Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Their faith was first to be sorely tried. D’Annunzio was dividing his time between Venice, where music and philandering kept him busy, and Rome, where he was being offered other roles. Nitti hoped to neutralise him with a job offer: he could be high commissioner for aviation. D’Annunzio does not appear to have responded. From somewhere came the idea that he might fly by stages to Tokyo. This was more tempting. D’Annunzio addressed a group of aviators, calling on them to turn their backs with him on the West, which was at once so “infected” and so “sterile.” While the Fiuman-Italians awaited him with “faith and discipline,” he apparently forgot them, busying himself with meetings with chiefs of staff to discuss the complex logistics of the proposed flight.

  It is unclear who, if anybody, seriously expected this voyage to take place. It is possible the government offered it as a lure to keep d’Annunzio harmlessly busy on the other side of the world. It is equally possible that d’Annunzio himself was only pretending interest in order to deceive the police agents by whom he was, by this time, ceaselessly watched. More likely, he simply hadn’t made up his mind which of the two roles offered him appealed to him most. Again he dithered. Again he waited for a sign. Several more weeks were to go by before the fortune-telling princess inspired him to action.

  In July 1919, Fiume passed from tension into lethal violence. The city was still garrisoned by a mixture of Italian and French troops under Allied command. The multi-ethnic French troops would cross over in the evenings from Susak, and parade through Fiume, provocatively wearing rosettes of ribbons in the Yugoslav colours. Meanwhile Fiuman-Italian girls would hand out rosettes in the Italian colours, and at evening, when everyone assembled along the city’s waterfront for the passeggiata, there were scuffles. After an incident when a French soldier was alleged to have torn a rosette in the Italian colours off a girl’s dress, the jostling and bullying which had become commonplace tipped over into murder. Thirteen Vietnamese-French soldiers were killed—stabbed or shoved off the quays into the water to drown. Some fifty more were injured. An American oil man who was staying in the grand waterfront Europa Hotel saw it all from his window and told one of his colleagues: “Believe me, friend, that was one hellish business … they literally cut those poor little Chinks into pieces.” The Croatian Club was trashed by Italian nationalists. Italian troops were seen taking part in the riots and allowing, if not actually participating in, the killing.

  This was too much. When reports of the massacre reached Paris, four Allied generals were despatched to Fiume to set up a commission of enquiry. Giuriati, visiting the city, found it “in an indescribable state of exaltation.” The prospect of having their affairs decided by a panel of outsiders had the citizens in uproar. Wild talk, bells ringing, patriotic songs. “No one cared any more about his own business. Timetables no longer existed. News, true or false, spread like lightning.” At every flying rumour people poured into the streets. “An orator, leaping onto a chair or a table in the Caffè Commercio would find his every word underlined by waves of enthusiasm or explosions of fury.” Giuriati met Host-Venturi of the Legion, Grossich, leader of the National Council, and other prominent Fiuman-Italians. They were all, he reported, ready to risk their all for annexation to Italy.

  The Italian government’s attitude to the Fiume question was ambivalent. The stridency of d’Annunzio’s invective was an embarrassment, but his speeches, which were widely reported throughout Europe, were useful to the Italian negotiators in Paris as evidence that without substantial concessions in Dalmatia the government would find it hard to keep the peace at home. Orlando would not overtly sanction a coup in Fiume or anywhere else, but it is quite possible that he would have covertly welcomed one. With Nitti’s accession to the premiership though, the situation changed. The Duke of Aosta, who had been in command of the Third Army stationed around Fiume, was recalled, and replaced by General Badoglio, who had been Diaz’s deputy for the last year of the war.

  Badoglio had a lot of sympathy with d’Annunzio. Three months earlier he had written to him: “Your image, as a Great Italian, will be for ever a radiant example of faith, of heroism and of sacrifice to the army and to the whole nation.” He had drawn up a plan to blight the beginnings of the Yugoslav state using black propaganda and agents provocateurs, encouraging Italian soldiers to seduce the “susceptible local women,” and stirring up conflict between the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He seemed like a natural ally for the irredentists. Late in July, Giuriati approached him, hoping at least for “discreet complicity.” But Badoglio was still a loyal soldier. He would not condone the creation of a private army like the Legion of Fiume. He certainly would not tolerate mutiny in his own ranks. “In barely educated minds and simple souls, like those of most of our soldiers, the concept of discipline expresses itself in a single word ‘I obey’.” On 31 July he issued orders that the approach road to Fiume was to be watched, and that no one attempting “movements contrary to the government’s orders” was to be allowed to pass, not even “noti uomini”—famous men. (He meant d’Annunzio.)

  With the Italian high command refusing to sanction their plans, the Fiuman-Italians prepared for open revolt. On 19 August, Host-Venturi, commander of the Legion, declared: “I no longer speak to you as an Italian officer, nor even as an Italian citizen, but from today onwards as a revolutionary.”

  In August the Allied commission on Fiume decreed that the city’s Italian-dominated National Council should be replaced by a governing body under Allied control which better represented the Croat population of the city’s suburbs, that the Legion of Fiume should be disbanded and that the Italian troops, a regiment of Sardinian grenadiers, who formed a part of the Allied garrison, should be moved out of the city and replaced by British and American troops. These orders caused an uproar. Italian officers were greeted with thunderous applause on every street corner and the church bells clanged all day. More parties, more romances between Italian officers and obliging Fiuman-Italian girls, more laughing and kissing and (according to Comisso) more “exquisite cakes.”

  The Sardinian Brigade had been the first Italian troops to enter Fiume the previous November. They were seen, by themselves and the Fiuman-Italians, as the city’s liberators and guardians. The Allied command, hoping to avoid a demonstration, ordered them to march out of the city before dawn, but the Fiuman-Italians saw to it that the demonstration took place anyway. The town hall’s bells were rung at 3 a.m. Boys ran through the city yelling and clashing hand bells. People, many of them brandishing, or wrapped in, the Italian flag, poured onto the torchlit streets.

  Trumpets sounded. The President of the National Council addressed the departing troops: “Tell our brothers that we have been Italian for centuries … Though rent from our mother we are her devoted sons.” The Sardinians found their route blocked by kneeling women entreating them to stay and by children who grabbed at their knees and hung on their coat tails. They hesitated. Like most of the military, they were convinced irredentists. They had been idling in Fiume for several agreeable months during which they had become fond of the Italian citizens who hailed them as heroic protectors, who drank and danced and had sex with them. Only the resolution of their commanding officer—who would have faced court-martial had he allowed them to linger in the city—got them moving. They left at last, shouting: “Long live Italian Fiume!” in chorus with the crowds who pelted them with flowers.

  They withdrew across the Istrian peninsula to the military base at Ronchi, but the boldest among them immediately began to make plans to return and claim Fiume for Italy. Then, like the Fiuman-Italians before them, they made contact with d’Annunzio. Seven officers, hereafter known portentously as the “Ronchi Seven,” signed a letter: “We have sworn upon the memory of all who died for the unity of Italy: Fiume or death! And you do nothing for Fiume? You who have all of Italy in your hands?” One of the signatories carried it to Venice in person.

  Still d’Annunzio hesitated. Another emissary, one Attilio Prodam, set out from Fiume t
o Venice and the Casetta Rossa, taking his pretty daughter with him and vowing he would not return to Fiume alive unless he brought d’Annunzio with him.

  Day after day Prodam visited d’Annunzio, staying with him for four or five hours at a time. Persuasion failed: perhaps an erotic-cum-patriotic spectacle might succeed? General Diaz came to Venice to be presented, amid much pomp and ceremony, with a sword of honour. Prodam arranged for his daughter to present the general with a bouquet. Wearing a ribbon with the words “Fiume or Death” embroidered on it, she made a speech begging permission to present Diaz with the “flowers of the passion of my city.” The following day, 6 September, Prodam visited d’Annunzio again. His daughter (still wearing her ribbon) was with him. This time, at last, d’Annunzio agreed to go.

  Yet more days went by. D’Annunzio wanted to wait until the eleventh, a date he considered particularly auspicious, because it was on the eleventh that he had first had sexual intercourse with Giuseppina Mancini and on the eleventh that he had perpetrated the Buccari prank. Besides, he had some dinner engagements. Ida Rubinstein was in Venice preparing a film version of The Ship, to be directed by d’Annunzio’s son Gabriellino. On 9 September she gave a party at the Danieli for guests including d’Annunzio and two of his painter friends. Rubinstein herself danced to music by Florent Schmitt, and a gifted young pianist, Luisa Baccara, played the piano wearing, at d’Annunzio’s express request (he was still taking an interest in his women’s clothes), a silver dress and black and white shawl.

  D’Annunzio had met Luisa at Olga’s house (which he continued to frequent) and was struck by her playing, her lovely voice, her narrow brown face and wild hair prematurely streaked with silver. On 10 September he invited her to the Casetta Rossa again, this time so she could sing the Garibaldi hymn, with its rousingly xenophobic refrain: “Get out you foreigners,” for himself and emissaries from the Sardinian Brigade at Ronchi. Luisa, nearly thirty years younger than d’Annunzio, stayed the night. (“Do you remember,” he wrote afterward “the extreme voluptuousness, and the terrible mirror, and the final moments when I made you a drink with my own hands?”) She would be d’Annunzio’s mistress and the keeper of his harem until he died nearly two decades later.

  At last, on 11 September, d’Annunzio rose early despite a high temperature, took a boat over to the mainland and set out, in his brand new, bright red Fiat 501 motor car (a sporty model launched that season), on what he was to call his “penultimate adventure.”

  The City of the Holocaust

  IN FRANCE BEFORE THE WAR d’Annunzio witnessed a forest fire. His house at Arcachon was on the seaward fringe of a pine forest stretching for miles along the coast. At summer’s end the woods were suddenly ablaze. D’Annunzio rode out to watch. Behind the line of the advancing fire, the black tree skeletons, stripped bare of all their needles and twigs, stood upright like “undefeated martyrs” at the stake. A gusty wind raised whirling man-high funnels of ash, veering, dipping and dissolving among the ruined woods like ghosts.

  Fires blaze through d’Annunzio’s work. In both The Ship and Jorio’s Daughter, a heroine leaps voluntarily onto a pyre. One of his favourite words was “holocaust,” meaning a sacrifice in which the victim is wholly consumed by fire. He had found the word used with relish in Salammbô, where Flaubert describes the killing of scores of children as sacrifices to Moloch. He had made it a part of his wartime rhetoric. The conflict was a fire in which all the filth and corruption of peacetime would be utterly destroyed, leaving a world cauterised and pure. Dead wood must burn so that new can grow. The millions of deaths would create a transformative blaze out of which would emerge a new form of humanity. Arriving in Fiume with a vanguard of Arditi known as the “black flames,” he had come to set the match of his personality to a conflagration which would scorch the eyes of the watching world.

  On the morning of 11 September 1919, d’Annunzio wrote to Mussolini to announce that he was setting out for Fiume. Nine years later Mussolini would publish part of this letter, declaring: “I too had been living this drama—day by day d’Annunzio and I had been close together,” and claiming that it was one of many “brotherly letters” that had passed between them. He was lying. This was not a letter between brothers, but a set of instructions from a world famous author delivered, without a please or thank you, to his subservient editor. The part which Mussolini did not publish reads: “Summarise the article which the Gazzetta del Popolo will be publishing, giving the last section in full. And support our cause vigorously.” Having thus seen to the all-important business of publicity, d’Annunzio set out, bundled up in rugs, on his great adventure.

  The march on Fiume was set to begin from the cemetery of Ronchi at midnight. The “Ronchi Seven” had managed to recruit 186 men to their cause. Arriving at the base, d’Annunzio, still feverish, passed the early part of the night stretched out uncomfortably on four small tables (no damask cushions here). Years later he remembered how thirsty he was, and how his fever made him too weak even to reach out for the bunch of grapes an old peasant woman placed on a chair next to him.

  The hour came, but the lorries to transport the men did not. Ronchi is over a hundred kilometres from Fiume. An aviator named Guido Keller, a notorious wild man who would play an important role in d’Annunzio’s Fiume, took charge. Keller had flown with d’Annunzio’s squadron in the raid on Pola in August 1917. He kept an eagle as a pet and habitually slept rough. According to one of the mutineers, Keller leapt into a motor car and “hurled himself at breakneck speed” towards a military depot. There, revolver in hand, he faced down the captain of the guard. The captain was an Ardito, one of the black-clad killer elite, but on this occasion he was either timid or, more likely, complicit. Announcing that he “ceded to violence,” he allowed Keller and his band of hijackers to drive away twenty-six lorries. Several hours after the appointed hour, the column was ready to move. At last, recumbent in his red car, his damaged eyes protected by dark glasses, d’Annunzio set out for Fiume.

  The Italian army occupying Istria on behalf of the Allies lay ahead. As dawn turned the sky what one of his followers saw as a “Garibaldian red,” d’Annunzio stepped out of his car and addressed a group of thirty officers, telling them that from this moment on they were entirely his—“mine perdutamente.” Like the leader of a religious cult, he was requiring them to abandon their separate identities. He was deathly pale. His little blond moustache and his chin were all caked with dust. He said they were about to confront the guns of the regular troops barring the road. He would not turn back, and nor would they. He was offering them death. His voice was weak at the outset, but it gradually became as “sharp and penetrating and resonant as a blade of steel.”

  The Allied garrison in Fiume was under the command of the Italian General Pittaluga, who had assumed command only ten days previously. He had told Nitti he felt unequal to a post of such political delicacy. Nitti had assured him that the administration’s policy was quite straightforward and he would face no difficulty. This was nonsense. Pittaluga was out of his depth. His troops’ loyalties were divided and he found the people of Fiume “bellicose and intolerant.” Now he drove out to meet d’Annunzio’s oncoming column.

  A group of Arditi had placed themselves in the vanguard. Pittaluga ordered their commanding officer to turn around and shoot d’Annunzio. The officer flatly refused. Pittaluga drove on until he found d’Annunzio himself. He implored the poet to turn back, “for Italy’s sake.” D’Annunzio, regressing at this heroic moment to memories of his boyhood hero, unbuttoned his overcoat to reveal the row of medals on his chest as he said: “All you have to do is order the troops to shoot me, general.” Just so had Napoleon, returning from exile on Elba, opened his coat and invited French troops to fire on him if they would. D’Annunzio, like Napoleon, was armoured by his fame. It was as impossible in 1919 for an Italian soldier to kill the “poet of slaughter” as it had been in 1815 for a French one to kill his Emperor.

  Pittaluga gave up. “I will not shed blo
od nor be the cause of a fratricidal war!” he announced. According to the account in Il Popolo d’Italia (Mussolini was dutifully supporting the cause) the general took d’Annunzio by the hand and said: “Great Poet, I am honoured to meet you. I hope that your dream will be fulfilled and that I may shout with you, ‘Viva Italian Fiume!’ ” He then turned around and headed back towards the city he was supposed to be defending, meekly following in the invaders’ train.

  Of the thousands of armed men within range of d’Annunzio that morning, all of them under orders to stop him by any available means from reaching Fiume, not a single one opened fire. D’Annunzio’s little band proved magnetic, and the more recruits were drawn into it, the greater its magnetism. D’Annunzio himself described it in an interview in the Corriere della Sera five days later. “Armoured cars were awaiting us to stop our column. I reached them, passed them by, and the cars followed me under my orders. A staff officer tried to stop me. I ordered him to fall in at the rear of the column, and he obeyed … It was really rather funny.” By the time he reached the city he had a following of over 2,000 men.

  The first of the armoured cars crashed through the barricades at the city’s outskirts. One after the other, machine guns at the ready, the lumbering vehicles passed into the centre through streets which the Fiuman-Italians had carpeted with branches of laurel. Two decades earlier d’Annunzio had written: “Imagine the flash of desire in the eye of the adventurer when, at a turn in the road, at the crest of a mountain, appears the face of a promised city.” Then he was thinking of the condottieri of mediaeval Italy. Now he had a city of his own.