Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Later that day he makes two short flights, as passenger to the American aviator Glenn Curtiss and the Italian Mario Calderara. He poses for the cameras in a leather flying helmet. Immediately upon landing he gives an interview to the reporter for the Corriere della Sera (his flair for self-promotion never leaves him). Flying, he says, is divine; so divine that even he, the divo of words, is for the moment at a loss as to how to describe it. It is as ineffable as sex.

  Increasingly bellicose and nationalist in his politics, d’Annunzio sees—years before the military establishment begins to invest in aviation—the strategic potential of the new flying machines. In the following year he will repeatedly deliver (for handsome fees) a lecture on the need for Italy to achieve Great Nation status by seizing control of the skies.

  1910. The bailiffs are in d’Annunzio’s house in Settignano. Pursued by his creditors, himself in pursuit of a long-legged Russian countess with a lovely singing voice and a complaisant husband, announcing to the world that he needs to visit a French dentist, d’Annunzio has decamped to Paris. There his arrival causes quite a stir: he has been a bestselling author in France for two decades. At once he begins to circulate in society, and those he meets are recording their impressions.

  He is forty-eight now. To Gide he seems “pinched, wrinkled, smaller than ever.” Certainly he needs a good dentist. He has “funny little crenellated unhealthy teeth,” notes a French actress on whom he tries his charm. “He is the only man I have ever seen with teeth of three colours, white, yellow and black.” As he has aged his aura of sexual ambiguity has become more marked, intriguing to women, repulsive to most men. Several of his new acquaintances remark on his narrow, feminine shoulders and wide womanly hips, his little beringed white hands, his fussy fluttering gestures, his extravagant compliments. “An unprepossessing figure,” notes René Boylesve. “He enters like a character from an Italian comedy; one could easily imagine him with a hump.”

  For all that, for some he is irresistible. Isadora Duncan testifies that the woman courted by him, “feels that her very soul and being are lifted as into an ethereal region where she walks in company with the Divine Beatrice.” The young English diplomat Harold Nicolson, discussing d’Annunzio with two equally snobbish European noblemen, decides that the petit-bourgeois poet is “a chap one couldn’t know,” but, having heard him declaim his verses in an aristocratic drawing room, the bisexual Nicolson is instantly besotted. Nicolson leaves the party abruptly and walks along the quays, “still fervent with excitement,” d’Annunzio’s voice ringing in his ears “like a silver bell.”

  There are Parisians who see beyond the bewitching surface. D’Annunzio accepts advances for books he will never write. He decamps from hotels leaving bills unpaid. Maurice Barrès, the French nationalist writer whose work d’Annunzio has correctly been accused of plagiarising, plainly sees the self-serving, exploitative side of the poet. “He is like a bird which scratches about for seed with its hard beak … this hard little soldier, this grasping conqueror, pecking and hurting the palm of my hand.” Others sense his weariness. His greatest loves are past; his best poetry is written; in leaving Italy he has lost his role as national figurehead. The flamboyant homosexual Count Robert de Montesquiou has taken him up, and is introducing him to Parisian high society, but notices that occasionally his mask drops. Then one sees “something withered … the nostrils become deformed like those of a face on a shield that has been dented in combat, and the corners of the mouth express unutterable horror.”

  Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes are in Paris, performing Cleopatra, choreographed by Fokine with designs by Léon Bakst. The title role is mimed by Ida Rubinstein—a bisexual Russian beauty. She comes on in an immense blue wig and drifts of diaphanous, gem-scattered gauze, most of which she sheds before the evening is out. D’Annunzio is in the audience with de Montesquiou. After the performance they go backstage, where Rubinstein is holding court still clad only in massive “barbaric” jewellery and an exiguous amount of chiffon. Barrès is there, and Edmond Rostand, and other literary luminaries, all in evening dress. D’Annunzio takes up the story. “Seeing at close quarters those marvellous naked legs, with my usual boldness I threw myself to the ground and—quite oblivious of my swallow-tail coat—kissed the feet, rose, still kissing, from the ankle to the knee, and up along the thigh to the crotch, kissing with lips as swift and supple as a flautist’s scurrying over the stops of a double flute. Tableau! Scandale!” The bystanders are embarrassed. Rubinstein is amused. D’Annunzio lifts his eyes (even when standing upright he is a good six inches shorter than she) and sees, beneath the great tangled blue cloud of false hair, that she is smiling, and that she has a “dazzling” mouth.

  Soon they will be having some sort of a sexual relationship (in their private encounters, as well as this public one, it is mostly a matter of d’Annunzio’s mouth and Rubinstein’s nether parts) and she will be playing the title role in his The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. The saint has long featured in d’Annunzio’s sexual fantasies. Now he converts them into a long, lush piece of music drama, with a score by his new friend Claude Debussy and designs—again—by Bakst. The Bishop of Paris forbids his flock to attend it. It is placed on the Papal Index of books no good Catholic may read.

  MARCH 1915. Since the outbreak of war, d’Annunzio, who believes only “a great conflict of the races” can purge society of its decadence, has been calling from Paris for Italy to enter the war on the side of Britain and France (its “Latin Sister”). He is planning to return to Italy, but as he awaits his moment he accompanies the Italian journalist, Ugo Ojetti, to Reims, to see the venerable cathedral which went up in flames while under German occupation the previous September. Ojetti has obtained a pass, and a motor car. He stops off at the seventeenth-century hôtel particulier in the western Marais, where d’Annunzio has an apartment cluttered with oriental artefacts—a visitor has dubbed it “the House of the Hundred Buddhas.” A servant comes out first with several suitcases (d’Annunzio never travels light) and hampers full of food. Then d’Annunzio appears, “elegant and glossy as ever,” in an outfit which (unlike Ojetti’s suit and trilby) has a vaguely military air: his civilian status shames him. He is wearing a motoring cap, riding breeches with grey puttees, and a rich brown overcoat lined with curly yellow fox fur.

  They drive through the “lunar landscape” of the battlefields to Reims. Everywhere there are dead horses, their bellies inflated, their legs in the air. The great Gothic cathedral is roofless, its windows empty, its stones blackened. Guns are audible: they are not far from the front. D’Annunzio is silent and attentive. He picks up a shard of stained glass, a twisted strip of lead, a carved stone flower fallen from one of the pinnacles (all three will be on his desk at the time of his death twenty-three years later). He scrambles over sandbags to view the statues which he knows are there; he has been studying the guidebooks assiduously. He is making notes: “Pigeons fly up as though the wing of an angel had suddenly opened.”

  This is his first visit to Reims but he has already written an account of the fire, each paragraph introduced with the lie “I saw.…” He knows what a potent image of German “vandalism” the blackened ruin of the cathedral makes, and he understands how his own celebrity endorses it. His pseudo-eyewitness account was useful propaganda: it didn’t need to be true.

  On the return journey—still, in that deathly landscape, the aesthete and poet—d’Annunzio notes how the road curves like the banderoles in mediaeval depictions of saints.

  17 MAY 1915. ROME. The Capitol. D’Annunzio has returned after five years in France, re-energised. He is past fifty, but the most exciting period of his life is only just beginning. Europe is at war and he has found a new medium—the spoken word; a new persona—that of national hero; and a new mission—that of urging his compatriots to be great. Italy is still neutral. Ever since d’Annunzio arrived in the country twelve days ago he has been delivering oration after oration, each one more virulent in its contempt for the peace part
y, each one more bellicose.

  Now he is speaking at the heart of ancient Rome to an already volatile crowd. D’Annunzio himself recalls the scene months later as he lies wounded: “Faces, faces, faces without number run past my bandaged eyes, like hot sand pouring through a fist. Is it not the Roman crowd, of that May evening on the Capitol? Enormous, rippling, howling?”

  Fastidious to the point of neurosis, d’Annunzio has always been shudderingly preoccupied with dirt. Now he translates that private anxiety into political rage. In a virtuoso display of his immense vocabulary, he loads his speeches with synonyms for filth. The old order reeks and must be utterly destroyed. Cautious politicians are to be disposed of like rotten meat. “Sweep away all the filth! Into the sewer with all that is vile!” Italy, its government, its entire political system, is dirty, foul, filthy, polluted, besmirched, sullied, soiled, stinking, fetid, contaminated, shitty, rancid, infected, diseased, putrid, rotten, corrupt, festering and defiled. He calls for a cauterisation by fire, a holocaust (a word he uses often), a great outpouring of blood to purge the stench of corruption.

  He is beside himself. “I feel my own pale face burn like a white flame. There is nothing of me in me. I am as the demon of the tumult … Each of my words resounds beneath my cranium like the reverberation of curved metal.”

  As his tirade reaches its climax he produces a prop, a sword which once belonged to Nino Bixio, the most aggressive of Garibaldi’s lieutenants.

  “I take it and draw it … I press my lips to the naked blade … I abandon my soul to delirium.”

  The crowd weeps and howls. D’Annunzio thunders on. He is urging his listeners to ensure, by any means, up to and including murder, that the appeasers should not be allowed to take their seats in parliament again. “Make out lists. Proscribe them. Be pitiless. You have the right.”

  His speech triggers a riot. Hundreds of people are arrested. One of them is Marinetti, who has declared in his “Futurist Manifesto” that he would celebrate “the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capital.” Another is a magazine editor named Benito Mussolini.

  One week later Prime Minister Salandra declares that Italy is at war.

  AUGUST 1917. War. As a roving “liaison officer” d’Annunzio has been on night manoeuvres on board warships in the Adriatic, and has been down in a submarine. He has been repeatedly under fire in the terrible battles in the mountains and along the River Timavo, and he has flown repeatedly. He has survived a plane crash after which he had to lie motionless in a darkened room for months, and which has left him blind in one eye. Even Ernest Hemingway, who can’t stand his highfalutin rhetoric, grants that he has been “divinely brave.”

  This is d’Annunzio’s account of a mission flown in pursuit of Austrian troops in the Slovenian mountains. He is now in command of a squadron of fighter planes. The letter is to his latest lover, mistress of one of Venice’s great palaces, whom he calls Venturina because her gold-flecked, tawny eyes remind him of one of the colours used by the Murano glass-makers (he is a discriminating collector of glass): “I think Venturina will be pleased with her friend. It was an inferno of fire. I went down to 150 metres over the enemy infantry in order to machine-gun them. I could make out their uniforms, and the flap of canvas they wear hanging down the back of their necks to keep off the sun … Miracle! A bullet heading for my head hit the bar at the back of the cockpit, and rebounded. I heard the clear ping it made, and turned round. The steel bar was dented. Another bullet passed through the canvas between my legs. Innumerable others have made holes in the wings, splintered the propellers, snapped the cords. And we are unharmed!”

  Twelve days earlier, d’Annunzio, ever attentive to the ritual of warfare, has taught his squadron a new battle cry. Instead of the “Ip, Ip, Ip, Urrah!” which he finds crude and barbarous, he has ordered them to shout the Greek: “Eia, Eia, Eia, Alalà!” It is, he claims, the battle yell of Achilles. He has found it in Aeschylus and Pindar. He has used it in his plays. Now he is demanding that the men under his command give the shout standing upright in the cockpits of their flimsy little wood and canvas planes.

  The aircraft circle round, flying beneath the enemy troops on the high mountain passes and then climbing again “up the sides of Mount Hermada like a cart crawling up a slope.” They return to base to load up with more bombs, and fly back into battle over the Austrians’ big guns. “We saw shells passing the prow and the stern like ugly big rats tunnelling through the air.” This is the fiercest fire d’Annunzio has ever yet endured. It is “a marvellous hour, which I would not exchange for any other I have lived.”

  APRIL 1919. The war is over. The peacemakers are still conferring at Versailles, carving up the remains of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ever since the war ended d’Annunzio has been crying out that Italy is being cheated of its fair share, that its victory has been “mutilated.” Now he is in Venice, speaking in the Piazza San Marco, calling upon Italians to take up arms again and lay claim to the territory (Istria, Croatia and the Dalmatian coast) which the newborn state of Yugoslavia is claiming, but which he calls “Italy’s left lung.” The Irish Italophile Walter Starkie is there and, at first, is horribly disappointed by d’Annunzio’s appearance. “A dwarf of a man, goggle-eyed and thick-lipped—truly sinister in his grotesqueness, like a tragic gargoyle.” Starkie, like many others, wonders incredulously: “Is this the man that Duse loved?”

  D’Annunzio begins to speak; at once Starkie is “fascinated.” D’Annunzio plays on the crowd “as a supreme violinist does upon a Stradivarius.” He pretends to be reluctant to speak. “The time for words has passed.” But he has come prepared, bringing with him an enormous Italian flag, which he employs as a prop in a brilliantly manipulative, quasi-liturgical performance. His bearing is priestly, his delivery carefully measured. “Never a hurried, jerky gesture: occasionally one arm raised slowly as though wielding an imaginary wand.” The effect is mesmerising. “The tones rose and fell in an unending stream, like the song of a minstrel, and they spread over the vast audience like olive oil on the surface of the sea.”

  This oil is designed not to calm troubled waters but to set them surging. Very, very gradually, his voice rising in a patiently extended crescendo, d’Annunzio strings his public’s emotions ever tighter. He incites the crowd to call out in reply to him, involving them in their own bewitchment. His own record of the speech notes their responses. “All the people cry out ‘We want it’ ”; “the whole piazza resounds to unanimous acclamation”; “frenetic cheering”; “the people cry ‘Yes’ ”; “the people cry ‘Yes!’ again, more loudly”; “the people repeat the shout and brandish their flags.” As he reaches his thundering climax, writes Starkie, “the eyes of the thousands [are] fixed upon him as though hypnotised by his power.”

  SEPTEMBER 1919. D’Annunzio has taken action. He has marched into Fiume and made himself ruler of the tiny but now world-famous city-state. Among his new acolytes is Giovanni Comisso, another poet (some thirty years younger than d’Annunzio), who was serving with the Allied garrison when d’Annunzio marched into the city, and who promptly deserted to join him.

  Comisso is there when d’Annunzio arrives at the Governor’s Palace amid a din of bands playing and crowds singing. Stepping out of the car he looks small and, feverish as he is, “very, very weak.” Comisso joins the throng who jostle along behind d’Annunzio up the marble staircase to the wide balcony from which he is to address the people massed below. To Comisso’s wonder the frail invalid begins to speak “with incredible force,” declaring that Fiume is the only brightness in a mad, vile world. The assembled crowd weep and laugh and howl out their enthusiasm. “This man convinced me,” writes Comisso “as though he was one of the prophets of olden times.”

  A few days later Comisso is shaving when he hears a hubbub outside his window and leans out, his shirt open, his face covered with soap, to see what’s causing the commotion. Down in the street soldiers are milling around a very small man wearing the ja
unty-brimmed felt hat of the Alpine troops. “He seemed like a boy, agile and restless. He kept taking one of the others by the arm and having himself photographed.” It is d’Annunzio, turning some of his prodigious energy to the job he does so well—making a spectacle of himself. When he arrived in the outskirts of Fiume he paused to allow a camera crew to catch up. One of his first measures on taking power in Fiume is to establish his press office. During the next fifteen months d’Annunzio’s image, carefully groomed by himself, will appear in newspapers all over the Western world.

  NOVEMBER 1920. The aristocratic English man of letters Osbert Sitwell has come to Fiume, curious to see what “the man who has done more for the Italian language than any writer since Dante” has made of his city-state. Sitwell finds the streets full of colourful desperadoes: “Every man seemed to wear a uniform designed by himself; some wore beards and had shaven heads like the commander, others cultivated huge tufts of hair, half a foot long, waving out from their foreheads, and a black fez at the back of the head. Cloaks, feathers and flowing black ties were universal, and all carried the Roman dagger.”

  Sitwell succeeds in securing an audience. He passes through a pillared hall, full of palm trees in “pseudo-Byzantine flower pots … where soldiers lounged and typists rushed furiously in and out.” In an inner room “almost entirely covered with banners,” he finds two more-than-lifesize, carved and gilded saints from Florence, a huge fifteenth-century bronze bell, and the Commandant (as d’Annunzio now likes to be called) in military grey-green, his chest striped with the ribbons of his many medals. He seems nervous and tired. But, bald and one-eyed as he is, “at the end of a few seconds one felt the influence of that extraordinary charm which has enabled him to change howling mobs into furious partisans.”