Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The Capponcina, writes Palmerio, had become a place of pilgrimage. Processions of creditors trooped up the hill to it. “There were those who were cordial and patient, and there were those who showed their teeth.” D’Annunzio remained insouciant. When Palmerio tried to explain his situation to him, he interrupted to exclaim at the beauty of a blossoming tree. That he was short of funds he certainly knew, but he made no consistent attempt to reduce his expenditure. He spent all his earnings from his latest play on a hunter. He won the lottery—an amazing stroke of luck—but his prize money, boon though it was, was very soon gone. To avoid the duns now virtually besieging the house, he went to stay for months on end with his friend Origo. In 1909 he flitted from Genoa to Cap Martin to Rome, staying in hotels he could not afford.

  In public he appeared suave, with the bloom of success on him. But “melancholy” darkened his world view. He fell from his horse, breaking his shoulder, and newspaper reports hinted the accident might have been a suicide attempt. Even sex sometimes failed him, generating only fatigue and self-disgust. His apartment in Florence was next to a workshop. Sometimes, in bed with a woman there, hearing the productive clash and bang from next door, he felt ashamed of his compulsion to “the sterile carnal work.”

  D’Annunzio’s affair with Giuseppina was, he wrote when he was near death, his “last felicity.” After the catastrophe, the world around him seemed “a sewer” and love “a drunken clown.” He had written to her: “There is no desire in my blood which is not for you … I see in my life no other companion. I see no other joy.” But it was not quite true. Several months before her breakdown, in Rome for the premiere of The Ship, d’Annunzio met a Russian visitor from Paris, Nathalie de Goloubeff, the wife of a diplomat from whom she was amicably separated. Nathalie was a gifted singer. She had modelled for Rodin. She loved dogs and horses as much as d’Annunzio did. A photograph (overleaf) shows her superbly androgynous in large felt hat and riding breeches, her soft leather boots laced up to mid-thigh, with the kind of large-boned face d’Annunzio admired. In Rome she became a protégée of Count Primoli, who—once more acting the go-between—introduced her to d’Annunzio. For several months she hung back, thinking of her husband, her children, her social position, but a few days after Giuseppina’s incarceration she telephoned d’Annunzio late one night and boldly asked if she might visit him.

  He was uncharacteristically diffident. A decade earlier he had written cruelly about Foscarina’s withering and softening skin, now he was five years older than Duse had been then. The mirror appalled him. “I am ashamed of my kisses.” All the same he bid Nathalie come. “She arrived pale, trembling, determined to give herself … blind to all the rest.” He called her his “Spikenard,” after the herb whose oil is an ancient remedy for pain. “One passion is extinguished,” he wrote, “another passion flames up.”

  Once again a sexual relationship revived him, both emotionally and creatively. He laid claim to Nathalie by calling her Donatella or his “Caucasian Diana,” and soon he was writing a play, Fedra, dedicated to her. She was his “red rose,” his “young archer.” He wrote to tell her how he longed to kiss “the wound of St. Sebastian”—meaning her cunt. This was to be a relationship in which, more even than was usual for d’Annunzio, pain was the spur to passion. He liked to think of Nathalie as a descendant of Tamburlaine—a wild conqueror. He called her “a great naked bee with beautiful tresses” (bee stings were still sexual for him) and longed to suck her honey. The relationship would be full of unhappiness for Nathalie, but it would last, intermittently, another seven years.

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  In February 1909, while d’Annunzio was writing Fedra, in Paris Le Figaro gave its entire front page over to the publication of Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto.” This was Marinetti’s cultural coup, the moment when he transformed himself into the spokesman for an international artistic-cum-ideological movement whose art (uneven in quality) and ideology (incoherent) were both eclipsed by the sheer élan, to borrow one of his favourite words, of the front man.

  Born in Egypt, educated in Paris, Marinetti was rich, cosmopolitan and provocative, the self-described “Caffeine of Europe.” He was a journalist, an entrepreneur, a performer, an agitator and a polemicist. Like d’Annunzio, he understood and used publicity. (One of the futurist artists, Carlo Carrà, was to call the movement an “advertising machine.”) And, like d’Annunzio, Marinetti had a pike-like talent for snapping-up the ideas of others and making them his own. Many of the notions laid out with such a provocative flourish in his “Manifesto” had been expressed, in several instances years earlier, by d’Annunzio.

  Marinetti had been writing about d’Annunzio for over a decade. An advocate of all that was modern and vigorous (“a roaring motor car, which seems to run on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”), he had for a while been vociferously anti-d’Annunzio, the man who kept a reproduction of the Victory in his bedroom. He described d’Annunzio’s oeuvre as the Monte Carlo of literature: “that false decorative verdure, those ideas sick and plaintive beneath a weight of futile opulence.” He berated the older man for peddling “the intellectual poison of sickly nostalgia” and condemned his “obsession with lechery … and mania for antiquity.” Over the years, though, he had come to recognise that, for all his fondness for classical art and mediaeval knick-knacks, d’Annunzio was a fellow modern, a poet who rhapsodised over warships and steelworks, and who set a higher value on energy than he did on virtue.

  Through the first years of the century Marinetti had been staging “futurist evenings,” uproarious events each of which was a political demonstration, a satirical cabaret, a publicity stunt and (nearly always by the end of the evening) a bloody brawl. One of them had honoured d’Annunzio. When Duse’s production of The Dead City was badly received in 1901, Marinetti took it upon himself to defend it. He and “hundreds of others” invaded the theatre “delivering boxes to the ears and blows to the bellies of the conservative spectators”—not, one would have thought, an efficient method of helping them to enjoy the play, but one which attracted plenty of attention. D’Annunzio and Marinetti shared a sophisticated understanding of the serious uses to which showmanship could be put. Marinetti was drawn by “a violent personal sympathy,” he said, to “the distinguished seducer, the ineffable descendant of Cagliostro and Casanova.”

  In early 1909, thousands of copies of his “programme” (a condensed version of the “Futurist Manifesto” reduced to bullet points, to make it more handy for journalists), were sent out to opinion-formers around the world, from Mexico to Romania. A friend of Marinetti’s father, who happened to be a shareholder in Le Figaro, got him the front page of the paper. Back in Milan he published the manifesto in his own journal, hung a huge white sheet bearing the single word “FUTURISM” from his balcony on one of Milan’s main thoroughfares, and had billboards in cities all over Italy plastered with his manifesto blown up to ten foot by three foot and printed in fiery red letters.

  The manifesto is an eccentric document—part tirade, part fantasy. It opens with a thoroughly d’Annunzian fictional episode. A young man is discovered lounging around in an interior cluttered with oriental rugs and brass lamps, his fingers glittering with Byzantine rings. Abruptly galvanised, he leaps into his motor car, drives recklessly through the city streets, crashes and climbs unruffled from the wreck. The juxtaposition of fin-de-siècle languor and machine-age velocity was one d’Annunzio had been living long before Marinetti wrote it down. The polemic which follows is full of sentiments d’Annunzio had already expressed. D’Annunzio had proclaimed the tenth muse, whom he named Energeia, and announced: “I advance towards life.” Now Marinetti—following Henri Bergson—worshipped élan vital. D’Annunzio had written of an awful beauty in the newly industrialised world: “The omnipotent machines … proclaim an unknown poetry, an unhoped-for joy, an august liberation.” Now Marinetti wrote admiringly of “violent electric moons,” of “bridges that straddle the rivers like gian
t gymnasts, flashing in the sun with the glitter of knives.” D’Annunzio had been writing for over twenty years about the advent of the superman. Now Marinetti proclaimed “the hour is nigh when men with broad temples and steel chins will give birth magnificently, with a single thrust of their bulging will, to giants with flawless gestures.”

  In 1901 d’Annunzio had prophesied an imminent war which would cleanse Europe. Now Marinetti hailed war, “the world’s only hygiene.” D’Annunzio had deplored the meanness of lives governed by prudence and economy and had run his own affairs and written his dramas with a Dionysian disregard for moderation. Now Marinetti wrote: “Let us break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind!” Marinetti never acknowledged it, but he was d’Annunzio’s noisiest and most brilliant disciple.

  In the summer of 1909, d’Annunzio was intent on throwing himself into the wind, quite literally. He wanted to fly. He was in Rome, enjoying himself (while Nathalie awaited him on the coast) with the Marchesa Beatrice Alvarez de Toledo, who signed a kind of contract: “I belong soul and body to Gabriele d’Annunzio, now and for ever ready for him in life and in death.” By day he was visiting the Centocelle airfield, where Wilbur Wright was teaching the first Italian aviators how to construct and pilot a flying machine. D’Annunzio describes it: the hangars, the din of roaring engines and whirring propellers, the mechanics, silent and intent. He observed the aviators: an edgy tribe, with their own jargon and their distinctive style, the wide breeches, the tight leather caps, the incessant cigarettes.

  The now-familiar form of a winged tube had yet to establish itself as the best one for an aircraft. Early flying machines came in many shapes. D’Annunzio lists them: “Assemblages of quadrangles like heaps of bottomless boxes, flimsy hulls laden with scaffolding.” Others which reminded him of windmills and ceiling fans and butter churns. And in each bizarre structure sat an aviator, like a spider in his web, pulling levers, desperate with the nearly-always-frustrated longing to feel his machine rise. After hours of preparation someone would achieve lift-off, propellers whirring until they were visible only as “stars of air in air.” Each flight, however brief and clumsy, was a miracle.

  “We stand on the extreme promontory of the centuries,” wrote Marinetti in his manifesto. “Why look behind us?” But look behind him Marinetti, like d’Annunzio, repeatedly did, ransacking ancient myths for imagery. Motorists were centaurs. Aviators were angels. D’Annunzio repeatedly likens manned flight to the assumption of the Virgin Mary. He writes again and again about the myth of Icarus. He invokes the bird-headed gods of ancient Egypt with their immense wings. Marcel Proust, watching flying displays in France in the same year through “eyes brimming with tears,” felt the same need to “look behind.” He was as moved, he wrote “as a Greek might have been upon seeing a demi-god for the first time.”

  God-like though they may have been, the aviators were not immortal. The danger they faced fascinated d’Annunzio. Death was constantly on his mind. He was attending séances and listening to fortune-tellers. He told friends that three separate clairvoyants had predicted that he would die violently on 17 July 1909. He at least partially believed it. He wrote to Treves, listing his works in progress and referring to them as his “posthumous books.” His son Gabriellino recalls seeing him on the dread day “playing crazy tricks” on horseback and at the wheel of his car, as though daring fate. But the disaster that in fact befell him that month wasn’t death, but financial ruin.

  All the contents of the Capponcina had been mortgaged to guarantee a bank loan. When it became obvious that d’Annunzio would not and could not pay up, bailiffs broke down the door of the house that had once been the “serene haven of dream and thought.” D’Annunzio had taken his horses and dogs down to the coast in the vain hope of retaining possession of them. The bailiffs caught up with him at his borrowed villa in Marina di Pisa and took the animals too. “Perhaps tomorrow they will confiscate my shoes and superfluous shirts,” he wrote flippantly to his old friend Scarfoglio. They did.

  There is something liberating about calamity. The Capponcina and all its contents—its hundreds of damask cushions, its lecterns and choir stalls and death-masks and shelves full of crystal cosmetics jars—were lost. (D’Annunzio’s books were bought and eventually returned to him by a syndicate of his friends and admirers, but it would be years before he had them with him again.) The house into which he had poured so much money and creative energy was being dismembered. Yet, Palmerio, his faithful steward, was astonished to see him leave the house for the last time as carelessly as he might leave a hotel where he had briefly stayed. “To be separated from old things impregnated with useless memories doesn’t hurt me.” He carried his fortune in his head.

  The only thing that bothered him was that all the kerfuffle made it hard for him to concentrate on the novel he was writing. Looking out of his window, he envied the hens spreading their feathers to catch a downpour of rain, and wished he were one of them, “then nothing would prevent me laying my egg.” He found a money lender willing to oblige him, and set to work making “improvements” to his seaside villa, squandering money he would never repay on a house he would shortly leave. He went on a series of excursions—to Mantua and Volterra, which would provide the settings for the new novel, and most importantly, back to Brescia for the air show.

  Air shows were the new circuses, as deadly as those performed 2,000 years previously in the Colosseum: two of the most celebrated pilots would die that summer. The one at Brescia was a great event. The rich and fashionable arrived in their motor cars, ploughing ruts into the dirt roads and rendering them impassable. Kafka and Brod, gazing up at the stands, could have seen d’Annunzio’s brother-in-law the Duke di Gallese, the Marchesa Luisa Casati in one of her striking monochrome outfits, and the Countess Morosini, whom he would meet again in Venice on his way to overfly Trieste. Puccini was there, and so was the King, and so were perhaps 100,000 others. Afterwards people would spend up to twelve hours trying to travel back along the clogged roads to Brescia, twenty-five kilometres away. D’Annunzio’s description of the chaotic scene must be the first-ever literary account of a traffic jam.

  The American aviator Glenn Curtiss won the Grand Prize and then consented to take d’Annunzio up as his passenger. In his fictional account of the event d’Annunzio would describe his heroic aviators flying so high that their planes were specks in the sky, or so far that they vanish over the horizon. The reality was less sublime, more often ridiculous. Luigi Barzini, covering the show for the Corriere della Sera, described d’Annunzio—in a tight-fitting motorist’s cap with a chin strap like a baby’s bonnet—perched on a narrow bench, his dainty feet resting on a bamboo pole, caged in by the rigging of steel cords. The crowd let out a great shout when Curtiss’s plane moved forward with the “first genius of Italy” aboard, but all they could actually see of the poet were his legs.

  “The aeroplane set off, its wheels wavering over the uneven ground, raising and lowering its tail with the motion of a boat in the water; then it lifted a few feet off the ground, but soon it fell back again and continued its humble gallop over the ground for a while before coming to a stop.” Not exactly the soaring trajectory d’Annunzio had hoped for, but he was nonetheless ready for the crowds who pressed around the grounded plane clamouring for his impressions.

  “He was glittering with enthusiasm,” reports Barzini. “It’s divine,” he announced. “I can think of nothing but my next flight.” Someone pointed out that the Italian aviator Calderara was still on the field. At once d’Annunzio hurried off to beg him for a ride. Calderara agreed, and this time d’Annunzio remained airborne for eight minutes. Once again he was mobbed on landing by journalists and admirers avid for his account of the experience. “D’Annunzio,” wrote Barzini, “is the representative of human sensibility, taken on board like a precision instrument of the psyche.” Afterwards, Curtiss’s mechanics staged an auction, selling the be
nch on which d’Annunzio’s backside had rested to the highest bidder among his clamorous fans.

  Having flown, d’Annunzio wrote his novel of flight. Maybe Yes, Maybe No was written at high speed during the autumn of 1909. His home closed to him, he worked all day and all night in his villa by the sea, going to bed at five in the morning, only to rise again at ten to continue writing. By the end of the year he had written over 900 pages. Treves decided to publish the work in two volumes—apparently in the hope that the first half might have a cordial reception before the more shocking aspects of the plot—brother-sister incest, sadism, prostitution—had been made explicit.

  The novel contains some of d’Annunzio most effective prose-poetry. Gorgeous settings and gothic plot devices—incest, a suicide pact, mysterious intruders glimpsed only in a mirror, a ruined abbey, a lunatic asylum, a prison, an ancient tomb—alternate with scenes of modern high life as sophisticated as anything in Pleasure, and with passages of haunting Symbolist landscape-writing. Its heroine Isabella Inghirami is a volatile character, a kind of group portrait of d’Annunzio’s recent mistresses. Her gift for performance is Eleonora Duse’s: her independence as a young widow and her physical daring are Nike’s; her heavy eye make-up and Fortuny robes recall Luisa Casati; her pathetic descent into madness is not just like Amaranta’s, it actually is Amaranta’s. Page after page of the novel are taken, word for word, from d’Annunzio’s journal of the terrible end of their affair.