From Saddam Hussein to Stalin, why do dictators write novels and poems?

Benito Mussolini wrote 'The Cardinal’s Mistress', a novel about a passionate love affair; Saddam Hussein’s 'Zabiba and the King' tells the tale of a lonely ruler and the beautiful woman who adores him; and Francisco Franco wrote 'Raza', is about a noble family torn apart during Spain’s civil war. (Images via Wikimedia Commons)

Saddam Hussein’s extra-curricular activities are the subject of some passages in The Achilles Trap, Steve Coll’s new book on the origins of America’s invasion of Iraq. The country’s strongman spent time fishing, swimming, playing chess – and writing novels to boot. Don’t rush to add them to your reading list just yet. Coll comments that the novels were not very good: Hussein had a digressive prose style and largely shrugged off the suggestions of brave editors.

One of his literary escapades, Zabiba and the King, tells the tale of a lonely ruler and the beautiful woman who adores him, sacrificing everything for love. Apparently, this theme was a favourite of Hussein’s, as he composed other stories of royal intrigue, love affairs, and betrayal. In The Infernal Library, a study of the works of dictators, Daniel Kalder echoes Coll’s views when he says that Hussein’s writing struggles to find its footing and lacks control over both words and structure.

Kalder’s book contains many other examples. A decade before he came to power, Mussolini wrote The Cardinal’s Mistress, a novel about a passionate love affair containing decidedly anti-clerical views. When he took time off from running Spain, Franco wrote Raza, a one-sided melodrama about a noble family divided against itself during the country’s civil war. And Gaddafi dabbled in short stories which, in Kalder’s description, were “brief prose feuilletons and pseudo-philosophical streams of consciousness”.

Libya's Muammar Gaddafi (Photo by Stevan Kragujević via Wikimedia Commons 3.0)Poetry, too, has its place in the autocrat’s repertoire. Mao wrote verse throughout his life, and many of his non-poetical texts are sprinkled with literary references and allusions to classical Chinese literature. A teenage Stalin also wrote poems about the joys of nature and the beauty of the motherland, perhaps foreshadowing the sort of work he approved of when he was the leader of the Soviet Union.

It's understandable that rulers publish memoirs and manifestoes to promote their ideologies, sometimes even before coming to power, but why do they feel the need to be acclaimed as novelists and poets? Perhaps some think of themselves as sensitive, creative types. In his youth, after he was denied admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, Hitler put “writer” as his profession when registering a new address with the municipal authorities – but this, as Kalder points out, “was a fantasy”.

Narcissism apart, quite a few autocrats aspire to break free from the image of a brutish ruler. Literary pursuits are a handy way to polish personas and convey an aura of intellectual depth. By positioning themselves as talented writers, they aim to enhance their charisma; such “creative” endeavours are little more than tools to burnish a cult of personality.

At other times, as in the case of Franco, there’s clearly an urge to portray an “official” version of history and reinforce a worldview by whatever means possible, including literature. The caudillo’s Raza, after all, is a romanticised, warped version of the bloody events that brought him to power. And Steve Coll writes about Saddam Hussein that the president regarded novels, his own and those of other Iraqi authors hired out by the state, as “prestigious propaganda”.

In one respect at least, autocrats who write novels are to be envied by others who merely aspire to write. Leaders don’t have to worry about pesky issues such as being taken on by agents and publishers, and they live without anxieties about whether their work will immediately find an audience.

On the other hand, their novels and poems typically fade into obscurity once they leave power. You won’t find many readers nowadays happily curled up with dog-eared copies of Franco or Hussein’s work - unless, like Kalder, they’re writing about them while trying to suppress a shudder.

Far better to dive into novels not by dictators but about them, such as Alejo Carpentier’s Reasons of State, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme, to mention just a few from Latin America. Not only do these have genuine artistic merit, but they also provide a more nuanced view of the complexities of authoritarian rule.