Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  AUGUST 1911. The Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre, and remains missing for over two years before the thief, an Italian named Peruggia, is found with it in Florence. The robbery is the talk of Paris. Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso are both arrested as suspects. According to Antongini, the thief brings the painting to d’Annunzio at Arcachon and asks him to hide it. The story seems far-fetched, but d’Annunzio confirms it in a letter to Albertini, and tells a reporter from Le Temps that he knows something about the theft that he cannot reveal.

  D’Annunzio, the playwright of La Gioconda, has frequently written about Leonardo, implicitly comparing himself with the great Renaissance polymath. Perhaps Peruggia really did see him as someone who might help. The famous painting’s presence in France is as much of an irritant to Italian nationalists as Lord Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon marbles is to Greeks. When Peruggia is finally arrested he becomes a hero in nationalist circles.

  D’Annunzio claims that he urged the man to return the masterpiece to its true owners, the people of Italy. The theft—viewed as a piece of political theatre or propagandist performance art—appeals to him. He also sees it as a way of making a bit of money. He announces his intention (never realised) to write a detective story titled, “The Man who Stole the Mona Lisa.” Claiming that he himself is implicated in the crime is a piece of advance publicity for the proposed work, as audacious as his long-ago faked death in a riding accident.

  OCTOBER 1911. Italy is at war with the Ottoman Empire in North Africa, fighting over the territory which will afterwards become the Italian province of Libya. The action foreshadows Italy’s African ventures of the succeeding two decades but for now the future instigator of those wars, Benito Mussolini, still a socialist and anti-imperialist, disapproves. He writes: “Let a single cry arise from the vast multitudes of the proletariat … down with war!” He serves a five-month jail term for rioting in protest against the “mock-heroic madness of the warmongers by profession.” By contrast d’Annunzio, who is unlikely to have yet heard of Mussolini, is fiercely excited.

  The conflict is ugly. Turks and Arabs kill over 500 Italians in one engagement, and nail their mutilated corpses to palm trees. The Italians retaliate by massacring thousands of Arabs, and sending thousands more to penal islands. Undismayed, d’Annunzio settles down to write ten Songs of Our Exploits Overseas. A colonel obtains the manuscript of one of them and keeps it in a kind of improvised shrine along with the regimental colours. D’Annunzio receives packets full of admiring letters, some signed by whole companies of soldiers, many of them illiterate and able only to make their mark.

  These new Songs are diatribes against the Turks and their allies—most particularly Italy’s “hereditary foe” the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In them, d’Annunzio turns his aversion to dirt against whole nations, smearing them with imagined filth. The Song of the Dardanelles is so vitriolic that the government intervenes. Austria is still officially Italy’s ally, yet here is d’Annunzio describing the Emperor Franz Joseph as a hangman and an angel of death and Austria as “the two-headed eagle which vomits back up, like a vulture, the undigested flesh of corpses.” (This disgusting image haunted d’Annunzio—he used it repeatedly.)

  Albertini says he cannot print the poem in the Corriere della Sera. Treves, who is to publish the Songs in book form, implores d’Annunzio to cut the offending lines. D’Annunzio refuses. The text is censored. When the book appears some of the lines have been deleted, and in the blank space where they ought to have been d’Annunzio inserts the words: “This song of the deluded fatherland was mutilated by order of Cavaliere Giolitti, head of the Italian government.”

  Giolitti, careful and pragmatic, had succeeded Crispi as the dominant figure in Italian politics. He was a realist, a practitioner of the art of the possible and adept at the practice of trasformismo. Socialism was to be placated by gradual reform and the alleviation of poverty. Trade unions were to be tolerated. International affairs were to be conducted with tact, and deference to rivals’ wishes. If Crispi had wanted to baptise Italy with blood, Giolitti sought to soothe it with the oils of prosperity and diplomacy. His opponents accused him of being too “empiricist.” He replied that “if by empiricism you mean taking account of the real condition of the country and the population … and proceeding as best one can, without grave danger,” he was happy to own up to it. Such an approach to government “is the safest and even the only possible method.” Giolitti was the master of compromise and caution. D’Annunzio detested him.

  D’Annunzio’s foreign admirers, accustomed to seeing him as one of the international fellowship of artists, are dismayed by the violence of his Songs. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who has been one of his greatest admirers, publishes an open letter to him saying: “You were a poet, an admirable poet … Now I do not see a poet, or an Italian patriot. I see Casanova whose luck has run out, Casanova at fifty, Casanova tricked up as a warrior, in a badly fastened dressing gown.” The philosopher Benedetto Croce, with whom d’Annunzio was on friendly terms in Naples in the 1890s, is repelled by the way d’Annunzio appears to “enjoy war, even to enjoy slaughter.” The “politics of beauty” is beginning to reveal itself as a politics of blood.

  D’Annunzio is entertaining an editor. He is all sweetness and affability, smilingly conceding point after point as they discuss his latest contract, but whenever sums of money are mentioned he flinches away from the subject as though, observes Antongini, he wished to say, “I implore you to leave this revolting and painful discussion to our secretaries.”

  A couple of days later, Antongini, acting as d’Annunzio’s agent, conveys his demands to the editor, who turns pale, and fidgets, and points out that other eminent authors—Tolstoy, Kipling, Rostand—are all content with far less. D’Annunzio is immovable. The deal is done.

  APRIL 1912. There is a solar eclipse. Viewed from Arcachon, the sun’s disc is almost completely obscured. The weird, dreary light suits d’Annunzio’s mood. Here is an image of the Landes, he writes in his notebook. Here is a leafless tree. Here is a mummified corpse with a blade of grass between its teeth. He is contemplating mortality. Two deaths—those of his fellow poet Giovanni Pascoli, and his sweet-natured octogenarian French landlord—have shaken him. Writing in his new introspective mode, he composes a meditation in which the repugnant bodily facts of death are squarely confronted.

  The previous year he saw the corpse of a drowned fisherman washed up on the beach, “a poor naked thing, more wretched than broken debris, more squalid than a pile of seaweed.” Now he recalls the pale, emaciated arms “weak as a woman’s,” the blue fingernails, the legs pale beneath “the bestial hair,” the mottled feet. He has been haunted by the memory. Working late at night he has a frisson of dread—imagining the corpse standing in the corner of his dimly lit study. Horror and fear diffuse themselves through his mind, as a cuttlefish’s black ink darkens water.

  · · ·

  In the winter of 1911/12 he writes the libretto, all 5,000 lines of it, for an opera, Parisina. This is the subject for which he doubted Puccini’s music would have the requisite tragic heft. The story, of incestuous love set against a backdrop of mediaeval warfare, has been covered in a long poem by Byron, and in an opera by Donizetti. But for his version d’Annunzio draws directly on mediaeval lyrics and on the thirteenth-century chronicler Panfilo Sasso. He laces the work with allusions to Tristan and Isolde and to his own Francesca da Rimini. The composer is Mascagni, whom d’Annunzio once dismissed as a “band-leader” but with whom he now works amicably. The pivotal moment is that where the hero, arriving hotfoot and gory from the battlefield, embraces his stepmother in the sanctuary of the miracle-working church at Loreto, thus staining her beautiful robes with blood.

  1913. The Marchesa Casati is in Paris, staying at the Ritz, and requiring the staff to supply her with live rabbits with which to feed her boa constrictor and fresh meat for her Borzoi dogs. Seven years after they first met, she and d’Annunzio are now lovers. D’Annunzio calls her �
�the divine Marquise,” an allusion to de Sade. They dine together in the garden of a restaurant in St. Germain, where a band plays the tango. Afterward he notes “the stinging kiss on the neck, the mad return to the hotel, the red mark displayed.”

  Luisa smokes cigarettes in a long diamond-studded holder and wears enormous pearls and Persian trousers of heavy gold brocade fastened around the ankles with jewelled bangles. She has several homes, all fantastical. Her house in Rome is decorated all in black and white, with an alabaster floor lit from below. In Venice, she lives in the single-storey palazzo on the Grand Canal which is now the Guggenheim Museum, lining its main saloon with pale gold leaf, and draping the widows with gold lace. She looks like one of the etiolated seductresses Gustav Klimt is painting in Vienna, swathing them in jewel-coloured fabrics and setting them, as Casati set herself, against a background of shimmering gold.

  Come winter, she moves on to St. Moritz (winter sports are beginning to be fashionable). She writes d’Annunzio a letter in gold ink on a sheet of black parchment, crested with a death’s head and a rose (his watermarked stationery is sober by comparison). She summons him to meet the film producer Giovanni Pastrone.

  D’Annunzio is interested in the cinema. Nearly thirty years earlier, he was already fantasising about a way of preserving a theatrical performance, and guessing that, just as a still image could be captured by a camera, so some day movement, and even sound, might be similarly recorded. Now that his prediction is coming true he foresees a new art of the “marvellous.” In 1911 he sells the film rights to four of his plays, and reworks a libretto he once offered to Puccini as a film script. But d’Annunzio’s most successful excursion into film-making will be the work he does on Pastrone’s epic of ancient Carthage, Cabiria.

  He has nothing to do with the film-making, being brought in at a late stage to rewrite the captions and “inter-titles,” a simple task for which he is paid so much that when the offer is first made Tom Antongini, acting as his agent, literally cannot believe his ears. Despite the fact that he is making a huge sum for very little work, d’Annunzio—characteristically—is so dilatory about it that Pastrone, with the scheduled opening looming, eventually plants himself in the hall of his apartment, prevailing upon the porter to bring him up sandwiches, to ensure the poet doesn’t go out until he has finished. In three days the task is done.

  Cabiria is marketed as “a film by Gabriele d’Annunzio.” Certainly it is d’Annunzian enough. Set in ancient Carthage, it celebrates Roman virtue, while titillating audiences with human sacrifice. Scarfoglio, reviewing it in Naples, summed it up: “the ruin of men, the fall of a civilisation, the riot of passions in the blazing heat of a terrible conflagration … the Fates, and, opposed to them a lovely curly-haired girl, armed only with her fragile beauty.” It is the most successful of all pre-war Italian films, running for six months in Paris and a year in New York.

  D’Annunzio pockets his fee and accepts the credit and the compliments. (“Your genius,” says the director of the Vaudeville Theatre, has produced “a masterpiece.”) But he never goes to see the film. He tells Treves it is “rubbish,” good enough only for the “silly crowd.” Ever since he was electioneering in the 1890s d’Annunzio has been anxious to reach a mass audience, but he has no wish to join the masses in the confined space of a cinema. He does not like the way they smell.

  In the Landes, d’Annunzio goes boar-hunting, becoming acquainted with the local gentry, and with the Duke of Westminster, who has a hunting box in the forest. Once the hunt lasts from seven in the morning until the early hours of the following day, and fifteen years later he will still be dwelling on the long ride home at walking pace through the night-dark pine forest, and the vigorous massage his Pisan groom gave him when he returned home at long last, filling the house with the smell of embrocation. He persuades the local fishermen to take him out on their boats, several times braving ferocious seas.

  The climate is supposedly healthy for tubercular lungs. A “winter quarter” has sprung up along the shore and in the town there are concerts, which d’Annunzio attends. The Villa St. Dominique is agreeably remote, but not so far removed that d’Annunzio cannot walk through the woods at night, lantern in hand, to visit a mistress, sometimes Nathalie, who lives in a separate villa, sometimes another.

  Without sex, even for a few days, he is wretched. Alone in Arcachon he writes to Antongini in desolate mood, and then writes again a few days later, much happier, reporting that he has found “a most delectable stray cat” in a nearby village. André Germain comes to visit him and is gleefully shocked to meet “a veritable maenad of the Landes, who was nearly always on a horse and only dismounted to fall into the arms of d’Annunzio.” D’Annunzio takes the woman off into the woods. “As he pushed his maenad before him … he made the whinnying sounds of a faun who … rushes off to seduce a nymph.”

  Aélis, the “housekeeper,” later claims that he requires her to have sex with him three times a day. Soon she is acting as his procurer as well as his concubine, finding him willing local girls.

  FEBRUARY 1913. D’Annunzio writes La Pisanelle, ou la Morte Parfumée. The story, which he offered to Puccini years earlier (he is using up all the scraps left in his cupboard), is set in Cyprus under its twelfth-century crusader kings. Two men, uncle and nephew, both love a mysterious woman, who is eventually murdered, buried under a heap of rose petals. D’Annunzio might have found the idea in Suetonius, who accuses Nero of smothering some unwanted guests with roses, or in the Satyricon. Or he may have seen a print of Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus, in which a melee of smooth-fleshed young men and women, tunics slipping suggestively, are overwhelmed by a wave of pink petals.

  Later in the year he follows it with Le Chèvrefeuille (Honeysuckle), a modern tale of a ruthless superman and seducer, and the havoc he causes in a family of neurasthenic aristos. Paul Poiret makes the costumes, and there is a fracas when D’Annunzio refuses to pay extra for a particularly elaborate outfit. Poiret sues.

  Neither play is a success.

  AUGUST 1913. D’Annunzio has written a novella for magazine publication, Leda without Swan. Its setting is modern and the plot concerns a disreputable woman with a pearl-handled revolver and a hobble skirt (d’Annunzio was intensely appreciative of the increasing visibility of women’s legs). The unnamed lady is a femme fatale whose fortune-hunting adventures are squalid and provincial, involving a life-insurance policy, morphine, and a sequence of loveless flirtations with men picked up in small-town casinos or a spa. This is the kind of life, where promiscuity and prostitution merge, into which d’Annunzio feared Barbara might lapse, and which Maria Gravina was, by this time, living. It is also a little too close to his own—the lady’s problems all have their origin in debt.

  D’Annunzio was writing a “thriller,” a “mystery,” something intended to be popular and enticing, but into it he poured a toxic dose of depression and misanthropy. He didn’t like his fellow beings. There were certain moods in which he didn’t like his life. This is the book in which he gives his narrator the name Desiderio Moriar (Death Wish).

  In the autumn of 1913, d’Annunzio returned to Paris, renting an apartment on the Avenue Kléber. His creditors had caught up with him again. He was behind with his rent. The Villa St. Dominique was under siege. There was really no prospect of his being able to repay his debts, but meanwhile he had his windfall from Cabiria. He made the most of being back in the great city. He attended race meetings at Chantilly. Nathalie was now installed at the Dame Rose (Pink Lady) farm near Villacoublay to the north of Paris, where she cared for her dogs and d’Annunzio’s. Between them they had some sixty greyhounds, including some champion racers, most of them bred by themselves. D’Annunzio had a win in the greyhound racing at St. Cloud with his “White Havana.” He went to boxing matches. He had been a keen boxer since his school days. Now he set up a punchball in the hallway of his apartment, dressing it up with a curly black wig so that visitors were startled by the apparition of a Medusa
.

  He attended performances: one night he and Auguste Rodin are among the invited audience at a tango demonstration staged by Valentine de Saint-Point, author of the “Futurist Manifesto for Women.” According to Natalie Barney, that winter d’Annunzio “was all the rage. The woman who had not slept with him became a laughing-stock.”

  D’Annunzio is taking tea and cakes in Rumpelmeyer’s patisserie. People are looking and whispering: everywhere he goes in Paris his bald pate and curious waxen complexion are noticed. A strange gentleman approaches and asks if the maître would consent to meet his employer, the Queen of Naples. D’Annunzio is delighted to do so. The Queen, driven off her throne by Garibaldi half a century earlier, has featured several times in his work. She is the “Bavarian eaglet,” the embodiment of the royal warrior caste now being rendered obsolete all over Europe by the rising tide of democracy which d’Annunzio deplores. Bowing low to the old lady, he kisses her hand.

  D’Annunzio steps out of his front door on the Avenue Klebér, and gives twenty francs, as he does every day, to the Italian tenor begging there. His companion protests, telling him that the man has been seen drinking in a fashionable café with a pretty woman. “What do you expect him to do with twenty francs?” asks d’Annunzio. “Buy a motor car?” He is as generous with others as he is indulgent to himself.

  Antongini, who knows all too well how little he can afford to throw money around, observes his prodigality with mixed dismay and affection. “He tips the man who punches his ticket at the railway station; he tips the man who looks at the ticket on the train; he tips the servants who open the doors in the homes of his friends; he tips the attendants in museums; he tips the urchin who picks up the handkerchief he has dropped; he tips the urchin’s friend who is sneering at such wasted energy.”