Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  AUTUMN 1926. After surviving another assassination attempt Mussolini dismisses his Minister for the Interior, and adds the ministry to the many he already holds. Those members of the opposition who withdrew as the “Aventine Secession” are formally deprived of their parliamentary seats. The communist leader Antonio Gramsci is arrested again and tried by Mussolini’s “special tribunal.” He will die in prison. Francesco Nitti, d’Annunzio’s Cagoia, is stripped of his citizenship and goes into exile. The fascist-friendly newspaper L’Impero goes further, calling—in terms as virulent as d’Annunzio’s once were—for Nitti to be condemned to death, “the sentence to be executed by any Italian citizen who can succeed in catching him.”

  Mussolini is proclaimed “Caesar of the Modern Empire.” The ceremony involves much deployment of Roman eagles, fasces and a gilded throne. A textbook designed for the Balilla, the fascist boys’ movement, announces, “Caesar has come to life again in the Duce; he rides at the head of numberless cohorts, treading down all cowardice and all impurities to re-establish the culture and the new might of Rome.”

  D’Annunzio, who has been calling since the previous century for a revival of what Mussolini calls Romanità, receives another big present: a pair of Roman arches donated by the city of Vicenza. Maroni has them reerected in the Vittoriale’s grounds.

  14 JANUARY 1927. Winston Churchill meets Mussolini and is charmed by the dictator’s “gentle and simple bearing.”

  The wild men of the squads are being eliminated. Their violence was useful in bringing Mussolini to power, but they are too anarchic and unpredictable to form part of his new regime. Thousands of them are expelled from the party. Fascism is now respectable.

  Mussolini has learnt another lesson from d’Annunzio. He tells parliament that he intends to strengthen the navy and to “make the air force—in which I believe increasingly—numerically so strong and powerful that the roar of its engines will drown out every other sound in the peninsula, and the surface of its wings will blot out the sun across our land.”

  11 SEPTEMBER, 1927. The anniversary of the march from Ronchi is celebrated with a performance of Jorio’s Daughter in the gardens of the Vittoriale. The Duke of Aosta is there, representing the King, and so are luminaries of the theatrical world including Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and Max Reinhardt. D’Annunzio is in his general’s uniform, and the opening of each act is signalled with cannon shots. The poet’s retreat is becoming—despite his insistence on his desire for tranquillity and solitude—a performance venue. He is planning a pond in the shape of a violin, with a platform at one end on which he can stage dances.

  1927. A new fascist calendar is introduced, full of days sacred to Italy’s glorious past or to its tragic dead. The new year begins on 29 October, and the years are numbered as beginning in 1922.

  War memorials are springing up all over the country. As d’Annunzio has done so many times before, Mussolini repeatedly invokes the 600,000 war dead, urging Italians to be worthy of their sacrifice. Schoolchildren were invited to feel pride in being “born on this soil bathed by so much blood, sanctified by so many martyrs.”

  MORNING, 21 SEPTEMBER 1927. D’Annunzio is in his bedroom. A woman has just left. A disordered bed. An overturned scent bottle. A little gold box in which a few traces of cocaine remain. A cold supper laid out on a table. D’Annunzio hasn’t yet touched the food, but the woman ate some of it during the night, while he returned to his own room mid-“orgy” to wash and change into a fresh silk nightshirt. Now, alone, he eats ravenously: the figs and the prosciutto each remind him of his visitor’s cunt.

  16 MARCH 1928. A new law decrees that in future elections all parliamentary candidates will be selected by the Grand Fascist Council. Giolitti, now aged eighty-six, is the only deputy to speak out against it.

  D’ANNUNZIO’S DEPRESSION, which he gives its Latin name “taedium vitae,” has many causes, but one is the fame which he once so assiduously courted. He says he is a mostro, an ambiguous word meaning both “monster” and “show” (as in freak show).

  Three former legionaries reach the Vittoriale, having travelled all the way from Naples on foot, like pilgrims. D’Annunzio refuses to see them. Another devotee is injured falling from a tree which he has climbed in the hope of catching sight of d’Annunzio walking in his garden. Maroni is set to work to build a girdle of high walls around the domain.

  1929. Mussolini moves his office to the Palazzo Venezia in the heart of Rome. He sets up his desk in a room called the Sala del Mappamondo, which also happens to be the name d’Annunzio has given his library in the Vittoriale. D’Annunzio estimates that he has 75,000 books. Increasingly secluded from the living, he keeps company with those of the dead he considers his peers. He reads Montaigne and Dante. He argues with them in his jotted notes, and agrees with them warmly when they lend their authority to his own opinions.

  D’Annunzio’s “World Map Room” is small, dominated by a collection of fine editions of the Divine Comedy and a five-foot-long model of a Venetian galley suspended from the ceiling. Mussolini’s is immense. One journalist remarks that you need a pair of binoculars to see him across it. The two rooms are both freighted with significance and knowingly designed for their occupants’ glorification. Mussolini’s mosaic floor shows Europa being raped by Jupiter in the form of a bull, just as the world is now to be dominated by the bull-necked Duce. His private secretary reports that women, a different one almost every day, are brought to him in his office for brisk bouts of sex.

  The Palazzo Venezia is Mussolini’s stage, as the Governor’s Palace in Fiume was d’Annunzio’s. Day after day he speaks to his people from his balcony. His gestures are deliberately exaggerated, as d’Annunzio required his actors to be after he had read about the gestural language of the ancient Greek drama. Mussolini grimaces and clenches his fists and throws his arms around. His body language looks impetuous, but it is carefully rehearsed.

  12 MAY 1929. D’Annunzio spends a night with a lesbian. They have thrilling sex, but in the morning he has her taken unceremoniously away. While she is sitting on her suitcase in the station, he eats little cakes with marmalade. He loves these tranquil post-coital breakfasts. He asks for a glass of Mumm champagne, and his sensations, on a fresh morning filled with birdsong, seem to him to transcend human experience.

  10 november 1929. Guido Keller, d’Annunzio’s action secretary from Fiume, is killed in a car crash. D’Annunzio has his body brought to the Vittoriale, keeps vigil over it on the deck of the Puglia, and then buries it in his grounds. He talks to Maroni about plans for a mausoleum.

  The Marchesa Casati visits again. D’Annunzio tells her that the tortoise she gave him has died after eating a surfeit of tuberoses. In a knowing allusion to the tortoise which made its way from de Montesquiou’s reality into Huysmans’s fiction, d’Annunzio has had his favourite animal sculptor Renato Brozzi give it bronze legs and head, and it is placed at the head of the table in the new dining room as a warning—d’Annunzio explains—against gluttony. This room, in his opinion, is the only one in the Prioria which is not “sad.” Scarlet and gold walls, brilliant blue and gold barrel-vaulted ceiling: everything lacquered shiny bright. This is a modern room, hard-edged, slick and jazzy.

  MARCH 1930. Mussolini addresses party leaders. He is parroting d’Annunzio again. The world believes, he says, that Italians cannot fight. It is their task to disprove the slander, by reviving the culture of the mediaeval condottieri who “had temperaments of steel, and brought all their courage, their hatred and their passion to bear in war.” Modern Italians must do likewise because “the prestige of nations is determined almost exclusively by their military glories, their armed might.” This is why d’Annunzio wrote Francesca da Rimini, and why he wanted Italy to go to war in 1915.

  D’Annunzio is working alongside the craftsmen embellishing his Wildean “House Beautiful.” He mellows the stark white of new plaster by brushing it lightly with a mixture of tea and coffee (a trick he learned from an American woman in th
e first years of the century in Venice, when he was happy there with Duse). He paints a length of silk with the signs of the zodiac, a realisation in the real world of the marvellous bedspread he described nearly half a century earlier in his first novel. It is a wedding present for Mussolini’s daughter Edda, who is marrying the son of d’Annunzio’s old friend Ciano.

  He has a collection of scarves and shawls and slips and kimonos and stockings with which to dress up each “Clarissa of passage.” He is a stylist as a well as a lover. Hard to know which he enjoys more, the dressing of a new woman, or her undressing.

  D’ANNUNZIO AND AÉLIS are both crazy about jazz. He sends a servant to Milan to buy records by the dozen. “Jazz-band. Jazz-band. Jazz-band!” (his English). He tells a friend: “We dance every night.”

  The Vittoriale is covered with words—mottoes, warnings, instructions, couplets from d’Annunzio’s own poems. There are snatches from the canticles of St. Francis. There are unorthodox beatitudes: “Blessed are those who die in a just war.” A Latin inscription in the entrance hall introduces the host. “I am Gabriel who stands before the gods/Among the winged brothers uniquely sighted.”

  Mussolini likes mottoes too: “Who dares wins.” “War is to a man what motherhood is to a woman.” “He who hesitates is lost” (this is an old saying, but Mussolini probably lifted it from d’Annunzio’s Glory). “Fidelity is stronger than fire.” “Mussolini is always right.” “Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands and infinite scorn in our hearts.” “Hang the weak.”

  JUNE 1930. The Italians are in Libya. Pietro Badoglio, who played such an equivocal part in the story of d’Annunzio’s Fiume, is the governor. Telling his men they must be “ferocious and inexorable,” he and his military colleagues round up over 100,000 civilians—women, children and old men—march them across the desert (in some cases for over a thousand kilometres) and intern them in barbed-wire compounds near Benghazi. Over the next three years over forty per cent of the internees will die of disease or malnutrition. Libyans resisting the occupation are bombarded from the air with poison gas.

  In celebration, d’Annunzio commissions a medal from Renato Brozzi. Ivory and gold (d’Annunzio relishes the word “chryselephantine”); an elephant, trunk raised; the words “Teneo te Africa.”

  AUGUST 1931. D’Annunzio is an avid reader of Domus, a magazine devoted to interior decoration and edited by the architect and designer Gio Ponti. Many of the craftsmen working on d’Annunzio’s house first came to his attention through its pages. Now Ponti himself is refurbishing d’Annunzio’s bathroom, which has marbled walls and lapis blue sanitary ware. Glass-maker Pietro Chiesa contributes a Japanese-inspired Art Deco window with a swirling design made up of the outstretched wings of herons in shades of blue from darkest indigo to brilliant ultramarine. D’Annunzio is still delighted by new technology, still keeping up with aesthetic fashion.

  He likes to shuffle his possessions. He balances an ancient green glass alembic on a damascened Persian helmet. He likes the effect.

  OCTOBER 1931. Giovanni Giuriati, d’Annunzio’s erstwhile first minister, is Mussolini’s party secretary. Now, as in Fiume, Giuriati is loyal but open-eyed. He is dismayed by Mussolini’s boastfulness and his cynical acceptance of corruption.

  SEPTEMBER 1931. D’Annunzio, who came to Gardone, he said, in search of silence, has now been living for a decade in the hubbub of a building site.

  Maroni is dispatched to Pompeii to study the amphitheatre, and then set to work designing his patron another one big enough to accommodate 1,500 people. He is also building a garage. D’Annunzio still adores cars, and regularly receives Fiat’s latest models as gifts from his wartime associate Giovanni Agnelli. Cars are female, he rules. His favourites are as graceful and lively as women, but much more obedient. He is particularly pleased with his bright yellow one.

  18 FEBRUARY 1932. D’Annunzio asks Mussolini for funds for more building. He is not expanding his living space. Far from it. Antongini likens the Vittoriale to Versailles, that vast palace where visitors are startled by the tininess of Marie Antoinette’s private apartments. D’Annunzio is planning a museum of war, with a concert hall, a cinema and a hanging garden (the latter is never to be realised). There must be a great many Persian carpets and “other beautiful, rich things.” And there must, of course, be first-rate bathrooms.

  All these will be housed in d’Annunzio’s new “citadel” designed by Maroni in the style of Giorgio de Chirico’s architectural fantasies. D’Annunzio calls it Schifamondo—escape from the world—an allusion to the seaside villa in which a part of Pleasure was set, which in turn was named after the fourteenth-century d’Este Palace in Ferrara. Far larger and more pompous in style than the sprawling over-decorated Prioria of which it is an offshoot, it has tall, smooth, vertical surfaces, unadorned arches, the grandeur of height and space and implied power. D’Annunzio hasn’t seen any fascist architecture—he never leaves home now—but, avidly reading illustrated magazines, he has identified, with his usual acute eye for novelty, the essence of the new aesthetic.

  The cinema is a great success. While Maroni acts as projectionist, d’Annunzio watches films in rapt silence. (In public cinemas, films are shown with live musical accompaniment.) He enjoys westerns. His favourite star is Greta Garbo. He likes Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, The Mask of Zorro, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. He shakes with laughter at the antics of Harold Lloyd.

  Mussolini enjoys comic films too. It is after watching Laurel and Hardy that he decides to leave off wearing his bowler hat. He hadn’t previously realised that his favourite headgear might be considered funny.

  SEPTEMBER 1931. D’Annunzio writes about diaphanous blouses, a new fashion of which he heartily approves, and about silk stockings, about the way their colour is only visible at their seams, as the colour of a fine Murano glass is perceptible only in its rim. Memories of Nike have set him off on this train of thought. Now they become more explicit. Menstrual blood on his fingers, the silvery skin on her breasts, his “indefatigable poignard” thrusting away. Sex as a stimulus to writing: writing as a means to sexual stimulation. D’Annunzio’s libido has always been his most helpful muse.

  Eating watermelon, he seeks for similes with which to express his pleasure in its glassy pinks and greens. Sometimes he eats nothing for days on end—his appetite killed by cocaine—but he takes lascivious pleasure in the eventual satisfying of his hunger. He is a connoisseur of spring water. He abominates coffee now—especially coffee with milk, “Puah!’

  He says that the three wonders of the terrestrial world are lobster, the pubic hair of a blonde woman, and the “clean, clean, clean” flavour of oranges. He enjoys delivering dicta of this kind. He also says that “a greyhound or a thoroughbred race horse, Ida Rubinstein’s legs, the body of an Ardito fording the Piave, the form and structure of my highly polished cranium—these are the most beautiful phenomena in the world.”

  He is still taking sleeping pills, which control the pain in his useless eye and relieve him of his exhausting hallucinations. He has vivid dreams from which he awakens as though from a trance. Immured in his gorgeous refuge, he likens himself to Napoleon on St. Helena, to a werewolf, to Bluebeard in his castle, to Nero the artist-tyrant, or to an ancient king, entombed with his treasure “according to ancient rites.”

  He has another gramophone. The futurist painter Carlo Carra calls him “the gramophone-prophet.” This one is in the little ante-room called the Room of the Mask, with its art deco bronze horse and its Murano glass chandelier which is supposed to represent a cluster of cornucopiae, but looks more like a bunch of ice-cream cones. He listens to jazz, foxtrots, spirituals, rumba. He has a record of Josephine Baker’s J’ai deux amours, and plays it until it is all but worn out.

  12 DECEMBER 1931. The ceremonies and liturgy of fascism are becoming ever more elaborate, its choreography more ambitious. Mussolini tells a journalist: “Every revolution creates new forms, new myths and new rites.” It is decreed that ev
ery official meeting will begin, as d’Annunzio’s did in Fiume, with a ritual “Salute to the Duce.”

  An article in the journal Critica Fascista urges Italians to imitate Mussolini (as Christians are enjoined to imitate Christ). A priest declares that Mussolini is St. Francis of Assisi reborn. Pilgrims arrive in his hometown in lorries decorated with flowers. They visit the house in which he was born, reverently kissing the walls, the furniture, the floor. Schoolchildren are being taught a new creed: “I believe in the high Duce—maker of the blackshirts … He came down to Rome; on the third day he re-established the state. He ascended into high office.…” D’Annunzio has been making this kind of political use of sacred rhetoric since before the war, but age hasn’t rendered him devout. Jotting down some thoughts on the contrast between the ethereal “spark” of consciousness and the two “bestialities” of eating and sex, he writes: “God is a tyrant and a buffoon, with a fake crown and cap with bells on … I abominate him!”

  APRIL 1932. D’Annunzio is sixty-nine years old and he is thinking, as he does almost constantly now, about mortality. Life, he writes, is “putrid,” but it has a kind of lovely fuzz like that which gilds the legs of beautiful women. “I run my lips along each of them [life and women].” The pleasure is marvellous, but his lips can sense the imminent rot, the skeleton beneath the luminous flesh. He hears that an old friend has died. He asks his musicians to play him Beethoven’s late string quartets, and he stays up until dawn listening. “Every profound piece of music weeps for the loss of something good.”

  6 JULY 1932. D’Annunzio is in a misanthropic mood. His relatives are milking him of money, he complains, until he feels like a Swiss cow, or like the many-breasted Diana of the Ephesians. His sister and niece come to visit him. He refuses to receive them.