Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  At the time of their first sacred night of love d’Annunzio had promised Eleonora his first play, The Dead City, but when he finally got around to writing it, a year later, he offered it instead to Sarah Bernhardt (whose acting he considered “more poetic,” though Duse’s was “more sincere”). The betrayal was very nearly the end of their affair. D’Annunzio wrote in his notebook that “the noble woman whose eyes are full of tears and infinity” had withdrawn from him. “Always in her sad step I hear the rustle of laurel leaves.” He seemed to be resigning himself, with agreeable feelings of poetic melancholy, to having lost her. He was engaged, that winter in Rome, in two new love affairs, besides still living part of the time with Maria Gravina. He imagined Duse “far from me among the cypresses, carrying in her arms her love, like a lamb, its four feet tied by a rope.” The romance which was to make the poet and the actress the most celebrated couple in Italy, if not in all Europe, was on the point of fading, almost before it had started, into a Symbolist image—delightful to d’Annunzio—of blood sacrifice and feminine grief. Friends intervened. Count Primoli, whose lacquered and cluttered salon d’Annunzio had so admired in the 1880s, invited them both to his house and effected a reconciliation.

  Eleonora forgave. In ten days d’Annunzio wrote a new play, Sogno d’un Mattino di Primavera (Dream of a Spring Morning), as a reconciliation gift, and sent Duse the manuscript bound in antique brocade and fastened with green moiré silk ribbons. The play—like most of d’Annunzio’s dramas—is wordy and static, and shot through with morbid eroticism. A wronged husband murders his wife’s lover. She cradles the bloody corpse in her arms all night long and by morning she is raving mad. D’Annunzio had been reading about the stylised gestures of the classical tragedians and his stage directions (almost as verbose as the dialogue) suggest ways of emulating them, as well as giving detailed descriptions of his practically unrealisable setting.

  In the summer of 1897, Eleonora performed the play in Paris. It was not a great success. That autumn d’Annunzio finally left Maria Gravina, and Duse took a house near Settignano, the town in the Florentine hills which was to be home to both of them for the rest of their time together.

  Their relationship was fascinating to the public and fruitful for both of them. It was a love affair, certainly, but it was also a working partnership. Eleonora was not only a star, she was her own manager, hiring and firing fellow actors and setting up the exhausting tours on which she played before thousands all over Europe and America. For d’Annunzio, now launching himself as a dramatist, an intimate relationship with her could not but be useful. (His contemporary, Luigi Pirandello, had to wait years to see his plays performed.) Conversely Eleonora was tired of her repertoire; she was glad to have an author celebrated all over Europe writing plays especially for her. But if, professionally and artistically, they were partners, privately and emotionally they were a master and his abject devotee. In The Virgins of the Rocks, d’Annunzio had imagined a woman with “an unbridled need to be enslaved.” Princess Massimilla confesses: “I am eaten up by a desire to belong entirely to a higher, stronger being, to dissolve my will in his, to burn like a holocaust in the fire of his immense spirit.” In Eleonora Duse, d’Annunzio had found such a woman in real life. “I would like to unmake myself, wholly, wholly, wholly!” she told him, “to give my all, and melt away.”

  She added his plays to her repertoire, thus boosting his income but greatly reducing her own—her staples like The Lady of the Camellias, Antony and Cleopatra, Goldoni’s La Locandiera, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, were far more popular at the box office. Bernard Berenson, the art historian who was their neighbour in the Tuscan hills, described d’Annunzio as a gigolo, a man paid for his sexual services. This was unfair: d’Annunzio was far too feckless and, in his own fashion, innocent, to make money out of women. But it is certainly true that Duse was ready to let him exploit her. Early in their time together she gave an interview to Olga Ossani (d’Annunzio’s Febea, still working as a journalist) in which she insisted she would be happy to spend all she had in the service, not of her own art, but of his. “I have earned pennies, I will earn more … What do you want me to do with them? Buy a palace?…Can you see me, surrounded with liveried servants, giving the parties of an actress grown rich? No, no! Art has given me joy, intoxication and money; art shall have the money back.” This was how Duse talked. She was “not an intelligent woman,” said d’Annunzio cruelly after they had parted, but she was desperately serious. “I will die happy if I have made a beautiful thing, a work of Beauty.” D’Annunzio—soon to be Beauty’s parliamentary representative—benefited immensely.

  She endured his infidelities. Her friends warned her against him, reminding her of his notorious promiscuity, but to speak ill of such a poetic spirit seemed to her like “slaughtering flowers … like pulling the hair of one who lies dreaming.” He was a monster, but an adorable one, whom she could nurture and comfort. She was to tell a friend how he would come to her the morning after he had been with another woman, “exhausted, stupefied, spewing out his disgust at the night and his contempt for women.” She appeared in the ignominious role of his handmaiden: a caricature of the period shows a scrawny-shanked d’Annunzio, posed as Botticelli’s Venus, rising naked from the waves, while the much larger Eleonora, a buxom attendant nymph, holds out his bathing towel. When he was working he refused to admit her to his study. The great actress, adored by multitudes, waited meekly in the corridor until he felt like opening the door.

  Her legions of admirers were soon indignant at d’Annunzio’s treatment of her. But though their relationship was undoubtedly laced with cruelty (his cruelty to her), her masochism shaped it as powerfully as his sadism. He liked her abjection. When he heard the rustle of her dress and the sound of her breathing outside his door, he took pleasure in keeping her standing there. But she liked it too. She had no wish for independence, even for her own identity. She signed her telegrams “Gabrighisola” as though the two of them were one. She wanted to dedicate all the strength remaining to her to him, as the earth gives itself to nourish the peasant’s sheaf of corn. “What would I live for if not to work for you?”

  He repaid her with the privilege of being his chosen companion, and with sex. For Eleonora their sexual relations were ecstatic. “My soul is no longer impatient to go beyond my body … I have found harmony.” But if she was perpetually hungry for him, his desire for her was equivocal. In June 1896, only a few months into their love affair, d’Annunzio made some notes for the novel he was contemplating. “The clear and crude vision he has of her physical disintegration. Certain aspects of her face, her small pathetic chin … He is drawn towards the dawn when he leaves her house. She sees him so young and strong, taking deep breaths of the untainted air as if in the joy of liberation; he has just left the suffocating room where she oppressed him with her tears.”

  D’Annunzio had freed himself from Maria Gravina only to involve himself in another relationship with an emotionally dependent older woman who would be driven frantic by the pain he caused her. Something in him, this repeated pattern suggests, thrived on the presence of an imploring, adoring, despairing woman. And something in Duse predisposed her to accept that role. In the plays d’Annunzio wrote for her, she was blind (The Dead City), mutilated (La Gioconda), driven mad (Dream of a Spring Morning) and murdered (Francesca da Rimini). Their affair finally ended when he refused her a part in which she would have been burnt alive (Jorio’s Daughter). She resigned herself to being exploited and hurt by him. He had an absolute right, she declared, to live according to a “law” formulated by himself to suit his own extraordinary nature.

  The desires at play in their relationship were complex. D’Annunzio complained to his friends of Duse’s jealousy and possessiveness, but he submitted to it, allowing her to make at once a god and a child of him. She, in turn, went along with him in exaggerating the age gap between the two of them. She called him “little son,” “Gabrieletto,” “Sweetness.” She scolded him and chivv
ied him back to work—with the dual authority of a parent and a patron. “Life races by,” she wrote to him. “Grasp it in your art.” They played at being mother and son, but that doesn’t mean that their relationship was any the less ardent. Over the next few years d’Annunzio would write a novel in which a widow has a sexual relationship with her much younger brother, and he would produce his own versions of the tragedies of Phaedra, the legendary queen of Athens, and the mediaeval Italian duchess Parisina d’Este, both of whom fall passionately in love with their stepsons. Incestuous relationships excited d’Annunzio, and so did the bond between sexually mature women and beautiful younger men.

  D’Annunzio dedicated book after book to “La divina Eleonora Duse.” He betrayed and humiliated her and made her cry, but her love was the inspirational fire in which he—the pirausta—renewed himself. He was, as he confessed almost ruefully, “mad about her.”

  Two vignettes, both real events that would find their way into d’Annunzio’s fiction, and both involving damage to Duse’s lovely hands. In January 1899, d’Annunzio accompanied her on tour to Egypt. He noted that in the theatre in Cairo the women’s boxes were veiled with silk, so that from the stage it appeared she was playing to an empty house. They visited the Sphinx and the Pyramids. An archaeologist took them down into a newly opened burial chamber, and lifted the lid of a jar to show them that it was full of ancient honey, still glistening. As they marvelled, a bee flew in. The archaeologist tried to keep it from the pharaonic honey, and Eleonora helped. “The beautiful white hands, uplifted in the dimness of the sepulchre, seemed to compete in flight with that … bee of the morning and of two thousand years.” Eventually—and this is what gave the memory its force for d’Annunzio—the bee stung one of those elegant pale fingers.

  A few days later d’Annunzio and Eleonora visited the gardens of the Khedive’s Palace. There was a maze of high myrtle hedges. They strolled in and became separated. D’Annunzio was enjoying himself, but Eleonora was frightened. “Suddenly I found myself all alone, in an alley between dense green walls.” She felt as though she would never find her way out. “What silence, like a tomb.” D’Annunzio recreated the scene in Fire, relocating it to the gardens of the Palladian Villa Pisani in the Veneto. In his account, his fictional alter ego, Stelio Effrena, is deliberately hiding from his mistress. He taunts her, laughing at her, calling out, “Come and find me!” but then staying silent as she calls frantically after him. He crawls under the hedge on all fours. He imagines himself a faun—goatish, feral, heartless. Pitilessly he refuses to help his wretched lover. The incident, for him, is charged with an intense and furtive pleasure.

  In the Cairo garden, by her own account, Eleonora panicked, and sobbing, began to scrabble at the dense, thorny hedges, attempting to break out. “Look at these scratches on my hands that I thrust in vain through the myrtle!”

  Silently watching from the other side of the hedge, d’Annunzio saw those lovely hands bloody and torn.

  “I kept crying in anguish: ‘Enough! Enough! I cannot stand it any longer! D’Annunzio!’ ”

  D’Annunzio, still silent, took notes.

  Life

  HERE ARE SOME OF THE WAYS in which d’Annunzio described the Italian parliament. “A House which has trampled on the national dignity”; “a foul crowd of knaves and fools”; an assembly of “stable-hands of the Great Beast” whose “chatter is as vulgar and repulsive as the burping of a peasant who has eaten too many beans”; “a mephitic sewer.” He had written that democracy was an absurd system. “You cannot treat human beings as though they were as alike as a row of nails awaiting the hammer.” But in 1897 the parliamentary seat for his home district of the Abruzzi became vacant and d’Annunzio was offered the nomination. The man who could never turn down an invitation found this one irresistible. After taking careful soundings to ensure that he was not likely to be humiliated by an electoral defeat, he accepted. “The world,” he wrote to Treves, “must be convinced that I am capable of everything.”

  It was a turbulent moment in Italy’s history. In the previous year an Italian army had been defeated at Adua by the troops of the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik; 6,000 Italians were killed in one day. The disaster brought down the government of Francesco Crispi, whose bellicose nationalism had been much to d’Annunzio’s taste. Crispi’s followers looked to d’Annunzio as a new champion, and perhaps even as a leader. He himself, though, refused to be identified with any particular programme. He promised a “politics of poetry” and was content to allow the meaning of the phrase to remain obscure. “I am beyond right and left, as I am beyond good and evil,” he declared (acknowledging his debt to Nietzsche with the phrase). He stood as an independent, describing himself as “The Candidate for Beauty.”

  Such a candidacy was neither as unworldly nor as innocuous as it might sound. When, in 1871, Nietzsche heard a rumour that the Louvre, one of the great treasure houses of European art, had been burnt down by the Communards, and all its precious contents destroyed (in fact the fire was in the Palace of the Tuileries) he wrote: “It is the worst day of my life.” Nietzsche was an aesthete, and not only in a green-carnation-wearing, stained-glass-fancying sense of the word. He was one who valued beauty far higher than justice or human kindness. D’Annunzio would respond in the same spirit to the collapse of the campanile in Venice’s Piazza San Marco in 1902. He was prostrated by grief, weeping, and pacing from room to room all day, unable to work. “And in the newspapers someone dares to be happy because there were no human victims!” To him the pain and death of his fellow beings would have been insignificant, by comparison with the loss of an harmonious architectural ensemble. “Innumerable human victims would not be enough to compensate.”

  The incompatibility of egalitarianism with the cult of beauty preoccupied nineteenth-century thinkers of all political persuasions. In the decade before d’Annunzio was born Heinrich Heine, utopian socialist and friend of Karl Marx, sorrowfully prophesied how the “red fists” of the communists with whom he sympathised would smash “all of the marble structures of my beloved art world.” Beauty, genius, high culture could none of them coexist, Heine thought, with social equality. “The shop keepers will use my Book of Songs for shopping bags, to store coffee or snuff for the old wives of the future.” What saddened Heine enraged d’Annunzio. He has one of his fictional heroes reflect with bitter irony on the function of poets in a democracy. How, he wonders, can they make poetry of the deplorable passing of power to the masses?

  While writing The Virgins of the Rocks d’Annunzio had frequently escaped from Maria Gravina to spend time in Rome, staying—thanks to his friend de Bosis—in an enormous chamber in the Palazzo Borghese. Once the saddle room of the princely household, it was furnished only with a bed, a piano and a plaster cast of the Belvedere Torso. D’Annunzio loved its “splendid poverty.” He dwelt on the image of Michelangelo, nearly blind, palpating with rough hands the Torso’s marble planes. Living alongside it, he was in contact with genius, both classical and Renaissance. Throughout the winter of 1894/95 he was there for weeks on end, feeling the “joy of breathing grandly” and working with his friend on the launch of a new journal, the Convito (the Banquet). The title is an allusion both to Dante’s Convivio and to Plato’s Symposium. (In Paris in 1892, a journal with the same name, Le Banquet, was founded by a similarly minded group including the twenty-year-old Marcel Proust.) The Convito was lavishly illustrated and prohibitively expensive, a magazine for the elite, strongly advocating elitism. In the review’s first issue d’Annunzio called upon “intellectuals” (a neologism he popularised) to gather up all their energies to fight for the “cause of intelligence against the Barbarians.”

  The Convito writers were united in lamenting that the realm of art and literature, once the hortus conclusus of a few rare spirits, was becoming a public playground for the unrefined many. D’Annunzio liked selling his books to the many, but, leaving that aside, he joined his voice to the others. The times, he wrote, were as disastrous as those
in which Goths and Vandals rampaged through Italy but, while those invaders were a “whirlwind with tresses of lightning,” with the grandeur of “bloody foaming rage,” the “new barbarism” was mean and sordid. The Risorgimento had brought forth heroes commensurate with those who glittered off the pages of Plutarch’s Lives, but the “Third Rome” they had created was now overwhelmed by “a thick grey sludge in which a deformed multitude bustle and trade.”

  These attitudes—elitist and misanthropic—were what underlay d’Annunzio’s espousal of the cause of “Beauty,” but to his constituents he was first and foremost a local man who had become a celebrity. He was greeted with cries of: “Long live d’Annunzio! Long live the Abruzzese poet!”

  He campaigned vigorously. “This enterprise may seem stupid and extraneous to my art,” he wrote to Treves defensively, but he submitted to the dust and discomfort attendant on rattling in overcrowded carriages over miles and miles of country roads through a hot Italian August. He attended banquets. He listened politely while the bands he detested played in his honour. He flinched, Coriolanus-like, from the “acrid smell of humanity,” but nonetheless he visited town after town, village after village, delivering flowery and mellifluous speeches to crowds who may not have recognised his abstruse classical allusions but who responded with gratifying excitement to the performance he put on. Copies of his speeches were mounted on poles and carried through the streets—the word as icon. He ran his own press campaign, asking his writer friends to contribute laudatory articles on him to local papers, and adding his own (anonymous) comments. The publicity generated by his new political venture was made to serve his literary career. The halls in which he spoke were hung with posters advertising his novels and poems. While other candidates handed out cash bribes to voters, d’Annunzio found it sufficient to offer autographed volumes. The books were provided gratis by Treves; the autographs possibly, but not certainly, by d’Annunzio. (Book-signing was a chore he preferred to delegate—his eldest son was to become especially good at forging his signature.)