Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  DECEMBER 1922–JANUARY 1923. The Fascist Grand Council is created, an extra-constitutional body, not answerable to the electorate, which will gradually assume many of the powers and functions of the conventional ministries. At the same time the fascist militia is formed. It is Mussolini’s own private war host, as the Legion of Fiume was once d’Annunzio’s.

  It is unclear to what extent d’Annunzio’s withdrawal from the world is voluntary. He tells Luigi Albertini: “I am a perpetual prisoner here.” He fumes intermittently at his confinement. “Why can I not run along a level road, or pass through a populous city, or enter a library, or rest in meditation before the works of art I interpreted and loved?” Certainly he is closely watched, and certainly he acts as though an invisible fence keeps him by the lakes, far from the centres of power. Fifteen years after his death, Ernesto Cabruna, who was among his trusted lieutenants at Fiume, writes: “History will reveal how fascism diabolically kept d’Annunzio prisoner at the Vittoriale in the last years of his life … D’Annunzio had twenty-one persons in his service, six of them members of the fascist police.”

  MARCH 1923. Mussolini writes: “Mankind is perhaps tired of liberty. It has had an orgy of it.” He proposes sterner, more bracing ideals: “order, hierarchy, discipline.” The British ambassador to Rome reports back to London that although Mussolini is “hasty and violent” and prone to “fits of ungovernable rage,” he is nevertheless a “statesman of exceptional ability and enterprise,” and really quite gentlemanly. He has been “driving about through Rome in a two-seater with a well-grown lion cub sitting beside him.” The ambassador finds this “strange,” but concludes: “Italians seem to like this sort of thing.”

  6 MAY 1923. D’Annunzio is becoming more and more reclusive. His typist reports that he stays shut up in his room. He sees no one. He wants to see no one. For days on end he doesn’t even go out into the garden.

  He does, however, find time for sex. Now he is writing to Luisa, who is in the house but refusing to see him. Some visiting woman has provoked Luisa’s jealousy. D’Annunzio apologises. “I know I am incomprehensible,” he writes. “I know that what I have sometimes asked of you is perhaps inhuman.” He reassures her. “Nothing is taken from you. You are always the highest in my heart and in my thoughts. I do not know how I would live without you.” So far, so ordinary for an erring lover. But then d’Annunzio takes a further, outrageous step. Really, he writes, she should pity him. Her “silent rancour” is very trying to him. Her “bitter words” are even worse. He is not responsible for his own promiscuity. The trouble, he explains, is his “hereditary infirmity,” which makes him more wretched than she can possibly be. He deserves—he demands—her “fraternal compassion.”

  15 MAY 1923. Over a week has gone by and Luisa is unappeased. She has let d’Annunzio know that their love affair is “dead.” He protests. He never wants to part from her. Has he not given her endless proofs of his tenderness? He becomes querulous. Has he not explained over and over again that he takes other sexual partners, not for pleasure, but in a spirit of “voracious curiosity”? They stimulate his imagination—bedding them is a form of research, just part of his work. “We’ve talked about this so many times.” (Poor Luisa!) He reminds her that after he has had another woman he and she have especially exciting sex. “Our delirium goes beyond all limits.”

  Perhaps that is why Luisa stays, “imprisoned by her senses” as Duse was before her. For the next fifteen years she will live with d’Annunzio, playing the piano for his pleasure, running his household, procuring other women for him, entertaining his guests, leaving a rose in the keyhole of her bedroom on nights when she wants him in there with her.

  JUNE 1923. D’Annunzio is still cultivating his increasingly peculiar garden. This month he takes delivery of boulders from the various mountain tops where Italy’s Great War battles were fought. He arranges them around the Arengo and decorates them with mottoes.

  He turned sixty in March, and he has a new sexual partner, a twenty-two-year-old Frenchwoman named Angèle Lager who is living on Lake Garda as paid companion to an old acquaintance of his from Paris. She will be his lover, off and on, for the next three years. He enjoys biting her neck, revealed by fashionably cropped hair. He calls her Jouvence (Youth). He sends her strawberries and peaches and—so she will allege after their affair has ended—introduces her to the use of cocaine, and infects her with venereal disease.

  BACK IN 1915, Marinetti hailed Mussolini as an exemplary futurist. Now he adores everything about the Duce: his contempt, his audacity, his pugnaciousness; the way he “spits on everything which is vain, slow, cumbersome, useless”; his massive head, his “ultra-dynamic eyes like speeding cars”; his bowler hat like “black clouds which hang heavily over the inky blackness of ravines in the Apennines”; his resemblance to a torpedo.

  The feeling is not mutual. Mussolini doesn’t much like the futurists. He doesn’t trust Marinetti, and has him closely watched.

  24 SEPTEMBER 1923. D’Annunzio asks Mussolini for a “guard,” ostensibly to keep off the importunate legionaries who are still turning up at the house with tiresome frequency to salute their Commandant. Mussolini is delighted to comply, sending him Giovanni Rizzo, a police officer who subsequently plays the triple role of protector, jailer and spy. D’Annunzio is fully aware he is under surveillance. Fascist agents have been loitering around the village under various transparent pretexts. Now, in voluntarily accepting a spy into his household, he takes control of his own situation which is, from now on, virtually one of house arrest.

  Rizzo sends regular reports back to Fascist Headquarters. D’Annunzio, knowing this, uses him for the transmission of messages to Mussolini. He is a good master to Rizzo, using his influence on Mussolini to obtain repeated promotions for him. Rizzo, in turn, apparently growing fond of his master/charge, protects d’Annunzio by putting, in his reports to Mussolini, a harmless gloss on the poet’s more dangerous public utterances. He is also very helpful in persuading the local police to ignore d’Annunzio’s motoring offences, which are many and flagrant.

  D’Annunzio is undressing. He washes. He dabs scent onto himself. He is trying to resist his craving for cocaine. He fails. “Like a thief, like an assassin, fleeing the light, I go to fetch the poison from the cabinet.” As well as cocaine and sulfonal, he is regularly taking laudanum and a painkiller he calls “Adalina.”

  The door to Luisa’s room is ajar. The “orgy” lasts until dawn.

  23 NOVEMBER 1923. Mussolini has been taking an interest in the Bavarian “fascists” led by one Adolf Hitler, but after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch he decides they are “buffoons.” The visiting Spanish general, Miguel Primo de Rivera, is more congenial: he salutes Mussolini as “the apostle of a world campaign against dissolution and anarchy.”

  22 DECEMBER 1923. D’Annunzio graciously offers to donate the Vittoriale to Italy, giving a new meaning to his favoured motto: “Ho quel che ho donato” (I have what I have given). He has the words incised in the arch above the entrance gate. Their ambiguity is teasing. D’Annunzio is fully aware what a good deal he is proposing. The house will remain his home, but he will no longer be financially responsible for its upkeep.

  27 JANUARY 1924. Fiume finally becomes a part of Italy under the terms of a new treaty with Yugoslavia, and d’Annunzio is named Prince of Monte Nevoso (Snowy Mountain). He writes to Jouvence: “I am, oh delicious Maldestra, a ‘great man’ and a ‘public man’ alas, alas, alas!”

  Whatever he may say, he is very pleased with his new title and commissions one of his favourite artists to design him a coat of arms—a laurel wreath, a mountain and seven stars—which will soon be carved in stone on the Vittoriale’s grand portico. Rizzo reports to Mussolini that d’Annunzio wants only two things: the first is a great name to be remembered by posterity; the second is enough money “to live as he has always lived, without anxieties of any kind.”

  6 APRIL 1924. Another general election. Campaigning is rough. Rallies deteri
orate into brawls. The fascists employ fraud, intimidation and murder. To ensure their impunity, Mussolini purges the police force, forcing 340 commissioners and deputies to retire prematurely. The opposition parties—socialist, communist, liberal—again find it impossible to overcome their differences in order to stand together against fascism.

  Mussolini’s supporters win two-thirds of the votes, and now easily dominate the chamber. The fascist deputies are new—eighty per cent of them have never sat in parliament before—and young, two-thirds of them being under forty. Like d’Annunzio in Fiume, Mussolini is now a “Prince of Youth.”

  12 APRIL 1924. Paul Valéry visits the Vittoriale. He is met in Desenzano by a “diabolical motorboat” and whizzed up the lake in a flurry of wind and spray which comes near, he complains, to stripping him of his clothes, his hair and his skin. Arrived at the Vittoriale (“heated like a furnace”), he is greeted by d’Annunzio, who has shaved off all his facial hair, eyebrows included. They embrace, but not on equal terms. As Valéry tells it, d’Annunzio’s embrace is the “accolade of a King.”

  D’Annunzio tells Valéry he has been trying to re-enter that “third place,” the state that was neither life nor death, which he glimpsed on the night of his perilous night flight over Cattaro. His cocaine consumption and his compulsive promiscuity are not just self-indulgence. By means of drugs, of sex, of the arrangement of his bizarre but meaningful domestic spaces, he is trying to attain a mystical self-transcendence. He is reading ancient authors on the cult of Dionysus. He quotes St. Paul on “sobria ebrietas.” He has been studying the Rig Veda, Socrates, Nietzsche, the prophet Hosea.

  He is interested in self-denial as much as in self-indulgence. He makes a note about Mahatma Gandhi: he is impressed by the way Gandhi survives on a kind of thin porridge.

  24 APRIL 1924. John St. Loe Strachey, a British journalist who will become Oswald Mosley’s parliamentary private secretary, visits Mussolini in the Palazzo Chigi. Mussolini is hunched behind his desk: his only greeting is a brusque nod. Strachey is sufficiently impressed to employ a metaphor frequently used by d’Annunzio of himself. “Imagine Vulcan interrupted at his forge.” Mussolini is the Vulcan who is hammering out the new Italy on his anvil. “You can feel the heat of the furnace, the strain on his body, in the set of the muscles of his face, in his heavy shoulders, and in his regard.” Strachey shares his impressions with Ambassador Graham, who agrees about Mussolini’s “smouldering force,” but has reservations. “I fear that he does not really, in his heart, disapprove of the violence used towards his political opponents.”

  22 MAY 1924. D’Annunzio takes delivery of Mussolini’s biggest gift yet—the plane in which the poet flew over Vienna in August 1918. He will eventually construct an enormous domed room for its display.

  21 APRIL 1924. Eleonora Duse dies, in a hotel in Pittsburgh, while touring America. On receiving the news d’Annunzio writes to Mussolini: “Far from Italy, the most Italian of hearts has been extinguished.” He asks that her “adored body” should be brought home at the state’s expense. It is. Mussolini, who fully understands the symbolic usefulness of celebrities, needed no prompting.

  Sure now that she can make no further demands on him, d’Annunzio mourns Duse unreservedly. He asks his favourite sculptor to make a bust of her and keeps it—veiled—on his desk. Every year, for the rest of his life, he marks the anniversary of her death. He has always enjoyed imagining his beloved women dead.

  Duse’s daughter Enrichetta destroys all her mother’s letters from d’Annunzio. She claims Duse “commanded” her to do so, but it seems strange, in that case, that Eleanora did not destroy them herself. Enrichetta must have been shocked by them: no doubt, like all d’Annunzio’s other love letters, they contain explicit accounts of the couple’s love-making. D’Annunzio writes furiously to her “the destruction of my letters to Ghisola is an unjustifiable crime against the spirit.” He knows Duse’s mind better than Enrichetta does. “She is ever near me, speaking without words.”

  30 MAY 1924. Giacomo Matteotti, the new leader of the Socialist Party, addresses parliament, denouncing the “obscene violence” whereby the fascists have won the recent election. There is noisy barracking. Mussolini sits silent, frowning, immobile; but his supporters shout and shake their fists and attempt to drag Matteotti from the podium. A voice from the government benches yells: “We will teach you to respect us by kicking you or shooting you in the back!” Matteotti waits until he can be heard again above the hubbub and then continues his indictment of the government. He protests against the formation of the illegal militia. He declares: “You want to hurl the country backwards, towards absolutism.”

  He knows exactly what he is risking. In conclusion he turns to his friends and says, smiling: “Now you can prepare my funeral oration.”

  26 MAY 1924. D’Annunzio has a new pet, a tortoise that Luisa Casati bought for him from a zoo in Hamburg. The gardeners call it Carolina. D’Annunzio, aiming for a higher tone, names it Cheli (Greek for tortoise).

  10 JUNE 1924. Matteotti is walking along the Tiber, in the centre of Rome. Not only has he challenged the fascist government in parliament, he is an accomplished lawyer with important connections abroad. It is widely believed that he is gathering evidence of corruption within the fascist government, and particularly of bribes paid by an American oil company to secure control of petrol distribution in Italy.

  As Matteotti walks alone, five men surround him and drag him into a car. They all belong to an undercover group of fascist hitmen known as the Ceka (after the Soviet secret police). Matteotti is stabbed to death. His killers drive around the city for several hours, before eventually taking his corpse out into the countryside and burying it in a shallow grave beside the road, where it will be found two months later. It is rapidly established that their car was parked the previous night in the courtyard of the Ministry of the Interior. Late in the evening, one of the men visits Mussolini and shows him a small piece of blood-stained upholstery.

  Mussolini denies any responsibility for the murder and orders his associates to create “confusion” about the facts of the case. He announces that the investigation will be conducted, not by the independent magistrates but by the fascist chief of police. He tells his staff: “If I get away with this we will all survive, otherwise we shall all sink together.”

  Throughout the next two weeks d’Annunzio is at work revising his autobiographical essays for publication, working, so he tells Treves, from two each afternoon until five o’clock the following morning. He makes no recorded comment on Matteotti’s death.

  13 JUNE 1924. Some one hundred anti-fascist deputies—democrats, socialists and members of the Catholic Popolari Party—declare that the fascist government is “unconstitutional” and walk out of Montecitorio, boycotting parliament to signal their condemnation of the killing of Matteotti. Their withdrawal, known, after the fifth-century BC revolt of the Roman plebs, as the “Aventine Secession,” is a disastrous mistake. Mussolini calls for a vote of confidence, and with all the opposition absent, easily wins it.

  G. Ward Price writes in the Daily Mail: “Not in our time only, but down through history Mussolini will remain an inspiration to all who prize freedom and love their native lands.”

  d’annunzio communicates with his domestic staff in writing. Now he writes in playfully salacious mode to his cook, whom he addresses as Sister Albina. He loves her pastries and cream cakes, to each variety of which he gives a sacred name. The “five eyes of St. Ninfa” is a chocolate and chestnut confection topped with five dollops of whipped cream. Now he tells her that he has been informed by Aélis (“the Abbess”) that the biscuits she produced the previous evening are known in France as “nuns’ breasts.” He signs his letter “Father Prior.”

  15 JUNE 1924. The fascist government pay d’Annunzio an enormous sum (the price, perhaps, of his silence) for the manuscript of Glory, the play in which—it is generally agreed by fascist critics—he described the kind of leader with whom Italy has n
ow been blessed, Mussolini.

  D’Annunzio writes to Antonietta Treves, his editor’s wife, asking her to buy him two large garden umbrellas, one with red stripes, one with blue, and a quantity of the very best opoponax for the concoction of perfumes. This summer he acquires the house next door, the handsome Villa Mirabella with its balconies and apricot-coloured stucco, as a guesthouse. For all his talk of hermitages and melancholy, he is quite the host. Ida Rubinstein comes to stay. No sooner has she left than Luisa Casati arrives. And a week after Casati’s departure d’Annunzio’s wife takes her place: he takes pleasure in welcoming her as the Principessa di Monte Nevoso. Four decades ago their elopement opened a way for him into the aristocracy: now he has conferred a title on her.

  23 JULY 1924. D’Annunzio writes to one of his former legionaries describing the political situation as a “fetid ruin.” It is the nearest he will ever come to commenting on Matteotti’s death. When the letter is made public Rizzo reports to Mussolini that neither this, nor any other public statement of d’Annunzio’s, should be taken at face value. Rizzo thinks d’Annunzio may have written the letter as an “alibi” in case anti-fascists ever return to power. The poet “has never been fascist,” says Rizzo, but he is now politically quiescent.

  SEPTEMBER 1924. A fascist deputy is shot dead in a Roman street. Roberto Farinacci, most aggressive of the fascist ras, blames the communists and calls out for vengeance: “The land of Mazzini and Dante must not be consigned to Lenin.” The squads are out in force, bullying and beating suspected socialists and trashing their property.

  Luigi Pirandello, Italy’s other famous playwright, sends a telegram to Mussolini. “If Your Excellency deems me worthy of entering the National Fascist Party, I will consider it the greatest honour to occupy the post of your most humble and obedient follower.” D’Annunzio is to blame for saying nothing about Matteotti’s murder, but at least he does not say this.