Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In doing so he wasn’t writing down to his public: he was following his own bent. He wanted popularity, but he made no compromises in order to achieve it. Pleasure is that rare thing in literary history, an uncompromisingly experimental novel which became a huge popular success. It was the occasion of much scandalised gossip and an immediate bestseller. In the words of a contemporary journalist, “thousands of young men dressed, moved, spoke, walked and smoked in the style of Andrea Sperelli. Women imitated his heroines’ attitudes and the décor of their rooms.” In the longer term, it became an international succès d’estime. Henry James praised it for d’Annunzio’s “excited sensibility,” his “splendid visual sense” and “his ample and exquisite style.” Even Casanova’s autobiography, concluded James, was “cheap loose journalism compared with the directed, finely condensed iridescent epic of Count Andrea.” D’Annunzio was made.

  Superman

  DURING THE SIX YEARS following the publication of Pleasure, d’Annunzio lived in Rome, the Abruzzi, Rome again, various military barracks, Rome again, the Abruzzi again, Naples (successively in several rented or borrowed houses around the bay), Rome, Francavilla, Pescara and Rome again. A number of these moves were involuntary. In this period d’Annunzio wrote a novella and three more novels, as well as substantial quantities of poetry and journalism, and he began to earn large sums from his writing; but it was never enough to pay his debts. In public he posed successfully as the aesthete/dandy/poet, but his home life was repeatedly disrupted by the horrid rumpus of the bailiffs at the door.

  His relationship with Barbara continued, increasingly shadowed by ambivalence, into its fifth year. After he separated definitively from his wife in 1888 and moved to Naples he was still receiving visits from Barbara—and assuring her how ardently he adored her—as he embarked on his next and most disastrous affair, with the Princess Maria Gravina Cruyllas di Ramacca. There were calamities, variously pathetic, sordid and deadly serious. His father died, after being declared bankrupt. His wife, Maria Hardouin di Gallese and his new mistress, Maria Gravina, each attempted suicide, their desperation at least in part the result of d’Annunzio’s treatment of them. With Maria Gravina he came close to being imprisoned for adultery (a criminal act under Neapolitan law). His fourth (and best-beloved) child, a daughter, Renata, was born, and nearly died. In old age he remembered the night he held her tiny body in his arms until dawn—his muscles cramping and his entire being concentrated on the effort of willing her fever to pass—as being charged with the purest and strongest emotion he ever knew.

  His writing, increasingly popular and lucrative, was also increasingly controversial. As his reputation with the general public as the purveyor of thrilling wickedness grew, so did the respect of his literary peers. The French publication of Pleasure occasioned both a scandal in the popular press and a conference convened by his learned admirers at the Sorbonne.

  These were d’Annunzio’s helter-skelter years, a period when in public his reputation was consolidated thanks to bouts of hectic work, and in private he reeled, in a state of fecklessness and bad faith, from one desperate situation to the next. It was also the time when his reading and thinking began to coalesce into a political creed. Here are some glimpses of that period.

  ROME. A WET NIGHT IN FEBRUARY 1889. D’Annunzio is in a closed carriage, waiting outside the house where Barbara lives with her mother. All day he has been passing and repassing her door, racked by desire for her. “It was raining almost as hard in the carriage as it was in the street, so violent was the downpour.”

  The life of an illicit lover can be wretched. Some time past midnight Barbara appears. She is with a man—her husband. D’Annunzio watches them go into the house, and waits on, hoping to see Count Leoni leave. After an hour and ten minutes he gives up and goes, not to the apartment where his wife and children are living, but to the rented room where he and Barbara meet. “Then began a new torment … My ear strained after every sound. Two or three times I went out into the street … I even imagined I could hear your voice.” She doesn’t come. At dawn he falls asleep, so exhausted that he feels “a physical need for death.”

  FIVE MONTHS LATER. Michetti’s convent at Francavilla. D’Annunzio has arrived with a clear statement of intent. “This summer I absolutely must write a masterpiece.” Now Michetti has found him in his studio down on the beach, in tears. He has a heap of fresh sheets of paper prepared, but so far he has written only on three of them: not the first pages of the new book, but three suicide notes, one to his mother, one to Barbara, one to Michetti. His knuckles are bleeding. He has banged them and his head repeatedly against the wall until he is half stunned. His forehead shows the bruise. Michetti is appalled and uncomprehending. D’Annunzio pours it all out. Barbara’s “pathetic, sensual beauty, her sickness contracted in her marriage, the turpitude of her husband … and all my incurable passion … the necessity of having her with me without delay, despite all that forbids it, or of dying.”

  One of his mentors, on reading Pleasure, remarked that it “smelt of sperm”—several of its most memorable passages are extended erotic fantasies—and advised d’Annunzio, before he wrote another, to take the sexual pressure off by providing himself with an undemanding concubine, “a sort of cow,” for the duration of the work. Michetti, more sympathetic, undertakes to bring him, not a “cow,” but Barbara. A true and generous friend, he finds d’Annunzio a hideaway, and persuades Barbara to join him there.

  For two months the lovers live in the little house which d’Annunzio, still toying with the fantasy of a religious seclusion, dubs the “hermitage.” This is his sketch of it (see above). It is a forty-minute walk along a rough path from the nearest railway station, on a cliff above the Adriatic, where, as d’Annunzio warns Barbara in advance, “all the comforts of life are lacking” but where they are completely secluded, able to enjoy the immensity of the sea before them, and to make love at all hours. D’Annunzio works on a new collection of poems, and begins the novel which will eventually be published as Il Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death).

  The first draft, written that summer with Barbara constantly beside him, traces the gradual slackening of his passion. The man who would wait all night in the rain for her is now sated. “The irreparable ruin that the constant presence of a woman wreaks on an exalted spirit,” runs one of his notes. The novel describes two people in many ways resembling d’Annunzio and Barbara, alone in a house just like the “hermitage,” swimming off the beach beneath, making love in an orange silk tent on the sand, observing the rituals of the peasants and fishermen who are their only neighbours, watching appalled (as d’Annunzio and Barbara did) as a family of fishermen mourns the death of a drowned child.

  D’Annunzio later told Romain Rolland that he had sat by the bedside and taken notes on Barbara’s appearance as she slept so that he could describe it in his novel with “terrible truthfulness.” His heroine (who, as d’Annunzio explicitly tells Barbara, “is you”), blooms in the sea air (d’Annunzio preferred her sickly). She becomes tanned (d’Annunzio liked his women pale). With nothing else to do she makes a companion of their peasant-housekeeper, and busies herself with “low matters” like cooking. Her face becomes less spiritual, vulgar. Her pleasures are “animal.” “She lets herself go.” The hero notices certain mannerisms, especially her way of rolling a cigarette, which strike him as “whorish.”

  The novel’s hero has moods when he is revolted by sexual contact, by damp voracious flesh. Love, he reflects, “drags after itself an immense net full of dead things.” D’Annunzio’s liaison with Barbara will last another three years—his passion for her reignited by separation—but soon after they both return to Rome that autumn he writes the disenchanted elegy, Villa Chigi.

  All night—how long! (it seemed the dawn would never come),

  With ardour, with mad anger, I had tried

  To revive the flame in our mingled bodies, in our kisses.

  She no longer drank my spirit in those kisses.
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  She drank only her own tears in those kisses.

  MARCH 1890. D’Annunzio’s twenty-seventh birthday. He is passing it in a military hospital. After years of evading his national service (compulsory for all male Italians) on the spurious grounds that he is a student and therefore exempt, he has at last submitted. The soldier’s life appalls him. He is tormented by bedbugs and nauseated by the close proximity of so many of his fellow men. Obliged to drill for hours of every day, he has stopped work on his novel. He has to groom his own horse and to help clean the stables. He barely has time to wash. “My worst enemy could not have imagined a more ferocious, inhuman torture for me.”

  For all his protests, he is being leniently treated. He has already been granted extended leave to visit his father. Now he is taking further time off for treatment for “neurasthenic disturbances.” Seeking distraction, he goes to the hospital’s dissection room and watches an autopsy. “Blood, so much blood, the stench of death, impassive doctors.” He observes the admission of two badly injured soldiers. One of them is bleeding so profusely that all the onlookers are sprayed with gore. It is evening. “The shadows, the murmurs of the bystanders, the glitter of surgical knives, all these tragic things exalt me.” Back in his room he writes to Barbara about the dissected corpse. “I still see that big body with the skull cracked, the chest ripped open.”

  D’Annunzio has an awareness of bodies—his own and others’—which is unlike that of any of his literary peers. In his love letters he likes to be right inside a woman, describing the inner folds of Barbara’s vagina back to her. In his novels he gets near enough to his heroines to see their sweat and smell their breath. He writes about the pink, inner rims of eyelids, about armpits, about snot-clogged nostrils, about bare feet. When a group of young women crowd to a window in Maybe Yes, Maybe No to watch the swallows return in spring they are aware—pleasantly but a little awkwardly—of each other’s legs as they stand flank to flank. These women are flesh, and so are we all—a fact which seems to d’Annunzio now marvellous, now disgusting, now pitiful, but which he never forgets.

  In April 1890 in Pescara, Francesco d’Annunzio, cousin to the poet, shot himself dead. On 6 June, Maria Hardouin di Gallese, d’Annunzio’s wife, threw herself from an upstairs window.

  Maria survived, with two broken legs. Various possible motives for her attempted suicide have been proposed. She told one of her husband’s early biographers that it was her father who reduced her to despair that day. Meeting him in the street while out walking with one of her boys, she tried to introduce him to his grandson. He rebuffed her, saying, “Who are you? I don’t know you.” Another source suggests that Maria was distraught after d’Annunzio had accused her of encouraging the advances of their mutual friend, a journalist who wrote under the Balzacian name of Rastignac. There was even gossip that she might be pregnant with her lover’s child. All these accounts are credible, but Maria’s worst trial must surely have been d’Annunzio’s persistent infidelity. He had recently subjected her to a new humiliation, renting a new love nest for himself and Barbara in the self-same building as that in which he was living with his wife and children.

  He visited Maria assiduously as she lay in hospital. He was always most attentive at sickbeds. “She would please me if she was always suffering, always ill,” reflects his fictional Giorgio. But on the very day of her suicide attempt he wrote to Barbara suggesting that, since his wife would certainly be hospitalised for at least three weeks, she should hurry back to Rome. On leaving hospital Maria separated from him definitively.

  The spectre of suicide stalks through d’Annunzio’s fiction, and through his letters and diaries. The Triumph of Death (already partially written when Maria tried to kill herself) opens with a suicide. Giorgio and Ippolita are walking in the Pincio gardens when they see a group of men by a parapet overhanging a steep drop. On the road beneath, a carter pokes with a stick at traces of blood and blonde hair. A woman has thrown herself down. Her corpse has already been removed. “Blessed are the dead,” remarks Giorgio as they walk away. “They doubt no more.”

  Suicide was a Romantic act. Death, as a consummation devoutly to be wished, was a concept d’Annunzio would have found over and over again in his reading. The English poets he had loved from his school days were death-besotted. Goethe’s Young Werther, killing himself for love of an unattainable woman, had sparked a Europe-wide wave of copy-cat self-killings: in d’Annunzio’s lifetime another wave of suicides swept over the German-speaking world. Arthur Schnitzler’s daughter, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s son, three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers and Gustav Mahler’s brother would all kill themselves. Schnitzler suggested motives for suicide: “Grace, or debts, from boredom with life, or purely out of affectation.” In 1889 the deadly fashion reached a peak when Crown Prince Rudolf, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, committed suicide after murdering his mistress Marie Vetsera, just seven months before d’Annunzio began writing the novel which would end with a similar double death.

  In France in 1913, d’Annunzio wrote a novella whose narrator is the curiously named Desiderio Moriar (“Death Wish”). He signed his last work as “Gabriele d’Annunzio Tempted to Die.”

  · · ·

  His military service done, his marriage over, d’Annunzio spent the winter of 1890/91 living in a large ground-floor room near the Piazza di Spagna. There Barbara frequently visited, and d’Annunzio, his desire for her rekindled by abstinence, banked up the fire (d’Annunzio’s expenditure on firewood was exorbitant) and lay with her naked on heaps of damask cushions in front of the great blaze.

  Prompted by Barbara, he was reading the Russian novels which had begun to appear in French and Italian translation in the 1880s. From Dostoevsky he picked up a new tone of voice, and new subject matter. Rome in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was teeming with single men as alienated as Raskolnikov, many of them far from home, attempting to make a living in the booming city. During the spring of 1891, d’Annunzio wrote the novella Giovanni Episcopo set among such people.

  An assorted group of men, ill-educated and coarse-mannered, live together in a boarding house. Each night they eat there and, sex-starved as they all are, each of them lusts after a good-looking waitress. “The heat becomes suffocating; ears turn red, eyes glisten. A base, almost bestial expression appears on the faces of those men who have eaten and drunk. I think I’m going to faint … I draw in my elbows to increase the distance between myself and my neighbours.”

  The brutalised peasants who surround the lovers in The Triumph of Death; now the bestial city workers: d’Annunzio’s fiction was teeming with sub-humans. His Darwinism was becoming malignant: his imaginary world was filled with the unfit, those whose survival was unnecessary and undeserved. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s murderer believes there are some superior beings who “have the absolute right to commit any kind of excess, any crime … to break the law in any way whatsoever, because they are not common men.” D’Annunzio’s next work was to be The Innocent, in which the hero Tullio kills a baby. The novel takes the form of a confession addressed to no one because, as Tullio asserts: “The justice of men cannot touch me. No tribunal on earth would know how to judge me.” Tullio, like Raskolnikov, is laying claim to an exceptional status which allows him absolute licence, the status of the superman.

  MARCH 1891. The bailiffs are breaking down the door of d’Annunzio’s room. He has been declared bankrupt. The chief plaintiff against him is the maître d’ at the Caffè Roma, where d’Annunzio has been eating on account for years. His financial affairs are complex beyond comprehension. He has debts covered by other debts, guarantors standing surety for each other in a web of illusory security designed to veil the horrid truth that he has spent far, far more than he has ever earned.

  He has sent several containers full of his furniture and movables to Francavilla, where Michetti (from whom he has borrowed large sums) will accept it in lieu of payment, with a promise to return it all some fine day
, and thereby keep it safe from other creditors. An extract from the inventory of those cases’ contents suggests how d’Annunzio’s money melts away so fast: “A damascened harp, two twisted ebony columns, a blue and gold Japanese tray, an etching of Botticelli’s Primavera in a baroque frame, a large platter of bohemian glass, a length of Cordoba leather painted with figures, two boars’ tusks, an altarpiece in the form of a sunburst, ten large antique oriental rugs …” And so it goes on, and on, and on. There are eighty items in all, all salvaged from a one-room apartment.

  Now he sees it all go, and leaves the city. “I departed ill, desperate, with no strength left, in a sinister dawn.” He flees to his usual refuge at Francavilla. Michetti, his guardian angel and father abbot, takes him in.

  Later he will boast of having written The Innocent in three and a half weeks. It takes him closer to three months in fact, but even so it is a prodigious feat of mind and will. He writes to Barbara, describing the budding fruit trees, the haze of grey-green veiling the distant woods, and then describes them again in his novel. He attends a village christening: the songs and rituals he observes pass straight into his narrative. Again he resists all Barbara’s pleas for a visit, despite writing her letters in which he enlarges upon the state of unassuageable sexual arousal in which he lives. His “savage gonfalon,” he tells her (the word is as archaic in Italian as it is in English), is permanently raised.

  In mid-July he posts the completed manuscript to Emilio Treves. For months already he has been pestering Treves for an advance. He is, he says, a good investment. Treves can look forward to receiving a whole series of further books from him. Surely the publisher will not deny him now? “I await an answer accompanied by the money which is necessary to me.” Treves will agree to nothing until he has read the novel. D’Annunzio sends it. Three weeks pass, and then comes the devastating response. The Innocent is “highly immoral.” It is derivative (Treves, who has recently published Italian translations of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, is unimpressed by d’Annunzio’s appropriation of Tolstoyan themes and techniques). Treves will not publish it. Now Barbara writes, threatening to break with him (they haven’t seen each other for five months). His marriage over, his love affair faltering, his professional prospects dim, d’Annunzio leaves Francavilla for Naples.