Here are some episodes from the period between d’Annunzio’s arrival in Paris, and the night, over four years later, when he was seen at the Trocadéro theatre on 27 June 1914. On the latter date he sat in the box of the Comédie-Française’s leading actress, Cécile Sorel, whom he had first met playing charades with Isadora Duncan, and to whom he had paid what—from him—was the highest possible compliment, telling her that she could hold her own in a beauty contest with a greyhound. They watched Isadora Duncan’s troupe performing a programme of “Botticellian” dances. The following day the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, was shot dead in Sarajevo and what d’Annunzio called “la vita leggera” was over.
In coming to France in 1910, d’Annunzio has arrived at the hub of the aviator’s world. At Issy-les-Moulineaux, just north of Paris, the great Blériot—to d’Annunzio a modern avatar of the Frankish knights who once dominated all southern Europe—presides over the growing number of novice pilots and engineers. Their exploits fascinate the intelligentsia. Proust makes the trip with his chauffeur Albert, and soon he will send his fictional narrator out to the airfield with Albertine. Maurice Maeterlinck, Pierre Loti, Anatole France and Henri Bergson are among those who, like d’Annunzio, travel out to watch the flying. D’Annunzio affects to despise Maeterlinck (“artificial and monotonous”) but he has frequently imitated him. Anatole France is becoming his friend. Soon he will rent the Dame Rose farm conveniently close to Issy and ensconce Nathalie there with their dogs.
Artists are as excited about flight as the writers. It creates new perspectives. The aviators see terrestrial life from further off than anyone has previously done and from an unprecedented angle. The pioneers of cubism, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, make model aircraft, and frequently visit Issy-les-Moulineaux to watch the planes take off. D’Annunzio does not know them. He writes with fervent enthusiasm about the classical statuary and Renaissance paintings in the Louvre, and about a Pisanello medal in a private collection, but nothing about the post-Impressionists, nothing about Picasso. He is in Paris at a time of tremendous artistic innovation, but it passes him by.
THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE. De Montesquiou has arranged a dinner at Le Pré-Catelan. Newly restored, the restaurant is a place of swagged silk curtains and crystal chandeliers, grandiose bow windows and discreet private rooms. The damask and the silver are heavy, the food rich. Cécile Sorel is playing hostess. During dessert another actress reads out passages from Fire. D’Annunzio sits next to Sorel and sets out to charm her. Nathalie, watching from the other end of the table, bursts into tears. Sorel is embarrassed but d’Annunzio, unperturbed, tells the assembled company: “She is beautiful only when she cries.”
The purpose of the dinner is to introduce d’Annunzio to Maurice Barrès, one of the lions of the Parisian literary world. Born within a year of each other, the two have, in their separate countries, been following parallel paths. Barrès began as an aesthete and an individualist, instigator of a “culte du moi.” His early novels were among those from which d’Annunzio was lifting ideas, images, even whole sentences, in the 1890s. He has written a book about Venice with the d’Annunzian title of Amori et Dolori Sacrum. He has been a member of parliament, but only so that he could complain about parliament’s shortcomings. For the last decade—increasingly convinced that the individual could thrive only in full consciousness of his race, his blood, his soil—he has been writing novels full of mystical nationalism. He and the Italian, so like-minded, should be allies, and d’Annunzio, by means of a flattering dedication, will see to it that they soon are, but Barrès is initially wary, watching d’Annunzio with a perspicacious eye and a grudging mind. D’Annunzio affects “the fading tradition” of the Symbolists and Oscar Wilde, thinks Barrès, but there is nothing languishing about him. “He is a little Italian with a hard face … A businessman looking for providers of funds.”
Every Friday afternoon the American whisky-heiress Natalie Barney is at home to her friends in the Rue Jacob, in a room hung—d’Annunzio-style—with red damask and decorated with mottoes. Into the lace curtains are woven the words: “May our drawn curtains shield us from the world.” Barney, a lesbian, has had a shamelessly public affair with Liane de Pougy, the beautiful courtesan who thought d’Annunzio a “frightful gnome.” She calls her salon the “temple of friendship.” She serves strawberry tarts and invites an eclectic group. There are writers—Cocteau, Rilke, Tagore—and there are, according to Sylvia Beach, a quantity of “ladies with high collars and monocles,” although Barney herself wears long white lace dresses.
D’Annunzio is fascinated by lesbians. He gains an entrée to Barney’s cosmopolitan circle of self-confident homosexual women. Soon he meets another American heiress (destined to become the love of Barney’s life), the painter Romaine Brooks (above).
Brooks crops her dark hair and wears trousers. Her clothes and the décor of her apartment are all black, white or shades of grey. D’Annunzio dubs her Cinerina (“little ashy one”). She has just had her first solo exhibition: de Montesquiou, paying tribute to her stark monochrome portraits in Le Figaro, calls her “the thief of souls.” D’Annunzio is impressed by her talent and her beauty (she reminds him of Eleanora Duse) and titillated by her bisexuality. “Although she is an American,” he says—the New World, in his opinion, is inhabited entirely by barbarians—“she is both intelligent and a true artist.” She notices that he uses his knife and fork “like weapons” and likes him for ignoring gossip and talking instead about English poetry. They ride together in the Bois de Boulogne. He gives her a dog named Puppy, and then writes a story in which he imagines it savaging her face. She senses in him a “supernatural force.” When he leaves Paris for the Atlantic coast in July, she is with him. It is probably she who pays the rent on the house.
D’Annunzio leaves Paris clandestinely. Antongini and de Montesquiou—enjoying the prank—have been complicit in a scheme whereby his luggage is moved by night from one hotel to another and thence to the railway station (perhaps to avoid his creditors, perhaps to baffle Nathalie and any other women who might be pursuing him). For a while he succeeds in vanishing. He and Brooks go for drives together. He falls asleep in the passenger seat and she watches “your dear face, enclosed in a leather helmet and a great fur collar.” She imagines a tranquil shared life of work and begins on her first portrait of him, but after two weeks they are interrupted. D’Annunzio is dressing himself in his hunting clothes—white breeches, high, black boots, pink coat—to pose for her when they hear a rumpus outside. Nathalie—whom d’Annunzio has taken to calling “the tormenting woman”—has tracked them down and, on being told by Brooks’s chauffeur that d’Annunzio is not at home, is trying, in tears again, to climb over the garden gate.
Brooks is one of the few women with sufficient self-possession to enjoy an affair with d’Annunzio without being shattered by its ending. Too dignified to dispute possession of her lover, she returns to Paris. D’Annunzio writes her one of his self-pitying farewell letters. She replies tartly that he has no cause to be sad since he has precisely what he wanted. “In heaven, dear poet, there will be reserved for you an enormous octopus with a thousand women’s legs (and no head).” Their friendship survives.
Early in their relationship, d’Annunzio took Nathalie to see Benozzo Gozzoli’s painting of St. Sebastian in San Gimignano. He addressed her as St. Sebastian. With her long legs and ephebic body, Nathalie made a plausible boy. Their letters to each other are full of quasi-mystical allusions to rough sex. “My suffering is like carnal magic, oh St. Sebastian!” he wrote. She replied that St. Sebastian was reliving “his martyrdom” with intense pleasure. She/he “calls to the archer who loved him—come to St. Sebastian stretched on his burning couch.” In the autumn of 1910, d’Annunzio settles to making of that private fantasy a dramatic spectacle.
He orders photographic reproductions of every known painting or statue of St. Sebastian. He despatches Antongini to the library in Bordeaux to hunt
out material on the saint. He walks at night through the pine woods. Each tree has a cup strapped to its trunk to collect the resin oozing from a gash the foresters have made. The trees are bleeding, he thinks, like the martyred saint stuck full of arrows.
Around him as he works in his first floor library, on walnut bookcases, are some 5,000 books, all purchased since he arrived in France, all luxuriously bound, with gold lettering, by the celebrated Parisian bookbinder Gruel. He calls them, with a Latin flourish, his Bibliotecula Gallica. Everywhere in the room, on the cornices, on the mantelpiece, on the walls, are mottoes, his old favourites in Latin and Italian augmented now by others in Old French pleading for peace and quiet: “Tais Toy,” and “Laissez Moi Penser a Mon Ayse.” D’Annunzio will stay here, eating his dinner alone, until four in the morning, before retiring to his bedroom number one. Bedroom number two, on the second floor, is for private assignations. No visitor other than his sexual partners sees it, and servants enter only with express permission.
Ida Rubinstein is his producer, and she will play Sebastian. She and d’Annunzio address each other as “Brother.” She urges him on: “Brother, send me a word with fire in it!” She and Romaine Brooks are now having an affair. With d’Annunzio they make up a perverse androgynous trio, three incestuous “brothers.” Rubinstein comes to Arcachon to visit. D’Annunzio buys six longbows with arrows and they practise archery among the dunes.
D’Annunzio is broke again. His expenditure on firewood, oil and candles is exorbitant. He has just spent half of his remaining funds on flowers, and there’s not enough remaining to pay the rent. He hands Antongini his gold watch and chain, a gold pencil and several small gold charms. Antongini—devoted follower—adds a ring of his own, and sets off to town to pawn the lot. When the next crisis comes d’Annunzio rummages through the pockets of his winter clothes, which have been put away in camphor, and finds 500 francs. His inability to live within his means seems—literally—insane. He writes that he is so weary of money troubles he is “seriously considering retiring to a Trappist monastery,” and then, in the self-same letter, orders an expensive green morocco binding for a run of journals.
The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian is a “mystery” or a “choreographic poem” or an almost-opera, with music by Claude Debussy. D’Annunzio may be ignorant of modern French painting, but when it comes to music he is discriminating and well informed. In France he listens to Franck and Ravel. Reynaldo Hahn becomes his close friend (providing another link with Proust, Hahn’s one-time lover) and sings to him one evening, a cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth: d’Annunzio loves the nonchalance of this.
Debussy is a congenial collaborator. Described by a contemporary critic as one who reclothed “the old French beauty” in “modern garments,” he is entirely in sympathy with d’Annunzio’s aim of creating modern work in an ancient idiom. D’Annunzio (like Ezra Pound, who arrived in Paris in the same month that he did) has been making a study of the Provençal troubadour poets, and now he employs their intricate verse-forms and archaic language with a fluency that even French critics find prodigious.
The production, funded by Ida Rubinstein, is spectacular, with sets and costumes designed by Bakst. There are over 200 performers on stage, a hundred musicians in the pit. The mood of the piece is Byzantine and sado-masochistic, full of glittering imagery and eroticised pain. It is heavily derivative of the works of Flaubert (The Temptation of St. Antony, Hérodias, Salammbô), Oscar Wilde (Salomé, another foreign-written French drama), Swinburne (passim) and, above all, of d’Annunzio himself. The victim who trembles with desire as he/she begs the archers to shoot, the stage thronged with choirs, the chanting, the lascivious focus on wounds and blood, the detailed stage directions calling for silken banners and beautiful weaponry and crowds of persecuted victims, all recall The Ship. So does the merging of the languages of sex and of religious ecstasy. The difference is that the earlier play employed all this gorgeous antique flummery to modern political ends. Now, distanced from his patria, d’Annunzio is writing only about his own psyche.
Debussy’s music is generally admired, the lighting is magical, and the choruses so movingly sung that the composer is seen repeatedly wiping away tears. But Ida Rubinstein is no actress. “You are the Prince of Youth,” the Emperor tells Sebastian. “Power and joy are yours/And wonder woven of dream/To clothe your ambiguous form.” There is nothing wrong with Rubinstein’s ambiguous form: whether encased in golden armour or stripped almost naked for death, she looks the part perfectly. But, for all that she has hired a professor to improve her French, her elocution is not up to the task of making d’Annunzio’s convoluted lines dramatic. Jean Cocteau thinks she looks like a stained-glass figure animated by a miracle but not yet in command of its newly found voice.
Marcel Proust, making a rare excursion out of his cork-lined room, is at the premiere, sitting next to de Montesquiou, clasping his wrist and feeling how the count is vibrating with emotion. Proust himself is unmoved. He praises d’Annunzio’s language—“How many Frenchmen write with such precision?”—but nonetheless the play, which lasts until past one in the morning, is, he says, “very boring.” The two authors don’t meet. D’Annunzio, as usual on his first nights, stays away from the theatre. Antongini finds him in the small hours, in a nearby café, fast asleep.
D’Annunzio is a connoisseur of early ecclesiastical music—Palestrina, Monteverdi. In Paris he kneels in St. Séverin, and is moved to think that Dante once knelt there too. He has made friends with the organist Louis Vierne, who invites him into Notre Dame by night and plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for him, the two of them sitting in a single pool of light alone in the enormous edifice. It is, writes d’Annunzio years later, the most exalted moment of his “exile.” He attends the Lenten sermons of a famous preacher, and takes note of the flirtations for which the service is cover, especially the closeness of two young girls. “The hair of the one is the colour of tea, cool in a ‘famille rose’ bowl, and the hair of the other like coffee, steaming in a cup of dark blue saxe.” He watches as one of “these sinful girls” kisses her friend’s hand “with such an ardour of desire that I half expected the cherubim to drop their tinsel-paper skirts, and fly away, shrieking in holy horror.”
So he is a church-goer, of an impious kind, but he is not liked by the Church. A priest once refused to give Nike the sacraments so long as she was living with him. Now the Archbishop of Paris has warned all good Catholics to stay away from The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. The fact that the martyr is played by a woman is shocking enough, but that Ida Rubinstein is Jewish is worse, and so is the fact that she appears on stage with her famous legs fully exposed. D’Annunzio, fully aware of the way controversy can be transmuted into useful publicity, gets Debussy to keep the fuss going by writing a letter to Le Figaro, insisting that the work is “profoundly religious.” The Church does not agree. D’Annunzio has compared Jesus Christ with Adonis, the beautiful young man whom Aphrodite loved, and who died to rise again. The similarity between the two myths is now a commonplace of comparative theology, but in 1911 it is shocking to clerics. All of d’Annunzio’s works are placed on the Vatican’s Index of forbidden reading.
· · ·
D’Annunzio is back in Arcachon. Nathalie is there with him, and he has hired a housekeeper who will remain a part of his household until his death, Amélie Mazower, whom he dubs Aélis. She is no ordinary servant. She is d’Annunzio’s occasional concubine, and she suffers intensely from jealousy whenever he and Nathalie retire to the bedroom reserved for sex. Aélis’s origins are working class, but her manners are grand. One visitor, to whom she opens the door wearing elbow-length white gloves, likens her to a Swedish princess. D’Annunzio also has a groom he hired in Pisa—he may be broke but he still keeps horses—and there is a witch-like woman servant, who rides briskly about, not on a broomstick, but on a bicycle.
Henri Régnier, whose poetry d’Annunzio has imitated in his earlier work, is visiting. His wife leaves a d
escription of the house. Much of it is predictable—hot, perfumed air; silk curtains and shaded lamps; full-size plaster casts of statues. But there are two new details: the Charioteer of Delphi now holds in its outstretched hand “a sort of blue stone which, it appears, is a violent poison” and on d’Annunzio’s desk lie “dense rows, like a thousand thin blue piano keys, a veritable keyboard of telegrams.”
D’Annunzio takes great pleasure in the new medium of wireless telegraphy. He still writes copious letters, but telegrams have become his preferred method of communication. He likes to make them tiny imagist poems which must frequently have left their recipients flummoxed. On arriving at Arcachon he gave Antongini four telegrams to transmit, each one to a different woman, each one suggestively opaque. To one: “The melody of the waves cradles my regrets. Everything is distant and everything is near.” To another: “I am thinking of you as the richest bronze for my statues.”
D’Annunzio is writing about himself. He is sending autobiographical fragments, which he calls “Faville del Maglio” (Sparks from the Anvil), to the Corriere della Serra. His sources are his notebooks, dozens of them, which he brought away with him from the Capponcina in his smart pigskin suitcases. Through them he revisits his past, converting it into prose more intimate and direct than any he has previously published. These pieces owe something to the works of the Renaissance essayists Michel de Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne, both of whom d’Annunzio admires, but, as he often did, d’Annunzio is doing something both old and up-to-the-minute. As he begins his “Sparks,” Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are all, like him, experimenting with new forms of narrative, in order to explore the working of their own and their characters’ minds.
Gabriele D'Annunzio Page 32