Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The novel which Treves has just rejected will win d’Annunzio international acclaim. Its confessional form is innovative. Its protagonist-narrator Tullio Hermil describes himself as maintaining “an intensely clear-eyed surveillance” over himself. That self is so volatile that Tullio, tracing the currents of depravity and penitence, tenderness and sadism swirling through his own consciousness, describes himself as “multanime” (many-spirited). The Innocent is one of the most intricately nuanced of all the great psychological novels. It is also d’Annunzio’s most compelling piece of story-telling.

  Tullio, like most d’Annunzian heroes, is a contemporary Roman gentleman of leisure, intellectually sophisticated and emotionally jaded. He has been repeatedly unfaithful to his beautiful wife Giuliana and she, despairing of ever regaining his love, has allowed herself to be seduced by another man. At Easter time, while they are staying at his mother’s house in the countryside, Tullio seeks a reconciliation, but Giuliana is by now pregnant with her lover’s child. Together the couple spend a day at the deserted Villa Lilla, and in the garden, overcome by the scent of lilacs, Giuliana swoons into her husband’s arms. Tullio is ardently in love with her again (not least because her difficult pregnancy makes her as pale and ill as d’Annunzio liked his women to be), but he is sickened by the prospect of having to rear another’s man’s child. A boy is born. In the dead of winter, when the rest of the household are in the chapel to celebrate the coming of Christmas, Tullio strips off the baby’s shawls and holds him, naked, by an open window in the bitter cold until he catches a fatal chill.

  Treves had been correct in fearing condemnation. When the novel was finally published the reviewer in the Fanfulla della Domenica deplored the “sour poison … which oozes from every pore of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s new novel,” and its nauseating “stench of corruption and depravity.” It wasn’t only the double adultery and the infanticide which shocked readers. There is a disturbing intimacy in the way d’Annunzio writes about the warm slime of kissing mouths, or crusted mucus on a baby’s upper lip, or the softness of a woman’s uncorsetted breasts. He is equally forensic in his analysis of the impulses of desire, cruelty and squeamish revulsion alternating in a lover’s mind as he caresses his partner. For many, this was a great deal too much reality.

  To less nervous readers, The Innocent vindicates d’Annunzio’s claim that the novel could be as verbally exquisite and emotionally suggestive as poetry. A network of repeated and varied images makes of the whole work a tapestry of words. Giuliana’s hands, lying inert along the arms of a chair or over the sheets of her sickbed; a bunch of white chrysanthemums; Monteverdi’s plaint of Euridice; the swallows’ nests piled along the eaves of the empty villa: each of these motifs recurs, setting up a series of refrains which echo musically through the narrative. Henry James declared that The Innocent showed d’Annunzio reigning supreme over the sphere of “exasperated sensibility.” “Other story-tellers strike us in comparison as remaining at the door of the inner precinct, as listening there but to catch an occasional faint sound, while he alone is well within and moving through the place as its master.”

  D’Annunzio aspires to “make his own life,” but he is a man, not of decision, but of impulse. Michetti is going to Naples, so d’Annunzio, with no pressing reason for being anywhere else, goes there too. Their mutual friend Scarfoglio and his wife, Mathilde Serao, are living in the city. D’Annunzio reads The Innocent aloud to them over three successive evenings and they agree to publish it in instalments in their journal, the Corriere di Napoli.

  If Rome is bustling with the energy of a new metropolis, Naples is grandly degenerate, the capital of a defunct kingdom (the Bourbon monarchs left hastily when Garibaldi advanced on the city in 1860). The drama of its situation between the volcano and the sea is breathtaking. Its government is corrupt: the authorities rule only with the consent of the Camorra, which is to the region what the Mafia is to Sicily. Its society is, in every sense of the word, decadent. D’Annunzio finds it congenial.

  The celebrated author is soon frequenting the drawing rooms of at least two prominent hostesses. Meanwhile a notorious fixer is arranging meetings for him with the city’s indispensable money lenders, and, at the offices of the Corriere, Scarfoglio and Serao are introducing him to the intelligentsia. He meets another brilliant Abruzzese, the philosopher Benedetto Croce, and two future prime ministers of Italy, Francesco Nitti and Antonio Salandra. A quarter of a century later Croce will be one of d’Annunzio’s severest critics, and Nitti his political adversary; but for the time being they are both talented young men with whom he is pleased to keep company. He looks different now, more masculine. His fast-receding hair is cut short—no more of those dark curls—and he has grown a little, pointed, surprisingly blond, beard. He affects a monocle, and gets into a scuffle with a gentleman whose lady friend he has been eyeing up too brazenly.

  He and Barbara exchange letters in which acrimony alternates with delirious pornographic fantasies. He tells her that he has with him always a “reliquary,” a locket containing a photograph and a strand of her pubic hair. She visits. They bicker. He writes elegiac poems about the autumnal light and the gardens of Capo di Monte and the fading of love. Their affair, d’Annunzio tells a close friend, is at its finishing point. He receives anonymous letters informing him of Barbara’s visits to a woman who is both a money lender and a go-between. Perhaps this woman is helping Barbara look for a new man wealthy enough to pay off her debts. Perhaps d’Annunzio would like to persuade himself so, in order to temper his own guilt.

  He has already found her replacement. Shortly after arriving in Naples he meets the Princess Maria Gravina. Two years older than d’Annunzio, and several inches taller, she is married to an artillery officer, with whom she has two, or perhaps four children (accounts differ—however many children there are, she will anyway soon abandon them). She is Sicilian, a prince’s daughter, dark-eyed, with a dramatic streak of red in her black hair.

  Throughout the following winter, while still writing ardent letters to Barbara, d’Annunzio is wooing Maria. In the spring comes a sequence of unhappy events. Maria’s husband Count Anguissola invests his money unwisely and loses it. He gives up his house in Naples and withdraws to his family’s estate. Maria Gravina refuses to go with him. She leaves the marital home, taking her children with her, and asks for a legal separation. Her parents cut off her allowance. She discovers she is pregnant: d’Annunzio must be the father. She attempts to induce a miscarriage but fails. Her husband visits her house and surprises her and d’Annunzio in flagrante. The count brings legal charges. His prosecution takes nearly a year to come to court, during which time the lovers live with the knowledge that under Neapolitan law adultery is a crime carrying a mandatory prison sentence. D’Annunzio had not intended to prolong his relationship with Maria, but feels unable to abandon her now. Separated from her husband, estranged from her parents, she clings to him and her pregnancy “makes a break more difficult.”

  Naples and Rome are still separate societies. Gossip circulates slowly. Still oblivious of his new love, Barbara writes that she will come to visit d’Annunzio. He finds reasons why she should not. He has no money. Maria Gravina and her children move into his lodgings. D’Annunzio is accumulating debts in Naples as fast as he did in Rome. He is dogged everywhere by a “dreary procession of those to whom we owe money.” Soon the bailiffs come to his lodgings. He is turned out. All the curios he has once more been accumulating are seized. He is homeless again, and this time he has a pregnant woman, her children and their nanny with him.

  A friend of Maria Gravina’s rescues the forlorn party by offering a wing of her castle in Ottajano, thirty kilometres out of Naples along the bay. Their setting is splendid: their circumstances wretched. As Maria Gravina enters the last trimester of her pregnancy, winter begins. “This immense feudal castle is an icehouse,” writes d’Annunzio, the man who likes to keep his homes at such a temperature that his mistresses can comfortably lie naked on the floo
r at all hours, and whose male visitors repeatedly complain that to visit him is to risk being stifled. “These rooms are as high and long as the nave of a cathedral, and impossible to heat.” Maria Gravina’s children are noisy and demanding and a constant reminder to d’Annunzio of how long it is (nearly two years) since he saw his own boys. They cannot pay the milkman. They cannot buy bread. They cannot afford firewood. D’Annunzio cannot ask his former landlady to forward his mail because he hasn’t paid his rent and she, too, is demanding money of him. He writes to Barbara (implying that he is alone), lamenting the curse of which he is victim, the fact that he (Duke Minimo! the arbiter of fashion!) has been stripped by his creditors of all his clothes but for one suit and a couple of nightshirts.

  And yet, somehow, he gets by. He writes a teasing verse begging the Baronessa della Marra to buy him a Louis XVI writing desk he has seen in an antique-shop window, a lovely thing “in every way worthy of a famous writer,” but which is, alas, beyond his own means. If she does so, then she is one of a number of aristocratic ladies ready to offer the poet expensive favours. Just as a princess offered him a rent-free castle, so, when that seems too cold, an obliging baroness lends him a villa. And when money comes in, as it intermittently does, d’Annunzio doesn’t pay the milkman, he goes into town and dines out.

  At last Barbara hears of the existence of Maria Gravina and the imminent child. She writes that she “knows everything.” Unabashed, d’Annunzio replies that if that is so, she will know that “hustled along by the violence of events, trapped in a maze with no exit, I have done my duty.” His last letter to Barbara is an astonishing exercise in self-delusion and self-regard. He has never lied to her, he says. He forgives her the words she has written in the blindness of her anger. He urges her to find another love—but not, please, in such a way as to embarrass him. As for himself, “I pursue my blind and vertiginous course towards who knows which precipice. I will not turn round to gaze, with eyes veiled with tears, at the great past love.” He is the Dostoevskian exceptional being, beyond human judgement. He is also a helpless victim who cannot be held responsible for anything. He is unhappy. He is to be pitied. He is doing his best. None of this is his fault. Nothing has ever been; is ever; will ever be, his fault. “It is unbelievable how fate hounds me.”

  Through all this hubbub of wronged women, of bailiffs and criminal charges and precipitate flights, d’Annunzio keeps working. During his two years in Naples he produces a stream of poems, stories and journalism. He revises and completes the interrupted Triumph of Death, and gathers material for his next novel, The Virgins of the Rocks. He writes the poems to be published as Poema Paradisiaco, which includes some of his most abidingly popular verse.

  He is encountering new stimuli. In Naples, there are people who knew Richard Wagner during his sojourn in Ravello during the 1870s, and it is now that d’Annunzio begins pestering van Westerhout to play Tristan and Isolde to him over and over again. He is also interesting himself in politics.

  In Italy in the 1890s, political parties were defined not by ideology, but by shared interests. Administrations tended to be centrist coalitions, put together by means of the trading of favours. Alliances, based cynically on mutual advantage, were so tenuous that a new term “trasformismo” was coined to describe the process whereby deputies were tempted or intimidated into switching sides. Francesco Crispi gave an acerbic account of the process. In parliament, he writes, whenever an important vote was to be taken, chaos reigned. “Government supporters run all over the place, along the corridors, looking for votes. Subsidies, honours, canals, bridges, roads—everything is promised.” Corruption was endemic, and commentators of every political persuasion called for change.

  Edoardo Scarfoglio and Mathilde Serao were both loud in their condemnation of the feebleness of parliamentary government. The Corriere di Napoli was consistently critical of Italy’s democratic institutions. D’Annunzio, in an article he wrote for the paper in September 1892, goes further, attacking democracy itself.

  His piece is provocatively entitled “La Bestia Elettiva” (the electoral beast). The majority, he declares “will never be capable of liberty.” The elite “sooner or later, will always regain the reins of power.” He lays out his vision of the future. “Men will be divided into two races. To the superior ones, who have raised themselves by the pure energy of their will, everything will be permitted, to the inferior ones nothing, or very little.” D’Annunzio is not talking about traditional class distinctions here. “The true nobleman in no way resembles the spineless heirs of ancient patrician families.” Rather a member of the master race would be distinguished by his “personal nobility.” Like the speaker in W. E. Henley’s poem Invictus (first published in 1888), he is the master of his fate and the captain of his soul. “He is a self-governing force.” His hands will never be dirtied by contact with a ballot paper. To participate in the democratic process would render him equal with the “plebs”—a degradation he will never accept.

  At a dinner in 1895, d’Annunzio proposed a toast to “putrefaction,” than which, he said, “there is no more fervid and violent manifestation of life.” He explained himself by alluding to Darwin, but he was not really talking about biology. His toast was to the continuing debasement of political life, in the apparent hope that parliamentary democracy might destroy itself, leaving a land more fit for d’Annunzian heroes. “I drink to the roses which will flower from the blood.”

  In June 1893, d’Annunzio’s father, Francesco Paolo, died. The news was brought to him as he sat in a café. “No rhetoric please,” he said. He went to Pescara, but he went too late. For no good reason that we know of, he missed his father’s funeral, arriving in time only to oversee the break-up of the estate. It was a sad and sordid business. He had hoped for an inheritance sufficient to pay his debts, but he was disappointed. The house in Pescara was preserved for his mother to live in, but all the other family property had to be sold, the proceeds used to pay the dead man’s debts.

  D’Annunzio introduces The Triumph of Death with an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche: “We prepare ourselves, in art … for the coming of the ÜBERMENSCH, the superman.” With his usual gift for sensing shifts in the cultural atmosphere, d’Annunzio had begun referring to Nietzsche’s work some time before he had actually read any of it. But in 1893 an anthology of French translations of extracts from the philosopher’s writing was published. D’Annunzio seized on it.

  It has been customary for biographers and critics to allege that most of d’Annunzio’s subsequent thinking was derived from Nietzsche’s, but the truth is rather that both writers had been looking to the same masters, and arriving at the same conclusions. Like d’Annunzio, Nietzsche had been influenced by Dostoevsky, whom he called “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.” Like d’Annunzio, he had noted Darwin’s suggestion that “Man” (none of these thinkers paid much attention to female humanity) might hope “for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”

  “What is the ape to man?” wrote Nietzsche. “A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment is exactly what man should be for the Übermensch—the superman.” A new race—a new species, even—was gradually coming into being. For Nietzsche, as for d’Annunzio, that “higher destiny” was reserved only for an elite. The great creative sprits, those exceptional beings whom Nietzsche saw as “bright lights” in the tragic darkness of life, could only display their brilliance at the cost of the oppression of lesser folk. “Mankind sacrificed en masse so that one single stronger species of man might thrive—that would be progress.”

  D’Annunzio, with his theory of the two races, was more than ready for these ideas. Years later in France, contemplating some porters lugging his furniture out of yet another house he was leaving, he was to ask himself in his notebook: “Am I of the same species as those men chattering as they carry the trunks?” The question expected the answer no.

  The Nietzschean superman was the acme
of biological evolution. More, he was a being so exceptional as to be beyond the reach of moral judgment, “beyond good and evil.” Nietzsche extolled magnificent criminals. Humanity, he wrote, is “better off looking for a Cesare Borgia than a Parsifal.” Discipline, ruthlessness and an inexorable will were required if one was to transcend the squalor and pettiness of most lives, and aspire, as Nietzsche did, to the condition of “no-longer-animals,” those great philosophers, saints, warrior-heroes and artists whom he called the “Tyrants of the Spirit.” He revered Napoleon, as the schoolboy d’Annunzio had done. All the bloodshed and mayhem of the French Revolution (which Nietzsche otherwise deplored) had been, in his opinion, amply compensated for in the emergence of such a “genius.” “For the sake of a similar prize one would have to desire the anarchic collapse of our entire civilisation.” He longed for the heroic, the colossal. He awaited the advent of the superman as an epiphany. “Imagine the bold step of these dragon-slayers.”

  In 1848, Thomas Carlyle, whose work d’Annunzio had known since his teens, had written: “Man is heaven-born; not the thrall of circumstance, of Necessity, but the victorious subduer thereof.” Neither Nietzsche nor d’Annunzio considered heaven to have had any hand in the matter, but both of them agreed that to be “great,” one must subdue necessity, imposing a value on life by the exercise of one’s own will. Declaring that one must be not the “slave of life” but life’s master, Nietzsche habitually slept only four hours a night. He was as ascetic as d’Annunzio was in his periods of “enclosure.” His self-discipline, self-mortification even, was not a way of abasing himself but the means by which he lifted himself up. D’Annunzio had written that: “One must make one’s own life as one makes a work of art.” In Nietzsche he found his echo: “One should fashion an unequivocal work of art out of one’s own life.”