The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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      Hérelle is disappointed. He has been looking forward to earnest literary discussions interspersed with serious sightseeing, but d’Annunzio seems only to want to bask in the sun while swapping smutty jokes with the other young Italians on board, and fretting about the difficulty of getting his shirts properly ironed ready for dinner engagements in port. When they go ashore at Eleusis, Hérelle notes that d’Annunzio ‘hardly looks, chatting all the time of things which have nothing to do with our excursion; about amorous adventures, about society people’. On train journeys he doesn’t feast his eyes on the passing landscape, he puts a silk handkerchief over his face and dozes. In Patras and again in Piraeus he goes off, almost as soon as they’ve landed, to find a prostitute. ‘Truly,’ notes Hérelle in his journal, ‘there is something puerile about Gabriele d’Annunzio.’

      What Hérelle doesn’t grasp is that d’Annunzio’s mind works so fast he doesn’t need to gaze at length in order to receive impressions, or to preserve a solemn silence in order to reflect upon what he sees. Within days of returning from the cruise he will start planning his first play, La Città Morta (The Dead City), inspired by the party’s visit to Mycenae. Eight years later he will write his modern epic, Maia. The visit to a Patras brothel which Hérelle found so sordid (‘These awful women … these sailor’s women … I cannot understand how in Greece one can waste time so foolishly’), will appear transmuted into a half comic, half profoundly sorrowful episode in which Helen of Troy, terribly aged, symbolises the transience of the pleasures and beauties of the flesh.

      December 1895. The Caffè Gambrinus, Florence. André Gide, who is in the café with him, is watching d’Annunzio carefully. ‘He is greedily eating little vanilla ice creams served in cardboard cones. He talks with charming good manners without, I think, making much effort … Nothing about him suggests literature or genius. He has a little, pointed, pale-blond beard, and he speaks with a clear voice, rather icy but soft and wheedling. His glance is quite cold: perhaps he is cruel, or perhaps it is his refined sensuality that makes him seem so to me. On his head he wears a plain black bowler hat.’

      Since returning from Greece, d’Annunzio has begun his relationship with Eleonora Duse. He tells Gide: ‘I have read Sophocles under the crumbling gates of Mycenae.’ This reading must have been brief – d’Annunzio’s visit to Mycenae was over in time for lunch – but the claim fits with his sense of himself as heir to the great classical tradition, and with the project he and Duse are cherishing. They want to build an amphitheatre in the Alban Hills and run it as an al fresco national theatre where d’Annunzio’s plays will be performed in tandem with those of the Greek tragedians.

      The talk turns to contemporary European literature. D’Annunzio tells Gide that he dislikes Maeterlinck’s ‘banality’ and Ibsen’s ‘lack of beauty’. He knows all the French authors’ work.

      ‘With a smile I say to him: “But you’ve read everything!”

      “What can you expect?” he says, as though to excuse himself, “I am Latin.’’’

      Being ‘Latin’ is very important to d’Annunzio’s sense of self. Later it will become the dominant theme of his politics. He calls all Anglo-Saxon or Germanic people ‘barbarians’.

      ‘I’m a terrible one for work,’ he tells Gide. ‘For nine or ten months of the year, non-stop, I work twelve hours a day. I’ve already written a score of books.’ This is only a slight exaggeration. D’Annunzio’s love life is so scandalous that the public thinks of him as a dilettante, but the majority of his time is passed in near solitude and intensely concentrated effort. ‘When I write,’ he says, ‘a sort of magnetical force takes hold of me, like an epileptic. I wrote L’Innocente [his second novel] in three and a half weeks in an Abruzzese convent. If anyone had disturbed me, I would have shot him.’

      ‘All of these things,’ records Gide, ‘he said without any boastfulness, with gentle sweetness.’

      The ability to conjure that same lulling sweetness which entranced Scarfoglio was a gift which never deserted d’Annunzio. Even those who know him well enough to perceive the indifference it masks, find it irresistible. ‘His face lights up in greeting you,’ writes one of his aides years later. ‘And you succumb! You have to succumb! In reality, he doesn’t give a damn!’

      January 1901. Turin. In the five years since his encounter with Gide, d’Annunzio has written several plays and his most celebrated novel, and he has embarked on the exquisite sequence of lyric poems, Alcyone (Halcyon). He and Duse are living in adjacent houses in Settignano, in the hills above Florence, their every outing reported by the gossip columns, their incongruous appearance as a couple (Duse is nearly five years older and several inches taller than her lover) repeatedly caricatured.

      D’Annunzio’s literary career is at its apogee, and he has begun his transition from poet to politician. In 1897 he contested and won an election in his native Abruzzi. In his electoral campaign he hymned the ‘politics of poetry’. Voted out of office after barely two years, he has been writing the poetry of politics, composing odes in an aggressive and nationalist vein. He is in Turin to give a public reading of the latest of them, a thousand-line tribute to Giuseppe Garibaldi.

      Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is in Turin as a contributor to the Parisian journal Gil Blas. Marinetti, who will soon become better known as the impresario and spokesman of the futurist movement, is a prolific journalist. Quizzically, Marinetti observes d’Annunzio in his new role as public speaker. Il Vate, the bard, as he now likes to be styled, is thirty-eight, but he could be any age, or ageless. Tightly buttoned into his dark suit he looks like ‘a little ebony idol with a head of ivory’. His eyes ‘sharpened and electrified by the expectation of triumph’ are ‘strangely resplendent’. His face is ‘pale, dried, as though burnt by the fire of Ambition’. This is not an objective description. Marinetti is jealous of d’Annunzio, whom he sees as ‘corsetted by ambition and pride’. He sneers that ‘at all times and in all places Gabriele is dreaming of turning the world upside down with a well-turned phrase’. This is something Marinetti also dreams of doing, and so far d’Annunzio is proving better at it.

      D’Annunzio takes his place on the platform, and begins his performance with, thinks Marinetti, the smugness of a cordon bleu chef lifting a lid to display a steaming dish of lentils. He reads very slowly, softly beating time with his fist on the table. His lips are preternaturally red: several contemporaries report that he uses make-up.

      The recitation over (it takes an hour and a half) the crowd noisily acclaims him. He half rises to acknowledge the applause, bowing his head. Marinetti notices how the new-fangled electric light is brilliantly reflected off d’Annunzio’s shiny bald pate: a thoroughly modern nimbus for a machine-age hero.

      1904, Settignano. Here is another view of d’Annunzio, this one by an anonymous lady whom he takes to bed one afternoon.

      He is compulsively promiscuous. Within the last three years he has completed his immense poem-cycle, Laudi. His eight-year-long affair with Eleonora Duse is over and he is spending money more prodigally than ever before. His new lover, an aristocratic young widow, the Marchesa Alessandra di Rudinì, is dangerously ill. It is probably during one of Alessandra’s sojourns in hospital that the unknown lady arrives in response to an invitation with the pointed postscript, ‘I shall expect you alone’.

      She is shown into a small sitting room crammed with roses. ‘They were everywhere – in vases, in amphorae, in bowls – and their petals were strewn on the carpets.’ D’Annunzio takes great care over dressing the set for his seductions. Outside the long windows a pergola covered with wisteria casts a mauve veil over the sunlight. The room is suffocatingly overheated, and the atmosphere is further laden with Acqua Nuntia, the scent d’Annunzio has concocted СКАЧАТЬ