Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In the afternoon he wrote more letters, then prepared for Melitta’s arrival. White roses, perfumed lozenges smouldering in a censer, fine linen handkerchiefs drenched in more perfume tucked under the cushions. He thought about her pubic hair, which was even redder than the hair on her head. A bath, a massage, a fine silk shirt. But when Melitta arrived, looking like a big brown velvety moth in her fur coat, it turned out that all these preparations had been a waste of time. She was mistaken. Her husband was not on duty. He was waiting for her. She was so sorry.

  D’Annunzio was angry, but also icily indifferent. He realised he didn’t care for her at all. It was just annoying to have taken so much trouble over futile scene-setting. Miraglia’s view of sex, as of a nine-minute phenomenon not worth troubling oneself about, came to his mind. Melitta begged him to walk her back along the narrow dark alleyway. He agreed, but coldly. As they went along he had a vision of her not as the graceful twenty-five-year-old she really was, but as an ancient crone dressed in spider webs, with long claw-like nails, leading him by the hand to a well in the middle of a secluded little square, in which he would see Nothingness. Sensing his alienation Melitta started to whine.

  “Don’t you want to see me again?”

  “No.”

  “Haven’t you ever had a married woman before? Don’t you understand what it means to be married?”

  She was irritating, but she was still elegant, and her red hair smelt of verbena. Suddenly he wanted very much to have her right there, leaning up against the damp wall of the alley, but someone with a lantern was coming towards them and Melitta hurried away. D’Annunzio walked home, sadistic lines from his new ode running through his head.

  He had three male friends to dinner. They talked about planes and bombs and new weaponry. D’Annunzio was exhausted (had he caught Miraglia’s virus?) and contributed little. He slumped in his armchair, too inert even to move his leg when the fire began to scorch it. When the others left he went to bed but the cries from the lookouts on the altane repeatedly woke him. At midnight he got up again to write.

  His sour mood translated into a furious verse-polemic. Within a week he had sent off an ode to the Corriere della Sera containing a vicious personal attack on the Emperor Franz Joseph, whom he described as putrescent, with slavering mouth, worms crawling through his nostrils and revolting slime dripping from his brow. In addressing the troops he never alluded to the gross physical facts of death, but what he had seen at the front made its way into his invective. The censor cut fifty lines.

  On 21 December, the year’s midnight, Giuseppe Miraglia was killed. At the time d’Annunzio was posing for Romaine Brooks, who had followed him to Venice and was painting his portrait, this time as military hero, uniformed and resolute, clutching a distinctly phallic baton. On the previous day he had gone to the airbase at Sant’Andrea taking his suitcases and a bag of flyers ready to be dropped, hoping that he and Miraglia would take off the following morning for the long-planned aerial sortie over Zara. But the weather was wild: the expedition was postponed for two days. D’Annunzio stayed and lunched in the mess. Miraglia had shown him a talisman, saying he would take it up in the plane for good luck. The conversation became general as all the assembled officers told stories about fetishes and charms (their lives depended, almost every day, on luck—no wonder it was a preoccupation for them). They talked about explosives: several of them were engineers. They discussed the “psyche” (a modish word) of the Chinese and Japanese. The company of these young men, a well-educated elite who shared his nationalism and taste for risk, was delightful to d’Annunzio. As they talked he watched a black cat eating from a bowl beneath a couch, its tail switching with pleasure “as cats’ tails do when they are in love.” After lunch he parted from Miraglia, inviting him for supper the next day.

  That night he took Renata out to dinner, along with two young officers. After he had escorted her back to the Danieli, he walked home past the church of Santa Maria del Giglio, whose seventeenth-century façade is decorated with reliefs depicting some of Venice’s Dalmatian colonies, and touched, as he always did (it was one of his superstitious rituals) the comical little depiction of a walled town: his target, Zara. He was awake much of the night, falling asleep after dawn, and he came down near midday on the twenty-first to find that Renata (as profligate a buyer of flowers as her father) had arranged red roses, violets, carnations and narcissi to make a gala of their supper party. After breakfast he went to Brooks’s studio on the Zattere. Renata followed him there with the dreadful news. Miraglia had gone up on a test flight. The lookouts had seen his plane drop into the sea.

  Over the next three days d’Annunzio kept watch over his friend’s corpse. He returned home only to sleep briefly before taking up his post again. This vigil left him physically and emotionally exhausted. He was beside himself with grief. But to one like d’Annunzio, who called it “a beautiful fate” to be killed young, it was perfectly possible to love someone, while finding a satisfying consummation in his death.

  He described the ordeal in writing three times. D’Annunzio’s syntax in his intimate memoirs is stark, his expressions of emotion terse. He writes about the chill in the dismal chapel of rest. He mentions the transgressive intimacy of touching Miraglia’s dead legs, cold and solid, as he lays flowers alongside them. He describes the way his own teeth chatter as four soldiers lift the corpse into the coffin. He records the sense of a further, more absolute loss as the lead casket is soldered shut. He describes not only the visiting dignitaries and the masses of flowers (in his opinion only Renata’s white roses and his own enormous wreath—so big it takes two strapping sailors to carry it—escape vulgarity), but also the man with a mop wiping the blood from the tiled floor. He has not lost his taste for obscure, high-sounding verbiage: “The man in a coffin encompasses the horizon, is the ring of the universe.” But he is also very clear about what death entails. He records with grim exactitude the way, as the second and third day pass, the body becomes blotched and begins to smell.

  A few days later, d’Annunzio asked another pilot to undertake the flight to Zara with him. The man replied: “With a single motor. In an unreliable contraption. Around nine hours of flying. We would certainly fall, and land on the sea. One cannot count on being picked up by a torpedo boat.” He firmly believed, he concluded, that there was no chance whatsoever of success, but if he was ordered to attempt the flight he would, as a good soldier, obey. D’Annunzio was disappointed. With Miraglia gone, “I feel that never again will I find my equal in the love of risk,” he wrote. The expedition to Zara was, for the time being, abandoned.

  That wartime mid-winter, Venice was even more melancholy, more haunted by spirits of dead revellers, than ever. D’Annunzio, from the little garden in front of the Casetta Rossa, looked almost directly across the Grand Canal at the shuttered house of his friend Luisa Casati, setting for so many extravagant parties, now as silent as an abandoned palace in a fairy tale. There were no longer white peacocks screeching in the garden, only seagulls flying back and forth, back and forth, “like large pale supple hands repeatedly rearranging a pearly veil.”

  Soon after Miraglia’s death he escorted Renata, one foggy evening, through the blacked-out alleys back to the Danieli. “We chewed on fog,” he noted. People passing seemed insubstantial. The bridges were identifiable only by the rims of white stone edging the steps. “Dream city, other-worldly city, city bathed by Lethe or Avernus.” St. Mark’s Square was as full of opalescent mist as a pool is full of water. Returning home alone, d’Annunzio was amazed to be overtaken by a family talking at a normal pitch of ordinary things. They passed and became shadows. The eerie silence resumed.

  Entering the narrow alleys which led past Miraglia’s lodgings and on towards the Casetta Rossa, he became conscious of someone walking beside him, silently, as though in bare feet, and with an extra silence about him “as though there was neither voice nor breath in him.” D’Annunzio didn’t believe in ghosts, exactly, but he dreaded seeing on
e. He slowed: the other, grey all over, walked ahead. His stature, his shape, his gait, were all Miraglia’s. D’Annunzio’s heart fluttered. Skeins of mist wound themselves about him. He hurried to keep up with the other. “Beneath the house where, in the evenings there was always a piano playing, beneath the house where there was an antique shop, he suddenly vanished.” There was no exit from the narrow alley, no canal to fall into, no doorway in which to hide. Silence. And then, in the distance, the bellowing of a group of drunks.

  On 27 December 1915, d’Annunzio had a visitor, an archaeologist now working in the commissariat. He had been in the Alps near Trento, distributing white winter uniforms to men living virtually without shelter. That winter was one of the coldest on record: five metres of snow had fallen in the first half of the month. On the Carso, he reported, things were even worse. The men were required to stand for days on end up to their knees in foul water. “Three days, he says, are enough to finish off even a tough man.”

  From the contemplation of these horrors, the conversation shifted. The visitor told d’Annunzio a story about their mutual friend Miraglia, about how once, when flying alone at sunrise, the pilot had folded his arms, leaving his plane to coast unguided while he sang, words and music flowing spontaneously from him. The war afforded both horror and joy, the one somehow enabling the other. To d’Annunzio, Miraglia’s dawn song recalled St. Francis’s canticles, his great Praise of Life.

  Later in the war W. B. Yeats wrote his famous poem about an Irish airman, driven to volunteer not by any sense of patriotic duty but by a “lonely impulse of delight’:

  I balanced all, brought all to mind,

  The years to come seemed waste of breath,

  A waste of breath the years behind

  In balance with this life, this death.

  D’Annunzio wasn’t alone in thinking it was death’s constant imminence which gave lustre to “life”—the quasi-religious ecstasy of the lone pilot singing to the rising sun.

  · · ·

  D’Annunzio was still seeing the red-haired Melitta, his “frenetic little friend.” One misty evening in early January he agreed, without enthusiasm, to wait for her in a gondola. The water was low and Venice smelt rotten. He had been reading Kipling, and Casati’s half-built palace reminded him this time of a ruined temple in a jungle. He didn’t like the gondola’s little cabin. Cushions, rugs and perfumes could have made it charming, he thought, but as it was it was like a third-class coffin.

  Melitta arrived. She had told him she would come “without pantaloons” and she was as good as her word. Beneath her fur coat she wore only stockings and a man’s woollen shirt, which she promptly removed, allowing her hair to fall down over her bare torso. She smelt—obligingly—of d’Annunzio’s own Acqua Nuntia. Kissing; biting; “Hurt me! Hurt me!” The gondola rocked; d’Annunzio’s knees ached. Melitta came twice, grinding her pretty teeth. D’Annunzio “was as though absent from what I was doing. I felt not pleasure but anger. I could barely refrain from violence.” The water around them reeked, the tiny compartment was stuffy. Soon Melitta had to get back.

  On the outbreak of war Rupert Brooke wrote that it provided men like him with an escape from “all the little emptiness of love.” Walking home that night through alleys full of distorted shadows and echoing footsteps, d’Annunzio was left desolate by that “little emptiness.” He yearned for Miraglia. “Why don’t you console me. Why don’t you take me away?” There was nothing dashing or romantic about such adventures: he was allowing himself to be used as a sexual toy by a woman half his age whom he didn’t much like. Everything around him seemed slimy and foul-smelling. He thought of the white roses he had put in Miraglia’s coffin and wondered whether they, and his friend’s flesh, were already putrefying. He wanted to be back at the front, or dead.

  On 15 January 1916, d’Annunzio went up in a trial flight of a new aircraft with Luigi Bologna, a pilot who had stood beside him, shuddering with grief, by Miraglia’s corpse. The plane was sluggish: Bologna couldn’t get it to rise high enough to be safe from artillery fire. Nonetheless, the following day, they went ahead with a planned raid on Grado. On the way there they were pursued by two Austrian planes and fired on from the ground. The aircraft was damaged. Bologna succeeded in bringing it down on the water, but he hadn’t seen a submerged sandbank. D’Annunzio was flung upwards by the force of the impact, then fell back, receiving the blow to the head which would blind him.

  His vision was immediately affected, but he mentioned the fact to no one. Ojetti suggests that, “at his age, alongside his very young companion, he was ashamed to admit to being tired or in pain.” They returned safely to the airbase but he insisted on taking off again, and carrying out the planned mission. He wrote that the flight back westward into the sunset that evening was “divine.” The following day he was airborne once more.

  He travelled to Milan and spoke at La Scala, the great opera house which holds over 2,000 people, describing what he had seen on the Isola Morosina during the autumn offensive in grandly sonorous sentences sharply contrasted with the pithy immediacy of his diaries. The speech was published in the Corriere della Sera. Two days later he was back in Venice speaking in the cemetery of San Michele for Miraglia’s trigesimo (the Mass celebrated thirty days after a death) and mourning his friend as a second Icarus: his private mythology was proving neatly adaptable to wartime circumstances.

  It wasn’t until over a month after the accident that he finally sought help. On 21 February, he was due to fly in a three-man plane to Laibach (now Ljubljana), but was late arriving at the airfield. Another officer took his place, and was killed, along with the pilot, when the plane came under fire. The third man aboard succeeded in flying the damaged plane back to base (but was killed in his turn two years later). D’Annunzio had been keeping his eye trouble secret, in anticipation of the Laibach raid. Now he finally faced up to what was happening to him. His right eye saw only a purple cloud, his other very little. Looking in the mirror, all he could see of his face was a small part of his forehead. He reported to a doctor and was taken directly to a field hospital for those with injuries to their eyes.

  Here everyone was blind. Soldiers turbanned with linen and gauze clustered around him murmuring timidly as he lay on a stretcher. The arrival of the hero had caused a stir in the hospital. One of the blind men, shaking his bandaged head, said softly, in a tone of reverence and amazement: “This is that man!” They didn’t annoy d’Annunzio: he pitied them as they pitied him. One of his favourite mottoes, “I have that which I have given,” sounded through his head. It had had other meanings for him. He had used it to describe kissing: the greater the pleasure given, the greater the pleasure received. But now he meant it piously—he was happy in the greatness of his loss. Those blinded in action were generally accorded especial respect: they were the aristocrats among the wounded.

  The doctor examining d’Annunzio told him that his right eye was damaged irreparably. To save the left eye he would have to remain absolutely still for a long time, perhaps months. D’Annunzio insisted, against all advice, on being driven back to Venice and there, cared for by his daughter, he took to his bed. While he lay in the dark, writing on his little strips of paper, the approaches to the Casetta Rossa were crowded with admirers come to leave tributes. Telegrams arrived from Prime Minister Salandra, from commander-in-chief Cadorna, from the Duke of Aosta. The Mayor of Venice called in person, and so did the senior naval and military officers in the region. Thousands of letters and tokens arrived from d’Annunzio’s lesser admirers. At the front a soldier had told him that while anyone else was dispensable, he must at all costs be protected. “Because if you are killed, who will make another like you?”

  Immobile on his sickbed, d’Annunzio repeatedly imagines himself buried. Sweating, dehydrated, his mouth tasting of iodine and steel, and filling with the tears streaming continually from his damaged eye, he struggles with claustrophobia. The darkness seems to press in on him like the walls of a sarcophagus. />
  He doesn’t know whether he will ever see again. The blind woman in The Dead City, the one-eyed Malatestino of Francesca da Rimini, the whole family of blinded brothers in The Ship; with shuddering relish he has inflicted on these imaginary beings the fate he is now actually suffering. He doesn’t know whether he is in his right mind. The drugs he is being given are powerful and disorientating. He is hallucinating almost continuously. The insane, too, have haunted his fiction: the gibbering mother of The Virgins of the Rocks and her sons, prey to creeping dementia. The writer in The Innocent who succumbs to a neural disease which leaves him paralysed and dribbling and, worst of all, aphasic. These images of madness return to d’Annunzio as he lies in the dark. He recalls his friend, a sculptor, who lost his reason, and seems to see him struggling up a steep and stony slope surrounded by devilish goats.

  He composes a hymn to death. The dead beat their wings like wounded eagles, bloodying the light. He fantasises about his own end as it would have been if only he had died rather than Miraglia. “The heroic pilot brings back to the fatherland the bloodless corpse of the sacrificed poet … All the shores of Italy ripple like the margins of his banner.”

  Waking dreams chase themselves through his head. He is driving into an abandoned village near the front. The houses are all ruined. The mountains, visible at the end of a row of shattered trees, are sapphire blue. A young soldier appears, chewing a piece of bread. D’Annunzio asks to see Colonel Barbieri (the man who was killed in his stead over Laibach). The soldier leaves, and returns with a bundled up leather jacket streaked with blood.

  Another dream. He is at the airfield from which he should have flown, inspecting the damaged plane. It is covered with blood, still liquid and dripping. It is a miraculous liquefaction, like that of the saints’ blood kept as relics in numerous Italian churches. D’Annunzio clambers into the plane. His hands are bloody as though he is receiving the stigmata. He sees the place where his neck should have rested as he sighted his targets. It is like an executioner’s block.