Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  On 2 September, with the French army still retreating, he found his road out of Paris jammed with people in flight, “beautiful fresh women glimpsed through the windows,” but arrived at Dame Rose in time to take Nathalie out to lunch in Versailles, and with enough of his peacetime persona intact to object to her outfit. She was fresh and pretty in a summer dress, suitable enough for a restaurant, but not—he judged—for the visit they planned to make afterwards to the hospital for the wounded. They ate an omelette and cold chicken, and a punnet of wild strawberries which d’Annunzio had brought with him from Paris. The maître d’ told them, to d’Annunzio’s disgust, that although he had already hidden his best wine he would stay put, and was ready to serve German officers.

  The battle lines were now very close. The Boulangers’ house at Chantilly was overrun. Nathalie insisted she would not leave Dame Rose without the dogs; she would rather die. D’Annunzio indulged in an admiring fantasy about his “Caucasian Diana” going into battle, “unleashing with her guttural cry the fearsome pack against the invader, commanding the strange battle amid the red glow of flames.” He loved his greyhounds for their ferocity as much as for their well-muscled beauty. “The urge to kill is terribly strong in them,” he wrote. “They tremble with the desire to kill.”

  At the beginning of September, the French government decamped to Bordeaux and over 800,000 Parisians fled south. D’Annunzio would have been safe at Arcachon. Tom Antongini reports he had received an invitation from a lady with a house on the Côte d’Azur offering refuge and, as Antongini coyly puts it, “all the rest.” But d’Annunzio stayed. He went shopping, stocking up on sardines, condensed milk and jam sufficient for himself and his two servants, and bird seed for the twenty-two canaries he had acquired that year. He dined with Luigi Barzini, the Corriere’s celebrated war correspondent, and envied him his freedom to travel to the front, but he wrote ruefully to Albertini, admitting he was not a reporter. His subject matter was “sentiments and ideas.” “In the present moment, could that interest your readers?”

  By 3 September the German army was less than forty kilometres from Paris. The city’s trees were being cut down, and trenches dug at its gates. Life was simplified. D’Annunzio saw the cartloads of flour being brought in past the barricades at the city’s gates—basic provisions in a situation where luxuries would be inappropriate (no more fraises du bois). Night after night he went to the railway stations, which seemed to him like gigantic pumps, ridding the city of cowardice (those fleeing to safety), sending the courageous out to fight. He saw women, their make-up looking lurid against their white faces, struggling with piles of suitcases and boxes. He noticed other women in high heels—prostitutes getting ready, he supposed, for new German clients. He was still sufficiently himself to appreciate the “knowing play of knees and thighs in the tight skirts.” But what he went for primarily was to see the wounded being brought back from the front, and to exult in the “splendour of the blood.”

  He despatched another article to the Corriere, one in which public indignation—“the enemy’s horses trample on the very heart of France”—alternates strangely with poignant expressions of his own state of mind. “I have lost my world and I do not know if I can conquer a new one.” He spent evenings in the Café de la Paix. There were no horses for cabs and no fuel for private cars: for the first time he began to use the metro, and marvelled at its efficiency. Obliged to stay home all day to complete an article, he felt jumpy and miserable until, at dusk, he set out with his favourite greyhound, Fly, for a stroll up the Champs Elysées. He was seen in the Bois de Boulogne, lost in thought on a bench, with the dog at his feet.

  By night the blacked-out city seemed newly beautiful to him, lit only by the crisscrossing blades of the searchlights and by the moon. Previously he had lived mainly amidst the grands boulevards of western Paris. Now, in those summer nights, he paced the not-yet-fashionable streets and alleys of the mediaeval city, of the Marais and St. Michel, of the Îles de la Cité and St. Louis, noticing the mean shops, the beggars and prostitutes, the shrines with little lamps, the stale-smelling taverns. He read the Life of Benvenuto Cellini, who worked for the French kings. He conjured up France’s sacred heroes—St. Louis, Philippe le Bel, Napoleon. He was projecting a visionary city onto the darkened stones of the real one, one full of martial symbolism, and traces of a Franco-Italian “Latin” culture under threat from the “Huns” and “Vandals.” He dwelt on stories of Italian ladies who had become, by marriage, members of the aristocracy or the royal family of France. One night, pausing to take notes on the view from the Pont des Arts, he was accosted by two officers under suspicion of spying and taken to the police station. He went quietly but first, according to Barzini, he begged his captors to wait: “Would you allow me to add an adjective?” His identity established, he was released with profuse apologies. As the most famous Italian in France, and one who was repeatedly and emphatically promising that his country would soon come to France’s aid, he was a man the French authorities were anxious not to offend.

  By 12 September, French and British troops had at last halted the German advance on the Marne. The Germans fell back. Both sides dug in. D’Annunzio, brought so close to modern warfare, was in two minds about it. Publicly he declared it was magnificent. Privately, though, he was surprised to find it tedious. “For two months we have been going round and round a single little group of ideas and sentiments. When it comes down to it, war is the most monotonous of human activities.”

  After the Germans drew back, d’Annunzio obtained a permit to drive out into the territory they had occupied in the weeks before. On a day of pouring rain he set out towards the front with three friends, one of whom recorded his “bizarre” get-up: a long yellow waterproof, goggles and a “kind of helmet of waxed cloth which covered his ears.” He was in high spirits. On this, and subsequent sallies into the war zone, he comported himself as though going on a jaunt. His companion found his gaiety and “verve” quite “extraordinary.”

  A few days later he made another such excursion, this time taking Antongini with him. On each occasion he made copious and careful notes. They drove through devastated villages and abandoned fields. D’Annunzio concentrated on intimate details—grubby toys, a vase of artificial flowers and a “toothless” piano in an abandoned house; shutters flapping in the wind, blackened stooks of corn; the thinness of the cows and their distended, unmilked udders—sad remnants of blasted lives. He saw human corpses “as stiff as cardboard puppets,” but he paid more attention to the dead horses with which the roads and fields were littered, all lying stiff in the same ungainly pose, their bellies inflated by gas, their hind legs hoisted into the air, prey to carrion crows and clouds of flies. His notes are dispassionate, acutely observant, honest. Not so his published accounts of his explorations of the war zone.

  On his second expedition he reached Soissons. Antongini reports that on the outskirts of the town a soldier examined d’Annunzio’s papers and told him “the city is being shelled. If you want to go on, you can, but you will probably be killed.” In the main square they found a horse and driver, both lying dead in their own blood. An officer ran out of a house, shouting at them to take cover or get out. This officer turned out to be a fervent admirer of d’Annunzio’s works, and—mollified—allowed him to stay for two hours and to distribute fifty packets of cigarettes to the soldiers. As d’Annunzio left he asked where the battle was, and was drolly pleased to be told that he was in the middle of it.

  So much for Antongini’s laconic account of what happened. Here is d’Annunzio’s report, all puffed up with poetic sentiment and lies. Arriving at the brow of a hill, on a road crowded with cartloads of the wounded, he reached out his arms “with a gesture of love” towards the city. He could see the cathedral’s twin spires, which seemed to him to reach for the sky like imploring hands. The Germans were shelling the road. He was under fire, and so were all the helpless, mangled men around him. “Everything appeared beautiful to me.” Bloody banda
ges were like red and white rose bushes. He seemed to see an angel balancing between the cathedral’s two spires.

  A sudden dazzling flash. A tremor of the air.

  “There was a human and superhuman silence everywhere, in everything, as when the multitude gathered in the square falls silent to hear the innocent’s head roll from the platform into the executioner’s basket.

  One of the two spires was broken. The town raised to heaven only one arm and a stump.

  I cried out to the carts. Now all the wounded were bleeding on behalf of that bloodless stone.”

  The truth is that d’Annunzio never saw the paired spires of Soissons’ cathedral rising like two hands to heaven. He didn’t see the stricken one fall. It was destroyed by German shells several days before he visited.

  The night before d’Annunzio set off for Soissons, another cathedral, that of German-occupied Reims, was burned, its timbers all consumed, its soot-blackened walls left a roofless skeleton. As we have already seen, d’Annunzio first visited Reims and saw the ruins in March 1915, half a year later. But that didn’t prevent him from giving a sombrely beautiful “eyewitness” account of the event. “I saw another cathedral, the most solemn, the place of the great sacred rites, fulfil itself in flame.”

  D’Annunzio had been a writer of fiction: now he was a propagandist. Truth-telling, the accurate expression of facts, was not something by which he set much store. He was out to stir emotions and alter minds and to tell his readers how to understand the chaotic violence of the war. On the one side were the Latins (he never mentions France’s British and Russian allies)—the inheritors and defenders of a civilisation dating back, via the mediaeval cathedral-builders, to the ancient Greeks; on the other, Hunnish barbarian vandals. “This war,” he wrote, “is a struggle of races, a confrontation of irreconcilable powers, a trial of blood, which the enemies of the Latin name conduct according to the most ancient iron law.” He contrasts the French troops—“shining children”—with those of the enemy—“stinking beasts.”

  Every bit of land in the environs of Paris was being taken over for the war effort. D’Annunzio’s precious kennel at Dame Rose was overrun, not by German invaders but by the French authorities, and handed over to literally stinking beasts. The close-mown grass of the walled meadow where his dogs had been exercised was churned into mud by the 600 cattle foisted on him. The hungry animals stood up to their bellies in muck, and bellowed. Nathalie was frightened by the herdsmen. D’Annunzio protested. “That the refuge of a poet should be made to serve the belly, that meat and butchery should overwhelm it, is not very Apollonian.”

  Now the meadow was lost, he and Nathalie and their kennel hands walked the greyhounds for hours on end, on leashes, through the forests around the farm. If a hare crossed a clearing in front of them the dogs would take off, their “ferocious clamour echoing in the shadows.” One day they pulled d’Annunzio off his feet and he was dragged though the mud, the leashes wound around his wrists, until at last he managed to stagger upright, bruised and bloody, his mouth and nostrils full of earth. His imagination, full of images of trenches and mass graves, made the undignified incident the starting point for an appalling new cult of the earth as a deity greedy for human flesh.

  The image of soil watered and fertilised by the blood of warriors, has been a part of the poetry of war at least since Homer, but while the heroes of the Iliad grieve over it, d’Annunzio dwelt on the idea with sombre joy. His writings that winter are full of related images: of Joan of Arc “armoured in mud”; of troops coming from the trenches so fouled with mud they are identifiable as human only by their eyes. The soldiers fighting and dying in deep slits in the ground were children of the earth, who now reclaimed them. The earth was the foundry in which they were to be broken down so that a new race could be forged: it was the god who demanded their death as a sacred holocaust. Carnage is the necessary prelude to renaissance. “Where flesh putrifies, there sublime ferments arise.” Even d’Annunzio’s own mishap—falling over and getting muddy while out dog-walking—was transmuted into a kind of eucharist, a communion with “the insatiable voracity” of the “divine” earth.

  Nietzsche had written that there were too many low-grade people in existence, dragging down their superiors. “Far too many live.” To d’Annunzio it seemed that, swallowing human flesh, the earth opened up “mystical space.” As the felling of trees creates a light-filled clearing in a forest, so the killing of large numbers of people opened the way for “sublimity.” Even his own dramas, The Ship with its tortures and mass executions, Glory with its paeans to the purifying power of violence, were puny compared to the spectacle to which he was now witness. In Paris he watched “the great tanks … heading northwards, full of sacrificial flesh and drunken singing” and thought “Destiny ordains events like a great tragic poet.”

  In the last week of September 1914 ships of the French navy attacked the Austro-Hungarian fleet in the Gulf of Cattaro (now Kotor in Montenegro), a part of the eastern Adriatic coastline which d’Annunzio wished to reclaim as Italy’s lost “left lung.” This was his cause. It was intolerable to him that it should not be his, and his country’s, war. On 30 September he published a great tirade of anger and disgust and self-aggrandisement, quoting the most furious lines from his own past work, laying out the themes which would clang again and again through his rhetoric over the coming years. The “senility” of the cautiously pragmatic Italian authorities who would not commit themselves to war. The “corruption” that a pacific foreign policy engenders in a state. The “necessary hatred” all good patriots must feel against those who deny their nation’s greatness. The grandeur of “action,” regardless of its purpose. With each one of his public utterances the essence of his philosophy was becoming more naked. Killing and being killed, pouring out the blood of myriads of young men, only by doing these things could a race demonstrate its right to respect. What d’Annunzio was saying is appalling: what is worse is how few people there were to disagree.

  He had sounded his trumpet. He didn’t quite know what to do next. At Dame Rose he walked his dogs. In Paris he visited the wounded daily in the Franco-Italian hospital, for which he helped to raise funds. Hearst Newspapers proposed to employ him as a war correspondent, but he instructed Tom Antongini to demand an enormous retainer, plus a correspondingly enormous fee for each article published, plus reimbursement of all travelling and hotel expenses for himself, his secretary and his servant. Furthermore he must be allowed total freedom of action, including the freedom to fight. Hearst demurred.

  Inactive, he sank into one of his cyclical depressions. He wrote to friends complaining that he was “dying of sadness.” His house at Arcachon was now off limits to him: he was behind on the rent, and creditors were waiting for him there. Still he shopped. A notebook of his expenses reveals that he was spending prodigally on flowers, perfumes, taxi-cabs, new suits and laundry. It was in this desperate winter that he bought the painting which might, or more probably might not, have been by Watteau. He boasted he had got it cheap, presumably from a refugee, “true booty of war.”

  He found a new home. In a street of old houses in the then-unfashionable quarter which lies along the right bank of the Seine between the Hôtel de Ville and the Marais, a line of shops is interrupted by a magnificently sculpted portal surmounted by a roaring lion and a heraldic cartouche. Behind it lies the exquisite baroque Hôtel de Chalons-Luxembourg. D’Annunzio wooed the leaseholders, a Madame Huard and her artist husband, by inviting them to dinner, and presenting them, at the end of the evening, with a pair of greyhounds, each dressed in a blue coat with red trimmings which d’Annunzio had had tailored for them by Hermès. The deal was agreed. D’Annunzio rented five high-ceilinged, wood-panelled rooms on the ground floor.

  At once he set about “improving” the place. He removed all the Huards’ antique furniture and filled the apartment with sofas and chaises longues piled high with cushions. He arranged his collection of oriental artefacts. He installed a lavatory
in what Madame Huard (aghast, on reclaiming her home, to find how it had been altered) called a “black redoubt” lit by candelabra, and he hung enormous mirrors on the panelled walls. His rooms lay between a courtyard and a garden with a portico and statues. The nights were silent, the days full of birdsong. There were blackbirds in the garden: indoors d’Annunzio kept his canaries in lacquered and gilded Japanese cages. He reverted to his peacetime pastimes. An Italian visitor reported that he was “quite happy in an exquisite house,” concocting perfumes and experimenting in glass-blowing. He developed his interest in the making of musical instruments (there was a clavichord and spinet in the salon) and was overjoyed to find that the wood-panelled salon had a perfect acoustic. There he listened to hired musicians play Frescobaldi and Couperin. He wrote: “Ivy covers the walls. The silence is interrupted only by the bells of churches and neighbouring convents.” The man who, in the first weeks of war, had been out on the streets by day and night, unable to bear solitude, now retreated. “It is like being in a small cathedral city in a distant province. When I go out I ‘go to Paris’ as though to Hell.”

  In January 1915 central Italy was shaken by an earthquake. In Rome the British ambassador saw chandeliers swinging. On the other side of the peninsula, in the Abruzzi, the tremor’s violence was devastating: 29,000 people were killed. The town of Avezzano was totally destroyed, L’Aquila partially so. (The latter would be rebuilt in the 1920s, becoming one of the most complete examples of fascist architecture and town planning, only to be flattened again by the earthquake of 2009.) The earthquake aroused in d’Annunzio neither concern for his family nor pity for his fellow Abruzzesi. Instead he appropriated the natural disaster as a parable supportive of his newly synthesised mythology. He suggested that the earth, impatient for Italy’s entry into the war, and the feast of human blood and bone on which it could subsequently gorge itself, had claimed “a preliminary sacrifice.” “It drags us back, it reclaims our flesh and our breath … it bends over us with voracious love.”