Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In February 1907, Carducci died. Four days later the Corriere della Sera published d’Annunzio’s poem, For the Tomb of Giosuè Carducci. It ended with the words: “The living torch which he entrusted to me,/I will brandish on the sternest peaks.”

  Luigi Pirandello considered the lines presumptuous. D’Annunzio was not the only surviving great Italian poet—Giovanni Pascoli was another—but here he was “lighting a funeral torch at the death-bed” and pushing his way to the highest peak alone. A month later he consolidated his claim, delivering an oration in the course of Carduccci’s memorial ceremonies in Milan.

  The theatre was packed. Wherever d’Annunzio went now he caused a stir. Arriving a few minutes late to hear a new oratorio around this time, he was aware of a great whispering and rustling as he took his seat. When he found the music was not to his taste, and left before the end, “I believe I caused a scandal.” From Milan he wrote to Amaranta: “Everyone wants to chew on a scrap of me: there’s nothing left but a few aching bones.” But for all his claims that he would much prefer to have been at home, enjoying the violets in the Capponcina’s garden and the “soft ears of my dogs,” he had to confess that the task of offering himself up “as a meal to the mob” had been lightened by two moments of elation.

  One came as he stepped out on stage. “Never have I seen such a deep human sea.” The second was his visit to the newly modernised printing works of the Corriere della Sera. Editor Luigi Albertini had devoted the whole of the front page to the text of d’Annunzio’s oration. Seeing his words flowing off the presses, 300,000 copies destined to be distributed all across Italy, d’Annunzio exulted in the power and reach the paper had granted him. He was to become one of Albertini’s most prized contributors.

  He was supposed to be delivering a eulogy to Carducci. In fact, the speech is his own manifesto. Mingling the discourses of devotion and of nationalism, he talked about the “eternal spirit of the race.” He spoke of the Roman consuls, of the bloody but noble wars of the Ghibellines, of the Medici, of Michelangelo, of a history full of “arduous beauty and violent destiny.” Naming Italian hero after Italian hero, Italian city after Italian city, he seemed to be ushering a nation into being by naming its parts. He alluded to Rudyard Kipling, whose Puck, summoning ghosts of past Britons out of Pook’s Hill in a book published the previous year, performed a similar function for Great Britain.

  His speech was a call to arms. Half a century before, the land had been “irrigated” by the “rich blood” of brave Italians, but the great adventure of the Risorgimento had petered out. Now, like Crispi before him, d’Annunzio was looking for a pretext for a fight. The identity of the opponent was unclear—it might be the internal enemy, the “grey democratic flood.” It might be a foreign power. No matter. Repeating the sentiments he had given his imaginary dictator in Glory, d’Annunzio declared that the contaminated land must be violently ploughed up. He called for Italy to become industrialised, to arm itself with modern weapons, to develop an aggressive new “national consciousness.” He praised Germany, a nation as young as Italy, where the prowess of a new generation of heroes was made concrete in massive ships and manufacturing plants. He conjured up a modern world of iron and fire as dangerous and majestic as the mediaeval one he had tried to create on stage in Francesca da Rimini.

  All this bluster availed him nothing in his love life. In the “green cloister” he would lay out the robe patterned with violets which bore the scent of Amaranta’s body, or the wonderful pleated Fortuny tunic, blue-black and printed with Mycenaean motifs, which he liked so much he would dress two of his fictional femmes fatales in it. He would light the incense burner. He would strew the bed with petals and scented handkerchiefs. He would yearn for Amaranta’s presence, for the chance to bite her nipples, which he had named Muriella and Fragoletta (“blackcurrant” and “little strawberry”). But time and again something would prevent her arrival.

  He was happier at his desk. He was writing The Ship, his most ambitious drama to date. Its protagonist, he wrote, was “an entire race.” Its central image was the construction of a warship, the sixth-century equivalent of the ironclads being constructed in Germany’s Baltic shipyards, or those he wished that Italy would build. Throughout the autumn of 1907 he wrote flat out, staying at his task for twenty hours nonstop, eating only fruit and raw eggs, working, not like a dog (he loved his dogs for their aristocratic idleness), “but like a labourer on the road.”

  Set in AD 552, the play gives a lurid account of the Venetians’ struggle to make themselves free of Byzantium. A basilica (which, we are to understand, will be St. Mark’s) is rising from the watery ground of an island in the Venetian lagoon. Built into its fabric are Roman fragments—pillars, pieces of carved marble, golden mosaics. In this new state Romanità will be preserved and revitalised. Also in view is the half-built ship (the production team included a master shipwright) and enough large vistas to accommodate the enormous cast. At several points in the drama there are three choruses simultaneously onstage.

  D’Annunzio had required his composer, Ildebrando Pizzetti, to provide a musical equivalent for the “rush and roar of rivers in spate.” Sailors belt out triumphal anthems, Christian zealots sing Latin hymns. Pagans challenge them with Dionysian paeans. Soldiers march on in victory. Prisoners of war are driven into a pit, where they are killed, one by one, by a fatal woman with a bow and arrow. This woman, Basiliola Faledra, is an avenging demon. Her father and brothers have all been blinded for their treachery in dealing with the eunuch-Emperor of Byzantium. Now she hopes to destroy their rivals, another pair of brothers whom she seduces one after another with a lascivious ballet-cum-striptease in which she unsheathes her body like the lethal weapon it is, slithering out of layer upon layer of gorgeous Fortuny-inspired silk.

  The play’s language is a sequence of seductions, outpourings of religious fervour and war cries. The action is a-throb with cruelty and sex. The five blinded Faledri cower on stage. Basiliola is “shaken by the craving to see blood flow.” As she fits another arrow to the string she licks it lasciviously and the infatuated prisoners in the trench beneath her beg her to kill them. “Another arrow!” “To me!” “To me!” At the end the hero cries out that she must be the figurehead of the new ship, her body nailed, still living, to its prow. She thwarts him by leaping into the great fire blazing before the altar, living sacrifice to the project which d’Annunzio announced in his prefatory verses: that of making all the oceans (but most particular the Adriatic) “Mare Nostro,” our sea.

  D’Annunzio went to Rome to supervise rehearsals. He was in one of his black moods. The city whose stirring glamour he had once chronicled seemed “appalling” to him. The faces he saw in the street expressed “weakness, cynicism, savage envy, useless love.” He complained that the actors’ voices gave him headaches. “To have my skull trepanned without chloroform wouldn’t have made me shudder as much as Traba’s trombone of a voice.” The hugger-mugger circumstances and perfunctory manners of backstage life were repellent to him. “I had to eat lunch there, at a dusty table, in view of all the actors!”

  D. H. Lawrence, who saw The Ship a decade later, called it “bosh.” D’Annunzio’s first Italian audiences, though, were exhilarated by it. Most overtly polemical of his plays, it triggered an uproar, immensely gratifying to its author. The King and Queen attended the opening night and called d’Annunzio into their box to congratulate him at the end of the evening, while a noisy crowd spilled out of the theatre and marched through the streets of central Rome chanting the catchline—which at once became an irredentist slogan: “Arm the prow and set sail for the world!”

  At a grand banquet given in his honour a few nights after the opening, in the presence of a government minister, d’Annunzio proposed a toast to the “most bitter Adriatic.” He explained the phrase to a reporter: “the bitterness of the Adriatic relates to our diseased left lung” by which he meant the land on the eastern shores of the Adriatic, those once-Venetian dominions of Venezia Giul
ia, Istria, Croatia, Dalmatia, which were still in Austrian hands.

  The production ran for weeks, and then transferred to Venice. D’Annunzio offered to donate the manuscript to the city. There was further, publicity-generating controversy when the mayor demurred on the grounds that The Ship’s blend of sexual perversity and Christian liturgy might upset the Church. Eventually his objections were overcome and d’Annunzio, spruce in top-hat and tails, arrived at the municipal offices by gondola, carrying the manuscript tied with a crimson ribbon and wrapped in fine old red velvet (a piece, he claimed, of the state robes of a magistrate of the mediaeval Venetian Empire). The presentation was followed by a banquet for over a hundred prominent irredentists at the Hotel Danieli. The tables were decorated with flowers picked inside the Roman amphitheatre at Pola, the “unredeemed” Istrian port. Speakers prayed that d’Annunzio might “sound the paean of victory over our sea.” He responded by paying tribute to those who tended “the hidden Roman flame” on the “other shore.”

  His speeches in Venice were incitements to war. When Giolitti, President of the Council, met the Austrian Chancellor von Bülow a few days later, it was noted that d’Annunzio’s words had created “ill humour” between the two powers. The Austrian Foreign Minister thenceforward kept a copy of The Ship always on his desk, as a reminder of how dangerous Italy might be.

  The play’s production was profitable enough to cover its immense costs and leave d’Annunzio with a substantial sum of much-needed money. More cheerful now, he basked in his success.

  In 1908, the year of The Ship’s premiere, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, driving through the outskirts of Milan, swerved to avoid two bicyclists and overturned his car in a ditch. Marinetti wrote up the incident as a prologue to his “Futurist Manifesto,” published the following year, and noisily appointed himself the spokesman for a new aesthetic of sleek metal and powerful machinery.

  Marinetti was seizing upon and popularising a cultural trend that had been extant for at least a generation. Huysmans’s des Esseintes queries whether there could be any human being “more dazzlingly beautiful than the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway” and d’Annunzio too, despite being a conservationist and celebrator of the Italy’s past glory, had, for years, been celebrating all that was new and fast and efficient. “In the carriages which race along the steel rails, in the ships which slice through the rivers and seas, and in all the machinery of work and wealth, marvellous beauties are preparing themselves.”

  He had a telephone installed in the Capponcina at the earliest opportunity. As soon as motor cars became available he bought himself one, a red Florentia with a ninety horse-power engine, the biggest and fastest then available. He bought motoring manuals, and talked about patenting a new kind of steering wheel. (Of his three sons it was Veniero, who became an engineer, for whom he seemed to feel most respect.) He drove so recklessly that Clemente Origo insisted he made a will before accepting a lift to the seaside. D’Annunzio filled the car with red roses when he took female friends for a drive in it—so abundantly, remarked one lady, that there was scarcely room to sit down. He was soon known to the Tuscan police for speeding along the region’s narrow dirt roads.

  Like her lover, Amaranta was excited by the new technology of speed. Contemporaries who knew them both saw Isabella Inghirami, the death-defying heroine of Maybe Yes, Maybe No, as a portrait of her. In this helter-skelter decade of d’Annunzio’s life women’s fashions changed utterly. The high-necked, lace-adorned dresses, with their capacious skirts and boned bodices, gave way to slim lines and fluid fabrics. D’Annunzio’s heroine, her legs outlined in motion by her narrow satin skirts, her face shaded by a hat as sleek and angular as the wing of a predatory bird, is a modernist vision of female elegance.

  With Amaranta and her husband, d’Annunzio attended a motor rally at Brescia in 1907, a sensational event. The sight of such speed, previously undreamt of, was intoxicating. The drivers were so resolute, so likely to die. Marinetti was inspired to write his prose-poem, Death Takes the Wheel: “Transmission of my nerves, throwing into gear the planetary orbs!/Divining instinct, oh gear-box!/O my explosive and detonating heart!”

  All this enthusiasm for the whizz and zoom of modern machinery found its way into heroic fiction in d’Annunzio’s Maybe Yes, Maybe No, but in real life it was converted into the blackest farce. The ending of d’Annunzio’s relationship with his Amaranta was wretched, and in it a ridiculous spectacle recurs: that of the poet who had welcomed the machine age with such enthusiasm standing fuming at the side of the road by a broken-down car.

  Giuseppina might look as shiny and trim as a metallic car mascot, but she was psychologically frail. She craved danger but, guilty, she also craved punishment. Her liaison with d’Annunzio was an ill-kept secret. She was afraid both of her husband and of her father. For all d’Annunzio’s ardour, she suspected him of infidelity (she was right). When she reproached him, he cruelly turned the tables on her, accusing her of denying their sacred love. She couldn’t make a decision. She couldn’t reconcile all the claims being made on her. In September 1908 her mind gave way.

  One morning she precipitately left home, leaving a letter for her husband announcing that she was abandoning “all things which were once my life and my every good,” but saying as well that her heart rebelled against d’Annunzio—“he who is the cause of all this ruin.” She took a train, but her resolve failed. At Compiobbi, not far from d’Annunzio’s home at Settignano, she left the train and telephoned him. He came to her, but not fast enough. We have only his fragmented recollection of what followed: “the pursuit, the engine blowing up in the middle of the road, the butcher’s cart, running through the dust, the crowd gathered at the station. Amaranta with a look of madness, trembling, babbling, shuddering.” Waiting for him, she had become so agitated as to attract a crowd of gawping villagers. The more they stared, the more frightened she was, the more crazy her behaviour became. How the episode ended we don’t exactly know, but soon thereafter she was back in her marital home, on her own, her husband having left for the country after terrible scenes during which he had called her a puttana, a whore. She met d’Annunzio in the “green cloister” but refused to spend the night. D’Annunzio let her go, and the next morning, feeling a “need to be elsewhere,” he drove to Bologna. From there he sent her a flurry of telegrams, and tried to telephone her, but failed to get through.

  At 2:30 in the afternoon he received a telegram from her. “Dying of grief and love. Come, come, come for pity’s sake.” He sent her three more telegrams, but didn’t go to her. Once more his car was out of action (a problem with the ignition). The following morning he telephoned her again. She was incoherent: she didn’t know where he was, or what she herself had been doing. “The breath of madness blew on my face, and froze me.” This time he set out instantly but his journey, which should have been easily accomplished in three hours, became a long-drawn-out farce. The car broke down repeatedly. Eventually d’Annunzio hitched a ride with some friends who providentially passed by. It was nightfall by the time they reached Florence. They stopped for ten minutes just outside the city to light the oil-fuelled headlamps. Those ten minutes—as d’Annunzio subsequently tormented himself by thinking—sealed Amaranta’s fate. Just before he finally reached the “green cloister,” she had been there with two strange men, calling themselves police officers, who had been beating noisily at the door, and who, as d’Annunzio eventually discovered, were in fact known criminals.

  The police eventually pieced a story together. The two strangers had found Giuseppina, confused and vulnerable, in the piazza only a few minutes walk from her home. Somehow they had coerced her into getting into a carriage with them. It seems that initially they had taken her for a prostitute and when she gave the address of d’Annunzio’s hideaway they assumed it was a brothel. Failing to gain entrance, and beginning to understand the real situation, they saw the chance of blackmailing her. It was now about nine o’clock. Later that ev
ening they were seen with her in a café. They finally deposited her at her own home very late that night. D’Annunzio never discovered what had happened to her in the intervening hours.

  By the time a doctor saw her the following morning she was raving. She had hidden herself in a little room on a landing which she refused to leave. She claimed she had been poisoned. She talked about her “enemy,” by whom she meant, as the doctor gradually understood, d’Annunzio. She didn’t wish to see him or to hear him spoken of. She threw away the jewellery he had given her, and took to wearing her wedding ring again, and a bracelet her husband had given her (with multicoloured stones, in horridly “strident” taste, according to d’Annunzio). When her father arranged for her to be confined to an asylum, d’Annunzio left bunches of wild cyclamen on the outer windowsill of what he believed was her room. He suspected a plot by her family to deprive her of her liberty and so separate her from him; but he resigned himself to never seeing her again.

  Nike, Amaranta and numerous less significant others, this hectic succession of love affairs, complicated by drugs and insanity, by prodigal luxury and near-fatal illness, was accompanied by the gradual crescendo of d’Annunzio’s financial problems. He was always demanding payment—he was not a disinterested artist—but he was an inept businessman. There was something in him, it seemed, that recoiled from commercially promising assignments.

  Giacomo Puccini proposed a collaboration. The composer, disappointed by the poor reception of Madame Butterfly, hoped to do better with a libretto from “the first genius of Italy.” Flattery got him nowhere. D’Annunzio demanded such an extortionate fee that the plan foundered. In 1908 Puccini tried again, visiting d’Annunzio in his summer retreat by the sea. D’Annunzio proposed the subject of Parisina (on which he would in fact write a libretto, to be set by Mascagni, four years later) but privately doubted that Puccini had the creative force “to raise such a tragic weight.” Puccini responded by suggesting the poet might write more concisely. As soon ask the sea to be less wet. D’Annunzio was almost too incredulous to be affronted. “He actually told me that he needed a little thing, something light to be set to music in a few months! And for this he turned to the poet of Francesca da Rimini!”