Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The novel’s hero is a libertine who idly seduces other men’s wives, without passion and without remorse, and who passes his unoccupied evenings with prostitutes he despises. Gambling, heartless seduction and brutal sexual abuse all form part of the plot, and all—so d’Annunzio implies—are endemic in this apparently exquisite world. The ladies look divine from a distance in their satin evening gowns, but when d’Annunzio sends his sound boom close enough to pick up their chatter, their pettiness and malice are manifest. They mock others’ appearances. “She looks like a camel dressed up as a cardinal.” They gossip spitefully about others’ love affairs; they boast of their own transgressions. Young noblemen stand in the corner of a ballroom, their clothes impeccable, their conversation lewd. These people are the last specimens of an exhausted caste. In one of the novel’s most evocative passages, d’Annunzio takes a gavotte by Rameau as the inspiration for a vision of ennui, sterility and despair. “The future is lugubrious, like a field of graves already dug and ready to receive the corpses.” Sperelli, with his fine appreciation of beautiful things and his quasi-autistic failure to empathise with his fellow humans, is left, in the end, futilely attempting to console himself for the loss of love, by buying up his lover’s furniture. Pleasure is a study in decadence.

  “We are dying of civilisation,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt, one of the French authors d’Annunzio had been reading with enthusiasm. French intellectuals identified themselves as the inheritors of a Latin culture beset by the “barbarians” who had so humiliatingly defeated them in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Perversely enough, given the immense creative energy palpable in the industrial and artistic life of late nineteenth-century France, they felt themselves part of a civilisation embarked on its decline and fall. They employed the word “decadence” to describe a particular sensibility they shared, a languid disdain for anything so clumsy and naïve as sincere emotion. They congratulated themselves upon it—so refined, so sophisticated—while at the same time deploring it as an enervation of the energy and the will.

  This decadence was nothing new. Reading Byron at school, d’Annunzio had aspired to emulate the persona of the disenchanted poet-lord. Chateaubriand’s novel René, ur-text of French Romanticism, presented him with the type of a superior spirit too noble to be happy in a levelled-down democratic world, but also too intelligent not to despise his degenerate peers. Andrea Sperelli, the hero of Pleasure, owes much to these prototypes, and something as well to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, who flirts with an innocent young woman to relieve his ennui and then kills her fiancé in a pointless duel. He had also, though, a more contemporary model.

  In 1883, Stéphane Mallarmé visited Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a key figure of the fin-de-siècle cult of decadence. In his home, dimly lit by candelabra, Mallarmé saw a sled positioned on a white bearskin, one room furnished as a monastic cell, another as the cabin of a yacht, and a third with a Louis XV pulpit, choir stalls and an altar rail. In the library there were books with jewel-coloured bindings, and the gilded shell of a tortoise who had died as a result of being so adorned. He described the visit to his friend, Joris-Karl Huysmans.

  Huysmans, like d’Annunzio, had previously written realist fiction heavily influenced by Zola’s, with working-class or peasant characters. Like d’Annunzio he was himself a hard-working member of the bourgeoisie (he was a civil servant). Like d’Annunzio he was fascinated by those who, unlike himself, had the prestige of an ancient name and the leisure to devote themselves to thinking and feeling in exquisitely decorated rooms which were their lives’ chief work. In 1884, the year in which d’Annunzio returned to Rome with Maria and their baby, Huysmans published À Rebours (Against Nature) a novel which is also a kind of compendium of decadent tastes and values.

  À Rebours soon reached d’Annunzio; he later acknowledged to his French translator that Pleasure was something like it. It was immensely congenial to him. Huysmans’s literary style is as mannered as his hero’s lifestyle. Its syntax is convoluted, its vocabulary archaic. Huysmans was a word collector, like d’Annunzio, who crammed his notebook with arcane phrases, and subsequently sprinkled them over his writing, he said, like “sequins,” to make his sentences glitter.

  Huysmans’s hero, Jean des Esseintes, partitions his drawing room to form a series of niches, each one differently decorated so as to provide an appropriate setting for the reading of one of his favourite books. He drinks fine yellow tea imported from “China via Russia in special caravans for his express use.” (We have seen how d’Annunzio savoured his China tea.) This “liquid perfume” des Esseintes sips from porcelain cups as translucent as eggshell and sometimes (though he has little appetite for food) he takes tiny morsels of toast served on plates of slightly worn silver-gilt. (D’Annunzio’s Andrea Sperelli has silver-gilt tableware worn in just the same way.) Following de Montesquiou, des Esseintes sets off the colours of his carpet by letting loose on it a tortoise which is still alive, but gilded and studded all over with jewels.

  Barbey d’Aurevilly declared of À Rebours that the novel expressed such world-weariness that its author would surely have to choose “between the muzzle of the pistol and the foot of the cross.” Huysmans chose the latter. Eight years after his novel’s publication he retreated to a Trappist monastery: he later took holy orders. In this, he and d’Annunzio differed fundamentally. D’Annunzio cluttered his own and his hero’s rooms with ecclesiastical bric-a-brac, but, unbeliever as he was, when he secluded himself, he did so just for a bit, every now and then.

  In Pleasure, Sperelli, embittered by his lover’s cruel rejection, embarks on a sequence of affairs. A “taste for contamination” impels him to seduce ladies of previously impeccable reputation. His promiscuity is as damaging to himself as it is to the women. “Degradation, like leprosy,” has marked him. D’Annunzio’s novel glitters, but it is also intended to burn. From Francavilla he wrote to Emilio Treves, a Milanese to whom Michetti had introduced him and who would be his publisher for the next twenty-eight years. He had written, he told Treves, “the saddest and most spiritual of books,” a novel full of “the highest morality.”

  He was protesting perhaps a tad too much. Huysmans’s des Esseintes retreats permanently to the country and becomes a recluse. D’Annunzio’s Andrea Sperelli once resolves to spend an evening alone in reflection, but within an hour has accepted an invitation to dine out with three other young noblemen and assorted ladies of pleasure. D’Annunzio in his twenties might need a few months’ clausura, but he had no wish—even in his imagination—to permanently forswear the pleasures of the world and the flesh.

  Blood

  DRIVING BACK TO HIS PALATIAL APARTMENT after a concert one day, Pleasure’s Andrea Sperelli is annoyed to find his carriage delayed by an uproar on the streets of Rome. It is January 1887. People are marching on the parliament buildings while troops attempt to disperse them. The demonstrators are distraught and angry. Sperelli has heard the news of the massacre of Italian troops at Dogali in Ethiopia, but it is nothing to him. The dead men, he says to the woman with him, are merely “four hundred brutes, killed brutally.”

  Those “brutes” were part of an ill-prepared invasion force. They had been set upon by an Ethiopian army which outnumbered them ten to one, and had been slaughtered to a man. Dogali was to Italians what Rorke’s Drift was to the English or Little Big Horn to the Americans, a waste of life converted by popular rhetoric into a tale of heroism and self-sacrifice. The deaths of these hundreds of white men, inflated into legend and misted over with grief, eclipsed other, more embarrassing stories, of thousands of indigenous people dispossessed, driven off their lands or killed. By the time Pleasure was published in the summer of 1889 the 400 dead men had become 500 glorious martyrs in the patriotic cause, commemorated with a monument in front of Rome’s railway station, and a second Italian invasion of Ethiopia was in the offing.

  The line in Pleasure provoked a chorus of indignation from those who took Sperelli to be one and the same with his creator. D�
��Annunzio was indignant in his turn. He protested that this passage was the point in the novel where Sperelli shows most clearly that he is a “monster.” He, d’Annunzio, most certainly didn’t share his character’s decadent anti-militarism. Had he not written an ode in honour of those who died in the African wars?

  · · ·

  Grievance and failure had shaped Italian patriotism from the very beginning of the new nation’s history. In 1866, when d’Annunzio was three years old, the still-incomplete nation intervened, unprovoked, in a war between Austria and Prussia. The conflict between the two northern powers offered an opportunity for Italy to acquire Venice and its hinterland without any bloodshed: the Austrians would have ceded control of the region in exchange for Italy’s neutrality. But bloodshed was precisely what Italy’s rulers wanted. In parliament a follower of Garibaldi’s announced, “We must … shed much Italian blood if we are to secure the place in the world that we deserve.” He was echoed by Francesco Crispi. Italy must have its “baptism of blood” to prove its status as a “great nation.” The writer Edmondo de Amicis records the exultant crowds filling the streets when war was declared, the atmosphere of carnival. “These are great days for Italy! A great war!…This is how nations are made!”

  The outcome was humiliating. Within weeks Italian troops were surprised and routed at Custoza. Again the Austrians, hard pressed by Prussia on their northern front, offered to hand over the Veneto if Italy would withdraw from the war. King Victor Emmanuel and his generals refused. They wanted not territory but glory. In July came the sea battle of Lissa. A numerically inferior Austrian force defeated the Italians. The admiral in command was found guilty by the Senate of incompetence, negligence and disobedience. Giuseppe Verdi wrote: “What a wretched time we live in! What a pygmy time! Nothing great: not even great crimes!”

  Italy gained the Veneto anyhow, not as the spoils of victory, but as a favour granted by the French emperor, Napoleon III. Good sense might have suggested this was something to be celebrated, but to patriots longing for a bloody baptism and a nation-building great war, it was a disappointment. Crispi wrote: “To be Italian was something we once longed for; now in the present circumstances, it is shameful.” For Italians of d’Annunzio’s generation that shame was a stain that had to be erased by blood.

  Blood streams through the utterances of late nineteenth-century nationalists and Romantics. Blood. Blood. Blood. The word tolls in parliamentary speeches and newspaper articles. Blood must flow, the motive or occasion for its shedding being of only secondary importance. In the realm of literary fantasy, d’Annunzio’s Andrea Sperelli is nearly killed in a duel over an insignificant insult (as numerous young men were in fact). In the realm of real politics statesmen cast around for a pretext for conflict.

  Across Europe the same sanguinary rhetoric was in use. In England, the poet-laureate Lord Tennyson gave the narrator-hero of “Maud” a starry vision of “a hope for the world in the coming wars,” not because there was any rational justification for those unspecified wars but because peace “was full of wrongs and shames,/Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told,” while “the blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire” was “pure and true.” In France, General Georges Boulanger talked of the invigorating power of bloodshed. In Germany, canny Chancellor Bismarck might protest that Germany had no further need to fight but his realism was out-shouted by the bellicosity of the circles around the young Prince (soon to be Kaiser) Wilhelm. By the 1880s spokesmen of all the Italian groupings were expressing their patriotism in calls for war—any war, anywhere. Peace was demoralising. The national character must be strengthened in the “crucible of war.” This war need have no precise strategic aims. War was great and glorious, and good for the soul.

  The unprovoked Italian invasion of Ethiopia ended only in the calamity at Dogali. Francesco Crispi, seen as a strong man who could infuse the country with his strength, became prime minister shortly afterwards. While d’Annunzio was writing Pleasure, Crispi was persistently attempting to lure France into a fight. The British chargé-d’affaires reported that “the great ambition of Signor Crispi, and perhaps the mainspring of his actions, is to obtain a military success for Italy, no matter where or how.” The intelligentsia supported Crispi’s belligerence. “Glory to you!” wrote Giuseppe Verdi, addressing the premier as “the great patriot.”

  The pointless war was postponed. Crispi’s emissary to Vienna reported that the Austrians (now Italy’s intended allies in a projected war against the French) had “a kind of sentimental and philanthropic love of peace” (which he evidently found both puzzling and deplorable) which meant that “it will be very difficult for us to provoke a war simply for our own interests.” Italy’s bloodthirst was only semi-slaked by a second invasion of Ethiopia in 1889. But the rhetoric which made it possible for d’Annunzio and others to carry Italians into a “great war” a quarter of a century later was already forming.

  Fame

  AT CONCERTS WHICH HE ATTENDED during his first years in Rome, both for the music and for the erotic opportunities they offered, d’Annunzio occasionally saw Franz Liszt. Forty years earlier all Europe had been gripped by Lisztomania. Adoring women had made bracelets out of the maestro’s discarded piano strings and lockets from his smoked-out cigar butts. His performances had been said to induce trances and conjure visions. Entire audiences had fainted in instances of mass hysteria described by Heinrich Heine in 1844 as “a veritable insanity, one unheard-of in the annals of furore!” By the time d’Annunzio saw him, Liszt was in his seventies and very frail, but still had the numinous presence of a star. He would sit between two ladies in the front row and when the music ended he would process down the aisle, while his admirers stood reverently by to watch him go.

  D’Annunzio was fascinated. Liszt’s famous shoulder-length hair, now white, seemed to be made of solid silver. His adorers gazed at the back of his head, wrote d’Annunzio, in “a kind of religious ecstasy … as devotees might gaze when the priest elevates the host.” Liszt would sit completely still, his head cocked to one side as he listened. D’Annunzio checked his watch: the old man could hold his pose, immobile, for half an hour at a time. “It almost seemed he was not a living man but an idol made of metal and wax.”

  Like Liszt, d’Annunzio was to become that oddly disjunct thing, a celebrity, and he well understood the difference between the person and the “idol,” the persona fame foisted on him. In old age he was to write feelingly of the “horror of being ‘Gabriele d’Annunzio.’ ” Horror or not though, that persona was one he himself created, showing extraordinary energy and invention in his pursuit of fame.

  · · ·

  He set about promoting his novel with gusto. Emilio Treves was, in d’Annunzio’s opinion, the only publisher in Italy “who knows how to launch a book.” The two of them devised a campaign designed to overlay the figure of d’Annunzio himself—the hard-working, hard-up scribbler—with the image of his fictional hero Sperelli, son of a Byronic nobleman, “tall and slender, with that inimitable elegance which only ancient lineage can confer.”

  The membrane separating fact from fiction became permeable. The real artist Aristide Sartorio, a friend of d’Annunzio’s, was commissioned to produce in reality a version of the fictional etching which the fictional Sperelli (who is, in an amateur, gentlemanly way, a fine poet and draughtsman) makes in the novel. Its subject matter is titillating. Elena Muti lies asleep beneath a sumptuous blue silken bedspread embroidered with all the signs of the zodiac. In Sartorio’s depiction the cover, which d’Annunzio describes with loving detail in the novel, has—as is the way of drapery in such images—slipped. Elena’s lovely upper body is exposed and (here’s the detail which gives the image its particular frisson) a greyhound leans over to lick her naked breast. D’Annunzio had been at pains to insist his novel was not pornographic: he was not so fastidious when it came to publicity material. “We’ll print a limited number of copies, we’ll sell them with an air of mystery,” he wrote to Sartor
io, explaining how they would both benefit. Sartorio, entering into the spirit of the thing, signed the picture “Andrea Sperelli calcographus.” It went on display in the front window of a picture-dealer’s shop on the Corso.

  D’Annunzio wanted a wide public. He never completely gave up journalism, even once he was earning prodigious sums from his fiction and poetry. “I like this quick communication with the unknown mass,” he wrote. “It’s good for the modern artist to immerse himself from time to time in the current, vital media.” For the same reason he had chosen to write in a genre which was both up to date and popular. He had noticed that when a journal included an extract from a new novel its sales figures increased enormously. There was a demand for fiction, and, in Italy, very little supply. In d’Annunzio’s opinion Manzoni (the author of I Promessi Sposi—The Betrothed—published in 1840 and generally considered to be the great Italian novel) had no worthy successors. Nor, come to that, did he much admire Manzoni.

  He was writing now, not only for the educated elite, but for a mass market. Novels’ readers, he ascertained, were predominantly female. The majority of them were neither rich nor upper class, but enjoyed reading about those who were. In his early stories he had written about beggars and work-worn seamen. But the audience whom he now sought to please weren’t interested in the tribulations of the Abruzzese peasantry. They wanted to be lifted above “mediocre reality.” Accordingly he gave them a fantasy world where no one did paid work, where life was passed in pleasures variously voluptuous or intellectually arcane.