Lucy Hughes-Hallett

This is a mammoth biography of the Italian godfather of fascism, Gabriele d'Annunzio. Claimed as Italy's greatest living poet and playwright in his day, he was lauded by Mussolini. D'Annunzio, in turn, detested Mussolini and considered him a "crude imitator". He equally detested Hitler. He embraced Nietzschean ideals, wrote a lot about Country, Flag and Sacrifice, evolved the visual style of much fascist spectacle but never specifically claimed he was a fascist himself. He was a massive show more self-promoter, narcissist and serial seducer of women (only for some of his writing to display distinct homoerotic tendencies). It's a fascinating but highly detailed book with some 640 pages of text; little seems to be omitted.

D'Annunzio was born into comfortable circumstances in the Italian east-coast province of the Abruzzi. From an early age he determined to become a great writer; as he grew into manhood, he also developed an enormous libido. Growing up in a recently-unified country, he admired the heroes of the Risorgimento, and absorbed political turmoil just as avidly as he did all the latest artistic trends. He was widely read and had a solid understanding of his art. In time, those arts came to embrace the poetry of action, promotion and spectacle, as well as the more traditional ones of verse, prose and drama. He seized upon the works of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, and soon embraced the idea of the "superman" - not our modern image of some caped superhero, doing good for all and fighting evil, but rather the idea of the "superior man", whose innate qualities set him above the ordinary mass of the people. To such a man, rules, moral norms and laws should not apply, for only then can they achieve their destiny to lead. His studies of Italian history led him to identify with the Romans and to yearn for a time when Italy could regain the power and status that once was Rome. He also identified with the condottieri, the Renaissance mercenary leaders who waged war across the peninsula at the same time as many of the world's greatest artists and thinkers were founding Western civilization. This contrast fascinated d'Annunzio.

He identified with the Futurist movement, which in turn reinforced his fascination with power, new technologies and mechanised warfare. D'Annunzio's self-publicism arose at the birth of mass media; he was ever anxious to embrace, and what was more understand, new media. The propaganda of fascism was essentially his invention. In the years before the First World War, he was lauded by many of the greatest literary figures of the age. This led to his leading a lifestyle well beyond his means; even as a best-selling author, he was regularly evading bailiffs and fleeing from debts. Bankruptcy drove him to Paris in 1909; five years later, he returned to Italy to await his Destiny.

Having agitated for Italy to join World War I in 1915, he went to the front and participated in various military actions - but always those that reflected well on him and that he could write about, turning the action and attention onto himself. He was especially active in writing about the "irredeemed" territories that Italy should seize by force of arms to establish the nation's esteem amongst the other World Powers. He came to concentrate on the territories on the Dalmatian coast, now part of Yugoslavia; at the end of the war, a number of these places were about to change hands, and d'Annunzio wanted to be certain that the hands they fell into were Italy's. He concentrated on the port city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) and marched into the city at the head of a band of irregulars who would eventually become the basis of Mussolini's Blackshirts. Over the next year, he declared himself the leader of a new Utopia based on Nietzschean principles, only to find himself unable to control his followers and outmanoeuvred by politicians in Rome. Mussolini rose to power partly on d'Annunzio's coat-tails; he stole his ideas, his style and his methods and made them his own.

D'Annunzio died in 1938 at the age of 74; perhaps the one area where the book falls down is that the narrative ends with his death. There is nothing about the extent to which he is remembered today in Italy. His books are all still in print (most of them written before his moves into politics, war and totalitarianism), though we are only left with contemporary accounts of the praise they attracted. It is difficult to get any idea of what d'Annunzio was like as a novelist. At the same time, I was led to wonder about what this book was telling me about modern Italian history. Although Mussolini imposed racial purity laws similar to Hitler's in 1938, Italian Jews were not deported to concentration camps within the Reich until German troops moved into the country in 1943 in pursuit of war aims. Indeed, until the 1970s, many Italians believed that their country had played little or no role in the Holocaust. This book isn't specifically about the wider role of fascism in Italy, but the extent of the adulation for d'Annunzio at the time, the hints about his status since his death, and the parallels that the book invites with more recent Italian politics gives pause for thought.

The book has a wry turn of phrase at times; it is not dry and is certainly no hagiography. And throughout, I felt the urge to compare d'Annunzio with political figures of our time hard to deny. Such figures - narcissists, serial liars, persons who claim the moral high ground whilst not practising their own creeds, people who use high rhetoric to whip up a following amongst the populace whilst personally despising the ordinary people for being followers, people who feel that they are too important for rules to apply to them - are unfit for public office and in a just world would be excised from public life. I do not need to supply names. show less

A sprawling portrait of a singularly bizarre individual; d'Annunzio, by all rights, should have been in disgrace and shunned a hundred times over before World War I for his sexual and financial misadventures but he instead channeled his aesthetic gifts and his own Nietzschean will to power (or at least acclaim) into becoming an agitator for Italian entry into war and then built on that to ultimately become "leader" of the city-state of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) to protest the "mutilated" show more victory that Italy was having to endure for her efforts. Consider this part of the general project to demonstrate the organic nature of Italian fascism as an acceleration of the dream of Italian great power status as a tool to create Italians.

The problem with this book is that while Hughes-Hallett does a fine job of illustrating the streams of experience and tradition that created d'Annunzio, she is probably weakest at illustrating what were the attractions of the man's artistic output to the populace at large, to the point that they would overlook that he was the proverbial bad man who was dangerous to know. This is considering that one of her goals in writing this book was to avoid the dichotomy of overlooking the man's politics for the sake of his art or damning his art due to his now discredited politics. show less

This is a wonderfully quirky and clever novel. The main character is the house and grounds of Wychwood in Oxfordshire and the central theme is walls. The story begins in 1663 when a wall is built around the house to keep those inside 'safe'. The tale then leaps forward in time to 1961 when the Berlin Wall suddenly appears almost over night, and then time hops again to 1973 and again to 1989 when big changes are occurring in the world and walls are broached.

There are a lot of allegories and show more parallels in this enchanting, shall we call it, parable. Walls can keep us safe or divide us, even isolate us to a certain extent. We can also build a wall around ourselves. I think it is quite relevant to the present time, too. It has a lot to tell us. There are usually chinks in walls and we should bear in mind there is a whole wide world out there waiting to be explored and bridges to be built!

It is beautifully and vividly written. Some of it is told almost like a fable. The grounds of Wychwood are so easy to imagine. It has a magical and otherworldly feel, a peculiar ground indeed. What a fabulous place to live or visit! I love the map at the front of the book. It really helps with visualising where everything is. There are some brilliant characters and, as in a lot of country estates, the families seem to stay through the generations, the same name recurring.

I found this story so captivating. I absolutely loved it! I was very sorry to turn the last page. Wychwood and its peculiar ground is well worth a visit!

Many thanks to Lovereading.co.uk for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book. show less

In spring 1622 King James VI & I’s favourite, George Villiers, then marquess of Buckingham, toured Fontainebleau Palace with the Flemish artist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens. Admiring Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the Englishman ‘asked if he might have it’ but was firmly rebuffed. ‘Unaccustomed to having his requests denied, Buckingham was put out, but the day was otherwise pleasant.’ Evincing Buckingham’s audacity as well as his connoisseurship, this instance is one of numerous show more scenes vividly recreated in Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Scapegoat. More a cluster of evocative vignettes than a conventional biography, her life of Buckingham is presented in more than 100 chapters, with some – such as ‘More Advice on Bargaining’ – extending to barely 100 words, while others – such as ‘Houses’ – supplying a chronological list of property acquisitions. As Hughes-Hallett indicates at the outset: ‘This book is about big things – peace and war, Parliament and despotism. It is also about small things – babies, jewels, anemones … aiming to make a collage that conjures up a life in all its complexity.’

Reading The Scapegoat sometimes feels like reviewing the author’s informal working notes. Hughes-Hallett’s prose style shifts from narrative description to imaginative speculation; when discussing how Buckingham and Prince Charles sought to extricate themselves from Philip IV’s court in Madrid in July 1623, she presents ‘two possible guessed-at versions of their all-night conversations’.

Rendered in luxuriant detail are the flamboyant personalities, material magnificence and complex hierarchies that comprised court culture under James VI and I, Charles I, Louis XIII of France and Philip IV of Spain. Regular modern interjections also echo Hughes-Hallett’s novel Peculiar Ground (2017), which moves in focus from Oxfordshire in the 1660s to Berlin in the 1970s. Chronological shifts evidently attract the author, who posits that comparing a portrait of Buckingham by William Larkin with another executed five years later by Anthony van Dyck is ‘to have the dizzying experience of a ride in a vastly accelerated time machine’. Confronted by centuries of salacious speculation regarding the nature of Buckingham’s relations with James, Hughes-Hallett is forthright in insisting that, since theirs was ‘the kind of love that ambushes at first sight’, it ‘doesn’t much matter’ whether sexual intercourse occurred – even if ‘the not-mattering is alien to the twenty-first century mind’. Less compelling – at least in terms of appreciating the scale of Buckingham’s political influence – is her observation that she started working on The Scapegoat in 2020 at a time when ‘large decisions about the way Britain was ruled were being made by one of the prime minister’s staff, Dominic Cummings’, who ‘seemed to come, as Buckingham did, from nowhere’ and then ‘became a scapegoat, as Buckingham did four hundred years before’. Such a comparison seems needlessly flattering to Cummings.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/scapegoat-lucy-hughes-hallett-review

Clare Jackson is Honorary Professor of Early Modern History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. show less