Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  That evening, d’Annunzio spoke at the Press Association and then moved on to Rome’s grand opera house, the Teatro Costanzi. Interrupting the scheduled performance, he stepped out onto the stage at the end of the first act. There he took it upon himself to make public the news that Italy would fight. His delivery was peremptory, dramatic (as a demagogue he had come a long way in the few days since he had delivered his piece of elaborate prose-poetry at Quarto). “Hear me!” he began “Hear me! I have momentous things to tell you, things you don’t know. Keep silent. Listen to me. Then leap to your feet, all of you!” Again he raved against Giolitti, “an icy lie armed with flexile cunning, as the horrible sac of an octopus is equipped with twining tentacles” who “betrays the King, betrays the fatherland.” D’Annunzio urged “good citizens” to take their vengeance. His speech was an incitement to murder. “If blood flows, such blood will be as blessed as that shed in the trenches.” Afterwards some of his supporters hijacked a fire engine and used its ladders in an attempt to break into Giolitti’s house: they were driven off by the military guard.

  The King invited Salandra to form a new government. Giolitti conceded defeat and left the city. The war party had carried out what historian Mark Thompson calls a “coup d’état in all but name.” The socialist leader Filippo Turati expressed his despair with the percipient words: “Let the bourgeoisie have its war. There will be no winners; everyone will lose.” The road to war was open. But still d’Annunzio talked. The task he had set himself was greater than a simple change in government policy. He was assisting at the birth of a new, greater Italy. “The crowd howls like a woman in labour. The crowd writhes in giving life to its own destiny … Everything is ardour and clamour, creation and intoxication, peril and victory, beneath the murky sky of battle where the swallows flash and cry.”

  Those hectic days in Genoa and Rome were to enter d’Annunzio’s personal mythology as “radiant May,” a period haloed in glory during which he created a masterpiece in a hitherto unknown art form. In 1906 he had watched his friend, the sculptor Clemente Origo, casting a bronze statue inspired by one of his own poems, a large and complex piece showing a centaur wrestling with a mighty stag. The scene in the workshop—the fierce heat, the courage of the foundry workers, the combination of artistry and danger—had haunted him. He used it in a novel. Now he repeatedly evoked it as an image of what he was doing to the Italian people. He was breaking up the decadent old forms of Italian society in order to make the nation anew, as a smith might smash up scrap metal ready for use in a new compound. He was cleansing his human material of its impurities. He was melting it down in the white heat of his eloquence. On 17 May he spoke on the Capitol Hill, and in his account of the occasion he likens his words to the blows with which the foundry man strikes out a plug to let the liquefied metal flow into the mould. “The tumult” seems to him like a furnace’s fiery breath. The crowd is an incandescent mass of molten bronze ready to be shaped by his will. “All the mouths of the mould are open. A gigantic statue is being cast.”

  There were swallows on the Capitol that day, a numerous flock of them squabbling noisily as they swooped around the green-bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. We know it, because d’Annunzio made a note about them. Surrounded by an ecstatic crowd whose excitement he himself was orchestrating, he was yet sufficiently detached to observe birds and flowers (the masses of red carnations in the Teatro Costanzi on the night he spoke there) or the feel of a horse’s rump under his hand.

  He was fast developing a brilliantly manipulative oratorical technique. He allowed his public no break in his contrivance of their hysteria. He played on them with rhetorical tricks borrowed from religious liturgy or from classical drama. “Hear me!” he cried “Listen to me!” “Understand me!” The crowd was urged to join him, howling out responses to his insistent “Evvivas!” These were not speeches to be rationally appraised but acts of collective self-hypnosis. D’Annunzio’s works as a dramatist had frequently been grandiose in conception, spectacular in their staging and appalling for the violence of their sentiments, but never before had he produced anything like the shows he put on during that “radiant May.”

  He had found his métier. Romain Rolland, recoiling, likened him to Marat. He had become the figurehead of a mass movement. When he drove away from the Capitol, “dishevelled boys, their faces crazy, dripping with sweat as though after a fight,” threw themselves at the car, nearly lifting it off the ground. “The battle is won. The great bell has sounded. The whole sky is on fire. I am drunk with the joy of war.”

  Quite how much political effect this extraordinary sequence of public demonstrations had is a matter of dispute. The Treaty of London had been ratified already, before d’Annunzio returned from France, but it is conceivable that without his intervention Salandra and his cabinet might have failed to carry the electorate (the majority of whom dreaded war) with them. But, whatever the extent of his actual influence, it certainly appeared to the public that d’Annunzio—a private individual without any constitutional authority—had imposed his will on the elected government, and that he was the man who had taken them to war. He had done it by directing a stream of virulent abuse against representatives of Italy’s democratic institutions, and by urging the crowds that gathered around him to begin what might have amounted to a civil war. If anyone in Rome in those frenzied days was an enemy of the state it was surely not Giolitti, but d’Annunzio himself.

  Nietzsche defined the state as “a remorseless machine of oppression,” a “herd of blond beasts of prey.” D’Annunzio—who fancied himself (in some moods) to be a Nietzschean Übermensch (superman), unshackled by social conscience or civic duty—had no respect for the electorate, and no compunction about undermining the authority of democratic institutions. A decade later Mussolini would refer to the events of May 1915 as a “revolution” and boast that in that glorious month the Italian people, incited by d’Annunzio “the first Duce,” had risen up against their corrupt and lily-livered rulers, clamouring for the right to prove their honour and gain glory, and that those rulers had ignominiously surrendered. The truth is otherwise. But the spectacle of a government apparently harangued into action by a demagogue with no respect for the rule of law was ominous for constitutional democracy.

  Immediately after the fierce excitement of his appearance on the Capitol, d’Annunzio withdrew and walked, alone and quiet, on the Aventine Hill. The lovers in his novel Pleasure had ridden the same way, “with ever before their eyes the great vision of the imperial palaces set alight by the sunset, flame-red between the blackening cypresses, and through it drifting a golden dust.” So had d’Annunzio himself with Elvira Fraternali, the great love of his Roman years. He thought about her that evening (although he was to leave the letter she wrote him that month unanswered: he did not like to see what age did to women he had once doted on). He brooded over the five years of his “exile” in France. To return to the city where he had made his name, and married, and several times fallen in love, and been young (he wrote that year that he would give anything, even Halcyon, his finest poem-sequence, to be twenty-seven years old again) moved him deeply. By the gate of the Priorato of Malta, with its famous view through a keyhole of the dome of St. Peter’s, he saw what looked like a tiny star hovering at the level of his eyebrows. It was a glowworm, the first he had seen since he left Italy in 1910.

  In his notebook, in his letters, in his memoir Notturno, the glowworm is accorded almost as much space as the preceding oration. D’Annunzio’s case has always puzzled those simple-minded enough to believe that artistic talent and refined sensibility are incompatible with political extremism and an appetite for violence. Only hours after he had been raving against his political opponents and urging a mob on to murder, he was strolling—pensive and nostalgic—through the jasmine-scented Roman night, his appreciation of Rome’s multi-layered beauty that of a man of deep erudition; his response to a minuscule natural wonder that of a poet.

  On the day Italy d
eclared war on Austria-Hungary, d’Annunzio dined with some of his supporters. Very late, as dawn was breaking, he spoke to them. This address makes a quiet, gravely ominous coda to the stridency of the public speeches. He looked forward to the ensuing carnage without compunction for his part in involving his country in it. He referred blasphemously to his days of nonstop oratory as “the Passion Week.” This was his night in the Garden of Gethsemane, the moment when he allowed himself and his hearers to feel the horror of what was to come. “All those people who yesterday were tumultuous in the streets and squares, who yesterday with a great voice demanded war, are full of veins, are full of blood.” He had exulted in the idea of arriving at Quarto with a legion of sacrificial victims, “young blood to be spilt.” Now he looked forward to making the oblation of countless others’ lives to his “tenth muse, Energy,” who “loves not measured words but abundant blood” and who was about to get her fill of it. He concluded with a muted prayer: “God grant that we find each other again, living or dead, in a place of light.”

  · · ·

  Show over, d’Annunzio relaxed. In the summer of 1915, between his prodigious feats of oratory in May and his setting out for the front in July, he sank, according to his secretary Tom Antongini, into “the most abject state of frivolity.” He summoned Aélis from Paris to join him (Nathalie was pointedly not invited) and went, so Antongini tells us, “from a reception to a dinner and from an intimate tea to an even more intimate night.” As the forger of Italy’s new martial destiny he was the man of the hour: women found him less resistible than ever. D’Annunzio’s son Mario reports that a rich Argentinian lady took a room in the hotel expressly to be near him. (He accepted the flowers with which she presented him, but rejected their donor—“too thin,” he said.) Isadora Duncan was there too, and perhaps more fortunate. His philandering did nothing to decrease his popularity with the public. His militancy added to his sexual allure; his sexual conquests enhanced his virile, ironclad image.

  He was not writing. Now he was a hero he was more marketable than ever, and the people he had hurried into war looked to him to compose their battle hymns. But no words came. “I have a horror of sedentary work,” he wrote that summer. “Of the pen, of the ink, of paper, of all those things now become so futile. A feverish desire for action devours me.”

  He had not, as a young man, shown much enthusiasm for the soldier’s life. He had been a resourceful evader of national service and, when he found himself unable to defer the evil day any longer, he served his country with extreme ill grace. “It is certain death for me,” he wrote to his lover. “Ariel a corporal!” (Like Shelley, one of the models for his own persona, he named himself after Shakespeare’s androgynous spirit.) “The delicate Ariel! Can you imagine it?” He was obliged to live in barracks and groom his own horse. He left the army with relief. Now, a quarter of a century later, he was avid to rejoin it.

  As he waited in Rome for instructions as to where he was to present himself he fretted over the difficulty of getting his uniforms made. Luigi Albertini, who was expecting a Song of War from him for publication in the Corriere della Sera, received instead a letter complaining about the difficulty of finding a tailor. Soon, though, he was wearing the elegant white outfit of the Novara Lancers, and experiencing curiously mixed feelings about it. “I already feel I belong to a caste, and that I am the prisoner of rules.” He was to be attached to the staff of the Duke of Aosta—the King’s taller, more charismatic cousin who commanded the Third Army—and given almost unlimited licence to define his own war work. He had permission from the commander-in-chief, General Cadorna, to visit any part of the front and to participate in any manoeuvres he chose. He was to be, not a leader, but an inspirer.

  His progress northward at the end of July was attended by almost as much excitement as his arrival in Italy had been. Minister Martini, who saw the pushy adolescent he remembered all too clearly in the world famous poet, wrote irritably that d’Annunzio would have done better to have gone directly and “in silence” to the military base at Udine, “but he can’t live without réclame.” He went to Pescara to pay a farewell visit to his mother, who was by this time paralysed and mute, and was lavishly fêted by his fellow Abruzzese. He stopped off in Ferrara and presented the manuscript of his play Parisina to the mayor in a public ceremony, declaring that he “carried the beauty of that city in [his] intrepid heart.” Martini wrote that this was “all foolishness which annoys the public,” but he was wrong: the public responded warmly.

  As usual, d’Annunzio was spending money like there was no tomorrow—a natural response to the onset of a war perhaps, but one which was exasperating to Albertini, who was acting as his unofficial manager and saw all too clearly how close d’Annunzio was coming to another financial catastrophe. He was unable to settle his bill at the expensive Hotel Regina where he had stayed for two months; nearly three years later he was still trying to retrieve the trunks full of clothes and knick-knacks he was obliged to leave there in lieu of payment. He had to beg his book publisher, Treves, for an advance to pay for the two horses which, as a cavalry officer, he was expected to provide. Now Albertini urged him to go straight to the Duke of Aosta’s headquarters: good sensible advice. “There you’ll eat regular meals for four lire a day. Perhaps you won’t need to pay for lodging. They’ll give you 400 lire a month. See what horizons open up!” Not the kind of horizons that drew d’Annunzio. On arrival in Venice he checked into the Hotel Danieli, then, as now, one of the grandest hotels on earth.

  For Italians the Great War was fought along the border with Austria, in the mountains to the north and east of Venice. The city was drastically changed. The summer of 1914 had been, according to the contemporary Venetian historian Gino Damerini, an especially brilliant season. American, English, French, German, Hungarian and Russian visitors packed out the hotels, restaurants and beaches, “each competing with the others in luxury, nudist exhibitionism, hedonist wildness, carnivalesque fancies and pretentious elegance.” The palaces along the Grand Canal, many of whose proprietors were d’Annunzio’s old acquaintances, were all open, flooding the hot, still nights with light and music. Then came the assassination at Sarajevo, and “at the echo of the first cannon shot all those people … the illuminations, the silk, the jewels, the kaleidoscopic game of devil-may-care sophistication … vanished, as though sucked away by a whirlwind.” By the time d’Annunzio arrived a year later, Venice had assumed the character of a military and naval base, and a city under imminent danger of attack. The larger canals were blocked. The altane, the rickety wooden roof terraces with which the land-starved Venetians have been consoling themselves for their lack of gardens since at least the fifteenth century, had been taken over by air-raid wardens: on the high platforms where Carpaccio painted courtesans bleaching their hair in the sun, there were now searchlights and sirens. Statues were hidden by mounds of sandbags. The palaces and churches stood stripped, their treasures removed and hidden. Hotels were hospitals. The entrance halls of grand houses sheltered refugees. At the brightest of times Venice is a place in which one easily loses oneself. Blacked out, it became a labyrinth through which its inhabitants fumbled at night as though blind.

  En route north, d’Annunzio wrote in his notebook: “Sense of emptiness and distance. Life and the reasons for living elude me. Between two streams, between past and future … Tedium. Lukewarm water … Necessity for action.” On arriving in Venice, finding action was, accordingly, d’Annunzio’s first priority. Within two days, he was on board the leading destroyer of a naval squadron on night manoeuvres, travelling east along the coast towards Austrian-held Trieste in the hope of encountering enemy vessels.

  He made notes about the moonlight, the crisscrossing lines of the ships’ wakes, the sailors eating as they sat silent around their guns, all of which later found its way into his wartime writings. He was to be a witness: he was also to be an “inspiration.” Two weeks before his arrival the Italian cruiser Amalfi had been torpedoed and sunk. Scores of I
talian seamen died. D’Annunzio addressed the survivors, who were being sent back into action. “Now is not the time for words,” he said, for the first of many, many times; but words were what he brought them. Throughout the remainder of the war he was to speak again and again, to men going into battle, to men returning exhausted, to men burying their dead. He spoke of blood and sacrifice, of memory and patriotism, and the duty owed by the living to those who had died for Italy. His funeral orations posthumously awarded the wretched conscripts the dignity of heroes; his pre-battle harangues presented the bloody slog of modern warfare as noble sacrifice. His gift for oratory had become an instrument of war.

  To urge others on, though, was not enough to satisfy him. He sought a role appropriate to a superman. He found it in the air. D’Annunzio had always been fascinated by flight. For decades he worked and reworked the myth of Icarus in his poetry. We have already seen him making his first flight at the 1909 Brescia air show. When he moved to France he frequented the airfield at Villacoublay, and several times he flew again. Shortly after arriving in Venice in July 1915, he made his way to the island airbase at Forte Sant’Andrea, at the mouth of the lagoon. There he met the young pilot, Giuseppe Miraglia.