Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Well connected (his father was director general of the Banco di Napoli and a political insider) and, according to d’Annunzio, bronze-skinned, with greenish-yellowish eyes flecked with gold, Miraglia was a paragon to his fellow servicemen, known for having gone alone into enemy-occupied Pola with only a pistol for defence. He was to be the first of a series of young men who became for d’Annunzio, during the war years, at once beloved comrades and incarnations of his ideals of youthful valour and fit sacrifice. “Blessed are those who are now twenty years old,” he said. He worshipped and envied their beauty and took enormous pleasure in the opportunities the war afforded him to live alongside them as companions-in-arms. Their deaths were marvellous to him. When they were killed, as one after another they were, he took them into the pantheon he was elaborating in his writing and speeches, making them the martyrs and cult heroes of his new mythology of war.

  From Miraglia, d’Annunzio learned that a bombing raid on Trieste had been proposed. Trieste, the cosmopolitan city at the head of the Adriatic, then Austria’s chief port, was one of the irredentists’ most yearned-after lost territories. Here was an exploit exactly to d’Annunzio’s taste. He was an aviator. Venice and Trieste are barely 150 kilometres apart, a short hop for a modern plane, but in 1915 a formidable distance. As a showman d’Annunzio saw how the flight could become a piece of splendidly theatrical propaganda. He determined to claim it for himself. He and Miraglia would drop explosives on the Austrian emplacements in the harbour but—more importantly as far as d’Annunzio was concerned—they would also drop pamphlets (written, of course, by himself) over the town’s main squares.

  With Miraglia he began to talk of ways and means. He studied maps of the coastline they would overfly. He thought about the best design for the little sandbags to which the leaflets would be attached, and went himself to the Rialto market to buy the necessary canvas. He reflected happily that, thanks to his rigorous programme of exercise followed over many years, he was more than fit enough for the physical ordeal of the flight and confident of being able to hurl bombs or sandbags from the unstable perch of a tiny plane. He drafted a message to “the Italians of Trieste,” assuring them of his devotion to the cause of their imminent liberation, and copied it out over and over again in his own hand, taking care that his signature (often an exquisite but illegible arabesque) should be unmistakably clear.

  Word got out, and reached a reporter. Anything d’Annunzio did was not only a gossip column item, but a news story. A Venetian journal announced the projected flight, and that the poet was to join it. The admiral commanding the tiny air force was doubly dismayed, firstly by the breach of security—clearly it was going to be hard to keep any operation in which d’Annunzio was involved secret from the enemy—secondly, by the risk of this inconveniently famous subordinate getting himself killed. D’Annunzio alive could help to encourage the troops and, if he continued to produce the kind of furiously nationalist poetry that he had been writing over the previous decade, help maintain the civilian population’s support for the war. His death, on the other hand, would have a deleterious effect on the entire nation’s morale.

  The admiral vetoed the flight. D’Annunzio protested. The admiral consulted his superiors. Telegrams went back and forth between Rome and Venice and the military headquarters near the front at Udine. None of the authorities wanted to sanction the flight. The order came down: d’Annunzio’s life was “preciosissimo” and must be conserved. He was forbidden to join this or any other dangerous operation. Furious, d’Annunzio went to the top. On 29 July he wrote an impassioned letter to Prime Minister Salandra.

  He flattered: “You, whose own spirit is so hard-working and so generous, must understand me.” He stressed his physical competence. He was not “a man of letters of the old type, in skull cap and slippers.” He was an adventurer. “My whole life has been a risky game.” He boasted of his past daring. “I have exposed myself to danger a thousand times against the fences and hedges of the Roman Campagna” (he adored foxhunting). In France he had often been out on the Atlantic in chancy weather “as the fishermen of the Landes could tell you.” He had ventured repeatedly into enemy territory on the Western Front (he visited the front twice, staying on the safer side of the French lines). Most importantly, “I am an aviator … I have flown many times at high altitude.” (This wasn’t strictly true either.) And he wasn’t only brave: he had knowledge and skills which could be useful. He knew Istria, he knew Trieste. He had an “observant spirit.”

  Having presented his credentials, he made his request, in the most insistent terms. “I pray, I beg … repeal this odious veto.” He hinted that if he were not allowed to risk his life in his own way he would deliberately endanger it by going straight to the front. To bar one with “my past, my future” from living the heroic life would be “to cripple me, to mutilate me, to reduce me to nothing.” The troops, the press, the people of Italy all saw him as “the poet of the war”—now the authorities were trying to treat him as an exhibit in a museum.

  Minister Martini scoffed at the suggestion that foxhunting and jaunts in pleasure boats provided the necessary experience for the kind of role d’Annunzio was claiming. But Salandra was impressed by d’Annunzio’s earnest tone. The ban was lifted. The flight would go ahead.

  Exultant, d’Annunzio went shopping again. At the haberdashers he chose ribbons (red, white and green, the colours of the Italian flag) with which to adorn his missives to the people of Trieste. He filched a sandbag from among those banked up along the façade of St. Mark’s. Its contents, sanctified by contact with the ancient building, the hub of the Venetian Empire, would give his little packets historical gravity as well as physical weight. He bought himself thick woollen vests and long johns and when all was ready, all the little bags stowed away in one big one, he danced “a pyrrhic dance of joy around them.”

  The date of the enterprise was fixed for 7 August, which d’Annunzio considered an auspicious date. He prepared himself—as was only realistic in those early days of flying—for death. He would write a few months later about the mornings on which he set out for such missions, “the thought of returning was left in the vestibule, despised, as a vile encumbrance,” and recall how he sat once with a pilot before a flight, talking easily about routes and equipment, but aware that “each of us, by noon, could be a fistful of charred flesh, a crushed skull with gold teeth glinting in the mess.” He drew up a will, and entrusted it to Albertini.

  On 6 August he and Miraglia made a test flight. D’Annunzio had flown before, but only rising briefly over airfields. Now he looked down on a great city, seeing Venice as only a handful of human beings had ever yet seen it. He was the first writer to record the experience. He wore, as all the aviators did, heavy leather gloves. When he took one off to help Miraglia tighten the elastic of his chinstrap he at once felt his fingers begin to freeze. All the same, belted into the forward seat, exposed to every wind in the shaky little flying machine, he persistently scribbled down his impressions. The diverging lines of a ship’s wake were like “the palms in the hand of Victory.” Venice’s islands, divided up by canals, resembled the segments of a loaf of bread. The long railway bridge was the stem to the city’s flower. The wind-ruffled water by the lagoon’s outlet was iridescent as a pigeon’s throat. The mainland—in August’s dryness—was blonde, feminine, girdled by the pale ribbons of dykes. Avidly absorbing these new sights, fixing them with similes, d’Annunzio makes no mention of discomfort, or vertigo or fear.

  On the morning of the seventh he performed his usual toilette—a vigorous massage administered by his servant followed by a bath—and thought about the possibility that the body he was tending might, by nightfall, be stripped and laid out dead. After breakfast (strong coffee) he went shopping again, for another woollen jumper: he must have felt the cold the day before. Walking back towards the Hotel Danieli he encountered the Countess Morosini, with her daughter, the Countess di Robilant. It is one of the oddities of d’Annunzio’s war experienc
e that on his way into action of the most serious kind he might find himself chatting with an acquaintance about a social engagement. Annina Morosini, known to the gossip columns as the “uncrowned Queen of Venice,” was the chatelaine of the Palazzo da Mula on the Grand Canal and a generous friend to the poet. That morning he noticed how lovely her eyes were, and jotted in his notebook “still desirable” (she was fifty-one). He told her what he was about to do and asked her playfully to give him a talisman. She demurred, offering him only her blessing, but saying she would telephone that evening. He was offhand about the latter promise. “I don’t know what she’s calling for,” he noted. Given his thoughts at bathtime, the coming evening must have seemed remote. Back in his hotel room he filled a cigarette case with cartridges, laid out his woollen flying gear and wondered: “Will it be cold up there, or down there?” (The underlining is his.) He was thinking of the sea bed. Remembering that he might not die but be taken prisoner, he put six of the laxative tablets he swore by, and some cash, in his pocket, then went down and took the waiting gondola to the airfield. Miraglia was ready for him. They set off on the flight which would take them further than any Italian pilot had flown before, and well within range of enemy guns.

  In the notebook d’Annunzio was carrying that day, his poet’s-eye observations—“the teeth of the breakwaters which gnaw at the unhappy sea”—are interspersed with dialogue. The two men couldn’t speak to each other. The only complaint d’Annunzio makes about the physical circumstances of the flight are about the engine’s atrocious din: he regrets not having brought wax earplugs. He and Miraglia communicate by passing book and pen back and forth, d’Annunzio having to twist awkwardly in order to do so. Their initial exchanges are pleasantly companionable: “Are we still climbing?.” “You look like a bronze bonze [a Japanese Buddhist monk],” says d’Annunzio to Miraglia. “Do you want some coffee? It’s really hot.” Soon though, more urgent messages are passing between them. D’Annunzio was not just there to make notes on the landscape (“in the pallor of the lagoon the twisting canals are green as malachite”), he was also the bombardier.

  They were carrying several bombs in cylinders fitted to the plane’s undercarriage. It became evident that one of them was jammed. D’Annunzio struggled to free it. “It’s impossible to pull it up.” “Have we got any string?”

  Miraglia gave him anxious directions: “You absolutely must not turn the screw … See if you can push it so it falls out, but don’t twist it.” It might explode at any moment. Even if it didn’t, unless they could free it first it would almost certainly blow up when they touched down. “When we’re landing I’ll hold onto it with both hands,” d’Annunzio told Miraglia. There have been those who sneered at d’Annunzio’s war record, but the dangers he ran were real, and so was the courage with which he met them.

  They came in sight of Trieste, the white stone city luminous in the August sun against the backdrop of the Carso, the rocky wilderness which would be, for the next three years and more, a battlefield. They saw puffs of smoke way beneath them, signs that they were under fire. Soon they could hear the gunfire, and feel the hits (on their return they would find a bullet embedded in the fuselage a few inches from d’Annunzio’s elbow). They continued their descent. They saw the enemy submarines in the marina and dropped bombs on them. As they came in low, d’Annunzio hurled down his little bags, and watched the ribbons and pennants attached to them flutter down, some uselessly into the sea, others into Trieste’s grand waterfront piazza, with its palatial banks and customs houses. His purpose in dropping his pamphlets was not just to convey a message: it was also to show that where he had sent down words, he could have sent down explosives. He was there to encourage the pro-Italian population, but also to terrorise their Austrian rulers. Like most of his wartime exploits, this first flight was an attack not so much on enemy forces, as on enemy morale.

  It was as they turned back that he and Miraglia discovered the malfunctioning bomb. D’Annunzio struggled awkwardly with it in his tiny cockpit, deafened by the engine noise, careful not to make any abrupt movement for fear of unbalancing their fragile conveyance. He had often longed for an heroic death: now he was bothered by the idea that the plane—coming down only to bounce up as it exploded—would look not tragic but ridiculous. Somehow (it is a measure of his insouciance that we don’t know how) he managed to deal with the problem—perhaps, as his and Miraglia’s notes suggest, with the help of a rag and d’Annunzio’s belt. They came safely back to earth.

  From that moment onward, according to Damerini, the Venetian people engulfed d’Annunzio in “a wave of anxious affection.” He had been a privileged visitor in aristocratic circles. Now he became, in Venice as he already was in Rome, the people’s idol. His admirers mobbed him. They hung around outside the Danieli hoping to catch a glimpse of him. When he went out on foot crowds followed him along the Riva degli Schiavoni. When he came back by gondola or in one of the recently introduced motorboats they pressed so thickly around the landing stage he could scarcely make his way ashore.

  He had embarked on his new life as national hero, and the character in which he had done so was both archaic and up to date. In preferring the weapons of propaganda to those of material destruction he was displaying a quintessentially modern sophistication. He was a newfangled PR man, but he was also a hero from the age of chivalry, one who had exchanged his charger for an aeroplane. As the British Prime Minister Lloyd George put it, “the pilots are the Knighthood of the Air, without fear and without reproach. Every aeroplane fight is a romance, every record an epic.” In a war which was becoming, on its every front, more brutal and more gruesome, d’Annunzio with his beribboned leaflets, skyborn and dancing invulnerable through the enemy anti-aircraft fire, seemed gallant, joyous and debonair.

  He returned to the Danieli. We do not know whether the Countess Morosini telephoned that evening as promised, but we do know that the next day she sent d’Annunzio a little silver box engraved with her name and the date of his exploit, and that he thanked her, saying that he would carry it always because the day it commemorated was more precious to him “than all my odes.” After having been for decades a self-described genius and one of the most famous people in Europe, he had begun what felt like a second, and more important existence. “All the past flows together towards all the future,” he wrote. “All my life I have waited for this hour.”

  It is time to turn back from that point, and to map some of the streams flowing through his life and mind towards it, to see how far back they rise, how variously muddy or silvery fresh their sources are, to observe how they join and braid together and diverge again before merging at last, and to trace how they eventually debouch into a sea of blood.

  · II ·

  STREAMS

  Worship

  GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO—Gabriel of the Annunciation. Everything about his own name was delightful to the poet: the aristocratic particle, the scriptural associations, the way it marked him out as superhuman. He was an archangel, bringing revelations to the wondering world. The name (so felicitous that some of his contemporaries insisted he must have made it up) was his real one, or at least a family name to which he was genuinely entitled. His father had been born Francesco Paolo Rapagnetta, but when Francesco’s childless uncle d’Annunzio made him his heir he changed his surname by deed poll. His son took the prompt. On the back of the winged dining chair d’Annunzio used during his period of greatest fame and fortune were carved the words: “The Angel of the Lord is with us.”

  D’Annunzio was not a pious man but he revelled in the trappings of Christian worship. He surrounded himself with lecterns and prayer stools and censers and alabaster stoups originally carved to hold holy water. His addresses to his political supporters were structured, like the liturgy, as a sequence of calls and responses. To him soldiers were martyrs and battered weapons were relics. He was an arch-sensualist, but he was also an ascetic. After visiting Assisi he discovered an affinity between himself and St. Francis, and l
iked to dress in a friar’s habit (the penitential roughness of the garment mitigated by the fact he wore it over a shift of mauve silk).

  In Fiume he staged pseudo-sacred ceremonies in the cathedral of St. Vito, and encouraged a cult of his own personality so fervid that the Bishop of Fiume noted furiously that his flock were forsaking Christ for this modern Orpheus. His last years were devoted to the conversion of his house above Lake Garda into a self-glorifying shrine. He revered no one but himself, but reverence fascinated him. If a deity’s defining act is that of creation, then d’Annunzio—whose creativity was so exuberant that nothing but physical exhaustion ever slowed his pen—was god-like. He thought so. The hero of his novel Forse che sì, Forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No), crash-lands his plane on a beach in Sardinia and, alone in a wild landscape, reflects: “There is no God if it is not I.”

  Faith shaped the culture into which he was born: faith in the Christian God and his saints; faith in magic. As an adult, d’Annunzio would embrace modernity and all its racket, but he grew up in a world where the sounds were made by sheep and cattle, creaking carts and rustling straw. The Abruzzi was, in the 1860s, and to an extent remains, a place apart. Blocked off by the Apennines from the great cities of Italy’s western seaboard, it is bounded by bald mountains, where bears and wolves still live, and in whose foothills walled towns perch on crags fluted like the underside of mushrooms. From there the terrain slopes gradually to the Adriatic, across which Abruzzese mariners have, for centuries, traded with their counterparts on the eastern, Dalmatian shore. The land is edged by low cliffs or, near Pescara, the region’s capital and d’Annunzio’s home town, by flat sand and pine woods (most of them now felled to make way for beachside hotels). Returning in middle age, d’Annunzio was moved to be back among the stone walls, the low hills scattered with flowering trees. “A painted cart passes along the shore, drawn by a pair of white oxen. The sandy soil sloping down to the sea is ploughed almost to where the waves break. Rows of beans. Vines contorted like arthritic old hands. A blackened stack of straw. Parsimony, diligence … The mountain rearing grand above.”