D’Annunzio had once complained of the tedium of a life in which tame commercialism had replaced the “magnificent crimes” of a grander, bloodier age. During the war the Arditi had adopted d’Annunzio’s motto “me ne frego”—I don’t give a toss—which Mussolini would later describe as being the summation of the fascists’ “new style of ideal life.” Now d’Annunzio had it embroidered on a banner which hung over his bed. He had become the insouciant ruler of an outlaw state.
D’Annunzio dubbed Nitti “Cagoia,” an invented term of abuse which translates approximately as “shitty.” The filth, which he had so deplored when he saw it engulfing Italy’s political system, now gushed through his own rhetoric. Alongside his exalted talk of sacrifice and fatherland ran another stream, that of scatological abuse. He became a verbal cartoonist, ribald and jeering, as disgusted by Nitti’s body as he had once been by his own father’s. His invective is full of excrement and blubbery flesh, of belches and farts.
Nitti retaliated by putting it about that d’Annunzio had lost control of his own adventure. The poet “has been overcome by madmen,” he told a reporter. D’Annunzio was no longer responsible for his actions. He was senile (or childish); he was being held prisoner by his officers; he’d fled from Fiume on a sailing boat; he’d accepted a massive bribe and was about to surrender. All of these rumours were intended to undermine d’Annunzio with apparent sympathy. The poet’s popularity was such that any direct verbal attack on him would only rebound on its perpetrator.
D’Annunzio was not so tied. Over and over again he accused the Prime Minister of cowardice. Reaching back to his memory of the “cowards” on the Timavo, tying strips of torn clothing to their bayonets as they surrendered to the enemy, he elaborated a grotesque image of Nitti using his soiled underpants as a white flag. He berated him for being interested only in “eating and swilling.” D’Annunzio was not anorexic—he could write with hearty gusto of roast quail and of strawberries and ice cream—but now he equated eating with degradation. He was ferocious. He called upon his followers to pillory Nitti. He was blasphemous. He called upon them to “baptise” Nitti by spitting on him. He was flattering. He told his listeners they were free, unlike the “slaves” who remained loyal to Nitti’s government.
In Rome, on 25 September, two weeks after d’Annunzio’s Sacred Entry, the King called a meeting of his privy council. It was agreed that d’Annunzio’s annexation of Fiume could not be accepted. Nitti, encouraged, dissolved parliament, calling an election for 16 November. D’Annunzio’s seizure of Fiume was perhaps not such a bad thing. It vividly demonstrated what Orlando had been trying to argue at Versailles the previous spring—that the Italian administration was obliged, by its own people’s wishes, to ask for concessions in Dalmatia. Unable to dominate d’Annunzio, Nitti, whose pragmatism d’Annunzio considered so dishonourable, sensibly made use of him.
Fiume, always bustling, was now crowded with armed young men. Four bands patrolled the streets, playing by day and night, trains of followers forming up to march or dance along behind them. D’Annunzio himself passed daily through the city at the head of his troops with a flower in his hat, their progress accompanied by the sound of trumpets. Each morning he reviewed his personal bodyguard of Arditi on the waterfront. Modelled on the “black band” attendant on a Renaissance Medici prince, they wore tight black tunics and were drilled in a way most of the Fiuman troops were not. They had a showy new salute, a straight arm raised skywards. “The company files past him in the greatest solemnity. He claps his hands and two hundred daggers are raised on high on extended arms.” Randaccio’s banner dips in salute “and the fateful cry, breaking from two hundred breasts, resounds by the sea. A NOI!’
Every day the Legion marched out into the surrounding countryside. They ran and wrestled in the pine forests along the seashore, and marched, singing now the Garibaldi hymn, now the battle song of the Arditi, through the orchards and olive groves that climb the hills backing the town. They would cut leafy branches. At nightfall, still singing and garlanded with greenery, they marched back into the city, lit great fires along the waterfront and roasted sheep. Feasting off charred mutton, their fantastic costumes glittering in the light of the flames, they made an archaic and stirring spectacle. As d’Annunzio appreciated, it was as though Achilles and his myrmidons had returned to encamp once more before Troy.
Léon Kochnitzky had been an admirer of d’Annunzio since he read Fire at the age of sixteen. “Ecstasy! Enchantment! The excruciating joy of discovering treasure destined to render all our lives more beautiful!” Before the war he glimpsed d’Annunzio at the Paris opera, immaculate in a starched cravat and with pearly-white cuffs and monocle gleaming. In the summer of 1919, by this time a published poet himself, Kochnitzky made his way to Rome and there at last he contrived to meet the bard who had meant so much to him. A true fan, he stole one of d’Annunzio’s gloves and kept it as an “amulet.”
Kochnitzky arrived in Fiume towards the end of October 1919. D’Annunzio kept him waiting for two full days for an appointment, but then he was all affability. Of course he remembered their encounter in Rome, the card game they had played, the flowers that had scented the room, everything about the night. Kochnitzky was dumbfounded by the honour. Only later did he realise d’Annunzio greeted every acquaintance as though welcoming a dear friend, “but really, he couldn’t care less.”
Kochnitzky was an adoring disciple. “I breathed in the light which radiated from Gabriele d’Annunzio: in this light I lived.” Self-mocking but candid, he committed to paper the self-abnegating emotions which thousands of hero-worshipping legionaries shared. “I am an instrument without a will, a tool which sees and feels nothing but the marvellous craftsman.” He didn’t feel degraded by his infatuation, on the contrary: “I give thanks to God for having put me in direct and daily contact with the most perfect of his creations.”
For Kochnitzky, a Belgian of Russian-Jewish descent, Italian irredentism was of little interest. “Where are we going? Nobody can say … What are our war aims? Hard to define them … So be it!…Above us we have Gabriele d’Annunzio to guide us. Beyond Gabriele d’Annunzio the UNKNOWN and the destiny which drives him on.”
D’Annunzio set Kochnitzky, and another enthusiastic young poet, the American Henry Furst, to work scanning the foreign press for him. Furst revered d’Annunzio for his poetry and also because he was a great “pagan.” Paganism had been fashionable in Anglophone poetic circles since Pater, and Rupert Brooke, beautiful dead idol of the pro-war British, had been at the centre of a group of “neo-pagans.” D’Annunzio was happy to accept the characterisation, and literary young men with language skills were useful to him. Kochnitzky and Furst drafted press releases. They were affronted by how frequently he returned their drafts to them, with their syntax corrected or a word changed.
When d’Annunzio was not speaking to his people he was writing to them. He took over control of the city’s Italian newspaper La Vedetta (The Lookout), and made it his mouthpiece. It appeared daily, printing verbatim every one of his speeches. He would convey his resolves to the populace on proclamations fly-posted all over town or in leaflets handed out in the streets or showered from the sky by low-flying aeroplanes. In times of crisis new posters reflecting his changing state of mind would appear in public places four, or six, or even eight times a day. Fiume was for d’Annunzio both stage and page, the platform on which he postured and a surface on which he could inscribe the marvellous story of himself.
That story had to be broadcast, as well, beyond Fiume’s confines. The City of the Holocaust was to be a beacon visible around the world. D’Annunzio’s publicity department was organised with thoroughly modern efficiency. His speeches were rushed off the administration’s own printing presses within hours of their first delivery and distributed to newspaper offices across Italy. A journalist went with the Uscocchi on each of their most daring raids, writing up their exploits. D’Annunzio’s pilots overflew the disputed cities of Trento and Zara
dropping leaflets. He ordered the citizens of Fiume out to form up in an open space along the waterfront so that their massed bodies formed the words “Italia o Morte,” had them photographed from the air, and circulated the pictures.
On 7 October, two of d’Annunzio’s aviators were killed when their plane’s engine failed during a reconnaissance flight. D’Annunzio seized upon the deaths of Fiume’s first “martyrs” as the occasion for an awe-inspiring ceremony. The city’s florists’ shops and its public parks were stripped of their flowers. The funeral procession wound its way through Fiume for several hours, observing a solemn and impressive silence but for the blaring of the bands. Troops of little children from the orphanage led the way. Then came the legionaries, both wounded veterans and frightening black-clad young warriors. Almost the entire Fiuman-Italian population paced after them. As night fell the coffins were displayed in the main square. Randaccio’s banner was draped across them by the dead men’s fellow pilots and, as a full moon rose, d’Annunzio spoke. He talked of the “sign of the cross that is made by the shadow of the winged machine” and described the dead men as “burnt confessors of the faith.” A legionary recalls it: “The words of the poet rang high and clear in the great piazza … It seemed that those thousands and thousands of persons who listened did not breathe, did not live: it seemed that they were a people of mournful shades.”
From the night of its inception, d’Annunzio’s Command had included an intelligence service called the “Office of Information.” “Within a week,” records Giuriati, “the officer in charge had established a network of most trustworthy informers.” These agents were instructed to be on the lookout for “Yugoslav intrigues” and to report on the behaviour of all the citizens, but most particularly of non-Italians. La Vedetta called for the expulsion of “foreigners,” i.e. native Fiumans of non-Italian origin. “We have tolerated them long enough…[they] have nothing to do here.” The Fiuman-Italians wanted to be locked in an exclusive embrace with the “brothers” come to defend them. The actual racial diversity of their “Italianissimo” city complicated the simple, glorious story of their “redemption.”
In d’Annunzio’s supporters’ accounts of their sojourn in Fiume, the city’s non-Italian inhabitants are all but invisible. The Italians ignored them, or feared them as an enemy within. Other less partial observers testify that the harassment of one ethnic group by the other, which Father Macdonald had seen as constant throughout the summer, continued. As trade faltered and stuttered during d’Annunzio’s reign, there were food shortages. Seeking scapegoats, some of the Fiuman-Italians began to blame their Slavic neighbours. It was said that the Croatian butchers of Susak would sell meat only to those who spoke Croatian, or who would swear fealty to Yugoslavia. In Fiume proper, Croats were evicted from their homes in the city to make way for incoming Italians. The city of fiery brilliance had from the outset its dark and hidden channels.
· · ·
Luisa Baccara, the young pianist d’Annunzio had met just before leaving Venice, was soon visiting him regularly in Fiume.
Simple, clear-cut, severe, classical—these are some of the words d’Annunzio uses to describe Luisa’s beauty. Powerfully arched eyebrows, strong shoulders and neck which reminded him of a swan exhaling its death song. She put others in mind of birds, too. Guido Keller, who was jealous of her hold over d’Annunzio, once presented her with a cockatoo, a gift which was intended as an insulting allusion to her beaky nose.
Luisa was thirty years younger than her lover. He called her Sirenetta, the name he had also given his daughter. But like so many of her predecessors, she was a strong-willed and talented woman, a fêted artiste, not quite a star like Eleonora Duse but a performer who played with confidence to full theatres. He loved to watch her at the keyboard, to see the waves of energy passing through her from the nape of her bowed neck to her foot on the pedal, as though the music was issuing not from the piano but from her body. That body, as he knew from their love-making, was finely constructed and responsive as a violin from the hand of a master lutenist. He called her his “dark rose,” his “olive-skinned melancholy,” his “golden, poisoned grape.” He applauded her taste for metallic embroidery and silver lamé. His letters suggest that she was not just compliant but sexually demanding. Self-confident and poised, Luisa made d’Annunzio hers, not exclusively, but for life.
In Fiume she gave recitals for his officers and for visiting dignitaries, finishing with a rendition of the Song of Ronchi, while, as d’Annunzio describes it, “the Arditi, long-haired like the Achaeans, would brandish their daggers at each refrain, making her a crown of vengeance.”
Relations between d’Annunzio’s Command and the National Council were strained. In mid-October, d’Annunzio dissolved the Council and called elections, putting forward new candidates of his own. On the day of the vote he spoke in the theatre, telling his listeners: “You are asked to vote for your soul. You are asked to vote for an act of love and fervour.” Over seventy per cent voted for his candidates. Four days later the reconstituted National Council reconfirmed his absolute power.
Father Macdonald scoffed. “The stage chorus of loose women and licentious soldiery, which the poet-actor had succeeded in attaching to his touring party, could be relied upon to vote to order.” It is true that women played a large part in the political life of d’Annunzio’s Fiume. Just before his arrival they had been enfranchised, a fact which several contemporary observers considered to have been a great help to him. In the view of his detractors, he had not so much stepped out of the boudoir into the real, tough, male world of political action as transformed the political arena, by dint of his incorrigibly decadent and voluptuous ways, into another boudoir. His phenomenal success in establishing his ascendance over a turbulent city was, when it came down to it, just another seduction.
In Fiume, under d’Annunzio’s rule, drugs were as readily available as sex. One artist attempted to make a living in the city by selling psychedelic art, advertising “Fantastic impressions ‘morphine style’ ” in the evident expectation that his public knew just what that looked like.
D’Annunzio wrote, in a moment of exasperation, that he was wearing himself out on behalf of a “rabble stuffed with phrases and crammed full of drugs.” He was as guilty on both counts as any of his followers. While he was recovering from his eye injury he took painkillers and sleeping pills and afterwards always kept stocks of opiates by him. We know that soon after he left Fiume he had a greedy cocaine habit. He was probably already a user while there.
In the pre-war years cocaine was seen as an aid to courage and endurance. Shackleton and Scott each took a supply of it with them on their polar expeditions. During the war, a number of pilots, in Italy as elsewhere, used it to keep themselves alert. Many retained the habit afterwards. Others imitated them, despite the fact that it was becoming all too obvious that the drug was not, as Freud had thought, good for the health. Marcel Proust called cocaine one of time’s special express trains bound for old age (a good haircut, he considered, was an equally fast train running back towards youth).
In Fiume a pharmacist was arrested for selling cocaine. D’Annunzio asked that he be released (perhaps the man was his own supplier). Osbert Sitwell, who visited Fiume later, mocked the British reporter who took the “glassy glitter” of d’Annunzio’s “snakelike eye” as evidence that he was “drug-crazed.” Did the hack not know that one of the Commandant’s eyes was glass indeed? It wasn’t, actually, and it is more than likely that the hack was right.
Italy was boiling with discontent. Ex-soldiers, or the bereaved families of the war dead, were demanding compensation for their sufferings or their lost men. Combatants’ associations rallied them. Beating drums and waving flags, they marched onto uncultivated land and began to dig for themselves, to the consternation of landowners, many of whom, unable or afraid to reclaim their property, were obliged to sell. The socialists were increasingly belligerent. Socialist labour unions had quadrupled their membership in two y
ears during which more than a million people (including the waiters at Florian’s, where d’Annunzio had spent so many evenings) went on strike. At their National Congress in the autumn of 1919 the Socialist Party voted in a new constitution calling for the “violent conquest of political power.”
The Italian authorities could no longer trust their armed forces. In October two of the army’s highest-ranking generals arrived in Fiume to dedicate themselves to the service of d’Annunzio, one of them being the charismatic General Ceccherini. D’Annunzio, on first meeting Ceccherini at the front in 1916, described him as a “famous fencer, of Herculean stature, square shoulders … with a fine mouth beneath grey moustaches. He seems to be dressed in leather, like a warrior who has removed his armour.” Now he became commander of the “Fiuman First Division.”
Every day in Fiume there were parades. Every night there were torchlit processions and firework displays. The funeral of the two airmen. The ceremony to endorse General Ceccherini’s command. The solemn inauguration of the reelected National Council. A military review to honour the visiting Duchess of Aosta. The lamentations over the death of a legionary killed by regular troops after visiting a restaurant in Abbazia. March pasts. Fly pasts. Yelling crowds. Flags, bells, dancing. But still the Italian revolution failed to happen. Still Nitti held on to power.
Resigning himself to a long stay, d’Annunzio sent for his winter clothes. Boots and shoes, cravats, a variety of uniforms and an overcoat lined with Astrakhan were despatched from the Casetta Rossa, along with ten boxes of his favourite chocolates and 500 grains of strychnine. He was at war again, and again in need of the wherewithal to kill himself.
Gabriele D'Annunzio Page 50