Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The hero of Triumph of Death is awakened one morning to find an unwelcome visitor already in his bedroom, an old school friend down on his luck, a whining, wheedling fellow who has come to beg a loan. The scrounger is described with loathing and contempt. D’Annunzio, a novelist capable of analysing his characters’ most elaborate self-deceptions, must have been aware that this sketch was, among other things, a hideously caricatured self-portrait.

  In Naples his debts grew ever larger, the shifts by which he managed to evade paying them more elaborate and opaque. Everything he earned was already promised away long before he received it. He could not even buy postage stamps. His friends had to pay the charges on letters in which he begged—or rather peremptorily demanded—loans which were unlikely ever to be repaid. There were days when there was no food in the house. “I can barely see,” he wrote to a friend. “I have had no breakfast and I feel faint.” He demanded sympathy with talk of suicide. “I would throw myself into the torrent so as not to suffer any more of this.” He envied the poor fishermen bent over their nets; “I envy the beggars. I envy the dead.” He even solicited money from Olga Ossani, his Febea, telling her he was so beset he might, at any moment, go mad.

  In the event it was Maria Gravina’s sanity which began to give way. The year 1893, in which he turned thirty, was d’Annunzio’s annus horribilis. In January, Maria Gravina gave birth to Renata, but the event brought little immediate joy. The baby was sickly. Maria was unable to feed her. According to d’Annunzio unhappiness soured her milk. A court order took her older children from her: to d’Annunzio’s relief they were returned to their father’s custody. She could not endure the hardship and insecurity of the life she was being obliged to lead and vented her misery as rage. She was jealous (very likely with reason—Benedetto Croce complained that d’Annunzio broke an engagement with him for the sake of an amorous tryst). When d’Annunzio wanted to leave her to go into Naples for a few hours, she became frenzied. There were noisy, violent scenes.

  Renata contracted whooping cough, and came close to death. She survived, but a couple of weeks later fell another blow. Count Anguissola’s case against the errant couple came to court. D’Annunzio and Maria Gravina were obliged to appear and hear themselves sentenced to five months imprisonment for a crime, adultery, which d’Annunzio, by this time, most earnestly regretted. They were saved by a general amnesty, but the disgrace was mortifying.

  D’Annunzio’s debts were still unpaid. “It has begun again, the lugubrious line of people to whom we owe money. Twenty times I have heard the door knocker, twenty times the uncouth voices, twenty times I have been suffocated by a suppressed and most bitter anger.” There were more crises: more humiliations. Creditors waylaid d’Annunzio on the street, and besieged him at home. Maria Gravina was jealous, reproachful, angry. One day, when he talked of leaving on his own for the Abruzzi, she became so frantic that he had to call the landlady to help him wrestle her to the ground to forestall her attempts to kill herself: “for a whole hour we had to make superhuman efforts to prevent her breaking her head on the floor or against the walls.”

  Afterwards he was sick, miserable, unable to work. He left Maria for a few days in their little house in the suburb of Resina and hid out in the city. When he returned to Resina the bailiffs broke into the house again and stripped it of what little remained of their belongings—carpets, clothes, chairs. This time, as the wretched couple and their baby went in search of yet another borrowed home, Maria Gravina, the prince’s daughter, took with her nothing but the dress she wore.

  Rescue was, most wonderfully, on its way. Georges Hérelle, an Italophile French schoolteacher, visited Naples around the time d’Annunzio arrived there. The two didn’t meet, but the Frenchman read and enjoyed the Corriere di Napoli, and when he left for home he took out a postal subscription. When The Innocent began to appear in the journal in instalments, Hérelle was “dazzled.” He set himself to translate it and wrote to d’Annunzio, who encouraged him to continue. In September 1892, The Innocent, rendered into French by Hérelle under the title L’Intrus, began to appear in instalments in Le Temps. The following year, as d’Annunzio was being chivvied by his creditors up and down the Bay of Naples, it was published in Paris in book form. It was both a succès de scandale and a succès d’estime. Reviews were good. Sales were high. D’Annunzio had made his mark where it mattered.

  Paris in the 1890s was the Western world’s intellectual entrepôt. It was through French translations that d’Annunzio had discovered the Russian novelists and Nietzsche. It was through French translations that the rest of the world would first discover d’Annunzio. Payments began to arrive from France for d’Annunzio, steadily increasing both in size and frequency as more of his works appeared there. German and British publishers took note of this new name, and commissioned translations of their own.

  This upturn in his fortunes, though, was too slowly accomplished to solve his immediate problems. When d’Annunzio and Maria Gravina were turned out of their house in Resina, the money coming from his French publication was still only a trickle. There were quicker, if less honourable, ways of saving oneself from debt than waiting for royalties. In October 1893, d’Annunzio somehow found himself in a position to pay his most pressing bills. According to Scarfoglio, Maria Gravina had obtained a large sum of money from a former lover. We do not know, although Scarfoglio drops heavy hints, what services she might have rendered in return. A respite had been granted. The besieging creditors placated, d’Annunzio escorted his troublesome mistress and their baby to Rome, left them there and went himself—with profound relief—alone to stay with Michetti in Francavilla.

  Virility

  WHEN D’ANNUNZIO LEFT NAPLES one of the city’s pawn-brokers gave up hope of ever getting his money back and put d’Annunzio’s pledges up for auction. One of them was a fur coat. The sale was crowded. The bidding was competitive. D’Annunzio was a celebrity, and his cast-off clothes were worth collecting as relics.

  He was also, in his own estimation and that of his growing number of supporters, a genius, and the world—with prompting from him—was starting to take note of the fact. Ever the self-promoter, he saw to it that the positive French reviews of The Innocent were reprinted in Italian journals. “In Paris, frenzy. That’s the only word for it,” he reported gleefully, and he spread that word. One of his last tasks in Naples was to oversee the publication of a special magazine issue devoted entirely to the glorification of himself and his works. Called D’Annunziana, it included an enthusiastic essay by the young Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The essay had been “translated” (with the insertion of extra laudatory adjectives), by d’Annunzio himself. He sent copies to Treves, and to his French editor. Fame was a plant which needed careful nurturing, and harried as he was, d’Annunzio took care of it.

  Back in the sanctuary of Michetti’s convent during the spring of 1894, he at last concluded The Triumph of Death, laid aside four years previously, and published a new volume of verse. His public status, at home and abroad, and his earning power, were growing steadily. He had installed Maria Gravina in Rome in the borrowed apartment of a long-suffering friend (all his life d’Annunzio was to have an extraordinary gift for persuading other people to put themselves out on his behalf). After a few months, though, he succumbed to her pleas, and rented a house, the Villino Mammarella, at Francavilla. He took the largest room for his study and filled it with the usual bric-a-brac: a photograph of that year shows him reclining odalisque-like among the cushions on a daybed draped in embroidered textiles. Maria Gravina and Renata came to live with him. They were not happy. D’Annunzio told his friends that living with Maria was “torture beyond imagining.” She had lost her looks. Worse, she was “almost completely mad,” subject to “terrible nervous attacks which make her almost demonic” (a fact confirmed by several of his friends). She did nothing, he said, but torment him. “What have I ever done to deserve this scourge?”

  Maria is greatly to be pitied. She was menta
lly ill (possibly schizophrenic). She had sacrificed her social position, her children and her home for a man who no longer loved, or even liked, her. Her parents wanted nothing more to do with her. Her personal property had been confiscated and settled on her legitimate children. Isolated and insecure, she plagued d’Annunzio with her jealousy and frightened him with her rages. She invaded his study and tore up his manuscripts. She produced a pistol and tried to shoot herself. “What a disgrace that would have been!” commented d’Annunzio, “and there would perhaps have been people who accused me of causing her death.”

  · · ·

  In September 1894, d’Annunzio was in Venice to meet Georges Hérelle for the first time. He sat night after night in Florian’s, receiving eager admirers. Each night there were more of them, until by the end of the evening a court of fifteen or twenty adulatory young men were gathered at his table.

  One night, walking back to the hotel, d’Annunzio lamented the waste of the evenings. How much more agreeable it would have been, he said, to have hired a gondola and spent two or three hours exploring the “mysterious and fantastic obscurity of the little canals.” So why, asked Hérelle, had he agreed to meet all those people? D’Annunzio replied, feebly but probably truthfully: “I am incapable of doing otherwise: I can neither refuse polite invitations, nor excuse myself from issuing invitations in return.” It is true that he found it all but impossible to issue any kind of decisive rejection, whether it was saying no to half an hour in a café or ending a mutually destructive years-long relationship. His friends and relations were urging him to leave Maria, but he couldn’t yet bring himself to make the break.

  Actually he was probably enjoying the company of these acolytes (so different from the miseries of home) a great deal more than he admitted to Hérelle. Among the people he met, or re-met, that September were many who would remain close friends and collaborators. There was Angelo Conti, the art historian, whom d’Annunzio nicknamed Doctor Mysticus, and who would become his guide to the treasures of Venetian architecture and paintings. There was Mariano Fortuny, the designer of marvellous fabrics, gossamer-fine and pleated like the tunics seen on classical Greek statuary, which flowed over women’s bodies with wonderfully modern immodesty. From this time forward the women in d’Annunzio’s life, and in his fiction, would frequently wear Fortuny gowns (Marcel Proust was an equally enthusiastic admirer of them). There was the Austrian Prince Fritz von Hohenlohe and his mistress—the pair of them avid collectors of rococo ornaments for their miniature palazzo, the Casetta Rossa, which d’Annunzio would rent from them two decades later. There were hostesses both Venetian and foreign, many of them eager to entertain the famous poet. Another member of the circle in which d’Annunzio was moving was Eleonora Duse.

  Soon after his sojourn in Venice, which left him, he said, in just the right frame of mind, with the vision of beautiful ancient things in his mind’s eye, and imbued with the plangent sadness he wanted for “my musical book,” d’Annunzio embarked on the writing of The Virgins of the Rocks. The novel is the nearest he was to come to his stated ambition of writing a modern prose narrative which played on consciousness as music might, blending “mystery with thought.”

  He had referred contemptuously to the “spineless heirs of the ancient patrician families.” In this novel he brings them before our eyes. A family loyal to the dispossessed Bourbon monarchs of Naples and Sicily have retired to their labyrinthine country house, full of dim antique mirrors and relics of the ancien régime. The patriarch is a venerable representative of the old nobility, but his wife is mad: a sinister bloated figure who is occasionally glimpsed at the end of a garden alley, followed by two shadowy grey-clad attendants. The two sons are feeble-minded—one already “lost” to creeping dementia, the other pathetically afraid of suffering the same fate. The family are not, on the face of it, good breeding stock, and yet that is precisely how the hero, Cantelmo (apparently without any irony on d’Annunzio’s part) sees them. There are three daughters, the virgins of the title, all princesses, all nubile, all beautiful. Cantelmo comes to the old house intent on choosing one of them to be his bride and the mother of the great hero whom he believes he is destined to sire.

  The long first section of the novel sets out Cantelmo’s world view. A fictional character’s opinions needn’t be those of his or her creator, but in this case we know that they are. Many of Cantelmo’s sentiments are quoted word for word from articles and essays d’Annunzio had previously published over his own name. Cantelmo possesses a portrait of his ancestor, a condottiero, painted by Leonardo da Vinci. (While he was still in Naples, d’Annunzio had been reading an influential new biography of Leonardo by Gabriel Séailles.) He quotes Socrates, another fashionable past master. (Walter Pater’s Plato and Platonism had been published just two years before d’Annunzio began work on The Virgins.) Like Nietzsche, like d’Annunzio, Cantelmo scorns the modern political process. He pronounces his belief that “Force is the first law of nature,” that men are doomed to fight each other in each generation “until one, the most worthy, establishes dominion over all others.” Plaiting together archaic concepts of hereditary nobility with the new one of evolution, he declares “each new life, being the sum of the preceding lives, is the condition of the future.” The greatness of his forebears imposes a responsibility. Cantelmo is to be parent of “He who must come.”

  · · ·

  Maria Gravina’s madness seeped into d’Annunzio’s fiction. Frequently, as he sat writing of the way their mother’s dementia lay like a curse over the lives of the “Virgins of the Rocks,” the woman whose insanity was his own curse was in the next room. He described himself as living “like a tamer of wild beasts who would be devoured if for a moment he turned his head aside or allowed the whip to fall from his hand.” He confessed to a male friend that Maria Gravina’s sexual demands left him exhausted and afraid. She wishes, he told Hérelle, “to possess me entirely, like an inanimate object.”

  He saw no way of freeing himself. Far easier just to slip away. When, in the summer of 1895, Scarfoglio proposed an extended sea voyage to Greece and on to Istanbul, d’Annunzio accepted with alacrity.

  This was the trip on which, as we have seen, d’Annunzio distressed Hérelle by parading around naked, and by telling smutty stories. Although the yacht was entirely Scarfoglio’s, d’Annunzio pretended to have a share in it, and acted with host-like munificence. He had assured Hérelle that not much would be needed in the way of clothes—life on board would be informal and they would avoid dining ashore. The Frenchman, having taken him at his word and brought only one suit, was mortified to find that d’Annunzio himself had packed six, all white, as well as a dinner jacket, more than thirty shirts and eight pairs of shoes, and that he accepted all of the invitations which awaited them in Athens and elsewhere.

  D’Annunzio was now an international celebrity, and enjoying the fact. But the term multanime, which he had coined to describe the volatile hero of The Innocent, could as well be applied to his many-spirited self. In Greece his manner was that of an indolent playboy, but his notebooks reveal a very different interior life. To Hérelle, sunbathing in the nude and complaining, as d’Annunzio repeatedly did, at having to do without daily sexual intercourse, might seem “puerile.” But what looked to the Frenchman like preening indecency and silliness, was, to d’Annunzio’s mind, perfectly in keeping with the spirit of their journey.

  He was in pursuit of what Walter Pater called the “light-hearted religion” of ancient Greece, and hoping to make contact with the Dionysian vitality Nietzsche had described in The Birth of Tragedy. He improvised sacred rites. On board ship he burnt myrtle twigs as an aromatic offering to the beauty of the sunset. He was developing a neo-paganism of a kind which would shortly become fashionable everywhere from Cambridge to Munich. Nude, he exulted in his freedom from shame: “I feel as though Hellenism has penetrated me to the marrow … I should have been born in Athens, and exercised in the gymnasia with the young men.” Gossiping and dozin
g on deck and exploring the sleazy backstreets in pursuit of whores, or dressing for dinner at an embassy in his nicely ironed shirts and shiny shoes, he may not have comported himself as Hérelle believed a poet should, but a poet he was. Within days of returning from this voyage he would begin work on The Dead City, his first play, its form borrowed from the Greek tragedians, its theme the glamour and potency of the myths and bloody histories archaeologists were then bringing back to light.

  The cruise was curtailed. They were supposed to be sailing to Byzantium, but the yacht never reached the Bosporus, and d’Annunzio had anyway turned back several weeks before Scarfoglio and the others. He might pose as a pagan hedonist, shamelessly parading his sun-burnished body, but that body let him down. He was seasick again. When they sailed into a storm off Cape Sounion he asked to be put ashore and took the ferry home.

  In the autumn of 1895, shortly after his return from Greece, Michetti painted a portrait of d’Annunzio (previous page). A photograph of the sitting shows the two friends in the studio, at ease and smiling in crumpled linen suits, but the resultant painting tells a very different story. Earlier paintings and photos of d’Annunzio had shown a romantic poet, pensive, introspective, melancholy. This one presents him in a new persona. The background is a turbulent skyscape, as though d’Annunzio were standing alone on a mountain top. His narrow, sloping shoulders have been broadened to heroic proportions. His hair (rather more of it than the photograph shows) and pointed beard are darker and more firmly defined than in life. The ends of his moustache have been waxed into ferocious vertical spikes.