Still busily promoting himself and his work, d’Annunzio obtained some kind of introduction to Cesare Fontana, a rich Milanese, a connoisseur of the arts and a prodigal spender of his own considerable fortune. D’Annunzio sent him a “psychological sketch” of himself.
He pulsates, he writes, with “the first fires of approaching young manhood.” He has “an inordinate desire for knowledge and for glory, which burdens me often with a dark, tormenting melancholy.” He cannot tolerate any “yoke.” He despises “meanness of spirit.” He is “an ardent lover of new Art and lovely women: most unusual in my tastes: most tenacious in my opinions: outspoken to the point of harshness: prodigal to the point of ruin: enthusiastic to the point of madness … What else? Ah! There’s something I forgot: I’m a wicked poet and an intrepid chaser of dreams.” Apparently so artless, with its disdain for punctuation and exclamation marks, this letter is a deft piece of self-advertisement. In it d’Annunzio fits himself to the model of the romantic hero. He lays claim to sophisticated vices (those beautiful women, those wicked poems). He slips in a gentle reminder of how very young he still is. Several times over the next two years he asked Fontana to put in a word for him with editors in Milan.
Further copies of Primo Vere were sent out. One went to the influential critic Guiseppe Chiarini. In approaching him, d’Annunzio wrote, he felt as bashful as a loutish peasant who, on being introduced to a distinguished person, turns red as a boiled prawn and twists his hat in his hands unable to say a single sensible thing. Having summoned up this image of sweet diffidence, the shameless self-publicist proceeded to make such a good impression on the older man that the two were soon corresponding genially about their shared love of Heine and Horace. D’Annunzio had found himself yet another first-rate master (he addresses subsequent letters to Chiarini: “Mio carissimo Signor Professore”) and he had also got himself some invaluable press coverage. In May 1880, Chiarini reviewed Primo Vere in the widely read Roman journal, the Fanfulla della Domenica. He hailed the now just seventeen-year-old d’Annunzio as “a new poet” with an “uncommon aptitude.” Within days d’Annunzio had sent him his next volume, along with a letter asking the question that was always on his mind. If he is going to be “charming,” “pleasing” and no more, he’ll give up writing straight away. He can’t stand “little artists … little poets.” He’d much rather be an engineer, or a lawyer. He’d even rather be a small-town mayor (like his father). So the important question was: “Can I cover myself with glory?”
Within a year of his first book’s appearance, d’Annunzio, whose collected works were eventually to run to forty-eight volumes, had brought out two more. In Memoriam, dedicated to his grandmother, who had recently died, was published in May 1880, followed in November by a second edition of Primo Vere with forty-three new poems (throughout his career d’Annunzio was to repeatedly revise, re-package and resell his work). In each case Francesco Paolo paid the printer’s bills, but d’Annunzio himself was personally responsible for the books’ design. He was already knowledgeable about book production and literary business. Writing from his school desk to the printer, he fussed over paper quality and font sizes. He argued vigorously over the printer’s terms and negotiated a distribution deal with a local bookseller. As for the books’ promotion, father and son each did their part of the work. To celebrate the appearance of Primo Vere (second edition), Francesco Paolo gave a banquet on the terrace of the Villa Fuoco. Gabriele found a more ingenious way of attracting attention to the work.
Reading the English Romantics, he had reflected on the ways Keats’s and Shelley’s early deaths had left their names enveloped in a glimmering haze of pathos. It was a few days before Primo Vere’s second publication that the editor of the Florentine Gazzetta della Domenica received a postcard from Pescara, from an unknown informant (d’Annunzio himself), advising him that the “young poet already noted in the republic of letters” had died suddenly after falling from his horse. The editor ran the story prominently. The news was picked up by papers all over Italy. In Turin the tragic death of the “last-born of the Muses” was lamented. In Ferrara tribute was paid to the marvellous boy who was “the joy of his parents, the love of his friends, the pride of his masters.” The schoolboy poet had ceased to be someone spoken of only in the “republic of letters.” He had become a celebrity. He might not yet have achieved glory, but he had attained fame.
Liebestod
A DAY OF TUSCAN SPRING SUNSHINE, a stream running between banks starred with flowers; nearby the cupola of a church glinting, tall cypresses rising above the walls of an ancient villa; in the background blue hills. Along the path comes a dark maiden: black eyes, black hair, black eyebrows, pale, pale face. A young man walks towards her. Days later he writes to tell her that he is hers forever.
It could be a tableau painted by Dante Gabriel Rosetti or Burne-Jones, prints of whose work Gabriele had seen in Nencioni’s rooms. It could be a scene from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, or from Swinburne’s Laus Veneris (In Praise of Venus). Gabriele had been reading both poets. It was in fact the meeting of two flesh-and-blood teenagers as described by one of them: d’Annunzio, in Florence for the Easter vacation before his last term at school, falling precipitately in love with the seventeen-year-old daughter of his favourite teacher.
It wasn’t his first erotic experience, but it was the first of his romances. In d’Annunzio’s case the ambiguous word is the right one. All of his love affairs were at once real relationships—carnal and ardent—and literary creations. Vivere scrivere was one of his mottoes—“To live to write.” Sexual experience especially fuelled his creative energy. Looking back years later on his first kiss, he wrote that it was “the very moment when my life began to be my art and my art began to be my life.” In love, he reached for his pen.
The black-eyed girl by the stream was Giselda Zucconi. Dark-haired and heavy-jawed (like Gabriele’s mother, like several more of the women he would love), she was unusually well-educated for a girl, and a competent pianist. Her father, Tito Zucconi, taught modern languages at the Cicognini, and had become yet another of d’Annunzio’s mentors. Zucconi was a dashing figure, a teacher very different from the “greasy-handed priests” about whom d’Annunzio wrote so contemptuously. He had fought alongside Garibaldi: he was himself a poet. He befriended the brilliant student, took him for long walks on days off and invited him to visit his family in Florence.
D’Annunzio, looking back regretfully in middle age, describes himself as he looked then: “the brow smooth beneath the dense mass of dark hair. The eyebrows drawn in such a pure line as to give something indefinably virginal to the melancholy of the big eyes. The beautiful half-open mouth.” Self-regarding as it is, the description matches the photographs. Giselda was entranced. D’Annunzio had begun writing short stories set in the Abruzzi, heavily influenced by Guy de Maupassant and Giovanni Verga. On his second visit to the house he read Giselda one of them, a morbid tale involving a dumb beggar and the frozen corpse of a little girl. When he first encountered Giselda walking by the stream he had felt “an I-don’t-know-what.” When he saw her eyelashes wet with tears as she listened to his story he decided it was love.
He returned to school. Back in Prato he confessed his love to Tito, who gave him permission to write to Giselda. Within days she had told him she loved him in return. In the school dormitory d’Annunzio stayed awake until dawn, kissing her photograph and writing her long letters. Sometimes he expressed himself as any teenager might: “I am happy, happy, happy.” Or, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Sometimes his letters show how unusual he was. “Kiss me Elda, kiss me. Thrust your little hands into my hair and hold me nailed down and quivering like a leopard enchained.”
D’Annunzio’s erotic career began early. As the smartly uniformed boys of the Cicognini marched around Prato he was much inclined, so one of his teachers noted, to turn and stare at passing young women. Spending his school holidays with family friends in Florence, he escorted the daughter of th
e house (aged seventeen to his fourteen) to the Museum of Archaeology and kissed her in the Etruscan Room, falling on her mouth (as he recalled years later) as ravenously as a famished labourer might fall on food at the end of a day’s hard work and thinking—with a kind of delirious horror—about the other secret “mouth” beneath her skirts. On a school trip he slipped away from his teacher, and sold his grandfather’s gold watch to pay for his initiation by a prostitute. That summer, sixteen years old and allowed home at last, he flirted with several young ladies in Pescara’s polite small-town society, and—according to his own later account—raped a peasant girl who struggled and babbled and shook with terror as he hunted her down in a vineyard and knocked her to the ground.
By the time he met Giselda two years later his craving for sex had become entangled with an appetite for suffering and with fantasies of death. It was the sight of Giselda’s tears that had first fired him with love. “I want to make those tears fall again,” he wrote to her. He imagined she would be sobbing, frantic for a word from him. He luxuriated in the idea of her unhappiness. He even told her how much he would like to see her corpse. He loved it that she was deathly pale, like “the Blessed Damozel,” the dead girl of Rossetti’s famous poem and painting, but he would have preferred her even paler. He told her that he would go around all the florists in the city, fill a carriage with assorted flowers, and come to bury her beneath them. “Yes! To bury you! I want to make you die!”
He wrote to Tito Zucconi, not, as one might expect, promising to cherish and protect Tito’s daughter, but announcing: “I and Elda cannot live long.” Both he and Giselda were, so far as we know, in perfectly good health, yet d’Annunzio wrote: “Our cold bodies will fall to the earth to feed the flowers; and we will be swept away, unconscious atoms, in the irresistible currents of the universal force.” D’Annunzio had not yet heard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (on which his novel The Triumph of Death would be a variation) but the fantasy of Liebestod already possessed him. “If you were here now,” he wrote to Giselda, “we would kill each other … Don’t you feel all the tragic terror of this passion?”
Letters began to pass between the young couple almost daily. She sent him her photograph and pressed flowers (her father acting as emissary). He sent her words, thousands upon thousands of them (around 500 letters in under two years). This was a love affair all made of words on paper. D’Annunzio wrote proudly to Chiarini, only six days after he had met Giselda, that he had found his “Beatrice.” So d’Annunzio was the new Dante and poor Giselda had been assigned the role of the girl whom Dante (if his poeticised account of their meetings is to be taken literally) laid eyes on only twice, who inspired his poetry and personified his ideal, but in whose actual life he played no part at all.
D’Annunzio set about remaking Giselda as an accessory suited to his own self-image. He deplored the conventional pose (“so, so common”) of the photograph she had given him. He wanted her to look like a “proud and pensive queen, on the arm of her poet.” He renamed her (he would give all his lovers new names). “I want to call you Elda,” he wrote. The name was more caressing than the full-length Giselda, more fitting for the child he wanted her to be. “You’re not a great big woman,” he wrote. (He was to address many of his lovers, even when they towered over him, as “Little One”). He called her “bimba” (baby), and imagined nursery scenarios, in which she played a petulant child. “It’ll do you no good to stamp your little feet on the ground … Come Elda … Baby, little pretty pretty pretty one. Forgive me?…You’re laughing, aren’t you?” But if he liked to infantilise and dominate her, he also liked to be dominated. He told her that she was “bad,” “wicked.” He instructed her to wear black. “I detest, detest, detest pale colours on a woman.” It would set off the pallor of her skin and it was appropriate to the other role he had assigned her, that of a “witch,” like Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” or Tennyson’s Morgan le Fay.
Term ended, the young lovers could at last meet for the first time since they had declared themselves. “What happy hours we had yesterday!” d’Annunzio wrote to Giselda the next day. “Do you know that for twelve hours we were always in each other arms, always kissing with those long long kisses which made us tremble in every limb, always whispering those soft words?” Of course she knew, but for d’Annunzio an experience was insubstantial until he had written it down. During the eleven days he stayed in Florence he wrote several of the lyrics which would appear the following year in his next collection, Canto Novo, with its dedication to Elda, “the great the beautiful the most adored inspiration.” By the time he left for Pescara he considered himself engaged to her. Tito, who knew that his daughter had caught the eye of an exceptionally talented boy, made no objection. D’Annunzio confidently told both father and daughter that his own parents doted on him. They would agree to anything that would make him happy. And so off he went to Pescara.
In his first novel, Pleasure, d’Annunzio describes his hero, Andrea Sperelli, anguished by his bewitching mistress’s sudden and inexplicable announcement that she is leaving him. She stops her carriage. He descends. He is in despair. “What did he do, once Elena’s carriage had disappeared in the direction of the Four Fountains?—Nothing, to be honest, out of the ordinary.” Sperelli goes home, changes into evening dress and goes to a dinner party, not apparently to give Elena much thought until they meet again by chance two years later. Sperelli is by no means a faithful self-portrait of his creator (he is very much richer and more aristocratic), but author and fictional character have a great deal in common, and this trait is one they share. There is no reason to suppose that d’Annunzio was cynical in his treatment of Elda. He was, for a while, in love with her. He probably really thought of marrying her. And yet, once he had left Florence, he doesn’t seem to have missed her very much.
· · ·
Life was sweet for d’Annunzio that summer. Eighteen years old, finished with school at last, he was poised to enter the adult world where his reputation, going before him, would guarantee him a welcome. Returning to places he loved and a growing circle of entertaining friends, he enjoyed a long, delicious and productive summer by the sea. His family were gratifyingly proud of him. Francesco Paolo had had the titles of the poems in Primo Vere written into the frescoes on the drawing-room walls. He was working fast, writing the stories of peasant life that would be published the following year in Terra Virgine, and more poems for Canto Novo. He was also enjoying himself. He rode, he swam, he went boating by moonlight.
His letters to Elda are full of tactless hints of how full and merry his life was without her. People burst in on him while he’s writing to her. “Curses! There is an absolute eruption of friends in the room … Forgive me if I leave off … They’ve taken all the foils and sabres out the rack and they’re making the most awful din.” (Then and later, d’Annunzio loved to fence.) He was doted on and fussed over. Preparing for a trip, he reported that his mother, his three sisters and his two aunts were all in the room helping him to get ready. When he wanted other female company the resort town of Castellamare, just the other side of the Pescara river, provided—by his own account of the following year—plenty of diversions. There were bathers on the long sandy beach, and on the promenade “what vaporous floating of veils around women’s heads! What feline flexibility of bodies confined by the arabesques or flower patterns of an outfit à la Pompadour!…What flurries of young laughter ringing out from beneath big hats laden with flowers!” The Abruzzese journalist Carlo Magnico would describe d’Annunzio bobbing around a group of such young women “cocky as a wagtail.” As dapper as a glossy little bird, preening under the attention afforded a local hero, full of energy and self-love, he enjoyed himself while Elda pined.
He had been wrong, as it turned out, to assure her that his parents would consent to their engagement. His father, especially, was far too proud of him to welcome the idea of his committing himself so young to marrying a mere schoolmaster’s daughter. Somehow it was settled tha
t, rather than enrolling at the University of Florence, where he could have continued his studies while seeing Elda as often as the two of them pleased, he would go instead to Rome. How far Gabriele resisted the decision is unrecorded. Rome, the capital, was surely the place for an ambitious young man, and d’Annunzio was very ambitious indeed. Besides, his need to be with Elda does not appear to have been all that urgent.
He wrote to her daily; he composed poems celebrating her bewitching beauty. But when she suggested that he could perhaps make a scappata, a “jaunt,” to Florence to see her, he treated the idea as absurd. She has no idea of distances, he wrote. “You really think Pescara to Florence is a ‘jaunt’?” Perhaps, he adds, he’ll stop off on his way home from visiting the Exhibition of Fine Arts in Milan. (He didn’t do so.) Elda might well ask why, if he was able to go to Milan, he should find it impossible to reach Florence, which was so much nearer. “If I can’t kiss you again I’ll die,” he wrote, but still he allowed time to slip by without doing so. “Just think,” he wrote, on the eve of his departure for Rome in November, “it is five months, five long, long months, since we saw each other”—a fact for which he had no one to blame but himself.
Finally, at Christmas, half a year after their last meeting, he took the train from Rome to Florence to see her again, and stayed until Twelfth Night. By the time he left Elda’s mouth was sore and swollen from all their “savage kisses.” There followed another six months, during which he assured her almost daily by post that he “was all yours, all yours, all yours for ever.” Giselda wrote again and again imploring him to come to her; but always there was some excuse. He had deadlines to meet; he had to sign the university register on a regular basis in order to avoid being called up for national service; his parents were coming to visit. On 15 April, the anniversary of their first meeting, he wrote lamenting his inability to be with her and elaborating a happy vision of their future domestic life. He will have a lovely bright study, he writes, full of pictures and antique weapons and rare fabrics, “and I will break off in the middle of a hexameter to come and give you a kiss on the mouth.” It is noticeable that he seems to have put more creative energy into picturing the room than into imagining her. It is so hard, he says, that he cannot run to her. He seems to hear her crying out to him. And yet, he says, he cannot possibly visit her. He doesn’t explain why not.
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