Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  4 NOVEMBER 1921. On the third anniversary of the armistice, Notturno is finally published. D’Annunzio has made a myth out of its composition: out of his blindness and prostration in a still room encircled by the hubbub of war; the little slips of paper; the daughter as devoted as Milton’s were to their sightless genius of a father. In fact what he wrote in those dire months in 1916 was a scrappy kind of journal. Now he has expanded and shaped it, keeping intact its unconventional cut-up structure, and its intense inwardness. Through it d’Annunzio’s consciousness streams as fluidly and inconsequentially as that of any of Virginia Woolf’s characters, veering from childhood memory to hallucination, from wartime reportage to erotic fantasy.

  À la recherche du temps perdu was already partially published when d’Annunzio embarked on Notturno. Given that he and Proust had such a good mutual friend in de Montesquiou, d’Annunzio was probably aware of it. But he didn’t need to have read Proust in order to write with Proustian solipsism. In his Dostoevskian novels of the 1890s he was already minutely attentive to fluctuations of emotion. A long sentence wavering, via multiple subordinate clauses, towards an inconclusive main verb was already in his repertoire in the 1880s. As for an attentiveness to the fine detail of life, including some of the gross facts not conventionally included in fiction, he needed no one to teach him that. As he overflew wartime Trieste, James Joyce was in the city writing Ulysses, modernising classical epic just as d’Annunzio had done in Maia; making connections between smutty-minded modern prostitutes and the temptresses of Homeric legend, just as d’Annunzio had done; deploying languages ancient and modern in a word symphony in which the sharp ping of up-to-date allusions sounded over the grand subterranean rumble of ancient myth: d’Annunzio had been employing these strategies for decades. Now, with the book’s publication, Ernest Hemingway, who loathed d’Annunzio for his glorification of war, pays tribute to “the great lovely writer of Notturno whom we respect.”

  Nearing sixty, d’Annunzio writes poignantly: “Now that at last I have perfectly mastered my art I have only until tomorrow morning to sing.”

  Sales figures are splendid. D’Annunzio is making money. He is writing for Hearst’s New York American, and being paid enormous fees. He is also doing nicely from the sale of his autographs.

  JANUARY 1922. In a glade among his garden’s magnificent old magnolias, D’Annunzio creates what he calls his “Arengo” (an archaic word for a parliament or assembly). Stone benches are arranged in a circle, with a carved marble throne for d’Annunzio raised on a dais. There are seventeen stone columns, for the seventeen Great War battles which were (in d’Annunzio’s opinion anyway) Italian victories, and a broken column signifying Caporetto. There is a specially commissioned bronze figure of Victory wearing a crown of thorns (pagan triumphalism merging with the Christian idealisation of a suffering victim). Here d’Annunzio holds court, and addresses the legionaries who come to the Vittoriale to pay their respects.

  Now it is the anniversary of one of d’Annunzio’s battles and he is conducting a ceremony. A fire burns beneath a wrought-iron grill. D’Annunzio lays branches of laurel over the flames. Afterwards he distributes the ashes to his old companions-in-arms.

  23 FEBRUARY 1922. D’Annunzio writes to Luisa Casati, inviting her to visit his “Franciscan garden.” He alludes only with vague distaste to what is happening elsewhere. “The whole world is drowning in the murkiest vulgarity.” Casati accepts his invitation, only for d’Annunzio to put her off. He is wary of reunions with women from his past. It distresses him to see how they have aged. It distresses him even more to allow them to see what age is doing to him.

  Ugo Ojetti, however, is permitted to visit on 24 February, and finds the house heated like a furnace and perfumed with sandalwood. D’Annunzio, looking “slim, agile, dapper,” is full of energy and good cheer. He wants to show Ojetti around at once. He has been reading a chicken-breeders’ manual: now he requires Ojetti to admire the “rational poultry house” in his garden, stocked with rare breeds. He introduces him to the gardener, pleasingly named Virgil.

  The construction works which will transform the Vittoriale have barely begun. Ramshackle and built over a drop, the old house is desperately unstable, its walls riven by cracks and precariously propped up by an exoskeleton of scaffolding. A chunk of plaster has fallen from the bedroom ceiling onto d’Annunzio’s pillow: he escaped a nasty blow to the head by a matter of inches. His writing table is set by a window so that if the floor gives way he will be able to jump onto the balcony and cling to the railings until someone comes with a ladder to rescue him. Ojetti, to whom he explains all this, listens with amused scepticism. “He enjoys exaggerating the decrepitude of his house.” As a war hero, d’Annunzio went on at great length and with great solemnity about his love of risk, his fortitude in the face of danger. Now he reprises the same themes for a laugh.

  SPRING 1922. The fascists gain control of trade unions—displacing the socialist organisers—and of large sections of the press. Five national newspapers and eighty local papers are now run more or less directly from the fascist headquarters in Rome. Mussolini has abandoned hope of forming an alliance with the socialists and tacitly encourages his followers’ violent attacks on them. The third anniversary of the meeting in Piazza San Sepolcro, now grandiosely described as the foundation of fascism, is celebrated with rallies in Milan and other northern cities.

  The architect Gian Carlo Maroni is twenty-eight when he first begins to work for d’Annunzio. Soon he has become the latest of d’Annunzio’s beloved young acolytes. With him, d’Annunzio is teasing. He gives him nicknames: Gian Caro (Dear Gian) or Gian Carnefice (Gian the Executioner). He addresses him as Brother or Magus or as the “Master of the Living Stones.”

  5 APRIL 1922. Mussolini visits d’Annunzio in Gardone. He has a high regard for literature. One of his mottoes is: “Book and rifle—perfect fascist.” He has even written some books himself.

  Ten days later d’Annunzio publishes an open letter to the actress playing the lead in a new production of Jorio’s Daughter in Rome. He will not be in the audience, he writes. “All the rights and all the privileges of the free citizen have been revoked for me for some time.” Whether Mussolini has threatened him—or whether his decision to cling to his home and his silence is freely taken—is unclear. “I am now reduced to making a hole in my little piece of land in which to place my secrets.”

  21 APRIL 1922. More fascist rallies, this time to celebrate the foundation of Rome. Fascist orators have taken over d’Annunzio’s insistence that modern Italy should model itself on, and aspire to be worthy of, the grandeur of ancient Rome. Mussolini writes: “In Rome we see the promise of the future. Rome is our myth.”

  D’ANNUNZIO’S HOME—like so much of his written work—is an idiosyncratic and original creation made up of allusions and reproductions. The house’s rooms are full of plaster casts of famous statuary and photographic prints of famous paintings. There are oddities of scale and tone. The Mona Lisa dwindles to a black and white postcard. Classical Greek sculptures, known for centuries only as pristine marble, have been gilded. Michelangelo’s tragic Dying Prisoner is festooned with necklaces, its truncated legs kilted with a silk shawl.

  The buildings are as much of a collage of imitations as their contents. The cornucopia which recurs on stone seats all over the garden is copied from a Roman tomb in Lucca cathedral. The eagles perched on pillars are replicas of those in the gardens of the Villa d’Este, where the youthful d’Annunzio once heard Liszt play by moonlight, and where he and Barbara were happy. The façade of the original farmhouse, now the Prioria, is covered with plaster escutcheons in direct imitation of the mediaeval Palazzo del Podestà in Arezzo. The colonnades lining the driveway are copied from Roman aqueducts.

  D’Annunzio has encountered modernism in the white cubes of Luisa Casati’s Roman villa, in the black and grey austerity of Romaine Brooks’s rooms. Now, half a century before the term becomes current, he is creating a piece of post-modern
ism, sprinkling his enormous work of installation art with fragments of the great buildings and statuary of the past.

  27–28 MAY 1922. D’Annunzio receives Georgy Chicherin, the Soviet Union’s Commissar for External Affairs, who stays with him for two days or more. The squadristi have torched houses which communists are known to have visited. “Thank you,” says Chicherin on arrival. “You show greater courage by receiving me than I do by coming to visit you.” D’Annunzio wilfully misunderstands. “I have never feared contagion,” he announces. “The plague victims of Fiume know it.” (He is proud of the fact that when there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Fiume, he visited the victims in hospital, as fearless of disease as Napoleon at Jaffa.)

  He is interested to receive the commissar, but he is not impressed by his doctrine. “The Russian people have freed the world for ever of a puerile illusion,” he writes. “The dictatorship of a class has proved incapable of creating the necessary conditions for a tolerable life.” It is during this visit that d’Annunzio allegedly pulls the trick with the scimitar and the threatened beheading.

  MAY 1922. Tens of thousands of squadristi, led by Italo Balbo, converge on Ferrara for the funeral procession of a fascist “martyr.” The procession clashes with anti-fascist demonstrations. People on both sides are killed. Mussolini writes, “To all Italian fascists: consider yourselves materially and morally mobilised from this moment on.” They are to move with the speed of lightning. “Everything will crumble under your blows.” Ten thousand fascists pour into Bologna, camping out under the colonnades. They drive out the city prefect, and install a sympathetic general as head of police.

  1922. Thanks to the efforts of a syndicate of d’Annunzio’s devoted friends and admirers, the library of the Capponcina, all those thousands of books which he has not seen for twelve years, are at last restored to him. Mining his past again, he begins to rework and expand his Faville for a collection of semi-fictionalised autobiographical fragments covering his childhood and schooldays.

  He is still spending. He asks a friend, travelling to Milan in February, to buy him at least a dozen Californian peaches: “Don’t be terrified by the price.” The army of decorators and craftsmen at work in the house wait months, even years, for payment, but he gives extravagant presents to his servants on their saints’ days. He commissions Antongini to buy “two or three” trinkets for presents. Antongini sends twenty-odd pieces from which to choose: cufflinks, gold and silver cigarette cases, some rings, a few tie pins. D’Annunzio keeps them all. He has drawers full of such things to give to guests.

  JULY 1922. The socialists have called a nationwide strike. It provokes a terrible response. Fascists led by Italo Balbo sweep through northeastern Italy, burning socialists’ houses and smashing up their meeting places. Balbo writes in his diary: “It was a night of terror. Our passage was signed by plumes of smoke and fire. All the Romagna plain up to the hills became prey to the exasperated reprisals of the fascists, determined to finish for ever the Red terror.” Balbo’s aim, he writes, is to “destroy the present regime and all its venerable institutions. The more our actions are seen to be scandalous, the better.”

  AUGUST 1922. Duse is in Milan, performing The Dead City. Back in 1909, d’Annunzio asked her to play the part of Fedra. She wrote back firmly refusing. When he left her, she said, it was as though he had smashed her to pieces with his own hands. She can no longer read his work. To speak to him would be harder for her than to rise from the dead. “I have given you everything. I have nothing left.”

  Thirteen years later, though, she feels differently. She has written to d’Annunzio asking his permission to make changes to the text of the play, and suggesting they might meet. D’Annunzio replies, telling her that he has come to realise “certainly and mystically” that no relationship with any other human being “is worth the communion that I had with you, that I have with you.”

  He goes to Milan. Accounts of their reunion vary. D’Annunzio’s servant claims afterwards that he peeped through the keyhole of the hotel room and saw d’Annunzio and Duse facing each other, both on their knees like the donors in a Renaissance altarpiece, both in floods of tears.

  Duse herself gives unmatched accounts of their conversation to two different female friends. To one she says she snubbed him:

  D’Annunzio: “Even you cannot imagine how much I loved you.”

  Duse: “Even you cannot imagine how much I have forgotten you.”

  This kind of sharpness wasn’t Duse’s style. Her other version sounds more like her, and (with its breathtaking arrogance) more like him:

  D’Annunzio: “How you have loved me!”

  Duse (silently to herself): “He is still deluding himself. Had I loved him as he thinks, I would have died when we parted. Instead I have lived.”

  In the first days of August 1922, some 5,000 squadristi, singing Giovinezza and brandishing revolvers, rampaged through Genoa, destroying printing presses, trashing the offices of a socialist journal and driving the president of the shipowners’ association out of his office. There were similar scenes in Ancona and Livorno, where the fascist squads were led by d’Annunzio’s beloved comrade Ciano. In Parma d’Annunzio’s former associate, de Ambris, courageously resisted the fascist onslaught, fighting back at the head of the socialist “People’s Arditi” against thousands of squadristi led by the fascist heavyweights, Balbo and Farinacci.

  Milan had a socialist city council. On 3 August the squads swarmed through the city, drove the councillors out of the city hall in the Palazzo Marino and occupied it themselves. The mayor, turning for guidance to the government in Rome, was advised not to intervene.

  3 AUGUST 1922. D’Annunzio is in Milan seeing Duse and chivvying his publisher, Treves, over the production of his Complete Works. Several of his wartime comrades, now with the squads, come to seek him out at the Hotel Cavour. According to Antongini, who is with him, their black shirts are drenched in sweat, and their “burning faith” shows in their every gesture and in their shining eyes. With thousands of fascists milling around the city, d’Annunzio allows himself to be carried along to the Palazzo Marino. Going out onto the balcony he speaks in public for the first time in the twenty months since he left Fiume.

  His speech is long and evasive, one of his luminous word-clouds from which no meaning flashes clear. He does not use the word “fascist.” He does not mention Mussolini. He speaks in the gnomic liturgical style he perfected in Fiume: “It is not we who breathe but the nation which breathes in us. It is not we who live but the patria which lives in us.”

  His apologists will maintain that this is an act, not of commitment, but of political naïveté. He withholds any explicit verbal endorsement of fascism, and perhaps he does not realise how potent an image his presence on that balcony, alongside a phalanx of blackshirts, provides. The argument doesn’t stand up. D’Annunzio is a master of political theatre. He surely understands how he is being used. Perhaps he is afraid to refuse the blackshirts’ invitation. Perhaps he can’t resist the chance to be once more onstage in front of a roaring crowd. But whatever his motives for going to the Palazzo Marino, he rapidly comes to regret it.

  The fascists assail the offices of Avanti! for the third time, using bombs, rifles and electrically charged barbed wire. The journal’s warehouse is set on fire. The Communist Club is broken into and smashed up. There are battles in the streets between the civil authorities’ tanks on the one hand, and the fascists’ forty armoured trucks on the other. Mussolini sends a message from Rome, approving “the grand, the beautiful, the inexorable violence of decisive moments.”

  D’Annunzio is not paying attention to the public commotion. Safely back in the Hotel Cavour, he fires off a sequence of telegrams to Luisa instructing her to prepare for a visit from Duse, whom he now sanctifies as the great love of his life.

  Back in Gardone he waits in vain for Duse, but he receives a telegram from the Fascist Party Secretary. “The National Fascist Party echoes your cry of ‘Long Live Fascism!
’ ” D’Annunzio, who has pointedly refrained from uttering any such “cry,” replies indignantly that his only Evviva is for Italy: “I know of no other.” Too late. The fascists are as adept as he at disseminating their own versions of reality. A copy of the telegram has been sent to their paper Il Popolo d’Italia, which promptly publishes it. D’Annunzio is now indelibly marked by his apparent association with fascism. Three weeks later Mussolini publishes a bellicose article: “Our recruits want to fight, not to argue.” He entitles it “La Fiumana.” He is keen to emphasise the affinity between d’Annunzio and himself. D’Annunzio is not. In his notebook he makes a Latin note to himself, “Tempus tacendi”—time to be silent. He will never speak in public again.

  SHORTLY AFTER HIS RETURN FROM MILAN, d’Annunzio received a surprising letter. It was from ex-Prime Minister Francesco Nitti—Cagoia—the man whom he had so virulently abused. For the country’s sake Nitti was prepared to overlook all d’Annunzio’s past insults: “It doesn’t matter about me.” He proposed they should work together to save Italy from the violence engulfing it. “All our forces must be united … You see the danger and you can work on the youth, setting it alight, and leading it back to the right path.” Nitti invited d’Annunzio to meet him and Mussolini in a villa in Tuscany on 15 August. It is hard to imagine what kind of accord they could have reached, but a quarter of a century later Nitti would write that if only that meeting could have taken place, the history of Italy might have taken a different path.