Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The curls will soon be gone (by the age of thirty d’Annunzio will be almost completely bald) and the modesty may never have existed outside of Scarfoglio’s imagination. Already the young poet is an adroit self-publicist. A few months before his arrival in Rome, he anonymously informed newspaper editors of his own untimely death in a fall from his horse. The pathetic story of the brilliantly gifted youth, cut off at the outset of what would surely have been a dazzling career, was widely reported and lamented over. The second volume of poems by the tragic boy, published later that month, sold well. By the time the “mistake” was discovered, d’Annunzio was considerably more famous than mere merit, however substantial, could have made him.

  Scarfoglio will lament that, only a few months after that first meeting, the androgynous innocent is on his way to becoming a smart young man about the booming capital. “I will never forget how stupefied I was, the first time I saw Gabriele all spruced up and perfumed for a party.” At the age of twenty, d’Annunzio (seen by Scarfoglio as being like a “timid, wild girl”) will demonstrate his worldly ambition and his virility by impregnating and eloping with a duke’s daughter. At the age of twenty-six, already the author of four volumes of poetry and two of short stories, as well as of reams of knowing, gossipy journalism, he will publish the first of his novels.

  1893. D’Annunzio, now aged thirty, is living in Naples. He left Rome to escape from his creditors, and before the end of the year he will have to scarper from Naples for the same reason. He has written three novels and dozens of stories which are beginning to make money, but never enough to pay off his exorbitant debts. He has abandoned his wife and three sons, and left Elvira Fraternali, whom he loved passionately for eight years. Now he is living with the Sicilian princess Maria Gravina, together with whom he faces a jail sentence for adultery (a general amnesty will spare them). His writing—as scandalous as it is brilliant—and his flamboyant lifestyle, his debts, his duels and his love affairs, have made him, by this time, an international celebrity.

  During this period of his life, in personal terms so harum-scarum, the groundwork of d’Annunzio’s political thinking is being laid. He has been reading Nietzsche and finding in the philosopher’s work confirmation of his own elitism. Acting the pike again, he makes provocatively Nietzschean declarations. “Man will be divided into two races,” he writes. “To the superior race, which shall have risen by the pure energy of its will, all shall be permitted; to the lower, nothing or very little.” D’Annunzio never doubts his own membership of the former class.

  Now he is enthralled by Richard Wagner. D’Annunzio adores music, but he is not himself a musician. To hear it he must seek out those who are. He goes repeatedly to call on the composer Niccolò van Westerhout and prevails upon him to play entire operas on the piano, while he follows the libretto, going through Tristan and Isolde at least ten times. He is learning to hear the patterning of reprise and variation, to feel the great surges of emotion released by the music and to understand how they are controlled. He keeps van Westerhout at the piano for hours and hours. “Tristan filled his spirit with a kind of morbid obsession.” He insists on hearing certain passages over and over again. He is transfixed by the “sufferings that begin with the love potion.”

  At home he is in desperate straits. The bailiffs are encamped outside the door of his borrowed lodgings. Maria Gravina’s sanity is precarious. But d’Annunzio has the knack of closing himself off from all emotional and practical demands. The musical sessions with van Westerhout pass straight into his influential essay on Wagner and into his suicide-haunted novel Il Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death), in which the lovers spend days on end playing and singing Tristan and Isolde together, before the hero drags his mistress over a cliff in an involuntary liebestod (love-death).

  Later that year Maria Gravina will try to kill herself. His wife has already attempted suicide.

  AUGUST 1895. D’Annunzio is sunbathing stark naked on the deck of a yacht bound for Greece. He has recently received his largest payment to date, for the French edition of his first novel, Il Piacere (Pleasure). Among his fellow guests on the cruise is his French translator, Georges Hérelle.

  Hérelle is disappointed. He has been looking forward to earnest literary discussions interspersed with serious sightseeing, but d’Annunzio seems only to want to bask in the sun while swapping smutty jokes with the other young Italians on board, and fretting about the difficulty of getting his shirts properly ironed ready for dinner engagements in port. When they go ashore at Eleusis, Hérelle notes that d’Annunzio “hardly looks, chatting all the time of things which have nothing to do with our excursion; about amorous adventures, about society people.” On train journeys he doesn’t feast his eyes on the passing landscape, he puts a silk handkerchief over his face and dozes. In Patras and again in Piraeus he goes off, almost as soon as they’ve landed, to find a prostitute. “Truly,” notes Hérelle in his journal, “there is something puerile about Gabriele d’Annunzio.”

  What Hérelle doesn’t grasp is that d’Annunzio’s mind works so fast he doesn’t need to gaze at length in order to receive impressions, or to preserve a solemn silence in order to reflect upon what he sees. Within days of returning from the cruise he will start planning his first play, La Città Morta (The Dead City), inspired by the party’s visit to Mycenae. Eight years later he will write his modern epic, Maia. The visit to a Patras brothel which Hérelle found so sordid (“These awful women … these sailor’s women … I cannot understand how in Greece one can waste time so foolishly”), will appear transmuted into a half comic, half profoundly sorrowful episode in which Helen of Troy, terribly aged, symbolises the transience of the pleasures and beauties of the flesh.

  DECEMBER 1895. The Caffè Gambrinus, Florence. André Gide, who is in the café with him, is watching d’Annunzio carefully. “He is greedily eating little vanilla ice creams served in cardboard cones. He talks with charming good manners without, I think, making much effort … Nothing about him suggests literature or genius. He has a little, pointed, pale-blond beard, and he speaks with a clear voice, rather icy but soft and wheedling. His glance is quite cold: perhaps he is cruel, or perhaps it is his refined sensuality that makes him seem so to me. On his head he wears a plain black bowler hat.”

  Since returning from Greece, d’Annunzio has begun his relationship with Eleonora Duse. He tells Gide: “I have read Sophocles under the crumbling gates of Mycenae.” This reading must have been brief—d’Annunzio’s visit to Mycenae was over in time for lunch—but the claim fits with his sense of himself as heir to the great classical tradition, and with the project he and Duse are cherishing. They want to build an amphitheatre in the Alban Hills and run it as an al fresco national theatre where d’Annunzio’s plays will be performed in tandem with those of the Greek tragedians.

  The talk turns to contemporary European literature. D’Annunzio tells Gide that he dislikes Maeterlinck’s “banality” and Ibsen’s “lack of beauty.” He knows all the French authors’ work.

  “With a smile I say to him: ‘But you’ve read everything!’

  ‘What can you expect?’ he says, as though to excuse himself, ‘I am Latin.’ ”

  Being “Latin” is very important to d’Annunzio’s sense of self. Later it will become the dominant theme of his politics. He calls all Anglo-Saxon or Germanic people “barbarians.”

  “I’m a terrible one for work,” he tells Gide. “For nine or ten months of the year, nonstop, I work twelve hours a day. I’ve already written a score of books.” This is only a slight exaggeration. D’Annunzio’s love life is so scandalous that the public thinks of him as a dilettante, but the majority of his time is passed in near solitude and intensely concentrated effort. “When I write,” he says, “a sort of magnetical force takes hold of me, like an epileptic. I wrote L’Innocente (his second novel) in three and a half weeks in an Abruzzese convent. If anyone had disturbed me, I would have shot him.”

  “All of these things,” records Gide,
“he said without any boastfulness, with gentle sweetness.”

  The ability to conjure that same lulling sweetness which entranced Scarfoglio was a gift which never deserted d’Annunzio. Even those who know him well enough to perceive the indifference it masks, find it irresistible. “His face lights up in greeting you,” writes one of his aides years later. “And you succumb! You have to succumb! In reality, he doesn’t give a damn!”

  JANUARY 1901. Turin. In the five years since his encounter with Gide, d’Annunzio has written several plays and his most celebrated novel, and he has embarked on the exquisite sequence of lyric poems, Alcyone (Halcyon). He and Duse are living in adjacent houses in Settignano, in the hills above Florence, their every outing reported by the gossip columns, their incongruous appearance as a couple (Duse is nearly five years older and several inches taller than her lover) repeatedly caricatured.

  D’Annunzio’s literary career is at its apogee, and he has begun his transition from poet to politician. In 1897 he contested and won an election in his native Abruzzi. In his electoral campaign he hymned the “politics of poetry.” Voted out of office after barely two years, he has been writing the poetry of politics, composing odes in an aggressive and nationalist vein. He is in Turin to give a public reading of the latest of them, a thousand-line tribute to Giuseppe Garibaldi.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is in Turin as a contributor to the Parisian journal Gil Blas. Marinetti, who will soon become better known as the impresario and spokesman of the futurist movement, is a prolific journalist. Quizzically, Marinetti observes d’Annunzio in his new role as public speaker. Il Vate, the bard, as he now likes to be styled, is thirty-eight, but he could be any age, or ageless. Tightly buttoned into his dark suit he looks like “a little ebony idol with a head of ivory.” His eyes “sharpened and electrified by the expectation of triumph” are “strangely resplendent.” His face is “pale, dried, as though burnt by the fire of Ambition.” This is not an objective description. Marinetti is jealous of d’Annunzio, whom he sees as “corsetted by ambition and pride.” He sneers that “at all times and in all places Gabriele is dreaming of turning the world upside down with a well-turned phrase.” This is something Marinetti also dreams of doing, and so far d’Annunzio is proving better at it.

  D’Annunzio takes his place on the platform, and begins his performance with, thinks Marinetti, the smugness of a cordon bleu chef lifting a lid to display a steaming dish of lentils. He reads very slowly, softly beating time with his fist on the table. His lips are preternaturally red: several contemporaries report that he uses make-up.

  The recitation over (it takes an hour and a half) the crowd noisily acclaims him. He half rises to acknowledge the applause, bowing his head. Marinetti notices how the newfangled electric light is brilliantly reflected off d’Annunzio’s shiny bald pate: a thoroughly modern nimbus for a machine-age hero.

  1904, SETTIGNANO. Here is another view of d’Annunzio, this one by an anonymous lady whom he takes to bed one afternoon.

  He is compulsively promiscuous. Within the last three years he has completed his immense poem-cycle, Laudi. His eight-year-long affair with Eleonora Duse is over and he is spending money more prodigally than ever before. His new lover, an aristocratic young widow, the Marchesa Alessandra di Rudinì, is dangerously ill. It is probably during one of Alessandra’s sojourns in hospital that the unknown lady arrives in response to an invitation with the pointed postscript, “I shall expect you alone.”

  She is shown into a small sitting room crammed with roses. “They were everywhere—in vases, in amphorae, in bowls—and their petals were strewn on the carpets.” D’Annunzio takes great care over dressing the set for his seductions. Outside the long windows a pergola covered with wisteria casts a mauve veil over the sunlight. The room is suffocatingly overheated, and the atmosphere is further laden with Acqua Nuntia, the scent d’Annunzio has concocted himself from a formula which he claims to have found in a fourteenth-century manuscript. He has had quantities of it made up by a chemist in Florence. It is bottled in Murano glass bottles (also made to the poet’s orders) and labelled (a lot of thought goes into the design of the labels).

  The host appears, dressed in a dark blue kimono bordered with black. It is d’Annunzio’s habit to dress in this conveniently removable garment for an assignation and he always provides a kimono for his female visitor’s use. On a small ebony table a large silver tray has been set, bearing a samovar, two cups, and marrons glacés on silver plates. D’Annunzio pours the tea (Chinese, very fragrant), then seats himself crosslegged on the rug by the lady’s chair, takes both her hands in his and embarks upon his seduction. “From his gestures, from his voice, there came an invincible wave of desire which engulfed my whole being in an irresistible atmosphere of love.” There are a number of descriptions of this process: d’Annunzio was a highly persuasive wooer. The anonymous lady feels herself swept “into mysterious spheres where there are no laws nor conventions.” Thus conveniently “drugged by the delicious poison of the Poet’s musical words,” she somehow swoons her way, without compromising herself by explicitly consenting to sex, into his bedroom.

  Their transports ended, d’Annunzio leaves her. “A quarter of an hour later I found him in the library, turning the pages of a book.” Without a word he escorts her to her carriage. She is driven away, feeling “the horrid sensation of being discarded like a toy.” On d’Annunzio’s orders, her carriage has been filled, “like a rich coffin,” with roses.

  SUMMER 1906. D’Annunzio is in a palatial rented villa, a former home of the dukes of Tuscany, at the seaside near Pisa. His play La Figlia di Jorio (Jorio’s Daughter) has made him not just a literary star but also the voice of his people. “Evviva the poet of Italy!” shouted the audience at its first night.

  Alessandra is here, but she is addicted to morphine now and d’Annunzio is already writing daily to his new love, a Florentine countess. For the first time in nearly twenty years he has all three of his sons with him. In the mornings they box in an improvised ring on the beach. D’Annunzio gallops his horse through the pine woods, or swims, or paddles his brand new canoe—throwing himself into each activity with energy which astonishes the younger men. For lunch, served formally by some of the fifteen servants, he changes into a white linen suit, one of the hundred or so he has brought with him. He writes late into the night.

  An aspiring poet, Umberto Saba, guest of d’Annunzio’s son Gabriellino, is our witness at this gathering. D’Annunzio, still physically trim at forty-three, greets Saba with exquisite courtesy. Flatteringly, he draws him away from the assembled company and out into the garden, where they sit down together on a stone bench. “He asked me, if I was not too tired from my journey, and if it would not be too much of a nuisance for me, to recite some of my poetry?” This is the acme of Saba’s hopes. He can hardly believe his good fortune. He obliges. D’Annunzio is all compliments. He asks if he may recommend Saba’s work to his editor? Saba, overwhelmed by the great man’s generosity, is close to tears. Everything about the marvellous moment stays with him. Years later it will be as though he can still hear the pine needles creaking beneath their feet.

  The conversation continues. There have only been three great poets in Italy, d’Annunzio says—Dante, Petrarch and Leopardi—before, that is, (and he repeats this twice) himself. Saba notices that the poet’s sons are not allowed to call him “Papa.” He requires them to address him as “Maestro.”

  Afterwards Saba posts his precious manuscript. He gets no response. D’Annunzio does not pass his poems on to anyone. He doesn’t even send them back.

  SEPTEMBER 1909. The Brescia air show: for most of the 50,000 people present their first sight of the amazing spectacle of a man aloft in a flying machine. It is only six years since Wilbur and Orville Wright made their first powered flight, thirteen months since Wilbur first demonstrated their Flyer I in Europe, barely six weeks since Louis Blériot (who is here at Brescia) flew across the English Channel, crash-landing in a vertical
fall of sixty-five feet to arrive, with a smashed undercarriage but himself unharmed, in a meadow near Dover Castle. D’Annunzio is ecstatic. Humanity’s conquest of the air, he proclaims, presages, “A new civilisation, a new life, new skies!” A poet is called for, “capable of singing this epic.” That poet must be himself. He stages a poetry-reading-cum-press-conference-cum-photo-opportunity at Brescia, reciting verses for the assembled journalists and photographers. The poem, about Icarus, was first published ten years previously: d’Annunzio has been dreaming of flight since he was a schoolboy.

  He is at Brescia to gather material for his next novel. He is also planning, courageously (already several aviators have died), to cadge a ride. Now he is being observed by Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod. The two are holidaying together on Lake Garda. Kafka is depressed: his inspiration has deserted him; his stomach feels to him like a person on the brink of tears. To get him writing again Brod suggests they compose competing accounts of the air show.

  The two young men are in the immense crowd on the parched airfield. They both notice d’Annunzio among the “sparkling ladies” and gentlemen on the stands. Brod is struck by d’Annunzio’s “feminine charm,” and finds him “marvellous through and through.” Kafka is less impressed. By his account d’Annunzio is “short,” which is the simple truth, but also “weak” (which may be another way of saying “feminine”). Kafka notes that d’Annunzio is “skipping” among the ladies and “shyly” trotting around after Count Oldofredi (one of the show’s organisers).

  D’Annunzio isn’t shy, but his body language can be deferential, his posture placatory and insinuating. (Photographs show him with his head dipped slightly to one side, leaning in towards a companion.) Oldofredi is his host for the day, whose consent he must have before he can fly, but he is no ordinary supplicant. To Brod it seems that at Brescia the bigwigs are treating him “like a second King of Italy.”