Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  He insisted on paying a rent twenty per cent higher than that required for the Capponcina: such was his compulsion to spend money that a bargain distressed him. The house was furnished, but not to his liking. One of his most exasperating habits, to those charged with keeping his financial affairs straight, was his way of paying extra for furnished accommodation, only to strip his newly rented home of all its contents and spend a fortune (far more than the whole house was worth) in refurnishing it. The decoration of the Capponcina, a house which was to be seen by only a handful of people—d’Annunzio very seldom entertained—was indeed gorgeous enough to be worthy of a Renaissance lord. His dogs and horses and whatever furniture remained from the shipwreck of his previous homes were transported there and the house was soon thronged with “smiths, joiners, masons, stonecutters, glaziers, upholsterers, decorators, woodcarvers.” His new major-domo, Benigno Palmerio (hired because he was an Abruzzese and because d’Annunzio liked both his face and his name—“Yes, you look benign”) reports that d’Annunzio spent hours and hours with them, moving serenely through the hurly-burly and discussing the elaborate home improvements he had in mind “like the master of a laboratory or a factory.”

  Every sense was caressed. Perfumes, music, the touch of old silk, meals of perfect fruit. D’Annunzio was attentive to the least detail. He fussed about the design of his lampshades, nagging his supplier for his favourite pinks and peach colours. He pored over catalogues before ordering just the right bedlinen. Most of his furniture was made to order, massive pseudo-Renaissance pieces built to his scrupulous specifications. He kept the house heated to tropical temperatures which many visitors found all but intolerable, but in which he thrived.

  By day and night he was at his desk, writing hour after uninterrupted hour. Between whiles he walked or sat in the garden, visited his dogs and horses or rode out, usually alone and in silence. “No one can ever have lived a life of such methodical discipline,” wrote Palmerio. “We would see him wandering like a shade.”

  Here are some glimpses of those years: of the private man, of his public persona, of the workings of his mind.

  1897. Romain Rolland has left a description of d’Annunzio at thirty-four years old. He looks like a slightly outdated man of fashion, an ambassador perhaps: “Small, oval head, a little pointed blond beard, his eyes focussed, attentive, clever, very cold and hard.” They talk about books and Rolland, like Gide two years earlier, is astonished by how much of the new French writing he knows. D’Annunzio is genuinely well read, but he also knows how to make the most of his reading. Tom Antongini noted that he could talk for an hour about a book he had looked into for ten minutes. The talk turns to Rabelais. D’Annunzio claims to possess one of his letters, and—furthermore—a portrait by Leonardo that he never shows to anyone. Rolland, who doesn’t believe him, remarks: “These little boasts don’t shock. He is like a big child.”

  At the Capponcina, Rolland, a fine pianist, plays for d’Annunzio and introduces him to the work of French composers. He is quick to appreciate them. He is knowledgeable about early music: he will be instrumental in reviving the work of Claudio Monteverdi. He also keeps abreast of the new. He will collaborate with Debussy and write a poetic tribute to Richard Strauss: both composers are sufficiently avant-garde for their premieres to provoke outcries from conservative listeners. A decade later the composer Pizzetti, visiting d’Annunzio to work on the music for his play The Ship, will be surprised and impressed by his understanding of musical form: “He could talk about liturgical chant and polyphony as few others can.”

  JANUARY 1898. D’Annunzio is in Paris for the opening of Sarah Bernhardt’s production of The Dead City. He is being fêted as the star he now is. Every night he returns to his hotel to find the lobby crowded with fans waiting to offer him flowers, or to demand an autograph, or simply to lay eyes on him. The two greatest living actresses are competing to perform his work. One of them, Duse, is his lover. Perhaps the other is too. According to Scarfoglio (over-fond of scurrilous gossip but unquestionably in the know: he is sharing a hotel suite with d’Annunzio), he has spent at least one night with Bernhardt.

  This is Paris’s belle époque. D’Annunzio is paying his first visit to a city through whose streets, it seems to him, “the fever of night burns as in the veins of a voluptuous woman” and he is, by his own account, “pouring out rivers of gold.” His diary is crammed with appointments: a reception given in his honour by the Minister for Education, dinners and soirées musicales with hostesses like Princess Bibesco, private meetings with literary luminaries: Barrès, the poet Heredia, Anatole France. Marinetti sees him in a box at the theatre, “with his hand in the little ringed hand of an illustrious Parisienne.” He is apt to finish the night in a boîte in Montmartre.

  Hérelle visits him at the hotel. D’Annunzio has brought a servant with him, but nonetheless the sitting room is in chaos. There are bouquets of flowers everywhere. Tables, chairs, chests are all heaped with books sent in tribute by authors hoping for an endorsement. “But above all there was an incredible quantity of letters, hundreds, perhaps thousands of letters, in every style and every shape, satiny-smooth envelopes or envelopes of coarse paper, scented pages and pages torn from a school exercise book.” Some of them are “lying half in half out of their envelopes for any passer-by to read.” The rest are unopened. “It is impossible to pass through the room without brushing them with one’s sleeve or one’s coat tails.” Soon they are spreading across the floor as well.

  Duse is wretched. On the play’s opening night, while Bernhardt is creating the role that she had believed was hers, she is at Count Primoli’s house in Rome, lying on a couch with a hot-water bottle, then darting nervously around the room talking compulsively and tearing a flower to shreds. Now she sends dozens of telegrams. They are added to the drift of d’Annunzio’s unread mail. At last she arrives in Paris, and sweeps him away to Nice. The great heap of fanmail is abandoned in the hotel.

  D’Annunzio is fastidious to the point of neurosis. When he stays in a hotel he insists on having the bedcovers turned down and the sheets inspected before he settles in. His luggage always includes, along with the inevitable crimson silk cushions, a green damask cloth to be spread over a table onto which the contents of his dressing case—every item made of ivory and monogrammed in gold—is ceremoniously laid out.

  Now he is in the dressing room at the Capponcina. It is “as light and white as a camellia,” says Palmerio. A line from Pindar, in praise of water, is inscribed above the washstand in letters of gold and enamel. There is a large mirror, Bohemian crystal flasks and jars for scents and lotions, a set of Capodimonte porcelain figures of the Olympian gods, leather armchairs, hangings in flowered Venetian silk. It is a pretty room, a room to linger in. “I think,” says Antongini, “if he had nothing better to do, d’Annunzio would be entirely happy bathing, dressing and spraying himself with perfume from morning until night.” Every day he uses a pint of Coty’s eau de cologne.

  D’Annunzio is here changing his shirt for the fifth or sixth time today. From the wardrobe (an entire adjoining room lined with cupboards of polished walnut) he selects a fresh one. After he has left, a servant takes up the discarded shirt and, seeing that it is still perfectly clean, irons it and surreptitiously replaces it in a drawer.

  · · ·

  In December 1898, d’Annunzio arrives in Alexandria to join Duse. The sea voyage has, as usual, made him fearfully sick. He feels weak and dizzy, but he is also excited. This is his first visit to Africa, or to the Arab world, or to anywhere outside Europe. It is not travel per se that inspires him, but history, and now he exults in being in a city founded by Alexander. Eleonora has sent a dragoman to greet him on the quay with a properly classical salutation—“Ave!” He regrets that, unlike the world-conquering Macedonian, he has no army and no baggage train, but he does have plenty of baggage. (Duse, who has been touring since childhood and knows how to pack, laughs at the exorbitant quantity of stuff he has brought with him.)


  Back at the hotel he drinks a glass of champagne, noting the powerful effect it has when drunk on an empty stomach, and then, light-headed, takes Eleonora in his arms. He has already heard how her performance of the previous night has been acclaimed. Now he feels that the body he embraces is that of the whole people over whom she has scored such a triumph. He is Italy and, lying above her while she strokes his lips and eyelids with a posy of violets (he often employs flowers as aids to love-making), he is showing his mastery of “the barbaric and mixed race” of Egypt.

  SPRING 1899, CORFU. D’Annunzio and Duse are in a rented villa, quarrelling over the young woman friend of Eleonora’s whom d’Annunzio calls Donatella and whom he has attempted, perhaps successfully, to seduce. Duse is frantic: “Horror!…I had loved a monster … She and you—both of you—devouring my heart.”

  D’Annunzio is impervious. “What’s wrong? Have you gone mad?” he asks. Tom Antongini maintains that d’Annunzio simply cannot understand the agonies of jealousy he causes. “He is capable of witnessing the most poignant manifestation of feminine sorrow with as little compunction as a dentist feels for a nervous patient.”

  D’Annunzio’s mind is not on Eleonora, it is on the politically inflammatory play he is writing, La Gloria (Glory). His drama, as Mathilde Serao points out, does duty for the speeches he has never made in the chamber. Glory, he boasts, will “rouse the frogs in the putrid swamp that is Italy.”

  The riots of the previous year have left the government, widely accused of corrupt financial practices, unstable. Into this edgy political atmosphere, d’Annunzio launches a play in which the “men of yesterday” are challenged by young radicals whose political creed is ill-defined but whose impatience with the cautious, corrupt old establishment blazes out. Ruggero Flamma, a young leader who, as his name implies, “could set the world burning,” leads a coup against an elder statesman, Cesare Bronte, only to be himself deposed by a furious mob. The play, d’Annunzio smugly tells Treves, “will have you shuddering in your conservative old skin.”

  Audiences see Bronte as a veiled portrait of Francesco Crispi, but more significant than any correspondence between the play’s characters and real-life politicians is d’Annunzio’s statement of a politics of violence. The earth itself, declares Flamma, cries out to be broken open and ploughed up so that the seed of hope can be sown. Change is to be effected by fighting in the streets. Corruption is to be washed away by blood. Battling by land and sea for its very existence, the nation will be purified and made magnificent. Only “a true man” with “a great destiny in his eyes” will be capable of effecting such a transformation, and whatever he does will be justified. Flamma loses power, according to his mistress, because he has sought his people’s love. Instead he should have worked on the “brutal passions” released by the destruction of the old political order. “He who can exasperate their appetites and delude them, can drive them, head down, wherever he will.”

  A young man, being introduced to d’Annunzio five years later, recorded his awe at meeting “La Gloria himself.” To d’Annunzio’s admirers, it seems that Flamma, the charismatic demagogue calling for cleansing blood in “a clear, icy voice with something of frenzy and of menace in its depths,” is the poet himself.

  THE DINING ROOM AT THE CAPPONCINA. The little round panes of yellowish glass in the long windows create a dim and churchy light. Everywhere there are mottoes. D’Annunzio’s cufflinks, his writing paper, his chairs and beds are all decorated with words. The jewellery he gives women is often engraved with the warning: “Who shall keep me chained?” A Latin motto is incised in gold into the wooden backrest of a row of choir stalls: “Read. Read. Read. And. Read. Again.” “Per non Dormire” (so as not to sleep) is everywhere—on the glass of the windows, on the painted frieze, on the tiles of the floor. It is d’Annunzio’s current favourite tag: he saw it on the façade of a Renaissance palace and adopted it for his own.

  All around the room there are flowers, in vases of Murano glass or majolica or bronze. At the head of the table is the throne-like “Chair of the Guest” covered with a gold embroidered cloth. This, when she is in Settignano, is Duse’s seat. To its right sits d’Annunzio. He eats little, but when the dessert is served he becomes greedy. He loves sweet things, and he loves fruit. When he has finished a servant pours water into a silver bowl, and d’Annunzio rinses his fingers, says Palmerio, “with the seriousness of one performing a sacred rite.”

  NAPLES, APRIL 1899. Duse is on tour and d’Annunzio is travelling with her. Each night, knowing himself to be a draw, he comes down to the footlights in the interval to take a bow, immaculate in white tie and tails, with a carnation in his buttonhole and a monocle in his eye (he is increasingly short-sighted). Duse is performing his latest plays, La Gioconda and Glory. The latter goes badly. The audience jeer at d’Annunzio, denying him his aristocratic persona by yelling out the name his father was born with: “Rapagnetta! Down with Rapagnetta!” D’Annunzio is unmoved. He withdraws while Duse struggles to regain the audience’s attention and goodwill. Later Scarfoglio comes across him emerging from a dark corridor backstage, in the act of rebuttoning his clothes. He tells his old friend he has just enjoyed hurried sex with one of the company’s actresses.

  The Capponcina. D’Annunzio is working. The great church bell in the dining room doesn’t ring to summon him to meals. When he is writing he eats only when it suits him, which may not be all day, stoking his energies with coffee. The servants move around on tiptoe. The word “Silentium” is carved into the lintel over his study door. A long work table from a Franciscan convent in Perugia is heaped with books and papers. Bundles of goose quills (he gets through up to thirty a day) stand in a bronze jar by a stack of fine paper, each sheet watermarked by hand with one of his favourite mottoes. This paper comes from Milani of Fabriano, where fine paper has been produced since the fifteenth century.

  D’Annunzio is writing Fire. His mind is full of images of autumn and of Venice and of the ageing actress (called Foscarina or Perdita in the novel—but understood by everyone, despite d’Annunzio’s protestations, to be Duse).

  He lingers over descriptions of the master glass-blowers of Murano. He conjures up fireworks, when the sky over the Grand Canal is a tissue of flaming gold. He mentally revisits the Eden garden on the Giudecca, with its paths paved with seashells, where he and Duse used to spend idle hours among the foxgloves and Madonna lilies. He writes of a demented artist and of a great lady immured by vanity in her own house (she cannot bear her wrinkles to be seen). He creates a fable of an underwater glass organ, a delicate piece of Symbolist fantasy. Alone in his room, pacing his garden, he is happy. Writing, he enters a trance-like fugue state in which he experiences “an uninterrupted series of epiphanies.” When his concentration breaks he is left only with a distant sense of the state of mind he was in, “mysterious and frightening”—such as one might feel when shut out of a monumental cemetery, able to see only the white heads of the funerary statues, glimpsed above the wall.

  Everything in the room looks old, but there are modern curiosities too. Some of the lamps are electric. D’Annunzio has recently taken up bicycling. He is delighted by photography. In the next door room, the library, along with some 14,000 books are stacked hundreds of photographs. D’Annunzio has been buying them from Alinari ever since his first years in Rome. They are reproductions of artworks, a compendium of images to add to the stout volumes of vocabularies which are his raw materials.

  Visitors to d’Annunzio’s homes may see clutter, but this is not mess, it is an arrangement. By the fire there is a painted chest emblazoned with a coat of arms. It is kept full of logs of pine and juniper wood, each piece cut to precisely the same length. When he works through the night, the poet will build up the fire himself, wearing gloves to protect his little hands.

  D’Annunzio is writing, standing at a lectern. Duse is sitting near him on a choir stall salvaged from Santa Maria Novella. Each time he finishes a page he hands it over for her to
read.

  SEPTEMBER 1899. Once again Eleonora is on tour, and once again d’Annunzio is with her. They are staying in a hotel in Zurich where, by chance, Romain Rolland and his wife are also guests. Rolland finds d’Annunzio “simple and serious—tired of his meretricious glory.” He seems to have aged rapidly over the preceding two years. His hair has almost all gone. He is wrinkled. He seems at once innocent and corrupt, “a youthful creature, almost a child, on whom debauchery has laid its wretched mark.”

  Duse stays in her room, coming out only to complain. “She is the eternal lamenter.” She confides in Madame Rolland. D’Annunzio’s life is like an inn, she says: “the whole world passes through it.” One night, as she leaves for the theatre, she asks Rolland to sit with d’Annunzio, saying that he has been threatening to kill himself and needs music to soothe him. Rolland finds him apparently perfectly composed, but plays the piano as requested until d’Annunzio begins to talk. He is in one of the black moods that intermittently engulf him.

  Another night the Rollands watch the other couple setting out for the theatre together. Duse strides ahead. “Little d’Annunzio followed her, running to keep pace.”

  JANUARY 1900. D’Annunzio has been invited to speak at the opening of the newly restored Sala di Dante in the Florentine church of Orsanmichele. He considers the occasion “a solemnity” with a “national character” and, as usual, takes pains over its publicity. He releases the text of his speech to the press in time for it to be published in full on the day, and is anxious for further coverage. “I don’t know whether Il Giorno has yet arranged to have a report of the event sent over the telegraph,” he writes to his friend Tenneroni. Tenneroni sees to it.