Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Scarfoglio was shocked. D’Annunzio, who had arrived in Rome with a sheaf of neo-classical poems and high-minded realist stories, had transformed himself into a frivolous sycophant to the idle rich. “For six months he has been going from one ball to another, from a morning’s riding in the Campagna to a supper party at the house of some pomaded old idiot furnished with nothing more than a set of quarterings. Not one serious thought enters his head. He is a puppy dog on a silken string.” One night when some of the Cenacolo were having an unpretentious, Abruzzese-style supper together, the two quarrelled. Scarfoglio was irritated by the way d’Annunzio cherished and protected his spotless white cuffs (laundry was expensive). D’Annunzio was seriously annoyed when Scarfoglio—probably deliberately—dropped some bread crumbs on the poet’s black suit.

  There was a part of d’Annunzio that agreed there was something shameful about what he was doing. The need to earn his living was abhorrent to him, as it would always remain. “What craven humiliations, Elda … Here men are sold like cattle.” But there was nothing wrong, in his opinion, with popular journalism. He wanted readers, plenty of them. Besides, when he wrote about shops and table settings and ladies’ hats, he didn’t feel he was demeaned by his subject matter. To Scarfoglio these might be trivia, but d’Annunzio was observing and recording aspects of life which delighted him.

  He gave a lot of thought to clothes. The heroines of his novels have wonderful dresses, minutely described. For a walk in the garden, Maria Ferres wears a Fortuny-style pleated gown. D’Annunzio devotes two full paragraphs to the cut of its sleeves, and its “strange, indefinable colour,” like rust, or like the stamen of a crocus. He tells us about the sea-green ribbon around its waist, the turquoise scarab brooch with which the collar is fastened and the hat, wreathed in hyacinths, which completes the outfit. In doing so he alludes to the Italian primitives, and to two of his favourite contemporary painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. To him fashion was an extension of the visual arts. He saw no reason why the décor of a drawing room or a woman’s dress should not be considered as worthy of serious attention as a landscape or a painting.

  High society was not just a pleasing spectacle. The “ancient Italic nobility,” wrote d’Annunzio in Pleasure, had “kept alive, from generation to generation, a family tradition of elite culture, of elegance and of art.”

  Everywhere around him he saw monuments to that tradition. Rome is a palimpsest, and d’Annunzio was an indefatigable explorer of the ruins of its multi-layered past. He clambered across the temples and fallen arches of the forum. He rode over the outlying hills past convents and basilicas, and out into the Campagna with its outcrops of titanic masonry, its aqueducts and tombs. He wandered through the immense ruins of imperial palaces. He went from church to church, listening to music, making notes on the statuary. But what moved him most was not the Rome of the Caesars, or the Rome of the Popes (the two predecessors Italian nationalists had in mind when they talked about the capital of the new nation as “the third Rome”). The Rome to which d’Annunzio responded most passionately was the Rome of the great aristocratic families.

  He loved the patrician villas. He admired their façades from the outside only, but in many of their grounds he was free to wander. Topiary, fountains, cypresses and obelisks echoing each other’s forms; broad, curved steps; pergolas draped with wisteria; marble benches supported by carved lions: these gardens were marvellous places. He stored them away in memory to feed his imagination for years to come. He took his women into them on summer nights, to carve their names onto mossy stone parapets, to kiss, to hear the nightingales, and on at least two occasions that we know of, to strip off all his clothes and make love.

  Those gardens, like landscapes glimpsed in a dream, were under threat. “We must build Italy in Rome,” declared Francesco Crispi, the nationalist statesman who was to dominate Italian political life for the next two decades. Every open space was a target for speculators. The Aventine and Gianiculum Hills were being divided up into lots for sale. The Corso Vittorio Emmanuele was being driven through the city centre, at the expense of a swathe of mediaeval and baroque alleyways. Within months of d’Annunzio’s arrival in the capital, Augustus Hare, an English resident, wrote that in twelve years the new regime had “done more for the destruction of Rome, with its beauty and interest, than the invasions of the Goths and Vandals.”

  D’Annunzio was to become, once fame gave him influence, an energetic conservationist. It is, for instance, largely thanks to his advocacy that Lucca still has its mediaeval walls. As a young journalist though, all he could do was lament the desecration. Parks “where, last spring, the violets appeared for the last time, as numerous as blades of grass,” were covered with white hillocks of plaster and piles of red bricks. In groves where nightingales had sung undisturbed for centuries “the wheels of wagons screech. The cries of artisans alternate with the hoarse yells of carters.” The laurels of the Villa Sciarra, whose grounds had been sold for development, “lie felled, or stand, humiliated, in the little gardens of stockbrokers and grocers.” In the gardens of the Ludovisi family’s magnificent Villa Aurora, to be sacrificed to the apartment blocks of the newly widened Via Veneto, he saw ancient cypresses uprooted, their blackened roots ignominiously exposed to the sky. A wind of Barbarism was blowing over Rome, he wrote. “Even the box hedges of the Villa Albani, which appeared as immortal as the caryatids and the herms, tremble at the presentiment of the market and of death.”

  That wind was a metaphor for the influx of middle-class officials and tradesmen and businessmen who had followed the new Italian administration into the city. In Rome in the 1880s, d’Annunzio’s fervent patriotism, which might have led logically to joy at Italy’s recent liberation and devoted loyalty to the regime running the unified country, came into conflict with his artistic sensibilities. The culture that he credited the aristocracy with having kept alive was in danger of being engulfed by “today’s grey democratic flood … which is drowning in meanness so many beautiful and rare things.”

  He wasn’t uncritically admiring of the aristocrats he gradually began to meet. But, debauched or silly though the upper-class characters in his novels may be, they still have graces denied lesser beings. D’Annunzio’s imaginary Count Andrea Sperelli, standing “on guard” at the beginning of a duel, displays in every line of his person the “sprezzatura of a great lord.” In another novel, d’Annunzio describes a refined young man’s revulsion on seeing his bourgeois mistress’s bare feet. They seem to him deplorably vulgar, suggestive of squalor and meanness. Even the curve of an upper-class instep was somehow more noble than that of a plebeian.

  On that school outing to Poggio, d’Annunzio had gained access to a grand house by ingratiating himself with the girls. In Rome as an adult he played the same game. In the fencing schools and stables he encountered the young men of the upper classes; he saw them striding, immaculately dressed, up the steps of their clubs; he might share a compartment on a train with them; but he was not one of them. He was a brave horseman, but it would be another twelve years before he became a member of the Circolo della Caccia, the exclusive foxhunting club. Women, however, were more approachable. Scarfoglio took it for granted that d’Annunzio’s enthusiasm for high society was sexually motivated. “As winter opens the doors of the great Roman houses, so he ceded to the flatteries of ladies.”

  The three or four streets between the Piazza di Spagna and the Corso—then full of antique shops and jewellers—were his hunting ground where, as he tells it, open-air “flirtation” (his English) was rife. In a teasing piece for La Tribuna he described the erotic opportunities shopping afforded. “Your hand can brush furtively against a lady’s, in feeling an embroidered silk.” Advice on the choice of a Christmas present, he explained to his readers, can have “an infinity of madrigals” as its subtext. “You can tell her you have seen an unusual object in a little-known curio shop and offer to accompany her there, and as the two of you bend over to inspect the
knick-knack in question you will feel your ear tickled by her hair.” And then, a little later, you can play on the memory of that intimacy. “ ‘Do you remember Duchess … You were wearing a chestnut-coloured mantle trimmed with chinchilla, and you were so fair, at Janetti’s shop, standing in a ray of sunlight, between a piece of marquetry and a screen of leather tooled with silver and rose-coloured chimeras … You were so beautiful that morning … And you were so kind … and sweet … etc. etc. Do you remember?’ If the Duchess remembers, you’ve almost certainly made a conquest.”

  It is not hard to guess of whom he was thinking. In April 1883, a couple of months after he wrote his last letter to Elda, d’Annunzio attended a gathering of high-ranking ladies in the Palazzo dei Conservatori. The piece he wrote is his usual confection of artistic references, fashion notes and social gazette. He mentions the Duchessa di Gallese, serene in crushed velvet, and notes that she smiles frequently at her blonde daughter, Maria, who stands by a marble statue and wears a white plume. D’Annunzio ends the piece with an enigmatic reference to a pair of “living turquoises speckled with gold” beneath long eyelashes. In his scandalous poem, Peccato di Maggio (Sin in May) published the following month, he describes seducing a young woman with just such eyes. Shortly thereafter he and Maria di Gallese eloped.

  He wrote to Nencioni: “Finally, I have given myself up entirely to love, forgetting myself and everything else.” The Duchessina Maria Hardouin di Gallese (pictured with their son Mario) was a year younger than him, described by a contemporary as “a graceful creature, fragile, an eighteenth-century pastel … the image of poetry.”

  The family bore a noble name, but neither of Maria’s parents was born into the ancient aristocracy. Her father was the son of a clockmaker from Normandy, who had come to Rome as a junior officer in the French army in 1849. Billeted in the Gallese palace, or perhaps just frequenting the stable yard, he had met, wooed and won the widowed duchess, marrying her and—thanks to a special papal decree—sharing her title. When she died he married again, to a much younger woman of the bourgeoisie. But however come by, the duke’s title was ancient and respected; his home, the fifteenth-century Palazzo Altemps, was imposing; his second wife, Maria’s mother, was a court insider and lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

  Persistent gossip suggests that it was the duchess who first became interested in d’Annunzio. She was described by her neighbour, Count Luigi Primoli, who would become a good friend of d’Annunzio’s, as “graceful, seductive, but as hysterical as the heroine of a novel.” Primoli adds that she was constantly going about with poets. In her salon writers and artists met high society. This was the kind of inclusive circle into which d’Annunzio could have been invited. Or perhaps he met mother and daughter with Primoli, who also made a practice of inviting “the two aristocracies, of the mind and the blood,” to meet. D’Annunzio certainly visited his house at about this time, and wrote fondly of a “mysterious corner” where a little low divan in a heavily curtained alcove, half screened by a palm tree, provided the perfect place to “converse in peace with a lady.”

  Whatever may have passed between d’Annunzio and the duchess, he soon transferred his interest to her daughter. Count Primoli, recounting the affair in his diary, imagines Maria finding him in a corner of the palace. “A young poet … as beautiful as a mediaeval page. Was he there for her mother? She took him for herself.” It wasn’t difficult for the young couple to meet. Later, Maria wrote nostalgically to Primoli of how she would ooh! and aah! at the lovely things in Janetti’s shop window, or buy violets from the flower stall in the Piazza di Spagna (in Pleasure all the ladies carry little posies of violets inside their muffs). D’Annunzio was frequently there too. Soon they were meeting while out riding as well. And if Sin in May is to be taken as the description of an actual event, those outdoor assignations were soon deliriously pleasurable. In a wood where blackbirds sing, the poem’s narrator falls to his knees before his “slim blonde companion.” His hands play upon her body like a harp. She hangs over him, swaying, swooning. They lie down. Her tumbled hair forms a bed on which she stretches out: “I felt/The points of her breasts rising, at the lascivious/Approach of my fingers, like fleshy flowers.…” A rigor as of death freezes her, but “she revives as on a wave of pleasure./I bend entire over her mouth, as if to drink from a chalice, trembling at the conquest.”

  The woman in the poem is called Yella (a diminutive of Mariella, a common variant of Maria). D’Annunzio was being flagrantly indiscreet, perhaps having calculated that the only way he could win Maria was by compromising her beyond redemption. The duke might himself be an upstart who had entered the ranks of the nobility by way of the bedroom: it did not follow that he would welcome a son-in-law who followed his lead. Quite the reverse. Some time early that summer Maria became pregnant (Mario d’Annunzio was born the following January), but still her father adamantly refused to sanction her marriage to the “penny-a-liner.”

  On 28 June 1883, Gabriele d’Annunzio and Maria di Gallese took the train to Florence. Their flight was widely reported: d’Annunzio himself had probably tipped off the press. There was some attempt to veil the impropriety: most journalists covering the scandalous elopement alleged that the pair were met at the railway station (telegrams flying faster than trains) by the prefect of police, and sent straight back to Rome. It was a polite fiction. It was not until the following morning that the prefect found them at the Hotel Helvetia. Maria was hustled back to Rome, but by passing the night together in a public place the lovers had ensured that Maria’s parents would be obliged to permit their marriage.

  To permit, but not to approve or bless. The duke was so outraged at a mere writer having carried off his girl that he wouldn’t attend their wedding in the chapel in the Palazzo Altemps. Worse, he refused to give Maria and her new husband any financial support, or ever to meet them. To do him justice, d’Annunzio has left no sign that he was disappointed by Maria’s lack of dowry, or by the fact that as an outcast she was unable to provide him with an entrée to the aristocratic circles that fascinated him so. The couple left town to enjoy a marital idyll. Maria was d’Annunzio’s pearl-pale, high-born damozel and he was her curly-headed page, and for a while they were entirely happy. He took her off to Pescara and lived there with her for over a year in his father’s Villa Fuoco, revelling in his freedom to enjoy a legitimate “horizontal life” with his delicately lovely wife. When eventually he returned to Rome he took on another dependant. Maria’s parents separated soon after their daughter’s hasty marriage and, for a while, the duchess lived with d’Annunzio and Maria. If d’Annunzio was a fortune-hunter, he was an inept one. Instead of riches and position, he had acquired for himself two disgraced and dependent women whose upkeep he could ill afford.

  Beauty

  WHEN D’ANNUNZIO first went to Count Primoli’s house he might have had something to say about the host, a pioneering photographer and a flamboyant dandy who took pictures of himself dressed in velvet knickerbockers. Primoli was to become another of d’Annunzio’s mentors, and played the part of go-between in two of his later love affairs. But in his account of one of his first evenings at the count’s, d’Annunzio ignores the human and lingers over the inanimate.

  A large room painted Chinese red, a mass of flowers, glass lampshades shaped like birds or lilies, every surface cluttered with things. D’Annunzio made notes. “A dazzling shimmer: a gold-embroidered sash encircles a Hispano-Moresque platter, a length of Venetian velvet is secured by a samurai sword: a sixteenth-century globe and a mauve cope are the backdrop to a profane picture by an ultra-modern artist.” This rich jumble, in which the very old and very new, the beautiful and the bizarre, are juxtaposed, was a model for the interiors d’Annunzio later created in his own homes, spaces which were both settings for the drama of their creator’s life and works of installation art.

  D’Annunzio wrote about his contemporaries’ “bric-à-bracomania.” “Every drawing room in Rome … was laden down with ‘curiosities’, ever
y lady covered her cushions with a bishop’s cope or arranged her roses in an Umbrian pharmacist’s jar or a Chalcedon goblet.” It was a craze he entered into with enthusiasm. He rummaged through the stalls in the Campo dei Fiori, looking for coins and prints and figurines. He frequented auction houses. In Pleasure, Sperelli and Elena Muti attend the sale of a dead cardinal’s effects. Tiny, exquisite objects are passed round for prospective buyers’ inspection—Roman cameos, illuminated missals, jewels made by the goldsmiths of the Borgia court. When Elena touches something particularly fine, her “ducal” fingers quiver a little, a frisson which pleases Sperelli both as boding well for her capacity for sexual ecstasy, and as evidence of the fineness of her aristocratic taste.

  A shop that d’Annunzio particularly enjoyed was that run by the Beretta sisters, selling all things Japanese. He loved its clutter—“lacquers, bronzes, textiles, earthenware, all the rare and precious things are scattered about in a wonderful confusion of colours and shapes.” Japanese artefacts had been gradually reaching the West since the 1850s and by the time d’Annunzio arrived in Rome they were quite the fashion. Identifying a vogue, be it for a new style of hair ornament, an innovative narrative technique or a political theory, was already one of his talents. He was devouring the writings of his French contemporaries, alive to the Parisian dernier cri as well as to what was being worn, read and thought in the Italian capital. He reviewed Judith Gautier’s translations of Japanese poetry; he praised the Goncourt brothers for the way they promoted oriental art. The Berettas’ shop, with its crimson walls and glossy black woodwork, its air scented with cedar and sandalwood, was another of the places which would shape his own style.

  Rare and precious things, unfortunately, are expensive, and in the early 1880s, d’Annunzio, for all the volume of his work, was not earning nearly as much as he thought he needed. Meanwhile his responsibilities were growing. He and Maria passed the first fifteen months of their married life in Pescara, Francesco Paolo having allowed them the Villa Fuoco. There, in January 1884, their son Mario was born. D’Annunzio was not to prove a dependable father, but the birth moved him. “I went round and round the room like a beast in a cage … I could hear a feeble, sweet mewling … I don’t know how to tell you what I felt.” He wrote dotingly about the little pink creature with blue eyes and a tiny, tiny mouth, and made plans for him. Mario would be a painter, or perhaps a scientist. His second novel, The Innocent, contains lovingly detailed descriptions of a baby’s tiny hands and wet gums, its wildly waving arms and unfocused eyes. The novel ends though, with the fictional father killing the infant, which is impeding its parents’ love life. Less than a month after Mario was born d’Annunzio reported that he had sent his baby to stay with its grandparents. “It yelled too much.”