Two weeks after writing that letter he went to Rome’s railway station with two friends who were on their way to Sardinia. He intended only to see the others off, and then on an impulse, he went along too, declaring he couldn’t pass up the opportunity of seeing the full moon rising over the sea. He was wearing a white rose in his buttonhole and carrying nothing but a cane with a lotus-flower handle. (For aesthetes of his generation, the lotus, the “sceptre of Isis,” was both a phallic symbol and a kind of shorthand for all things Orientalist and exotic.)
The trip was hilarious, its planning shambolic. On the train the young men fell in with some aristocratic acquaintances in hunting gear, who were going out to the marshes to shoot quail. Much jovial talk, then, once the huntsmen had got out, the remaining three lay full-length along the seats, dangling their feet out of the window. At Civitavecchia, where they were to embark, d’Annunzio dithered. First he said that he wasn’t going any further, then he said he’d come but wandered off and ordered a vermouth in a bar, thereby nearly missing the boat. That night, at sea, he began by strolling on deck, jotting down notes for an ode on the moonlight. The weather changed. A wind got up and he abruptly turned first yellow, then green and went below, where he spent a miserable night retching and shivering in his linen suit.
The trip to Sardinia began as a boyish lark, but developed into a mind-altering experience. The friends visited the mines at Masua, and d’Annunzio wrote a powerful account of the hellish conditions in which the miners lived and worked. They went down into the lightless, foul-smelling tunnel, where “the hot viscid mass of vapour embraced us; we felt it on our faces like a soft, wet tongue; it seemed as though two hands drenched in sweat were wringing our hands.” He wrote to tell Giselda about it, but she—poor girl—was struck only by the fact that he had been free to leave Rome at a moment’s notice for a three-week trip, while declaring himself unable to spare even a day or two to be with her. The following month he was with her in Florence for ten days before going onto Pescara for the remains of the summer. There he named a rowing-boat Lalla, but the frequency of his letters to the real Giselda dwindled. In February 1883, he wrote to her for the last time.
D’Annunzio was rapidly to acquire the reputation of a Don Giovanni who seduced and deserted his women without a qualm. In fact he always found it immensely hard to take his leave. It was partly that he was chronically indecisive: his havering on the quay at Civitavecchia is characteristic of the man. And it was partly that he could say neither “no” nor “goodbye” to anyone. He never turned down commissions. He would agree to anything, and then default on his promise. Years later, when he was a great man plagued by fans or presumptuous ex-friends, he was incapable of bringing tedious conversations to a close. Instead he would mutter something enigmatic and leave the room. His visitors would wait, expecting him to return at any moment, but they would wait in vain. He found it dreadfully hard to dismiss a servant. When he was living on the French coast he once went to Paris (a day-long train journey) to avoid being present when his major-domo, on his orders, sacked his groom. Rather than give a straight “no” to unwelcome invitations he would invent preposterous excuses: he once got his chauffeur to telephone his host for a lunch with the information he had gone up in a balloon and might not be coming down to earth for some time.
There is a further reason why his love affairs had such protracted endings. The more unhappy a woman was, the more interesting to him she became. The more he tantalised Elda with promised visits which were repeatedly deferred, the more adorable her image seemed to him. “You must be sad, immensely sad, my poor angel!” he wrote. “You will be thinking of me with desperate desire.” The idea of her disappointment—denied his “savage kisses”—was one he liked to dwell on. Seeing her so seldom, he was really in no position to report on how pale and wan Elda really was, but he addressed her in a rapture of sadistic pity as: “My pallid Ophelia, my poor betrayed virgin.” That he himself was the betrayer he seldom directly acknowledged. Instead he responded to her reproaches by becoming, or so he tells it, frenzied with grief.
The d’Annunzio who wrote the letters was as much a fictional construct as the girl to whom they were addressed. The Sardinian escapade ended with a scene that might have been lifted from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. D’Annunzio and his two friends, who had been overly familiar with the local women, were chased down to the ferry by a crowd of hostile male Sardinians. A comical (though probably frightening) episode, it gives us a glimpse of the real-life “wagtail” d’Annunzio—a very young man strutting and flirting on a trip out of town. One of his companions on the voyage wrote: “He would be off and then, before he’d even been missed, he’d be back like a cat with a mouse in his jaws”—the “mouse” being a young woman.
Writing to Elda he was a very different person, palpitating with love and anxiety, frequently suicidal. “I am surrounded by a terrifying abyss,” he wrote after she had threatened to break off their relationship. “I am alone on a pinnacle of rock. I see no light, I have no hope, you have taken everything from me.” His very last letter must have been bewildering for her to read. “We love each other always,” he writes, but then, “the memories disperse inexorably like empty dreams.” He dwells with repellent arrogance on the unhappiness he’s caused her. The letter ends in a cruel sequence of contradictions. “Addio,” he writes repeatedly. He is sad, he says. To write more will only make her sad as well. “Addio” again, but then “I kiss your mouth with a desire beyond words.” More maddening pity—“Oh my poor martyr!” Again “Addio, addio.” And then finally, the by-now-evident-untruth twice affirmed: “Yours, always yours.” He was just about to turn twenty. Four months later he was married, and not to Elda.
In 1921, after a silence of thirty-eight years, Giselda wrote to d’Annunzio asking for his permission to sell his letters. She hoped that they would fetch enough money to allow her son to marry. She was unusual among d’Annunzio’s women in having kept them so long. At the end of each of his subsequent love affairs he wrote his once-beloved woman a letter full of mellifluous expressions of regret for the fading of a great passion, but ending with a brusque request for the return of his letters. He replied to Giselda by suggesting she hand the letters over to his lawyer. He did not invite her to visit him.
Homeland
THE BOISTEROUS GROUP who burst into Gabriele’s room, making a distracting racket with the fencing foils, were not his only companions in the Abruzzi. A few miles south of Pescara, in Francavilla, lived the painter Francesco Paolo Michetti, who was to become the most loyal and generous of all d’Annunzio’s friends. Michetti was eighteen years older than Gabriele, old enough to become one of his extra fathers, and a successful artist. During the summers he was joined in Francavilla by a creative group of comrades who called themselves—with playfully blasphemous arrogance—the “Cenacolo” (the word translates as dining club, or dining room, but in Italian it is most frequently used of the Symposium over which Socrates presided, or of Christ’s Last Supper). The most constant guests were Francesco Paolo Tosti, the composer who would later set many of d’Annunzio’s verses to music, and the sculptor Constantino Barbella.
By the summer of 1880, when Gabriele was seventeen, with another year of school ahead of him, he was already an established member of the Cenacolo, riding over from Pescara or moving in to stay, initially in Michetti’s small house by the sea and later in the rambling deconsecrated convent which Michetti transformed into his studio and home. “Oh beautiful days of Francavilla!” he wrote later, recalling the “solitary beachside house,” through all of whose rooms blew the salty sea wind: “There life bloomed.” He was, by more than a decade, the youngest of the group, several of whom were men with well-established reputations. If Nencioni and his other invited mentors had been the tutors who saw him through his secondary education, the Cenacolo was his university. He and Michetti talked and talked, “seven hours on end,” he told Elda, “and always about Art, always about Art.”
It was n
ot, primarily, a literary group. Among Michetti’s friends, poets were outnumbered by artists, musicians, scholars. One of d’Annunzio’s great strengths as a writer and as a cultural commentator was that he was as knowledgeable about music and the visual arts as he was about literature, and valued them as highly. He was always intensely observant of visual effects. He was an exhaustive sightseer. His plan to visit the exhibition of contemporary art in Milan was not just a ploy to put Elda off. He was really excited by the prospect. Artworks perform important functions in his novels and plays, as symbols, as points of reference, as inspiration, as aphrodisiacs. One of his heroes models himself on a portrait by Leonardo. Another propositions a woman by telling her that he can see from her hands that her naked body would be as lovely as that of Correggio’s Danae. His poetry is full of colour. He frequently dresses his novels’ heroines in grey, but not just any old grey. He specifies each shade: the grey of ashes, of pigeon feathers, of pewter or a pale sky. At Francavilla he was learning to see through his painter-friend’s eyes. His early stories are full of brilliant unexpected colour: scarlet poppies luminous against a bleached background of dry rock, sky the colour of beryl or turquoise, purple mountains, a beggar’s crimson jacket, a river bright green with reflected trees and—over and over again—the almost fluorescent brilliance of orange and tawny-brown sails on a silver or lead-grey sea. These were the scenes Michetti painted. D’Annunzio’s task was to convert his images into words.
His ear was as discriminating as his eye. His most anthologised poem, La Pioggia nel Pineto (Rain in the Pine Wood), is a piece of beautifully modulated word-music which at once describes and imitates the sounds made by rain falling on leaves. He boasted that he once astounded the conductor Toscanini by detecting which instrument in an orchestra was out of tune. Throughout his life music was one of his greatest pleasures. “No one,” wrote Romain Rolland, “could hear music better than he.”
At Francavilla he could talk about composition with composers, and observe how a sculptor and a painter gave form to their visions. There he would write, so he tells us, in rooms papered with his host’s sketches, with the sculptor Barbella modelling a bust beside him, with another comrade playing Schubert on a mandolin, and Tosti singing the refrain of a lullaby. “[Michetti’s] villa is truly the Temple of Art and we are its priests.”
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It was in that temple that d’Annunzio began to see his native region as a fit subject for literary treatment. With Michetti he embarked on long rides into the region’s mountainous hinterland. These outings took him into a world at once archaic and exotic. The rural people were “almost dwarfs, with snub noses and flattened lips,” but dressed with a kind of “oriental” splendour. D’Annunzio described a wedding party as a riot of “silk dresses, brocade scarves, big gold earrings; toasts accompanied by the delirious-making hum of guitars … gunshots … hailstorm of confetti … joyful cries.”
The members of the Cenacolo all shared an interest in the traditional culture of the Abruzzi. Tosti was collecting folk songs. Michetti’s friends also included Gennaro Finamore, author of a vocabulary of the Abruzzese dialect and a transcriber of folk tales, and the ethnologist Antonio de Nino, whose Abruzzese Customs and Costumes ran to six volumes. The poet Bruni wrote verse in the Abruzzese dialect, which Tosti set to music for a “chorus of youths” to sing during an al fresco ceremony on Easter Monday. The subject of all Michetti’s art, wrote d’Annunzio later, was the “ancient vital race of the Abruzzi, so vigorous, so thoughtful, so full of song.”
For over a century European intellectuals had been searching in isolated rural communities for remnants of obsolete folk cultures. Ethnography was practised most enthusiastically in situations where nationalism needed to assert itself against an alien regime. James Macpherson, “discovering” ancient Gaelic poems (most of them, published under the name of Ossian, his own forgeries) and his admirer and successor Sir Walter Scott, collecting songs and tales in the Scottish Highlands, were intent on demonstrating that Scotland had as rich a cultural heritage as England, its politically dominant neighbour to the south. While Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were growing up, the majority of German states were under Napoleonic rule. Their collecting of fairy tales “found among the common German peasantry” was not just conservationist, it was “imaginative state-building.” The Gaelic League, set up in Ireland in 1893 for the preservation and promotion of Gaelic language and literature, aimed to provide inspiration for an independent Irish state.
So Michetti, touring the Abruzzi in search of picturesque peasant girls in embroidered bodices and home-spun red skirts, and Tosti, with his transcriptions of the songs sung by harvesters in the fields, were providing the cultural underpinnings for the new Italian nation. But it was not easy, as many patriotic ethnographers discovered, to identify authentic relics of indigenous culture. Several of the stories the Grimms collected to provide the new Germany with an unadulterated German back-story were in fact imported by French Huguenots. So d’Annunzio’s Italian friends were swayed by non-Italian influences. Their subject matter was local, but their interest in it was aroused by foreign examples. Michetti’s paintings owe much to the French realists: Corot, Courbet and Millet. Even the name of their fellowship was a borrowing. Over half a century earlier, in Paris, Victor Hugo had presided over a “Cénacle.”
At Francavilla, d’Annunzio swam: he was an exceptionally strong swimmer. “We bathed down there, like savages on the bare beach.” He galloped his horse along the sand and rowed his little boat offshore. He and his friends cooked for each other, as inexpertly as young men accustomed to being waited on by servants or mothers have always cooked; he was to remember with pride a gigantic omelette he managed. Michetti posed his guests for photographs on the beach: d’Annunzio looks as faunlike as he liked to imagine himself—curly hair falling forward, a slight body taut with energy. There are women in some of the pictures, incongruously overdressed by contrast with the men, in long-sleeved gowns and big hats. This was not the monastic retreat d’Annunzio suggested in writing to Elda.
In the evenings there was wine, although d’Annunzio—then and for the rest of his life—was an abstemious drinker. There was opium, which he took to with gusto (“in no time I became a passionate opium eater”). Aware that he was being “stunned” by the drug, he soon left off taking it (“but what beautiful moments I had!”). At night, sitting out among olive trees whose branches had been turned silver by the full moon (an effect d’Annunzio would use repeatedly in his fiction), they sang the choruses and lullabies that Tosti had been collecting and weaving into his newly composed “serenades.” Sometimes they would hear those eerie, repetitive melodies echoed back to them by unseen workers in the countryside around.
During the summer of 1880, Michetti and d’Annunzio made two excursions which were to be particularly fruitful for both of them. One took them to the village of Tocco di Casauria at harvest time. There they witnessed a scene involving a handsome young woman and some drunken harvesters. Michetti began that winter to make studies for one of his most celebrated paintings, La Figlia di Jorio (Jorio’s Daughter), which was finally exhibited at the first Venice Biennale fourteen years later. It shows a peasant girl, in a scarlet dress and shawl, hurrying past a group of leering men. D’Annunzio was to make something much more violent of the subject. He described the event in an interview: “Suddenly there burst into the little square a beautiful young woman, crying and dishevelled, followed by a throng of harvesters, brutalised by the sun, by wine and lust.” From that one tableau he would devise a story of sexual transgression and mob violence which, nearly a quarter of a century later, became his most successful play, also called Jorio’s Daughter.
The other memorable outing was their visit, on a suffocatingly hot summer’s day, to the church of San Pantaleone at Miglianico. The church was crammed with pilgrims who had come to celebrate the saint’s feast day, to expiate sins and pray for miracles. Michetti depicted the scene in his painting The Vow, which was exh
ibited in Rome in 1883 to great acclaim. He makes a grand spectacle of the gorgeous colours of the girls’ embroidered costumes, the slanting light from the church’s high windows and the tragic drama of the dying come to beg for grace.
To d’Annunzio, though, the scene in the church was a horror show. In his account an animal stench rises from the bodies crammed together in the dimly lit church. At the centre of the crowd a kind of furrow is left open, a narrow passage walled with humanity, along which crawl devotees. “Three, four, five lunatics came writhing with their bellies on the ground, with their tongues on the dust of the tiles, with their feet rigidly flexed to support the weight of their bodies. Reptiles.” There is blood on their feet and hands. They are licking the floor before them as they inch forward, drawing crosses with their own saliva. “The red stains that one fanatic has left, are rubbed by the dry tongue of the next fanatic.” The crawlers, one by one, approach the silver effigy of the saint, each one grasping him around the neck “with a supreme effort which seemed akin to hatred” and each fix a bleeding mouth to the saint’s metal mouth and hang there, “with a kind of convulsion of pleasure.” The watchers moan.
Gabriele D'Annunzio Page 12