Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Once d’Annunzio began to spend days on end in the battle lines he needed a forward base, and rented rooms in a house in the garrison town of Cervignano. His landlord was an ornithologist, and the rooms were cluttered with stuffed aquatic birds. D’Annunzio disliked them and, according to Tom Antongini, bought eighteen screens over six feet high. “Through a cleverly contrived arrangement the birds disappeared from his sight, but he was only able to reach his bed by devious paths through a sort of labyrinth.” In this eccentric billet he lived well. He had brought with him forty damask cushions and a terracotta figure of Melpomene, the tragic muse. Every morning he enjoyed what he described to Miraglia as a “tribute paid by my hosts to the Maestro”—a lavish breakfast of milk fresh from the cow, thick cream, jam, marzipan and the finger-shaped little cakes known as savoiardi.

  War hadn’t cured him of his profligacy. He was still sending money to Nathalie at Dame Rose for herself and the dogs (at least twenty-four of them still surviving) and maintaining, for no good reason, his household at Arcachon, as well as the Casetta Rossa and his rooms in Cervignano. Albertini paid him handsomely for anything he wrote, but he would “sing” if he felt moved to, not for sordid mercenary motives. “If I must earn my daily bread singing, then I renounce my bread.”

  There are certain days of d’Annunzio’s war which he recorded in detail, so that we can know not only what he was doing, hour by hour, but also the fluctuations of his mood and the eddying of his thought. One such day was Sunday, 17 October 1915, the day preceding the beginning of a major Italian offensive along the River Isonzo.

  A priest was to celebrate mass for a brigade encamped near Cervignano, and d’Annunzio drove out to attend, his motor car cutting through the long files of troops on the road like a ship’s prow slicing through water. The soldiers were drawn up in formal ranks, bayonets fixed, in the slanting October sun. A crude altar—a table covered with badly holed wool blankets of the kind in which the men wrapped themselves to sleep—had been set up beneath a row of yellowing poplar trees whose leaves trembled continuously.

  A general shouted an order, the soldiers knelt, leaning on their rifles as they dropped to their knees. There were crows cawing in the trees and insects circling. A young officer kneeling next to d’Annunzio murmured “excuse me,” captured a wasp that was about to sting his neck, and showed it to him smiling. He contemplated the soldiers tenderly. Some of them were as beautiful as classical statuary. Kneeling, they showed the soles of their boots, a part of them as intimate and usually secret as the warm damp crannies of groin and armpit and knee that he loved in his mistresses. When they stood at the end of the service their knees were earthy. But, for all his awareness of their physical particularity, d’Annunzio still valued them primarily as matter to be sacrificed. As they dispersed across the meadow he saw them as “a mass … a torrent” of “flesh ready for the shambles.”

  The Duke of Aosta was present. Tall and handsome, an infinitely more impressive figure than his cousin the King, the duke was a vociferous nationalist and an effective commander: d’Annunzio respected him. After the service they talked briefly about aeroplanes. Afterwards d’Annunzio was driven up to the duke’s observation post on a nearby crest. An enemy aircraft was circling overhead, trailed by anti-aircraft fire. D’Annunzio, who knew, as few others did, the view from the sky, told an officer he should cover the glass windows: their glint would be easily visible from above. He was taken down into a redoubt. With surreal incongruity the wood-panelled walls of the bunker were being decorated with painted garlands of flowers. The painter, an admirer of d’Annunzio’s writing, asked the poet to propose some mottoes to complete the design.

  Back in Cervignano, d’Annunzio lunched with his old friend Ugo Ojetti (soon to be appointed head of the military command’s press department). They ate fresh sea bass. Then he took out his horse, named Doberdò after one of the unredeemed regions, and set off in search of open country. He followed a stream away from the road, away from the smoke and dust and din of trucks and troops and ambulances, along a bank lined with willows. The October afternoon light on the dying leaves was gold on gold. D’Annunzio, like Keats before him, imagined autumn personified. For him it was a portrait by Palma il Vecchio, “something feminine and docile.” Arriving at a secluded meadow curtained by rows of poplars he put his horse into a gallop.

  He was melancholy but calm. He thought he might die the following day and the thought left him undisturbed. “It is time to die: tempus moriendi.” The Latin tag (from the Book of Ecclesiastes) was one which had recurred throughout his work.

  He went back to his apartment, read with some irritation a letter from Nathalie, and then took a bath. This was an elaborate ritual. His manservant rubbed him down with a horse-hair glove and scrubbed his back with hard brushes. He was still in the “tub” (his English) when the pilot Beltramo tapped on his window. He thought “perhaps he has come to offer me an heroic death.”

  Spruce and scented once more, he joined the pilot on a bench outside the door. Beltramo told him that he had just spent an hour of “ferocious voluptuousness” with a Red Cross nurse. “What,” thought d’Annunzio, as he thought frequently, “would I not give to be twenty-seven years old!” Then, getting down to serious matters, they discussed flights. The offensive would begin the following morning. Two days later they would fly over the enemy lines, to reconnoitre and to do what they could to protect the troops on the ground. “He offers me peril, as one offers a flower.” They talked a little longer, about their dream of flying over Vienna (it would be nearly another three years before d’Annunzio achieved it) and about Beltramo’s girl. All the time d’Annunzio was appraising his companion’s appearance—his white teeth and dark curly hair, his suppleness, but also his gloves, which were too tight (“he has no real elegance”) and thinking that in a day or two they might each be reduced to a handful of charred meat.

  Beltramo left and d’Annunzio was at a loose end. It was evening, but he didn’t want to dine in the mess. “I could perhaps rape the servant,” he thought, watching the stocky girl empty his bath tub in the garden. Beltramo’s boasting must have aroused him sexually, but it was just a passing thought. (This is one of several fleeting suggestions in d’Annunzio’s private writings that he liked the idea of forcing himself on working-class women.) Instead he strolled out along the road, barely able in the blackout to see the river running alongside it. There were passers-by: a line of cavalry on foot, each man leading his horse; a lorry with its headlights dimmed by blue gel; a prisoner in rags, driven along the verge by a mounted lancer. Finally came a brigade of infantry singing, going up towards the front. D’Annunzio stepped into their ranks and walked with them, unnoticed in the darkness. An elbow nudged him, a rifle butt bumped against his hip, he could feel heavy breath on his cheek. He was, momentarily, intensely aware of these soldiers’ physical reality. “They weighed on me as though I was carrying them, as though I personally was taking them to their death.”

  The following day over 1,300 Italian guns opened fire along a fifty-kilometre front, shaking the earth as far away as Zagreb. The ensuing fighting, over mountainous terrain and in continuous rain, was ferocious and inconclusive. The trenches became “quagmires of filth.” In one brigade two-thirds of the men were killed. By the time snowfall put a stop to the fighting seventeen days later, 67,000 Italian soldiers had died to gain a strip of land about a hundred metres across.

  On the first day of the offensive d’Annunzio was on the island of Morosina, at the mouth of the River Isonzo, where a company of sailors, whose ship had been sunk, manned a battery. He picked his way over planks laid across the mud, and climbed a wooden lookout tower “like a pagoda.” He admired the view of the castle at Duino, where he had passed “delicious days” in the “time of idleness.” (The castle’s chatelaine, Rainer Maria Rilke’s patroness, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, was sister to his landlord.) When he arrived at dawn he heard larks singing. Then the Duke of Aosta’s order of the day blared ou
t of megaphones all along the line, the din of the artillery began, and “little by little even the air became metal.”

  D’Annunzio stayed on the island all day, while all around him men were being wounded or killed. Seconds after he had moved away from a position, a shell exploded there. He was gathering instances of heroism, and jotting down in his notebook the phrases in which he would celebrate it. He followed the wounded to the dressing station. The boardwalks were splashed with blood. He found an Abruzzese with terrible abdominal wounds. The man was naked but for his ragged shirt. His exposed genitals moved d’Annunzio, so vulnerable did they seem. D’Annunzio knelt in the mud beside him. Years later he would still be haunted by the way the man, in his agony, flexed his bare feet spasmodically, poking them into d’Annunzio’s thigh. An officer, so chopped about by shrapnel he seemed almost shapeless, was agitated because he could not hear his battery firing. “He begged to return there, and wept with bitterness and promised to be better, and he didn’t know himself to be sublime.”

  Always a devoted sick-room nurse, D’Annunzio stayed with the wounded, soothing them and telling them that they were heroes. On the drive back to Cervignano that evening, their blood was still beneath his fingernails. The poplars along the roadside, “like the arches of a cathedral,” induced a feeling of hushed solemnity. He thought of Titian, of his mother, and of angels. The fact that he himself had escaped death by a matter of seconds hadn’t shaken him. “The incomparable music of the divine war” was sounding through his mind.

  Over the next two weeks d’Annunzio was repeatedly on the front line. Around him he saw the mountains thick with gun emplacements spouting fire, like volcanoes, or wreathed in smoke, as though in the aftermath of an eruption. He stood in a church-tower-turned-observation post, hearing bullets thwack into the walls near him, as he trained his binoculars on a hillside and watched soldiers running up it, their bayonets glittering like water, while enemy machine guns drilled into them with the stabbing efficiency of a sewing machine.

  Three times he and Beltramo flew over the battle zone. He was using his machine gun to fire on the Austrian troops, but he doesn’t mention any killing in his notebook, although he does recall looking down through his binoculars and seeing soldiers, limp and helpless as discarded rags, tossed into the air by an exploding shell. Instead he dwells on the marvellous effects of the light.

  Repeatedly he addressed the troops. He talked at mass funerals. He harangued soldiers who had fought all day and must fight again the next day. He talked of banners flaring in the wind over Italy, of rivers full of corpses, of the earth’s terrible thirst for blood. He flattered the soldiers in terms they might not have recognised, but which fired them nonetheless. Dante had imagined no such tortures: the Carso was an inferno beyond all inferni. “You chewed poison, you bit on flame, you wept black blood.” Mazzini, instigator and rhetorician of the Risorgimento, had devised an oath whereby all those joining Young Italy must swear loyalty “in the name of all the martyrs of the holy Italian cause.” Now, applying the same kind of emotional pressure, d’Annunzio insisted that the living owed it to the dead to fight to the uttermost. He declared the dead were crying out from beneath the earth: “Forward! Forward!” He said that they would never rest easy until all the unredeemed territories of Greater Italy had been redeemed.

  In his notebooks there is a constant fluctuation between the appalling and the pastoral. Sun on the grass. Birdsong. “Dry leaves fall delicately, like a love letter dropped furtively at the feet of the beloved.” Other witnesses record the foul stench of the battle lines. Many men found it almost impossible to eat, so nauseating was the atmosphere in which they lived. Corpses lay unburied. Many units neglected to construct latrines, and even if they did so the conscripts, untrained and terrified of snipers, failed to use them, defecating wherever it felt comparatively safe to do so. Soon, as a volunteer from Trieste records, the hillsides were covered with human excrement. D’Annunzio says nothing of this. Instead he records the light of the setting sun filling a forward base in a hollow in the Carso with a purple glory, making the shells in their wooden crates glow, turning bits of broken bottle-glass to emeralds.

  In 1921, when the war was safely over, d’Annunzio described what was actually happening in that rocky dell where the glass sparkled so brightly. The Italian artillery, firing from behind the advancing soldiers, had misjudged the range. Sheltered for once from enemy fire, the soldiers in the hollow had been hit by their own guns. Soon a heap of mangled corpses lay to one side of the space. To the other the captain was addressing the survivors. The guns were still firing; a lieutenant was sobbing. D’Annunzio, in as much danger as the rest of them, was observing as intently as ever—the soldiers’ socks and shirts hanging on a washing line, the row of mess tins and worn cooking pots, the way the captain’s voice trembled, the fact that he wore too many rings. But, for once shocked out of his usual cool acceptance of mass death, he was imagining the dead dragging their entrails and slithering towards him. “I heard it, as you hear the advance of a company crawling flat between rocks and bushes.” The captain fumed and cursed, then suddenly collapsed and rolled, convulsing hysterically, down into the bottom of the hollow.

  D’Annunzio did not choose to pass on scenes like this to his wartime readers. He saw for himself how muddled and disgusting war really was, but he continued to preach his faith in its purifying virtue, to tell the troops that they were superhuman. “I see them scaling the mountain crests, alone with the flash of steel and the gaze of the fatherland … They are like the teeth of the ferocious rock. They bite eternity.”

  Ernest Hemingway, who worked as a volunteer in the Italian ambulance service in the last year of the war, wrote afterwards in A Farewell to Arms: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain … I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear.” The narrator of Hemingway’s novel hears those words, “standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through.” D’Annunzio was foremost among those doing the shouting.

  By 6 November the battle was over, and d’Annunzio was back in Venice. He went to visit Admiral Thaon di Revel to discuss his plan to fly over Zara (now Zadar) on the Dalmatian coast—an 800-kilometre round trip in one day, a phenomenal distance for aircraft at that time. Thaon di Revel was enthusiastic and promised to have torpedo boats in the area in support.

  The following day d’Annunzio called on Miraglia, recovering after four days in bed with gastric flu. The two friends walked back to the Casetta Rossa to smoke cigarettes (d’Annunzio had taken up smoking while at the front, preferring the smell of tobacco to that of his fellow men). They looked at maps and pictures of Zara, and fantasised about aerial battles. They talked about “warrior chastity” and about “contempt for women” (d’Annunzio sometimes calls Miraglia “the misogynist”).

  D’Annunzio proposed a shopping trip. They went to Alinari, supplier of photographic reproductions of works of art, and he chose pictures to paste up on the screens in his rooms in Cervignano: a selection of warriors—Carpaccio’s St. George, Donatello’s great bronze statue of the condottiero Gattamelata—and of sculpted lions (the symbol of Venice). For Miraglia he bought an image of the Marciana Leda, the relief of which he would have a plaster copy in his bedroom in the Vittoriale. They moved on to a curio shop, where d’Annunzio was tempted by some glass, but finally allowed himself “to be seduced by a little red morocco binding.” The book was an eighteenth-century edition of the Dubious Loves and Luxurious Sonnets of the Renaissance pornographer Aretino. D’Annunzio was delighted. “It’s a poisonous little book, disgustingly obscene. And the morocco is so lovely!” He bought it, and carried it off discreetly concealed.

  Miraglia left—to meet a woman, d’Annunzio supposed, because he stopped to buy a box of
bonbons (so perhaps his praise of “warrior chastity” was as hypocritical as d’Annunzio’s own). D’Annunzio went home and had supper with his son Gabriellino and Tom Antongini. They were interrupted by a group of friends, with whom d’Annunzio had recently shared a “droll Casanovan adventure.” A woman he refers to as his “little friend” Melitta sat down next to him, surreptitiously nudging his leg with hers, despite the fact that her jealous husband was present. Afterward he escorted Melitta and two other ladies to the end of the alley. She rubbed herself against him like a cat, and murmured that she would come back tomorrow when her husband was on guard duty. “I see with terror a dangerous new adventure beginning,” wrote d’Annunzio afterwards. Celebrity that he was, he was often now, in his erotic adventures, the trophy rather than the hunter.

  That night he slept fitfully. His mind was busy. The “Ode on the Serbian Nation” which he would shortly deliver to the Corriere della Sera pulsed through it in “lyrical waves.” He had been reading his new Aretino and was troubled by “voluptuous visions.”

  The following day he woke depressed. His morning went by in tiresome business related to “the eternal source of trouble: vile money.” An art dealer came round, hoping to sell him some chalk drawings attributed to Watteau. (D’Annunzio, a famous big-spender, was a target for the dealers of Venice.) He was irritable, bored; he thought longingly of shells and shrapnel.