Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  There were people living rough in the idle shipyards—deserters, criminals, underage runaways or other fugitives who had arrived in Fiume without documents. Nitti’s agents reported that these “turbid elements” lived in vast warehouses alongside armoured cars, whose engines they kept turning over day and night, despite the chronic shortage of fuel. Keller, paying a visit to investigate, found a titanic adventure playground full of half-naked men, heavy metal and aggressive song: a Vorticist underworld peopled by hell’s angels. Amidst the fumes and incessant mechanical din, men dived into the harbour from the bows of the abandoned ships, others attempted to drive the immobilised engines of the Fiume-Budapest railway line, others scrambled up the immense cranes along the waterfront, all “beautiful and proud, crazy and joyful.” Keller thought they could be of use. He formed them into a troop of irregulars variously known as the “Centurions of Death” or La Disperata (the Legion of the Desperate), and offered them to d’Annunzio, who made them his private guard. They became a highly visible part of Fiume’s public life. Handsome, rowdy and violent, they paraded through the streets bare-chested. At night they played war games, using live grenades. Some of them died.

  D’Annunzio and Keller teased and riled each other. Their relationship was prickly and flirtatious. D’Annunzio, so portentously earnest in public, was playful in private and with Keller, the latest of his beloved young men, he could relax. Keller absented himself from headquarters and took a room in a hotel with a sea view. There, despite the February chill, he basked naked on his balcony, accompanied by his eagle, who liked to groom him, plunging its beak into his thick black hair. D’Annunzio, on being told how he passed his time, sent a legionary with instructions to wait until Keller was taking a bath, and then to abduct the eagle. The deed was done. Keller, distraught, ran out into the street in his towel. There was (as so often) some sort of a rally going on. A column of marching Arditi all acknowledged the semi-nude Action Secretary by giving him the salute—arm outstretched, dagger in hand.

  Keller went back indoors, having guessed there was only one person in Fiume who would dare to cross him so, and wrote out a challenge. There must be a duel. The robber—whoever it might be—would have to face him. The missive was carried to the palace by his seconds. D’Annunzio cheerfully admitted his crime and handed back the eagle, now wearing a ribbon in the Italian colours around its neck and a label proclaiming in Latin that it brought tidings of a future empire. The duel was averted. The Commandant placed his car at the disposal of Keller’s two friends and the restored eagle. As they made the short journey back through the crowded streets, Arditi, clustering as they did every day around the famous motor car, found themselves hailing a bird.

  No one expected Yugoslavia to last. It was not a nation, said d’Annunzio, it was a monster, an earthly version of Dante’s imagined Malebolge; a place part Byzantine, part Roman, “where Belgrade commands, Sarajevo conspires, Zagreb threatens, Lubliana froths, and Catholic and Orthodox and Muslim tear each other to pieces.” Hardly any well-informed commentator would have predicted in 1920 that the botched-up new country, with its mutually hostile populations and its bloody history, might survive for nearly seventy years.

  The Italian government was looking for ways to provoke conflict among its constituent parts. So was the rogue outpost at Fiume. During the autumn of 1919, Giuriati encouraged d’Annunzio to see the Slavs encompassing Fiume, not as a sea of undifferentiated enemies, but as a pool of possible supporters. The Command was in contact with Montenegrins and Croatians, and Giuriati worked tirelessly behind the scenes to foment hostility to the over-dominant Serbs among their fellow Yugoslavs. After he left, at the beginning of 1920, d’Annunzio told one of his correspondents that: “Even the Croats, wishing to unshackle the Serbian yoke, turn to me.” Throughout the spring he worked to effect an uprising which would have shattered Yugoslavia back into its constituent ethnic groups, and left the way open for Italy to grab what territory it wanted. A revolution, he said, would shortly “explode.” “I can lead the movement. I can enter Zagreb as a liberator. All is ready.”

  Luisa Baccara was not popular with the young men around d’Annunzio. Fiume was a place of boyish adventure, not adult sexual partnerships. When a risky expedition down the coast was discussed Luisa didn’t want her lover to go. What if they met Allied ships? What if they were torpedoed? Guido Keller and Comisso, his adoring sidekick, deduced, entirely irrationally, that she must therefore be an agent of the government in Rome. They resolved to be rid of her.

  When carnival time came round Keller offered to organise a festa, and Comisso suggested they revive the ancient game of the Castle of Love. In mediaeval Treviso, a wooden castle would be built and the town’s prettiest young women shut themselves up in it and were “besieged” by suitors throwing food and flowers. Keller planned a party-cum-mock battle on the beach, during which a troop of Fiuman women headed by Luisa Baccara would be similarly imprisoned in a “castle” (actually a bathing pavilion). Each nationality represented in Fiume would have its own boat. Hungarians, Slavs and Italians would compete in a sea battle and in a “tournament” on the beach to decide who would carry off the disputed women.

  D’Annunzio refused to sanction the idea on the interesting grounds that it would be “too d’Annunzian.” He was the Commandant now, not the precious antiquarian poet, and, with his ever-alert awareness of how a story would play, he no longer wished to be associated with pseudo-mediaeval erotic frolics.

  It was just as well he withheld his permission. Keller and some of his fellow radicals had formed what they called a Committee of Public Safety; the menacing historical echoes were fully intended. A Dadaist Robespierre, Keller intended the Castle of Love to be a purge, in the not-yet-current Stalinist sense of the word. In the frenzy of the dancing, those identified by Keller as the “men of the past” would be “seized, put on a boat and carried away,” while Luisa would be “put in a cage like a hen” and marooned on an uninhabited island in the bay.

  · · ·

  D’Annunzio’s legionaries were ebbing away: 750 left in one week. In La Vedetta he reminded the erstwhile legionaries how bravely they had come to Fiume, and how, in entering the marvellous city, “all of a sudden you were changed into a single flame.” But now—Oh, what a change! He heaped up reproachful words: infamy, perjury, violation, abandonment. The defectors were like St. Peter, who denied Christ three times. Let them go. Those who remained would share his death and his glory, as the true disciples had shared Christ’s.

  Each time he reiterated one of his phrases it acquired an extra patina, an extra authority, until his legionaries would bellow them back to him, like rock fans recognising and singing along to the opening riff of a beloved anthem.

  D’Annunzio and de Ambris were working on their constitution, the Charter of Carnaro. By March 1920 its outline was complete.

  The political institutions it describes are modelled variously on the Athenian assembly, on the governments of the mediaeval Italian commune, and on the institutions of the Venetian Republic. True to the doctrines of anarcho-syndicalism, it decentralises power, granting “collective sovereignty” to all its citizens “without regard to sex, race, language, class or religion.” There were to be two parliamentary assemblies, both elected by universal suffrage, but they were to meet only once or twice a year. Remembering the tedium of his few visits to Montecitorio, d’Annunzio required their meetings to be of “sharply concise brevity.” The great speechmaker had no desire to hear others speak.

  The real work of government would be done by the nine “corporations,” each of which represented a section of the community defined by the work they did—one for seamen, one for artisans, one for “the intellectual flower of the people” (teachers, students, artists), and so forth. Every citizen had to belong to one or other of them.

  A College of Ediles would be responsible for “the Beauty of the City” (as in Ancient Rome) and for civic ceremonies, of which there would be many. Creativity became a p
ublic duty. Every corporation was “to invent its insignia, its emblems, its music … to institute its ceremonies and its rites; to participate, as magnificently as it can, in the anniversary festivals and the games; to venerate its dead, honour its leaders, celebrate its heroes.”

  A great edifice was to be constructed, an enormous theatre akin to that which d’Annunzio and Duse had once planned in the Alban hills, where 10,000 people at a time could attend concerts “gratis, as the Church fathers termed the grace of God.” In this Utopia, music, not religion, would be the opium of the masses.

  The constitution described in the charter had no place for a Commandant. There was, however, another vacancy in the political structure which d’Annunzio might fill. There was a “tenth corporation … represented in the civic sanctuary by a glowing lamp,” whose nature and function is so veiled by mumbo-jumbo that it can only be described in the constitution’s original words. “It is reserved for the mysterious forces of the people. It is a figure of offering to the unknown genius, to the appearance of the new man, to the ideal transfiguration of the works and of the days, to the fulfilled liberation of the spirit.” The unknown genius sounds a bit like Nietzsche’s superman, and the only available incarnation of the ideal was, of course, d’Annunzio himself.

  Many of d’Annunzio’s contemporaries mocked the charter’s apparently disproportionate stress on appearances and ceremony as evidence that d’Annunzio was nothing but a frivolous old mummer. There were others, Mussolini and the many future fascists who were present in Fiume among them, who grasped the importance of the art in which he was so adept, the manipulation of a community’s collective emotions. Political doctrine was impotent without the art to promote it.

  In April, the Uscocchi turned horse-thieves, a band of them seizing and bringing back to Fiume forty-six well-fed cavalry horses belonging to a recently disbanded regiment of the regular Italian army. D’Annunzio greeted them exultantly: “My young corsairs!” Herding their catch into Fiume in the small hours they were “luminous in the shadowy morning, as though you had seized the horses of the Sun from the cavern of the furthest Orient.”

  To d’Annunzio their raid was an exploit worthy to be celebrated by a new Tasso. To General Ferrario, now in command of Italian troops in the region, it was a breach of the tacit understanding whereby d’Annunzio had been allowed to remain in Fiume for so long. Ferrario demanded the horses back, and announced that if they were not returned within three days the hitherto-perfunctory blockade would turn serious. Trains would cease to arrive in Fiume. No flour or other foodstuffs would be allowed across the line. For historians the interesting point about these threats is the clarity with which they show how lenient the so-called blockade had previously been. But for d’Annunzio they were “brutal,” the “cruellest cut” inflicted upon the “tortured and famished body” of the “martyred” city. “The hospitals would have no more medicine; the exhausted children would have no more milk.” He raged against Nitti and pelted the soldiers of the regular Italian army with pleas and reproaches. He presented the episode as a story of brutish oppressors overreacting to the high-spirited teasing of “merry predators.”

  The episode ended with another prank. D’Annunzio had forty-six horses delivered to Ferrario’s headquarters—not the original, glossy animals, but an assortment of scrawny beasts from Fiume’s own dwindling stock. It was a way of mocking the general, and of advertising what d’Annunzio claimed to be Fiume’s desperate straits, deprived not only of milk for its babies but even of fodder for its nags. He issued a statement—jeering, mystical, nonsensical, highfalutin and defiant.

  We have stolen forty-six quadrupeds.

  We deserve only to be starved, manacled and executed.

  We shall resign ourselves.

  But I must further confess that last night I stole the Horse of the Apocalypse…

  Cum Timore.

  With the coming of spring the Legion of Fiume’s daily marches became more festive. The legionaries traversed meadows full of violets. They cut branches of almond and peach blossom and carried them like banners. Clumping heavy-booted, they sang out loudly, and d’Annunzio, the smallest and oldest of the party, always aware of his “devastated face,” sang along, jubilant.

  D’Annunzio’s was the politics of poetry and his poetry the poetry of sensuality. In Fiume under his command a political rally might segue smoothly into a street party and thence into a love-in. To be young and passionate was a patriotic duty. “It was a period of madness and bacchanal,” wrote a participant, “ringing with the sounds of weapons and those, more subdued, of love-making.” With so many unattached young men crammed into the town there were not enough women to go round. Homosexuality was tolerated. D’Annunzio, looking out of his window one day and watching couples of Arditi walking hand in hand toward the hills behind the town, said fondly: “Look at my soldiers, going off in couples as in the time of Pericles.” Father Macdonald was shocked to see Italian officers “painted and powdered like street-walkers.” An Italian medical officer reported there were 150 cases of venereal disease for every fifteen patients with other complaints. It was widely rumoured that d’Annunzio himself had contracted syphilis (or more likely brought it with him, mark of the Parisian “branding iron”).

  As the spring of Fiume’s “fifth season” turned to summer, the Arditi stripped off and bathed in the river, and strutted through the streets in short shorts. “There was no limit to the number of love affairs,” says Comisso. The cemetery on the hills behind the towns was full, at night, of couples making love.

  Rations grew tighter. In March 1920 the sale of cakes, biscuits, chocolate and caramels were banned. No more delicious patisserie. Basic foods were rationed, and even when provisions were available in the shops the workers often had no money to buy them. To demonstrate his solidarity with the hungry troops, d’Annunzio put on the uniform of a humble corporal and took his place in a ration queue for a photocall (overleaf).

  In April the Fiuman unions called a general strike to back up their demands for a minimum wage. D’Annunzio acted as arbitrator in negotiations with the Employers’ League. His sympathies were with the workers (he was still corresponding with Giulietti about labour relations) but he was bored by the whole affair. Sitting in on rancorous discussions he fretted at being confined in a stuffy meeting room when he might have been out picking violets. He hadn’t come to Fiume to talk about the cost of living (a subject he’d always preferred to ignore). He wasn’t interested in securing a decent wage for the workers; he wanted to make them burn with a hard, gem-like flame.

  He was increasingly estranged from the National Council, most of whose members were industrialists or businessmen. They were annoyed by his espousal of the workers’ cause. He in turn was incensed by the way they acted without consulting him, expelling so-called troublemakers (most of them union officials) from the city. Five hundred workers were arrested. The local police, led by Captain Rocco Vadalà, sacked and then closed down the offices of one of the main unions, all apparently without d’Annunzio’s consent. He was losing his grip on Fiume’s civil administration. In April 1920 the mayor and other members of the National Council went to Rome to meet Nitti and tell him they were exasperated by the “disorder, corruption and craziness” d’Annunzio had brought to their city.

  In May a party of Uscocchi stowed away on board a Hungarian grain ship outward bound from Trieste. They hid in the ship’s tender, all but buried in coal, appearing after several days, black all over, to persuade the crew to mutiny and alter course for Fiume. “We have bread for eight months!” exulted d’Annunzio. It was the miracle of the loaves and fishes all over again. It was a new Eucharist. “In dark grief yesterday we made our communion in blood. Today, with manly serenity, we make our communion in the bread that God has sent us.” It was a respite, but it was not enough to stop the defections.

  In May 1920, Captain Vadalà left Fiume at the head of 750 men. D’Annunzio rewrote their defection as a purge: “We are no longer
nauseated by the fetor of bad consciences.” He was not being rejected, rather he was rejecting traitors whose moral degeneration made them as horrifying as walking corpses, slimy and putrescent.

  His odious rhetoric stirred his followers to violence. As the departing men approached the armistice line they were set upon by Arditi. Three men were killed and several wounded. The entire front page of La Vedetta was given over to an account of how the Arditi had punished the “traitors,” nobly shedding their own “robust blood.”

  Back in Italy, with the government’s authority gravely undermined by d’Annunzio’s continued defiance, Italians were fighting among themselves. Socialists claimed that 145 of their supporters were killed by police in the year up to May 1920.

  The fascist movement, badly shaken by its electoral defeat, died down, then mutated and grew back in more virulent forms. Its revival began in Italy’s northeastern corner, in Trieste and the surrounding region, just across the Istrian peninsula from d’Annunzio’s Fiume. Trieste had only been Italian again since the armistice, and its population was as mixed as Fiume’s. “Border fascists,” as these groups were known, were as interested in race as they were in ideology. They inveighed against socialism, but their prime opponents were the Slavs who lived among them. Throughout the last months of d’Annunzio’s “five seasons,” fascist violence around Trieste become ever more frequent and more ugly. Newspapers’ offices trashed; Slovenes and Croats harassed and bullied; socialist rallies disrupted; labour offices torched; socialists shot dead.

  Elsewhere, fascism’s second wave of recruits were of a different mind from the original trenchocracy. A military ethos, with its glorification of discipline and hierarchy, gave way to an outlaw mentality. In the immediate aftermath of the war there had been much talk of sacrifice and dedication. New fascists were motivated more by the intoxication of violence perpetrated with impunity.