Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  D’Annunzio recruited Mariano Fortuny as his production designer and wrote him long letters about each detail of the costumes, the props, the lighting, the complicated machinery required. In these years he was campaigning for the preservation of Italy’s artistic heritage, lobbying for the protection of Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, writing an ode on Leonardo’s Last Supper. Now he was putting Italy’s past on stage for the glory of the race, and he wanted it to look right.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fortuny found the job undoable, and dropped out, to be replaced as design supremo by d’Annunzio’s old friend and illustrator de Carolis. The costumes were eventually made by the couturier Charles Worth, from fabrics woven to order after mediaeval patterns. (Duse as Francesca, previous page.) The production was to be the most expensive ever yet seen in the Italian theatre.

  The first night was bedevilled by d’Annunzio’s insistence on a realistic battle. He had demanded real smoke: the audience, as a result, were half-asphyxiated. He had wanted real missiles: a boulder, hurled from a catapult, demolished one wall of the stage. But once the machinery was brought under control, the play was acclaimed. Romain Rolland called it “the greatest Italian work since the Renaissance.”

  Liane de Pougy, one of the most celebrated courtesans of Paris’s belle époque, is visiting Florence. D’Annunzio invites her to the Capponcina and sends a carriage, filled with roses, to collect her. As she descends from it his servants pelt her with more roses. “There before me was a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath, the manners of a mountebank and the reputation, nevertheless, for being a ladies’ man.” She rejects his advances and leaves. Two days later the carriage comes for her again but this time she sends her maid—“my sniffy old Adèle”—with a long note full of excuses.

  De Pougy is one of many who testify to d’Annunzio’s ugliness, yet photographs show a trim and perfectly presentable-looking middle-aged man. He was no Adonis, and certainly no Hercules, but no “frightful gnome” either. It appears that just as his charm could transfigure him, and make him irresistible to some, so—to those who were resistant to it—there was something repugnant about his incorrigible impulse to seduce. De Pougy, a professional well known for her book-keeping, and who was accustomed to being paid a fortune for her favours, was aware of his reputation as “a man who was, to say the least, ungrateful to the ladies.” Great man he might be, but a debt-ridden poet had nothing to offer that could interest her.

  1902. D’Annunzio is in Turin overseeing the production of Francesca da Rimini, conversing with an old acquaintance from Rome, the writer de Amicis. As he holds forth a servant keeps coming in, each time bringing a calling-card or a note from someone hoping to see the great man, or asking him to address some gathering. “In two days he has been asked to make eight public speeches.” Each time d’Annunzio replies that he is unwell, and lays the card down on a table already strewn with them. He is a master of evasion. None of these interruptions cause him to lose the thread of what he is saying.

  Their conversation over, d’Annunzio allows those who have been waiting in the outer room to come in for a kind of public audience. Again his performance is impeccable. De Amicis writes: “He wears the royal mantle of celebrity as though he had been born to the throne.”

  Now he is in Milan, at the house of his editor Treves. He is playing the newfangled game of ping-pong. (Celluloid balls and rubber-stippled bats first went on sale in Europe in the previous year.) He is very fit. He needs to be, he says, for the heroic labour of writing his books. He rides most days when he is at home, returning, after hours in the saddle, in a kind of ecstasy: he feels himself a centaur, wild and not wholly human. He plays tennis and golf. At the Capponcina there is a large wood-panelled room on the first floor which he uses as a gym. There, every day, he practises fencing and lifts weights and dumbbells. His face may be ageing—in these years people describe it as looking like wax, or like ivory, covered all over with tiny wrinkles—but his body is smooth and muscular.

  He loves ping-pong. He plays for hours, his mouth tense with concentration, his eyes shining.

  1902. Duse is touring the Austrian-controlled territories of Venezia Giulia and Istria. D’Annunzio is with her, and the two of them are received with a wild excitement which is more about politics than about their theatrical gifts. To d’Annunzio and like-minded Italian nationalists, these territories, still under Austrian control, are irredenti (unredeemed) parts of the true Italy.

  Twenty-seven curtain calls (with d’Annunzio on stage) in Gorizia. Flowers and scraps of coloured paper bearing the titles of his works raining from windows as he passes through Istria. Delirious crowds roaring their approval in the theatre, and then taking to the streets to roar some more, in Trieste, where a deputy describes the couple’s progress as a “sacred pilgrimage”—sacred, that is, not to any celestial divinity, but to the cause of Greater Italy. Wherever they go they are shadowed by the Austrian police.

  D’Annunzio asks his book-finder to provide him with books on Istria and Dalmatia. He invokes Dante’s lines “to Pola by the Bay of Carnaro/which bounds Italy and washes its edges.” (Pola and the Carnaro are at this time deep into Austrian territory.) He writes an ode to the Bronzetti brothers, a pair of Italian partisans from Trento executed by the Austrians as “martyrs” to the irredentist cause. “As the white sap surges through wood, hidden by the bark,” writes d’Annunzio, so should the people of unredeemed Trento “in silence make ready your heroes.” The Austrian authorities protest at what they (correctly) interpret as incitement to rebellion, and confiscate copies of Il Giorno, in which the poem is published.

  1903. The bedroom at the Capponcina. The walls are covered with fine old green damask. The ceiling is hidden by a sixteenth-century canopy with flower-embroidered hangings, fixed at the centre with a gilded garland. The room contains the usual profusion of precious things, a gilded harp, a silver Arabian sword inlaid with ivory and gemstones, columns and tables covered with vases and caskets and old morocco-bound books. At the bed’s foot, two bronze copies of the Winged Victory of Samothrace stand on green-veined marble pillars. D’Annunzio has completed the Laudi and Eleonora Duse’s celebratory gift is being delivered. She has already given him a full-size plaster cast of one of Michelangelo’s Prisoners. Now, into the bedroom, porters carry a terracotta copy of the Charioteer of Delphi. They set it up at the food of the bed.

  In this room, in the previous month, d’Annunzio awoke on the morning of his fortieth birthday with, as usual, a dagger beside his pillow, and a sense that his youth is struggling like a soldier of fortune whose adversary kneels on his chest, ready to give the death blow. “Now I must embalm the corpse of youth. I must wrap it in bandages and enclose it between the four walls of a coffin. I must make it pass through the door, where the spectre of old age has appeared between the slats of the blinds and with an almost familiar nod has wished me a good day.”

  1904. Eating alone in a hotel in Lucerne, d’Annunzio overheard a group of diners telling each other that the plot of The Innocent was all factual: Gabriele d’Annunzio had really and truly killed a baby. He once aspired to make his life into a work of art. Now others—journalists, fans, gossips—were doing it for him. D’Annunzio the public figure had become an imaginary construct, one over which d’Annunzio the man was struggling to retain control.

  Fame was a tool which he used with cunning. It was also a burden. Celebrity worship, then as now, was a volatile emotion which included fault-finding vigilance, a perverse joy in the adored one’s flaws and furious envy. There were plenty of people who disapproved of d’Annunzio. There were others who exhausted him with their admiration, their craving for a piece of him. They rummaged through his intimate affairs and “the poet himself and his life are made ugly by the filth of those hands.”

  He was talked about as an inveterate socialite, but the inscription on the lintels of the Capponcina’s rooms—“Silence,” “Enclosure,” “Solitude”
—give a truer account of his daily life. Rolland, visiting him this year, was struck by the isolation in which he and Duse lived. They never seemed to go out. “She has no friends. He, not many.”

  MILAN, 1904. D’Annunzio has turned back to his Abruzzese origins to write a rustic tragedy. Two decades after the event, nine years after Michetti’s painting of the same name took a prize in Venice, d’Annunzio has finally converted into drama the scene they witnessed of the young girl hounded by drunken peasants. He has made of it an Italian myth. Now Jorio’s Daughter is going into rehearsal and d’Annunzio is reading it to the cast. It takes him four hours. He enunciates with perfect clarity: he chants. The leading actress is trying to commit to memory every one of his inflections so that she can reproduce it exactly in her performance “I phonographed his rhythms. My Mila was his.”

  He wrote the play, he claims, in eighteen days (it seems, in fact, to have taken him about six weeks) “obedient to the daemon of the race, which chanted its songs through me.” The story is that of a girl—a feared outsider, the daughter of a sorcerer—hunted down by a crowd of harvesters intent on rape. She is saved, but inadvertently brings death and disgrace to the family who rescues her. There is a wedding, a murder, terrible penalties (drowning in a sack with a savage dog: live burial). The language is archaic but simple, a blend of traditional songs with echoes of Dante and phrases from the Bible and the Catholic liturgy. Much of the dialogue is in verse. There are choruses, constructed like fugues (d’Annunzio’s understanding of music was one of the most useful tools he brought to his playwriting). Earthy naturalism is disrupted by the entrance of characters with overtly symbolic functions—a miracle-working saint, an old wise woman who can provide poisons and cures.

  D’Annunzio fires off almost daily letters to his folklorist friend de Nino, asking his opinion of costume sketches and bits of stagecraft and greedily demanding more detail. He has recruited Michetti, who in turn has set several of the Cenacolo to scouring the Abruzzi for old pottery and embroidered costumes and archaic musical instruments. The two friends correspond earnestly about carved stools and goatskin bladders. The resulting spectacle is to be a grand mélange of poverty and colour, of crude materials and beautiful workmanship.

  In the persecuted girl d’Annunzio has created a luminous heroine. Duse exults. Here is the dramatic masterpiece of which she has always believed him capable. But Mila, the play’s heroine, is an innocent girl in her teens, and Duse is now forty-five, an ailing woman whose love life has been a topic of prurient public gossip for a quarter of a century. The company to whom d’Annunzio has granted the first performance rights has their own leading actress, who would like the part. There are edgy negotiations. The gossip columns are full of rumours. Duse feels obliged to issue a statement denying that “there is any truth in the stories about artistic differences between herself and d’Annunzio.”

  As the play goes into rehearsal she is ill again, shaken by an uncontrollable cough. Nobly, at the last moment, she agrees to waive her claim to the role. The production must go ahead without her. She writes to d’Annunzio, in her usual staccato style: “Gabri—sweetness strength—hope—the sole strongest and most painful thing in my life … I have given it to you, for you, for your beautiful destiny—and if the heart shatters into tiny pieces—it doesn’t matter!” With her own hands she folds the costumes that have been made for her—wonderfully elaborate as d’Annunzio likes them to be—and sends them to Irma Grammatica, who will take her place.

  Mathilde Serao visits Duse in the hotel in Genoa where she lies sick, coughing and spitting blood. D’Annunzio has not been to visit her, although he has taken a few days off from attending rehearsals in order to go to Rome for some foxhunting. As Duse suspects, he has a new love whom he will see there. Serao asks her about the play. “A cry burst from her: ‘It was mine, mine, and they have taken it from me!’ ” She brings the script out from under her pillow and, struggling to sit up, begins to read from it. Feeble as she is, “her voice strengthens; her face changes; she recites as though she were on stage, in front of a thousand spectators.” Fearful that she will bring on another fit of coughing, Serao tries to stop her, but Duse reads it all.

  A week later the play opens in Milan. The production has been put together at great speed, but it is splendid. D’Annunzio’s drama describes a brutal, misogynist society, whose people live in terror of their comrades’ disapproval and of supernatural vengeance. But it seems to his first audiences that he has given it the grandeur and mythic resonance of Aeschylus’ Mycenae or Sophocles’ Thebes.

  As the curtain falls at the end of the first act there is a sepulchral silence. The actors wait in suspense. Then, according to one of them, “suddenly, as from far off, like a great wave of the sea, resounds the immense applause.” D’Annunzio is called to take a bow ten, twelve, fifteen times.

  For reasons both financial (too many creditors trying to get in the door) and romantic (too many women claiming an exclusive right to the visitor’s bedroom), d’Annunzio has found it expedient to leave home for a while. He is staying near Florence with the sculptor, Clemente Origo. The poet (so health-conscious, so obsessively clean) is a non-smoker himself, but he is amused by Origo’s prodigious intake of nicotine—120 Turkish cigarettes a day.

  Origo is very tall and lean. One day the friends exchange jackets and pose for a photograph. Origo towers. His shoulders are hunched together in an attempt to squeeze himself into d’Annunzio’s trim little linen blazer, his bony forearms extending well below the cuffs. Beside and below him stands d’Annunzio. The broad shoulders of Origo’s tweed jacket droop half-empty on him. Its sleeves dangle. The hem reaches the poet’s knees. He is beaming, like a child dressing up in the grown-ups’ clothes.

  D’Annunzio could be playful. Those of his household who wrote their memoirs recall his pranks and teasing: so do several of his friends. His work, though, and his public persona, are totally devoid of humour. Of all the dozens of pictures of d’Annunzio in existence—most of them carefully posed—this is the only one which suggests that he had it in him to make fun of himself.

  An episode from d’Annunzio’s life with Duse, one described by himself.

  They are outside the Capponcina. Eleonora is on a raised terrace, leaning over the ivy-covered railing. Beneath her d’Annunzio is checking his horse’s girth. He rides for hours every day along the lanes and tracks of the hills above Florence, flanked with olive groves and vineyards, crowned with woods, rich in associations with artists and ancient wars. His poetry is full of his sense of the old and new of what encircles him, the freshness of blossom and rushing water, the deep timbre of a beauty already and so often hymned. As he writes he alludes to those who have described this landscape before him—Dante, Michelangelo, Lorenzo the Magnificent. This is the kind of company he likes to keep.

  “Where are you going?” asks Eleonora.

  “At random.”

  “But in which direction?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  The very word, “fidelity,” in his opinion, has a tone as phoney and theatrical as that of false chains (since his plays’ heroines were frequently manacled, this is a sound with which d’Annunzio is familiar). “No couple is faithful for love’s sake … I am unfaithful for love’s sake.” Perhaps this is cynical self-justification: perhaps he really doesn’t understand the pain his promiscuity causes.

  He takes the old road skirting the hillside towards Fiesole. Florence’s Duomo and Campanile seem to float on the haze beneath. He dismounts, he tells us, at the gate of a villa surrounded by neatly clipped hedges, where he is awaited by two sisters, both musicians, both “expert in perverse games” (these obliging girls sound like figments of d’Annunzio’s erotic imagination, but there certainly were women on whom he paid such calls). Three hours later he goes home.

  As he comes up the road he begins to call out to his “one and only companion.” He drops the reins and leaps down onto the gravel. He is still shouting “Ghisola, Ghisolabella!”
(his tenderest name for Duse).

  She appears, surprised and slightly frightened. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Indoors he strips and bathes. His desire for her is urgent, “the fleeting infidelity gave love an intoxicating novelty,” but, fastidious as ever, he won’t omit his bath. From the tub he calls out to her incessantly. “Ghisola, I love you. I love you, only you for ever. Wait for me. You wait for me.” Clean at last, he goes to the guest room. What follows, he tells us, is like dying without death.

  Poor Eleonora has different views on fidelity. Benigno Palmerio, the major-domo, tells the story. She summons him one day at the Capponcina (d’Annunzio being away in Livorno). She is in the music room, seated in an armchair “in an attitude which could have been that of a dead woman or a medium.” There is a surviving film showing Duse acting out grief and outrage. In it she leans against a wall, head thrown back, mouth trembling, eyes half-closed, her lovely pale face as smooth and yet mobile as turbulent water, her throat exposed as though to an assassin’s knife. This is how she looks as Palmerio comes in.

  Speaking “like an automaton,” she announces: “We must set fire to this house immediately.” On stage or off, Duse is always dramatic. Palmerio stammers and temporises. He is a practical man, an inhabitant of the real world, and now he finds himself obliged to act out a scene from a melodrama opposite the world’s greatest tragedienne. It is embarrassing. Duse begins to circle the room, moaning: “The Temple has been profaned. Only fire can purify it.” She is looking for matches. Palmerio warns her that if she sets light to the house he will call the fire brigade. He pleads. He soothes. He leads her outside. He asks what is the matter. She opens her clenched hand to reveal the two hairpins—the kind of pale-coloured ones a blonde would wear—she has found in the guest room. Palmerio, who knows very well whose the hairpins are, and also whom (yet another woman) d’Annunzio has gone to meet in Livorno, cajoles and flatters and gradually calms her until her tragic grandeur collapses and she bursts into tears.