Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  On the day the streets and squares around Orsanmichele are thronged with people. Before an audience of well over a thousand, d’Annunzio reads a canto of the Inferno and his own poem in praise of Dante, and then enlarges on a poet’s role in a nation. “The artificer of the word” should be “first among citizens.” Dante, he says, is like a mountain range, “home of the black eagles and lapidary thought.” Dante was as much a part of Italy as the rocks of which the country was made. He brought Italy into being.

  Tacitly d’Annunzio presents himself as the new peak in the mountain range of Italy’s literature, and he predicts a great Italian renaissance. Dante wrote that the key to general felicity was strong autocratic government: he entertained a vision of a mighty emperor who would eliminate Italy’s warring factions and impose order by force. D’Annunzio, awaiting “the necessary hero,” thinks likewise. Italy will be great again, he announces. He is assuming his role of Vate—bard or prophet of the New Italy.

  Between 1898 and 1903, d’Annunzio was composing poetry at a prodigious rate. In his Laudi—Praises of the Sea, the Sky, the Heroes—a veneration for the classical past blends with hopes for a grand and warlike future, and with the celebration of exceptional beings from the age of Homer to the present. Adding up to 20,000 lines of verse, the Laudi are inevitably patchy, but, as a contemporary critic puts it: “From the muddy sea of words emerge islands flowering in beauty, and rocky outcrops of rude and tragic grandeur.”

  They fall initially into three “books” (later d’Annunzio will add two more). Maia, the last written, is published as the first. It contains Laus Vitae (Praise of Life), a kind of modern Odyssey, drawing on d’Annunzio’s memories of Greece and on classical mythology. The second, Elettra, is more overtly nationalist, containing twenty-six sonnets on the cities of Italy, verse eulogies to Italy’s great men—condottieri, artists, thinkers—and bellicose visions of Italy’s future. Halcyon, the third, is immediately and has remained the most popular. In its poems, d’Annunzio employs intricate forms and archaic vocabulary to create lyrics of limpid elegance which will be loved and memorised and anthologised for decades to come. In them d’Annunzio draws for his imagery on the Tuscan landscapes around him, all gilded by his imagination, stripped of intrusive modern buildings and vulgar modern people, and inhabited instead by nymphs and gods and hybrid mythological creatures.

  He writes ceaselessly. “Nothing can compare with the intoxication of work. All the rest is mud and smoke.” He breaks only for his daily ride and as he sets out, followed by his greyhounds, in the warm rain of an Italian spring (he loves rain) he feels ideas and poems forming in his mind, as plentiful and vigorous as the new leaves breaking on the trees around him.

  MARCH 1900. Fire is published. The novel’s hero, Stelio Affrena, is a dramatist who is writing a play which sounds just like The Dead City. Stelio is having an affair with an older woman, a world famous actress, Foscarina. He is young, brilliant, blazing with creative energy. She is beautiful but pathetic, constantly bewailing the loss of her youth and weeping over his obvious interest in other younger, more confident women.

  D’Annunzio claims that Duse has sat beside him for weeks on end, reading each page as soon as it was written. In so far as the fictional heroine resembles her, he says, his depiction of her is a tribute to the real woman’s greatness of soul. “I don’t know a creature anywhere in modern fiction who can compare with Foscarina for moral beauty.” Others disagree. Foscarina is in part a literary archetype like Pater’s Mona Lisa. She is “a night creature shaped by dreams and passions on a golden anvil.” Her mouth has “tasted both honey and poison, the jewelled goblet and the cup of wormwood.” So far, so safely non-specific. But she is also a tired actress who has—so d’Annunzio implies—had a great many lovers: “How many men had been singled out of the crowd to embrace her?” Her jealousy is tiresome and her breath is “cadaverous.” In a passage which must have been unspeakably hurtful for Duse to read, Stelio and Foscarina make love. She is lying on top of him. She is heavy (Eleonora was taller and broader than d’Annunzio). He feels suffocated. “She fastened him down, with a grip that never slackened, as indissoluble as that of a corpse when its arms stiffen around the body of one living.”

  Duse’s admirers are indignant. The impresario Joseph Shurmann begs her to forbid Fire’s publication. She writes back grandly, “I know the novel and I have authorised its publication. My suffering, whatever it may be, counts for nothing compared with a masterpiece of Italian literature. Besides, I am forty years old, and in love!” According to Romain Rolland, when she read it she thought of killing herself, refraining only because of the damage her suicide would have done to d’Annunzio’s reputation.

  From this time onward d’Annunzio will be known as the man who exploited Duse, profited by her financially and then cruelly made public his vision of her as a worn-out degenerate. But if her fans cannot forgive him, she can. They will be together for another four years. She still adores him. And there is plenty of evidence that he is still, in his fashion, in love with her. Within a month of Fire’s publication he joins her on tour. In his notebook he writes: “My heart pounds. In an hour I will see Isa.” (Isa is one of his many names for her.) They meet, the reunion is evidently delicious for them both. Afterwards he writes to her: “Remember April 10 as the culmination of your life.” He is writing in Laus Vitae about Helen of Troy, about the way the love of entire peoples has exhausted her, but also made her divine. When he describes Foscarina/Duse as having been desired by multitudes, he intends no insult, and what the public, outraged by his candid descriptions of her ageing, have not taken into account is how much he is moved by it. He loves “the faint lines that ran from the corner of her eyes up towards the temples, the dark veins that made her eyelids look like violets, all that in her which seemed touched with autumn sadness, all the shadow of her passionate face.”

  APRIL 1900. D’Annunzio is in Vienna, where Duse is performing La Gioconda before the Emperor and all his court. D’Annunzio is not at the theatre. Although he seldom misses a rehearsal, he never attends his first nights. He is out on the street at nightfall, admiring the “rumps” of the large blonde women and making notes. He feels good. He has eaten snipe—“magnificent colour … dark golden sauce in a silver dish”—and drunk gold-tinged Marco Brunner wine from fine glass. The aftertrace of recent sex tingles in his veins. All this physical well-being is stimulating his mind. “Great intellectual exaltation.” He pauses to admire the window display of a florist’s shop. He notices the deep dark red of a bunch of carnations, “a colour found only in the pictures of Bonifazio [Veronese].” He marvels at the extortionate prices. All around, the cafés and restaurants are noisy with laughter and raised voices. He is acutely aware of the prosperity and bustle of this great modern city, “the barbaric force of it, the power of trade and of work.” He passes and repasses in front the Burgtheater. Inside, a multitude of strangers is listening to his lover utter his words, but the odd thing is that no one turns to stare at him, as they do invariably now when he goes out in Florence or Rome. It is a little disconcerting. Travelling, he has temporarily shed the “glittering skin” of celebrity.

  He follows Duse into Germany, and is impressed. The “miraculous” combination of Prussian militarism with a booming modern industry excites him. Nationalism, the “implacable yeast,” is at work in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, disrupting and fragmenting it; but in Germany, the “instinct to dominate” is powered by commercial success. Temporarily forgetting his commitment to the conservation of fine old buildings, he praises German cities transformed into gigantic factories, German cathedrals “soot-blackened,” German shipyards and railway depots.

  He sees, with a clairvoyance unusual in 1900, where the “hurricane” of “the struggles of trade, the struggle for wealth” must surely lead. “Above the din of work can be heard the barking of the Dogs of War.” The sound seems not to have alarmed, but excited him.

  D’Annunzio is in his study again, rapt in
concentration. He is delving into the literature of the distant past, mining it for verse-forms and models. For him, reviving Italy’s mediaeval texts is a political project. He is quarrying them for words, because a developed literary language is the tool and badge of a great nation. The writing of poetry in the emergent cultures of modern Europe is a political act. “A poet is the creator of the nation around him,” wrote Herder. D’Annunzio agrees. He works always with a dictionary at hand. Most Italians, he writes scathingly, use a vocabulary of barely 800 words. “I have so far used at least 15,000. Many I have called back to life, to many I have given a fresh significance.” Out of all the thousands of books in his library, the one that is most essential to him is Niccolò Tommaseo’s seven-volume dictionary of the Italian language.

  D’Annunzio’s teenage son Gabriellino is staying at the Capponcina and getting a little weary of the household’s quietness. “It’s like living in a Trappist monastery.” It is lunchtime and Gabriellino is hungry. The servant, Rocco Pesce, rings a bronze bell which once sounded the hour of prayer in a monastic cloister. Gabriellino heads smartly for the dining room, but his father does not emerge and, despite Gabriellino’s pleas, Pesce will not ring the bell again, or knock at the study door. He most certainly won’t serve lunch until the master appears.

  When d’Annunzio comes out at last it is as though he has wakened from a deep sleep. “There seems to be a veil over his face, his eyes are sightless.” But once he sits down at table the cloud lifts from him. He has been writing about Homeric heroes, now he eats like one. He tucks into his veal cutlets with the kind of formidable appetite Ajax brought to meals of plump kids eaten by the sounding sea before Troy.

  Across the broad courtyard in front of the Capponcina is a pretty little red-brick house. From its rooftop flies a green banner with the word “Fidelitas” written in red on one side, and on the other the figure of a greyhound. As evening comes on, the newfangled electric lights are switched on inside and the building, with its stained-glass windows, glows like a jewel. This is d’Annunzio’s kennel.

  D’Annunzio confesses to loving animals more than people. At the Capponcina he initially has two horses. Soon he has eight, all of them handsome thoroughbreds, and ten (eventually rising to twenty-two) dogs, most of them borzois or greyhounds. He strips to his shirt-sleeves and squats in the kennel, a greyhound between his knees, running his hands over its feet, its ribs, its back, feeling with pride the musculature of its thighs, and the delicacy and power of its tendons. He will write one day that none of his syntactical constructions can rival the body of a greyhound for beauty.

  Returning from an outing, he calls all the dogs by name and they come hurtling out of the kennel and race around him, leaping higher than his head, barking and yelping. He is delighted. He smiles. Then with a word he calms them (Benigno Palmerio, who was a vet before he become master of d’Annunzio’s household, is impressed by his dog-handling skills). The dogs retreat to settle themselves watchfully around him. Now he turns his attention to his spaniel, Teli-Teli, and, holding the dog’s gaze, launches into a long speech. Teli-Teli whimpers as though contributing to the conversation. When d’Annunzio leaves the Capponcina he will give the spaniel to one of his lady friends with a photograph captioned “Teli-Teli the philosopher.”

  When King Umberto I was shot dead by an anarchist in July 1900, d’Annunzio composed an ode to his successor, urging the young King to be worthy of the role to which he had been called, and darkly hinting that if he failed to be as martial and stalwart as his destiny required: “You will see close at hand among the rebels/Even he who today salutes you.”

  In his electoral campaign, d’Annunzio had proclaimed the “politics of poetry.” Now, increasingly, he was writing the poetry of politics. Other odes on patriotic themes followed, including one on the death of Giuseppe Verdi. He gave a public reading of it in Florence, prefacing it with a rousing oration “To the youth of Italy,” urging them to be worthy of their glorious past. He wrote and recited his long poem to Garibaldi. He appeared on horseback at the funeral of Menotti Garibaldi (the hero’s son), delivering an address to the assembled crowds in which he predicted a future glittering with blood: “The Latin sea is covered/with the slaughter of your wars…/Oh flower of the races!”

  Every summer d’Annunzio and Duse rented a house on the Tuscan coast. These summers, passed between the long sandy beaches and the pine forests above which the mountains loom, formed the settings for the exquisite neo-pagan fantasies of d’Annunzio’s Halcyon poems.

  D’Annunzio was serene and productive. “These last few days, in my boat,” he wrote to his publisher, “I have composed Laudi all penetrated with air and salt.” He swam. He rode. “Furious gallops on the elastic sand, where the traces of the retreating waves are as delicate as the ridges inside my greyhounds’ mouths.” But even during these sojourns by the sea d’Annunzio was indoors working for most of the day and much of the night. Nothing, not even a life-threatening accident, could distract him long.

  One August morning he was galloping along the beach when his horse stumbled. He fell. His foot was caught in the stirrup. The horse bolted, dragging him, bouncing. He struggled. The seconds seemed to stretch out interminably. At last he freed himself and lay stunned, his cheek pressed to the hot sand, hearing the vibration of his horse’s hooves gradually distancing themselves. His perceptions were extraordinarily sharp. The cool slime of seaweed, the hardness of a stone, the corner of a piece of driftwood, the scent of the prickly flowers that grow in the sand; everything was hyper-real to him. As he stumbled down to the water to bathe his bleeding face the idea for an ode, “Undulna,” a fantasy about a sea nymph, one of the loveliest of the Halcyon poems, sprang into his mind.

  In the summer of 1901, at Versilia on the Tuscan coast again, d’Annunzio stood at his lectern day after day, working for up to fourteen hours at a stretch on his tragedy Francesca da Rimini. He was intent on giving Italy a back-story appropriate to the future he wanted for his country, that of a bellicose and expansionist great power. As Wagner had looked to the past to inspire the future, reviving the stories of the Niebelungenlied to give Germans an heroic tradition, so d’Annunzio, bard of modern Italy, expanded Dante’s poignant brief tale of forbidden love into a grand five-act tragedy full of sound and fury.

  The thirteenth-century wars between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines rage onstage and off. The kernel of the narrative is the well-known story which had already inspired fourteen operas in Italy alone, as well as numerous pre-Raphaelite paintings, Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem and Rodin’s most famous sculpture (The Kiss was originally entitled Francesca da Rimini). Francesca is married for dynastic reasons to Gianciotto Malatesta, a fabled warrior but lame and unlovely. She was tricked into the marriage. She thought her husband was to be Gianciotto’s handsome brother Paolo, with whom she is in love. Reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere together, Paolo and Francesca can no longer restrain their passion. Finding them together Gianciotto kills them both.

  D’Annunzio sat (so he tells us) elbows on knees, head in hands, eyes clenched in concentration until he could see in his mind’s eye “the very bones and flesh” of Gianciotto, the ferocious one-eyed killer he was conjuring up. At nightfall he would appear in the hallway, shouting for a light (the Capponcina had electricity, but by the sea he still needed a servant and a lamp). When he took his daily gallop along the beach he singed his horse’s mane, to have in his nostrils the acrid smell in which—according to him—the warriors of the Malatesta family had delighted.

  His play is spectacular. He embellishes the simple plot with a Shakespearean jester and a chorus of attendant women who perform folkloric dances and provide a salacious commentary on their mistress’s love life. There is a scene with a cloth merchant which allows him to display his knowledge of mediaeval textiles and to fill the stage with swirling lengths of gorgeous fabrics. There are brothers palpitating with incestuous desire. The play’s tone owes much to d’Annunzio’s early reading of
Keats, with his pseudo-mediaeval fantasies full of jewel-bright colours and his pot of basil fertilised by a buried human head; but it is animated by a zest for violence which is d’Annunzio’s own. There is a scene in which the heroine, in ferocious mood, plays dangerously with “Greek fire” (a form of early napalm invented in Byzantium) and talks wildly of immolating herself and her enemies. There are lascivious lines about the “lips of a fresh wound.” There is an off-stage torture chamber from which awful howls emanate. There is a great deal of noisy and technically elaborate business to do with siege engines and catapults. There is a severed head brought, dripping gore, onto the stage.

  D’Annunzio’s stage directions make inordinate demands on his performers. In Glory his female lead is required to speak in a voice “whose indefinable melody seems to prolong itself in the most remote mystery of being.” Her smile, moreover, must “arrest time and abolish the world.” Even from an actor of Duse’s calibre, this was asking a lot.

  Designers were set equally impossible tests. Each of the sets for Francesca da Rimini, as d’Annunzio describes them, are multiplex. Arches open onto further vistas, galleries and alcoves provide subsidiary acting spaces, windows show distant landscapes and sea battles afar off. Trapdoors, curtained doorways, flights of stairs and raised terraces further complicate the geometry. And these elaborate structures are crowded with objects. Walls hung with weapons, tables spread with wine and bowls of fruit, rose bushes and embroidered hangings, all clutter the space, which must yet be left clear enough for a dozen men at arms to assemble or for a bevy of handmaidens to perform a “swallow-dance,” waving gold-entwined garlands of narcissi and carved wooden birds.