the essential conflict remains. . . .

Red or Black. Since the Papist-Fascist issue is thus obvious and clear, it becomes more intriguing to try and extract from Claudia an answer to the still hotly debated question of whether Benito Mussolini is a turncoat politician who changed his Socialist red bandanna for a black Fascist shirt from motives of the basest opportunism. Pertinent and even damning in this connection is the fact that most Italian Socialist leaders who were friends of II Duce's youth now languish in exile or in Fascist jails. But even this fact will not deter a reader of Claudia from wondering if Socialist Mussolini may not have been a Fascist at heart all along.

Certainly this view is strengthened by the peculiar attitude of Socialist-Novelist Mussolini toward the mob which he raises against Claudia the courtesan. The mob, he declares, "represented the poorest classes, excitable, impulsive, sentimental. They are the classes which patiently endure economic slavery without protest and then burst into revolt over some moral issue."

Claudia is made to exclaim: "The people is blind. It loves and hates without discernment. It sacrifices its victims only to mourn and adore them when the hour of bestial fanaticism has ceased."

When the mob's sentimental and superstitious demands for the exile of Claudia are brought to Cardinal Madruzzo, he exclaims in amazement and scorn: "I supposed that the people desired a material diminution of taxes, a free distribution of food. ... Go and tell them that Emanuel Madruzzo does not obey the orders of the mob."

In a word, the attitude of Benito Mussolini at 26 toward "the people" was as scornful, as sneeringly paternalistic and as essentially Fascist as is his attitude today. The conclusion is attractive and difficult to resist that the Man of Destiny "used" and even "espoused" Socialism, just as he has Roman Catholicism, solely as a means to his unswerving and consistent ends: Power & Paternalism.

*CLAUDIA PARTICELLA, THE CARDINAL'S MISTRESS: GRAND ROMANCE OF THE DAYS OP CARDINAL EMANUEL MADRUZZO--Benito Mussolini--A. & C. Boni ($2.00). *Today just such chairs are to be found in the sumptuous residence of Dictator Mussolini, no longer Socialist but Fascist.