Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  It is two days before the appointed date and d’Annunzio is enjoying a musical evening. Luisa is playing the piano in the Music Room on the raised ground floor of the Vittoriale. It is around eleven o’clock at night. D’Annunzio, in pyjamas and slippers, is sitting on a window seat, with the windows wide open behind him. Accounts differ as to who else is in the room. One suggests that Luisa’s younger sister Jolanda, a cellist, is sitting beside him and she and Gabriele are fondling each other. There are certainly a number of people in the house, servants and guests. Among them is Aldo Finzi, who was one of the pilots who flew with d’Annunzio to Vienna. Finzi is now an influential member of the Fascist Party’s central office.

  Somehow d’Annunzio falls head-first out of the window onto the gravel some ten feet below. His skull is fractured and for the next three days he lies in a coma while no fewer than six distinguished doctors attend him.

  Many theories—none of them proven—have been advanced to explain how a man might suddenly topple out of a window. Three people at least see what happens: a lawyer who is visiting, Finzi, and the gardener’s boy; but none of them ever gives a conclusive account of the event. D’Annunzio’s children accuse the Baccara sisters of trying to murder him, but it is hard to imagine their motive for doing so. D’Annunzio is later so outraged by the suggestion that he forbids his son Mario and even his dear Renata ever to visit the Vittoriale again. Anti-fascists allege that it was Finzi who pushed him. The Fascist High Command see d’Annunzio’s political interventions as dangerous meddling. His public following is still substantial (his fall is front-page news, and once he is on the way to recovery the Corriere della Sera publishes cabled messages of goodwill from dignitaries ranging from Francesco Nitti to Giacomo Puccini). He is unpredictable. They might have wanted to forestall his meeting with Nitti. They might simply have wanted him eliminated.

  But Finzi has been, and remains, a friend and admirer of d’Annunzio’s. Besides, if this was a failed assassination it was a remarkably clumsy one, and one which the victim himself was at pains to cover up. D’Annunzio claimed in his semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical Libro Segreto that his “fall” was a suicide attempt. Perhaps it was: he had been toying with the idea of killing himself for years, and his ill-advised appearance at the Palazzo Marino might have precipitated one of the bouts of depression to which he was subject. Or perhaps—and this seems the most likely explanation—he just fell.

  One-eyed, he occasionally complained of disorientation, or disturbances to his balance. Besides, according to the local pharmacist, he was, by this time, consuming large quantities of cocaine. He was also taking sulfonal, an addictive hypnotic drug whose side effects include problems with balance and a tendency to stagger. Perhaps he was unsteadied by drugs or alcohol (always an abstemious drinker, he nonetheless enjoyed fine champagne). Perhaps Jolanda, disliking his advances, gave him a shove which was harder than she meant it to be. At all events—whether it was a sinister attack, an act of despair or the undignified accident of a drug-fuddled lecher—the incident was soon to be transformed to golden fable by d’Annunzio’s Midas-like way with stories. Something about the incident shamed or alarmed him, so he baffled enquiry by wrapping it in a haze of glory. He ascribed his escape from death to supernatural intervention. He entitled his fall his “archangelic flight.” He noted that on the third day he rose again.

  26 SEPTEMBER 1922. The Fascist Party has thousands of new members, so many that the party secretary maintains that it cannot continue as an independent institution, it must “become the state.” Mussolini delivers an ominous speech, warning the King that he should not oppose the “fascist revolution” which is ready to shoulder its “responsibilities”—in other words, to seize power. For decades d’Annunzio has been inveighing against the filth engulfing Rome, and calling for it to be cleansed. Now Mussolini volunteers for the job. “It is our intention to make Rome the city of our spirit, a city that is purged and disinfected of all the elements that have corrupted it and dragged it into the mire.”

  4 OCTOBER 1922. Fascists have occupied Trento and Bolzano near the Austrian border. Still the government makes no move to curtail their rampages. Mussolini addresses his followers in Milan. The liberal state, he announces, is “a mask behind which there is no face; a scaffolding behind which there is no building.” One of Mussolini’s closest associates writes that the government is “useless … We are forced to take over. Otherwise the history of Italy would become a joke.”

  11 OCTOBER 1922. Mussolini pays d’Annunzio a visit. D’Annunzio, apparently fully recovered from his fall, has been negotiating with Mussolini on behalf of the Seamen’s Union headed by Giuseppe Giulietti, who did so much for him at Fiume and who is losing his members to the rival fascist Mariners’ Union. These negotiations are long-drawn-out and frequently ill-tempered. It is a frustrating wrangle, to which d’Annunzio is giving attention he might have better employed observing more significant developments in Italy’s political life. After their meeting Mussolini agrees to close down the fascist union, allowing Giulietti’s association a free hand. D’Annunzio is exultant. He owes Mussolini a favour. He agrees to disband his legions, who have been massing at Fiume.

  14 OCTOBER 1922. Mussolini writes to General Badoglio, now chief of the general staff, warning him that any attempt to put down the fascists by military means will result in a massacre.

  21 OCTOBER 1922. D’Annunzio writes to Antongini saying: “I am not, and I do not want to be, anything but Italy’s poverello. I live only for my work.” He has five books in progress, including a memoir of his childhood, and Hearst has given him an advance of a million lire for an autobiography. (He will never deliver it.) He has done seven years’ “forced labour” in the public arena. He has “stooped” to “repugnant mingling” with hoi polloi on the battlefields and in the piazzas. “No one can imagine with what anxiety I sought out this refuge, with what a need to steep myself in myself, and in the secret springs of my poetry.”

  24 OCTOBER 1922. At a Fascist Party conference in Naples there are repeated calls for a march on Rome. Mussolini, who enters the conference to three blasts on a trumpet, seems to concur. “Either the arrow must leave the bow or the string will break.” The delegates parade through the city in their black uniforms for three hours, singing war songs. They call their groups now not “squads” but “legions” (another d’Annunzian borrowing). Shouts, salutes, blaring music. An especially noisy cheer for the representatives of Fiume. Yells of “On to Rome!” At last, in a “religious” silence, Mussolini speaks. “Either they will give us the government or we will take it by descending on Rome. It is a question of days, of hours perhaps … Go back to your towns and await orders.” Those orders are likely to be for violent action, for “in history, force decides everything.” Like d’Annunzio motoring into Fiume three years earlier, Mussolini is about the make his “Sacred Entry.”

  The representatives of liberal democracy are hopelessly disunited. The incumbent prime minister, Luigi Facta, is longing to be ousted. “I have great hopes to be free of all this in the next few days,” he writes to his wife. “Oh darling … the day I will leave I shall be indescribably happy.” Over the next four days ex-premiers Salandra, Orlando and Giolitti fail to agree on a strategy to keep the fascists out. On the contrary, each indicates he would prefer the premiership to go to Mussolini than to one of the others. Meanwhile there is much talk of a strategic alliance between the socialists and the Catholic Popolari Party who could, between them, have formed a government. Many of the moderate “reformist” socialists are in favour of the alliance, but the hard-line “maximalists” cannot stomach a partnership with the purveyors of the people’s “opium.” Keeping their principles unsullied, they open the door to fascist dictatorship.

  26 OCTOBER 1922. The fourth anniversary of the fightback across the River Piave. All fascist leaders are ordered to mobilise their squads. Fascist sympathisers in the army and police are warned not to intervene.

  27 OCTOBER 1922. F
ascists swarm through major towns all over Italy, taking over telephone exchanges and telegraph offices, police stations and town halls. It is cold and rainy. The squadristi wander without good maps. All the same, some 16,000 of them reach assembly points in an arc around the periphery of Rome. Mussolini stays in Milan, going to the theatre, disconnecting his telephone at bedtime, making a display of his sang-froid. Later this crisis will be repeatedly described as a “revolution” led by the valiant Duce, but at the time Mussolini is careful to stay well away from any potential violence. He is aiming, not at the glamour of an insurrection, but at solid, incontrovertible, legitimate power.

  28 OCTOBER 1922. In the early hours of the morning, Prime Minister Facta meets his ministers and senior generals. Very few of the fascists encamped around Rome have weapons (apart from their clubs) and they have no provisions. General Badoglio offers to disperse them. Just before 8 a.m., Facta resolves to declare a state of emergency and impose martial law across the whole country from midday. Officials all over Italy are informed by telegram. At 9 a.m. Facta goes to the King, and asks him to sign the declaration. Victor Emmanuel refuses. His reasons for doing so remain, to this day, uncertain. Perhaps he is afraid the troops will mutiny if asked to take action against the fascists, just as he and his generals feared they would if asked to attack d’Annunzio in Fiume. Perhaps he suspects a move to launch a military coup and replace him with his more dashing cousin, the Duke of Aosta. Perhaps he is unwilling to sanction bloodshed and afraid of triggering a civil war. Perhaps he prefers the possibility of a fascist government to the one he has: he remarks later that he had no desire to order the army to fight for “a cabinet of poltroons.”

  Facta resigns. Martial law is revoked. The fascists enter the capital, not in the kind of awe-inspiring “March on Rome” that fascist mythology will later describe, but sporadically, and in no particular order. Many of them arrive by special trains chartered with the connivance of the army. The King calls upon Salandra to form a government. Mussolini, still at his editorial desk in Milan, writes: “Central Italy is completely occupied by blackshirts … The government must be unequivocally fascist.” He needs a ringing phrase. He takes it from d’Annunzio. “Our victory must not be mutilated!”

  STEEPED IN HIMSELF and the secret springs of poetry, d’Annunzio plays no part in the day’s events, but Mussolini, uneasily aware how much influence he has, keeps him informed. In the morning a telegram arrives at the Vittoriale. “We have had to mobilise our forces to cut short a wretched situation. We are absolute master of the larger part of Italy, and elsewhere we occupy the essential nerve centres of the nation.” Then comes the assurance that d’Annunzio is not expected to “line up” and finally a request. “Read the proclamation!…You will have some great word to speak.” D’Annunzio utters no word.

  Mid-afternoon. Mussolini sends another message. “The latest news consecrates our triumph. Tomorrow’s Italy will have a government. We will be intelligent and discreet enough not to abuse our victory.” He is sure, he says, that d’Annunzio will salute this marvellous development, and “consecrate the reborn youth of Italy.” He ends with a bit of sycophancy which is not intended to be taken seriously. Mussolini has seized power, he tells d’Annunzio, “To you! For you!”

  At nightfall d’Annunzio responds at last. He has had an awfully busy day, he says, and only just got around to reading the telegrams. He makes no clear comment on Mussolini’s news. Instead he sends him a volume of his own wartime speeches, with a gnomic caution: “Victory has the clear eyes of Pallas Athena. Do not blindfold her.”

  29 OCTOBER 1922. It is still raining. Thousands more damp blackshirts have converged on Rome, but the fascists’ seizure of power is an act, not of force, but of robbery with menaces.

  Salandra informs the King that he cannot, or dares not, assume power. At last Mussolini receives the telephone call he has been awaiting. He is one of only thirty-six fascist deputies, but Victor Emmanuel is proposing that he attempt to put together a coalition. As keenly aware as d’Annunzio has always been that the media coverage of an event will have a wider impact than the event itself, Mussolini delays his journey in order to draft a press release. He is going to Rome, he tells the world, “wearing his black shirt, as a fascist” and he has the support of 300,000 men “faithful to my orders.” Belatedly he places himself in the van of the “March” by taking the night train south.

  30 OCTOBER 1922. Arriving after a fourteen-hour journey, Mussolini goes to the Quirinal Palace, wearing a bowler hat and spats and a formal suit over his black shirt, and introduces himself to the King with another verbal flourish taken from d’Annunzio. “Sire, I bring you the Italy of Vittorio Veneto.” Victor Emmanuel invites him to form a government and implores him to send his blackshirts home. Mussolini agrees to the former request but rejects the latter: his “legions” must be allowed to celebrate their Roman Triumph.

  31 OCTOBER 1922. Mussolini is sworn in as prime minister and 50,000 fascists celebrate on the streets of Rome. They break into Nitti’s house, smashing and robbing things from the man d’Annunzio taught them to despise as Cagoia. Giovanni Giuriati, d’Annunzio’s prime minister in Fiume, is Mussolini’s minister for “recently liberated lands,” meaning the former Austrian territories along the Dalmatian coast. General Diaz, who set such a high value on d’Annunzio’s wartime rhetoric, is his chief of staff.

  For five hours the King reviews the blackshirts who pass by the palace cheering, flapping banners, and yelling, as d’Annunzio taught them to do, “Eia, Eia, Eia, Alalà!” They sing Giovinezza. They give the stiff-armed salute. For those many of them who were with d’Annunzio in Fiume it seems as though sparks from the City of the Holocaust have at last ignited an answering blaze in Rome.

  2 NOVEMBER 1922. D’Annunzio publishes a statement in the journal of his legionaries’ association. It is non-committal. He praises the King, but in nebulous terms. He says that the “experimental government” is to be “tolerated” until an election can be called in the spring. He mentions labyrinths and rainbows. He sprinkles his text with Latin tags. He is lining up neither alongside Mussolini and the fascists, nor in opposition to them.

  He writes more candidly to Antongini. He complains that his name is being improperly made use of. He does not want the fascists exploiting his reputation for their advantage. He is, however, quite willing to exploit their newly acquired power for his own ends. Once again he gives Antongini a list. This time he is not sending him out shopping for household fixtures and fittings. He is asking him to convey some proposals and requests to the new premier and his ministers. Military bases in Trentino must be strengthened. The convent in Assisi which has been converted into government offices must at once be restored to the Franciscans. And so on and so forth. For the rest of his life d’Annunzio will ceaselessly demand favours of Mussolini: some on a grand scale (changes of policy), some trivial (jobs for his protégés). Mussolini receives them patiently, and grants those to which he can easily agree.

  16 NOVEMBER 1922. Mussolini’s first speech to parliament. He is crowing over the parliamentarians’ discomfiture. He harks back to May 1915, the month when d’Annunzio had all Rome in uproar, and when Italy went to war without the consent of parliament. “So now a government has arisen without parliamentary approval.” Like d’Annunzio reminding the people of Vienna that it is only thanks to his magnanimity that they are not being bombed, Mussolini tells the assembled deputies, that he could have turned “this grim grey chamber into an armed camp for blackshirts, a bivouac for soldiers. I could have nailed up the doors of parliament and formed an exclusively fascist government.” That he didn’t do so is a token of his forbearance, and the clear implication is that nobody should count upon its lasting. He has learned from d’Annunzio the efficacy of the theatre of what might have been.

  D’ANNUNZIO’S SILENCE IS MUSICAL, he writes. Those of his former comrades who have “lined up” with Mussolini, would prefer a more audible music. On 24 November, Aldo Finzi, who is now M
ussolini’s High Commissioner for Aviation, writes to him reproachfully. How can he, “superb prophet of the destiny of our beautiful Italy,” withhold his support from those who are converting his prophecies into reality? Finzi has followed Mussolini “blindly” because he is persuaded that Mussolini is the one man who can realise d’Annunzio’s visions. “How are we mistaken? How do our ends differ from those you have predicted and desired?” A letter from d’Annunzio to Luigi Albertini provides an indirect answer. He recognises the fascist “ideal for the world” as being a version of his own, but it has been “squandered and falsified.” He wants nothing to do with it.

  mussolini leaves for london. He stays at Claridges and is received by the Prime Minister and the King. He lays a wreath at the Cenotaph. Crowds follow him around, some British blackshirts singing Giovinezza in a deplorably bad accent. By the time he returns his mood has hardened. On 15 December he demands his cabinet’s authorisation to act “by whatever means I hold necessary” against a variety of untrustworthy political elements including “pseudo-Fiumanism.”

  D’Annunzio has been bombarding Mussolini with instructions. Construct airfields. Build “a beautiful pediment around the temple that is Italy.” He has insisted on his role as fascism’s inventor. “In the movement which calls itself ‘fascist’ has not the best been engendered by my spirit? Was not the present upheaval heralded by me forty years ago and set in motion by the condottieri of Ronchi?” He is disappointed by the slowness and curtness of the Duce’s replies. On 16 December he writes to Mussolini: “I have resolved—today—to retreat into my silence and give myself up again entirely to my art.” A refusal, a promise and a surrender.

  Three days later comes the crackdown on d’Annunzio’s legionaries. Anarchists and “subversives” are questioned roughly. The legionaries’ armed groups are broken up. De Ambris and others with trade unionist connections are bullied and harassed until they go into exile. D’Annunzio protests, but ineffectually. By the end of the month Mussolini has switched his attention to the Communist Party. Most of the Central Committee, including Gramsci, are arrested and thousands of socialist and communist workers leave Italy.