The 'B'-File: Roman Household

The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg

December 26, 2014

Editor's Note: Jonah will be back to filing your favorite "news"letter in the New Year. In the meantime, we at NR thought we'd make this "G-File" a "B-File" and share this classic "Letter from Abroad" by our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., from November 2, 1957. In it, WFB charmingly chronicles the mix of politics within one Italian family how it reflects upon the greater political predicament of their country.

Roman Household

I am very ignorant of Italy. If anyone had told me eighteen years ago that these words would one day cross my lips I'd have replied, Sure, and the cow will jump over the moon. For I was quite certain that Italy withheld no secrets from me—how could it, when Father had willed otherwise? For six weeks we did Italy, in 1939, under my father's supervision. We being my mother, a brace of sisters, a Russian (White) chauffeur-aesthete we picked up in Paris (we gave up the practice of segregated meals shortly after we espied Bibikoff sharing his dinner table with Alfonso XIII); an Italian guide (a bewhiskered, stiffbacked, venerable old count, who mourned the fact that he had so long outlived his beloved countess, the opera singer Ella Russell); our French governess; and our music teacher. We peered down the crater of Vesuvius, ate fettucine at Alfredo's, climbed the tower of Pisa, stared at the mosaics at Ravenna, memorized the pictures at the Uffizi, conversed wide-eyed with the newly-installed Pope; and left the country secure in the knowledge that, on the subject of Italy, we were, each one of us, an authority.

And now I am back; and, as I say, essentially ignorant of the country and, moreover, unable to communicate even the most primitive message in Italian. But things have a way of opening up for you in Europe, even if you are as lackadaisical about things as my wife and I are. Sure enough, in Gibraltar we bumped into an American family on the way to Rome to spend the year, the purpose being to send their 17-year-old daughter and twelve-year-old son to Italian schools. Fentress Kuhn is an Idaho rancher, an active Republican who ran a few years ago for the Senate and got beat, and a genial and intelligent man. He both graduated from Yale and speaks to me; and what is more, he reads—and even, from time to time, agrees with—National Review. At dinner with him and his beautiful wife I found myself seated beside a roman lady who, conversation revealed, is a member of a remarkable household.

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Sofia Espantada grew up in the company of the mighty. Her playmates included young Prince Umberto, King for a few months after the war, and deposed in 1946 when the Italians, in part due to pressure by Communists and State Department ideologists, voted in the Republic. She knew Mussolini socially; indeed, he was an honorary usher at her wedding in 1925 and she was a guest at his daughter's wedding to Count Ciano. (She disapproves of pretty much everything Mussolini did after 1936.)

Signora Espantada, handsome and spirited, spoke zestfully about politics and world affairs and explained that on such occasions as that in which we found ourselves she was given to letting off steam because, by common consent, politics were not discussed in her household. Indeed, I was to learn, politics in her household, as in Italy, tend to be sundering.

Here is the trouble: Signora Espantada is a monarchist and a "traditionalist." She points out that there are no less than two monarchist parties in Italy (one of them did splendidly earlier this year in a by-election by distributing left shoes to the electorate and promising to distribute matching right shoes if elected), and that conceivably, after next spring's election, the Christian Democrats, who are not expected to win an absolute majority, will turn to them for help: which would mean brighter days for Italian monarchists.

Her husband, Rodolfo Espantada, a lawyer by profession, is a Radicale. To tell the truth, I forget just what a Radicale is, but I remember 1) that there are five members of the central committee, and three schools of thought; 2) that the Radicales are not very radical; and 3) that they are not a bit numerous (one member in the Chamber of Deputies).

Helena, the youngest of two girls, is 23, and pronouncedly Liberal. She is unaffiliated with any political party, and refused to tell her family whom she voted for in the last election ("It's a secret ballot, isn't it?"). She frowns on the conservatism of her older sister, who is a monarchist; but greatly admires, though she is a little apprehensive about the lengths to which he goes, the politics of her 27-year-old brother.

Luigi Espantada eats capitalists for breakfast. He writes regularly for a radical socialist highbrow fortnightly. I did not meet Luigi (he takes his finals in medicine this week, and was off cramming), and I feel somewhat a voyeur in reporting that he has in his bedroom framed pictures of Lenin and Stalin, and in his shelves, books to match. He is not a member of the Communist party, but one gets the impression he would be but for the automatic excommunication he would incur should he take that step—Luigi is a devout Catholic. He is convinced that the future is socialism's; he deplores Russian cruelties—I suspect in much the same language in which Liberal intellectuals deplored Russian cruelties in the thirties—but then, What about the negro situation in the South? . . .

That is why the Espantada family does not discuss politics. The son undoubtedly suspects his parents of vestigial Fascism; They in turn marvel that anyone of his intelligence should be so utterly bamboozled. And, with it all, they love one another dearly.

As the Espantada household gets along, so the nation gets along. There are those of us who feel that no nation can get on for very long with a Communist minority the size of Italy's. The Espantadas have transpolitical ties that bind them together: and—all important—the son has not rejected the final philosophical substratum that holds up the entire family, the belief in Christianity. But is Italy—a disparate country of disparate people, so recently united into a single nation—tied together strongly enough to resist the batterings of the largest Communist Party in Western Europe? Or will she come undone? The Espantadas, vexed though their situation is, are one up on Italy; and my guess is that their hotel for diverse political faiths will outlast Italy's.

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The 'B'-File: Roman Household

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