20 JANUARY 1920. The feast of d’Annunzio’s favourite Saint Sebastian. A solemn rite presided over by an Ardito priest is celebrated in Fiume, in the cathedral of San Vito. A troop of women process up the aisle to present their Commandant with a bayonet ornamented with gold and silver. Accepting the weapon, d’Annunzio delivers an oration in which the imagery of weaponry and sexualised pain overlap ecstatically. The tortured saint, d’Annunzio claims, cried out under the rain of arrows: “Not enough! Not enough! Again!” So Fiume cries out for more suffering: “I want to believe, my sisters, that this proffered bayonet was made with the steel of the first and last arrows.” The blade is presented by the priest on behalf of the women with the decidedly unChristian wish “that with it you may carve the word victory in the living flesh of our enemies.” The Autonomist Party leader Riccardo Zanella believes that the weapon is destined for his murder and leaves town, shifting the offices of his journal to Trieste.
After the ceremony d’Annunzio reviews his Legion in yet another march past. Fiume’s mayor, deeply moved, declares: “He’s a saint!” Kochnitzky reports that “in the impoverished homes of the old city the women had removed the sacred images. The tiny light glowed in front of the figure of Gabriele d’Annunzio.”
The priest officiating at the St. Sebastian’s Day ceremony was subsequently reprimanded by the Vatican, and ordered out of Fiume.
On the mainland the fascists and socialists were fighting each other, to the death in many cases, but d’Annunzio, with his gift for shape-shifting accommodation, was still friend to both parties.
On 10 October 1919, just a month after he arrived in Fiume, he had received some unlooked-for aid. The crew of the Persia, an Italian cargo ship carrying some thirteen tons of weapons and ammunition destined for the supply of the White Russian armies, refused to support the enemies of their “brothers” the Bolsheviks. In the Straits of Messina they mutinied and sailed the ship to Fiume, handed its lethal cargo over to d’Annunzio and placed themselves under his command. They, and especially their leader Giuseppe Giulietti, head of the Seamen’s Union, were given a properly Fiuman welcoming ceremony. D’Annunzio was jubilant. Most of the crew stayed—their presence in the city shifting the political character of the place leftwards—and d’Annunzio told Giulietti their politics might merge, inspiring “insurrections of the spirit against the devourers of raw flesh.”
In early January 1920, Giulietti (now back on the mainland) was writing to d’Annunzio about another planned coup. This one was to be of a very different political colour from those monarchist-militarist plots in which d’Annunzio had been involved the previous summer. This would be an uprising of Italian socialists, its leaders to include the veteran anarchist Enrico Malatesta, its rank and file to be provided by Giulietti’s Seamen’s Union and by the Legion of Fiume. D’Annunzio havered. His heart was not in the venture. He may have felt the projected uprising’s political complexion was uncongenial to him, but all he said was that he didn’t want to leave Fiume: “Here the new forms of life are not only conceived, but are fulfilled.”
As a man who believed the “the art of command is not to command,” d’Annunzio was creating a space in which those new forms could flourish, and where the most unlikely alliances could be attempted. Fiume in 1920 was a bazaar of the mind.
In the cafés, on the waterfront, along the stone-paved Corso with its pretty Venetian campanile, noisy groups of disputants passed days and nights in planning new world orders. Communists preached world revolution. Futurists leapt on café tables, holding up placards, or harangued passers-by from the back of carts—calling on them to “smash to pieces all altars and pedestals,” to destroy “banks, beards and prejudices,” to explore every possible option in the city “where everything is possible in an atmosphere of geniality and incandescent madness.” Bolsheviks formed soldier soviets. Anarchists and syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists set up varying versions of the producers’ networks prescribed by Proudhon. There were groups vehemently declaring elitist views like those d’Annunzio had been espousing since the 1890s: “We denounce the tasteless and unworkable system of parliamentary representation … We rejoice in beauty, in elegance and courtesy and style … we want to have over us miraculous, fantastic men.” Marinetti had envisioned an era “when life will no longer be a simple matter of bread and labour, nor a life of idleness either, but a work of art.” In the spring of 1920, another futurist, the Ardito Mario Carli, announced that that time had come to pass. In Fiume “today reigns poetry … the old antithesis of Life and Dream has finally been overcome.”
D’Annunzio had a new, world-bestriding vision. He had spent decades extolling the grandeur of the Roman and Venetian Empires; he had enthusiastically lauded Italy’s invasion of Libya. Of other, non-Italian empires, though, he disapproved.
It was time, he declared, for sparks from the Holocaust of Fiume to ignite “desires of revolt the world over,” against Western colonialists in general, and Great Britain in particular. He announced his support for “the indomitable Sinn Féin of Ireland,” and “the Egyptian red banner where the crescent and cross are united.” His mission was directed against all the world’s evil, “from Ireland to Egypt, from Russia to the United States, from Rumania to India.” It was universalist. “It gathers the white races and the coloured peoples, reconciles the gospel with the Koran.” The Fiume adventure, which had started out as a nationalist project with regressive aims—the recreation of an ancient empire—had transmuted into something resembling a Socialist International.
In January 1920, Léon Kochnitzky, poet and copywriter in d’Annunzio’s press office, was appointed his Minister for Foreign Affairs, with fellow poet Henry Furst as his deputy. D’Annunzio proposed a union of all the people oppressed by the capitalist-imperialist powers, a League of Fiume. This league would be set up in pointed opposition to the League of Nations, which had its first meeting in Paris on 16 January. Kochnitzky, a communist sympathiser, embraced the idea enthusiastically. It was, he said (still as star-struck as he had been when he gazed at d’Annunzio’s gleaming shirt front at the Opéra), a “shimmering globe that is worthy of the hand of Gabriele d’Annunzio alone.”
By March, Kochnitzky could report that he had promises of support not only from the various ethnic populations of Dalmatia and the inhabitants of the Adriatic islands but also from Egyptians, Indians and Irish. He had had promising responses from Turks and Flemings. He had made overtures to the Catalans. He was in contact with Chinese labourers in California. Emissaries from all of these groups came and went in Fiume, or attended secret meetings on the Italian mainland.
British spies and diplomats kept a sharp eye on the League of Fiume, with its links to anti-British nationalist movements worldwide, as the copious Foreign Office memos on the subject demonstrate. So did the Italian Ministry of the Interior. There was much exhilarating talk, many ardent promises of cooperation and solidarity, but d’Annunzio never had the resources to transform the League’s policies from hot air into arms or men.
D’Annunzio’s deputy as ringmaster of Fiume’s intellectual circus was his Action Secretary, Guido Keller. Keller, who got to know d’Annunzio in Venice in the months after the war, was an artist and an aviator who was said to paint a landscape or defy death with equal insouciance. “Like all true heroes,” wrote Giuriati, “he disdained to boast … Like all the great comedians, he seldom laughed.” Keller travelled light and liked to walk naked along beaches; before the war he had been arrested several times for indecent exposure. He had been awarded three silver medals (the maximum) for his wartime exploits but he never wore them. He was striking looking, with the sharpest of black eyes, a luxuriant black beard and a great tress of hair growing, Arditi-style, from the crown of his head and falling like a horse’s tail before his face.
He introduced a streak of night-black humour into the high solemnity of d’Annunzio’s Fiume. In Zurich during the war, the Dadaists had begun to create anti-art and gibberish poems as their way of unm
aking the world order which had concluded in the stupid slaughter. Keller certainly didn’t share their pacifism, but he did share their insolence and their taste for obscenity and absurdist pranks. Once, on a surveillance flight over Serbian territory, his engine failed and he brought his plane down abruptly in the grounds of a monastery. There he met, and took a fancy to, a little donkey. While the monks shouted at him from the doors of their cells, he coolly mended his aircraft and then—strapping the poor beast to the plane’s struts—took off with it and, having landed it safely, presented it to d’Annunzio.
It was Keller who enabled the Sacred Entry by stealing twenty-odd trucks, and it was Keller, continuing as resourcefully thievish, who recruited and commanded d’Annunzio’s Uscocchi. In the fifth season the Uscocchi graduated from piracy to terrorism. On 26 January 1920 a party of them crossed the armistice line and ambushed a general of the Italian army on the road to Trieste, taking him captive and bringing him back to Fiume. There he was held for a month in the palace, treated with sarcastic courtesy and intimidated into declaring (despite his well-attested hostility towards d’Annunzian Fiume) his “faith in the sanctity of the cause and his high esteem for the defenders of the threatened city.”
Fiume was like a city in the throes of Dionysiac possession, and d’Annunzio was its god. “The word ‘d’Annunzio’ shouted in a theatre or in any other public place was sufficient to cause the entire audience to rise to its feet and shriek frenzied Evvivas,” wrote Father Macdonald sourly. Women pelted d’Annunzio with flowers when he marched out with his legionaries. His men vied for the right to be near him, to touch him, to get his autograph, to speak to him if only for a few seconds.
Most evenings he dined in an officers’ mess, or sometimes made a performance of sitting down to eat among the ordinary soldiers. “Evenings of noise and shouting, of frenetic adoration, of craziness.” He had to be careful to distribute his favours with an even hand: after he had visited one division too often legionaries of another division, crazy with jealousy, attacked the barracks of the highly favoured ones waving machine guns.
In Paris, nearly a decade earlier, he had told a French lady who had been indelicate enough to commiserate with him on his hairlessness that he was proud of his “superhuman cranium,” and told her, “Madame, in future, beauty will be bald.” Unlikely as it may have seemed, his prediction was realised. In Fiume his devotees became, as the Bishop of Fiume noted, “so many caricatures of the Commandant.” They shaved off their hair (initiating skinhead fashion). They grew little pointed beards. They wore white gloves and monocles and moved, as d’Annunzio did, in a miasma of strong perfume. One reported that “officers ate candies … and pursued the charms of women,” all in imitation of their adored master.
Kochnitzky noticed how florid and verbose conversation in Fiume became, as the acolytes strove to emulate the fantastic circumlocutions of their master. Two months became “sixty days of passion and sixty nights of anguish.” D’Annunzio’s verbal mannerisms were catching, and so was his way of thinking. The bishop wrote: “The contagion of greatness was the greatest peril for anyone living in Fiume; a real contagious madness which everybody caught.”
To Mario Carli, futurist, Ardito and spokesman of Arditismo, Fiume seemed a good base from which to aim “a monumental kick” at a “thousand mouldy traditions.” In one of his first speeches in Fiume, d’Annunzio had removed his feathered cap to show his shining pate. The god of armies, he said, had given him a head harder than his enemies and now, he told his listeners: “You are Iron Heads all!” Testa di Ferro (Iron Head) became a Fiuman catchphrase, one of those which d’Annunzio only had to utter to get a bellow of appreciation from his adorers. Carli took it as the title of the journal he launched in Fiume, its first issue appearing on 1 February 1920.
For Carli there were two “centres of World Revolution”—Moscow and Fiume. He described Fiume’s political ethos as “our Bolshevism” and sought to establish links with the Russian variety. So did Kochnitzky, who considered it essential to get the backing of the Soviet Union for the League of Fiume. Communist Russia was one of the “spiritually alive elements of our time.”
Lenin and his cohorts, struggling to control their immense domain, had no interest in involving themselves in d’Annunzio’s little venture, but they viewed it benignly. An Italian Communist Party deputy declared: “The d’Annunzian movement is perfectly and profoundly revolutionary,” and went on to assert that “Lenin even said so at the Moscow Congress.” But when d’Annunzio made overtures to the Soviet Union, attempting in March 1920 to set up a meeting between Kochnitzky and one Engineer Vodovosoff, described as “official messenger” of the USSR, Vodovosoff declined.
It was increasingly hard to pin down d’Annunzio’s political position. Comisso was amused to watch him courteously hearing out Kochnitzky and Furst as they talked of the inevitability of the worldwide communist revolution. “He listened attentively, then went off and he did whatever he had previously decided to do.”
“All the ancient faiths are renegade, all the ancient formulae are rent,” proclaimed an editorial in the Testa di Ferro. “We shall put our faith in and obey no man but our sole and marvellous leader Gabriele d’Annunzio.” His worshippers (the word is not too strong) served not a cause but a man.
It was difficult for d’Annunzio to go out alone. The minute he set foot outside the Governor’s Palace a shout would go up, a crowd would gather. Immured by his celebrity, he created a den for himself in his apartments. His bedroom was hung about with banners and military standards. There was a table covered with flasks of perfume. There was a couch heaped with cushions on which he stretched out to allow his imagination to play, or on which he and Luisa Baccara enjoyed “ultimate voluptuousness,” their love-making shown back to them by a strategically placed mirror. Often, when he was conferring with his ministers, ostensibly intent on logistics or diplomacy, or quick-marching his soldiers over hills (“Today we almost ran,” he reported), his mind, or so he told Luisa, was in these intensely private rooms.
The days of wine and sugared rose petals were drawing to a close. There were fuel shortages. Rations were becoming shorter, for officers as well as rank and file. In March 1920, d’Annunzio had to tell Luisa that there were no flowers in Fiume, that his vases all stood empty.
D’Annunzio’s old habits of extravagance remained unchanged, and his followers imitated him. And if the financial administration of d’Annunzio’s household and staff was corrupt, that of the city as a whole was frighteningly ill-planned. D’Annunzio’s Command paid and provisioned the legionaries, the municipal expenses were the responsibility of the Council; there were incessant arguments over the balancing of the two separate budgets. De Ambris seemed almost as negligent of economic affairs as his Commandant. In February 1920 he announced that the economic situation was under control. A month later he had to admit that the food and fuel which had kept Fiume going through the winter had all been bought on credit, that the suppliers were now demanding payment and that the warehouses were “virtually empty, with no possibility of resupply.”
In February 1920, d’Annunzio created perhaps the most sentimentally potent and callously irresponsible of the artworks he made with the material of human lives. Declaring that—as a result of Nitti’s cruel blockade—Fiume could no longer feed its children, he called upon patriotic Italians to provide homes for hundreds of Fiuman babies whose lives would otherwise be at risk. A group of Milanese ladies representing the Fasci di Combattimento duly arrived in Fiume with an enormous banner and took away with them some 250 babies for fostering on the mainland. Nitti—a novice playing here against a grand master of public relations—initially refused to allow the children to land, but after a public outcry they were permitted to enter Italy and delivered to their foster families. D’Annunzio, the man who had abandoned his own children, had successfully cast himself as the good and loving father of hundreds, and forced Nitti into the role of one who refused succour to starving Innocents.
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Rivals for Luisa Baccara. On 21 February 1920, d’Annunzio was enjoying “voluptuousness, deep kisses, oblivion” and “savage sex” with a woman he named (repeating himself) Barbarella and on the following day he had three female visitors—“little Bianca,” someone “brown and soft” but nameless and a third whom he called “the little mistress of Merano.” The four of them engaged in partner-swapping sexual games, the number of his bedfellows making the pleasure, d’Annunzio noted, more than usually acute.
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Fiume, its civilian population swelled by some 20,000 fighting men, had become a military encampment, administered along military lines. But the legionaries, most of whom had come to Fiume in direct disobedience to orders, didn’t take kindly to discipline. Delinquent young men clustered around Guido Keller. Keller was drawn to the “most unhinged” because he considered them the most daring. There was “the Red Pirate,” who embezzled a large sum of money sent to the Command by supporters back in Italy, but who was nonetheless taken up by Keller, immediately on his release from prison, as a promising “action man.” There was the legionary whom Keller employed as his personal servant until one evening the man, getting hold of a gun, began to fire it at random out of the window. There were the three young anarchists whom he came upon one day passed out on the floor of a “lurid inn” after smoking too much hashish.
Gabriele D'Annunzio Page 52
