D’Annunzio became so closely associated with exasperated nationalism and fascism that his very real status as one of Italy’s major writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has become obscured. The Italian writer Alberto Arbasino wrote that D’Annunzio is “the proverbial body hidden in the basement, one of the most cumbersome of all literature, of all countries, vilified, trampled, neglected.” D’Annunzio’s place in the pantheon of great Italian poets is widely acknowledged, but it is easy to forget that such major twentieth-century authors as James Joyce and Marcel Proust were great admirers of D’Annunzio’s novels. It is thus extremely valuable to return to D’Annunzio’s literary contributions, starting with his extraordinary first novel, Pleasure.
Lara Gochin Raffaelli has performed a real service by restoring Pleasure to an English-speaking public, or rather giving it to us, in effect, for the first time. The frank eroticism of Pleasure was so shocking at the time of its publication, especially in the prudish English-speaking world, that the novel was butchered almost beyond recognition to pass muster with British censors when it appeared as The Child of Pleasure in Georgina Harding’s translation of 1898. The Victorian Harding had managed, in effect, to take the sex out of a novel in which sex is a central, if not the central, preoccupation. “Today, tomorrow, until death,” D’Annunzio wrote, “the work of the flesh is in me the work of the spirit, and both harmonize to achieve one sole, unique beauty. The most fertile creatrix of beauty in the world is sensuality enlightened by apotheosis.” Harding, for example, removes in its entirety the first chapter of the book, in which Sperelli awaits his former lover Elena, and relives their passionate affair in his mind. Elena has the “slightly cruel habit” of tearing the petals off the flowers that Sperelli has carefully arranged for their trysts and scattering them across the rug where the two of them evidently make love. D’Annunzio provides a memorable description of the nude Elena’s feline body becoming increasingly excited as she stokes the fire in Sperelli’s Roman palace, and of her imperious habit of making Sperelli tie her shoes after they make love: “Nothing could compare with the grace of the posture that she would assume every time, lifting her skirt slightly and putting forward first one foot and then the other, so that her lover, kneeling, could tie the laces of her shoe, which were still unfastened.”
One of the many striking things about reading Pleasure is its obsessive interest in things, in the buying and possessing of beautiful objects, of furniture and décor, drapes, bowls, bric-a-brac. Sperelli is obsessed with surrounding himself with beautiful things and is always careful to compose the room with objects as he conducts his love affairs. The objects themselves bear a kind of erotic charge that becomes bound up with the erotic bond between the two lovers.
For him, all those objects among which he had so many times loved and taken pleasure and suffered had taken on something of his sensitivity. Not only were they witness to his loves, his pleasures, his moments of sadness, but they had participated in them . . . And because he sought out these things with skill, like an aesthete, he naturally drew from the world of objects a great part of his exhilaration. This delicate actor could not comprehend the comedy of love without the backdrops.
In one of the many extraordinary scenes in Pleasure, Sperelli in effect wins over Elena at a public auction in which they are both bidding on beautiful objects being sold off from some venerable Italian collection. When Elena turns to him and says, “I advise you to buy this timepiece,” Sperelli senses that something has changed between them. “Is she advising me to buy it for us?” he wonders. As they hand the objects they have purchased back and forth, an erotic charge passes between them.
In Elena’s aristocratic hands, those precious materials seemed to acquire value . . . It seemed that a particle of the amorous charm of that woman passed into them, the way some of the qualities of a magnet pass into a piece of iron. It was truly a magnetic sensation of pleasure, one of those intense and profound sensations that one feels almost only at the beginning of a love affair.
This scene is, frankly, much more interesting than the famous seduction scene in Madame Bovary in which Flaubert has Emma grant her favors to Rodolphe while we hear a cattle auction outside the window.
The world that D’Annunzio describes is the Rome of the nineteenth century, only recently the capital of Italy, with one foot in the old papal Rome, a sleepy, provincial, but extravagantly beautiful city dominated by the old aristocracy, and a newer world of lawyers, politicians, and a rising bourgeoisie. D’Annunzio—the lover of beauty—sides clearly with the first over the second.
Sperelli is a member of that dying breed of Italian aristocracy, which still has a feeling for refinement and beauty. And yet D’Annunzio, although from a family of minor nobility, was one of the thousands of provincials who descended on the new capital to make his fortune. In fact, D’Annunzio helped support himself in his first years in Rome in a quintessentially new profession, journalism, contributing hundreds of pieces to various lively, gossipy illustrated magazines that were part of a new mass culture made possible by high-speed printing presses. D’Annunzio wrote, among other things, about fashion and high society, which helps explain the novel’s extremely fresh, minute descriptions of Roman life. He helped chronicle the aristocratic world he was anxious to be a part of, but in writing about it he participated in a process in which the nobles and their precious possessions became objects of consumption.
D’Annunzio describes an amazing scene in which the princesses and countesses of the Roman nobility contribute to a charitable fund-raising event by offering for sale objects they have touched. Some sell cigarettes they have lit in their own mouths, one sells glasses of champagne from which she has sipped, others sell pieces of fruit they have bitten sensuously into—which men purchase for the pleasure of placing their lips on something that has been in a beautiful woman’s mouth. One princess even performs the stunt of selling cigars she has placed under her armpit: “—Every act of charity is blessed, the marchioness decreed. —I, with all my biting of fruit, managed to gather about two hundred luigi.”
Of course, the objects that Sperelli is most interested in possessing are women. Pleasure is a fascinating psychological novel about the mind of a seducer, with D’Annunzio clearly using himself as subject. One of the things that makes Pleasure so interesting is that D’Annunzio is pitilessly frank in his analysis of his alter ego, Sperelli: “The basis of his power lay in this: that in the art of love, he had no repugnance for any pretense, for any falseness, for any lie. A great part of his strength lay in his hypocrisy.”
Part of Sperelli’s charm for women is his ability to make each one feel, in spite of much contrary evidence, that she is the only woman he has truly loved and will ever love: “He spoke to her in a low voice, kneeling, so close that it seemed he wanted to drink in her breath. His ardor was sincere, while his words sometimes lied.” D’Annunzio understands that eroticism is very much an affair of the mind and a matter of perception. He describes the way in which his conquest of Elena suddenly raises his status in the eyes of other women in the Roman aristocracy:
The contagion of desire is a very frequent phenomenon in modern societies. A man who has been loved by a woman of singular esteem excites the imagination in other women; and each one burns with desire to possess him, out of vanity and curiosity, competing with the others. The appeal of Don Giovanni is more in his fame than in his person.
At one point, when he is courting another woman, Maria, while also trying to win back Elena, Sperelli attends a concert with Maria and then notices Elena looking at them both, a gaze that is not lost on Maria either. Sperelli senses that a little jealousy may push the reluctant Elena back into his arms, while having a similar effect on Maria. “He was therefore on his way toward a double conquest,” D’Annunzio writes. As Sperelli imagines this “double conquest,” the two women become melded in his mind and transformed into a third:
How strange,
Elena’s tones in Donna Maria’s voice! A crazy thought flashed into his head. That voice could be, for him, the element of an imaginative work: by virtue of such an affinity, he could fuse the two beauties in order to possess a third, imaginary one, more complex, more perfect, more real because she was ideal . . .
For D’Annunzio the erotic life and the life of the literary imagination are one and the same, and imaginary reality is the most real.
Although only twenty-six at the time of the novel’s publication, D’Annunzio firmly resisted any attempts on his publisher’s part to cut or soften Pleasure. Curiously, the passage that his publisher was most worried about was not an erotic one but a brief cryptic allusion to a painful contemporary political event: the slaughter of Italian troops at the hands of Ethiopian soldiers at Dogali, an inglorious moment in Italy’s inglorious effort at African colonization. Politics hardly figures at all in Pleasure, and we experience the defeat at Dogali (which occurred just before D’Annunzio wrote the novel) in the form of a noisy rabble that slows down Sperelli’s carriage. Sperelli dismisses the event by saying, “All for four hundred brutes, who died brutally!”
When his publisher suggested the line would offend patriotic sentiment, D’Annunzio reacted with apparent outrage: “That phrase is spoken by Andrea Sperelli and not by Gabriele D’Annunzio, and it fits well in the mouth of that monster.”
Sperelli was thus a perfect foil for D’Annunzio, a character he could both inhabit and disown as needed, hero and monster.
Perhaps with D’Annunzio in mind, Luigi Pirandello, a writer of a very different kind, wrote, “Life: either you live it or you write it. I have never lived it except by writing.” This was a division D’Annunzio did not accept: he lived writing and wrote living, a dynamic and explosive combination that lasted for about twenty years, until his public life crowded out his writing.
ALEXANDER STILLE
Pleasure
To Francesco Paolo Michetti
This book, composed in your house as a welcome guest, comes to you as an offering of thanks, as an ex-voto.1
In the tiredness of the long and heavy exertion, your presence was as fortifying and consoling to me as the sea. In the disgust that follows the painful and captious contrivance of style, the limpid simplicity of your reasoning was an example and a correction for me. In the doubts that followed the effort of analysis, not infrequently was your profound judgment a source of light to me.
To you who study all the forms and all the mutations of the spirit as you study all the forms and all the mutations of things, to you who understand the laws that govern the internal life of man, the way you understand the laws of design and color, to you who are as much an acute connoisseur of souls as you are a great creator of paintings, I owe the exercise and the development of the noblest among the faculties of intellect: I owe the habit of observation, and I owe, especially, the method. I am now, like you, convinced that there is one sole object of study for us: Life.
We are, in truth, very far from the time in which, while you were in the Sciarra Gallery intent on penetrating the secrets of da Vinci and Titian, I was extending a salutation to you of nostalgic rhymes
to the Ideal that has no sunsets,
to Beauty which knows no pain!
However, an oath taken in that period was indeed fulfilled. We returned together to our sweet fatherland, to your “vast house.” There are no Medicean tapestries hanging on the walls, nor women assembled at our Decameronian gatherings; nor Paolo Veronese’s2 cupbearers or greyhounds strolling around the tables, nor supernatural fruits filling the crockery that Galeazzo Maria Sforza ordered from Maffeo di Clivate. Our desire is less presumptuous: and our lifestyle more primitive, perhaps also more Homeric and more heroic, if one may count the meals, worthy of Ajax,3 taken alongside the resounding sea, interrupting the fasts of one’s labors.
I smile when I think that this book where I examine, not without sadness, so much corruption and so much depravity and so much vain insidiousness and falseness and cruelty, has been written amid the simple, serene peace of your house, between the last starlings of the harvest and the first pastorals4 of the snow, while my pages grew together with the precious life of your small son.
Certainly, if there is any human compassion and any goodness in my book, I render thanks to your son. Nothing inspires tenderness and uplifts one as much as the sight of life unfolding. Even the vision of dawn cedes its place to that wonder.
Here, then, is the volume. If, while reading it, your eye skips on ahead and you see Giorgio holding out his hands to you and smiling at you with his rounded face, as in Catullus’s divine strophe, semihiante labello,5 you must interrupt your reading. And may the small rosy heels before you press down on the pages where all the misery of Pleasure is represented; and may that careless pressure be a symbol and an augur.
Hail, Giorgio. Friend and teacher, great thanks.
FROM THE CONVENT: JANUARY 9, 1889.6
FIRST BOOK
CHAPTER I
The year was ebbing away, very gently. The New Year’s Eve sun radiated almost imperceptible veiled warmth, infinitely soft, golden, almost vernal, in the sky above Rome. All the roads were crowded, as on Sundays in May. On Piazza Barberini, on Piazza di Spagna, a multitude of carriages were rushing back and forth; and from the two squares the mingled and constant noise, rising up Trinità de’ Monti to Via Sistina, reached the rooms of Palazzo Zuccari somewhat dulled.
The rooms were slowly filling with the scent emanating from fresh flowers in vases. Thick, fat roses were immersed in certain crystal goblets that rose, slender, from a sort of gilded stem, widening into the shape of a diamond lily, similar to those that appear behind the Virgin in the tondo by Sandro Botticelli at the Galleria Borghese. No other form of goblet equals in elegance such a form: the flowers in that diaphanous prison seem almost to become spiritual, resembling rather a religious or loving offering.
Andrea Sperelli was awaiting a lover in his rooms. Everything around him revealed special loving care. Juniper wood burned in the fireplace and the small tea table was ready, set with majolica cups and saucers from Castel Durante decorated with mythological scenes by Luzio Dolci, ancient forms of inimitable grace, with Ovidian hexameters written in blue-black cobalt1 italic script below the figures. Light entered the room softened by curtains of red brocade with pomegranates, leaves, and mottos embossed in spun silver. As the afternoon sun struck the windowpanes, the flowered design of the lace curtains cast its shadow on the carpet.
The clock of Trinità de’ Monti sounded three thirty. There was still half an hour to wait. Andrea Sperelli rose from the couch on which he had been lying and went to open one of the windows; then he walked around the apartment; then he opened a book, read a few lines, closed it again; then he looked around for something with a dubious expression. The anxiety of the wait stabbed him so acutely that he needed to move about, to engage in some activity, to distract his internal suffering with physical action. He bent toward the fireplace, took the tongs to revive the fire, and placed a new piece of juniper atop the burning pile. The pile collapsed; the coals rolled, scintillating, down to the metal plate that protected the carpet; the flames split into many small bluish tongues that vanished and reappeared; the embers emitted smoke.
Then a memory arose in the waiting man’s mind. In front of that very fireplace Elena had once loved to bask before dressing, after an hour of intimacy. She possessed much skill in heaping great pieces of wood on the andirons. She would take the heavy tongs with both hands and lean her head back slightly, to avoid the sparks. Her body on the carpet, in this slightly difficult task, in the movements of her muscles and the flickering of the shadows, seemed to radiate beauty from every joint, every fold, every hollow, suffused with an amber pallor that brought to mind Correggio’s Danäe. And indeed her limbs were somewhat Correggian, her hands and feet small and supple, almost, one could say, arboreal, as depicted in statues of Daphne
at the very beginning of her fabled metamorphosis.
As soon as she had completed her task the wood would flame up and emit an immediate radiant glow. In the room, that warm russet light and the frozen dusk entering through the windows would vie with each other for a while. The aroma of the burnt juniper made one slightly dizzy. Elena seemed to be overcome by a sort of childish frenzy at the sight of the blaze. She had the slightly cruel habit of scattering the petals of all the flowers in the vases onto the carpet at the end of every tryst. When she returned to the room after having dressed, pulling on her gloves or closing her fan, she would smile in the midst of that devastation; and nothing could compare with the grace of the posture that she would assume every time, lifting her skirt slightly and putting forward first one foot and then the other, so that her lover, kneeling, could tie the laces of her shoe, which were still unfastened.
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