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The Writer, Seducer, Aviator, Proto-Fascist,

Megalomaniac Prince Who Shaped Modern Italy
From Gabriele D'Annunzio to Silvio Berlusconi

BY JONATHAN GALASSI
February 9, 2014

NotturnoBy Gabriele DAnnunzio, Translated and annotated by Stephen Sartarelli, Preface by

Virginia Jewiss(Yale University Press)

PleasureBy Gabriele DAnnunzio, Translated by Lara Gochin Raaelli, Introduction by Alexander

Stille (Penguin Classics)

Gabriele DAnnunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of WarBy Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Alfred A.
Knopf)

Gabriele DAnnunzio (there seems to be no agreement, even in Italian, about whether the
particle should be capitalized) presents as a gure of splendiferous awfulness today: the very
personication of Italian decadence, a creature of unembarrassed and unbridled appetitefor
fame, for luxury, for thrills of all kinds. He dubbed himself LImmaginico, the Great Creator or
Image-maker, and oered himself as a Nietzschean sort of Renaissance man, espousing a
gospel of violence that encouraged what was then the most disastrous war of all time. Along
the way he gave Italian Fascism a style and an approach to politics that helped bring on an
even more destructive cataclysm.

DAnnunzios aping of princelysprezzaturaof what Mussolini later called Romanit

epitomized the misappropriation of Italys ancient glory that the newly edged Kingdom
needed to prop upits membership in the colonial club of modern Europe.In Britain, Lucy
Hughes-Halletts biography, which won last years Samuel Johnson Prize, appeared under the
title The Pike, because DAnnunzios opportunistic air for sensing what was new and

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inuential led his onetime friend the French novelist Romain Rolland to compare him to a
predatory sh lurking aoat and still, waiting for ideas. As shecreates her rich,
eervescent, astute, involving portrait of the notorious poet, seducer, and preacher of war,
Hughes-Hallett spares us the whole ghastly blow-by-blow, focusing instead on representative
vignettes while leaving us to understand that there were many more such in her subjects
unagging, jam-packed existence. It is a canny strategy that prevents her reader from sinking
under the weight of DAnnunzios overweening narcissism; it also underlines the unswervingly
exterior character of her relentless subject.

DAnnunzio started as a writera

novelist and a playwright and above all Time has not yet forgiven
a poetbut he left literature behind in D'Annunzio.
the last twenty years of his life to
become a public man.Alexander Stille,
in his introduction to a new translation of DAnnunzios rst novel,Pleasure, says that he lived
writing and wrote living, a dynamic and explosive combination that went on for two decades,
until his political ambitions led him to more or less abandon art.Wretchedness of
excess,arrivisme, compulsive seductiveness, priapism, preening supermanismDAnnunzio to
some Italians personies the nations worst vices, and his egregious journey dramatizes the
transition out of the stultifying bourgeoisGtterdammerungof the later nineteenth century
that we experience by way of Wagner, Nietzsche, the Symbolists, and Proust.

DAnnunzio announced the coming change in 1893, when he declaredthe end ofverismo, or
naturalism, and the failure of positivism: Science is incapable of repopulating the deserted
heavens, of restoring happiness to those souls whose ingenuous peace has been destroyed....
[W]e no longer want truth, give us the dream.

Dreams, desires, aspirations were his stock-in-trade all his life. He was born in 1863, the son of
an illegitimate small landowner and wine merchant who became the mayor of Pescara, a man
of the eshself-indulgent and corpulent, Hughes-Hallett calls him, who disgusted his son in
later life because his fathers sexual proigacy and compulsive overspending were a horrible
caricature of his own. The father clearly endowed the son with an unshakeable sense of self,
sending him to a renowned boarding school outside Florence and paying for the publication of
his rst book of poems. (The poet himself put it about that he had died before publication to
encourage sympathetic reviews.)

He was a climber in every conceivable way. After enrolling in the university at Rome, he
became a society journalist, signing himself Duca Minimo. He married a young aristocrat and
had three sons with her (a daughter, by another mother, would be born in 1893), but he soon
abandoned wife and children for other liaisons. Short and physically unprepossessing, some
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said ugly, he nevertheless possessed an androgynous intensity that was irresistible to many,
and had constant aairs, often several at once, throughout his life. DAnnunzio seems to have
been an almost involuntary seducer. Today he might be called a sex addict; indeed, there is an
aura of needy exhibitionism to much of his behavior.

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Rmi Andron

Harold Acton wrote that DAnnunzios high-pitched voice was intensely

human, almost bi-sexual, since its virility alternated with feminine sweetness. His intonation
seemed the ne ower of the Italian Renaissance and made him the idol of young Italy even
when the poet was a shriveled old man with a glass eye. Though his literary reputation today
rests on his poetic achievements, he owed his international fame to a string of decadent
novels, beginning in 1889 with the shockingly explicitIl piacere,orPleasure,a kind of portrait
of the artist as an irresistible, corrupt young aesthete cutting a wide voluptuary swath across
aristocratic Rome, which has now been lushly translated in an uncensored version by Lara
Gochin Raaelli.

DAnnunzioscalculatedlytitillatingctions were wildly successful in Europe, though they

struck more puritanical Anglo-American sensibilities as uncomfortably over-ripe. Henry James
wrote in 1902 that DAnnunzios doctrine of beauty at any price, beauty appealing alike to the
sense and the mind was distasteful and nervous-making, like many another Mediterranean
product: a queer high-avored fruit from overseas ... not found on the whole really to agree
with us. For James, it is fundamentally DAnnunzios solipsism that is not thoroughly
digestible: the only ideas he urges upon us are the erotic and the plastic, or malleable, which
he makes into interchangeable faces of the same gure. More straightforwardly,The New
York Timescalled the novels seducing Italian protagonist evil and entirely selsh and
corrupt, though the earlier translation by Georgina Harding was so heavily bowdlerized
thatThe Child of Pleasure, as it was called, had no sex in it. DAnnunzio was preaching in his
ction what he practiced in life. As James observed elsewhere, though his work is nothing if
not literary, we see at no point of it where literature or life begins or ends, and he often used
letters to his lovers detailing their intimate encounters asaides-mmoirein composing his love
scenes. Pentella [his nickname for one lovers vagina] has never been so soft and hot and
velvety as during thosefour orgasmsbefore Saturday lunch, he wrote to one of his on-again-
o-again partners in his later years.

More or less on the heels of the novels, DAnnunzio wrote a series of equally scandalous and
popular plays, many of them vehicles for his paramour Eleanora Duse, the great rival of Sarah
Bernhardt. The vicissitudes of their relationship were news, and enhanced the notoriety of
both of them.

It would be hard to overestimate DAnnunzios fame in Europe at the turn of the century. He
lived in what would later be called movie-star luxury, renting furnished houses only to
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refurbish them according to extravagant specications calculated to reect what Rolland called
his meretricious glory. He once told a visitor, I am a better decorator and upholsterer than I
am a poet or novelistand his opinion of his literary gifts was not modest. The decoration of
the villa that he rented in Settignano above Florence was gorgeous enough to be worthy of a
Renaissance lord, and involved massive pseudo-Renaissance furniture of his own design. He
kept the house heated to tropical temperatures.

In 1897, DAnnunzio stood for Parliament as an independent, calling himself the candidate for
Beauty and promising a politics of poetry, asserting in a self-consciously Nietzschean vein
that I am beyond right and left, as I am beyond good and evil. The future Futurist artist and
ideologue Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was riveted by the strident modernity of DAnnunzios
provocative candidacyconverting literary fame into political inuence, celebrity into
power. Once elected, however, DAnnunzio had little interest in the mechanics of politics,
which he considered beneath him. His one term in Parliament proved to be his sole experience
of legitimate public oce.

DAnnunzios debtshe was always proigate, in spite, or because, of the large sums he earned
as a celebrated writer and man of the theaterforced him to move to Paris in 1910, where he
collaborated with Debussy, wrote a libretto for Mascagni, made a lm, and hobnobbed with the
likes of Robert de Montesquiou, the model for Prousts Baron de Charlus. According to the
American whiskey heiress andsalonisteNatalie Barney: He was the rage. A woman who had
not slept with him made herself ridiculed. Among his many conquests was the American
lesbian artist Romaine Brooks, who painted his portrait.

World War I brought DAnnunzio to his second calling. The war represented a crucial
opportunity for Italy to advance its imperialist agenda, and he had long been advocating it.
Italy is no longer a pension de famille, a museum ... but a living nation, he declared in one
interventionist demagogic speech, to general acclaim. The prospect of mass deaths thrilled
him; Benedetto Croce was repelled by his seeming to enjoy war, even to enjoy slaughter. As
Hughes-Hallett puts it, The politics of beauty [was revealing] itself as a politics of blood.
Among his ardent supporters were Marinettis Futurists, who had recognized early on that,
for all his fondness for classical art and mediaeval knick-knacks, DAnnunzio was a fellow
modern, a poet who rhapsodized over warships and steelworks, and who set a higher value on
energy than he did on virtue. The Futurists, too, exalted violence and despised democracy.
They too were adepts of the cult of Italy as a future bellicose and expansionist great power:
the unheroic reality was not acceptable. Marinetti never acknowledged it, but he was
DAnnunzios noisiest and most brilliant disciple, Hughes-Hallett writes.

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DAnnunzio had become enthralled with ying, which he saw as the ne

plus ultra of contemporary heroism. He had played a prominent part at the famous Brescia air
show in 1909, riding with the American aviator Glenn Curtiss and watched by Ka a, Puccini,
and the king, among thousands of others. In France, he had met the great Blriot, whom he
considered a modern avatar of the Frankish knights. He foresaw aviations military
signicance and had urged the Italian government to establish an air force well before the war.

The war at last brought him a sense of purpose and engagement equal to his restlessness. He
returned to Italy in 1915 and volunteered as a ghter pilot, taking up residence in a gem-like
palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice lent him by an Austrian prince. He was in seventh
heaven. As Hughes-Hallett writes, To set out on a dangerous mission was, for him, to achieve
an ecstasy he compared with that known by the great mystics. He formed passionate
attachments to his fellow airmen, whom he gloried as martyrs and sacricial victims when
they died. DAnnunzios missions, though greatly daring and dangerous, were also self-
advertising performances, often more symbolic than militarily signicant. As Hughes-Hallett
puts it, Flying, he was yering, dropping leaets over Trieste and, famously, over Vienna, as
the war neared its end.

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In January 1916, he suered a detached retina during an air raid and was forced to lie
absolutely still for several months to save his other eye. During his enforced convalescence, he
composed a text in poetic prose written line by line on slips of paper handed to him by his
daughter Renata. These formed the basis for his memoir,Notturno, which appeared in 1921,
and has recently been published in a supple English translation by Stephen Sartarelli. It was
DAnnunzios entry into the steam-of-consciousness sweepstakes, his most openly modernist
work, admired by many, including Hemingway, in spite of the fact that he considered its
author a jerk. Notturnois DAnnunzios last major contribution to literature. It makes use of
modernist techniques of selectivity and parataxis, but its solipsism feels unsurprisingly in sync
with his earlier work.The incipient rot that James sussed out early on wafts across the
Venetian night:

O art, pursued with such passion, glimpsed with such desire!

Desperate love of the word inscribed for the ages!
Mystical thrill that sometimes fashioned the word from my very esh and blood!
Fire of inspiration suddenly fusing the ancient and the new in an unknown alloy!

For DAnnunzio and his cohorts, the chance for a glorious wiping clean of the historical slate
was disappointed by the Italians unheroic defeat at Caporetto, and by the victors
contemptuous disregard at Versailles for Italys territorial expectations. Many focused
obsessively on the recovery of unredeemed Italian-speaking territories a long the Adriatic
that had belonged to Austria, and DAnnunzio made himself the poster boy for the Irredentist
cause. We fought for a greater Italy. We want a greater Italy. I say that we have prepared the
mystic space for her appearance, he intoned. (It is worth noting perhaps that the orchestra pit
in an Italian opera house is called thegolfo mistico, the mystic gulf.)

When Wilson and the Allies decided that the Italian-speaking Dalmatian port of Fiume (known
today as Rijeka) would be given to the new state of Yugoslavia, DAnnunzio saw his chance. He
called on the Italian government to occupy the city, and in September 1919, after they failed to
do so, he took matters into his own hands. He marched on Fiume at the head of a cadre of
Arditi or Daredevil storm troopers dressed in the black and silver uniforms and black fezzes
that would be aped, like so much else that was DAnnunzian, by the Fascists. Greeted with
cheers by the Italian-speaking locals, DAnnunzio announced that he had annexed Fiume,
expecting that the government would take control, but there was no reaction. Suddenly the
poet-politician found himself in charge of a city in the grip of a delirious cocaine-enhanced
bacchanal. Eventually Fiume, with DAnnunzio as its duce, declared its independence.

The practicalities of governing his new city-state interested him less than what David
Cannadine has called the Ornamentalism of uniforms, titles, ceremonies. The style of his rule
in Fiume was to prove highly inuential on the look and liturgy of Fascism. But the Fiume
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experiment attracted political radicals of all stripes, and the so-called Carnaro Constitution
also reected the contributions of unionists, syndicalists, socialists, and anarchists.
DAnnunzio later wrote that he wanted to establish equilibrium between two fundamental
human tendencies, the need for liberty, for without that there are only slaves, and the need for
association, because without that there is no society. William Pfa, in his incisive portrait of
DAnnunzio in The Bullets Song (2004), has described it as an eort to reconcile a lyrical
anarchism and syndicalism with precedents from the Renaissance and Rome; he has also
called it a work of narcissism.

What happened in Fiume was not meant to stay in Fiume but rather to foment political unrest
that would allow DAnnunzio to assume absolute power in Rome. Instead, he was outwaited
and eventually outwitted by Giovanni Giolittis government, as enthusiasm for the Fiume
adventure waned. In January 1921, DAnnunzio capitulated and left, unapprehended and
unchastised, for Venice.

Afterward, DAnnunzio lived a kind of posthumous existence at Il Vittoriale, the villa above
Lake Garda that he gradually transformed into a monument and a museum to himself, waiting
in vain for the call to save Italy. His relations with Mussolini, who had marched on Rome
himself and claimed power not long after Fiume, were suspicious and uncomfortable, though
the duce paid him a series of ceremonial visits and showered him with gifts, including the
plane in which he had performed one of his famous stunts. The Italian state acquired Il
Vittoriale as a national monument, and in 1932, the king bestowed on DAnnunzio the title of
prince of Monte Nevoso.

DAnnunzio wrote little in his later years. He revised and expandedNotturno, produced a book
of memoirs, and oversaw a collected edition of his works. He seems to have become addicted
to cocaine, which had been used in the war to enhance pilots and soldiers concentration, and
he continued to have prodigious amounts of sex, often with prostitutes. Several of his sta,
including one of his girlfriends, were reportedly spies, working either for Mussoliniwho
nervously courted DAnnunzios approval, which he was careful not to give fully until it was
too lateor for the Nazis. DAnnunzio detested Hitler, and he urged Mussolini not to join the
Axis. He died in 1938, on the verge of another war he had done much to bring about.

Hughes-Hallett analyzes DAnnunzio in the Jamesian manner: she holds him up to the light as
an overly perfumed, deplorably behaved Continental, an exotic post-Nietzschean specimen
whose irresponsible aestheticizing of everythingfrom love to warinamed a lethal
irrationalism. She quotes the historian Emilio Gentile to the eect that Fiume represented a
new way of doing politicsone that is widely operative today. DAnnunzio remains a potent,
problematic gure in Italy. InLa Grande Bellezza, Paolo Sorrentinos gorgeous Felliniesque
lm about contemporary Roman social and artistic decay, which is much preoccupied with
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aesthetic fakery, the protagonist chides one of his friends, a would-be playwright, for
mimicking DAnnunzios oridity. Something of his priapic dandyism lives on, too, in the
loucheness of Silvio Berlusconi, which proved greatly attractive to Italian voters for a
generation.

Yet DAnnunzio was arguably the major poet of his time,something that Hughes-Halletts
excellent book doesnt delve into very deeply.He was the self-declaredprotagonist of the triad
with Carducci and Pascoli that dominated turn-of-the-century letters (Italians like their great
poets to come in threes), and his reputation as a writer today rests on his voluminous poetic
production. The Mondadori Meridiano edition includes two volumes ofVersi damore e di
gloria,orPoems of Love and Glory, that add up to more than 1,600 pages of verse.DAnnunzios
seductive lyricism rolls forward, as ineluctable as silken lava, smothering everything it
encounterswomen, nature, history, foreign territoryin an annihilating campaign of aural
seduction:

O Tripoli, cittdi fellona,

tu proverai se Roma abbia calcagna
di bronzo e se il suo giogo ferreo sia.

[O Tripoli, felonious city,

youll discover whether Rome has heels
of bronze, and if its yoke is iron.]

Too much of this reads like a parody of itself today.But there is no gainsaying the fact that at
his best DAnnunzio produced verse of voluptuary melliuousness whose ripeness is essential
to its charm.Eugenio Montale, who became the apex of the next Italian poetic triad, which
included Ungaretti and Saba, reminds us how bourgeois families gathered under the
breakfast-room awning or in the shade of the garden to hear DAnnunziosCanzoni
doltremare[orSongs from Overseas], which were printed in large type in the Corriere della
Sera,read aloud. Montales own classic rst book,Ossi di seppia, can be protably read as a
stringent modernist reaction to the magniloquence of DAnnunzios retrograde gorgeousness.

Perusing Montales critical writings, one gets a vivid sense of the deep shadow that
DAnnunzio cast for those who followed. Montale writes (about Guido Gozzano, and perhaps
about himself) that he had toattraversare, to pass through, DAnnunzio, in order to arrive at
territory of his own. He also allows that you could admire Yeats (as you could, in part, admire
DAnnunzio) without believing anything he said.

Montale here is evoking Audens great elegy for Yeats, which famously argued that poetrys
ultimate value has nothing to do with the opinions it expresses:
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Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent,
And indierent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Does DAnnunzio belong on Audens index of poetic miscreants? Auden later sought to
suppress these lines (and others), but they have proved indelible. Is he giving voice to the
writers self-glorifying credo?Is he scoring timely political points of his own, which he later
thought better of?Or has he put his nger on poetrys deeper purpose?

DAnnunzio would have rejected Audens claim that poetry makes nothing happen, and his
own story seems to suggest otherwise. With typical assurance, he subscribed to an Italian
model that goes back at least as far as Dante: the civic poet, the writer as engaged public man.
We like to give imaginative writers the last word, but only after it has been rened in the
alembic of history, with the contingent meanings ltered out. Poetrys survival as a way of
happening, a mouth essentially meant for praise, is the burden of Audens elegy for a poet
whose politics he detested but whose art he revered. Engagement, Auden seems to be
suggesting, tends to diminish and to compromise the essential witness-bearing work of the
poet, whoau fondmay be a bit naive. Take Pound, a marvelous wordsmith who turned out to
be unequipped to play with the big boys. Or Eliot, in another key. Or Auden himself.

Dantesor Popes, or Byrons, or Leopardispolitics have no relevance today, but their

expression of them is immortal. Kipling, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Auden, too, are well on their
way to becoming the gures into which eternity will nally change them, as Mallarmput it.
But time has not yet forgiven DAnnunzio, and Italians are still wrestling with his torturous
case.

Jonathan Galassis translation of the poetry of Primo Levi will be published later this year.

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