Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Centaurs, chimeras, satyrs and other hybrid beings recur in his imaginative work. Repeatedly, he describes himself as a faun: a feral half-human, smooth-skinned homo sapiens from the waist up, a hairy beast below. Fauns were fashionable. D’Annunzio had read Mallarmé’s famous poem, but for him the image expressed a fundamental conflict. Sometimes the self-description is gleeful, the conceit of a physically self-confident young man pleased to see himself as a mischievous animal. Sometimes it hints at self-loathing and shame.

  A few weeks after he met Barbara, d’Annunzio was summoned to Pescara to help deal with a family crisis. His father, Francesco Paolo, had been running through money at a disastrous rate. D’Annunzio’s mother’s inheritance was all but gone. There was little chance of finding dowries for his sisters. Over the next six years, d’Annunzio was to find his own financial problems greatly aggravated by his father’s. He would be sending handouts to his mother for the rest of her life.

  It is nearly always unwise to imagine one can deduce anything certain about a novelist’s life from a reading of his fiction, but d’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death (begun in 1889 and published in its final form five years later) is an exceptional case. It is a novel in which the author’s own love letters are quoted verbatim, and one which describes in exact detail the place in which it was first written. D’Annunzio told Romain Rolland that it was “not imaginary at all.” Its hero, Giorgio Aurispa, a sophisticated young city-dweller like d’Annunzio, revisits his family in the Abruzzi. His fictional father is a portrait of d’Annunzio’s real one. More painfully, it is also a kind of self-portrait: the author as seen in a hideously distorting glass.

  When he went to see Francesco Paolo that summer of 1887, d’Annunzio himself was already spending way over his income. Aurispa’s father, like d’Annunzio’s, is plundering his wife and children’s home to pay his mistress’s expenses. D’Annunzio was renting a room for his meetings with Barbara with money desperately needed by his legitimate family. The fictional father is shifty, telling transparent fibs. D’Annunzio, still living with his wife but meeting Barbara nearly every day, must have been lying hour by hour. Aurispa is fastidious and physically refined. So was d’Annunzio, the neat little man who even as a schoolboy was already spending inordinate sums on laundry. Aurispa contemplates his father: “Fat, full-blooded and powerful, a hot breath of carnal vitality seemed to emanate from his whole person … His face bore the impress of a violent and harsh nature … All this inspired him [Aurispa] with a feeling akin to nausea … And I, I am the son of this man!” Looking at his real-life father, d’Annunzio likewise recoiled as though from a hideous caricature of himself. Like the picture in Dorian Gray’s attic (Oscar Wilde’s novel would be published in the same year as the first instalment of The Triumph of Death), Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio was the image of his son’s worst faults. If the son was a faun—a pretty creature from an artificial pastoral—the father was the stinking goat that begot him.

  During the summer of 1887, probably while d’Annunzio was absent in the Abruzzi seeing to his father’s affairs, Maria, pregnant for the third time, read a letter to him from Barbara, one which made the nature of their relationship unmistakable. We do not know what passed between husband and wife after this discovery. It was to be another three years before they separated definitively. But d’Annunzio afterwards alluded to “violent scenes.”

  The Sea

  D’ANNUNZIO REPEATEDLY BOASTED that that he was born at sea, on board the brigantine Irene, and that his “marine nativity” had made a natural-born sailor of him. He identified himself with the sea-god Glaucus. He claimed to have a “nautical daemon” and called himself a “wolf of the sea.”

  Most of this is fanciful nonsense. D’Annunzio’s birth on dry land, in the family home in Pescara, is well documented, as is his tendency to turn queasy in high seas. But it is true that Pescara and all its neighbouring coastal towns were, in d’Annunzio’s lifetime, seafaring communities. Before the arrival of the railways a landmass was a formidable obstacle; an expanse of water was a highway. Peoples were linked not by a common land but by a common sea. D’Annunzio’s father’s income (while he still had one) came from trading across the narrow Adriatic with the Dalmatian towns of Fiume, Zara, Sebenico, Ragusa, Spalato (now Rijeka, Zadar, Sebenik, Dubrovnik and Split), all of which then had substantial Italian populations and close ties, of trade and also frequently of kinship, with the ports of Italy’s eastern coast. Several of d’Annunzio’s early stories are about sailors who cross and recross the water, trading in timber and grain, wine and dried fruits. If the Abruzzi was his native land, the Adriatic was, even more emphatically, his native sea.

  In old age he liked to dwell on memories of swimming far out: “My body completely naked, meeting playful dolphins, the effort to reach the fishing boats; the fishermen who dried me and wrapped me in their rags beneath the flapping of the orange and rust-coloured sail; the hot soup, cooked right there in a terracotta pot, mullet, sole, squid, all scarlet with peppers; hunger, hunger, pleasure and forgetfulness, with those sailors standing astonished around me, as though wondering at a sea creature dragged up from the deeps in the net along with the abundant fish.”

  In the summer of 1887, his personal life was in uproar. Barbara had been sent off by her parents to spend some weeks with her sister in Rimini. Her husband had reappeared to escort her to the station. It seems likely that parents and husband alike had got wind of, and for differing motives deplored, her relationship with a married man whose debts were already threatening to overwhelm him. Maria had discovered this latest and most serious infidelity. His recent visit to his parents had been traumatic, and practically worrying. Deliverance came in the form of an invitation to run away to sea.

  In a playful sketch written early that August, “Duke Minimo” makes fun of an unnamed friend who is always coming up with hare-brained schemes. One hot night, in a bar near the Palazzo Ruspoli, this friend is one of a jolly group drinking long glasses of iced lemonade with the “Duke” beneath artificial trees of painted zinc, while a singer warbles The Cuckoo Song. He announces that he is going to sail around the Adriatic, setting out from a port on the Abruzzi coast, going northwards to Venice, on to Trieste, around Istria, and then south along the Dalmatian coast. There, he promises, they will find trees bearing marvellous fruit, and water glittering like diamonds. They will meet beautiful women—white-skinned, blue-eyed blonde women, fierce black-haired women. Everyone laughs, but one Adolfo de Bosis, “ardent apostle of Shelley,” is alight with enthusiasm. He volunteers to come along too, declaring, “We will die like Percy,” and embarking on lengthy Shelleyan quotations which the others shush or shout down. The piece ends in bathetic whimsy: the scheme’s proposer turns up at Rome’s railway station too late for the train to the coast and ruefully resigns himself to a summer in the city. In reality, though, it had a sequel. De Bosis existed. He was Shelley’s translator and chief advocate in Italy, and a close friend of d’Annunzio. It was he who had a boat, a cutter called the Lady Clara. And it was d’Annunzio who impulsively accepted his suggestion that they sail in her around the Adriatic.

  Leaving Maria, by now in the last month of her pregnancy, he met up with de Bosis in Pescara. Their voyage began in aesthetic style. They took with them Persian rugs, lots of cushions and an intarsia stool. They hired two sailors, frivolously chosen by d’Annunzio for the sake of their high-sounding names, and both, as soon became obvious, incompetent.

  One of the many ways in which d’Annunzio was ahead of his time was in his passion for sunbathing. He lay on deck all day, stark naked, moving only to turn his other side to the sun. He contrived to see Barbara briefly in Rimini. She was so heavily chaperoned there that he could barely steal a kiss, but at least she was able to give him a red banner she had embroidered for him to fly from the Lady Clara’s mast. Back at sea with de Bosis he enjoyed himself in posturingly aesthetic style. When they stopped to picnic on beaches, the two young men dressed in white linen and took a
shore with them their rugs and cushions and a silver tea-set, and photographed each other, revelling in their own sophistication.

  North of Rimini they strayed too far out to sea. A stiff wind got up. The boat was being driven onto the Dalmatian coast. D’Annunzio, green-faced again, was useless. The two hired crewmen were little better. De Bosis struggled with his little vessel but it was soon frighteningly out of control. Dying “like Percy” suddenly seemed all too likely, but by happy chance a squadron of Italian warships were performing a practice manoeuvre nearby. The Lady Clara was seen floundering and rescued by the cruiser Agostino Barbarigo. The little sailing boat was first taken in tow and then hoisted aboard the ironclad warship. Their lives had been saved, and d’Annunzio’s had been given a new direction. He was to identify the escapade as the transition from his existence as a “mere poet” to the beginning of his life as the mouthpiece of his nation.

  As the Agostino Barbarigo steamed towards Venice, where the two hapless literati were to be dropped off, d’Annunzio exulted in being aboard a potent steel vessel. The following year he published his ode To a Torpedo Boat in the Adriatic, hymning the glittering ship, “beautiful as a naked blade,” throbbing with power “as though the metal encloses a terrible heart.” Such a gigantic weapon, he wrote, could be wielded only by men of “cold courage.” At sea there was still a place for a hero, bestriding the shuddering bridge of a colossal warship, as the knights of old had bestridden their ironclad steeds.

  The pact between Italy, Austria and Germany—the Triple Alliance against which d’Annunzio was to rail so furiously two decades later—had been agreed five years previously, in 1882. At the same time, the Italian administration, unhappy at being obliged by weakness to accept such uncongenial allies, had begun to build up Italy’s army and to create a fighting fleet. Now d’Annunzio, self-styled “sea-wolf,” immersed himself in the subject. Briefed by the officers on the Agostino Barbarigo, he wrote a series of polemical pieces, published under the collective title of The Italian Armada, calling for the construction of more ships on nationalist grounds. “The shouts and greetings and blessings accompanying the happy descent of a new ship into the sea reverberate from one end of the peninsula to the other.”

  The articles were full of practical suggestions about the financing and equipping of the fleet and the training of seamen. The languid Sir Charles Vere de Vere, the pleasure-loving Duke Minimo, the flighty Happemouche, had transformed themselves into a commentator who had read and thought carefully about engineering and naval discipline, and one moreover with a frighteningly bellicose nature. D’Annunzio predicted the future role of torpedo boats and the havoc they might cause to enemy shipping. He imagined the mood of their crews. “No human joy will equal theirs as they see the monstrous dreadnought keel over.” This was his own voice. The articles, unlike his gossip and fashion pieces, were published under d’Annunzio’s own name.

  · · ·

  D’Annunzio and his companions were put ashore in Venice and the Lady Clara was delivered to the shipwrights of the Arsenal, where the great ships that once made Venice ruler of the eastern Mediterranean had been built. It was d’Annunzio’s first sight of the city. Arriving there as he did with the theme of maritime glory on his mind, it became for him the symbol of all Italy’s past greatness. Even more than imperial Rome, it was the Venetian Empire which was to shape his politics in the modern world.

  Within days of his arrival in Venice, d’Annunzio received word that in his absence his third son had been born. He telegraphed back to his wife that the baby was to be named Veniero, after the great Venetian admiral and doge, commander at the battle of Lepanto.

  Veniero’s father was prevented from assisting at his birth by the arrival of Barbara and by his lack of money. In The Triumph of Death, the heroine Ippolita joins Giorgio Aurispa in Venice. Only one detail of the remembered idyll is provably untrue. In the novel, the lovers stay in grand style at the Hotel Danieli. In actuality d’Annunzio had a room in a far less glamorous hotel further along the Riva degli Schiavoni. Even that he couldn’t afford. Unable to pay his bill, he was prevented from leaving until de Bosis kindly lent him the necessary cash.

  Decadence

  HERE, FROM THE PAGES OF La Tribuna, is d’Annunzio’s advice to young gentlemen invited to the newly fashionable late afternoon events known as “garden-parties” (his English). They should not wear evening dress, “but a simple redingote.” Their trousers should be neither too pale nor too tight, “but loose, as fashion requires.” The cravat should be light-coloured, with a large knot, “and the top hat should be white, for preference, with a black ribbon, as in half mourning.”

  Seriously as d’Annunzio took the subject of personal adornment, it was by this time as evident to him as it was to Scarfoglio that he was wasting his talent. Was it for this he had stolen his school fellows’ lamp oil? Was it for writing such tosh that he had prepared himself by making himself conversant first with the classics and, more recently, with the latest, most innovative writing from England, France and Russia? Was this a proper way for a prodigy to employ his talents? Were such fripperies appropriate interests for one born to a high destiny? Clearly not. In July 1888, when he was twenty-five years old, he gave up his job at La Tribuna. He left Rome. He retreated to Michetti’s convent in Francavilla and painted the word “clausura” (“enclosure,” as in an enclosed religious order) above the door of a cell.

  There he stayed, seeing neither his lover nor his wife and sons, for five months. He had become persuaded that the novel was the literary form best suited to his own era. He was resolved to make it new and at the same time to establish his own reputation as a great modern writer. By the time he returned to Rome he had finished Pleasure.

  He dubbed Michetti “Cenobiarca,” an archaic word meaning the leader of a colony of monks, and acted as though he had joined his order. In his cell he worked indefatigably. Barbara wrote asking him to meet her in Turin, or imploring him to return to Rome at least for a few days. He refused. His work must not be interrupted. It was an ordeal, an heroic labour, an act of devotion.

  For months he was, as far as we know, celibate (if only because, according to him, “the only women for thirty or forty miles around were infected baggages or the worn-out mothers of at least twenty sons.” He was as self-punishingly dedicated as an anchorite. “Yesterday, after working for five hours in the morning, I stayed at my desk in the afternoon for seven consecutive hours, without ever getting up. When I stopped I was dying of exhaustion.”

  He was intent on creating a form of fiction as yet unknown. He had written realist stories, and poems full of dreamy pre-Raphaelite imagery. Now he would combine the two strands, creating women as dangerous as the jewelled biblical temptresses of Gustave Moreau’s paintings, but ones who inhabited not the distant, exotic past but the Rome he knew; real women with pubic hair and rank-smelling armpits, whose mouths, when kissed, tasted of the newly popular Peek Frean biscuits.

  As always, he was drawing on the ancient and the modern alike. D’Annunzio knew the classics, he knew early Italian literature as few others did. He was studying the writings of mediaeval churchmen, learning from their incantatory rhythms, their minute examinations of the human heart and conscience. But he was also a modernist, abreast with critical theory (he had recently been much impressed by Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine) who believed that a literature capable of representing a person’s inner life and the “invisible forces” which shape it must begin with the “total abolition of literary tradition.”

  In the evenings Michetti climbed the stairs to his cell and d’Annunzio would read his day’s new pages aloud. The steam rising from their China tea seemed to him an image of their intelligence, perfuming the tranquil atmosphere of the room as incense perfumes a church. They were hermits dedicated to the exercise of their respective arts. They were also heroes, he recorded, who broke their daily “laborious fast,” as Homer’s warriors did, by eating their supper beside the soundi
ng sea.

  Pleasure opens with an aerial shot of the quarter of Rome around the Piazza di Spagna. The square and surrounding streets are busy. A vague hum of passing carriages and human voices can be heard. It is an autumn afternoon and the light is golden, hazy, a touch melancholy (d’Annunzio had written poems describing just such an afternoon). The viewpoint zooms down and, as though passing through the window, into a set of rooms in Palazzo Zuccari. It pans around the interior, lingering on masses of roses arranged in gilded crystal vases. It cuts (by means of an explicit reference) to an almost subliminal glimpse of a Botticelli painting in which an identical vase is visible behind the Madonna, and then cuts back to the room across which our hero, Andrea Sperelli, is now visible.

  The cinematic language suits d’Annunzio’s narrative technique. Half a decade before the motion picture camera was invented, he structured his first novel as though it were a film script. Pleasure’s narrative is a sequence of lucidly visualised scenes. It employs flashbacks and abrupt cuts, distant views and voice-over-like meditations. In Francavilla, d’Annunzio told Michetti, his novels (like the yet-to-be-invented cinema) would combine “the precision of science with the seductions of the dream.”

  In Pleasure, d’Annunzio holds out a vision of a beautiful life, only in the end to condemn it as empty and sterile. He describes people whose gait and dress sense and taste in flower arrangements all proclaim them members of an elite. He places them in settings of dreamlike loveliness—tapestry-hung apartments in Renaissance palaces, terraced gardens large enough to get lost in. He gives them gorgeous clothes and precious bibelots, all so lasciviously described that the entire fictional environment seems fetishised. But he always insisted that his book was an exposé in which, “I study, with sadness, so much corruption and so much depravity and so much deviousness and falsity and futile cruelty.”