Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  JULY 1932. Mussolini’s contribution to the national encyclopaedia is published. Written with the assistance of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, it is on the “Doctrine of Fascism.” Among the tenets are the following: individual freedom is a delusion; the only real virtue is dedication to the state; war bestows moral grandeur; Italy must continue to expand; man is ennobled by struggle; the nineteenth century was the century of the individual, the twentieth is a “collective” century, “a fascist century.”

  In an appendix to Mussolini’s essay, the historian Giacchino Volpe laments the fascist heroes killed in fighting with “communists or deserters” during the turmoil of 1919. They were exemplary men, writes Volpe, and he sketches out a typical curriculum vitae. They were interventionists, they volunteered to fight and, best of all, they were legionaries at Fiume. D’Annunzio has still pointedly omitted to ask his followers to become fascists, but willy-nilly, the fascists are claiming them for their own.

  OCTOBER 1932. The tenth anniversary of the March on Rome. The “Avenue of the Empires” has been cut through ancient Rome, slicing between the Colosseum and the Capitol. Eleven streets of what Mussolini scornfully calls “filthy picturesque” mediaeval buildings have been demolished to allow him to parade his military might in the heart of the city.

  Four million people visit the “Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution” in the Palace of Exhibitions. The palace’s neo-classical façade has been masked with a new frontage, all black and red and silver, with a colonnade of four gigantic fasces faced with riveted aluminium. The exhibition’s most striking rooms are those framed as symbolic tableaux: the Gallery of Fasci, a hall where pilasters rear upwards out of the wall as though in the fascist salute towards a ceiling inscribed with the word “DUCE”; the Hall of Mussolini, a mock-up of the leader’s office; the Shrine of the Martyrs, a dark, domed room whose walls are covered with thousands of metal plaques, each representing a dead soldier. The art in which d’Annunzio has been experimenting in his seclusion—installation-art-cum-interior-décor—is now being practised on a massive scale by the regime.

  In November, Mussolini visits d’Annunzio. He still needs to show his respect to the older man, who describes himself as the “Giver of cities and of coastlines, the precursor of all that is good about fascism.”

  30 JANUARY 1933. Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Hitler has a great admiration for the “incomparable Mussolini,” whom he considers a “brilliant statesman.” There is much dividing the two leaders and their regimes—not least Nazi racial theory. Italians are not Aryan, they are not even Indo-European. They are “Mediterranean,” third-best of the European blood groups. Then there is the fact that Italy betrayed Germany, siding with the Allies in the Great War, and there is the ongoing dispute over the South Tyrol/Alto Adige. On the other side there is Italians’ centuries-old hostility to their Austro-German oppressors.

  Despite all this the two leaders are warmly disposed towards each other. Hitler keeps a lifesize bust of Mussolini in his party headquarters in Munich and in 1922, a couple of weeks after his March on Rome, Mussolini was gratified to be informed by one of his agents that the Nazis’ political programme “to restore the authority of the state; to abolish strikes … in a word to restore order,” was “in great part taken from the Italian Fascio.”

  FEBRUARY 1933. Italo Balbo leads a flight of twenty-four seaplanes across the Atlantic, flying from Orbetello to Chicago and back in tight formation, an exploit as magnificent as d’Annunzio’s once-projected flight to Tokyo would have been. During his stopover in the United States, Balbo is inducted into the Sioux tribe as Chief Flying Eagle, and enjoys himself at the coconut shies of Luna Park.

  JULY 1933. After years of complaining about it, d’Annunzio succeeds in having the “filthy tavern” by the Vittoriale’s entrance gate closed down and demolished. The drunkards there have been frightening off his lady friends, he tells his lawyer. In the newly cleared space, Maroni starts work on plans for the Square of the Fallen—a piazza-cum-war memorial. Stone arches frame an inscription describing the Vittoriale as a “religious book” composed of “living stones.”

  MUSSOLINI APPOINTS HIMSELF MINISTER OF CORPORATIONS. Fascist philosopher Ugo Spirito publishes a definition of “corporatism.” It is opposed both to the “levelling state” (socialism) and the “anarchic individual” (liberalism). Its essence is unanimity. “Wills unite to form a single will: multiple goals coalesce to form a single goal.” This monolithic state has at its apex the great leader. It is now conventional to use capitals when writing about Mussolini, as in writing about God. “The Revolution is Him. He is the Revolution.” “He is the GENIUS who brings good fortune to the Italic people.”

  All citizens, workers or employers alike, must belong to one or other of the corporations, within which they will operate on equal terms “with full dedication to the cause of the nation and fascism.” The constitution elaborated in Fiume by d’Annunzio and de Ambris has finally been realised.

  FEBRUARY 1934. D’Annunzio has a new lover whom he calls Lachne, a twenty-five-year-old prostitute from Milan whom Aélis has found for him. Lachne has tuberculosis: she will die in four years’ time. He loves her long hands, her pallor and the violet shadows around her eyes. She lodges above a trattoria, Lo Sport, down by the lake. He titillates himself with thinking of her in a narrow bed, in squalid surroundings. He writes verse in a mediaeval metre in celebration of her pubic hair. He sends his big shiny car to fetch her. He feeds her on his favourite risotto. He gives her a fur coat. He takes it off her, and strips her naked and then dresses her again, now in a golden tunic, now in a swathe of fine muslin he has painted himself. He writes her marvellous letters, describing their love-making, as he has done to so many women before her. When her period begins he dismisses her brusquely, and tells her to amuse herself at the cinema with another prostitute and leave him to his true love, Melancholy. After one of their extended trysts he overdoses himself with cocaine, collapses on the bed and passes out.

  Mussolini decrees that Italians must be taught to love their country and its past. Displays of traditional costume, performances of folk dance and folk music, re-enactments of rustic ceremonies—both Christian and otherwise—like those d’Annunzio and Michetti used to track down in the 1880s, are encouraged in order to arouse “that national spirit without which nothing great has ever been achieved in this world.”

  JUNE 1934. D’Annunzio has written to Mussolini urging him to keep his distance from Hitler, “that ignoble face spattered with whitewash and glue.” Mussolini, ignoring his advice, now meets Hitler for the first time, in Venice. It is not a happy visit. Hitler is revolted by the rooms full of degenerate modernist art on show at the Biennale. Mussolini thinks he looks like “a plumber in a mackintosh” and is bored by his diatribes. On returning to Germany, Hitler orders the murders of the Night of the Long Knives. The following month President von Hindenburg dies and Hitler assumes absolute power, proclaiming himself Führer. Nazis murder the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, with whom Mussolini has been friendly. Dollfuss’s wife and children are staying with the Mussolini family at the time of his death.

  Mussolini visits the Vittoriale again. Three days later, back in Rome, he and the King attend the opening of a production of Jorio’s Daughter, directed by Pirandello and with sets designed by de Chirico. D’Annunzio and his work are still in favour.

  D’Annunzio has a new playmate, a blonde young woman in her early twenties from the Alto Adige region, named Emy Huefler (opposite, on left). Sometimes he shuts himself into his private apartments with her for two or three days on end. Huefler will remain at the Vittoriale until d’Annunzio’s death.

  29 OCTOBER 1934. On the twelfth anniversary of the March on Rome, thirty-seven fascist “martyrs” are reburied in Santa Croce, the church in Florence where Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Galileo all lie. The coffins are carried through the streets in solemn procession—as those of d’Annunzio’s Fiuman “martyrs” were—each o
ne preceded by a banner bearing the dead man’s name. The ceremony is at once sacred and secular. A newspaper comments on the “civil liturgy of fascism,” and on the assembled crowd’s “great faith,” not in God, but in Mussolini.

  8 NOVEMBER 1934. D’Annunzio is ill and depressed. He writes to sculptor Renato Brozzi. For three days, he says, his only companions have been Brozzi’s bronze eagles, cats, ducks, gazelle, dogs and pigs. He identifies with the last-named. He, the man who tripped around Fiume showing off a waist which looked, and perhaps was, corseted, has grown flabby. Food is a growing preoccupation. He writes to his cook telling her he has a “mad desire” for cutlets beaten to the thinness of a banana skin. To Brozzi he describes himself as an “angelic winged pig.”

  DECEMBER 1934. The Brescia Combatants’ Association gives d’Annunzio a copy of the first-century statue of Victory which played a part in Maybe Yes, Maybe No. Maroni builds a temple in which to house it, within the tremendous honey-stuccoed loggias which now encircle d’Annunzio’s house and link it with the towers of the Archives and Library. More such gifts follow. The commune of Milan present a newly commissioned Victory of the Piave, another woman in bondage, inspired by d’Annunzio’s line: “On that shore of death we held Victory our immortal prisoner.” Maroni places it atop a high pillar and surrounds it with a colonnade of broken arches.

  JUNE 1935. A new Ministry of Popular Culture is inaugurated. Half a century earlier d’Annunzio had insisted that journalism had a greater influence than literature. Now fascists agree. To think that a political idea can spread via books and high culture, “with lots of homework,” is a delusion. A leading fascist reflects that “the advent of the masses into political life” has made it necessary to advertise an ideology, just as one advertises a bank or a business. A leader’s face, his tone, his words, must be repeated “over and over again through photography, film and photography once more … Just as in commercial advertising.” Another d’Annunzian lesson learnt.

  SEPTEMBER 1935. Publication of d’Annunzio’s autobiography, The Hundred and Hundred and Hundred Pages of the Secret Book by Gabriele d’Annunzio Tempted to Die. The Secret Book is a discontinuous work: autobiography with fictional interjections, narrative repeatedly interrupted by musings. Most of it is based on material from d’Annunzio’s notebooks, much of which has already been reworked and published in the Faville, or in Notturno. But though the matter is old, the form is modern, modernist in fact.

  “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” wrote T. S. Eliot in 1922, the year d’Annunzio began work on what would become The Secret Book. D’Annunzio, converting his life into a literary mosaic of reminiscence and introspective thought and stored-up fragments of the by now enormous library of texts with which his mind is furnished, is once more displaying his gift for scenting the zeitgeist.

  2 OCTOBER 1935. Mussolini, from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, declares war on Ethiopia. His speech is broadcast all over the country, booming out from loudspeakers in every piazza. Two weeks later the League of Nations condemns the invasion, and imposes sanctions against Italy. The British, many of whom have so far admired Mussolini, have second thoughts. Anthony Eden calls him a “complete gangster” and the “anti-Christ.” But in Italy even those liberals who have been most critical of the regime, d’Annunzio’s friend and editor Luigi Albertini among them, declare their support for Mussolini’s attempt to win for Italians a “little place in the sun” and to expunge the shame of the defeat at Adua four decades earlier.

  D’Annunzio writes to tell Mussolini he is moved “to my very depths—as by a kind of supernatural revelation.” He offers Mussolini a sword bearing a solid gold model of the city of Fiume on its hilt. He writes a diatribe against the League of Nations and sends it, bound in crimson silk with gold clasps and tassels, to the French President Albert Lebrun. The President does not acknowledge it.

  JANUARY 1936. Antongini visits d’Annunzio, having not seen him for a year. He is kept waiting for several days before he is granted an appointment and, when he is finally summoned to d’Annunzio’s rooms, he is shocked by how much his former employer has aged. His body seems shrivelled. The slope of his left shoulder is more pronounced. His face is ravaged. He is still loquacious. For hours on end he delivers fantastically elaborate sentences ornamented with extravagant images—but his conversation is disjointed and repetitive: its main topic is sex. The cafés along the lake’s shore, notes Antongini, “buzz with stories of the recent loves of Gabriele d’Annunzio.”

  5 MAY 1936. Marshall Badoglio, having overcome the Ethiopian army with the illegal help of mustard gas and arsine, enters Addis Ababa. In Rome, 400,000 people cram into the streets around the Palazzo Venezia to hear Mussolini’s victory speech, calling him out onto the balcony ten times to acknowledge their cheering, while a choir of 10,000 children, disposed on the steps of the Victor Emmanuel monument, sing an anthem. D’Annunzio fires twenty-seven shots from the Puglia in celebration and writes the Duce a congratulatory letter: “You have subjugated all the uncertainties of fate and defeated every human hesitation.”

  17 JULY 1936. A group of Spanish generals headed by Francisco Franco rise up against Spain’s democratic government, initiating a three-year civil war. Mussolini, who has said of the Spanish Republic, “to found a parliamentary republic today means using an oil lamp in the era of electric lights,” supports the rebels.

  26 AUGUST 1937. Ugo Ojetti visits the Vittoriale for the last time. D’Annunzio is sweet and affectionate, he reports, but physically he is a wreck. He is toothless, his face at once wrinkled and puffy. He who was once so meticulously clean is now slovenly. His shoes are decrepit, their laces mistied. His jacket and trousers are “lamentable.”

  28 SEPTEMBER 1937. Mussolini is visiting Germany. Hermann Göring demonstrates his toy train-set for his visitor’s entertainment. In Berlin, Mussolini addresses a crowd of nearly a million people, pointing out how much Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany have in common. They emerged as unified nations at about the same time. In each of their cultures youth and energy are exalted and the human will is seen as being the force driving history.

  On his return journey his train passes through Verona. This is the occasion of his last meeting with d’Annunzio.

  1 MARCH 1938. D’Annunzio, aged seventy-four, dies of a brain haemorrhage while sitting at his desk. The telephonist who transmits the news of his death to Mussolini’s headquarters hears someone at the other end exclaim, “At last!”

  Emy Huefler, d’Annunzio’s blonde girlfriend, leaves the Vittoriale immediately. Shortly afterwards she is in Berlin working for Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. She is a Nazi agent who has been planted in d’Annunzio’s household to spy on him. It has been suggested that she has killed him with an overdose of cocaine, but given his history of drug abuse and venereal infections, and his well-documented physical decline, it’s unlikely that she needed to.

  Mussolini, accompanied by most of the highest-ranking fascists, arrives at the Vittoriale the next day to claim the role of chief mourner and to ensure that, however evasive the poet has been in life, in death he will be securely claimed for the fascist cause. D’Annunzio’s body lies in state on the Puglia, while an honour guard of soldiers keeps vigil by torchlight. All day and all night mourners file past the coffin.

  His funeral takes place in the church at his gates, to whose priests he once offered a large bribe in an attempt to stop them disturbing his peace with their bell-ringing. The banner that Olga Levi made for him, the banner which he draped over Randaccio’s coffin, and which he so often employed as a prop thereafter, is hung over his own catafalque. Mussolini and the King’s representative lead the mourners, followed by d’Annunzio’s wife, who has been, of late, a frequent visitor, and his children (none of whom he has seen for years). There is no mention of Luisa Baccara or of Aélis in accounts of the ceremony—nor of the prostitute whom d’Annunzio called Titti and who was his favourite sexual partner during his last months.

  His
body is lodged, pending the construction of the mausoleum he and Maroni have been planning, in the “little temple of the holocaust,” in the forecourt of the Vittoriale.

  1 SEPTEMBER 1938. The Ship is performed al fresco on the Venetian island of Sant’Elena. The stage is enormous and so is the cast. The set is as elaborate as d’Annunzio always wanted it to be. A half-constructed basilica, a ship and a massive rampart-and-moat set-up complete with gun emplacements, are all simultaneously on stage, all plausibly close to actual size. Audiences of 4,000 people attend night after night. The Minister for Culture, who has funded the production, fixes a marble plaque to the Casetta Rossa and announces: “By the will of the Regime, Gabriele d’Annunzio is truly commemorated.”

  D’ANNUNZIO IS DEAD, but Maroni, who is now director of the Foundation of the Vittoriale, is still working for him. Architect and client communicate by means of séances. D’Annunzio’s spirit, speaking through a medium, insists that the planned amphitheatre and mausoleum be completed. Maroni passes d’Annunzio’s posthumous messages on to Mussolini, with requests for yet more money. Mussolini complies.

  The mausoleum caps the hill which d’Annunzio called the Keep or the Holy Mount. White, slabby and portentous, it looms, a brutalist shrine, above the muddled yellow stucco and terracotta of the Vittoriale. Three concentric circular platforms of stone, the “Rings of the Victory of the Humble, of the Artificers and of the Heroes,” polished stone stairways, a portico with tall, smooth arches: everything massive and imposing. On the Ring of the Heroes there are ten sarcophagi dedicated to (and in some cases containing the remains of) d’Annunzio’s disciples, including Guido Keller and Luigi Siverio, the first legionary to die at Fiume. In the centre, raised above his fellows by another round platform and four blocky pillars of unadorned stone, is d’Annunzio’s sarcophagus.