Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  FEBRUARY 1914. D’Annunzio is in England. He is travelling with four women: Nathalie, Aélis (who is keeping a diary of the trip) and Mesdames Boulanger and Hubin, who are, respectively, the wife and mistress of his good friend Marcel Boulanger, all of them united by their shared passion for dogs and horses.

  Aélis records that she and Nathalie both share his bed in the Savoy. The superfluity of sleeping partners doesn’t prevent him from appreciating the view from the hotel window, and jotting in his notebook a Whistleresque riverscape in words. “A red sun in an opal sky. The bridges are veils of lace—a symphony in grey.” They visit the National Gallery and then travel to Altcar in Lancashire, for the premier event of the hare-coursing calendar, the Waterloo Cup. D’Annunzio makes notes about the sodden green landscape, the huge horses dragging carts laden with coal, the Englishmen “returning from a day’s sport, red-faced as if varnished,” and the sheep grazing incessantly, like leeches sucking sustenance from the wet ground.

  SPRING 1914. The flower-sellers’ stalls are filling the air with the scent of violets and lilies of the valley. There is a concert of early choral music in the Sainte Chapelle. D’Annunzio is excited. To hear such singing in that marvellous Gothic building, with its jewel-coloured glass, will, he promises, be sublime. Also present is the young Russian artist Catherine Barjansky. “I saw a small, thin man with a strange face that looked as though it had been moulded in yellow wax. There was not a single hair on his scalp, and his narrow face was sharpened by a tiny, pointed beard.” He is escorting the Princesse de Polignac (née Winaretta Singer, American sewing-machine heiress, lesbian and noted musical patroness: she commissions Satie, Stravinsky and Poulenc). He introduces himself to Barjansky. “He approached with an odd dancing step, holding one shoulder slightly higher than the other … He was dressed too elegantly in a pale grey suit, an incredible necktie with a huge emerald, the same large stones in the cuffs of his silk shirt, patent leather shoes, and an eyeglass on a black cord.”

  He presses her hand meaningfully. She feels the rings on his fingers. He gazes into her eyes. His glance is “singularly penetrating.” He says: “I hope to see you again.”

  A few days later Barjansky receives an invitation to dinner. She goes, and describes the evening.

  ‘A heavy perfume, a mixture of incense and amber, assailed me as I entered.” The clothes she is wearing will smell of it for months. “On a couch of silver brocade, amongst a quantity of gold and black velvet cushions, sat a slim woman of remarkable beauty.” This is Nathalie, her dress cut very low in front, her jewels large and plentiful, her dark blue eyes swimming, as usual, with tears. There are some “Parisian society people,” and an actress-cum-courtesan with an over-loud laugh and strings of pearls dangling from neck to knee. Swathes of embroidered Indian fabrics are suspended from the ceiling. Black-framed mirrors glimmer. Orchids, masses of them, a concert grand piano, numerous statues of the Buddha, vases full of peacock feathers, a malachite dish heaped with peaches and grapes.

  There is music: Bach, Beethoven, Gluck. D’Annunzio, monocle fixed, sits listening intently, “as though turned to stone.” Afterwards dinner is served at a round table, surrounded by a tall gilded Japanese screen. There is a black bowl full of white roses on the table, and a number of little black or white glass horses from Murano.

  D’Annunzio holds forth until, after a particularly extravagant anecdote, Catherine Barjansky asks: “Was that really true?”

  “Oh no,” replies d’Annunzio.

  His fame has become something he plays with. He contrives tableaux, using all Paris as his stage. He and Ida Rubinstein drive down the Champs Elysées in an enormous white motor car, both dressed entirely in white (she has a wonderful ermine coat). Now he says to Barjansky: “Don’t you know that I’m the greatest liar in the world?”

  While d’Annunzio was posturing in Paris, back in Italy his ideals were finding new supporters. He would later cast himself as a lone voice, keeping the lights of nationalism and heroic endeavour bright among the vapours rising from “the swamp of abjection and compromise” which was Italy under Giolitti’s cautiously liberal-leaning administration. But the truth is that other voices were adding themselves to his in decrying democracy and glorifying violence.

  The futurists were the most clamorous. “We exalt aggressive acts,” declared Marinetti, “the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist … We want to glorify war … militarism, patriotism … the beautiful ideas which kill.” Marinetti’s zest for violence was matched by his contempt for the elected government: he called democrats “demo-cretins.” There were others who thought likewise, and who were calling out for a renaissance of Italian vigour. One of their mouthpieces was the journal La Voce, published in Florence. In 1907, Giuseppe Prezzolini, one of La Voce’s editors, described his generation’s state of mind: “Dissatisfaction and bitterness.” Prezzolini put forward no political programme, but he was clear that the unheroic reality was not acceptable. “Our opposition must be radical and irreconcilable. With implacable intransigence we have to say NO! to the present state of affairs.”

  Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence was published in Italy in 1909, and found more admirers there than it did in France. Sorel’s theory of the symbolic power of violence, and the creative potency of mass hysteria and mob action, appealed to those Italians who, like d’Annunzio, had made an idol of the tenth muse Energeia. In 1913 the philosopher Giacomo Donato wrote, under the pseudonym Spartaco, “the young generation wants to live, LIVE, LIVE, their own life, a life that is intense and strong … LIIIVVVEEE!!! (Fighting + Enjoying) A life of true freedom, of courage, strength, paroxysm, sport, desire, lust, pride, recklessness, of madness if necessary.” D’Annunzio, the mandarin stylist with a gift for unrolling enormously protracted, but syntactically perfect, sentences, would have put it differently, but to live, LIVE, LIIIVVVEEE!!!! was something to which he too aspired (had he not, as a member of parliament, “advanced towards Life”?).

  In March 1914, d’Annunzio announced, via the social columns of the French press, that he would be accepting no more invitations after an injury sustained while playing hockey in the Italian ambassador’s garden. From March to May he stayed in, and kept largely to his bed. In fact it was a sexually transmitted disease (probably syphilis)—which had incapacitated him. “The shameful mark of the Parisian branding-iron,” he called it in a letter to a friend, “the ignoble scourge.”

  He felt jaded, physically and emotionally. “A continual feeling of precariousness” prevented him writing. Ordinary life felt remote. The people around him were like insubstantial ghosts. He was seized by acute spasms of homesickness. “I don’t know how I can live here, how I can open my eyes every morning on this low, grey world.” His disease was as degrading as it was uncomfortable: his allusions to it are sheepish, he felt unclean. More, the world around him seemed soiled and rotten morally, spiritually and politically.

  In April, the French elections resulted in a landslide victory for the left. The new, anti-militarist government reduced the requirement for military service. Meanwhile the public was riveted by l’affaire Caillaux—a tale of adultery, murder, blackmail and political corruption involving the Minister of Finance and the editor of Le Figaro. D’Annunzio’s evocation of the atmosphere in the city and (indirectly of his own state of mind) is full of revulsion. He imagines the judges in the Caillaux case dipping brown-striped fingernails into the murdered man’s bullet wounds and then, with the same bloody nails, picking their own noses and wiping the mucus on their neighbours’ sleeves. He thinks of carcasses crawling with maggots and buzzing with flies, of beggars’ hands so repulsive that after touching them he needs to clean himself not only with water but with acid.

  The news from Italy was troubling. A general strike, called by the socialists, had occasioned a week-long series of violent demonstrations. Hundreds of workers had been killed in street-fighting, buildings were burned, telegraph wires cut, railway stations occupied. D’Annunzio w
as appalled. The “Latin genius crawls through the mud.” Summoning up his erudition to provide an image for his disgust, he recalled how, when Rome was in its decline, the sacred geese came down from the Capitol to honk and squawk in the city’s great sewer. On 16 June 1914 he told the French ambassador to Russia, Maurice Paléologue, “We live in an infamous era, under the reign of the multitude and the tyranny of the plebs.” Paléologue had been talking about the dire international situation. D’Annunzio told him, “This war that you seem to fear—I summon it with all the force of my soul.”

  27 JUNE 1914. D’Annunzio takes his seat next to Cécile Sorel at the Trocadéro Theatre. Isadora Duncan’s dancers are barefoot and dressed in skimpy “Grecian” tunics. As he sits, apparently so immaculate in white tie and patent leather pumps, d’Annunzio is feeling a little seedy. Sitting is uncomfortable. He is irritated by an outbreak of haemorrhoids.

  The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, are travelling through Bosnia. In a café in Sarajevo, Danilo Ilic´, leader of the Black Hand, is distributing weapons to his associates. He hands a gun to Gavrilo Princip.

  The Dogs of War

  ON 27 JULY 1914, one month after the assassinations at Sarajevo, d’Annunzio went to the races at Chantilly with his friends Marcel and Susanne Boulanger. That day the French Minister of War issued standby mobilisation orders. The ships of the British fleet, returning from manoeuvres, were instructed not to disperse but to take up war stations. The Serbian authorities were considering Austria-Hungary’s impossible ultimatum. The day was overcast. The racehorses were as superb as ever, but what few spectators there were seemed all to be walking with downcast eyes “as though searching for magical herbs in the grass.”

  After the races d’Annunzio went to dine at the Boulangers’ house nearby. Arriving, he was met by a boisterous crowd of greyhounds: eyes shining, muzzles pointing, glossy hides rippling and changing in the light like shot silk. D’Annunzio and Marcel Boulanger had already talked about the impossibility of feeding their dogs in wartime. Most of these treasured creatures would have to be killed; so would many of d’Annunzio’s pack. “Sacrifice had taken its place among the household gods.”

  Boulanger brought out the military tunic and cap he had worn as a young soldier. Moth-proofed and stored away for decades, it smelt of camphor. Touching it, d’Annunzio imagined it drenched in blood. At nightfall “not only a day ended: a world dissolved.”

  The following morning Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. A week later Germany declared war on France. Marcel Boulanger put all his beloved greyhounds on leashes and led them out into the forest, the dogs, as usual, prancing joyfully around him. Deep in the woods, he killed them. D’Annunzio writes that “he himself laid the noble bodies side by side in the ditch in the middle of the forest; and he came back by the same path, head low, with the collars empty and the leads dangling.”

  Earlier in the summer it had seemed to d’Annunzio that the air was infected. Rain was like sweat. He felt himself trapped in a ship becalmed, its bilges stinking, amidst a loathsome colony of gigantic octopuses. How to purge this nauseating mess? Violence on a massive scale was the only remedy. Now, at last, the torrent of cleansing blood was about to flood across Europe. “Is this the last day of humiliation? Are these the final hours of shame?”

  D’Annunzio’s relief at escaping from the “impure” complexities of peacetime life was widely shared. In Germany, Thomas Mann wrote an essay entitled “Gedanken im Kriege”—thoughts in time of war—in which he asked how an artist could fail to praise God “for the collapse of a peaceful world with which he was fed up?” Rainer Maria Rilke called war “a deadly enlivening” and exulted in his loss of personal freedom, “the battle-god suddenly grasps us.” In Austria, von Hofmannsthal published a patriotic poem and the twenty-five-year-old Adolf Hitler, “overpowered by stormy enthusiasm,” fell on his knees and thanked God for the cataclysm which would release him from “the painful feelings of my youth.” In England, Rupert Brooke wrote: “Now, God be thanked,/who has matched us with his hour.”

  As the German invaders marched in from the north, Paris emptied. At about four o’clock in the afternoon on the day France went to war, Luisa Casati, staying in one of Paris’s grandest hotels, rang for her breakfast (she was not a morning person). There were no staff left to serve her. Catherine Barjansky reports: “I found the Marchesa Casati screaming hysterically … Her red hair was wild. In her Bakst-Poiret dress she looked like an evil and helpless fury.” In such deadly times decadent posturing was no longer amusing. “War had touched the roots of life,” thought Barjansky. “Art was no longer necessary.” D’Annunzio concurred: “Who am I?” he asked himself. “What have I ever done?”

  As the clash of nations began, the Italian government announced that Italy would remain neutral, observing the terms of the Triple Alliance. D’Annunzio might believe war to be the crucible in which a great future could be formed, but Giolitti, now out of office, saw it as “a misfortune that must only be faced when the honour and great interests of the country require it.” The arguments of the pro-war party were all emotional and, although “anyone is free to throw his own life away for an emotion,” no one, in Giolitti’s considered opinion, had the right to imperil the country on such grounds.

  D’Annunzio found himself the expatriate citizen of a country with no part in the drama. He was the wrong age in the wrong place, and his patria had, in his opinion, the wrong policy. He wrote to Albertini asking, “What should I do?…My situation is terrible.” He was overtaken by a most uncharacteristic diffidence. As Parisians stampeded southwards he felt himself stranded like the pitiful debris left on the bed of a channel at low tide, as useless and squalid as an empty bottle or the shoe of a drowned man. For the next six months he was to write a stream of polemics in prose and verse, but to be a writer no longer seemed to him an adequate calling. Meeting General Gallieni, commander-in-chief of the French forces in Paris, he told him: “At this moment I would give all of my books for one of your actions.”

  The new intellectual fashion was anti-intellectual. Prezzolini had written in La Voce earlier that year: “One doesn’t make revolutions with scholars, or people who wear white gloves. A teppista [thug] counts for more than a university professor when it comes to opening fire on a barricade or breaking down the door of a bank. And if what’s needed now is breakage and violence, on whom should we call?” Not, clearly, on a short-sighted middle-aged poet still feeling down after a dose of venereal disease.

  The banks were closed. Travel was circumscribed. Driving out to Dame Rose, d’Annunzio passed new aircraft-hangars, “the black nests of the fighting-planes.” A man who had always treasured his solitude, he found himself, in those first weeks of war, unable to remain alone. He was out on the streets at all hours, exploring Paris on foot as he had never done before, with a compulsion to “know” the city (his emphasis) which he recognised as an anxiety that it might soon be totally destroyed.

  In 1897, visiting Assisi, the place sacred to St. Francis, lover of all God’s creatures, d’Annunzio was acutely aware of the distantly audible bellowing of cattle in a slaughterhouse. Animals, ignored in the majority of wartime reminiscences, are everywhere in d’Annunzio’s.

  Horses were being requisitioned for military use. The Bois de Boulogne was full of them, and the park at Versailles had become “an equine city.” Ropes were strung between the trees, and row upon row of horses were tethered there, ready to be taken to the front. The alleys and vistas of the palace’s grounds were littered with straw and dung. The fountains were stilled, and horses crowded around the basins to drink from the green scummy water.

  The roads were thronged with cattle. D’Annunzio found himself surrounded one day by perhaps 3,000 bullocks—a great mass of moving flesh spilling over the roadside and the riverbanks. Periodically they became entangled with “herds” of troops going north towards the front. The young men were, to d’Annunzio, all too obviously, dead m
en walking, just as those bullocks were, for all their noisiness, ambulant meat. He saw a soldier pushing a red-haired child in a pram. The woman with him wore a black dress “as though,” wrote d’Annunzio, “she was already a widow.” He watched lorries pass by, their flat-beds filled with seated soldiers. They wore the uniform of blue jacket and red breeches. Tight-packed, their lower bodies lapped in red cloth, they seemed to him to be sitting waist-deep in blood.

  Such hallucinatory prescience of the horrors to come did nothing to reduce d’Annunzio’s determination that Italy should enter the war. His Ode to the Latin Resurrection was a call to arms. France had already “donned the purple robe of the warrior,” ready to sing “like a lark on the summits of death.” Italy should be at her side.

  This is your day, this is your hour

  Italy…

  Unhappy be you who hesitate

  Unhappy be you who do not dare to cast the dice.

  Romain Rolland, now a pacifist, noted gloomily that d’Annunzio, along with Rudyard Kipling, was “writing hymns of war.”

  Throughout August the Germans advanced. D’Annunzio remained entranced by Paris’s “marvellous agony”—“the city has never been so beautiful.” On 24 August the Germans broke through the French defences at Charleroi and advanced on the Somme. D’Annunzio was seen in the street with tears in his eyes. On hearing that one in twenty-five of those French soldiers who had run from the battlefield had been shot, he was disappointed that the executions had been so few. That evening he walked outside after dinner, contemplating for the first time the possibility of a German victory: “Profound melancholy, thoughts of the distant horror.”

  With France on the verge of defeat, he was preoccupied with his dogs. Some had already been put down (“breaking my heart”). Over the next few days at the Italian embassy, where despairing lines of would-be refugees queued for exit permits, he was using his considerable influence to try (in vain) to get two covered carts to transport his pack south.