Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  MAY 1904. D’Annunzio’s landlady and neighbour in Settignano, the Marchesa della Robbia, witnesses a curious ceremony. Women are strewing the road through the olive groves to the Capponcina with rose petals. Servants in livery are dawn up in line. D’Annunzio appears, in a white silk suit, with a tall, blonde, elegantly dressed woman on his arm. They walk towards the house with the solemnity of a bridal pair approaching the altar. D’Annunzio’s romance with Duse is over, and so is the period of comparative tranquillity in which he has done so much work. The lady is the Marchesa Alessandra di Rudinì, an independently wealthy twenty-six-year-old widow and mother of two children (whom she is now abandoning), daughter of a former prime minister and, for the next three years, d’Annunzio’s acknowledged mistress.

  Speed

  D’ANNUNZIO’S LAST FULL-LENGTH NOVEL, Forse che sì, Forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No) opens with a couple hurtling across the northern Italian plain towards Mantua in an open-topped red car. She (wayward, seductive young widow Isabella Inghirami) is tantalising him (dashing explorer and aviator Paolo Tarsis) with the title words. Goaded, Tarsis speeds up. The car roars along the dead-straight Roman road, the pulse of its engine as warlike as the beating of a vast metal drum. He tells her that her life is in his hands:

  “I could in an instant dash it into the dust, crush it against the stones, make of you and of me a single bleeding mass.”

  “Yes.”

  They are both feverish.

  “Close your eyes, give me your lips.”

  “No.”

  “We are going to die.”

  “I am ready.”

  A cart is lumbering towards them, laden with massive tree trunks, drawn by four oxen, blocking the road. Tarsis keeps accelerating. Isabella is intensely aware of her own body, of her legs “as smooth as those of a silver crucifix which has been kissed by thousands upon thousands of pious lips.” A swallow careens across their path: it falls shattered. Isabella is watching Tarsis in the wing mirror, the image of his face—bronzed, clean-shaven, his lips swollen above his silk scarf—distorted by the convex lens into a streamlined futurist icon.

  “You want this?”

  “Let it come!”

  They are right upon the cart. At the last possible moment Tarsis swerves. The car judders over the rough verge, narrowly avoiding toppling into the canal full of water lilies which runs alongside the road. Isabella begins to laugh wildly, a great sobbing laugh hinting at her incipient madness.

  Speed, risk, sexual cruelty, suicide, insanity: these were themes which beat through d’Annunzio’s work and haunted his life in the years between his break with Duse and his departure for France. His financial affairs became increasingly desperate, his lifestyle more preposterously extravagant and his love-life more hectic. An awareness of his own age was growing on him, and it depressed him profoundly. His wrinkles, his bald pate, his discoloured teeth, all felt like disfiguring injuries. His literary output slowed: the miraculous years when poetry flowed through his veins like blood were past. His fame, its novelty exhausted, had become irksome. He called the journalists who tracked his comings and goings “mingy little scribblers.” He felt lonely. Pursuing younger women for the first time in his life, he knew he was chasing his own fast-escaping youth.

  He always courted danger. He was a duellist when he needn’t have been. (He fought another duel in 1900 when his election campaign in Florence gave rise to what he considered an unforgivably ad hominem newspaper article.) He rode fast and hard, and fell frequently, not because he was a bad rider but because he was such a reckless one. When he was going foxhunting he would feed his thoroughbred sugar lumps until the horse was so “drunk” he couldn’t control it. He once set a record by jumping forty-four walls in succession out on the Roman Campagna. Fellow huntsmen made a joke of the way he breached hunting etiquette, unable (or disinclined) to prevent his hyper-stimulated mount overriding the hounds. “The poet has an urgent message for the horizon!”

  Hunting near Rome in the autumn of 1903, while Duse was on tour, performing his Francesca da Rimini (to her own substantial financial loss) in Germany and England, d’Annunzio met Alessandra di Rudinì. A few weeks later he met her again in Florence at her brother’s wedding and within days he had written to tell her he loved her. That winter, as Jorio’s Daughter went into rehearsal, d’Annunzio repeatedly excused himself and slipped away, not to Genoa, where Duse lay ill, but to Rome to go hunting again, and to see his new beloved.

  Alessandra was fifteen years younger than d’Annunzio, twenty years younger than Duse. She was tall and athletic, a blonde Amazon known in Roman society as a fearless horsewoman who (shockingly) wore breeches and rode astride. “I love horses, dogs, hunting and all those things which give me the opportunity of proving to men that not all women are animals to be preyed upon,” she told d’Annunzio, shortly before becoming his prey. Always attracted to androgynous women, and admiring her for her aristocratic independence of spirit, he called her Nike (Victory) and set about encompassing her defeat. She was exultant and reckless. “How long will your love last? I fear terrible sufferings are in store for me. But it does not matter … I tremble at the thought of seeing you again.”

  D’Annunzio was still a married man. Alessandra’s family were aghast at her degrading herself by becoming the mistress of a bankrupt poet who was, for all his fame, a mere bourgeois. Her father cut off her allowance. Her husband’s family took her two small sons from her. She was undeterred. “Remember always to dare,” was one of d’Annunzio’s mottoes. “So as not to sleep,” was another. There was nothing sleepy or timid about Nike. She was as exciting and dangerous as a thoroughbred horse high on an excess of sugar lumps.

  No more, wrote Benigno Palmerio, of the “harmony and serenity, so propitious to work” that had prevailed in Duse’s time. The actress, careful of her reputation, had only ever been a visitor in the Capponcina, for all the hundreds of nights she had spent there. Nike, grand and self-confident enough to defy convention, moved in and set about expanding the household. The number of servants rose from six to fifteen and then to twenty-one. “Money wasn’t spent,” writes Palmerio, “it was thrown away.” A blacksmith came all the way from Milan twice a month, with an assistant, to shoe the horses (as though there were no farriers in Tuscany). Enormous bills for Nike’s clothes arrived from Paris couturiers. Antongini claims to have seen with his own eyes Persian carpets laid in the stables for the horses to bed down on. “It looked as though d’Annunzio and his adorable companion … were trying to compensate themselves in one wild flight for the austerity and reasonableness of some previous existence.” But for all their fortune-defying behaviour, the disaster that soon overtook the couple was not of their own making.

  In the spring of 1905, Nike developed an ovarian tumour. She underwent three life-threatening operations under general anaesthetic (extremely dangerous at that date). D’Annunzio moved into the hospital with her, staying there for weeks on end, and attended her assiduously. He stood by as the chloroform was administered. Three times, he wrote: “I have held in my hands the hands of the victim, while her soul plunged into the dark abyss … I seem to have been present at three death agonies.”

  He saw her illness as his own ordeal. “Sufferings horrible torture never ending,” he telegraphed to Antongini. “My anguish indescribable.” Nike’s survival was evidence of his own heroic fortitude. “The doctors are astonished by my endurance. For six weeks I have watched all night.” Her operations were his “martyrdom.” “Each time I waited standing upright on my legs of stone, transforming pain into a sacred vow.” For all that, the writer in him remained alert. While the potentially fatal surgery was performed he took notes about the mechanics of his lover’s ordeal—the gleaming scalpels and forceps, the wheeled “bed of torture,” the surgeon’s deft movements and the protocol of the operating theatre. His next play would include a detailed description of a similar operation.

  Moved and elated by Nike’s illness, he contemplated freeing
himself so that he could marry her. But divorce would not become legal in Italy until 1974. The only way he could end his marriage would be by adopting Swiss citizenship, something that, as the voice of the Italian race, was unthinkable for him. Anyway, the moment passed. As Nike recovered, his love for her dwindled.

  She had been given morphine to ease her pain. By the time her body was mending she was dependent on the drug, writing to d’Annunzio: “Nike has succumbed to her despair and has injected enough morphine to forget for an hour the torment of having Gabri far away from her.” D’Annunzio had loved her for her audacity. Now she was abject, he sought solace elsewhere. The more morphine Nike took, the more tiresome her lover found her; the more he stayed away from her, the more wretched she became and the more she took. Their affair ended in a style fitting to its inception. One evening—distraught—she took d’Annunzio’s strongest horse and galloped off, soon losing control of her mount. D’Annunzio raced after her and with difficulty managed to bring horse and rider safely back.

  The next day she wrote him a note. “The life we lead in common has become a weight upon you.” She could sense it in the “deaf irritation (as last evening when you took my horse in hand)—and more, your words (like yesterday), cruel disenchanted tired words which reveal your boredom.” Recovering her dignity at last, she took herself off to Rome. Palmerio watched d’Annunzio drive her down to the station, kiss her hand and say goodbye as impassively as though he were parting from “any guest who might have come for a day’s visit.” D’Annunzio’s emotions were intense, but when they were over they were over entirely.

  His spending was now completely out of control. Jorio’s Daughter had been translated into Spanish, English, Norwegian, German, Russian and half a dozen other languages, but still d’Annunzio’s income fell hopelessly short of his outgoings.

  His financial affairs were teetering: his private life was equally hectic. His liaisons multiplied: the longer-lasting love affairs overlapping, the brief encounters becoming more frequent. Women all over Europe fantasised about him. As an author he had admirers who longed to experience the waves of erotic ecstasy he described in his lyrics and novels. As a celebrity he had fans who wanted a share in the decadent glamour that hung around his name. He could invite a woman whom he had only just met to visit him alone at the Capponcina, and she came. He could pick up a girl in a café and suggest she take “a rest” with him in his hotel, and she consented. He could meet a respectably married woman at a formal party and make no move whatsoever, and she might yet appear at his door, set upon “abandoning herself.” Seduction was something he did almost without willing it. Bernard Berenson noticed that he talked quite sensibly when in male company, but that as soon as a woman came within earshot his voice and manner changed, as though he were a “trained monkey” responding to a command.

  One woman who became a lasting friend was the Marchesa Luisa Casati, heiress to an immense fortune. Orphaned at thirteen, and married before she was twenty to a Milanese aristocrat from whom she soon separated, Casati was an unconventional beauty, whom Marinetti described as having “the satisfied air of a panther that has devoured the bars of its cage.” Her style was studiedly bizarre. She surrounded herself with animate accessories expressive of exoticism—Afghan hounds and ocelots, parrots and peacocks; black servants whom she dressed for parties in costumes copied from Tiepolo. Very tall and thin, she painted her face dead-white, outlined her long green eyes with kohl or with glued-on strips of black paper, and wore her hair dyed red and teased into a Medusan tangle of curls standing out several inches around her head. She posed for artists as diverse as Boldoni, Augustus John, Giacomo Balla and Man Ray. She gave d’Annunzio a rare black greyhound and sent him cryptic telegrams: “The glass-maker has given me two large green eyes as beautiful as the stars, do you want them?” She was, wrote d’Annunzio, “the only woman who ever astonished me.”

  He was trying out another version of the role of superman. In his next play Più Che l’Amore (More Than Love), he created the figure of Corrado Brando, a magnificent brute of a man, square-shouldered—as d’Annunzio was markedly not—an explorer and fighting man. Brando has done battle in African wars and, when captured on the “black heap” of his slaughtered foes, laughed and sang under torture.

  Ever since the calamitous invasion of Massaua in 1887, Africa was seen as the place where Italians went to die or prove their manhood. Besides, d’Annunzio had been reading Henry Morton Stanley’s account of his African adventures, and Stanley, another shrewd manipulator of the press (who, according to Sir Richard Burton, “shot negroes as if they were monkeys”) appealed to him. When small-minded authorities deny him the funding for a new expedition, Brando robs and murders a money lender, a person he considers as dispensable as the grubs in a rotten loaf. D’Annunzio is reprising the plot of Crime and Punishment, but while Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is a desperate and pitiful character, d’Annunzio’s Corrado is a force of nature, not to be judged or condemned.

  More Than Love caused an outcry. One spectator recalled that the last scenes were “shipwrecked in a furious sea of hostility.” The curtain fell to a “hurricane” of hissing. As the audience poured out of the Costanzi Theatre in Rome someone yelled to a passing troop of carabinieri: “Arrest the author!”

  D’Annunzio reacted furiously, publishing a polemical afterword describing his critics as dung-eating beetles (his researches into archaic or arcane vocabulary had given him a terrific command of scatological invective, a weapon he would employ with increasing gusto over the next decade). He spoke vaguely of a “being who was forming himself, son of our marvellous anguish and of divine myth.” Any opposition to that development he dismissed as being the revolt of “drunken slaves.” Writing in his own person, he sounded alarmingly like-minded with the square-shouldered superman of his fantasy, to whom a person who got in his way was no better than a grub.

  Madness haunts d’Annunzio’s drama and fiction. As in his imagination, so in his life. There are aspects of d’Annunzio’s own psyche which smack of mental abnormality—the swings from obsessive hard work to equally driven frivolity, the bouts of depression, the dazzling intelligence combined with extreme obtuseness about practical matters and others’ feelings. Maria Gravina was at least intermittently insane, and Nike’s wildness might well be considered pathological. D’Annunzio’s next lover was, by the end of their association, to be incarcerated in a madhouse.

  She was Giuseppina Mancini, a Florentine countess whose husband, a prosperous landowner and wine producer, was initially gratified to welcome the great author into his house. D’Annunzio called her Amaranta, and adored her pallor, which he likened to that of a white rose or to the marble of Delos, “which the temple servants used to tint with a mystical synthesis of attar of roses and just a little gold.” He called her a witch or a cat. He addressed her as “little one,” and as “titiva,” naughty. But she was not really the mischievous animal of his fantasies. Months elapsed between their first meeting and the beginning of their sexual relationship, and their affair—ardent as it was—was never light-hearted or easy.

  On 11 February 1907, a date whose anniversary he would celebrate for the rest of his life, she came secretly to the Capponcina and made “the great gift.” There was a power cut. The benign darkness seemed to d’Annunzio a happy omen. He heaped their bed with white roses and then made love to her among the petals (one hopes he remembered to remove the thorns). He adored her ampits smelling of sandalwood and myrrh, her tongue dripping honey (he had been reading the “Song of Solomon”). He worshipped her “rose” which she revealed to him for the first time with delicious slowness, drawing aside the folds of her silk underwear to expose “the infinitely precious thing.” Their love-making, he told her, was “perfect”; their pleasure like an infinite melody passed from her to him, from him to her. “A kind of mystic happiness … because everything that is perfect is divine.”

  These divine trysts, though, were furtive and fleeting. D’Annunzio was
discovering all over again how wretched it was to be a married woman’s other man. Their sexual encounters were frequently hurried and uncomfortable. On the way back from an ostensibly innocent outing they stopped for two hours in a hotel, while a servant whose discretion could not be guaranteed waited below. When d’Annunzio was a guest in the Mancinis’ country estate they contrived to meet in the middle of the night, and made love on a landing. D’Annunzio was in his forties now, an acknowledged great man and the father of adult sons. Yet he was obliged to play the undignified role of a lover in a farce; lingering outside doors or recklessly climbing through bedroom windows.

  He could not be sure of Amaranta’s love. When they saw each other in company she was discreetly cool (although they did once hold hands while listening to Beethoven) and he would go home distraught. He tried in vain to persuade her to leave her husband. Lacking, for once, the upper hand, he described himself as her “prey” and “possession,” her “wretched slave.” He thought (perhaps not very seriously) about suicide. “Tonight I must take a narcotic, or take poison.”

  He waited for her in a closed carriage on a bridge over the Arno; she joined him in it dressed in black lace. He rented an apartment in Florence for their meetings. The bedroom was hung with green damask: he called it the “green cloister.” He kept it amply supplied with flower vases and kimonos—“in two years of passion and pleasure none of our days was without elegance and beauty” he wrote—but he was frequently miserable there, waiting through lonely evenings with only a stray cat for company on the off chance that his lover might come to him, or lying awake, chilled and aching with frustration, in a solitary bed. Amaranta, devoutly Christian, was oppressed by guilt, and terribly afraid of discovery. The apartment was on the ground floor, overlooking a garden with a creaking iron gate onto the street. When they were together there she flinched at every rasp of the gate’s hinges.