Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Negotiations between Austria and Italy continued, the former being ready to offer generous territorial concessions in exchange for the latter’s continued neutrality. Giolitti, ever reasonable, argued that Italy might thus gain more advantage than from fighting, however victoriously (he was right). Such thinking was anathema to d’Annunzio. He was not interested in “advantage.” He quoted his own line from More Than Love, “the fit place for a coin is between the jaws of a corpse.”

  On 12 February, d’Annunzio took part in a conference on “the defence of Latin civilisation.” In the grand amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, before an audience of 3,000 people, an actress read his Ode to the Latin Resurrection. D’Annunzio, who should have been on the platform with her, arrived late, and slipped into a seat on the benches. (Antongini, whose job it frequently was to get him to the right place at the right time, has droll stories to tell about d’Annunzio’s aversion to conforming to someone else’s timetable.) The next day, though, he was present, ready for his turn to take the stage. His speech was his usual blend of erudite references (Pallas Athena, Delphi, François Rude’s sculptures on the Arc de Triomphe), self-congratulation and calls to arms. He assured his audience that Italy would soon enter the conflict (an assurance that was grounded solely in wishful thinking). He prophesied an “heroic spring.” His Sorbonne speech was widely published in the French press: in Italy, Albertini dared to compromise the Corriere’s neutralist stance by reprinting it. D’Annunzio was becoming, in absentia, the spokesman for the Italian interventionist party. The Queen Mother wrote him a letter of congratulation and encouragement which he proudly displayed.

  There were an increasing number of Italians who thought like him. For a civilisation to become “fecund,” wrote Luigi Federzoni, “hatred is no less necessary than love.” Federzoni was one of the nationalists who drew on the ideas of Charles Maurras and Action Française, and who argued that Italy, expanding demographically, was a “young nation,” like Germany, and therefore must fight to enlarge its place in the world. In 1910, at the first Nationalist Congress, Enrico Corradini said: “Let nationalism arouse in Italy the will to a victorious war.” That war’s aims were immaterial. The Nationalist Association initially agitated for Italy to observe the terms of the Triple Alliance and enter the war alongside the Central Powers, but by the beginning of 1915 they were with d’Annunzio in urging Italy to fight on the other side.

  Syndicalists agreed. It was Georges Sorel’s belief that a “great foreign war” could put new vim into the sluggard bourgeoisie, and either trigger proletarian violence—“real” and “revolutionary” and therefore preferable to the dullness of peace—or open the way for a seizure of power by “men with the will to govern,” men who combined the attributes of the condottieri, the warlords for hire who rampaged through mediaeval Italy, with those of a messiah. Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, co-editors of La Voce, wrote in 1914: “While the mean-spirited democrats cry out against war as against the barbarous onset of ferocious deaths, we see it as the greatest awakener of the enfeebled, and a rapid and heroic way to power and wealth.”

  In November 1914 the war party received a new recruit. In August of that year, Benito Mussolini, as a good internationalist vociferously opposed to imperialist wars, had argued vehemently for Italy’s neutrality. A flag, he said, was “a rag to be planted on a dunghill,” and he declared that the Patria, like God, was “a spook … vindictive, cruel and tyrannical.” But a man can change his mind. In November, Mussolini wrote: “Those who win will have a history … If Italy is absent she will be the land of the dead, the land of the cowards.” He was immediately expelled from the Socialist Party, whereupon he started a new paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, funded by French and Italian industrialists, and began to campaign vigorously for intervention. “Mussolini is a futurist!” wrote Marinetti approvingly, adducing as evidence “his lightning-swift conversion to the necessity and virtue of war.”

  Another who believed in that “necessity and virtue” was one Ettore Cozzani, editor of a nationalist/interventionist journal, L’Eroica. In March 1915, Cozzani wrote d’Annunzio a most flattering letter, addressing him as “Maestro.” He invited d’Annunzio to contribute a piece to a forthcoming issue on “all that is noblest and greatest about Italy.” He also mentioned a monument to Garibaldi on which a sculptor friend of his was working, soon to be unveiled at Quarto. D’Annunzio put the letter aside unanswered.

  His financial affairs in Italy had finally, thanks to Albertini’s good management and help from other friends and well-wishers, been settled. It was time to go home, but characteristically, he was finding it hard to make a decisive move. In the first weeks of the war, as the Germans swept towards Paris, his mother wrote to him imploring him to return. He replied that he could not leave France in its time of “tragedy.”

  In November 1914 the municipality of Pescara had invited him to attend a ceremony in his honour: a plaque was to be fixed to the “hermitage” where he and Barbara had passed their summer together. This was too petty an occasion for the return of the hero. He refused, saying: “You know what I await before returning. All my wishes hasten the great day.” When friends pressed him to grace his stricken homeland with his presence after the earthquake he told them: “Not now. I will come for the war.” In February he declined to attend the premiere of Ildebrando Pizzetti’s musical version of his Fedra at La Scala. “My return should be reserved for a higher purpose.” He wanted to storm back into his homeland, harbinger and herald of the sublime conflict. Only a “Roman javelin” could free him, he said, a javelin “stained with blood.”

  He was in danger of becoming entrapped in his own rhetoric. But then came another letter from the obliging Cozzani, this one enclosing photographs of the Garibaldi monument, with its d’Annunzian imagery of heroes resurrected to fight anew in a patriotic cause. D’Annunzio liked the pictures. He was conferring now with Peppino Garibaldi about the return to Italy of the Garibaldi Legion. At last he read Cozzani’s letter, with its invitation to speak at the ceremony at Quarto. It was a grey morning, the sky over Paris ashen, but all his twenty-two canaries, scenting spring, were singing their hearts out. He would return to Italy. From now on he would “create not with words, but with human lives.” His life as a hero was about to begin.

  In the next few days, as though in a valedictory splurge on the pleasures of civilian life, d’Annunzio bought a prodigious number of cravats, and a painting that he thought (erroneously) was a Rembrandt. He composed four sonnets “On an image of France crucified.” The image in question, reproduced alongside the poems in Le Figaro, was a painting by Romaine Brooks, showing a uniformed Red Cross nurse. The model was Ida Rubinstein. The three androgynous “brothers”—Brookes, Rubinstein and d’Annunzio—brought together by art and polysexual desire, were now united in the glorification of war.

  On Maundy Thursday, Fly, who had been lame and ailing for some weeks, became too weak to stand. In the evening d’Annunzio took her to the vet and stayed with her, her dainty head cradled between his knees, until the following dawn. On 4 May 1915, he took the train to Italy, and to war.

  · III ·

  WAR and PEACE

  War

  A YEAR AFTER HE RETURNED to Italy d’Annunzio was lying supine, his bandaged head lower than his feet, in a blacked-out room in Venice. He was blind.

  On 16 January 1916 the plane in which he was flying had been hit by anti-aircraft fire. D’Annunzio was violently thrown about, his head smashing against the machine gun mounted in front of him. One of his eyes was irreparably damaged: he would never see through it again. He was told that if he was ever to recover the use of his other one he would have to remain absolutely still for months on end.

  He saw nothing real, but hallucinations flickered behind his closed eyelids—deserts shimmering with mirages, monsters carved into walls of rock. For weeks on end he lay, he tells us, with his elbows pressed to his sides, as though the darkness were the nailed planks of a coffin enclosing him.
He was as rigid as the basalt carving of an Egyptian scribe he used to admire in the Louvre (sightless, he had memories of three decades of sightseeing to draw on for his visual imagery). But all the same—because he too was a scribe—he was writing.

  His knees were slightly raised, to support a board which served as a desk. Using the smallest gestures and the least pressure possible (his head must not move), he wrote in pencil on tiny slips of paper, one line to a slip, guiding himself by feeling the edge of the paper with a thumb and finger. Aélis was with him, and so was his twenty-two-year-old daughter Renata. When she was his little “Cicciuzza” he had doted on Renata, but he hadn’t seen her for years, and he had not been reliable in paying her school bills: when Duse once gave him money for the purpose he had spent it on a horse, and Renata had had to work as a pupil-teacher in order to complete her education. When she arrived in Venice he initially arranged for her to stay in the Danieli Hotel, an unwarrantable extravagance, but he didn’t want her inhibiting his erotic adventures. Now that he was helpless, though, she was living with him as his nurse and amanuensis. Groping in the darkness, she gathered up the paper slips, carried them into the adjacent room, collated and copied them. The text thus produced would form the nucleus of d’Annunzio’s post-war memoir Notturno, the most emotionally direct and formally original of his prose works, the one for which Ernest Hemingway admitted one had to honour him, despite his being, in Hemingway’s opinion, such a “jerk.”

  He was living in the Casetta Rossa, a miniature palace on the Grand Canal, taken for a peppercorn rent in October 1915 from his friend Fritz von Hohenlohe. Austria might seem to d’Annunzio a vulture vomiting human flesh, but he had no compunction about accepting favours from an Austrian prince. He took on Hohenlohe’s staff, including a gondolier pleasingly named Dante. He planted a pomegranate tree (his emblem) in the garden, but, marvellous to relate, he left the house’s décor untouched. Hohenlohe and his mistress were collectors of eighteenth-century French furniture and ornaments. In their house, d’Annunzio’s base for the remainder of the war, the walls were hung with pearly pale silk or flower-patterned painted panels. The mantelpieces and side tables were crowded with porcelain figurines and little patch boxes in gold, silver or enamel. A collection of eighteenth-century purses—embroidered, beaded, filigree-clasped—hung on one wall. A small painting by Guardi, an iridescent waterscape, on another. In the dining room, mirrors in rococo frames multiplied the shimmering reflections of the canal outside. Hanging in the hallway were a tricorne hat, a crimson cloak and a domino, as though an eighteenth-century masquerader had stepped out of one of the prints by Pietro Longhi (there were several in the house) and come to call. D’Annunzio made only one substitution. Hohenlohe’s gilded spinet was removed to make way for a proper piano. At all times, and most especially in his blindness, d’Annunzio had to have music.

  Over and over again d’Annunzio set out from this “doll’s house” (as he called it) to go to war. In it he faced the possibility of having lost his sight, recovered the use of one eye and then set out again, defying his doctors’ warnings, to risk losing it once more. He was a war hero, but he was also still an aesthete and a voluptuary. His public life coexisted with a private one with which it often seemed to have as little relation as the tesserae of a mosaic viewed too close to see the overall design. Soon after he had participated in the deadly fighting along the River Isonzo, he was writing to Antongini in Paris asking him to buy and send him some high-heeled slippers in gold brocade (he liked his women to wear high heels in the bedroom). Repeatedly he took off on flights during which, passing through anti-aircraft fire, he flew further than had previously been considered possible, returning to Venice, as he explained to his publisher, “to take a bath” and to dine out in one of the city’s great palaces.

  Here are some of the tesserae—the themes and episodes—that made up that wartime life.

  In the last days of May 1915, while he waited in Rome for instructions as to where he was to serve, d’Annunzio made an excursion with his friend Guglielmo Marconi to see the radio station at Centocelle airfield. A couple of years earlier, in Paris, he had found himself staying in the Hôtel Meurice with Marconi as a fellow guest. There was a problem with the electricity. D’Annunzio quipped that he was untroubled—after all he had a world famous inventor to fix his lightbulbs for him. Now, in Italy and in wartime, his friend was no longer someone to joke about, but the “magician of space” who had slung a radio-telegraphic net around the world. Now he and Marconi were wearing their country’s uniform and their creations—d’Annunzio’s poetry, Marconi’s radio—would soon be employed as instruments of war.

  They travelled by car, as befitted two men of the future, but each of them wore a sabre, as befitted heroes of the past. They drove through a landscape dotted with ancient tombs, to an airfield full of spanking new machinery. Surrounded by the ruins of antiquity, they talked of things the future had yet to bring forth: about television—Marconi was already experimenting with the transmission of images; about radar—he was searching for ways of using radio waves to “see” underwater. Arrived, they listened to the rat-a-tat of the telegraph transmitting messages from France, Italy, Russia, America, and one, most startlingly, from enemy Austria. Marconi stroked the metal shell of the transmitter as an enchanter might lightly touch an animal he had placed under a spell. Both men held their sabres awkwardly to avoid trailing them along the floor. Old/new, novelty/antiquity, a recurrent theme of d’Annunzio’s thought was to be given full expression in this war, where humans were slaughtered, for the most part, by efficient modern industrial methods, but where, on the mountainous Italian Front, soldiers rolled rocks down enemy lines—killing their fellow humans in the way Neanderthals must have done.

  It was a blustery day, d’Annunzio recalled later, and “the whirling wind, lifting the ash from the sepulchres, transformed it into the seeds of the future.”

  Within thirty-six hours of arriving in Venice in July 1915, d’Annunzio was on board the Impavido (Fearless), flagship of a flotilla of torpedo boats, sailing under cover of darkness into the waters off the Austrian-held Istrian port of Pola. The fleet, based on Venice, was commanded by Umberto Cagni, the Polar explorer (he of the self-amputated fingers) whose exploits d’Annunzio had celebrated in one of his Laudi. Ever since his first arrival in Venice, as a shipwrecked dilettante yachtsman rescued by a warship, the poet had been a friend to and advocate for the Italian navy. Now he was made welcome by naval officers and allowed to accompany manoeuvres. On 12 August he was in a submarine when it submerged, sinking to the sea bed thirteen metres down. On 18 August, on what he would afterwards describe as one of the most beautiful nights of his life, he was with the Impavido again, when it was one of six ships sent to loose sixty torpedoes on the enemy’s base in Monfalcone, east of Trieste.

  He was an observer, the literary equivalent of the war artists the British sent to the battlefields in France. His notes demonstrate the quality of his attention. He has seen barges laden with the poison-yellow sulphur crystals (used in the manufacture of explosives) passing towards the Venetian Arsenal. Now he notes that the new moon burns yellow in the sky like a fistful of sulphur, and that the officer shielding a flashlight with his hand while reading the chart seems to have a fistful of sulphur too.

  He is wearing light shoes, easy to slip off should the ship sink. He notices that the sailors’ lifejackets are already inflated. The mate orders that biscuits and dried meat be placed in the lifeboats. “Death is here … it is as beautiful as life, intoxicating, full of promise, transfigurative.” An officer treats his fellows to champagne. “It could be the last glass,” thinks d’Annunzio.

  They steam eastwards. The vessel is cramped. “To pass from the bow to stern involves stepping over a recumbent sailor, knocking one’s shins against the casing of a torpedo, pressing oneself against a burning-hot funnel.” Everyone is silent. All lights and cigarettes have been extinguished. As they approach their target (and the enemy’s guns
) the minutes seem to lengthen into hours. Searchlights cross in the sky like white swords. “We could be discovered at any moment. The coast is barely a mile off. Always the funnels are our despair; they make too much smoke, too many sparks.” At last comes the order to fire. The enormous torpedoes slink down their tubes. At once the ships wheel. Relief. Hot coffee which tastes ambrosial. Cigarettes. Then comes a radio signal. There are two enemy submarines lurking near their homeward route. “And once again we fill our lungs, breathing in peril and death, in the first shivering of the dawn.”

  D’Annunzio’s wartime notebooks are full of physical detail: the glint of a nail in a soldier’s boot sole as he kneels to pray; the grain of the wood—as diverse as the markings of animals’ pelts—in the rough trestles on which the wounded are laid out. But when he came to work these notes up into fine prose for publication, he surrounded these sharp particular facts with a glittering miasma of past glory. The deadly weaponry was modern but the men who operated it were from a timeless tradition. One sailor is “a true companion of Ulysses.” An officer issues orders in the same Tuscan accent as that in which a great Renaissance sea lord would have spoken. Another man, a Sicilian, might have been an Arab from the thirteenth-century Palermitan court of the Emperor Frederick II. D’Annunzio was always looking for historical analogies, but in these war-writings the practice is more than just a stylistic quirk. In likening these young servicemen to mythical heroes or the great men of Italy’s golden age he is imposing a new meaning on the war.

  During the war years, d’Annunzio went often to the garden of the Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo. In the north of Venice, in what is even now a secluded district of tall dilapidated palaces and dead-ends, the garden extends down to the water on two sides, overlooking the lagoon. It was a place where he could be alone, unpestered by admirers. He was by this time not only a celebrity but a hero, and liable to be mobbed in the streets. The words “I am recognised, alas …” recur in his diaries. He dreamt wishfully that his public persona was like a colourless cloak, which he could take off and fold up. He dreamt again that he was hanging it from a nail on the wall.