Fencers Quarterly Online - The Living Sword: A Fencer's Autobiography

Aldo Nadi was a great fencer, an acknowledged giant among giants, a champion for whom winning became so commonplace his peers simply gave up challenging him in disgust. He was also a man for whom success was eternally colored by a fencing rivalry with his older brother Nedo, under whose broad shadow he often labored.

This autobiographical account, written sans ghost writer, has been both criticized and acclaimed. Some reviewers and readers zero in on Nadi’s "antiquated" personal views of life. These individuals have missed the point with their attacks: Aldo was clearly the product of his time period, his upbringing, and his family ties.

Nedo was clearly the beloved of fencing and of the Nadi family. Aldo was always the bad boy, the other brother. For all his

fantastic victories on the fencing strip, Aldo never managed to resolve his mixed feelings toward his sibling. While his vast competitive energies allowed him to overcome every major fencing star in pre-World War II Europe, his successes never quelled the image of Nedo as the main luminary of the Nadi clan.

Throughout his memoir, it is obvious that Aldo's desire to prove himself superior to his brother played an important role in his victories, yet this in no way diminishes the value of his achievements. After all, he had the talent as well as the drive to be a champion. In some ways, Aldo resembles Rostand's seventeenth century swashbuckler Cyrano de Bergerac - a character possessed of continually conflicting emotions and motivations. At times brash and opinionated enough to put off even the stoutest of supporters, Aldo Nadi nevertheless possessed the courage and skill to back up his words with impressive deeds. He never backed down to anyone, and he lived by a code that demanded he never give anything but his best effort. And all the while, he possessed an unflagging devotion to fencing as an art and science.

For these things, he should be admired. How many people live by a discernible philosophy today?

During his sixty odd years of life, Aldo Nadi was an amateur fencing champion, an Olympian, a duelist, a professional fencing

competitor, a fencing master, a movie fencing coach, an actor, a writer, and, by his own graphic confessions, a lover of many, many women.

The Living Sword (published thirty years after his death), does justice to his varied existence, illuminating not only the man, but also painting a colorful picture of the unique time in which he lived and fenced.

        Nadi's descriptions of the European fencing world of the 1920s and 30s, when fencing matches, both professional and amateur, were as popular with the general public as tennis is today, are of particular interest. Perhaps somewhat biased at moments, they still bring to life a time long extinct, when being a swordsman was more than an idle boast. Nadi’s candid account of his famous 1924 duel with Adolfo Cotronei alone makes the book worth reading!

        Those who have dismissed this book as fluff, or the prejudiced rant of an anti-feminist, miss the mark - failing to take into account that Aldo Nadi lived in a time much different than our own, which is a shortcoming of many revisionist historians today. His world could be looked on as stifling and narrow-minded in our tolerant society. But one of the joys of reading autobiographies set in earlier eras is gaining a sense of distance, of the uniqueness of another man's time. That is clearly seen in this work.

        You don't have to be a fencer to enjoy the Nadi narrative - but it certainly doesn't hurt. I would have enjoyed knowing

Maestro Aldo Nadi, not only for his expertise in fencing, but also simply for the man himself. Lacking that experience, reading this

book is the next best thing.

- Nick Evangelista

Picture of Aldo Nadi from: The Collection of Polly August.