Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The fictional lovers take to the air, flying above the Tuscan coast in their little plane. She wears sandals and a straw hat for their aerial outings, during which they converse comfortably. Few people, d’Annunzio not yet among them, had enough experience of flying to know how cold and noisy it was in an open plane. The seashore tilts beneath their wings. They look down on the quarries from which Michelangelo’s marbles were taken, Pisa’s Campo Santo with its leaning tower, the walls of Lucca, seeing it all from an angle at which it had never yet been seen by human eyes.

  Marinetti raved furiously against modern Italy’s subordination to its own past. Italy was too full of ancient beauty to have space for the new glories of speed and energy. “So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers!…Heap the fire with the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers, and wreck, wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly.” D’Annunzio’s strategy was less delinquent, more subtle. He sought to preserve the past’s legacy, but make it serve the new cause of nationalism.

  The novel’s hero, Paolo Tarsis, is a copybook superman, with “the bone structure of audacious will, the gaunt face of one possessed by the ardour of victory, the flashing eye of a predator … the hard jaw which held the red flesh of the mouth like a soft fruit gripped by steel pliers.” He and his friend Cambiaso have served together on battleships, fought in submarines. Impatient of discipline, they left the navy together and travelled the world, going lightly clad through Korean snows and the flaming tropical heat of Mindanao. They have starved for days on end in the desert: they have ridden for eighteen hours a day over the steppes. (D’Annunzio had been reading the English traveller A. Henry Savage-Landor and granted Tarsis and Cambiaso many of his adventures.) Eventually they arrive in Egypt where they gaze at ancient paintings of winged, bird-headed gods and dream of adventures in the sky. They come home at last to Italy to become members of the new aristocracy of the air.

  D’Annunzio had friends aplenty, but most of them were more properly disciples of whom he made use. Tarsis and Cambiaso are true comrades. Their feeling for each other is a “great and virile sentiment,” which, as d’Annunzio makes explicit, greatly surpasses the love of women. While Isabella Inghirami toys with Tarsis’s nipples, he is abstracted, impassive. When he sees her approaching over the airfield at Brescia, his first impulse is to prevent her meeting Cambiaso, so as to protect his friend from the debilitating effects of sexual love. She, and the other fashionable young women who hang adoringly around the aviators at air shows, are Sphinxes, Hydras, visions of corrupting pleasure that could have been lifted from Swinburne’s Ballad of Death, futurist versions of the fin-de-siècle archetype of the femme fatale.

  Shortly before he began work on Maybe Yes, Maybe No, d’Annunzio told an interviewer: “Contempt for women is the vital condition of the modern man: just as…disdain for men is the distinguishing quality of the modern heroines.” He was not a conventional misogynist. The two female characters in the novel are both considerably more interesting than the hard-as-bronze Tarsis or the women’s effete, if divinely beautiful, adolescent brother. But feminism and its obverse, misogyny, were dominant themes of public discourse, and d’Annunzio had to have his say on the subject. Love, he told the same interviewer, is incompatible with modern heroism (which, five years before the outbreak of the Great War, he thought found its only modern outlet in sport). The shoulder of a beloved woman “takes on the dimensions of a Himalaya, it cuts us off from the horizon.”

  So he said publicly, but privately he was writing to Nathalie: “Remember the inimitable hours of yesterday?…Your lovely laugh in the musical instrument shop, the concert, the interrupted caress, the white rose … the voice that I shall never forget, the tears, the fury, the voluptuous pleasure that was more than human?” D’Annunzio was inspired by the ideal of the adamantine male, taciturn and celibate, but it was not one he chose to emulate.

  His novel finished, d’Annunzio embarked on a lecture tour of the cities of northern Italy, speaking on “The Domination of the Skies.” He foresaw, long before the military establishment did, how aerial reconnaissance and aerial bombardment could alter the nature of armed conflict. So did his British contemporary H. G. Wells. “I do not think that numbers are going to matter so much in the warfare of the future,” wrote Wells after Blériot’s cross-Channel flight. “I fail to see what [the common soldier] can do in the way of mischief to an elusive chevalier with wings.” Only eight years later, hundreds of fighter planes would be deployed over Verdun. D’Annunzio predicted that explosive development. In the 1880s he had urged the Italian government to build up its navy. Two decades later he was calling for the creation of an air force.

  The organiser of his lecture tour was paying him handsomely, but d’Annunzio—as destructive of his own financial interests as ever—quarrelled with him. The audiences were insufficiently large, the venues insufficiently grand. Halfway through the planned programme d’Annunzio announced he would speak no more.

  Another impresario, Giovanni del Guzzo, approached him. Del Guzzo’s appearance in d’Annunzio’s life was an amazing piece of luck. An Abruzzese who had emigrated to South America and made an immense fortune there, del Guzzo wanted d’Annunzio to tour Argentina, speaking in city after city in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the country’s independence from Spain. The fee would be so prodigiously generous as to make it possible for d’Annunzio to do what had previously seemed beyond the bounds of possibility, and pay off all his debts. This was salvation, unlooked for and absolute. Even d’Annunzio, snobbishly referring to del Guzzo as the “tenacious colonial,” acknowledged his own good fortune. He gave del Guzzo a copy of Maybe Yes, Maybe No, inscribed: “To the Messiah, invoked and come … with Hosannas.” He signed a contract.

  In Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Tarsis goes to the airfield at dawn and sets off, alone and unobserved, on what was, at the time of writing, a flight of impossible ambition. Amidst a flurry of references to the Aeneid, he sets his course over the Tyrrhenian sea towards Sardinia. Lines from Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar toll through his mind, but he rejects the English poet’s pious hope to meet his divine “pilot.” Rather, “he was his own pilot; his spirit was the guide of his own spirit.” When his engine falters he sustains it by the sheer force of will. He is a raptor. He is the iron-headed god Horus. The sea he crosses is like the River Lethe, expunging memory, and erasing all the “filth” of love and the emotional complications of his past life. He is free.

  With this fictional vision of escape still fresh in his mind, d’Annunzio said goodbye to del Guzzo. The millionaire messiah left for South America to start making the arrangements for the lecture tour (12,000 d’Annunzio dolls were to be manufactured for sale in the lecture halls. The poet’s fame was capable of shifting merchandise as well as drawing crowds). Del Guzzo took with him seventeen of d’Annunzio’s manuscripts and his cherished red motor car, which had been kept out of the hands of his creditors only by dint of being hidden in the grounds of a clinic. D’Annunzio was supposed to follow him across the Atlantic in due course.

  He never went. Perhaps he balked, poor sailor that he was, at the thought of the long sea voyage. Perhaps he decided that delivering lectures to a “colonial” (and therefore, to his mind, negligible) public, was not worth his while. Perhaps he just wanted to be with Nathalie. Two days after del Guzzo sailed, d’Annunzio announced that he urgently needed to see a French dentist. Taking what was for him the exiguous luggage of three trunks and three suitcases, a dressing case and an edition of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse, he boarded a train to Paris. He would stay in France for the next five years.

  Kaleidoscope

  NEVER ONCE IN HIS LONG ADVENTUROUS EXISTENCE,” wrote Tom Antongini, “did d’Annunzio pass through a more phantasmagoric period, or a more useless one, than his first few months in France.” Antongini, a young lawyer and aspiring writer, first met d’Annunzio in Florence in 1897, in
the Caffè Doney, where d’Annunzio went to eat ice-cream. Great-nephew of Cesare Fontana, the wealthy Milanese aesthete with whom d’Annunzio had corresponded as a boy, Antongini attached himself to d’Annunzio as the latter had perhaps hoped to attach himself to Fontana. D’Annunzio encouraged him to set up a literary journal, then contributed to its collapse by failing to produce copy on time. Antongini moved to France and for the five years of d’Annunzio’s residence there, he was to be d’Annunzio’s right-hand man and confidant and, for part of the time, live-in secretary and factotum. In his relations with d’Annunzio (about whom he wrote three books of reminiscences) Antongini was at once amused and exasperated, a sceptic and a devotee.

  In Paris in 1910 he watched his newly arrived patron go day after day, night after night where sensationalism called, or where prurient adventure awaited … from a lunch at the Rothschilds, to the racecourse at Auteuil, from an intimate tête-à-tête to a first night at the Opera, from a fancy-dress ball to the reception of a new member at the Académie Française.”

  D’Annunzio in France was a different, lesser man. He had left his political eminence behind in Italy along with his possessions. He continued to address his Italian nationalist admirers, sending polemical poems to the Corriere della Sera. He met French nationalist authors. He acquired some contacts in the military and diplomatic establishment. But in Paris he was more fin-de-siècle decadent than futurist patriot. A cartoon of the period by Sem shows him dancing in the steam rising from a plate of pasta—trim, airy and frivolous. Outrageous stories circulated about him. Within days of his arrival it was being said that he had had sex in the lift at the Hôtel Meurice. (He may have left Italy to escape his debts, but he immediately checked into a preposterously expensive hotel.)

  Nathalie was to remain part of his life throughout the five years of his French “exile,” but she had to compete with a legion of his other mistresses. In memoirs of the time her tears of jealousy are mentioned as often as her extravagantly large jewels. Laying aside his mission to revive and expand the Italian language, d’Annunzio wrote in French, impressing French readers with his fluency not only in the modern language but also in the archaic vocabulary and constructions of mediaeval French verse. He dredged his memory and his notebooks for material for intimate, introspective prose-works. Like Marcel Proust, who began À la recherche du temps perdu the year before he arrived in Paris, he turned his gaze inward, experimenting with a kind of fictionalised autobiography in which the author’s prime subject matter is his own consciousness, his declared aim “to illuminate myself.”

  The five years he spent in France were divided between Paris, where his life was crowded with people and public events, and the Landes, a region of pine forests and sand dunes on the Atlantic coast. Once again d’Annunzio had found for himself a landscape closely resembling that of his childhood. There he rented a fantasically ornate wooden chalet overlooking the beach near Arcachon, and ensconced himself in rooms cluttered with the usual bric-a-brac, and his dogs in a specially constructed kennel, the columns of which were topped with carved wooden hares.

  The five years of his French sojourn are a kind of hiatus in his life. Superficially they were brilliant—never before had d’Annunzio enjoyed such a busy social life—but as an author he was reworking old ideas or experimenting with forms he would fully master only later. He made friends but they were peripheral to the core of his life story, which would seem in retrospect (to him anyway) to be a story about Italy. He had a number of lovers, but no great love. To him, as for all Europe, these are the pre-war years, a prelude to an as-yet-unannounced drama. They will seem afterwards to most of those who live through them either a gracious age of lost beauty and optimism, or a period of culpable irresponsibility, of a time when everyone played silly games with their backs turned to the approaching dark.

  D’Annunzio was forty-eight when he arrived in Paris, but he seemed both older and younger, physically wizened, intellectually ebullient. Hérelle, who had not seen him for twelve years, was shocked by how “old and ugly” he had become. His complexion was pale, his skin dead-looking. Several French observers commented on his large “semitic” nose. (Casual anti-semitism was widespread in snobbish French circles at the time: d’Annunzio himself became infected with it. He had never before shown any interest in the subject, but the diplomat Maurice Paléologue reported “d’Annunzio … hates the Jews.”)

  His many admirers (his fiction was immensely popular in France) were now laying eyes on him for the first time. Several were taken aback by how effeminate the superman seemed. Marinetti, contemplating his “dear little figure,” was put in mind of courtesans, of foaming lace and posies of violets and Gloire de Dijon roses, and detected an odour of chanciness and cunning emanating from his “feminine gestures.” There were men who found him sinister. The poet Henri de Régnier wrote: “He’s ugly, energetic. Something cunning and cruel about him, like the Harlequin who killed Pierrot.”

  D’Annunzio’s supposed ugliness was no obstacle to his social success. Nor was the fact that the fine-tuned snobbery of Parisians detected his merely bourgeois origins. “At first sight,” wrote René Boylesve, “he seems a bit common, a little man who could easily become ridiculous.” But let d’Annunzio only begin to speak and his spell was cast. He was courteous and apparently self-effacing. He dominated gatherings by stealth and charm, not by a noisy imposition of himself. A sharp-eyed girl not yet in her teens (the daughter of the composer Pietro Mascagni, with whom he collaborated in Paris) described his winningly confidential manner: “When Signor d’Annunzio speaks, it always seems as though he is telling one a secret. Even if he is only saying good morning.”

  Two women were waiting to introduce him to Parisian society, his mistress and his wife. Nathalie had had new gowns, inspired by Persian miniatures, made so that she could astonish him on his arrival. She lived in some splendour near the Bois de Boulogne and frequented a circle which the poet André Germain (who was a part of it) described as being made up of “false marquises, dubious princesses, upstarts, ambitious pederasts and knowing pimps” but which also included a number of fine musicians and artists. In this milieu d’Annunzio was easily made welcome.

  Maria Hardouin di Gallese was also in Paris. It was nearly twenty years since she and d’Annunzio had separated and they were on amicable terms. She gave a reception for him, and introduced him to Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac. De Montesquiou, nobleman, dandy and author, now aged fifty-five, had been painted by Whistler and Boldini. He was the primary model for Huysmans’s des Esseintes (as he would shortly be for Proust’s Baron Charlus). D’Annunzio, who had learnt so much from À Rebours, now had the piquant experience of meeting for the first time, in real life, the man who had indirectly inspired some of his own fiction.

  De Montesquiou seems to have become besotted with d’Annunzio. He called him “Beloved Master,” “Divine Friend,” “Porfirogenito’ (born to the purple). He invited him to his chateau, and laid Persian carpets along the drawbridge in honour of his arrival. He volunteered to enter into a sort of contract, “a sentimental, almost religious bond for a period of one year,” vowing himself to d’Annunzio’s service as a vassal might pledge his service to his liege lord. He also observed him perceptively. The Italian was not, he thought, “a man to whom one could become attached; attachment must be reciprocal, and he did not seem to desire it.” He may have meant simply that d’Annunzio was not homosexual, but he also saw that d’Annunzio would “put himself out to please,” not out of any feeling for another, but “for the pleasure he took in excelling in this skill, as he excelled in his art.”

  Another new friend was Comte Boni de Castellane, another of Proust’s circle (de Castellane is one of the models for Proust’s Robert St. Loup). Man about town, giver of extravagant parties and decorator of fantastic homes, de Castellane had much in common with d’Annunzio: “He even dared to claim he was more of a spendthrift than I.” De Castellane was initially surprised by the other’s reputati
on as “a dangerous man”—“a few reddish hairs on his head, pale face, green eyes; in a word, he looked sickly”—but de Castellane looked on as one woman after another succumbed. D’Annunzio’s allure was “like that of a perfume: it captivated, it attracted, it prostrated.”

  D’Annunzio soon met some of his French literary peers: Anatole France, Anna de Noailles, Maurice Barrès. But he had always sought out visual artists or musicians rather than fellow authors. When he arrived in Paris, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was beginning its second season. At de Montesquiou’s urging he went along to see Ida Rubinstein in Scheherazade, and stayed at the theatre bar afterwards until four in the morning expatiating on the “plastic perfection” of her legs. He saw her again in Cleopatra and—as we have already seen—went backstage and kissed those legs from toe to crotch.

  Rubinstein played only mime roles, but though she couldn’t dance and spoke only with a heavy Russian accent, she had, by all accounts, a compelling stage presence. “She is a fabulous being,” said the Ballets Russes designer Léon Bakst. “I adore her.” Tall and stick-thin, with long golden eyes, dark hair and a theatrical dress sense, she was like a tulip, said Bakst, or “like some heraldic bird’; the same delicate bone structure, the same combination of flexibility and long-lined angularity. Mascagni’s daughter conveys, again with innocent directness, how sexy she was. “I had the impression she was naked under her black tunic embroidered with gold … When she talked she made strange snakelike movements. She looked as if she were gesticulating with her legs and hips.” D’Annunzio loved Rubinstein’s exoticism, her grande dame manner, her rumoured bisexuality. She was to other Parisian actresses, he declared, as a Russian icon is to the sparkly trinkets in a modern jeweller’s shop.

  She was also rich enough to be, like Duse, her own impresario, and d’Annunzio must soon have been aware of the fact. Shortly after meeting her, in July 1910, he left Paris for Arcachon. According to Antongini, debauchery had left him “debased, tired, weakened, disgusted and spineless,” but the facts suggest rather that he had recovered his creative energy. At once he set to work to write Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien.