The Parisian journal Gil Blas had a reporter covering his campaign. It was Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, twenty-one years old, seeing d’Annunzio for the first time. Marinetti thought the spectacle of “the chiseller of precious dreams” addressing such rustic audiences a “savoury irony”: “the haughty aristocratic minstrel stoops to address the shabby crowd.” To Marinetti, watching from the back, d’Annunzio was a slight figure on the faraway platform, “elegantly narrow in a black suit, delicate, small, fragile.” Marinetti described his delivery as “monotonous,” but conceded that it was mesmeric. D’Annunzio, like an oarsman rowing on the “vast sea of the crowd,” was drawing the people’s spirits toward him “on a river of scintillating images” and on the “soft cadences of his voice.” At the end of the speech his supporters had to clear a path through the crowd with their fists, before he could be ushered to his carriage and sent off at a trot. Marinetti was impressed. He recognised the “strident modernity” (a great compliment from the soon-to-be futurist) of what d’Annunzio was doing—converting literary fame into political influence, celebrity into power.
D’Annunzio won his seat. Having done so, he lost interest in it. To owe his position to the votes of others seemed to him demeaning. And that position, in so far as its main privilege was that of allowing him to cast a vote in turn, offended his self-esteem. When urged by the whips to lend his support to a new bill, he haughtily replied: “Tell the President I am not a number.” He took his place in the chamber seldom (in this he was unexceptional, only about half of the elected deputies ever attended) and visited his constituency even less. After a year largely spent touring Egypt and Greece with Duse and overseeing the productions of two of his plays, he wrote to one of his Abruzzese relatives: “I do not understand how the constituents can complain about negligence on my part.” Swanning around the Mediterranean, thinking and feeling and pursuing his art, he was serving his country in the way he knew best.
The year after d’Annunzio entered parliament was a stormy one in Italian politics. Socialist and republican groups had been gaining influence, especially in the industrial north. There were food shortages and price rises. On 5 May a general strike was followed by rioting in several cities. The following day the Prime Minister, Antonio Rudinì, declared a state of emergency in Milan. Filippo Turati, the socialist leader, was arrested. General Bava-Beccaris led troops into the city and fired on demonstrators. Over a hundred, perhaps as many as 400, people were killed.
D’Annunzio, true to his role as representative of Beauty, wrote an article for the New York Journal and the London Morning Post (his association with Duse had brought him far greater visibility in the English-speaking world). He called it “Bloody Spring.” In it he laments, not the fact that troops have fired on unarmed citizens, but that Cellini’s bronze Perseus, which stands in Florence’s Piazza Signoria, has been hit by a demonstrator’s stone. To him, damage to an artwork was infinitely more dreadful than any number of dead plebeians.
His only notable action as a member of parliament was his crossing of the house. He sat initially on the far right of the chamber, aligning himself with the monarchists and nationalists, but when, in the wake of the civil unrest, the government attempted to introduce ever more repressive legislation, d’Annunzio, more of a libertarian than a conservative, refused his support. He relates that one day, passing a room where members of the Socialist Party were holding an animated discussion, he went in, joined in the talk and was warmly received. He wrote in his notebook: “On one side there are many dead men howling, and on the other a few men alive. As a man of intellect I advance towards Life.”
The socialists seemed dynamic: the establishment clumsy. D’Annunzio made his move. In the middle of a parliamentary session he left his place and, having ensured that all eyes were on him, he passed to the other side of the chamber. His secretary describes him springing from bench to bench “with the agility of a goat.” His previous allies on the right were shocked, but d’Annunzio was defiant. His fictional heroes, he said, were all “anarchists” intent only on manifesting their will in bold actions. He was not of the right, or of any other fixed position. “I am a man of life, not of formulae.”
“Life”—the word which d’Annunzio substituted for any conventional political value—had, like “Beauty,” a complex meaning for late nineteenth-century aesthetes. It was the catchword of a political and philosophical creed—vitalism. Nietzsche had exalted “zoe,” the life that pulses through all animate things. Pater wrote of “that eternal process of nature, full of animation, of energy, of the fire of life … in which the divine reason consists.” Life was amoral. “Life’s sole aim is to multiply itself,” wrote d’Annunzio. Life was violent, and paradoxically close to death. D’Annunzio liked to quote a punning tag from Heraclitus about a great bow “whose name was Life but whose work was Death.”
A few days after his switch of allegiance d’Annunzio wrote an article calling out for “unending strife and unending world conquest” and explaining that he admired socialism not only for its “Life,” but for its destructive potential. This was perverse of him: vitalism and socialism were not compatible. Pater, again alluding to Heraclitus, had made plain that only the “few” were capable of responding to and channelling life’s divine energy, while the sluggish “many” were inert, “like people heavy with wine.” “Life,” like “Beauty,” sounded grand, vague and surely unexceptionable, but for d’Annunzio and his like it had a particular meaning, and that meaning hardly accorded with a belief in the brotherhood of man.
“Do you really think I’m a socialist?,” d’Annunzio asked a journalist two years later. “It pleased me to go for a moment into the lions’ pit, but I was driven to it by my disgust with the other parties. Socialism in Italy is an absurdity … I am and remain an individualist, fiercely and to the uttermost.”
In the most celebrated speech of his election campaign (celebrated because he persuaded Treves to put it out as a pamphlet, and saw to it that it was published in newspapers nationwide) he derided the concept of collective ownership as being suitable only to primitive nomadic herdsmen. Under socialism, he declared, the citizen degenerates. “His energy is enfeebled, his will is enervated, his dignity is lost.” He is like the slaves whom the Scythians blinded and then chained in rows to churn great vats of mares’ milk, day in, day out. Two impulses power every advance in the human condition, he maintained, the drive to own and conserve property and the companion drive to “dominion.” Individual ambition; private property; a hierarchy with “infinite gradations” through which an exceptional spirit might rise: these were the essentials of a thriving state.
The words are unequivocal. Yet somehow d’Annunzio managed to persuade the socialists to accept him into their ranks, and even to support him in his next election campaign. Francesco Nitti, later d’Annunzio’s political adversary, studied his speech and, overlooking its entirely explicit attack on socialism, described it as an exercise in emptiness, “which could lend itself to any interpretation, so much the more because it said nothing.” For his peroration d’Annunzio launched into a eulogy of the hedge, the boundary which demarcates a farmer’s land, protecting his property and asserting his pride. The hedge, recalled one of his listeners, was evidently a political metaphor, “but as he spoke, it became real—a lovely, flowery hedge.” It appears that there was something about d’Annunzio’s sweet seductive manner which so befuddled his constituents and his political associates that they missed what he was saying.
When parliament was dissolved in June 1900 he stood for reelection in Florence. He was defeated. His life in politics had hardly started, but his participation in parliamentary democracy ends here.
Drama
Fire, D’ANNUNZIO’S NEXT NOVEL, ends with the funeral of Richard Wagner.
Wagner died in Venice in 1883. D’Annunzio set his novel in that year purposely so that his hero can volunteer to be one of the great man’s coffin bearers. The tributes include laurel branches brought all
the way from Rome. It is winter (Wagner died in February) but the laurel leaves are “green as the bronze of fountains and rich with the odour of triumph.” Back in Rome, the trees from which they were cut are putting out new buds “to the murmur of hidden springs.” Wagner the barbarian is dead. D’Annunzio will be his Roman heir.
In the autumn of 1897, within weeks of his election to parliament, when his constituents might have expected him to be protecting their interests in the Chamber of Deputies, d’Annunzio was shuttling up and down the railway lines from Venice to Rome, drumming up publicity and patronage for the great new project he and Eleonora had in mind. They were going to construct an amphitheatre in the Alban Hills, and there they would found a “national theatre” (a novel concept at the time). Wagner had had his Bayreuth, where his works with their new/old Teutonic mythology were performed in an atmosphere of veneration. Reviving the legends of the Nibelungen and of the Arthurian knights, he had given Germans a nationalist mythology. Wagner’s work, wrote d’Annunzio, supported “the aspirations of the German state to the heroic greatness of Empire.” In Lohengrin, Henry the Fowler, the tenth-century founder of Germany, cries: “Let the warrior rise up from all the German lands.” Thus inspired, in the 1860s and ’70s, German warriors had triumphed over Austria and France. “The same victory had crowned both the effort of iron and the effort of metre.” Now d’Annunzio craved a similar artistic-cum-expansionist triumph.
Drama offered him an enormous arena in which to display his talent. In late nineteenth-century Europe literature was for the entertainment of the educated classes only, but drama was popular. In the half century before d’Annunzio’s birth over 600 new theatres were built in Italy. Marinetti estimated that ninety per cent of Italians went to the theatre (while in 1870 only twenty-five per cent could read).
From Nietzsche, d’Annunzio had taken a concept of tragedy as something both sacred and anarchic, full of amoral, ruthless vigour. A theatre was a furnace in which the base metal of ordinary people could be melted and bonded and recast as a “People,” as hard and lustrous as bronze. He had read that when the Athenians left the theatre, exalted after a performance of Aeschylus’s tragedies, they went from temple to temple, striking the shields which hung in the porticos like great gongs, and baying out “Patria! Patria!” That was the kind of effect he wanted his drama to have.
In Greece d’Annunzio had seen ancient statues recently excavated after lying underground for centuries, and had taken their return to the light as a precedent for a new Graeco-Latin renaissance. In The Dead City he blended the heroic project of modern archaeology with decadent passions (brother–sister incest, murderous possessiveness). The archaeologist hero, rummaging through the vestiges of a convulsed civilisation, releases a fearsome energy. So, writing brand-new plays based on ancient tragedy, d’Annunzio would unleash on the world the power of Dionysus. He would create a new drama, rooted, not in the dark northern culture of Wagner’s dwarfs and dragons and maimed heroes, but in the dazzling light and tragic violence of ancient Greece.
Duse was beside herself. Enough of the realistic representation of modern life! Enough of light entertainment! “The theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible.” A new mission was wanted, and a new architecture. “The drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest dinner … I want Rome and the Colosseum, the Acropolis, Athens.” Away with the proscenium arch! Away with the pampered philistine socialites! “I want beauty, and the flame of life.”
Count Primoli formed a committee. James Gordon Bennett, the proprietor of the New York Herald, gave enthusiastic support and published a lengthy interview with d’Annunzio. Fund-raising parties were organised. Titled ladies subscribed. A Roman marchese, noting that two noble ladies of his acquaintance had joined “the band of initiates to the new d’Annunzian aesthetic cult,” predicted drily that “those gentlewomen and their intellectual acolytes will end by coupling like ancient nymphs with ancient fauns in the woods that shade the lake.” The new theatre’s repertoire would consist of the works of the great tragedians of antiquity and new works by d’Annunzio, all to be performed by Duse and the company she would assemble. It would open with a Persephone by d’Annunzio himself. The theatre would be charged with the “Latin spirit.” The life-force celebrated by Nietzsche would throb through it. It would burn not as an oil lamp, “a pure and tranquil flame,” but as a “smoky, resinous torch flashing with red sparks.”
In the summer of 1897, Sophocles’ Antigone was performed in the Roman amphitheatre at Orange in Provence. D’Annunzio was not there, but the tiresome little fact of his absence didn’t deter him from giving an eyewitness account of the event. He wrote that peasants and labourers listened intent and mute. “Their rough and ignorant souls” were stirred by “the words of the poet, albeit not understood,” with an emotion “like that of a prisoner on the point of being released from his heavy chains.” Even the acridly stinking mob of the slave class might eventually be exalted by d’Annunzio’s drama.
Nothing came of it. The theatre was never built. In Fire, Stelio writes a Persephone, but in reality d’Annunzio never did. Perhaps poor Eleonora was fortunate: the tragedy would have obliged her, as d’Annunzio’s plays often did, to play a mournful middle-aged woman—Persephone’s grieving mother Demeter—alongside a younger actress. In Paris fifteen years later d’Annunzio toyed again with the idea of founding a theatre: a collapsible and portable rotunda made of glass and wrought iron, to be designed by Mariano Fortuny and capable of holding audiences of up to 5,000 people. Nothing came of that idea either.
Scenes from a Life
IN SEPTEMBER 1897, reunited after an exhausting summer (he fighting his election campaign in the Abruzzi, she performing his Dream of a Spring Morning in Paris), d’Annunzio and Duse went together to Assisi, to visit the places sacred to St. Francis. As usual d’Annunzio was in tune with intellectual fashion: Paul Sabatier’s recent life of St. Francis was an international bestseller. D’Annunzio’s diary of the trip describes blue-green misty hills, soft rain and kindly light. He writes lyrically about the repose the place seemed to offer, the way the town felt cradled in the saint’s pierced hands. D’Annunzio, the hand-fetishist, was, of course, fascinated by stigmata.
St. Francis was not only a holy man: he was also the instigator of Italian literature. His Canticle of the Sun, also known as the Laudes Creaturarum (Praise of the Creatures), has been called the first Italian poem. Soon after his visit to Assisi, d’Annunzio began work on the immense cycle of poems which constitutes his surest claim to a place in the literary pantheon. He called them Laudi (Praises), associating himself with the saint.
With Duse he visited Santa Maria degli Angeli, the white baroque church whose splendid dome is built over the fifth-century chapel, the Porziuncola, which the saint himself is said to have restored. D’Annunzio was pleased by the tiny, ancient structure, all hung about with gold and silver votive hearts: “It is like a chapel in a forest.” He noticed the narrow door, as dry as tinder, cracked “like a heart consumed by suffering or rapture.” Small though he was, he thought that to pass through it he would have to take a knife to himself and cut himself down.
A priest led them to the rose garden where St. Francis is said to have rolled naked on the thorns to subdue his fleshly desires, and showed them that the rose bushes still bear leaves spotted with blood-red. Poetry, roses, sexuality and pain: this was a combination to please d’Annunzio. Afterwards he dubbed the whitewashed villa Eleonora had recently rented in Settignano “the Porziuncola.” The following spring he followed her there, taking the lease of a larger fifteenth-century villa across the way, the Capponcina, which was to be his base for the next twelve years.
Halcyon, the best-loved volume of his Laudi, begins with La Tregua (The Respite), a lyric in which the poet begs leave to withdraw from his political engagement with the mob, “the dark-minded dense Chimera whose sten
ch was so strong my throat convulsed in the fetid air.” Throughout the years he lived in Settignano, d’Annunzio kept up his interventions in public life, as an occasional orator and author of propagandist poems, but he spoke at a distance from the foul-smelling political arena. He lived on his hillside “like a great Renaissance lord,” as he put it, with his dogs, his horses and his team of servants. His partnership with Duse brought him more money than he had ever had before. After two years of his newly settled existence he had paid nearly all his creditors. It also gave him the creative energy to produce much of his best work.
He was both very visible and very secluded. When he appeared in public he made a stir—people turned to stare at the famous author when he walked through Florence—but his outings were rare. For weeks on end, he was alone at his desk seeing no one but his staff and whichever woman or women he was bedding. When he left for France in 1910 nearly all of his best work was done. And while he worked, his reputation grew, a reputation which was as diverse and complicated as his oeuvre. He was the sexually promiscuous lover, the precious aesthete, the bellicose nationalist, the antiquarian who campaigned for the preservation of Italy’s buildings, the embracer of the modern who courageously went up in one of the very first flying machines and who tore (at a shockingly speedy thirty miles an hour) along the dirt roads of Tuscany in a large, noisy, chronically unreliable motor car.
In old age, d’Annunzio told a visitor to his last home: “I am a better decorator and upholsterer than I am a poet or novelist.” He was not being self-deprecating (he was never self-deprecating), but proudly calling attention to his mastery of another art. Like Oscar Wilde with his Chelsea “House Beautiful,” he took interior design very seriously. During his years at the Capponcina he at last had large sums of money coming in. And when he had money he always immediately spent it. Tom Antongini, who entered his life in 1897, explains: “If he has 500 lire, he buys flowers. If he has a thousand, he feels that he can afford ivory elephants. If he has 100,000, he immediately thinks of precious silks, gold cigarette cases, dogs and horses. If he is troubled with a million, he is interested in houses. D’Annunzio must buy!”
Gabriele D'Annunzio Page 24
