Читать книгу The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War - Lucy Hughes-Hallett - Страница 10
ОглавлениеROME, 1881. Here is Gabriele d’Annunzio, seventeen years old, just out of school, the precocious author of two highly praised volumes of verse. Observing him is Edoardo Scarfoglio, himself only twenty-one, another ambitious young man making his way in the ancient capital of the eleven-year-old Italian nation. Scarfoglio is in the office of the weekly paper of which he is editor. The room is full of chattering people. Scarfoglio is lounging on a bench, yawning, when in comes the juvenile poet. ‘At the first glimpse of this little fellow with his curly head and sweetly feminine eyes … I started and sprang up, extraordinarily struck … Gabriele was the object of a craze, of an incredible cult, for all of us. He was so friendly and modest, and he carried the weight of his newborn glory with such grace that everyone ran to him, spontaneously drawn by feelings of friendship and affection.’
The curls will soon be gone (by the age of thirty d’Annunzio will be almost completely bald) and the modesty may never have existed outside of Scarfoglio’s imagination. Already the young poet is an adroit self-publicist. A few months before his arrival in Rome, he anonymously informed newspaper editors of his own untimely death in a fall from his horse. The pathetic story of the brilliantly gifted youth, cut off at the outset of what would surely have been a dazzling career, was widely reported and lamented over. The second volume of poems by the tragic boy, published later that month, sold well. By the time the ‘mistake’ was discovered, d’Annunzio was considerably more famous than mere merit, however substantial, could have made him.
Scarfoglio will lament that, only a few months after that first meeting, the androgynous innocent is on his way to becoming a smart young man about the booming capital. ‘I will never forget how stupefied I was, the first time I saw Gabriele all spruced up and perfumed for a party.’ At the age of twenty, d’Annunzio (seen by Scarfoglio as being like a ‘timid, wild girl’) will demonstrate his worldly ambition and his virility by impregnating and eloping with a duke’s daughter. At the age of twenty-six, already the author of four volumes of poetry and two of short stories, as well as of reams of knowing, gossipy journalism, he will publish the first of his novels.
1893. D’Annunzio, now aged thirty, is living in Naples. He left Rome to escape from his creditors, and before the end of the year he will have to scarper from Naples for the same reason. He has written three novels and dozens of stories which are beginning to make money, but never enough to pay off his exorbitant debts. He has abandoned his wife and three sons, and left Elvira Fraternali, whom he loved passionately for eight years. Now he is living with the Sicilian princess Maria Gravina, together with whom he faces a jail sentence for adultery (a general amnesty will spare them). His writing – as scandalous as it is brilliant – and his flamboyant lifestyle, his debts, his duels and his love affairs, have made him, by this time, an international celebrity.
During this period of his life, in personal terms so harum-scarum, the groundwork of d’Annunzio’s political thinking is being laid. He has been reading Nietzsche and finding in the philosopher’s work confirmation of his own elitism. Acting the pike again, he makes provocatively Nietzschean declarations. ‘Man will be divided into two races,’ he writes. ‘To the superior race, which shall have risen by the pure energy of its will, all shall be permitted; to the lower, nothing or very little.’ D’Annunzio never doubts his own membership of the former class.
Now he is enthralled by Richard Wagner. D’Annunzio adores music, but he is not himself a musician. To hear it he must seek out those who are. He goes repeatedly to call on the composer Niccolò van Westerhout and prevails upon him to play entire operas on the piano, while he follows the libretto, going through Tristan and Isolde at least ten times. He is learning to hear the patterning of reprise and variation, to feel the great surges of emotion released by the music and to understand how they are controlled. He keeps van Westerhout at the piano for hours and hours. ‘Tristan filled his spirit with a kind of morbid obsession.’ He insists on hearing certain passages over and over again. He is transfixed by the ‘sufferings that begin with the love potion’.
At home he is in desperate straits. The bailiffs are encamped outside the door of his borrowed lodgings. Maria Gravina’s sanity is precarious. But d’Annunzio has the knack of closing himself off from all emotional and practical demands. The musical sessions with van Westerhout pass straight into his influential essay on Wagner and into his suicide-haunted novel Il Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death), in which the lovers spend days on end playing and singing Tristan and Isolde together, before the hero drags his mistress over a cliff in an involuntary liebestod (love-death).
Later that year Maria Gravina will try to kill herself. His wife has already attempted suicide.
August 1895. D’Annunzio is sunbathing stark naked on the deck of a yacht bound for Greece. He has recently received his largest payment to date, for the French edition of his first novel, Piacere (Pleasure). Among his fellow guests on the cruise is his French translator, Georges Hérelle.
Hérelle is disappointed. He has been looking forward to earnest literary discussions interspersed with serious sightseeing, but d’Annunzio seems only to want to bask in the sun while swapping smutty jokes with the other young Italians on board, and fretting about the difficulty of getting his shirts properly ironed ready for dinner engagements in port. When they go ashore at Eleusis, Hérelle notes that d’Annunzio ‘hardly looks, chatting all the time of things which have nothing to do with our excursion; about amorous adventures, about society people’. On train journeys he doesn’t feast his eyes on the passing landscape, he puts a silk handkerchief over his face and dozes. In Patras and again in Piraeus he goes off, almost as soon as they’ve landed, to find a prostitute. ‘Truly,’ notes Hérelle in his journal, ‘there is something puerile about Gabriele d’Annunzio.’
What Hérelle doesn’t grasp is that d’Annunzio’s mind works so fast he doesn’t need to gaze at length in order to receive impressions, or to preserve a solemn silence in order to reflect upon what he sees. Within days of returning from the cruise he will start planning his first play, La Città Morta (The Dead City), inspired by the party’s visit to Mycenae. Eight years later he will write his modern epic, Maia. The visit to a Patras brothel which Hérelle found so sordid (‘These awful women … these sailor’s women … I cannot understand how in Greece one can waste time so foolishly’), will appear transmuted into a half comic, half profoundly sorrowful episode in which Helen of Troy, terribly aged, symbolises the transience of the pleasures and beauties of the flesh.
December 1895. The Caffè Gambrinus, Florence. André Gide, who is in the café with him, is watching d’Annunzio carefully. ‘He is greedily eating little vanilla ice creams served in cardboard cones. He talks with charming good manners without, I think, making much effort … Nothing about him suggests literature or genius. He has a little, pointed, pale-blond beard, and he speaks with a clear voice, rather icy but soft and wheedling. His glance is quite cold: perhaps he is cruel, or perhaps it is his refined sensuality that makes him seem so to me. On his head he wears a plain black bowler hat.’
Since returning from Greece, d’Annunzio has begun his relationship with Eleonora Duse. He tells Gide: ‘I have read Sophocles under the crumbling gates of Mycenae.’ This reading must have been brief – d’Annunzio’s visit to Mycenae was over in time for lunch – but the claim fits with his sense of himself as heir to the great classical tradition, and with the project he and Duse are cherishing. They want to build an amphitheatre in the Alban Hills and run it as an al fresco national theatre where d’Annunzio’s plays will be performed in tandem with those of the Greek tragedians.
The talk turns to contemporary European literature. D’Annunzio tells Gide that he dislikes Maeterlinck’s ‘banality’ and Ibsen’s ‘lack of beauty’. He knows all the French authors’ work.
‘With a smile I say to him: “But you’ve read everything!”
“What can you expect?” he says, as though to excuse himself, “I am Latin.’’’
Being ‘Latin’ is very important to d’Annunzio’s sense of self. Later it will become the dominant theme of his politics. He calls all Anglo-Saxon or Germanic people ‘barbarians’.
‘I’m a terrible one for work,’ he tells Gide. ‘For nine or ten months of the year, non-stop, I work twelve hours a day. I’ve already written a score of books.’ This is only a slight exaggeration. D’Annunzio’s love life is so scandalous that the public thinks of him as a dilettante, but the majority of his time is passed in near solitude and intensely concentrated effort. ‘When I write,’ he says, ‘a sort of magnetical force takes hold of me, like an epileptic. I wrote L’Innocente [his second novel] in three and a half weeks in an Abruzzese convent. If anyone had disturbed me, I would have shot him.’
‘All of these things,’ records Gide, ‘he said without any boastfulness, with gentle sweetness.’
The ability to conjure that same lulling sweetness which entranced Scarfoglio was a gift which never deserted d’Annunzio. Even those who know him well enough to perceive the indifference it masks, find it irresistible. ‘His face lights up in greeting you,’ writes one of his aides years later. ‘And you succumb! You have to succumb! In reality, he doesn’t give a damn!’
January 1901. Turin. In the five years since his encounter with Gide, d’Annunzio has written several plays and his most celebrated novel, and he has embarked on the exquisite sequence of lyric poems, Alcyone (Halcyon). He and Duse are living in adjacent houses in Settignano, in the hills above Florence, their every outing reported by the gossip columns, their incongruous appearance as a couple (Duse is nearly five years older and several inches taller than her lover) repeatedly caricatured.
D’Annunzio’s literary career is at its apogee, and he has begun his transition from poet to politician. In 1897 he contested and won an election in his native Abruzzi. In his electoral campaign he hymned the ‘politics of poetry’. Voted out of office after barely two years, he has been writing the poetry of politics, composing odes in an aggressive and nationalist vein. He is in Turin to give a public reading of the latest of them, a thousand-line tribute to Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is in Turin as a contributor to the Parisian journal Gil Blas. Marinetti, who will soon become better known as the impresario and spokesman of the futurist movement, is a prolific journalist. Quizzically, Marinetti observes d’Annunzio in his new role as public speaker. Il Vate, the bard, as he now likes to be styled, is thirty-eight, but he could be any age, or ageless. Tightly buttoned into his dark suit he looks like ‘a little ebony idol with a head of ivory’. His eyes ‘sharpened and electrified by the expectation of triumph’ are ‘strangely resplendent’. His face is ‘pale, dried, as though burnt by the fire of Ambition’. This is not an objective description. Marinetti is jealous of d’Annunzio, whom he sees as ‘corsetted by ambition and pride’. He sneers that ‘at all times and in all places Gabriele is dreaming of turning the world upside down with a well-turned phrase’. This is something Marinetti also dreams of doing, and so far d’Annunzio is proving better at it.
D’Annunzio takes his place on the platform, and begins his performance with, thinks Marinetti, the smugness of a cordon bleu chef lifting a lid to display a steaming dish of lentils. He reads very slowly, softly beating time with his fist on the table. His lips are preternaturally red: several contemporaries report that he uses make-up.
The recitation over (it takes an hour and a half) the crowd noisily acclaims him. He half rises to acknowledge the applause, bowing his head. Marinetti notices how the new-fangled electric light is brilliantly reflected off d’Annunzio’s shiny bald pate: a thoroughly modern nimbus for a machine-age hero.
1904, Settignano. Here is another view of d’Annunzio, this one by an anonymous lady whom he takes to bed one afternoon.
He is compulsively promiscuous. Within the last three years he has completed his immense poem-cycle, Laudi. His eight-year-long affair with Eleonora Duse is over and he is spending money more prodigally than ever before. His new lover, an aristocratic young widow, the Marchesa Alessandra di Rudinì, is dangerously ill. It is probably during one of Alessandra’s sojourns in hospital that the unknown lady arrives in response to an invitation with the pointed postscript, ‘I shall expect you alone’.
She is shown into a small sitting room crammed with roses. ‘They were everywhere – in vases, in amphorae, in bowls – and their petals were strewn on the carpets.’ D’Annunzio takes great care over dressing the set for his seductions. Outside the long windows a pergola covered with wisteria casts a mauve veil over the sunlight. The room is suffocatingly overheated, and the atmosphere is further laden with Acqua Nuntia, the scent d’Annunzio has concocted himself from a formula which he claims to have found in a fourteenth-century manuscript. He has had quantities of it made up by a chemist in Florence. It is bottled in Murano glass bottles (also made to the poet’s orders) and labelled (a lot of thought goes into the design of the labels).
The host appears, dressed in a dark blue kimono bordered with black. It is d’Annunzio’s habit to dress in this conveniently removable garment for an assignation and he always provides a kimono for his female visitor’s use. On a small ebony table a large silver tray has been set, bearing a samovar, two cups, and marrons glacés on silver plates. D’Annunzio pours the tea (Chinese, very fragrant), then seats himself crosslegged on the rug by the lady’s chair, takes both her hands in his and embarks upon his seduction. ‘From his gestures, from his voice, there came an invincible wave of desire which engulfed my whole being in an irresistible atmosphere of love.’ There are a number of descriptions of this process: d’Annunzio was a highly persuasive wooer. The anonymous lady feels herself swept ‘into mysterious spheres where there are no laws nor conventions’. Thus conveniently ‘drugged by the delicious poison of the Poet’s musical words’, she somehow swoons her way, without compromising herself by explicitly consenting to sex, into his bedroom.
Their transports ended, d’Annunzio leaves her. ‘A quarter of an hour later I found him in the library, turning the pages of a book.’ Without a word he escorts her to her carriage. She is driven away, feeling ‘the horrid sensation of being discarded like a toy’. On d’Annunzio’s orders, her carriage has been filled, ‘like a rich coffin’, with roses.
Summer 1906. D’Annunzio is in a palatial rented villa, a former home of the dukes of Tuscany, at the seaside near Pisa. His play La Figlia di Jorio (Jorio’s Daughter) has made him not just a literary star but also the voice of his people. ‘Evviva the poet of Italy!’ shouted the audience at its first night.
Alessandra is here, but she is addicted to morphine now and d’Annunzio is already writing daily to his new love, a Florentine countess. For the first time in nearly twenty years he has all three of his sons with him. In the mornings they box in an improvised ring on the beach. D’Annunzio gallops his horse through the pine woods, or swims, or paddles his brand new canoe – throwing himself into each activity with energy which astonishes the younger men. For lunch, served formally by some of the fifteen servants, he changes into a white linen suit, one of the hundred or so he has brought with him. He writes late into the night.
An aspiring poet, Umberto Saba, guest of d’Annunzio’s son Gabriellino, is our witness at this gathering. D’Annunzio, still physically trim at forty-three, greets Saba with exquisite courtesy. Flatteringly, he draws him away from the assembled company and out into the garden, where they sit down together on a stone bench. ‘He asked me, if I was not too tired from my journey, and if it would not be too much of a nuisance for me, to recite some of my poetry?’ This is the acme of Saba’s hopes. He can hardly believe his good fortune. He obliges. D’Annunzio is all compliments. He asks if he may recommend Saba’s work to his editor? Saba, overwhelmed by the great man’s generosity, is close to tears. Everything about the marvellous moment stays with him. Years later it will be as though he can still hear the pine needles creaking beneath their feet.
The conversation continues. There have only been three great poets in Italy, d’Annunzio says – Dante, Petrarch and Leopardi – before, that is, (and he repeats this twice) himself. Saba notices that the poet’s sons are not allowed to call him ‘Papa’. He requires them to address him as ‘Maestro’.
Afterwards Saba posts his precious manuscript. He gets no response. D’Annunzio does not pass his poems on to anyone. He doesn’t even send them back.
September 1909. The Brescia air show: for most of the 50,000 people present their first sight of the amazing spectacle of a man aloft in a flying machine. It is only six years since Wilbur and Orville Wright made their first powered flight, thirteen months since Wilbur first demonstrated their Flyer I in Europe, barely six weeks since Louis Blériot (who is here at Brescia) flew across the English Channel, crash-landing in a vertical fall of sixty-five feet to arrive, with a smashed undercarriage but himself unharmed, in a meadow near Dover Castle. D’Annunzio is ecstatic. Humanity’s conquest of the air, he proclaims, presages, ‘A new civilisation, a new life, new skies!’ A poet is called for, ‘capable of singing this epic’. That poet must be himself. He stages a poetry-reading-cum-press-conference-cum-photo-opportunity at Brescia, reciting verses for the assembled journalists and photographers. The poem, about Icarus, was first published ten years previously: d’Annunzio has been dreaming of flight since he was a schoolboy.
He is at Brescia to gather material for his next novel. He is also planning, courageously (already several aviators have died), to cadge a ride. Now he is being observed by Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod. The two are holidaying together on Lake Garda. Kafka is depressed: his inspiration has deserted him; his stomach feels to him like a person on the brink of tears. To get him writing again Brod suggests they compose competing accounts of the air show.
The two young men are in the immense crowd on the parched airfield. They both notice d’Annunzio among the ‘sparkling ladies’ and gentlemen on the stands. Brod is struck by d’Annunzio’s ‘feminine charm’, and finds him ‘marvellous through and through’. Kafka is less impressed. By his account d’Annunzio is ‘short’, which is the simple truth, but also ‘weak’ (which may be another way of saying ‘feminine’). Kafka notes that d’Annunzio is ‘skipping’ among the ladies and ‘shyly’ trotting around after Count Oldofredi (one of the show’s organisers).
D’Annunzio isn’t shy, but his body language can be deferential, his posture placatory and insinuating. (Photographs show him with his head dipped slightly to one side, leaning in towards a companion.) Oldofredi is his host for the day, whose consent he must have before he can fly, but he is no ordinary supplicant. To Brod it seems that at Brescia the bigwigs are treating him ‘like a second King of Italy’.
Later that day he makes two short flights, as passenger to the American aviator Glenn Curtiss and the Italian Mario Calderara. He poses for the cameras in a leather flying helmet. Immediately upon landing he gives an interview to the reporter for the Corriere della Sera (his flair for self-promotion never leaves him). Flying, he says, is divine; so divine that even he, the divo of words, is for the moment at a loss as to how to describe it. It is as ineffable as sex.
Increasingly bellicose and nationalist in his politics, d’Annunzio sees – years before the military establishment begins to invest in aviation – the strategic potential of the new flying machines. In the following year he will repeatedly deliver (for handsome fees) a lecture on the need for Italy to achieve Great Nation status by seizing control of the skies.
1910. The bailiffs are in d’Annunzio’s house in Settignano. Pursued by his creditors, himself in pursuit of a long-legged Russian countess with a lovely singing voice and a complaisant husband, announcing to the world that he needs to visit a French dentist, d’Annunzio has decamped to Paris. There his arrival causes quite a stir: he has been a bestselling author in France for two decades. At once he begins to circulate in society, and those he meets are recording their impressions.
He is forty-eight now. To Gide he seems ‘pinched, wrinkled, smaller than ever’. Certainly he needs a good dentist. He has ‘funny little crenellated unhealthy teeth’, notes a French actress on whom he tries his charm. ‘He is the only man I have ever seen with teeth of three colours, white, yellow and black.’ As he has aged his aura of sexual ambiguity has become more marked, intriguing to women, repulsive to most men. (See overleaf.) Several of his new acquaintances remark on his narrow, feminine shoulders and wide womanly hips, his little beringed white hands, his fussy fluttering gestures, his extravagant compliments. ‘An unprepossessing figure,’ notes René Boylesve. ‘He enters like a character from an Italian comedy; one could easily imagine him with a hump.’
For all that, for some he is irresistible. Isadora Duncan testifies that the woman courted by him, ‘feels that her very soul and being are lifted as into an ethereal region where she walks in company with the Divine Beatrice’. The young English diplomat Harold Nicolson, discussing d’Annunzio with two equally snobbish European noblemen, decides that the petit-bourgeois poet is ‘a chap one couldn’t know’, but, having heard him declaim his verses in an aristocratic drawing room, the bisexual Nicolson is instantly besotted. Nicolson leaves the party abruptly and walks along the quays, ‘still fervent with excitement’, d’Annunzio’s voice ringing in his ears ‘like a silver bell’.
There are Parisians who see beyond the bewitching surface. D’Annunzio accepts advances for books he will never write. He decamps from hotels leaving bills unpaid. Maurice Barrès, the French nationalist writer whose work d’Annunzio has correctly been accused of plagiarising, plainly sees the self-serving, exploitative side of the poet. ‘He is like a bird which scratches about for seed with its hard beak … this hard little soldier, this grasping conqueror, pecking and hurting the palm of my hand.’ Others sense his weariness. His greatest loves are past; his best poetry is written; in leaving Italy he has lost his role as national figurehead. The flamboyant homosexual Count Robert de Montesquiou has taken him up, and is introducing him to Parisian high society, but notices that occasionally his mask drops. Then one sees ‘something withered … the nostrils become deformed like those of a face on a shield that has been dented in combat, and the corners of the mouth express unutterable horror’.
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes are in Paris, performing Cleopatra, choreographed by Fokine with designs by Léon Bakst. The title role is mimed by Ida Rubinstein – a bisexual Russian beauty. She comes on in an immense blue wig and drifts of diaphanous, gem-scattered gauze, most of which she sheds before the evening is out. D’Annunzio is in the audience with de Montesquiou. After the performance they go backstage, where Rubinstein is holding court still clad only in massive ‘barbaric’ jewellery and an exiguous amount of chiffon. Barrès is there, and Edmond Rostand, and other literary luminaries, all in evening dress. D’Annunzio takes up the story. ‘Seeing at close quarters those marvellous naked legs, with my usual boldness I threw myself to the ground and – quite oblivious of my swallow-tail coat – kissed the feet, rose, still kissing, from the ankle to the knee, and up along the thigh to the crotch, kissing with lips as swift and supple as a flautist’s scurrying over the stops of a double flute. Tableau! Scandale!’ The bystanders are embarrassed. Rubinstein is amused. D’Annunzio lifts his eyes (even when standing upright he is a good six inches shorter than she) and sees, beneath the great tangled blue cloud of false hair, that she is smiling, and that she has a ‘dazzling’ mouth.
Soon they will be having some sort of a sexual relationship (in their private encounters, as well as this public one, it is mostly a matter of d’Annunzio’s mouth and Rubinstein’s nether parts) and she will be playing the title role in his The Martyrdom of St Sebastian. The saint has long featured in d’Annunzio’s sexual fantasies. Now he converts them into a long, lush piece of music drama, with a score by his new friend Claude Debussy and designs – again – by Bakst. The Bishop of Paris forbids his flock to attend it. It is placed on the Papal Index of books no good Catholic may read.
March 1915. Since the outbreak of war, d’Annunzio, who believes only ‘a great conflict of the races’ can purge society of its decadence, has been calling from Paris for Italy to enter the war on the side of Britain and France (its ‘Latin Sister’). He is planning to return to Italy, but as he awaits his moment he accompanies the Italian journalist, Ugo Ojetti, to Reims, to see the venerable cathedral which went up in flames while under German occupation the previous September. Ojetti has obtained a pass, and a motor car. He stops off at the seventeenth-century hôtel particulier in the western Marais, where d’Annunzio has an apartment cluttered with oriental artefacts – a visitor has dubbed it ‘the House of the Hundred Buddhas’. A servant comes out first with several suitcases (d’Annunzio never travels light) and hampers full of food. Then d’Annunzio appears, ‘elegant and glossy as ever’, in an outfit which (unlike Ojetti’s suit and trilby) has a vaguely military air: his civilian status shames him. He is wearing a motoring cap, riding breeches with grey puttees, and a rich brown overcoat lined with curly yellow fox fur.
They drive through the ‘lunar landscape’ of the battlefields to Reims. Everywhere there are dead horses, their bellies inflated, their legs in the air. The great Gothic cathedral is roofless, its windows empty, its stones blackened. Guns are audible: they are not far from the front. D’Annunzio is silent and attentive. He picks up a shard of stained glass, a twisted strip of lead, a carved stone flower fallen from one of the pinnacles (all three will be on his desk at the time of his death twenty-three years later). He scrambles over sandbags to view the statues which he knows are there; he has been studying the guidebooks assiduously. He is making notes: ‘Pigeons fly up as though the wing of an angel had suddenly opened.’
This is his first visit to Reims but he has already written an account of the fire, each paragraph introduced with the lie ‘I saw …’. He knows what a potent image of German ‘vandalism’ the blackened ruin of the cathedral makes, and he understands how his own celebrity endorses it. His pseudo-eyewitness account was useful propaganda: it didn’t need to be true.
On the return journey – still, in that deathly landscape, the aesthete and poet – d’Annunzio notes how the road curves like the banderoles in mediaeval depictions of saints.
17 May 1915. Rome. The Capitol. D’Annunzio has returned after five years in France, re-energised. He is past fifty, but the most exciting period of his life is only just beginning. Europe is at war and he has found a new medium – the spoken word; a new persona – that of national hero; and a new mission – that of urging his compatriots to be great. Italy is still neutral. Ever since d’Annunzio arrived in the country twelve days ago he has been delivering oration after oration, each one more virulent in its contempt for the peace party, each one more bellicose.
Now he is speaking at the heart of ancient Rome to an already volatile crowd. D’Annunzio himself recalls the scene months later as he lies wounded: ‘Faces, faces, faces without number run past my bandaged eyes, like hot sand pouring through a fist. Is it not the Roman crowd, of that May evening on the Capitol? Enormous, rippling, howling?’
Fastidious to the point of neurosis, d’Annunzio has always been shudderingly preoccupied with dirt. Now he translates that private anxiety into political rage. In a virtuoso display of his immense vocabulary, he loads his speeches with synonyms for filth. The old order reeks and must be utterly destroyed. Cautious politicians are to be disposed of like rotten meat. ‘Sweep away all the filth! Into the sewer with all that is vile!’ Italy, its government, its entire political system, is dirty, foul, filthy, polluted, besmirched, sullied, soiled, stinking, fetid, contaminated, shitty, rancid, infected, diseased, putrid, rotten, corrupt, festering and defiled. He calls for a cauterisation by fire, a holocaust (a word he uses often), a great outpouring of blood to purge the stench of corruption.
He is beside himself. ‘I feel my own pale face burn like a white flame. There is nothing of me in me. I am as the demon of the tumult … Each of my words resounds beneath my cranium like the reverberation of curved metal.’
As his tirade reaches its climax he produces a prop, a sword which once belonged to Nino Bixio, the most aggressive of Garibaldi’s lieutenants.
‘I take it and draw it … I press my lips to the naked blade … I abandon my soul to delirium.’
The crowd weeps and howls. D’Annunzio thunders on. He is urging his listeners to ensure, by any means, up to and including murder, that the appeasers should not be allowed to take their seats in parliament again. ‘Make out lists. Proscribe them. Be pitiless. You have the right.’
His speech triggers a riot. Hundreds of people are arrested. One of them is Marinetti, who has declared in his ‘Futurist Manifesto’ that he would celebrate ‘the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capital’. Another is a magazine editor named Benito Mussolini.
One week later Prime Minister Salandra declares that Italy is at war.
August 1917. War. As a roving ‘liaison officer’ d’Annunzio has been on night manoeuvres on board warships in the Adriatic, and has been down in a submarine. He has been repeatedly under fire in the terrible battles in the mountains and along the River Timavo, and he has flown repeatedly. He has survived a plane crash after which he had to lie motionless in a darkened room for months, and which has left him blind in one eye. Even Ernest Hemingway, who can’t stand his high-faluting rhetoric, grants that he has been ‘divinely brave’.
This is d’Annunzio’s account of a mission flown in pursuit of Austrian troops in the Slovenian mountains. He is now in command of a squadron of fighter planes. The letter is to his latest lover, mistress of one of Venice’s great palaces, whom he calls Venturina because her gold-flecked, tawny eyes remind him of one of the colours used by the Murano glass-makers (he is a discriminating collector of glass): ‘I think Venturina will be pleased with her friend. It was an inferno of fire. I went down to 150 metres over the enemy infantry in order to machine-gun them. I could make out their uniforms, and the flap of canvas they wear hanging down the back of their necks to keep off the sun … Miracle! A bullet heading for my head hit the bar at the back of the cockpit, and rebounded. I heard the clear ping it made, and turned round. The steel bar was dented. Another bullet passed through the canvas between my legs. Innumerable others have made holes in the wings, splintered the propellers, snapped the cords. And we are unharmed!’
Twelve days earlier, d’Annunzio, ever attentive to the ritual of warfare, has taught his squadron a new battle cry. Instead of the ‘Ip, Ip, Ip, Urrah!’ which he finds crude and barbarous, he has ordered them to shout the Greek: ‘Eia, Eia, Eia, Alalà!’ It is, he claims, the battle yell of Achilles. He has found it in Aeschylus and Pindar. He has used it in his plays. Now he is demanding that the men under his command give the shout standing upright in the cockpits of their flimsy little wood and canvas planes.
The aircraft circle round, flying beneath the enemy troops on the high mountain passes and then climbing again ‘up the sides of Mount Hermada like a cart crawling up a slope’. They return to base to load up with more bombs, and fly back into battle over the Austrians’ big guns. ‘We saw shells passing the prow and the stern like ugly big rats tunnelling through the air.’ This is the fiercest fire d’Annunzio has ever yet endured. It is ‘a marvellous hour, which I would not exchange for any other I have lived’.
April 1919. The war is over. The peace-makers are still conferring at Versailles, carving up the remains of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ever since the war ended d’Annunzio has been crying out that Italy is being cheated of its fair share, that its victory has been ‘mutilated’. Now he is in Venice, speaking in the Piazza San Marco, calling upon Italians to take up arms again and lay claim to the territory (Istria, Croatia and the Dalmatian coast) which the newborn state of Yugoslavia is claiming, but which he calls ‘Italy’s left lung’. The Irish Italophile Walter Starkie is there and, at first, is horribly disappointed by d’Annunzio’s appearance. ‘A dwarf of a man, goggle-eyed and thick-lipped – truly sinister in his grotesqueness, like a tragic gargoyle.’ Starkie, like many others, wonders incredulously: ‘Is this the man that Duse loved?’
D’Annunzio begins to speak; at once Starkie is ‘fascinated’. D’Annunzio plays on the crowd ‘as a supreme violinist does upon a Stradivarius’. He pretends to be reluctant to speak. ‘The time for words has passed.’ But he has come prepared, bringing with him an enormous Italian flag, which he employs as a prop in a brilliantly manipulative, quasi-liturgical performance. His bearing is priestly, his delivery carefully measured. ‘Never a hurried, jerky gesture: occasionally one arm raised slowly as though wielding an imaginary wand.’ The effect is mesmerising. ‘The tones rose and fell in an unending stream, like the song of a minstrel, and they spread over the vast audience like olive oil on the surface of the sea.’
This oil is designed not to calm troubled waters but to set them surging. Very, very gradually, his voice rising in a patiently extended crescendo, d’Annunzio strings his public’s emotions ever tighter. He incites the crowd to call out in reply to him, involving them in their own bewitchment. His own record of the speech notes their responses. ‘All the people cry out “We want it’’’; ‘the whole piazza resounds to unanimous acclamation’; ‘frenetic cheering’; ‘the people cry “Yes’’’; ‘the people cry “Yes!” again, more loudly’; ‘the people repeat the shout and brandish their flags’. As he reaches his thundering climax, writes Starkie, ‘the eyes of the thousands [are] fixed upon him as though hypnotised by his power’.
September 1919. D’Annunzio has taken action. He has marched into Fiume and made himself ruler of the tiny but now world-famous city-state. Among his new acolytes is Giovanni Comisso, another poet (some thirty years younger than d’Annunzio), who was serving with the Allied garrison when d’Annunzio marched into the city, and who promptly deserted to join him.
Comisso is there when d’Annunzio arrives at the Governor’s Palace amid a din of bands playing and crowds singing. Stepping out of the car he looks small and, feverish as he is, ‘very, very weak’. Comisso joins the throng who jostle along behind d’Annunzio up the marble staircase to the wide balcony from which he is to address the people massed below. To Comisso’s wonder the frail invalid begins to speak ‘with incredible force’, declaring that Fiume is the only brightness in a mad, vile world. The assembled crowd weep and laugh and howl out their enthusiasm. ‘This man convinced me,’ writes Comisso ‘as though he was one of the prophets of olden times.’
A few days later Comisso is shaving when he hears a hubbub outside his window and leans out, his shirt open, his face covered with soap, to see what’s causing the commotion. Down in the street soldiers are milling around a very small man wearing the jaunty-brimmed felt hat of the Alpine troops. ‘He seemed like a boy, agile and restless. He kept taking one of the others by the arm and having himself photographed.’ It is d’Annunzio, turning some of his prodigious energy to the job he does so well – making a spectacle of himself. When he arrived in the outskirts of Fiume he paused to allow a camera crew to catch up. One of his first measures on taking power in Fiume is to establish his press office. During the next fifteen months d’Annunzio’s image, carefully groomed by himself, will appear in newspapers all over the Western world.
November 1920. The aristocratic English man of letters Osbert Sitwell has come to Fiume, curious to see what ‘the man who has done more for the Italian language than any writer since Dante’ has made of his city-state. Sitwell finds the streets full of colourful desperadoes: ‘Every man seemed to wear a uniform designed by himself; some wore beards and had shaven heads like the commander, others cultivated huge tufts of hair, half a foot long, waving out from their foreheads, and a black fez at the back of the head. Cloaks, feathers and flowing black ties were universal, and all carried the Roman dagger.’
Sitwell succeeds in securing an audience. He passes through a pillared hall, full of palm trees in ‘pseudo-Byzantine flower pots … where soldiers lounged and typists rushed furiously in and out’. In an inner room ‘almost entirely covered with banners’, he finds two more-than-lifesize, carved and gilded saints from Florence, a huge fifteenth-century bronze bell, and the Commandant (as d’Annunzio now likes to be called) in military grey-green, his chest striped with the ribbons of his many medals. He seems nervous and tired. But, bald and one-eyed as he is, ‘at the end of a few seconds one felt the influence of that extraordinary charm which has enabled him to change howling mobs into furious partisans’.
Since Sitwell arrived in Fiume the great conductor, Arturo Toscanini, has brought his orchestra to the town. To celebrate Toscanini’s visit, d’Annunzio lays on a mock battle which is as lethal as an ancient Roman circus: 4,000 men take part, attacking each other with real grenades. The orchestra, which initially provides a musical accompaniment (Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), becomes involved in the fighting. Over a hundred men are injured, including five musicians.
Now d’Annunzio, discussing the event with Sitwell, explains that his legionaries are ‘weary of waiting for battle. They must fight one another.’ But he doesn’t really want to talk about the mayhem around him. Sitwell’s visit, he says, is welcome as an alleviation of his ‘great loneliness’. Soldiers are all very well, but he misses the fellowship, not of equals (he does not, in his opinion, have any equals) but of well-informed admirers. He quizzes Sitwell about the new English poets (one of the best of whom is Sitwell’s sister, Edith). They talk about Shelley, and about English greyhounds.
January 1921. The Italian government, on whose behalf d’Annunzio claims to have annexed Fiume, but for whom his escapade has been embarrassing abroad and destabilising at home, has sent troops and a warship to dislodge him. For years d’Annunzio has been leading crowds in chants of ‘Fiume or Death!’ but he hadn’t expected his opponent to be his own people. After five days of fighting he agrees to withdraw. The Italian populace of Fiume, some 12,000 people, turn out to see him leave. ‘Under a deluge of flowers,’ according to a supporter, ‘he forces his way through a city in tears.’ Later that day he arrives by car, alone but for his driver, at a landing stage on the Venetian lagoon. His long-serving aide, Tom Antongini, and an officer of his Legion, have brought a motor launch to meet him. The light is failing. Land and water are both shrouded in mist. D’Annunzio is enveloped in a grey cape and fur motoring cap. To Antongini he seems ‘suddenly aged’ and barely conscious. He embraces the two men and goes silently aboard the launch.
They make the short journey to the Palazzo Barbarigo. D’Annunzio has a rented apartment there, but it is less a home than a furniture depository, being crammed with the contents of the house in France that he left six years previously. Nine lorries were required to bring the mass of his possessions to Venice – the thousands of books, the hundreds of Buddhas, the scores of reproductions of paintings of St Sebastian. Now they are stacked up, higgledy-piggledy, in the lofty rooms. Documents spill from boxes. Dusty carpets are heaped in a corner. D’Annunzio’s housekeeper has sought to please her master by heating the place to his preferred inordinate temperature. As they enter, Antongini and the officer begin to sweat.
The next day d’Annunzio summons six of his acolytes. He is tetchy, exasperated by the mess surrounding him. He orders them off to search northern Italy for a new home for him. He needs a grand piano, a bathroom, a laundry, plenty of wood and coal, an enclosed garden. ‘If within eight days,’ he says ‘none of you has found a suitable house for me, I shall throw myself into the canal.’
January 1925. D’Annunzio is in the house on the mountain slopes above Lake Garda, where he will spend the rest of his life and which he will gradually transform into a bizarre piece of installation art: part display case for his vast and eclectic range of possessions; part externalisation of his own multi-faceted personality; part war memorial, part garden of earthly delights; part mausoleum. He calls it the Vittoriale.
Benito Mussolini has taken his political place, bullying his way to the premiership by marching on Rome in October 1922. It suits Mussolini that the Italian public should believe that d’Annunzio is whole-heartedly behind the new regime, but in truth they are suspicious of each other. The poet is a maverick, and still dangerously influential: he has to be kept on side. His insatiable need for money presents a point of leverage. ‘When a decayed tooth cannot be pulled out it is capped with gold,’ says Mussolini. He acts accordingly.
Mussolini greatly increases the strangeness of the Vittoriale by contributing to the jumble of objects it contains some Brobdignagian souvenirs. First comes the plane in which d’Annunzio once overflew Vienna (d’Annunzio will build a rotunda especially to house it). Next is the motor boat in which d’Annunzio made a daring raid on the Austrian fleet: d’Annunzio roars up and down the lake in it (and catches a bad cold). Next, dismantled and transported on over twenty flat-bed railway trucks, comes the forward half of a battleship, the Puglia. Offloaded at the railway station in Desenzano and laboriously transported piecemeal along the lake shore and up the mountainside to d’Annunzio’s fastness, it is there reassembled. Set in concrete, its missing rear recreated in stone, it juts out from the side of the cypress-covered slope above d’Annunzio’s rose garden as though breaking through a petrified wave. The gift comes complete with a set of real live sailors, whom d’Annunzio drills on deck.
And now we can see d’Annunzio with our own eyes. On YouTube we can watch a Fox Movietone newsreel showing a little party he gives on the Puglia’s deck soon after its installation. Proceedings open with the tolling of a great bell. Then comes a six-gun salute, smoke from the ship’s cannon cloaking the hillside. The host appears on deck, in military uniform with a chest full of decorations, smilingly escorting some ladies in cloche hats. A string quartet plays: d’Annunzio listens attentively (the camera politely staying on the side of his good eye). He is stouter now, and slightly stooped. He plays a few notes on a clarinet. Cut. Now d’Annunzio is cackling merrily, revealing that he is almost toothless. People are often surprised – given the total humourlessness of his writing – to find how playful he can be. He has been invited to recite some verse for the film crew. He waves his hands and gabbles, amidst more laughter, the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, before turning back to his female friends.
Only three years before his own accession to power, Mussolini wrote to d’Annunzio suggesting the overthrow of the Italian monarchy and the establishment of a ‘Directory’ with d’Annunzio as president. It was d’Annunzio who was the Duce then, while Mussolini was content to act as his enforcer. Now d’Annunzio is a lost leader. Throughout the 1920s there will be people looking to him to exploit his immense public following and give them a lead: fascists dismayed by the compromises Mussolini makes on his way to consolidating his power; anti-fascists who believe the poet could become the figurehead of a less brutal regime. They look in vain.
September 1937. The railway station in Verona. Mussolini is on his way back to Rome after visiting his new ally, Adolf Hitler, and showing himself to the German people. D’Annunzio – vehemently anti-German all his life – has described Hitler to Mussolini as ‘a ferocious clown’. All the same, although he seldom leaves the Vittoriale now, he travels from Garda to pay his respects. He is seventy-four, and although he is still goatishly proud of his sexual prowess, he is dreadfully aged, by time, but also by syphilis and by the quantity of cocaine he has been taking.
A newsreel, here described by d’Annunzio’s French biographer Philippe Jullian, records the occasion: ‘D’Annunzio, on the arm of the architect Maroni, shuffles along the red carpet up to the carriage window, through which the Duce is leaning. With the smile of an ogre, Mussolini takes the poet’s hand in his.’ Mussolini, descending from the train, makes his way towards a balcony from which he is to address the assembled crowd. ‘The little old man toddles after him, chattering away and waving his withered hands in the air; Mussolini, without slowing down, smiles down at him from time to time, but the ovations of the crowd prevent him from hearing a word of what d’Annunzio is saying.’ Eventually the Duce pushes brusquely ahead, pointedly not inviting d’Annunzio to join him, leaving the poet to struggle back to his car through the oblivious crowd.
According to Mussolini’s spy at the Vittoriale, what d’Annunzio claims to have been trying to say to the Duce was: ‘I admire you more than ever for what you are doing.’ But Maroni, whom d’Annunzio trusts, reports that he returns to the Vittoriale in a state of acute depression, murmuring: ‘This is the end.’ Five months later he will be dead.
