Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Towards evening on Boxing Day, when sunset, as d’Annunzio noted, was bathing the sea and the skies with blood red, the warship Andrea Doria fired on the Governor’s Palace. A shell slammed through a window of d’Annunzio’s quarters and exploded in the room below that in which he sat. The windows caved in. Plaster fell from the ceiling. D’Annunzio, seated at a table, was flung forward and temporarily stunned. According to one witness he panicked, screaming: “Help! Save me!” Two of his officers, stumbling over the debris, rushed to grab hold of him. They hustled him out of the room and down the stairs. The courtyard was crowded with Arditi running hither and thither brandishing daggers, rifles and grenades. Pushing though the melee, d’Annunzio’s aides half-carried, half-dragged him to a house safely screened from the waterfront.

  D’Annunzio was to claim that when the shell hit his palace, women, distraught to think of their Commandant in danger, came out onto their balconies, holding up babies and crying out: “This one Italy! Take this one! But not HIM.” Another, more plausible, story goes that there were women beating on the Mayor of Fiume’s door, imploring him to persuade d’Annunzio to spare their children by surrendering.

  The shell had been a warning of what might be to come. The Italian commander delivered an ultimatum. Either d’Annunzio must leave or he would order a further bombardment. The mayor, the bishop and members of the National Council came to beg d’Annunzio to save the city and its people by admitting defeat. He hesitated. According to Antongini, unable to decide the issue, he tossed a coin. Perhaps he really couldn’t make up his mind. Perhaps he preferred to pass some of the responsibility for the humiliating decision on to blind fortune.

  Hundreds of times now he had led massed crowds of people in the chant “Fiume o Morte!” “Italia o Morte!” He had been prepared to fight to the death: the Italian troops who afterwards entered Fiume found enough ammunition to have kept the Legion firing for weeks. The heroic death about which he had so frequently rhapsodised was imminent. The martyr’s crown hovered ready. But as the guns on the Andrea Doria prepared to fire again, d’Annunzio’s tossed coin came down for capitulation. The people of Fiume were to be spared the awful splendour he had for so long been offering them. The apostle of death and glory chose ignominy and life. D’Annunzio agreed to go.

  There were, of course, plenty of voices quick to sneer that for all his valiant speeches it had taken only one shell to make d’Annunzio turn and run. But he was no coward. “I have offered my life a hundred and a hundred times in war, smiling,” he said, and it was true. He would have been glad to die, he said, but the people of Italy, “wallowing in their Christmas debauch,” were unworthy of such a sacrifice.

  He had never quite believed that Italians would open fire on him. When they did, he lost in an instant the magical invulnerability which had allowed him to pass unscathed through an opposing army on the day of the Sacred Entry, and he lost his capacity for self-deception. Almost exactly a year after the people of Fiume had expressed through the plebiscite their disinclination to sacrifice themselves for him, the Andrea Doria’s shell had finally awoken him from his dream of their compliance. He had announced that where he was, was Italy. It took an Italian shell to make it plain to him that on the contrary, he was Italy’s opponent.

  Giolitti, who understood as well as his opponent did how to manipulate the news, had timed his attack carefully. No papers were published during the three days of the Christmas battle, but d’Annunzio, still unsurpassed as a propagandist, had made sure that the radio station Marconi had set up for him in Fiume kept the world informed, hour by hour, of the Legion’s brave resistance. Now he prepared to make a dignified spectacle of defeat.

  The legionaries laid down their arms reluctantly and slowly. They were furious at their own people’s “betrayal” of them. How could Italian troops have agreed to fight them? Why had the Italians at home not risen up in protest against the attack? Why had they been left to be slaughtered? They tore any remaining military badges off their uniforms and replaced them with Fiuman postage stamps.

  D’Annunzio called them all together in the main square. The weather was bleak. The Governor’s Palace stands on a hill above the main square down by the waterfront, with a long flight of steps leading from one to the other. Very slowly d’Annunzio walked down those stony stairs, his wrinkled ivory face paler than ever, wearing a yellow raincoat over his uniform. Seeing the banner he himself had given to La Disperata, he stopped and called on them to keep themselves in readiness. A voice answered him: “You haven’t seen anything yet, Commandant!” Fighting words, but this was the end.

  On 2 January he led a funeral procession several thousand strong to the cemetery on the heights above the town. The coffins of the thirty-three men who had been killed during the “Christmas of Blood” were decked with laurel and Randaccio’s banner laid across them. D’Annunzio spoke sombrely and with the kind of gracious gentleness with which, in his time, he had undone so many women and won over so many men. There were both “loyal” and “rebel” troops among the dead men. D’Annunzio, not strident now but generous in mourning, voiced his belief that if they were to rise again they would “weep, pardon one another, and throw themselves into each other’s arms.” He knelt down. The whole enormous crowd knelt with him. Finally, in silence broken only by the sound of weeping, he led the Italians of Fiume back into their city.

  He had taken up arms against the Italian state, but he still had a greater following in Italy than the government did. He was allowed to go with impunity. His defiance of the law had been outrageous. Giolitti chose to overlook it. There was to be no trial, no punishment.

  The legionaries departed by the train load. Groups of officers came to say farewell to d’Annunzio, who gave each of them a memento. Many of them wept, but few, perhaps, felt as desolate as he did. Looking back as they descended the steps, they saw him at the window, his face pale behind the glass, waving them out of sight.

  He left Fiume on 18 January. Even in defeat he was still an idol. The majority of Fiume’s inhabitants may have been relieved to see the last of him but nonetheless thousands of them turned out to watch him go, and the leader of Trieste’s fascio begged to be allowed to kneel in the dust along the roadside and kiss his hands as he passed by.

  In one day he dwindled from the god-like Commandant into a tired old man. That evening, a misty and bitterly cold one, he arrived in Venice, to be met, as we have seen, by Antongini. Arriving at his apartment, large, gloomy and cluttered with a jumble of stuff salvaged from his various past homes, he went straight to his room. He had nothing to say.

  Clausura

  IN SEPTEMBER 1920, while d’Annunzio was celebrating the proclamation of his new constitution in Fiume, workers in Italy rose up. Some half a million of them went on strike and occupied factories and shipyards, running up red (socialist) or black (anarchist) flags and demanding worker control. For nearly a month Italians lived with the possibility of an imminent revolution. Leon Trotsky was only partly exaggerating when he told the Fourth Congress of the Communist International two years later: “the working class of Italy had, in effect, gained control of the state, of society, of factories.”

  But their leadership was divided. Each factory was an isolated fortress. There was no consensus as to the strikers’ ultimate aims. Largely thanks to Giolitti’s adroit mediation, they were eventually prevailed upon to accept generous terms—higher pay, shorter hours, better conditions. Work resumed, but huge caches of arms and explosives were found in the factories. Nervous capitalists concluded (correctly) that the occupation might have been the beginning of a larger and more violent insurrection. In the face of such a threat the authorities were ready to use any weapon, however questionable. A circular sent to the chiefs of staff suggested that the fascist gangs might be serviceable “against subversive and antinational forces.”

  In November, while d’Annunzio cast around for pretexts to reject the Treaty of Rapallo, there were local elections all over Italy. The socialist
s further alarmed their opponents by making considerable gains. Bologna was one of several cities whose councils they would now dominate. On 21 November the council’s new socialist administration took over. Their opponents responded immediately: 300 armed fascists marched on the town hall. Grenades were thrown. Eleven people were killed.

  Further such attacks followed. The fascists were now organising themselves in squads, and were evolving a style they had taken from d’Annunzio. Like the “corporations” d’Annunzio and de Ambris proposed, the squads had their own banners, their own slogans and rituals. They dressed in black. They poured libations in cherry brandy before a raid. They gave their squads names—honouring dead heroes, or their own prowess. There was one called La Disperata, in knowing reference to Keller’s gang in Fiume. Many of the squadristi had been in Fiume themselves.

  The socialists appeared to be flourishing: fascism was comparatively weak. But, as Mussolini boasted, “a million sheep will always be dispersed by the roar of one lion,” meaning that force will always prevail. Fascist squads, riding in lorries, prowled the country in search of socialists to assault. Mussolini supported them in print. “The Socialist Party is a Russian army encamped in Italy. Against this foreign army, fascists have launched a guerrilla war, and they will conduct it with exceptional seriousness.”

  The communist leader Antonio Gramsci derided fascists as “monkey people” who “make news, not history.” But many Italians agreed with the editor of a Ferrara paper who wrote: “New, young, courageous forces are needed … the Fascists. Only they can arrest the wave of madness which is breaking over Italy.” In the five months following the deadly fracas in Bologna, the Fascist Party’s membership increased tenfold.

  During the war years, and at Fiume, d’Annunzio repeatedly alluded to his previous life as a “mere poet” with incredulous contempt, as though literature was something he had toyed with in the past but then outgrown. He was a warrior, a Commandant. He told his legionaries that there was no melody in him but that of their marching songs. Returned from Fiume, though, he was suddenly in a hurry to get back to work. Notturno, begun in his blindness five years before, had to be revised and amplified and he wanted to get on with it. He needed the money, of course, but he also needed the rapt pleasure he took in the exercise of his literary gift. He wrote to de Ambris: “I am eager for silence after so much noise, and peace after so much war.”

  On the morning after his defeated return to Venice, when he ordered his six helpmeets to find a home for him forthwith, d’Annunzio paused from pacing irritably around his cluttered apartment, fidgeting with papers and trinkets, to take Tom Antongini aside. Each of the searchers was to be dispatched to a different part of northern Italy. D’Annunzio had assigned Lake Garda to Antongini, because, he told him, with that flatteringly confidential air of his, “I feel that my fate impels me to live there.”

  Garda was border country: the frontier with Austria ran through the mountains only a few miles to the north of the lake. Italian nationalists complained that the region’s principal town should be known as “Desenzano-am-See,” so full was it of German tourists and German-speaking residents. In choosing it d’Annunzio was keeping himself close to the field of a dispute which, for him, was as yet unresolved. But there were other reasons for wanting to live in an area where mountains meet water to create a landscape of tremendous natural beauty and a playground for Europe’s leisured cosmopolitans. The poet murmured to his old friend that whereas the other searchers knew only the Commandant of Fiume, Antongini knew Gabriele d’Annunzio, “my tastes, my vices and my virtues.”

  Antongini found him the Villa Cargnacco, an eighteenth-century farmhouse secluded on a steep hillside, screened by cypresses and beech trees, but with immense views of the lake and the mountains on its opposite shore. Way beneath lay the resort town of Gardone Riviera, with its balconied and stuccoed grand hotels, its restaurants and gardens full of magnolia and jasmine, its jetties for pleasure boats. But d’Annunzio’s only neighbours would be the inhabitants of the mediaeval village of Gardone di Sopra (Upper Gardone) and he was surrounded by the kind of landscape—dry rock and terraced olive groves—he had loved in Settignano.

  The house was modest, remarkable only for its setting, for the profusion of roses around it and for its associations. Its previous proprietor, Henry Thode, had been married to Daniela Senta von Bülow, who was Liszt’s granddaughter and Wagner’s stepchild. Confiscated by the Italian state in 1918, the house was still full of its dispossessed owners’ stuff, including Thode’s 6,000-volume library, and the Steinway grand piano on which Daniela, and her mother, Cosima Wagner, had played. D’Annunzio was delighted. He saw his move as a patriotic act: in “Italianising” a German-owned property he was serving his country.

  He moved in on St. Valentine’s Day. He would devote much of the remaining seventeen years of his life to transforming the house out of all recognition. It was his ultimate artwork, purpose-made to outlive him as his memorial and his shrine. Initially he called it the Porziuncola, after St. Francis’s retreat and Duse’s house in Settignano. Later, as its function shifted from refuge to monument, he renamed it the Vittoriale. The word was archaic: d’Annunzio claimed that it came to him by divine inspiration while he listened to a choir. In fact he had found and underlined it in a military dictionary. Whatever its provenance, its significance was clear—of victory, victoryish, victory-thing.

  Work on the house never ceased. D’Annunzio’s architect, Gian Carlo Maroni, became a permanent member of his household. Masons and glaziers, sculptors and plasterers, painters and goldsmiths, smiths and woodworkers were kept busy for years refining and elaborating the poet’s extravagantly detailed and bizarre vision. The Vittoriale (which has been preserved as he left it) became the outward and visible manifestation of his peculiar personality: all his brilliance and all his perversity rendered in concrete form.

  All the rooms have names: the Room of the Leper, the Dalmatian Oratory, the Corridor of the Way of the Cross. They are dark and thickly ornamented, each one a piece of installation art dense with significance. The Room of the Lily represents d’Annunzio’s extraordinarily well-furnished mind: it contains over 3,000 books, fastidiously arranged, a harmonium and tiny dark niches that he called “thinking places.” The Room of the Stump, tucked away up a flight of stairs, expresses a more unsettling aspect of his psyche. It is another study, lined with books in dark-panelled bookcases, but its ceiling is patterned with the image of a severed hand.

  Everything in the Vittoriale is placed on something else. A rosary is draped over a statuette which stands on a piece of embroidered velvet, which covers a majolica box which is set upon a carved table which stands on an oriental rug. Every window is filled with stained glass and curtained with heavy, rich fabric; every available wall or ceiling space is encrusted with plaques and painted mottoes. There are casts of the Elgin marbles. There are Buddhas and Madonnas. There are reliquaries and swords, bronze animals and ecclesiastical furniture. There are vases and shawls and tapestries and numerous glass lampshades shaped like bowls of fruit. And in among all the artsy clutter there are modern relics—the steering wheel of a speedboat, a paintbox, a rusty nail. Max Beerbohm, who visited the Vittoriale in the last months of d’Annunzio’s life, wrote: “If Aladdin could come back to life and were admitted to the house and domain he would say to himself, rather ruefully: ‘My palace was comparatively insipid. My palace was rather pot-au-feu.’ ”

  On 28 October 1922, Mussolini seized control of the Italian state. That very day he wrote to d’Annunzio: “I do not ask you to line up at our side, though this would avail us greatly; but we are sure that you will not set yourself against this marvellous youth which is fighting for your and our Italy.” D’Annunzio, never one to line up at anyone else’s side, sought refuge in incoherence. His letter in reply refers to his “sadness and spiritual uneasiness” at the news but he promises to put his “robust and resolute shoulder to the wheel.” He further promises (as though addressin
g a criminal), “to see nothing, to hear nothing.” This latter promise he kept. “With the advent of fascism,” wrote Tom Antongini, “Gabriele d’Annunzio’s political activity came to an end … The proclaimer of the war, the hero of the heavens, of the sea, of the slopes of the Carso and of the miraculous gesture of Fiume entered the realms of Legend.” For the rest of d’Annunzio’s life he stayed at home and cultivated his garden, his collections, his house, his private museum, his literary reputation, his wardrobe, his increasingly deviant sexual tastes, his escalating drug habit and the cult of himself.

  He worked. He wrote little that was absolutely new after his return from Fiume, but he diligently revised and edited and expanded his existing oeuvre. Luisa Baccara was there. She stayed with him to the end of his life, and so did Aélis, the housekeeper-concubine he had employed in France in 1912. His wife joined him from time to time, living intermittently in a separate house in the grounds. He continued to amuse himself with speedy machines. He raced motor boats on the lake. He acquired an enormous bright yellow car.

  He received many visitors although, skulking unseen like the Minotaur in the private chambers of his labyrinthine dwelling, he was hard of access. Admirers, disciples and old friends alike were kept waiting for hours, days, or sometimes even weeks, at a time, housed in the Vittoriale’s guest rooms or a nearby hotel, before d’Annunzio would deign to grant them an audience. Some of the less-favoured went away without ever having laid eyes on him. But though the distinguished might be disappointed, others, more obscure, were welcomed. Like the Minotaur, d’Annunzio required his regular shipments of youthful sacrifices. A stream of new young women passed through his bed, many of them prostitutes, some local girls, some enthusiastic admirers who travelled from all over Europe to offer themselves to the poet and hero. He had always prided himself on his sexual vigour, now his notebooks are full of self-celebratory descriptions of his “orgies’: nights when, powered by drugs, he would fuck for hours on end.