Review: Dorothy Parker on Benito Mussolini, author
Signor Benito Mussolini, back in the days when he was wearing white shirts, if any, wrote a book
Mussolini at the typewriter, Villa Feltrinelli, 1945
Signor Benito Mussolini, back in the days when he was wearing white shirts, if any, wrote a book. It has lately been translated into English and stacked high on the local book-counters. It is called The Cardinal’s Mistress. Just when you think that things are beginning to break a little better, it turns out that Mussolini has been writing books about prelates’ girl-friends. That’s the way life is. That’s how things are managed in this world of yours. Sometimes I think I’ll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan.
It is rumored that Il Duce is having one of those old-fashioned Latin tantrums over the translation and publication of his literary gem. That would be, for me, the one bit of cheer in the whole performance. Anything that makes Mussolini sore is velvet so far as I am concerned. If only I had a private income, I would drop everything right now, and devote the scant remainder of my days to teasing the Dictator of All Italy. If anybody comes up to you on the street and tells you that he is my favorite character in history, would you mind saying it’s all a black lie? I want to scotch any rumor that I am what Mr. Walter Winchell would call “that way” about him. Indeed, my dream-life is largely made up of scenes in which I say to him, “Oh, Il Duce, yourself, you big stiff,” and thus leave him crushed to a pulp.
The Cardinal’s Mistress was written when Mussolini was a cunning little shaver of twenty-six, at which time he was secretary to the Socialist Chamber of Labor. His salary was twenty-four dollars a month and the use of the parlor, and he eked it out—he has never been a heavy eker—by giving French lessons and pursuing literature. For this book, first published serially, he thought up the title Claudia Particella, l’Amante del Cardinale: Grande Romanzo dei Tempi del Cardinale Emanuel Madruzzo. Well do I know, from reading the newspaper, that those who attempt disagreement with the Dictator trifle with their health; so I shall but remark, in a quiet way, that if The Cardinal’s Mistress is a grande romanzo, I am Alexandre Dumas, pére et fils.
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On the memorable day that The Cardinal’s Mistress arrived in the office of this lucky magazine, I was the girl who pled, “Please, teacher, may I have it to take home with me? Honest, I don’t want a cent of money for reviewing it. I’ll do it free of charge; I’ll even pay handsomely for the privilege.” Well, of course, they wouldn’t hear a word of that—or at least I hope to heaven they didn’t—but I got the book. I had all sorts of happy plans about it. I was going to have a lot of fun. I was going to kid what you Americans call the tripe (les tripes) out of it. At last, I thought, had come my big chance to show up this guy Mussolini. A regular Roman holiday, that’s what it was going to be.
Well, the joke was on me. There will be little kidding out of me on the subject of the Mussolini masterpiece, for I am absolutely unable to read my way through it. I tried—the Lord knows I tried. I worked, to employ the most inept simile in the language, like a dog. I put on my oldest clothes (first carefully hanging my second oldest in the cupboard), denied myself to my bill-collectors, backed the bureau against the door, and set myself to my task. And I got just exactly nowhere with that book. From the time I cracked its covers to that whirling moment, much later, when I threw myself exhausted on my bed, it had me licked. I couldn’t make head, tail, nor good red herring of the business.
In fairness to the author—and I would strip a gear any time in an effort to be square toward that boy—it is in my line of duty to admit that with any book on the general lines of The Cardinal’s Mistress, I start ’way back of scratch. When I am given a costume romance beginning “From the tiny churches hidden within the newly budding verdure of the valleys, the evensong of the Ave Maria floated gently forth and died upon the lake,” my only wish is that I, too, might float gently forth and die, and I’m not particular whether it’s upon the lake or on dry land. I go on to read of a lady whose “half-closed eyes understood the sorcery of poisonous passions,” and my one longing is to close those eyes all the way for her. And then I get into a mess of characters named the Count di Castelnuovo and Don Benizio and Carl Emanuel Madruzzo, Cardinal and Archbishop of Trent, and secular prince of the Trentino, and Filiberta, and Madonna Claudia—and everything goes black before my eyes. I know that I am never going to understand who is who and what side they are on, and I might just as well give up the unequal struggle.
There seem to be a lot of things going on in The Cardinal’s Mistress. There are political intrigues, and subtle poisons, and broken-hearted novices dying in convents, and mysterious horsemen dashing away in clouds of dust, and appropriate characters in history, and all the rest of that stock company. But such things are not for me. Even when they are fairly good, the Sandman has me, before I have so much as reached the middle of them.
For me, the one good bit of the book is its preface by Hiram Motherwell (he also translated the novel). Mr. Motherwell writes his introduction with an irreproachable seriousness, almost a solemnity, in his bearing toward Il Duce as a literary figure; and yet there is that something about it which makes the thoughtful reader feel that the translator would be just as well off if he kept out of the uncertain Italian climate for a time. It is to be hoped that he decides on some nice, far-away place—such as New York City, say—as the ideal winter resort.
Weak though the ordeal has left me, I shall never be the one to grudge the time and effort I put into my attempt at reading The Cardinal’s Mistress. The book has considerably enlarged that dream-life I was telling you about a few minutes ago. It has broadened now to admit that scene in which I tell Mussolini, “And what’s more, you can’t even write a book that anyone could read. You old Duce, you.” You can see for yourself how flat that would leave him.
This essay is drawn from Constant Reader, the collected columns of legendary wit Dorothy Parker from the year (1927–28) that she spent as a weekly book reviewer for The New Yorker. They are coming out this week, with a foreword by Sloane Crosley, from McNally Editions, the book imprint of New York City bookstore, McNally Jackson. You can order a curated subscription to McNally Editions’ series of “books from off the beaten path” for yourself or a friend here.
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Enlightening on so many levels. Thank you Ann.
Funny, yes, but goes on too long.