Dan Gregory and Benito Mussolini

Dan Gregory and Benito Mussolini are linked in the novel through Gregory’s open admiration for the Italian dictator, a portrait that earns him Mussolini’s thanks, and the political convictions he voices to his young apprentice, Rabo Karabekian. The connection is more than a matter of artistic patronage: Gregory’s reverence for Mussolini informs his contempt for modern art and his desire for authoritarian discipline, while his eventual death in an Italian uniform gives that allegiance a final, stark consequence.

The Artist and His Political Hero

Gregory regards Mussolini as his foremost hero. The connection appears early in Rabo’s account of making drawings for the local Luma County Clarion: the newspaper editor asks him to depict the dictator, whom Rabo identifies as Gregory’s hero of heroes. Mussolini’s image thus enters Rabo’s artistic life before he becomes Gregory’s apprentice, joining a provincial newspaper assignment to the formidable mentor whose approval will shape his career.

The relationship between artist and dictator is also material and personal. Gregory paints a portrait of Mussolini as a general of Alpine troops on a mountaintop at sunrise and gives it to him. Gregory’s attention to military clothing is exacting: the leather, piping, braid, brass, pleating, and decorations are all rendered correctly. The painting exemplifies Gregory’s mastery of uniforms, a skill that later carries into the military subjects he paints in Italy.

Mussolini responds with a letter thanking Gregory for the portrait. When Marilee Kemp brings Rabo’s pictures to Gregory’s studio, Gregory is unusually happy because he has just received that letter from the man he believes to be the most brilliant leader on earth. Marilee hopes his good spirits may make him more receptive to the boy’s work; instead, when Gregory looks closely at the pictures, he becomes angry over the expensive materials Marilee took from his supply room. His gratitude from Mussolini and his refusal of Rabo’s pictures occur in the same scene, setting political recognition beside the strict, hierarchical judgments through which Gregory exercises authority as an art mentor.

Authoritarian Beliefs and Artistic Judgment

Gregory’s admiration for Mussolini accompanies his denunciation of modern art. In conversation with Rabo, he calls the work of contemporary artists the work of swindlers, lunatics, and degenerates, and presents its growing acceptance as proof that the world has gone mad. He then invokes Mussolini as sharing that judgment. The dictator serves as more than a political figure in Gregory’s argument: his approval helps validate Gregory’s own hostility toward an art world he considers corrupt.

Gregory describes what Mussolini would supposedly do if he took control of the United States: burn down the Museum of Modern Art, outlaw the word democracy, replace it with a word that made the country face what it really was, and demand efficient performance. The imagined punishment for failure is castor oil, an example Rabo already associates with Mussolini’s treatment of his enemies. A year later, Gregory says that Americans are spoiled children seeking a frightening but just father to tell them exactly what to do. The political fantasy and the family metaphor converge in his preference for forceful authority over democratic self-determination.

This outlook also frames Gregory’s instructions about painting. He tells Rabo to draw everything as it really is, while his admiration for Mussolini and his own portraiture privilege legible authority, disciplined appearance, and exact uniforms. The novel juxtaposes that realist creed with Gregory’s belief that the Museum of Modern Art should be destroyed. His rejection of modernism is therefore not simply a disagreement about technique: it is bound to a political imagination in which order is imposed from above and dissenting institutions are to be removed.

Apprenticeship and the Cost of Allegiance

Gregory’s politics affect the atmosphere of Rabo’s apprenticeship. At a dinner party, Gregory argues bitterly with guests about Mussolini; the guests include Al Jolson, W. C. Fields, and Booth Tarkington, and none returns to the house afterward. Rabo, waiting upstairs to meet Gregory, is kept for about six hours in a luxurious guest chamber modeled on the bedroom of Napoleon’s Empress Josephine. The delay and the household’s charged political divisions place the young artist inside a world where Gregory’s convictions govern both public argument and private relations.

Gregory’s praise of Mussolini does not mean that his bond with Rabo is uncomplicated or lasting. During the war, Gregory and Fred Jones leave for Italy with Marilee and receive permission from Mussolini to wear Italian infantry officers’ uniforms, without badges of rank or unit, while painting the Italian Army in action. Gregory and Jones are killed at Sidi Barrani around December 1940, nearly a year before the United States enters the war. Gregory is wearing an Italian uniform when the British kill him in Egypt. The narrative does not reduce his death to a simple explanation of political allegiance, but the uniform makes his association with Mussolini visible at the moment of his death.

Rabo later recalls that, after the war, Gregory returned his pictures and never contacted him again; he suspects that he had been only a wartime activity for the older painter. The contrast is sharp: Gregory’s portrait of Mussolini secured a personal expression of gratitude from the dictator, whereas the young American painter he had once taken under his wing received no continuing recognition. The novel’s account of the relationship thus ties artistic prestige to power and patronage, while showing how little Gregory’s mentorship ultimately guarantees Rabo.

Narrative Significance

Mussolini’s presence links several otherwise distinct strands of Rabo’s history: his first paid drawing, his apprenticeship, Gregory’s account of modern art, and the wartime deaths of Gregory and Jones. The dictator is both the subject of a technically accomplished portrait and the measure by which Gregory judges political and artistic life. That double role makes the portrait especially revealing: Gregory’s craft serves an admired leader, while his contempt for modern art is expressed through a political vision that would silence its institutions.

The relationship also sharpens the novel’s treatment of authority and artistic value. Gregory can identify the quality of Rabo’s pictures, yet his attention is diverted by the materials used to make them; he can render a uniform with extraordinary precision, yet his own artistic and political judgments are inseparable from admiration for authoritarian power. Mussolini’s letter confirms Gregory’s success in the language of recognition he values, but neither that recognition nor his later military service prevents his death in Egypt. The connection therefore ends not in a reciprocal personal relationship between painter and dictator, but in a chain of images, beliefs, and consequences that Rabo narrates from the long distance of his autobiography.