Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In informal photographs he tends to hold his head on one side and watch his companions askance, half dropping his heavy eyelids, seductive and insinuating. Here he stands erect and glares upwards and outwards, his face in quarter-profile turned, not to the viewer, but towards his own great destiny. Hérelle, on being shown the picture, grasped its significance at once. “This is surely the first portrait of d’Annunzio ‘Superman.’ ”

  Eloquence

  AMONG THE GRAFFITI ON THE WALLS of the yellow-papered office of the Capitan Fracassa were a crowd of caricatures. Among them was a profile of Italy’s most celebrated actress, the beautiful Eleonora Duse, with her wide, soft lips, her exquisite bone structure and her pale mournful eyes. On St. Valentine’s Day in 1885 the Capitan Fracassa’s twenty-two-year-old contributor, Gabriele d’Annunzio, was out on the pavement of the Corso, making notes on the grand ladies standing on the balconies of the palaces to watch the carnival frolics, and throw down sweets and flowers to the crowds seething below. He saw his lover, Olga Ossani, on the loggia of the Palazzo Tittoni and noted how beside her, “the strange Japanese hair-do of Signora Duse was outlined against the flower-patterned blinds as though against a decorated screen.” For the time being he was interested in the actress only as an example of the fashion for Japonaiseries of which he was then so fond.

  Nearly a decade later, in 1894, in Venice, d’Annunzio was introduced to the diva. Earlier that year she had written to her former lover, Arrigo Boito, reporting that she had read The Triumph of Death, and that she would “rather die in a corner than love such a soul as … that infernal d’Annunzio.” Loving him was already on her mind. “I detest d’Annunzio, but I adore him.”

  It is unlikely that anything more than letters of admiration passed between them after that first meeting, but Duse obtained a copy of Pleasure, and read it on tour. The following September, shortly after returning from Greece, d’Annunzio, in Venice again, made a characteristically inscrutable but suggestive entry in his notebook, “Amori. Et. Dolori. Sacra” (Sacred to Love and Pain). According to a romantic account he gave many years later, he was climbing out of a gondola at dawn when he encountered Eleonora, each of them having passed a sleepless night. “Without a word,” wrote Duse, “we framed a pact of alliance within our hearts.” So began the most celebrated love affair of his life.

  Eleonora was thirty-seven, nearly five years older than her new lover. Like him, she had lived in the public eye virtually since childhood, not because, like him, she craved fame but because she was born into a family of itinerant actors and needed the work. She was cast as Francesca da Rimini at the age of twelve, and Shakespeare’s Juliet at thirteen. At twenty she was playing all the leading roles with a company in Naples. By the time she met d’Annunzio she had toured North and South America, England, Austria, France, Germany and Russia, playing a repertoire of suffering heroines, most notably Dumas’s Lady of the Camellias, and being acclaimed everywhere as the finest, most beautiful, most exquisitely pathetic of all actresses, with the possible exception of Sarah Bernhardt. She had had a succession of passionate relationships with sad endings. She was in her prime as an actress. Her audiences adored her. But she was discontented. The work she was doing, performing realist drama “among papier-mâché trees padded with green cloth,” didn’t satisfy her. After a successful season in London she wrote: “What an offence to the soul is this aping of life!” She wanted “the anguish and the promise.” She longed to attain “that deep of life.” D’Annunzio was just the man to help her reach it.

  She was experienced, independent, high-earning. Always on the move (d’Annunzio was to call her “the nomad”), she was not a woman who would keep a man confined. An artist herself, she would be, not a drain on a man’s energies, but an inspiration. As a woman whose fans were legion, she gave her lover the satisfaction of knowing he was the one chosen from among the multitudes who adored her. “When the theatre echoes with applause and flames with desire,” wrote d’Annunzio, “he upon whom, alone, the diva gazes, upon whom she smiles, is intoxicated by pride.”

  They had a great deal in common. Words poured from her, as they did from him. His sentence structure is always perfect: hers is almost non-existent. In their letters he weaves flawless nets of words, she stammers and gushes, but they share the fantastic pretentiousness of two artists sure of their own genius. She wrote after their first night together: “Oh bless, bless, blessings on him who gives … I have felt your soul and I have again found mine—Alas I don’t know how to tell you, but … do you know? Do you see? Clasp my hand tight!”

  Duse was histrionic and totally humourless. “Everything about her was so artificial,” wrote Tom Antongini, “that I never could understand how d’Annunzio … could put up for years with so patent and tiresome a lack of naturalness.” But d’Annunzio relished being a part of the melodrama that was her life. They traded gnomic declarations which might have been gobbledegook, but seemed vibrant with implied meaning. They shared a greed for experience. As he trained the intensity of his attention on the world about him and on his own consciousness, so she (as he wrote approvingly) was ceaselessly intent on “living more and feeling more.” “Life, life, free, absolutely free,” was what she craved, “the thrill!”

  Like d’Annunzio she was a hard-working artist, with the highest of aspirations. Like him she was a reader who knew her Shakespeare and her Sophocles, as well as being alert to the new: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was a regular part of her repertoire. And like him, she loved to shop, buying precious old glass and secondhand books in fine bindings, dressing in tailored outfits from Worth or flowing robes designed for her by their mutual friend Mariano Fortuny. Each of them felt their identity and self-confidence confirmed by the other. “If you believe, I shall be,” she told him. And he, in his turn, writing after her death, remembered how everything he did seemed to enchant her—“My way of biting a fruit … of kneeling to search for violets or four-leafed clover in the grass”; the way he tucked coins into his trouser pockets so that the warmth of his body might enhance their patina. “No woman has loved me like Ghisola, neither before nor after.” (Ghisola was one of his many names for her.) “I lived in her gaze as a pirausta lives in the furnace.” (A pirausta, according to Pliny the Elder, was a tiny filmy-winged fire-dwelling dragon.)

  D’Annunzio had told Hérelle that he was responsible for Maria Gravina’s troubles, and that he therefore had to stand by her, but, provided now with such an alluring alternative, he found that he was, after all, perfectly capable of overcoming his scruples. Not—being him—that he made a swift clean break. It would be another two years before he finally left Maria, but well before that she had sunk into the dim background of his increasingly busy and brilliant life. Over the winter of 1895/96, he was with Duse for weeks at a time in Venice, in Florence, in Pisa, returning to Francavilla only to write while she toured. They were to stay together, off and on, for eight years, the most settled and most creative of d’Annunzio’s life.

  The beginning of his liaison with the great actress coincided with the start of his career as a dramatist. There is no record of his having previously been much of a theatre-goer (though one of his early stories contains a sardonic depiction of a blousy actress on the provincial circuit). But Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy had set him thinking about drama’s potential. His immersion in Wagner’s music had suggested ways in which performance might be more immediately potent than literature on the page. Within three weeks of his return from Greece he was telling Treves about The Dead City, his first play.

  He also made his debut as a performer. The International Arts Exhibition, the first ever Venice Biennale, opened in 1895. Michetti’s painting, Jorio’s Daughter, was on show, covering an entire wall, and won a prize. D’Annunzio had promised the organisers that he would come to “hymn” his friend’s work. He was expected for the opening in April, but cried off, promising to speak instead at the close of the exhibition. In November he finally delivered his oration in a gilt and
marble saloon in the opera house, La Fenice.

  The talk was a sonorous piece of prose-poetry, a meditation on Venice, on Titian and Veronese, on sea and glass (d’Annunzio had visited Murano and was to become a discerning collector of the glass-blowers’ work) and on the decayed splendour of Venice’s ancient empire. D’Annunzio told an admirer he had written it in a single night, keeping himself awake by eating sugar lumps soaked in ether, a story which nicely combined his personae as heroic creator and as drug-taking decadent. In fact it was a reworking of a ten-year-old poem, The Dream of Autumn, and would itself be reworked for inclusion in d’Annunzio’s next novel, Il Fuoco (Fire). (D’Annunzio liked to get plenty of use out of his material.)

  D’Annunzio’s work was cerebral and sedentary (or stationary at least, he often wrote standing) but to his mind it was physically heroic. He trained for it, as an athlete or warrior might, and in later life he was proud of the marks it left on his body: the writer’s callus on his middle finger, the slight deformation of his shoulders, one raised above the other after a lifetime spent bent over a book. He boasted too of the effort he had put into developing his beautiful voice.

  There are many testaments to that beauty. The English poet Arthur Symons, who was among the most eager champions of d’Annunzio’s work, once heard him read from the Bible in Count Primoli’s palace in Rome and was spellbound, just as Harold Nicolson would be by his recitation in Paris. And there are half a dozen accounts by women of how the disappointment of his less than lovely appearance was erased as soon as he began to speak, so enchanting was the “soft, supple, velvety” timbre of his voice, and so seductive his manner of using it.

  He liked to stress that it was not something he had received as a gift, but his own creation. When, as a small child, he worried his mother by running out of the house, she would greet him on his return with a kind of chant of welcome and relief, wagging her head from one side to another as she crooned over him. “Enchanted, I imitated her manner, and tuned my speech to her speech, so that my voice might become ever more beautiful.” At the Cicognini he was teased initially for his Abruzzese accent. A proud and fiercely competitive boy, he rid himself of it in short order. Reading the classics, both then and later, he reflected on the way an orator could use speech to work on a crowd, writing about the way Cicero would “modulate his periods, almost as a singer would” to create a “vehement upheaval” in his listeners’ emotions.

  In his prose as well as his poetry, he was vividly aware that “an assembly of syllables has a suggestive and emotional power over and above their intellectual significance.” Hence the repeated phrases and incantatory refrains laced through his novels. Hence the care he lavished on the rhythms of his splendidly elongated sentences. Hence the style of delivery he adopted for his speechmaking, enunciating slowly and deliberately, as though “drawing a clear outline around each word.” (Several of his contemporaries describe the effect: at first hearing “colourless,” “without animation,” “flat” or “monotonous,” but rapidly establishing a hypnotic grip on his listeners.)

  At La Fenice, he was able to see and feel for the first time how the word-music he created could be used as an instrument of power. His audience—aristocratic ladies in evening dress, a strong cohort of the admiring young men who had paid court to him in the Caffè Florian the previous summer—saw a dandy in a tailcoat, his moustache tips upstanding, gesticulating precisely with his small well-cared-for hands as he slowly read out his piece. What d’Annunzio himself saw was something more dramatic, “an ancient savage game in which the Herculean energies of the athlete revealed themselves, making his tendons quiver and his arteries swell.”

  The hero of Fire, Stelio Effrena, delivers the very same speech in similar but glamorised circumstances. As Stelio watches the audience intently following his words, he feels his own intellect distending and relaxing like an enormous snake. “He felt himself to be holding their minds, fused into one single mind, in his hand, and to have the power to brandish it like a banner, or to crush it in his fist.” He is exultant. “In the communion between his soul and the soul of the crowd there arose a mystery, something nearly divine.” D’Annunzio had discovered a new way of impressing his mark upon the world.

  Cruelty

  HANDS EXCITED D’ANNUNZIO. He once recorded his delight in the beauty of his own left hand as it lay relaxed “like an underwater flower” on the desk before him as he wrote with his right. The motif recurs persistently in his fiction and poetry. The Virgins of the Rocks contains a virtuoso passage describing the three heroines leaning on a balustrade, their three pairs of hands hanging gracefully before them. There are hands in d’Annunzio’s love letters and hands in his domestic décor: the Vittoriale contains a room stencilled all over with hands.

  Hands were erogenous. In Pleasure, a woman’s leaving a glove on a piano is a signal of her sexual availability, and Elena Muti’s permitting men to lap champagne from her cupped hands is an image of her depravity and allure. Sperelli makes a drawing of Maria Ferres’s hands, a way of caressing her without touching. In real life d’Annunzio collected his lovers’ gloves as trophies: there are drawers full of them still in his last home.

  Hands were most interesting to him when mutilated. To Elda, his first love, he wrote: “Tell me something that would please you and I will do it … would you like me to cut off a hand and send it to you, in a box, by post?” In an early story he tells the tale of a peasant whose hand is crushed beneath a religious effigy. In a gruesome passage the man amputates it himself, and offers it as a tribute to the saint. Nearly thirty years later, d’Annunzio was thrilled to meet Umberto Cagni, the Arctic explorer who had cut off his own frost-bitten and gangrenous fingers.

  Duse’s hands were slender and pale. While they were together d’Annunzio dedicated book after book to her as “Eleonora Duse of the beautiful hands.” But he also wrote a play, La Gioconda (the name is an alternative title for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa), in which those lovely hands are horribly mangled. The character d’Annunzio created for Duse is trying to save a toppling marble statue, her sculptor-husband’s representation of his mistress. The massive figure, the image of her humiliation, falls on her hands and crushes them. It was widely said that d’Annunzio treated Duse cruelly: the way he depicted their relationship in his novels and plays suggests he was fully aware of it, and unabashed. Looking back on their love, after Duse herself was dead, the memory that moved him most was that of a curious gesture, peculiar to her. When he made her cry (as he frequently did), she would wipe her eyes with an upward movement of those long elegant hands, as though anointing her temples with her own tears.

  Over the first two years of their liaison they explored the Veneto and were together in Milan, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Rome, Albano, Assisi. Those times left delicious memories—an afternoon in the Campo Santo in Pisa, when he picked violets for her in the rain, was still haunting d’Annunzio a quarter of a century later. For Duse, though, these brief snatches of happiness were a torment. A friend who knew them both well believed she was addicted to the sexual pleasure d’Annunzio gave her, and pitied her for it. He “held her by her senses … she couldn’t do without him … it was lamentable.” She described their time in Pisa as a “terrible convulsion of body and soul” and her reaction afterwards, when she was once more alone, craving his touch, as “Madness … Twenty days of atrocious fever.” She fought her dependence by trying to reject him. “She is sobbing at the windowsill. ‘Oh no, no, no: I know what would happen to me afterward…You will go always, you will go farther and farther from me.’ ” We know about this painful scene because d’Annunzio recorded it in his notebook, along with its aftermath (“she yielded in tears”).

  He loved to see her unhappy. With her downward slanting eyes and tremulous mouth, she was, said d’Annunzio approvingly, a “harmonious vision of creative suffering.” One contemporary critic once described her as a “wounded Pierrot.” To another she was “a torch of passion and of pain … On all her features,
all her person, she carried written the word Melancholy.” She was always unwell (she had tuberculosis), something which naturally interested d’Annunzio, and along with her physical frailty she offered him the thrilling prospect of a great star, a diva, prostrate at his feet.

  They were frequently apart. Eleonora spent months of each year on tour. D’Annunzio returned periodically to Francavilla and Maria Gravina, alienated though they now were from each other. In the summer of 1897, Maria gave birth to a son, whom she named Gabriele Dante. D’Annunzio refused to acknowledge the child. He was not the father, he said: his servant was. Maria did not insist.

  When he wasn’t travelling with Duse he was frequently in Rome. He was now earning large sums (none of which he saved) from the French and German editions of his novels, and his reputation was sufficiently august to earn him the entrée to circles into which he had peered as an outsider when he was a young journalist. He was at last admitted into the exclusive hunting club, Il Circolo della Caccia, and rode recklessly after the foxhounds on the Campagna. He was invited, and went, to dinners and concerts, tea parties and balls. These periods of hectic gadding about, he liked to claim, provided stimulus for his imagination. “No day of drudgery was ever as fertile for me as a week of laziness.” Romain Rolland met him during this period. One night, at the Countess Lovatelli’s, Rolland heard a young man inveighing against d’Annunzio’s vanity,—“he thinks he’s a demi-god.” The next night d’Annunzio himself was at the countess’s, looking very “snob” in little pointed pumps, a white waistcoat with diamond buttons and, in his cravat, “an ugly pin in the shape of a jockey.” Initially Rolland took against him: “This peacock with his tail constellated with eyes, followed around by gawping snobs … this smell of a low-life Adonis.” Soon though, the two became close friends, united by a shared love of music. In Rome they attended concerts together day after day.