THE PIKE

Gabriele d’Annunzio

Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT

COPYRIGHT

4th Estate

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This ebook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2013

Copyright © Lucy Hughes-Hallett 2013

Map © John Gilkes

Cover shows d’Annunzio, 1919 (postcard, 14 x 9cm) by Ivo Tijardović (1895–1976)

The right of Lucy Hughes-Hallett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN 9780007213955

Ebook Edition © March 2017 ISBN: 9780007356515

Version: 2017-03-17

PRAISE

From the reviews of The Pike:

‘A magnificent portrait of a preposterous character whose life is a scarcely credible saga of ambition and outrageous exploits … His biographer has done him full justice’ FRANCIS WHEEN, Mail on Sunday

‘A bland chronology is the opposite of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s beautiful, strange and original structure. The Pike sets out the inner life of this fascinating man in a dazzling jumble of fragments and obsessions … An extraordinarily intimate portrait of him … we feel we are inside his life … If you want to understand fascism, you must start with d’Annunzio; and if you wish to understand him, then here is your book’ DANIEL SWIFT, New Statesman

‘Hugely enjoyable … Hughes-Hallett has a great talent for encapsulating an era or an attitude with an arresting one-liner … The fact that almost 700 pages flew by bears testimony to how pleasurable and readable those pages were’ TOBIAS JONES, Sunday Times

‘A deeply evocative new biography … She is a strong match for her subject, something that so many of the women in d’Annunzio’s life were lamentably not. Her style is rich, ironic and pugnacious; she jousts willingly with him and the reader becomes a spectator of this subtle and fascinating contest’ Economist

‘Hughes-Hallett dances her way through this extraordinary life in a style that is playful, punchy and generally pleasing’ IAN BIRRELL, Observer

‘It takes courage to write a biography like this one … its exhilarating virtuosity [is] d’Annunzian in the best sense’ JONATHAN KEATES, Sunday Telegraph

‘Engrossing and superbly written … Lucy Hughes-Hallett has written an eminently readable biography. Its strength lies in her ability to tease out and examine the strands of D’Annunzio’s complex personality in ways that continually illuminate how creativity can coexist with inhumane thought and action’ CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN, Times Literary Supplement

‘Exceptional … Hughes-Hallett has done an admirable job’ STUART KELLY, Scotsman

‘A vivid picture of the flow of ideas and inspirations in d’Annunzio, the meshing of work and character. The whole is an enthralling curiosity, much like d’Annunzio’s final epic monument to himself, the Vittoriale villa above Lake Garda’ ROBERT GORDON, Literary Review

‘[A] richly kaleidoscopic biography … In this scintillating study, full of wit and irony, she plumbs the depths of D’Annunzio’s horrible fascination’ PIERS BRENDON, The Oldie

for Lettice and Mary, with love

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

DEDICATION

I - ECCE HOMO

THE PIKE

SIGHTINGS

SIX MONTHS

II - STREAMS

WORSHIP

GLORY

LIEBESTOD

HOMELAND

YOUTH

NOBILITY

BEAUTY

ELITISM

MARTYRDOM

SICKNESS

THE SEA

DECADENCE

BLOOD

FAME

SUPERMAN

VIRILITY

ELOQUENCE

CRUELTY

LIFE

DRAMA

SCENES FROM A LIFE

SPEED

KALEIDOSCOPE

THE DOGS OF WAR

III - WAR AND PEACE

WAR

PEACE

THE CITY OF THE HOLOCAUST

THE FIFTH SEASON

CLAUSURA

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NOTES

READ ON…

ALSO BY LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT

PICTURE CREDITS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

D’Annunzio – a portrait painted in 1910 by his lover, Romaine Brooks

I

ECCE HOMO

THE PIKE

IN SEPTEMBER 1919, Gabriele d’Annunzio – poet, aviator, nationalist demagogue, war hero – assumed the leadership of 186 mutineers from the Italian army. Driving in a bright red Fiat so full of flowers that one observer mistook it for a hearse (d’Annunzio adored flowers), he led them in a march on the harbour city of Fiume in Croatia, part of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire over whose dismemberment the victorious Allied leaders were deliberating in Paris. An army representing the Allies lay across the route. Its orders from the Allied high command were clear: to stop d’Annunzio, if necessary by shooting him dead. That army, though, was Italian, and a high proportion of its members sympathised with what d’Annunzio was doing. One after another its officers disregarded instructions. It was, d’Annunzio told a journalist later, almost comical the way the regular troops gave way, or deserted to follow in his train.

By the time he reached Fiume his following was some 2,000 strong. He was welcomed into the city by rapturous crowds who had been up all night waiting for him. An officer passing through the main square in the early hours of that morning saw it filled with women wearing evening dress and carrying guns, an image that nicely encapsulates the nature of the place – at once a phantasmagorical party and a battleground – during the fifteen months that d’Annunzio would hold Fiume as its Duce and dictator, in defiance of all the Allied powers.

Gabriele d’Annunzio was a man of vehement, but incoherent, political views. As the greatest Italian poet, in his own (and many others’) estimation, since Dante, he was il Vate, the national bard. He was a spokesman for the irredentist movement, whose enthusiasts wished to regain all those territories which had once been, or so they claimed, Italian, and which had been left irredenti (unredeemed) when Italians liberated themselves from foreign rulers in the previous century. His overt aim in coming to Fiume had been to make the place, which had a large Italian population, a part of Italy. Within days of his arrival it became evident this aim was unrealistic. Rather than admitting defeat, d’Annunzio enlarged his vision of what his little fiefdom might be. It was not just a patch of disputed territory. He announced that he was creating there a model city-state, one so politically innovative and so culturally brilliant that the whole drab, war-exhausted world would be dazzled by it. He called his Fiume a ‘searchlight radiant in the midst of an ocean of abjection’. It was a sacred fire whose sparks, flying on the wind, would set the world alight. It was the ‘City of the Holocaust’.

The place became a political laboratory. Socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and some of those who had begun, earlier that year, to call themselves fascists, congregated there. Representatives of Sinn Féin and of nationalist groups from India and Egypt arrived, discreetly followed by British agents. Then there were the groups whose homeland was not of this earth: the Union of Free Spirits Tending Towards Perfection who met under a fig tree in the old town to talk about free love and the abolition of money, and YOGA, a kind of political-club-cum-street-gang described by one of its members as ‘an Island of the Blest in the infinite sea of history’.

D’Annunzian Fiume was a Land of Cockaigne, an extra-legitimate space where normal rules didn’t apply. It was also a land of cocaine (fashionably carried in a little gold box in the waistcoat pocket). Deserters and adrenalin-starved war veterans alike sought a refuge there from the dreariness of economic depression and the tedium of peace. Drug dealers and prostitutes followed them into the city: one visitor reported he had never known sex so cheap. So did aristocratic dilettantes, runaway teenagers, poets and poetry lovers from all over the Western world. Fiume in 1919 was as magnetic to an international confraternity of discontented idealists as San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury would be in 1968; but, unlike the hippies, d’Annunzio’s followers intended to make war as well as love. They formed a combustible mix. Every foreign office in Europe posted agents in Fiume, anxiously watching what d’Annunzio was up to. Journalists crammed the hotels.

D’Annunzio was already a bestselling novelist, a revered poet, and a dramatist whose premieres were attended by royalty and triggered riots. Now he boasted that in Fiume he was making an artwork whose materials were human lives. Fiume’s public life was a nonstop street-theatre performance. One observer likened life in the city to an endless fourteenth of July: ‘Songs, dances, rockets, fireworks, speeches. Eloquence! Eloquence! Eloquence!’

By the time his occupation of Fiume came to an end, d’Annunzio’s dream of an ideal society had deteriorated into a nightmare of ethnic conflict and ritualised violence. For over a year it suited none of the great powers to bestir themselves to eject him, but when, eventually, an Italian warship arrived in the harbour and bombarded his headquarters, he capitulated after a five-day fight. But for the duration of his command, Fiume was – precisely as he had intended it should be – the stage for an extraordinary real-life drama with a cast of thousands and a worldwide audience, one in which some of the darkest themes of the next half-century’s history were announced.

D’Annunzio believed he was working to create a new and better world order, a ‘politics of poetry’. So did observers from every point on the political spectrum, from the conservative nationalists who eagerly volunteered to join his Legion, to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who sent him a pot of caviar and called him the ‘only revolutionary in Europe’. His followers saw Fiume as a place where life could begin afresh – rinsed clean of all impurities, freer and more beautiful than ever before. But the culture created there rapidly took on a character which, seen in retrospect, is hideous. Black uniforms decorated with lightning flashes which made malign supermen of their wearers; military spectacles staged as though they were sacred rites; a cult of youth which degenerated into licensed delinquency; the bullying of ethnic minorities; the never-ending sequence of processions and festivals designed to glorify an adored leader: all of these phenomena are now recognisable as typical of the politics, not of poetry but of brute power. Later, Benito Mussolini encouraged the writing of a biography of d’Annunzio entitled The John the Baptist of Fascism. D’Annunzio, who saw the fascist leader as a vulgar imitator of himself, was not happy with the suggestion that he was a mere harbinger, preparing the way for Mussolini’s Messiah. But though d’Annunzio was not a fascist, fascism was d’Annunzian. The black shirts, the straight-armed salute, the songs and war cries, the glorification of virility and youth and patria and blood sacrifice, were all present in Fiume three years before Mussolini’s March on Rome.

A great deal has been written about the economic, political and military circumstances in which fascism and its associated political creeds flourished. D’Annunzio’s story provides a lens through which to examine those movements from another angle, to identify their cultural antecedents, and the psychological and emotional needs to which they pandered. To watch d’Annunzio’s trajectory from neo-Romantic young poet to instigator of a radical right-wing revolt against democratic authority is to recognise that fascism was not the freakish product of an exceptional historical moment, but something which grew organically out of long-established trends in European intellectual and social life.

Some of those trends were apparently unexceptionable. D’Annunzio was a man of broad and deep culture, thoughtful, widely read in the classics and in modern literature. He spoke for Beauty, for Life, for Love, for the Imagination (his capitals) – all of which sound like good things. Yet he helped to drag Italy into an unnecessary war, not because he believed it would bring any advantage but because he craved cataclysmic violence. His adventure in Fiume fatally destabilised Italy’s democracy, and opened the way for all the bombast and thuggery of fascism. He prided himself on his gift for ‘attention’, for fully experiencing and celebrating life’s abundance. ‘I am like the fisherman who walks barefoot over a beach uncovered at ebb tide, and who stoops, again and again, to identify and gather up whatever he feels moving under the soles of his feet.’ He posed as a new St Francis, lover of all living things. Yet his wartime rants are, in every sense, hateful. Italy’s enemies are filthy. He ascribes grotesque crimes to them. He calls out for their blood.

‘His gift for pleasing is diabolical,’ wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Even people who heartily disapproved of d’Annunzio found him irresistible. Similarly, reprehensible though the Europe-wide fascist movements were (and are), history demonstrates the potency of their glamour. To guard against their recurrence we need not just to be aware of their viciousness, but also to understand their power to seduce. D’Annunzio was never as supportive of fascism as Mussolini liked to make out. He jeered at the future Duce as a cowardly windbag. He despised Hitler too. But it is certainly true that his occupation of Fiume drastically undermined the authority of Italy’s democratic government, and so indirectly enabled Mussolini’s seizure of power three years later; that both Mussolini and Hitler learned a great deal from d’Annunzio; and that an account of d’Annunzio’s life and thought amounts to a history of the cultural elements that eventually came together, in the two decades following d’Annunzio’s annexation of his City of the Holocaust, to ignite a greater and more terrible holocaust than any he had ever envisaged.

The poet was fifty-six years old when he set out for Fiume, as notorious for his debts and duels and scandalous love affairs as he was celebrated for his wartime exploits and his literary gifts. A plane crash had left him blind in one eye, and, as he embarked on his great adventure, he was so weakened by an alarmingly high temperature that he could barely stand (something not to be taken lightly during a period when some fifty million people died of Spanish flu).

Small, bald, with narrow sloping shoulders and, according to his devoted secretary, ‘terrible teeth’, he was unimpressive to look at, but the long tally of his lovers included the ethereally lovely Eleonora Duse, one of the two greatest actresses in Europe (Sarah Bernhardt was her only rival), and he could manipulate a crowd as easily as he could entice a woman.

Poets nowadays are of interest only to a minority. But d’Annunzio was a poet, novelist and playwright at a time when a writer could attract a mass following, and deploy significant political influence. On the opening night of his play Più Che l’Amore (More Than Love) there were calls for his arrest. After the premiere of La Nave (The Ship) the audience spilled out of the theatre and processed through the streets of Rome intoning a line from the play, a call to arms. When he gave readings, agents of foreign powers attended, fearful of his influence. When he wrote polemical poems, Italy’s leading newspaper cleared the front page and published them in full.

Italy was a new nation. Its southern half (the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) was annexed to the northern kingdom of Piedmont two and a half years before d’Annunzio’s birth. He was seven years old in 1870 when the French withdrew from Rome and the new country was complete. The heroes of the Risorgimento had made Italy. Now someone had to ‘make Italians’ (the phrase recurs in the political rhetoric of the period). D’Annunzio, after spending much of his twenties writing erotic lyrics in archaic verse-forms and Frenchified fiction, accepted the task. Goethe in Germany and Pushkin in Russia had been celebrated, not just as authors of fine literature, but as the creators of a new national culture. So would d’Annunzio be. ‘The voice of my race speaks through me,’ he claimed.

He was much admired by his peers. In his twenties he was one of the acknowledged leaders of the aesthetes. As he matured he wrote works which won admiration not only from his own generation, but also from his younger contemporaries. James Joyce called d’Annunzio the only European writer after Flaubert (and before Joyce himself) to carry the novel into new territory, and ranked him with Kipling and Tolstoy as the three ‘most naturally talented writers’ to appear in the nineteenth century. Proust declared himself ‘ravi’ by one of his novels. Henry James praised the ‘extraordinary range and fineness’ of his artistic intelligence.

But though he was an author first and foremost, d’Annunzio was never solely a man of letters. He wanted his words to spark uprisings and set nations ablaze. His most famous wartime exploits were those occasions when he flew over Trieste or Vienna, dropping not bombs (although he dropped those too), but pamphlets. For d’Annunzio, writing was a martial art.

He was a brilliant self-publicist. He associated himself with Garibaldi, the romantic hero of the Risorgimento, whose image – poncho, red shirt, the dash of the guerrilla fighter combined with the integrity of a secular saint – was as important to the cause of Italian unity as his military prowess. D’Annunzio borrowed the lustre of figures from the past: he also identified himself with the dynamism of the future. He had himself photographed alongside torpedo boats and aeroplanes and motor cars – sleek, trim and modern from his gleaming bald pate to the toes of his patent-leather boots. Looking back, in his years of retirement, he saw exactly what had been his greatest strength as a politician. ‘I knew how to give my action the lasting power of the symbol.’ The hero of his first novel learns that: ‘One must make one’s life as one makes a work of art.’ D’Annunzio himself worked ceaselessly on the marvellous artefact that was his own existence.

He made canny use of the brand new mass media. As a young man he was a prolific hack, pouring out reviews and gossip and fashion notes and quasi-autobiographical sketches. His more earnest-minded friends thought he was debasing himself, but he wrote that the seed of an idea, sown in a journal, would germinate and bear fruit in the public consciousness more quickly and surely than one planted in a book. He describes one of his fictional alter egos as being drawn to his public as a predator is drawn to its prey.

Reaching a mass audience, d’Annunzio became a new kind of public figure. The first television broadcasts were made only in the last years of his life, but his influence was akin to that of a modern mass-media pundit. Instead of looking up the social scale and the political hierarchy, seeking endorsement from the ruling class, he looked to the people, turning popularity into power. As the historian Emilio Gentile has put it, what fascism took from Fiume was not a political creed but ‘a way of doing politics’. That way has since become almost universal.

In December 1919, d’Annunzio called for a referendum in Fiume. The people were to decide whether he was to stay and rule them, or to be expelled from the city. He waited for the result of the vote sitting in a dimly lit restaurant, sipping cherry brandy with his supporters. He told them about a life-size wax effigy of himself that, so he claimed, was in a Parisian museum. Once his present adventure was concluded, he said, he would ask to be given the figure and seat it by the window of his house in Venice, so that gondoliers could point it out to tourists. He was aware that someone like himself had two existences, one as a private person, the other as a public image. He knew that his celebrity could be used – to amuse trippers, to make himself some cash, to boost an army’s morale, perhaps even to overthrow a government.

D’Annunzio’s story is worth telling for reasons beyond his great talent and his life’s drama, lurid and eventful though it is. It illustrates a strand of cultural history which has its apparently innocuous origins in the classical past, passes through the marvels of the Renaissance and the idealism of early nineteenth-century Romanticism, but which leads eventually to the jackboot and the manganello, the fascist club.

D’Annunzio read voraciously in several languages. He was adept at reviving neglected ideas whose time had come round again and he could spot a developing trend at the very moment of its formation. It is hard to find a cultural fad of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century which was not explored in his work. His flair for sensing what was new and influential moved Romain Rolland (a friend who became an enemy) to liken him to a pike, a predator lurking ‘afloat and still, waiting for ideas’. He was repeatedly accused of plagiarism, with some justice. He was a brilliant pasticheur, adopting and adapting the techniques of each new writer whose work impressed him. He wrote like Verga, he wrote like Flaubert, he wrote like Dostoevsky. But more intelligent critics noticed that he didn’t imitate so much as appropriate. When he saw something that could nourish his intellect drifting by on the current, he would snap at it, pike-like, and swallow it, and send it forth again better expressed.

He borrowed, but he also anticipated. Before Freud, he was fully aware of the nature of the excitement he derived from sleek machinery: the prow of a metal warship, he wrote, is ‘a monstrous phallic elongation’. Reading Nietzsche in the 1890s he recognised ideas already implicit in his own work. He had been modelling his verse on that of pre-Renaissance poets for a quarter of a century by the time Ezra Pound began to imitate the troubadours. He was writing about priapic fauns and pre-pagan ceremonies three decades before Nijinsky and Stravinsky sparked off a riot with The Rite of Spring. In 1888, a full two decades before Marinetti proclaimed a ruthless new machine-age aesthetic in the ‘Futurist Manifesto’, d’Annunzio wrote an ode to a torpedo. He loved motor cars and telephones and aeroplanes and machine guns. Marinetti’s manifesto is full of unacknowledged d’Annunzian sentiments, including the notion that civil society was so foul that only war could cleanse it.

His politics were as eclectic as his cultural tastes. He was not a party man, having far too lively a sense of his unique importance to subscribe to a programme imposed by others. Besides, the period when he was most active politically was a time when groups which would, only months after he marched on Fiume, separate out into mutually hostile phalanxes, made common cause, the extremes meeting to oppose the centre. Nationalism (now identified with the right) and syndicalism (leftist) were, according to one of d’Annunzio contemporaries, alike ‘doctrines of energy and the will’. Both preferred violence to negotiation; both understood the political process in terms, not of reason, but of myth. In a ‘venal and materialist society’ of democratic ‘stockbrokers and chemists’, they were heroic: the ‘only two aristocratic tendencies’. What mattered to d’Annunzio, and to the fascists after him, was not a theoretical programme, so much as style, vitality, vigour.

In Fiume, d’Annunzio drew up a constitution for his little state. ‘The Charter of Carnaro’, as he called it, is in many ways a remarkably liberal document. It promised universal adult suffrage and absolute legal equality of the sexes. Socialists applauded it. But in the 1920s it was hailed as ‘a blueprint of the fascist state’.

There is an acceptable d’Annunzio, who writes lyrically about nature and myth, and there is an appalling d’Annunzio, the warmonger who calls upon his fellow Italians to saturate the earth with blood, and whose advocacy of the dangerous ideals of patriotism and glory opened the way for institutionalised thuggery. Those who admire the former have often tried to ignore, or even deny, the existence of the latter. After the fall of Mussolini it became conventional to suggest either that d’Annunzio could not really have had any sympathy for fascism, because he wrote such beautiful poetry, or – conversely – that because his politics were deplorable, his poetry cannot really be any good. I contest both arguments. The two d’Annunzios are one and the same.

D’Annunzio knew exactly how ghastly conflict could be. As a young man he visited hospitals out of curiosity. He was an attentive nurse to his mistresses when they fell ill, loving them the most, he told them, when they were suffering or near death. In wartime he spent weeks at the front, witnessing the slaughter, smelling the unburied corpses. He made careful notes about wounds, and the effects of decomposition on the bodies of his dead friends. In his wartime oratory he used the word ‘sacrifice’ over and over again in knowing reference to religious fables (pagan and Christian) where young men were killed that the wider community might benefit. When two fighter pilots of whom he was fond went missing in 1917 he wrote in his private diary that he devoutly hoped they were dead.

He was one of the cleverest of men, but also one of the least empathetic. He was as ruthless and selfish as a baby. ‘He is a child,’ wrote the French novelist, René Boylesve, ‘he gives himself away with a thousand lies and tricks.’ Child-like, he saw others only in relation to himself. In love, he was adoring, but once he had tired of a woman he ceased to think about her. He was an excellent employer (though far from punctilious about paying salaries). He was moved by the sweetness of small children. He was very kind to his dogs. But the woman who brought in his meals, he once wrote, was no more to him than a piece of furniture, a cupboard on feet.

One of his most famous poems is about the Abruzzese shepherds who could be seen at summer’s end traipsing along the beaches, robed and bearded like biblical patriarchs, their woolly charges churning around them like warm surf. It is a lovely lyric, tender and grand; but to those who know d’Annunzio it cannot be read as harmless pastoral. He wrote often about the sheep herded before dawn through the sleeping streets of nineteenth-century cities, their wool eerily silvered by the moonlight – a commonplace sight which few other writers notice. To him the animals weren’t pretty reminders of the countryside. They were hosts of creatures on their way to be slaughtered. So were armies. The thought didn’t appal him. In 1914, three years before his British contemporary Wilfred Owen made the same comparison, d’Annunzio was likening the herds of bullocks who churned up the roads of northern France, driven to the front to feed the army, to the trainloads of soldiers going the same way. Like Owen, d’Annunzio knew that in war men died as cattle. Unlike Owen, he considered their death not only dulce et decorum, sweet and fitting, but sublime.

One evening in Rome in May 1915, d’Annunzio was chatting lightly in his hotel room with a couple of acquaintances. One was the sculptor Vincenzo Gemito, the other was the Marchese Casati (with whose wife – ‘the only woman who could astonish me’ – d’Annunzio had a long amitié amoureuse). Then, this agreeable interlude over, he stepped out onto his balcony to deliver one of his most incendiary speeches, urging the crowds beneath his window to transform themselves into a lynch mob. ‘If it is considered a crime to incite citizens to violence then I boast of committing that crime.’ Three paces and a window pane separated the sphere in which he was an urbane socialite and man of letters from that in which he was a frenzied demagogue calling upon his countrymen to murder their elected representatives and to drench the soil of Europe with blood. Both personae are genuine. In writing about him I have tried to find a form which does justice to them both.

D’Annunzio’s must be one of the most thoroughly documented lives ever lived. He had a notebook in his pocket at all times. Those notebooks were his precious raw material. Their contents reappeared in his poems, his letters, his novels. When he flew (or rather was flown – he never learned to pilot himself) he took a specially bought fountain pen with him so that he could jot down his impressions even while dodging anti-aircraft fire. He noted the clothes and sex appeal of the women he met so immediately that it seems he must have been reaching for his book even before they turned away. Eating alone at home, he wrote down a description of the maid as she served him his lunch. A discriminating eater, he also made notes on the asparagus.

His works are full of descriptions of sex so candid they still startle. In his morning-after letters he would describe back to a lover the pleasures they had enjoyed, an intimate kind of pornography which was also an aide-mémoire for himself and, often, the first draft for a fictional scene. We know in enormous detail what d’Annunzio did in bed, or on the rug before a well-banked-up fire (he felt the cold dreadfully), or in woods and secluded gardens on summer nights. We know he liked occasionally to play at being a woman, pushing his penis out of the way between his thighs. We know how much he enjoyed cunnilingus, and that he therefore preferred a woman to be at least five foot six inches tall, or, failing that, to wear high-heeled shoes, so that when he knelt before her his mouth comfortably met her genitals. We have his descriptions not only of his lovers’ outward appearances but of the secret crannies of their bodies, of the roofs of their mouths, of the inner whorls of their ears, of the little hairs on the back of a neck, of the scent of their armpits and their cunts.

The notebooks, d’Annunzio’s enormous literary output, and his even larger correspondence, have allowed me to show the man’s inside: his thoughts, tastes, emotions and physical sensations; how moved he was by the pathos of a pile of dead soldiers’ boots; how he relished the slithery warmth of a greyhound’s coat under his hand. And because he was a public figure for over half a century, I have been able to draw on dozens of others’ accounts of him and his doings to show his outside as well. This book has many viewpoints. And because d’Annunzio’s life, like any other, was complex, they sometimes contradict each other. An acquaintance, seeing him in Florence, leaning on the stone parapet over the River Arno one grey November day, noticed the elegance of his raincoat (he was always dapper) and tactfully refrained from greeting him, supposing him to be absorbed in the composition of a poem. From his own account, though, we know he could think of nothing but of whether his mistress would shortly appear, and what he would do with her once he had got her back to the room he kept for their assignations, where he had already stowed scented handkerchiefs behind cushions and strewn the bed with flowers.

I have made nothing up, but I have freely made use of techniques commoner in fiction-writing than in biography. I have not always observed chronological order; the beginning is seldom the best place to start. Time’s pace varies. I have raced through decades and slowed right down, on occasion, to record in great detail a week, a night, a conversation. To borrow terms from music (and one of the themes of d’Annunzio’s life to which I have not had space to do full justice is his musical connoisseurship) I have alternated legato narrative with staccato glimpses of the man and fragments of his thought.

I have tried to avoid the falsification inevitable when a life – made up, as most lives are, of contiguous but unconnected strands – is blended to fit into a homogeneous narrative. In Venice in 1908 for the premiere of The Ship, d’Annunzio attended banquets and civic ceremonies in his honour, delivering convoluted speeches full of noble sentiments and incitements to war. He records, though, that ‘between one acclamation and another’ he spent a great deal of time hunting for the perfect present for his mistress. An antique emerald ring – which he could certainly not afford (he was at this period unable to go home for fear of his creditors) – satisfied him, but there was still the question of a box to put it in. He visited half a dozen places before finding the very thing – a pretty little casket in green leather (to match her eyes) in the shape of a miniature doge’s hat. I aim to do justice both to the man pontificating at the banquet, and the man fossicking through curio shops.

Two images help to describe my method. The first dates from 1896, when d’Annunzio was thirty-three, and staying in Venice to be near Eleonora Duse. There he came to know Giorgio Franchetti, who had recently bought the Ca’ d’Oro, the most fantastical and ornate of all the palaces along the Grand Canal, and was restoring it to its fifteenth-century Venetian-Moorish splendour. Franchetti was working himself on the installation of a mosaic pavement, crawling, covered with sweat and stone dust, over the varicoloured expanse of rare stones with slippers strapped to his knees. There d’Annunzio would join him, laying tiny squares of porphyry and serpentine in the fresh cement. Placing comments and anecdotes alongside each other like the tesserae in a pavement, my aim has been to create an account which acknowledges the disjunctions and complexities of my subject, while gradually revealing its grand design.

Another image comes from Tom Antongini, who knew and served d’Annunzio well for thirty years as his secretary, agent, personal shopper, and, in the sexual sphere, Leporello to his Don Giovanni. Antongini described the hectic months d’Annunzio spent in Paris in 1910 as ‘kaleidoscopic’. In an old-fashioned kaleidoscope, fragments of jewel-bright glass are rearranged as the cardboard tube is twirled – the same parts, a changing pattern. Images and ideas recur in d’Annunzio’s life and thought, moving from reality to fiction and back again: martyrdom and human sacrifice, amputated hands, the scent of lilac, Icarus and aeroplanes, the sweet vulnerability of babies, the superman who is half-beast, half-god. I have laid out the pieces: I have shown how they shift.

D’Annunzio has been much disliked. His contemporary, the philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce, said he was ‘steeped in sensuality and sadism and cold-blooded dilettantism’. Tom Antongini, who was fond of him, wrote that he ‘has been accused of polygamy, adultery, theft, incest, secret vices, simony, murder, and cannibalism … in short, Heliogabalus is his master in no particular’. When, on his death in 1938, there was discussion in the British Foreign Office as to whether it would be in order to offer official condolences, the proposal was vehemently opposed by Lord Vansittart, who called him ‘a first-class cad’. This hostility persists. Mark Thompson, the outstanding historian of Italy’s part in the Great War, writes with judicious moderation about General Cadorna, the Italian commander-in-chief who sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to a certain death. Thompson’s tone, in describing Mussolini and the beginnings of fascism, is temperate. But these are the words he uses of d’Annunzio: ‘odious’, ‘vicious’, ‘psychotic’.

I have been sparing of such language. I am a woman writing about a self-styled ‘poet of virility’ and a pacifist writing about a warmonger, but disapproval is not an interesting response. D’Annunzio cannot be dismissed as being singularly hateful or crazy. He helped to talk his country into an unnecessary war, and the views he expressed, then and throughout his life, are frequently abhorrent. But to suggest that his thinking was aberrant is to deny the magnitude of the problem he presents. Over and over again throughout the Great War, d’Annunzio called upon teenage conscripts, very few of whom had any idea what Italy’s war aims were, to die because the blood of those who had already died called out to them from the earth to emulate their ‘sacrifice’. At the time of writing a very similar thought – less floridly expressed – is regularly advanced to justify the continuation of the war in Afghanistan. Many have died. To admit that the fighting is futile, and put a stop to it, would be to betray them. So more must die. This reasoning may be odious (I consider it so). But if to be ‘psychotic’ is to think in a way few healthy people think, then it is not psychotic. It is all too normal.

In 1928, Margherita Sarfatti published a biography of her lover, Mussolini. In it she praised d’Annunzio for having ‘prophesied, preached and fought the war’ (preaching war being, in fascist opinion, a laudable practice) and hailed the poet as having given expression to ‘an arrogant, knightly, derisive, fascinating and cruel spirit that belongs to the immortal youth of fascism’. Later Sarfatti, who was Jewish, would have to leave Italy hastily in order to escape that ‘fascinating and cruel spirit’, but for the time being she adored it, and admired d’Annunzio, whose work seemed to her to be as full of ‘daring, hope, greatness and limitless faith’ as the sound of the blackshirts belting out popular songs as they converged on Rome in October 1922.

In the first winter of the Great War, d’Annunzio was living in France, and made several trips to the front as a privileged observer. There he saw – or pretended to have seen – dead soldiers bound upright, to stakes, in groups of ten. At the time, Mussolini had only recently left the Italian Socialist Party and had yet to find a new following. But already d’Annunzio had found an image all too hideously symbolic of the militarism which he himself so enthusiastically approved, and of the political creed which would shortly grow out of it. Those bloody clumps of upstanding corpses reminded him of an emblem frequently shown on Roman coins, one which would soon, once again, be omnipresent in Italy, that of a bundle (a fascio) of rods tied around an axe. The axe signified the law’s power over life and death. The bundled rods represented the gathering of powerless individuals into a single powerful entity, a ‘fascist’ state.

SIGHTINGS

ROME, 1881. Here is Gabriele d’Annunzio, seventeen years old, just out of school, the precocious author of two highly praised volumes of verse. Observing him is Edoardo Scarfoglio, himself only twenty-one, another ambitious young man making his way in the ancient capital of the eleven-year-old Italian nation. Scarfoglio is in the office of the weekly paper of which he is editor. The room is full of chattering people. Scarfoglio is lounging on a bench, yawning, when in comes the juvenile poet. ‘At the first glimpse of this little fellow with his curly head and sweetly feminine eyes … I started and sprang up, extraordinarily struck … Gabriele was the object of a craze, of an incredible cult, for all of us. He was so friendly and modest, and he carried the weight of his newborn glory with such grace that everyone ran to him, spontaneously drawn by feelings of friendship and affection.’

The curls will soon be gone (by the age of thirty d’Annunzio will be almost completely bald) and the modesty may never have existed outside of Scarfoglio’s imagination. Already the young poet is an adroit self-publicist. A few months before his arrival in Rome, he anonymously informed newspaper editors of his own untimely death in a fall from his horse. The pathetic story of the brilliantly gifted youth, cut off at the outset of what would surely have been a dazzling career, was widely reported and lamented over. The second volume of poems by the tragic boy, published later that month, sold well. By the time the ‘mistake’ was discovered, d’Annunzio was considerably more famous than mere merit, however substantial, could have made him.

Scarfoglio will lament that, only a few months after that first meeting, the androgynous innocent is on his way to becoming a smart young man about the booming capital. ‘I will never forget how stupefied I was, the first time I saw Gabriele all spruced up and perfumed for a party.’ At the age of twenty, d’Annunzio (seen by Scarfoglio as being like a ‘timid, wild girl’) will demonstrate his worldly ambition and his virility by impregnating and eloping with a duke’s daughter. At the age of twenty-six, already the author of four volumes of poetry and two of short stories, as well as of reams of knowing, gossipy journalism, he will publish the first of his novels.

1893. D’Annunzio, now aged thirty, is living in Naples. He left Rome to escape from his creditors, and before the end of the year he will have to scarper from Naples for the same reason. He has written three novels and dozens of stories which are beginning to make money, but never enough to pay off his exorbitant debts. He has abandoned his wife and three sons, and left Elvira Fraternali, whom he loved passionately for eight years. Now he is living with the Sicilian princess Maria Gravina, together with whom he faces a jail sentence for adultery (a general amnesty will spare them). His writing – as scandalous as it is brilliant – and his flamboyant lifestyle, his debts, his duels and his love affairs, have made him, by this time, an international celebrity.

During this period of his life, in personal terms so harum-scarum, the groundwork of d’Annunzio’s political thinking is being laid. He has been reading Nietzsche and finding in the philosopher’s work confirmation of his own elitism. Acting the pike again, he makes provocatively Nietzschean declarations. ‘Man will be divided into two races,’ he writes. ‘To the superior race, which shall have risen by the pure energy of its will, all shall be permitted; to the lower, nothing or very little.’ D’Annunzio never doubts his own membership of the former class.

Now he is enthralled by Richard Wagner. D’Annunzio adores music, but he is not himself a musician. To hear it he must seek out those who are. He goes repeatedly to call on the composer Niccolò van Westerhout and prevails upon him to play entire operas on the piano, while he follows the libretto, going through Tristan and Isolde at least ten times. He is learning to hear the patterning of reprise and variation, to feel the great surges of emotion released by the music and to understand how they are controlled. He keeps van Westerhout at the piano for hours and hours. ‘Tristan filled his spirit with a kind of morbid obsession.’ He insists on hearing certain passages over and over again. He is transfixed by the ‘sufferings that begin with the love potion’.

At home he is in desperate straits. The bailiffs are encamped outside the door of his borrowed lodgings. Maria Gravina’s sanity is precarious. But d’Annunzio has the knack of closing himself off from all emotional and practical demands. The musical sessions with van Westerhout pass straight into his influential essay on Wagner and into his suicide-haunted novel Il Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death), in which the lovers spend days on end playing and singing Tristan and Isolde together, before the hero drags his mistress over a cliff in an involuntary liebestod (love-death).

Later that year Maria Gravina will try to kill herself. His wife has already attempted suicide.

August 1895. D’Annunzio is sunbathing stark naked on the deck of a yacht bound for Greece. He has recently received his largest payment to date, for the French edition of his first novel, Piacere (Pleasure). Among his fellow guests on the cruise is his French translator, Georges Hérelle.

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 himself from a formula which he claims to have found in a fourteenth-century manuscript. He has had quantities of it made up by a chemist in Florence. It is bottled in Murano glass bottles (also made to the poet’s orders) and labelled (a lot of thought goes into the design of the labels).

The host appears, dressed in a dark blue kimono bordered with black. It is d’Annunzio’s habit to dress in this conveniently removable garment for an assignation and he always provides a kimono for his female visitor’s use. On a small ebony table a large silver tray has been set, bearing a samovar, two cups, and marrons glacés on silver plates. D’Annunzio pours the tea (Chinese, very fragrant), then seats himself crosslegged on the rug by the lady’s chair, takes both her hands in his and embarks upon his seduction. ‘From his gestures, from his voice, there came an invincible wave of desire which engulfed my whole being in an irresistible atmosphere of love.’ There are a number of descriptions of this process: d’Annunzio was a highly persuasive wooer. The anonymous lady feels herself swept ‘into mysterious spheres where there are no laws nor conventions’. Thus conveniently ‘drugged by the delicious poison of the Poet’s musical words’, she somehow swoons her way, without compromising herself by explicitly consenting to sex, into his bedroom.

Their transports ended, d’Annunzio leaves her. ‘A quarter of an hour later I found him in the library, turning the pages of a book.’ Without a word he escorts her to her carriage. She is driven away, feeling ‘the horrid sensation of being discarded like a toy’. On d’Annunzio’s orders, her carriage has been filled, ‘like a rich coffin’, with roses.

Summer 1906. D’Annunzio is in a palatial rented villa, a former home of the dukes of Tuscany, at the seaside near Pisa. His play La Figlia di Jorio (Jorio’s Daughter) has made him not just a literary star but also the voice of his people. ‘Evviva the poet of Italy!’ shouted the audience at its first night.

Alessandra is here, but she is addicted to morphine now and d’Annunzio is already writing daily to his new love, a Florentine countess. For the first time in nearly twenty years he has all three of his sons with him. In the mornings they box in an improvised ring on the beach. D’Annunzio gallops his horse through the pine woods, or swims, or paddles his brand new canoe – throwing himself into each activity with energy which astonishes the younger men. For lunch, served formally by some of the fifteen servants, he changes into a white linen suit, one of the hundred or so he has brought with him. He writes late into the night.

An aspiring poet, Umberto Saba, guest of d’Annunzio’s son Gabriellino, is our witness at this gathering. D’Annunzio, still physically trim at forty-three, greets Saba with exquisite courtesy. Flatteringly, he draws him away from the assembled company and out into the garden, where they sit down together on a stone bench. ‘He asked me, if I was not too tired from my journey, and if it would not be too much of a nuisance for me, to recite some of my poetry?’ This is the acme of Saba’s hopes. He can hardly believe his good fortune. He obliges. D’Annunzio is all compliments. He asks if he may recommend Saba’s work to his editor? Saba, overwhelmed by the great man’s generosity, is close to tears. Everything about the marvellous moment stays with him. Years later it will be as though he can still hear the pine needles creaking beneath their feet.

The conversation continues. There have only been three great poets in Italy, d’Annunzio says – Dante, Petrarch and Leopardi – before, that is, (and he repeats this twice) himself. Saba notices that the poet’s sons are not allowed to call him ‘Papa’. He requires them to address him as ‘Maestro’.

Afterwards Saba posts his precious manuscript. He gets no response. D’Annunzio does not pass his poems on to anyone. He doesn’t even send them back.

September 1909. The Brescia air show: for most of the 50,000 people present their first sight of the amazing spectacle of a man aloft in a flying machine. It is only six years since Wilbur and Orville Wright made their first powered flight, thirteen months since Wilbur first demonstrated their Flyer I in Europe, barely six weeks since Louis Blériot (who is here at Brescia) flew across the English Channel, crash-landing in a vertical fall of sixty-five feet to arrive, with a smashed undercarriage but himself unharmed, in a meadow near Dover Castle. D’Annunzio is ecstatic. Humanity’s conquest of the air, he proclaims, presages, ‘A new civilisation, a new life, new skies!’ A poet is called for, ‘capable of singing this epic’. That poet must be himself. He stages a poetry-reading-cum-press-conference-cum-photo-opportunity at Brescia, reciting verses for the assembled journalists and photographers. The poem, about Icarus, was first published ten years previously: d’Annunzio has been dreaming of flight since he was a schoolboy.

He is at Brescia to gather material for his next novel. He is also planning, courageously (already several aviators have died), to cadge a ride. Now he is being observed by Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod. The two are holidaying together on Lake Garda. Kafka is depressed: his inspiration has deserted him; his stomach feels to him like a person on the brink of tears. To get him writing again Brod suggests they compose competing accounts of the air show.

The two young men are in the immense crowd on the parched airfield. They both notice d’Annunzio among the ‘sparkling ladies’ and gentlemen on the stands. Brod is struck by d’Annunzio’s ‘feminine charm’, and finds him ‘marvellous through and through’. Kafka is less impressed. By his account d’Annunzio is ‘short’, which is the simple truth, but also ‘weak’ (which may be another way of saying ‘feminine’). Kafka notes that d’Annunzio is ‘skipping’ among the ladies and ‘shyly’ trotting around after Count Oldofredi (one of the show’s organisers).

D’Annunzio isn’t shy, but his body language can be deferential, his posture placatory and insinuating. (Photographs show him with his head dipped slightly to one side, leaning in towards a companion.) Oldofredi is his host for the day, whose consent he must have before he can fly, but he is no ordinary supplicant. To Brod it seems that at Brescia the bigwigs are treating him ‘like a second King of Italy’.

Later that day he makes two short flights, as passenger to the American aviator Glenn Curtiss and the Italian Mario Calderara. He poses for the cameras in a leather flying helmet. Immediately upon landing he gives an interview to the reporter for the Corriere della Sera (his flair for self-promotion never leaves him). Flying, he says, is divine; so divine that even he, the divo of words, is for the moment at a loss as to how to describe it. It is as ineffable as sex.

Increasingly bellicose and nationalist in his politics, d’Annunzio sees – years before the military establishment begins to invest in aviation – the strategic potential of the new flying machines. In the following year he will repeatedly deliver (for handsome fees) a lecture on the need for Italy to achieve Great Nation status by seizing control of the skies.

1910. The bailiffs are in d’Annunzio’s house in Settignano. Pursued by his creditors, himself in pursuit of a long-legged Russian countess with a lovely singing voice and a complaisant husband, announcing to the world that he needs to visit a French dentist, d’Annunzio has decamped to Paris. There his arrival causes quite a stir: he has been a bestselling author in France for two decades. At once he begins to circulate in society, and those he meets are recording their impressions.

He is forty-eight now. To Gide he seems ‘pinched, wrinkled, smaller than ever’. Certainly he needs a good dentist. He has ‘funny little crenellated unhealthy teeth’, notes a French actress on whom he tries his charm. ‘He is the only man I have ever seen with teeth of three colours, white, yellow and black.’ As he has aged his aura of sexual ambiguity has become more marked, intriguing to women, repulsive to most men. (See overleaf.) Several of his new acquaintances remark on his narrow, feminine shoulders and wide womanly hips, his little beringed white hands, his fussy fluttering gestures, his extravagant compliments. ‘An unprepossessing figure,’ notes René Boylesve. ‘He enters like a character from an Italian comedy; one could easily imagine him with a hump.’

For all that, for some he is irresistible. Isadora Duncan testifies that the woman courted by him, ‘feels that her very soul and being are lifted as into an ethereal region where she walks in company with the Divine Beatrice’. The young English diplomat Harold Nicolson, discussing d’Annunzio with two equally snobbish European noblemen, decides that the petit-bourgeois poet is ‘a chap one couldn’t know’, but, having heard him declaim his verses in an aristocratic drawing room, the bisexual Nicolson is instantly besotted. Nicolson leaves the party abruptly and walks along the quays, ‘still fervent with excitement’, d’Annunzio’s voice ringing in his ears ‘like a silver bell’.

There are Parisians who see beyond the bewitching surface. D’Annunzio accepts advances for books he will never write. He decamps from hotels leaving bills unpaid. Maurice Barrès, the French nationalist writer whose work d’Annunzio has correctly been accused of plagiarising, plainly sees the self-serving, exploitative side of the poet. ‘He is like a bird which scratches about for seed with its hard beak … this hard little soldier, this grasping conqueror, pecking and hurting the palm of my hand.’ Others sense his weariness. His greatest loves are past; his best poetry is written; in leaving Italy he has lost his role as national figurehead. The flamboyant homosexual Count Robert de Montesquiou has taken him up, and is introducing him to Parisian high society, but notices that occasionally his mask drops. Then one sees ‘something withered … the nostrils become deformed like those of a face on a shield that has been dented in combat, and the corners of the mouth express unutterable horror’.

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes are in Paris, performing Cleopatra, choreographed by Fokine with designs by Léon Bakst. The title role is mimed by Ida Rubinstein – a bisexual Russian beauty. She comes on in an immense blue wig and drifts of diaphanous, gem-scattered gauze, most of which she sheds before the evening is out. D’Annunzio is in the audience with de Montesquiou. After the performance they go backstage, where Rubinstein is holding court still clad only in massive ‘barbaric’ jewellery and an exiguous amount of chiffon. Barrès is there, and Edmond Rostand, and other literary luminaries, all in evening dress. D’Annunzio takes up the story. ‘Seeing at close quarters those marvellous naked legs, with my usual boldness I threw myself to the ground and – quite oblivious of my swallow-tail coat – kissed the feet, rose, still kissing, from the ankle to the knee, and up along the thigh to the crotch, kissing with lips as swift and supple as a flautist’s scurrying over the stops of a double flute. Tableau! Scandale!’ The bystanders are embarrassed. Rubinstein is amused. D’Annunzio lifts his eyes (even when standing upright he is a good six inches shorter than she) and sees, beneath the great tangled blue cloud of false hair, that she is smiling, and that she has a ‘dazzling’ mouth.

Soon they will be having some sort of a sexual relationship (in their private encounters, as well as this public one, it is mostly a matter of d’Annunzio’s mouth and Rubinstein’s nether parts) and she will be playing the title role in his The Martyrdom of St Sebastian. The saint has long featured in d’Annunzio’s sexual fantasies. Now he converts them into a long, lush piece of music drama, with a score by his new friend Claude Debussy and designs – again – by Bakst. The Bishop of Paris forbids his flock to attend it. It is placed on the Papal Index of books no good Catholic may read.

March 1915. Since the outbreak of war, d’Annunzio, who believes only ‘a great conflict of the races’ can purge society of its decadence, has been calling from Paris for Italy to enter the war on the side of Britain and France (its ‘Latin Sister’). He is planning to return to Italy, but as he awaits his moment he accompanies the Italian journalist, Ugo Ojetti, to Reims, to see the venerable cathedral which went up in flames while under German occupation the previous September. Ojetti has obtained a pass, and a motor car. He stops off at the seventeenth-century hôtel particulier in the western Marais, where d’Annunzio has an apartment cluttered with oriental artefacts – a visitor has dubbed it ‘the House of the Hundred Buddhas’. A servant comes out first with several suitcases (d’Annunzio never travels light) and hampers full of food. Then d’Annunzio appears, ‘elegant and glossy as ever’, in an outfit which (unlike Ojetti’s suit and trilby) has a vaguely military air: his civilian status shames him. He is wearing a motoring cap, riding breeches with grey puttees, and a rich brown overcoat lined with curly yellow fox fur.

They drive through the ‘lunar landscape’ of the battlefields to Reims. Everywhere there are dead horses, their bellies inflated, their legs in the air. The great Gothic cathedral is roofless, its windows empty, its stones blackened. Guns are audible: they are not far from the front. D’Annunzio is silent and attentive. He picks up a shard of stained glass, a twisted strip of lead, a carved stone flower fallen from one of the pinnacles (all three will be on his desk at the time of his death twenty-three years later). He scrambles over sandbags to view the statues which he knows are there; he has been studying the guidebooks assiduously. He is making notes: ‘Pigeons fly up as though the wing of an angel had suddenly opened.’

This is his first visit to Reims but he has already written an account of the fire, each paragraph introduced with the lie ‘I saw …’. He knows what a potent image of German ‘vandalism’ the blackened ruin of the cathedral makes, and he understands how his own celebrity endorses it. His pseudo-eyewitness account was useful propaganda: it didn’t need to be true.

On the return journey – still, in that deathly landscape, the aesthete and poet – d’Annunzio notes how the road curves like the banderoles in mediaeval depictions of saints.

17 May 1915. Rome. The Capitol. D’Annunzio has returned after five years in France, re-energised. He is past fifty, but the most exciting period of his life is only just beginning. Europe is at war and he has found a new medium – the spoken word; a new persona – that of national hero; and a new mission – that of urging his compatriots to be great. Italy is still neutral. Ever since d’Annunzio arrived in the country twelve days ago he has been delivering oration after oration, each one more virulent in its contempt for the peace party, each one more bellicose.

Now he is speaking at the heart of ancient Rome to an already volatile crowd. D’Annunzio himself recalls the scene months later as he lies wounded: ‘Faces, faces, faces without number run past my bandaged eyes, like hot sand pouring through a fist. Is it not the Roman crowd, of that May evening on the Capitol? Enormous, rippling, howling?’

Fastidious to the point of neurosis, d’Annunzio has always been shudderingly preoccupied with dirt. Now he translates that private anxiety into political rage. In a virtuoso display of his immense vocabulary, he loads his speeches with synonyms for filth. The old order reeks and must be utterly destroyed. Cautious politicians are to be disposed of like rotten meat. ‘Sweep away all the filth! Into the sewer with all that is vile!’ Italy, its government, its entire political system, is dirty, foul, filthy, polluted, besmirched, sullied, soiled, stinking, fetid, contaminated, shitty, rancid, infected, diseased, putrid, rotten, corrupt, festering and defiled. He calls for a cauterisation by fire, a holocaust (a word he uses often), a great outpouring of blood to purge the stench of corruption.

He is beside himself. ‘I feel my own pale face burn like a white flame. There is nothing of me in me. I am as the demon of the tumult … Each of my words resounds beneath my cranium like the reverberation of curved metal.’

As his tirade reaches its climax he produces a prop, a sword which once belonged to Nino Bixio, the most aggressive of Garibaldi’s lieutenants.

‘I take it and draw it … I press my lips to the naked blade … I abandon my soul to delirium.’

The crowd weeps and howls. D’Annunzio thunders on. He is urging his listeners to ensure, by any means, up to and including murder, that the appeasers should not be allowed to take their seats in parliament again. ‘Make out lists. Proscribe them. Be pitiless. You have the right.’

His speech triggers a riot. Hundreds of people are arrested. One of them is Marinetti, who has declared in his ‘Futurist Manifesto’ that he would celebrate ‘the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capital’. Another is a magazine editor named Benito Mussolini.

One week later Prime Minister Salandra declares that Italy is at war.

August 1917. War. As a roving ‘liaison officer’ d’Annunzio has been on night manoeuvres on board warships in the Adriatic, and has been down in a submarine. He has been repeatedly under fire in the terrible battles in the mountains and along the River Timavo, and he has flown repeatedly. He has survived a plane crash after which he had to lie motionless in a darkened room for months, and which has left him blind in one eye. Even Ernest Hemingway, who can’t stand his high-faluting rhetoric, grants that he has been ‘divinely brave’.

This is d’Annunzio’s account of a mission flown in pursuit of Austrian troops in the Slovenian mountains. He is now in command of a squadron of fighter planes. The letter is to his latest lover, mistress of one of Venice’s great palaces, whom he calls Venturina because her gold-flecked, tawny eyes remind him of one of the colours used by the Murano glass-makers (he is a discriminating collector of glass): ‘I think Venturina will be pleased with her friend. It was an inferno of fire. I went down to 150 metres over the enemy infantry in order to machine-gun them. I could make out their uniforms, and the flap of canvas they wear hanging down the back of their necks to keep off the sun … Miracle! A bullet heading for my head hit the bar at the back of the cockpit, and rebounded. I heard the clear ping it made, and turned round. The steel bar was dented. Another bullet passed through the canvas between my legs. Innumerable others have made holes in the wings, splintered the propellers, snapped the cords. And we are unharmed!’

Twelve days earlier, d’Annunzio, ever attentive to the ritual of warfare, has taught his squadron a new battle cry. Instead of the ‘Ip, Ip, Ip, Urrah!’ which he finds crude and barbarous, he has ordered them to shout the Greek: ‘Eia, Eia, Eia, Alalà!’ It is, he claims, the battle yell of Achilles. He has found it in Aeschylus and Pindar. He has used it in his plays. Now he is demanding that the men under his command give the shout standing upright in the cockpits of their flimsy little wood and canvas planes.

The aircraft circle round, flying beneath the enemy troops on the high mountain passes and then climbing again ‘up the sides of Mount Hermada like a cart crawling up a slope’. They return to base to load up with more bombs, and fly back into battle over the Austrians’ big guns. ‘We saw shells passing the prow and the stern like ugly big rats tunnelling through the air.’ This is the fiercest fire d’Annunzio has ever yet endured. It is ‘a marvellous hour, which I would not exchange for any other I have lived’.

April 1919. The war is over. The peace-makers are still conferring at Versailles, carving up the remains of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ever since the war ended d’Annunzio has been crying out that Italy is being cheated of its fair share, that its victory has been ‘mutilated’. Now he is in Venice, speaking in the Piazza San Marco, calling upon Italians to take up arms again and lay claim to the territory (Istria, Croatia and the Dalmatian coast) which the newborn state of Yugoslavia is claiming, but which he calls ‘Italy’s left lung’. The Irish Italophile Walter Starkie is there and, at first, is horribly disappointed by d’Annunzio’s appearance. ‘A dwarf of a man, goggle-eyed and thick-lipped – truly sinister in his grotesqueness, like a tragic gargoyle.’ Starkie, like many others, wonders incredulously: ‘Is this the man that Duse loved?’

D’Annunzio begins to speak; at once Starkie is ‘fascinated’. D’Annunzio plays on the crowd ‘as a supreme violinist does upon a Stradivarius’. He pretends to be reluctant to speak. ‘The time for words has passed.’ But he has come prepared, bringing with him an enormous Italian flag, which he employs as a prop in a brilliantly manipulative, quasi-liturgical performance. His bearing is priestly, his delivery carefully measured. ‘Never a hurried, jerky gesture: occasionally one arm raised slowly as though wielding an imaginary wand.’ The effect is mesmerising. ‘The tones rose and fell in an unending stream, like the song of a minstrel, and they spread over the vast audience like olive oil on the surface of the sea.’

This oil is designed not to calm troubled waters but to set them surging. Very, very gradually, his voice rising in a patiently extended crescendo, d’Annunzio strings his public’s emotions ever tighter. He incites the crowd to call out in reply to him, involving them in their own bewitchment. His own record of the speech notes their responses. ‘All the people cry out “We want it’’’; ‘the whole piazza resounds to unanimous acclamation’; ‘frenetic cheering’; ‘the people cry “Yes’’’; ‘the people cry “Yes!” again, more loudly’; ‘the people repeat the shout and brandish their flags’. As he reaches his thundering climax, writes Starkie, ‘the eyes of the thousands [are] fixed upon him as though hypnotised by his power’.

September 1919. D’Annunzio has taken action. He has marched into Fiume and made himself ruler of the tiny but now world-famous city-state. Among his new acolytes is Giovanni Comisso, another poet (some thirty years younger than d’Annunzio), who was serving with the Allied garrison when d’Annunzio marched into the city, and who promptly deserted to join him.

Comisso is there when d’Annunzio arrives at the Governor’s Palace amid a din of bands playing and crowds singing. Stepping out of the car he looks small and, feverish as he is, ‘very, very weak’. Comisso joins the throng who jostle along behind d’Annunzio up the marble staircase to the wide balcony from which he is to address the people massed below. To Comisso’s wonder the frail invalid begins to speak ‘with incredible force’, declaring that Fiume is the only brightness in a mad, vile world. The assembled crowd weep and laugh and howl out their enthusiasm. ‘This man convinced me,’ writes Comisso ‘as though he was one of the prophets of olden times.’

A few days later Comisso is shaving when he hears a hubbub outside his window and leans out, his shirt open, his face covered with soap, to see what’s causing the commotion. Down in the street soldiers are milling around a very small man wearing the jaunty-brimmed felt hat of the Alpine troops. ‘He seemed like a boy, agile and restless. He kept taking one of the others by the arm and having himself photographed.’ It is d’Annunzio, turning some of his prodigious energy to the job he does so well – making a spectacle of himself. When he arrived in the outskirts of Fiume he paused to allow a camera crew to catch up. One of his first measures on taking power in Fiume is to establish his press office. During the next fifteen months d’Annunzio’s image, carefully groomed by himself, will appear in newspapers all over the Western world.

November 1920. The aristocratic English man of letters Osbert Sitwell has come to Fiume, curious to see what ‘the man who has done more for the Italian language than any writer since Dante’ has made of his city-state. Sitwell finds the streets full of colourful desperadoes: ‘Every man seemed to wear a uniform designed by himself; some wore beards and had shaven heads like the commander, others cultivated huge tufts of hair, half a foot long, waving out from their foreheads, and a black fez at the back of the head. Cloaks, feathers and flowing black ties were universal, and all carried the Roman dagger.’

Sitwell succeeds in securing an audience. He passes through a pillared hall, full of palm trees in ‘pseudo-Byzantine flower pots … where soldiers lounged and typists rushed furiously in and out’. In an inner room ‘almost entirely covered with banners’, he finds two more-than-lifesize, carved and gilded saints from Florence, a huge fifteenth-century bronze bell, and the Commandant (as d’Annunzio now likes to be called) in military grey-green, his chest striped with the ribbons of his many medals. He seems nervous and tired. But, bald and one-eyed as he is, ‘at the end of a few seconds one felt the influence of that extraordinary charm which has enabled him to change howling mobs into furious partisans’.

Since Sitwell arrived in Fiume the great conductor, Arturo Toscanini, has brought his orchestra to the town. To celebrate Toscanini’s visit, d’Annunzio lays on a mock battle which is as lethal as an ancient Roman circus: 4,000 men take part, attacking each other with real grenades. The orchestra, which initially provides a musical accompaniment (Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), becomes involved in the fighting. Over a hundred men are injured, including five musicians.

Now d’Annunzio, discussing the event with Sitwell, explains that his legionaries are ‘weary of waiting for battle. They must fight one another.’ But he doesn’t really want to talk about the mayhem around him. Sitwell’s visit, he says, is welcome as an alleviation of his ‘great loneliness’. Soldiers are all very well, but he misses the fellowship, not of equals (he does not, in his opinion, have any equals) but of well-informed admirers. He quizzes Sitwell about the new English poets (one of the best of whom is Sitwell’s sister, Edith). They talk about Shelley, and about English greyhounds.

January 1921. The Italian government, on whose behalf d’Annunzio claims to have annexed Fiume, but for whom his escapade has been embarrassing abroad and destabilising at home, has sent troops and a warship to dislodge him. For years d’Annunzio has been leading crowds in chants of ‘Fiume or Death!’ but he hadn’t expected his opponent to be his own people. After five days of fighting he agrees to withdraw. The Italian populace of Fiume, some 12,000 people, turn out to see him leave. ‘Under a deluge of flowers,’ according to a supporter, ‘he forces his way through a city in tears.’ Later that day he arrives by car, alone but for his driver, at a landing stage on the Venetian lagoon. His long-serving aide, Tom Antongini, and an officer of his Legion, have brought a motor launch to meet him. The light is failing. Land and water are both shrouded in mist. D’Annunzio is enveloped in a grey cape and fur motoring cap. To Antongini he seems ‘suddenly aged’ and barely conscious. He embraces the two men and goes silently aboard the launch.

They make the short journey to the Palazzo Barbarigo. D’Annunzio has a rented apartment there, but it is less a home than a furniture depository, being crammed with the contents of the house in France that he left six years previously. Nine lorries were required to bring the mass of his possessions to Venice – the thousands of books, the hundreds of Buddhas, the scores of reproductions of paintings of St Sebastian. Now they are stacked up, higgledy-piggledy, in the lofty rooms. Documents spill from boxes. Dusty carpets are heaped in a corner. D’Annunzio’s housekeeper has sought to please her master by heating the place to his preferred inordinate temperature. As they enter, Antongini and the officer begin to sweat.

The next day d’Annunzio summons six of his acolytes. He is tetchy, exasperated by the mess surrounding him. He orders them off to search northern Italy for a new home for him. He needs a grand piano, a bathroom, a laundry, plenty of wood and coal, an enclosed garden. ‘If within eight days,’ he says ‘none of you has found a suitable house for me, I shall throw myself into the canal.’

January 1925. D’Annunzio is in the house on the mountain slopes above Lake Garda, where he will spend the rest of his life and which he will gradually transform into a bizarre piece of installation art: part display case for his vast and eclectic range of possessions; part externalisation of his own multi-faceted personality; part war memorial, part garden of earthly delights; part mausoleum. He calls it the Vittoriale.

Benito Mussolini has taken his political place, bullying his way to the premiership by marching on Rome in October 1922. It suits Mussolini that the Italian public should believe that d’Annunzio is whole-heartedly behind the new regime, but in truth they are suspicious of each other. The poet is a maverick, and still dangerously influential: he has to be kept on side. His insatiable need for money presents a point of leverage. ‘When a decayed tooth cannot be pulled out it is capped with gold,’ says Mussolini. He acts accordingly.

Mussolini greatly increases the strangeness of the Vittoriale by contributing to the jumble of objects it contains some Brobdignagian souvenirs. First comes the plane in which d’Annunzio once overflew Vienna (d’Annunzio will build a rotunda especially to house it). Next is the motor boat in which d’Annunzio made a daring raid on the Austrian fleet: d’Annunzio roars up and down the lake in it (and catches a bad cold). Next, dismantled and transported on over twenty flat-bed railway trucks, comes the forward half of a battleship, the Puglia. Offloaded at the railway station in Desenzano and laboriously transported piecemeal along the lake shore and up the mountainside to d’Annunzio’s fastness, it is there reassembled. Set in concrete, its missing rear recreated in stone, it juts out from the side of the cypress-covered slope above d’Annunzio’s rose garden as though breaking through a petrified wave. The gift comes complete with a set of real live sailors, whom d’Annunzio drills on deck.

And now we can see d’Annunzio with our own eyes. On YouTube we can watch a Fox Movietone newsreel showing a little party he gives on the Puglia’s deck soon after its installation. Proceedings open with the tolling of a great bell. Then comes a six-gun salute, smoke from the ship’s cannon cloaking the hillside. The host appears on deck, in military uniform with a chest full of decorations, smilingly escorting some ladies in cloche hats. A string quartet plays: d’Annunzio listens attentively (the camera politely staying on the side of his good eye). He is stouter now, and slightly stooped. He plays a few notes on a clarinet. Cut. Now d’Annunzio is cackling merrily, revealing that he is almost toothless. People are often surprised – given the total humourlessness of his writing – to find how playful he can be. He has been invited to recite some verse for the film crew. He waves his hands and gabbles, amidst more laughter, the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, before turning back to his female friends.

Only three years before his own accession to power, Mussolini wrote to d’Annunzio suggesting the overthrow of the Italian monarchy and the establishment of a ‘Directory’ with d’Annunzio as president. It was d’Annunzio who was the Duce then, while Mussolini was content to act as his enforcer. Now d’Annunzio is a lost leader. Throughout the 1920s there will be people looking to him to exploit his immense public following and give them a lead: fascists dismayed by the compromises Mussolini makes on his way to consolidating his power; anti-fascists who believe the poet could become the figurehead of a less brutal regime. They look in vain.

September 1937. The railway station in Verona. Mussolini is on his way back to Rome after visiting his new ally, Adolf Hitler, and showing himself to the German people. D’Annunzio – vehemently anti-German all his life – has described Hitler to Mussolini as ‘a ferocious clown’. All the same, although he seldom leaves the Vittoriale now, he travels from Garda to pay his respects. He is seventy-four, and although he is still goatishly proud of his sexual prowess, he is dreadfully aged, by time, but also by syphilis and by the quantity of cocaine he has been taking.

A newsreel, here described by d’Annunzio’s French biographer Philippe Jullian, records the occasion: ‘D’Annunzio, on the arm of the architect Maroni, shuffles along the red carpet up to the carriage window, through which the Duce is leaning. With the smile of an ogre, Mussolini takes the poet’s hand in his.’ Mussolini, descending from the train, makes his way towards a balcony from which he is to address the assembled crowd. ‘The little old man toddles after him, chattering away and waving his withered hands in the air; Mussolini, without slowing down, smiles down at him from time to time, but the ovations of the crowd prevent him from hearing a word of what d’Annunzio is saying.’ Eventually the Duce pushes brusquely ahead, pointedly not inviting d’Annunzio to join him, leaving the poet to struggle back to his car through the oblivious crowd.

According to Mussolini’s spy at the Vittoriale, what d’Annunzio claims to have been trying to say to the Duce was: ‘I admire you more than ever for what you are doing.’ But Maroni, whom d’Annunzio trusts, reports that he returns to the Vittoriale in a state of acute depression, murmuring: ‘This is the end.’ Five months later he will be dead.

SIX MONTHS

JUST AFTER DAWN on Good Friday 1915, Fly, Gabriele d’Annunzio’s favourite among his several dozen greyhounds, died in a veterinary clinic in Paris. The poet had stayed up most of the night while Fly leaned trembling against him, one of her legs so swollen she couldn’t lie down. Eventually the vet declared that he must ‘liberate’ her. While he did so d’Annunzio walked the streets. It was a public holiday, the most doleful festival in the Christian calendar, and Paris was anyway three-quarters empty: most of the city’s well-to-do inhabitants had fled when the government decamped to Bordeaux the previous autumn. What few people d’Annunzio passed were all men in uniform, and wounded. He stopped at the window of a musical instrument shop to admire some violins (as a connoisseur of music and of fine workmanship he was very interested in the luthier’s craft). Their delicate lines, their gilded darkness, reminded him of his dear dog.

Back at the surgery, the attendant uncovered Fly’s body for him. Her eyes, always before so adoringly fixed on him, were ‘blackened slots’. He had the corpse wrapped in cotton wool, then in a linen sheet, then in red damask, and finally laid in a white lacquered casket. As the workman nailed down the lid he remembered how much Fly had feared being alone in the dark. With the coffin in the back of his car he drove very slowly out to the farm near Versailles where his more-or-less-discarded mistress, Nathalie Goloubeff, cared for his dwindling pack of hounds. Since France had gone to war many of them had had to be put down for lack of food.

The grave was dug. Nathalie laid a basket of forget-me-nots and ivy at Fly’s head. D’Annunzio’s notebook entry for that day is listlessly bleak: the crackle of machine-gun fire (they were very near the front); a cock crowing; smoke drifting. ‘The mole hills, pale-coloured like dried-out clay … this terrible life … the throbbing of the aeroplanes, Fly’s poor eyes already putrefying … a sadness beyond words.’ Afterwards d’Annunzio ate breakfast with Nathalie, whom he had followed to France five years earlier, and with whom he still sometimes passed delicious nights. They were quiet. D’Annunzio was watching the dogs, Fly’s children and grandchildren, and thinking of the hound’s svelte body beginning to rot underground.

D’Annunzio writes about his dogs with a tenderness he seldom displays in writing about his women. Within days he would part from Nathalie, never to see her again; his references to her in his subsequent writings are more irritable than elegiac. That day of muted private emotion fell in the middle of a month of whirling excitement in his public life. As he buried Fly in a spoiled field he was in the midst of burying a phase of his life of which he was tired, and impatient for the beginning of a new one.

Since the outbreak of war the previous summer he had been stalled, stuck in the wrong place, unsure of his role, feeling his age (he was fifty-two). But on 7 March 1915 he finally got around to looking at a letter he had received days before (recipient of enormous quantities of fanmail, he often left his post unopened for weeks, or for ever). The letter contained a photograph of a monument to be erected at the harbour town of Quarto, near Genoa, from which Giuseppe Garibaldi and his followers had embarked for Sicily. The Sicilian expedition was, and is, the most thrilling episode in modern Italy’s myth of origin. In 1860, without the sanction of any government, at the head of a troop of just over a thousand ill-equipped volunteers, Garibaldi landed in Sicily. Over the next few months he drove the armies of the Bourbon King of Naples out of southern Italy, beginning the process which would lead to the creation of a free and united Italy.

Garibaldi was as famously beautiful as d’Annunzio was notoriously odd-looking. Garibaldi was renowned for his asceticism and his absolute integrity: after making himself dictator of half of Italy he took nothing for himself but a sack of seed corn. D’Annunzio was an inveterate breaker of contracts and non-payer of debts who bought suits by the dozen and shirts by the hundred. But the two men had some important things in common, among them prodigious sexual energy and a detestation of the Austrians (for centuries overlords of much of Italy). In Paris in 1915, d’Annunzio was in contact with Peppino Garibaldi, the great man’s grandson, who was commanding a legion of Italian volunteers fighting alongside the French. D’Annunzio had been waiting for the right occasion for his return to Italy. The letter, which so narrowly escaped the waste-paper basket, gave him his opportunity. The monument was to be unveiled on 5 May, the fifty-fifth anniversary of Garibaldi’s setting out. Would d’Annunzio, the organisers wondered, consider returning to his home country to speak on the occasion? ‘I opened the letter. I read it, and lo! Everything turned bright!’

When the war began, the previous year, Italy remained neutral. Prime Minister Antonio Salandra and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino, aware that their armed forces were ill-prepared for conflict, announced that they would observe the terms of the 1882 Triple Alliance, whereby Italy had agreed with Austria and Germany to refrain from making war on each other. To d’Annunzio that neutrality seemed shameful. Italy should fight, not for advantage but as a matter of pride. Too many people around the world thought of the country as ‘a museum, an inn, a holiday destination, a horizon touched up with Prussian blue for international honeymoons’. They must be shown otherwise. Throughout the winter of 1914/15, d’Annunzio had been calling on the Italian government, through the pages of journals both French and Italian, to intervene on the side of France (Britain and Russia’s part in the war was of no interest to him) against the Teutonic ‘horde’. ‘This war is not a simple conflict of interests, which might be transient, sporadic or illusory,’ he wrote, ‘it is a struggle of races, a confrontation of irreconcilable powers, a trial of blood.’

The French government was naturally eager to encourage d’Annunzio to bring his compatriots into battle on their side. The evening before he read the letter from Genoa, a French official, Jean Finot, came to see him. D’Annunzio didn’t like him much. ‘A little hunched man, held upright by a kind of dried-out vanity.’ Nor was he impressed by the plan Finot had come to discuss. Peppino Garibaldi’s volunteer legion had been fighting heroically: a quarter of the men, including two of Garibaldi’s other grandsons, had been killed. Now the survivors were to be sent home to rouse their fellow Italians to action. Madame Paquin, the couturier, had promised 2,000 red shirts of the kind that the great Garibaldi’s own men had worn half a century before, but made of silk this time. The venture was something like a coup d’état, something like a piece of political theatre. As the former it seemed incompetent: as the latter it felt muzzily ill-directed. D’Annunzio was anxious. After Finot left he applied a mustard plaster to his chest – he had a bad cough – and went to bed, but lay for a long time restless. All his life his moods oscillated between prodigious energy and depression. On this night he was very low. He waited for sleep, ‘as for death’.

When he read the letter from Genoa the following morning he was instantly high again. ‘I will go. I will lead the Garibaldini Legion, the red wave,’ he told his notebook. ‘To reach Quarto … to cross the Tyrrhenian Sea with a ship loaded with blood eager to be spilled!’ An ‘Apollonian providence’ had come to his aid.

Peppino Garibaldi came to see him in the afternoon. The two men paced around the room, both of them too excited to sit down. D’Annunzio small, neatly groomed as always; Garibaldi tall, with his deeply lined face and brilliant eyes, in the blue tunic and red breeches of a colonel in the French army. D’Annunzio expounded his vision: ‘Two thousand young men in arms … encircling the solemn monument ready to set out from there to conquer and to die.’ He himself as creator, director and star of this martial show. ‘It is impossible that Italy, however blind or deaf, does not see the sign, does not hear the appeal, rising up from the rock of Quarto.’ Garibaldi was equally moved. It will be a flame, he said, or a poem. D’Annunzio, who had woken that morning feeling seedy, with a touch of ‘the humiliating little complaint’ (either piles or a recurrence of the venereal disease which he had contracted the previous year), ended the day enraptured, swept away on ‘a torrent of interior music’.

Just over three weeks later came the sad day of Fly’s death, and a mournful Easter spent with Nathalie, followed by the melancholy process of packing up. ‘Life flows from the house as though from an open vein,’ wrote d’Annunzio, watching the removal men dismantle his Parisian home. He gave away some of his best greyhounds – two of them to Pétain, the future Marshal. D’Annunzio was, as usual, badly in need of money. To finance his journey he pawned some splendid emeralds which Eleonora Duse had given him. With another month to go before he was due in Quarto, he set out for his villa on the Atlantic coast at Arcachon. There he poured his energies into writing two furiously bellicose articles and the speech for Quarto, and into his last love affair on French soil, with a surgeon’s daughter, a fine horsewoman (d’Annunzio admired ‘Amazons’) to whose presence in the neighbourhood his housekeeper-cum-concubine-cum-procuress Amélie Mazower (whom he called ‘Aélis’) had alerted him.

Back in Paris, assiduous as ever in self-promotion, he gave a press conference. The Revue de Paris correspondent was positively shocked by the splendour of his wardrobe. His secretary had been busy chasing up the suits he had on order from his tailor, and his accounts for that month reveal he had also bought a prodigious number of new cravats. He delivered the text of his speech to Salandra, the Italian premier, and to newspaper editors in Paris and Milan, with strict instructions that it was to be embargoed until the morning of 5 May. He told the editor of Le Figaro, ‘the die is about to be cast’. The verbal flourish reveals that he saw himself as a second Julius Caesar, imposing a heroically martial destiny on an unwilling Rome.

He was given a grand send-off at the Gare de Lyon. ‘Women rushed to the station,’ he wrote. ‘Almost all of them were acquainted with my bed.’ Nathalie was not on the platform. D’Annunzio, who had begun referring to her as ‘the nuisance’, had sent her back to the farm. But the Amazon from Arcachon was in the crowd gathered to see him off, and so, probably, were several of his other lovers. The lesbian novelist Sibilla Aleramo, like him a member of the sexually ambiguous coterie who met at Nathalie Barney’s salon, and a friend of the painter Romaine Brooks, whose only male lover he was, alleges he had been carrying on affairs with ‘four, five or six’ women simultaneously during the previous year.

On 4 May 1915, just over five years after he had left Italy bankrupt and with ignominious haste, he recrossed the border. While he had dallied in Paris through the first months of the war, ordering haute-couture outfits for his dogs (red and blue, made by the couturier Charles Worth), teaching himself glass-blowing and twiddling at the recipe for his patent perfume, d’Annunzio had become, in his compatriots’ collective imagination, the man who could save their national honour. He had left the country as a celebrity whose escapades, however amusing, were becoming undignified. He returned as a nationalist messiah.

Giosuè Carducci, the great poet of the previous generation, had heralded the advent of such a man. ‘Prepare the way for the master who is to come, for the spirit of Italy, grand and great, for the genius, the beatings of whose approaching wings we already hear.’ So had d’Annunzio himself, writing enigmatically that ‘He will come from the silence, defeating death,/The necessary Hero.’ During his absence in France he had, for Italians of a nationalist and militarist persuasion, acquired the status and glamour of such a messianic hero. In Milan, his supporters organised a series of readings of his poems to celebrate his advent. ‘Rapt in his sublime visions, he seemed to have forgotten his beautiful fatherland,’ wrote an admirer. ‘But no! As soon as the new dawn appeared in the skies, he arose proudly and with a shudder of love he ran to the breast of the great mother.’

As d’Annunzio’s train approached the great mother’s border, he bound his eyes, lest, as he explained, the first sight of his homeland prove too emotionally overwhelming. Once he was on Italian territory, he was met at every stop by enthusiastic crowds. Young women climbed on the train’s running board, kissing the glass of his compartment’s windows and handing him flowers. In Turin, according to the following day’s Corriere della Sera, ‘thousands of hands reached out to him’, while d’Annunzio, with a catch in his throat, addressed them from the window of the train. As he approached Genoa, a professor at the university cancelled a lecture, urging his students not to learn history but to go meet d’Annunzio at the station and ‘live history’ instead.

With difficulty d’Annunzio was got into a motor car and driven through the press of people. Safely arrived at his hotel, he came out onto a balcony and spoke to the excited crowd. ‘Five long years of absence and sadness lie behind me, abolished!’ There had, in fact, been nothing but his own inclination to prevent him returning to Italy earlier, but he referred to his absence as an ‘exile’. ‘Now I live, I wish only to live, a new life.’

The next day he spoke on the waterfront. Having read the text of his oration, King Victor Emmanuel had decided he had better stay away. So did all the government ministers. Italy was still neutral. D’Annunzio’s rhetoric was too aggressive to receive the sanction of a royal or ministerial audience. He was not, however, asked to tone it down.

The quayside was thronged. Some hundred survivors of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’, living mementoes of Italy’s heroic foundation, were there, as well as the new Garibaldini in their Paquin-tailored tunics. News photographs show the monument engulfed in a sea of straw boaters. Men (there are few women visible) scramble out on the rocks for a better view, or take to their boats to avoid the crush on land. The mayor, who opened proceedings, addressed himself to the dignitaries assembled on the platform. Neatly demonstrating his understanding of the modern political process by turning the other way, d’Annunzio spoke out to the crowd.

Without any kind of amplification, he could make himself heard by thousands. The German caricaturist, Trier, depicted him later that year as a ranter, his face contorted, his mouth gaping wide. But the image is misleading. Even when inciting his hearers to make war, his strategy was not to harangue but to fascinate and seduce. His language was violent, his manner dulcet. His oration at Quarto was a magnificent piece of word-music. In it d’Annunzio paid tribute to the heroism of ‘The Thousand’, thus appropriating their glory for himself. He quoted Garibaldi’s most famous line: ‘Here we make Italy, or we die!’ He spoke of the noble aspirations of Rome’s ancient heroes. He flattered his audience and challenged them, daring them to be worthy of their great antecedents. He wrapped his provocative politics in the lulling grandeur of liturgical rhythms. He ended with a series of beatitudes:

Blessed are the young who hunger and thirst for glory, for they shall be satisfied …

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be called upon to staunch a splendid flow of blood, and dress a wonderful wound …

Blessed are they that have most, because they can give most, dare most …

Blessed are they who return with victories, for they shall see the new face of Rome.

It was incantatory. It was enthralling. It was blasphemy. ‘This man!’ wrote Romain Rolland, outraged. ‘This man, who is the incarnation of literary falsehood, dares to pose as Jesus!’ Rolland had once enjoyed d’Annunzio’s company, but they were now diametrically opposed in their attitudes to war. Rolland was a pacifist, while d’Annunzio had recreated ‘the Sermon on the Mount to incite Italy to violate her treaties and make war on her allies’.

There were those who thought d’Annunzio’s showmanship too contrived and his speech preposterously over-erudite. But d’Annunzio knew what he was doing. He was aware that politics was a performance art. Later in the year he noted how dull and patronising was a priest who spoke over-simply to uneducated solders, ‘believing that humble hearts don’t know how to understand high and noble eloquence’. That was not a mistake he ever made. He offered intoxicating rhythms, clanging declarations, the invocation of grand abstractions and resonant myth. Whether or not his audience followed the meaning of everything he said, they responded fervently to the hypnotic way he said it. At Quarto the crowd surged forward, sang the Marseillaise in sign of their support for their ‘Latin sister’ France, and shouted out for war.

The city was full of fervent nationalists. Again and again d’Annunzio was called upon to address them. In four days he spoke seven times. His speeches were reported all over Europe. Italian government ministers were nervous: they were engaged in secret negotiations of the utmost delicacy and d’Annunzio was a dangerously loose cannon. Sonnino called his appearance at Quarto ‘clowning’. Foreign Minister Marini dismissed it as ‘stupid’. But French reporters were full of admiration and gratitude. His enemies were respectful too: a German cartoon, showing him ranting and frenzied, was captioned ‘all would go well if we had cannon of the calibre of his big mouth’.

What seemed to be taking place in Genoa was the transfiguration of d’Annunzio from dandy-poet into national redeemer. But when he stepped back into the privacy of his hotel room he was still the incorrigible spendthrift and libertine. Ugo Ojetti, who had arrived in Genoa with him, wrote to their mutual editor and friend Luigi Albertini that week, imploring Albertini to use his influence on the poet, who was in danger of compromising his own reputation and the interventionist cause. ‘He’s only interested in snouting around under the most disreputable skirts.’ A hostile deputy was soon asking a parliamentary question expecting the answer ‘yes’ – whether it was true that Signor d’Annunzio had left Genoa’s Hotel Eden Palace without paying the startlingly large bill run up by himself and the two unidentified women who were accompanying him there?

It wasn’t only d’Annunzio’s personal renaissance that was less simple than it seemed. So too was his part in the political drama in which he claimed such a stellar role. He had come to urge his compatriots to repudiate the Triple Alliance and to agree to go to war alongside France, Britain and Russia, the nations subscribing to the Entente. Over the next two weeks he was repeatedly, and in increasingly virulent language, to denounce the government ministers who apparently hung back from doing so. But without his knowledge they had already done precisely that which he was urging them to do.

Throughout the winter, Prime Minister Salandra and his Foreign Minister Sonnino had been negotiating with both sides, and concluded that the terms offered by the Entente were the more attractive. On 26 April, while d’Annunzio was still in Paris, Italy’s rulers had secretly signed the Treaty of London with Britain and France, agreeing to enter the war on their side. On 1 May, Sonnino asked the cabinet to repudiate the Triple Alliance, so that he could reach an agreement with the Entente (an agreement that had in fact already been reached). On 3 May, the day before d’Annunzio took the train south, Salandra’s government formally (but still secretly) severed Italy’s ties with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Later, d’Annunzio was to claim to have been privy to the government’s secrets all along, but he was lying. During the last few weeks of his time in France, he was gleaning information from the secondhand gossip of the press corps and peripheral politicians. He had no secret collusion with the authorities he was shortly to be subjecting to such furious verbal abuse. He didn’t know it, but in calling for intervention he was banging, noisily and with big gestures, on an already open door.

The morning after he spoke at Quarto, the city of Genoa presented d’Annunzio with an 800 kilo plaster cast of a fourteenth-century stone lion. He accepted the lion (emblem of St Mark and of the Venetian Empire he was intent on reviving) by delivering his first oration of the day. Homeless as he was, he was always pleased with titanic bric-a-brac. At noon he was speaking again, this time to Garibaldi’s veterans. That evening he was presented with a bronze shield by the mayor, and responded with more speechifying. With each oration he became more incendiary. He told the university students: ‘Go! You are the flying sparks of the sacred blaze. Go start the fire!’

After five days’ rest and recreation with his two female friends, he moved on to Rome. Salandra’s administration, secretly committed to military intervention, was at an impasse. The majority of Italians, including the King, the Pope and a large proportion of military leaders, still favoured neutrality, and so did parliament. The peace party was headed by Giovanni Giolitti, the liberal statesman whose canny pragmatism had already made him a hate figure for d’Annunzio. Giolitti had been premier four times. He was out of office in 1915 but he still dominated parliament, as he had done for nearly two decades. There he repeatedly argued against intervention in a war from which, in his view, Italy would gain next to nothing (he was to be proved correct). He had many supporters. Over 300 deputies left their visiting cards on him that month as a sign of solidarity.

Giolitti’s opponents, though, were more vociferous. All over Italy pro-war demonstrations were taking place. British visitor and aspiring politician Hugh Dalton reported there were ‘hundreds and thousands of good people of all classes walking slowly through the streets of Rome and other Italian cities, intoning with a slow and interminable repetition, “Death to Giolitti, Death to Giolitti”.’ In Rome the British ambassador Sir Renell Rodd estimated that the crowd assembled in the Piazza del Popolo to demonstrate in favour of intervention was 200,000 strong. ‘They were not the type which ordinarily furnishes demonstrations, but an orderly and disciplined throng which seemed to include the best of the bourgeoisie.’

These British witnesses were naturally inclined to think well of Italians eager to fight alongside their own country: their description of the demonstrators as being ‘the best’ people reflects their bias. The ambassador’s wife threw flowers over the embassy balcony to the pro-war demonstrators, even though Rodd himself – the secret of the Treaty of London not yet being out – had to keep mum. In truth not all of the interventionists were so ‘disciplined’ and ‘orderly’. In Rome neutralist politicians were beaten up in the street. The then magazine editor Benito Mussolini called upon his readers to, ‘Shoot, I say shoot, a dozen [neutralist] deputies in the back.’ But though, as Rodd put it, ‘the people had come down into the piazza’ and ‘manifested their will’, Salandra couldn’t mobilise the armed forces without parliament’s consent, and Giolitti commanded the majority in the house. Something, or perhaps someone, was needed to break the deadlock.

D’Annunzio arrived in Rome on 12 May. The reporter from the Corriere della Sera estimated that 100,000 turned out to meet his train. There were tumultuous scenes at the railway station. D’Annunzio narrowly escaped being trampled to death by his admirers before he was hustled into a car. Photographs show the Via Veneto crammed from end to end, a dark river of hats. Arriving at the Hotel Regina, he made it to safety through the kitchen door. Shortly thereafter he reappeared on a balcony, declaring his devotion to the King and the Queen Mother (who was known to favour intervention) and calling upon his listeners to turn on cowards and appeasers, the ‘enemies within’.

Repeatedly, over the next few days, he addressed the increasingly volatile crowds. Jean Carrère, correspondent with Le Temps, describes him: ‘Never have I seen an orator advance before the public with such composure. Standing on his improvised tribune he was magnificently alone, of a marble pallor, with two eyes of flame.’ He glittered. Another observer wrote of ‘the light gleaming off his bald pate and flashing off his spectacles’ (actually a monocle, which he called his ‘caramel’).

Over and over again, with a terrible, measured fury, he denounced the government of his country. He once wrote musingly about how, to one inflamed by desire, a woman’s mouth might seem like a flower, like paradise, like the luscious epitome of all delight, while days or hours later (with lust appeased) it could seem repellent – slimy, disgustingly warm, alarmingly muscular. Now the revulsion with which, in the past, he had recoiled from lovers and pleasures he had tired of, was turned on the social mores and political institutions of peacetime Italy. Rome was a sewer; its rulers were drivelling, stale-smelling old men; civilian life was a foul morass.

He was voicing sentiments that would have found their echoes all over Europe. Marinetti had called war ‘the hygiene of Europe’. In the political rhetoric and the poetry of the period, civilian existence is grey, dim, morally compromised and physically grubby. The battlefield by contrast is bright, aglitter with weapons and flashing with joy. Above all it is clean. When Britain declared war Rupert Brooke proclaimed his gladness to ‘Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move/And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary.’ Like d’Annunzio, Brooke saw the war as a saving freshness into which he could plunge ‘as swimmers into cleanness leaping’. In Germany, Thomas Mann welcomed the conflict as ‘a purging and a liberation’. ‘Let the storm come,’ cried the Hungarian Dezsö Kosztolányi, ‘and sweep out our salons.’

The morning after he arrived in Rome, d’Annunzio visited the minister Ferdinando Martini, who, as editor of the journal the Fanfulla della Domenica in the 1870s, had known him as a precocious schoolboy contributor. There is no record of their conversation. Contemporaries speculated that Martini must have spoken of the repudiation of the Triple Alliance and the Treaty of London. He probably did, even though he didn’t trust d’Annunzio. A few days earlier, advising that the King should stay away from Quarto, he had written: ‘D’Annunzio thinks only of himself and his own success … He has no political sense whatsoever, sometimes even, despite his marvellous genius, not even any common sense … he could easily compromise us.’ But the decision to go to war could not be implemented until parliament and people had been swayed in its favour. D’Annunzio could help.

That evening, speaking from his hotel balcony, d’Annunzio launched into his most furious oratory to date. He may by now have been speaking with the tacit approval of the government, but his language was dangerously seditious, the actions he sought to instigate were criminal. He attacked the advocates of peace in vitriolic terms. The very air of Rome stank of their treachery. Those who still hung back from war were traitors, ‘assassins’ of the patria, Italy’s executioners. Giolitti was strangling the nation with a Prussian rope.

D’Annunzio was openly advocating violent attacks on the people’s elected representatives. He called upon the Roman mob to take the law into their own hands. He urged his listeners to attack the appeasers who ‘lick the boots on sweaty Prussian feet’. He called for ‘stonings and arson’. His rhetoric was becoming ever more frenzied. ‘I tell you, there is treason here, in Rome! We are being sold like a herd of diseased cattle.’ He urged the people to hunt down anti-war deputies. ‘Form squads!’ (‘squadro’ was one of the many words the fascists would pick up from him). ‘Lie in wait. Seize them. Capture them!’ An observer reports that the applause when he paused was like a storm. When he resumed to denounce Giolitti in ever more vituperative terms (‘that diabolical old blubber-lipped hangman’), the storm ‘was transformed into a cyclone’.

D’Annunzio was high on his own eloquence, on the frenzy of the crowds he flattered and inflamed and on the prospect of blood. Fifty-two years old, he extolled the ‘ruthless purity’ of youth. A poet whose life’s work had been the threading together of obscure and beautiful words, he inveighed against verbiage and called for action, swift, cruel if need be, and unambiguous. ‘It is not the time for speaking but for doing.’ He ended by leading the crowd in the Risorgimento anthem, beating time with his little white hands while the people beneath bellowed out the refrain: ‘Let us join the cohort,/We are ready to die!/Italy has called!’ Tom Antongini reports that the Queen Mother, listening from behind the shutters of her palace window, was moved to tears.

That night Salandra sought a more secure mandate by offering to resign. The following day, 14 May, Rome was in uproar. The painter Giacomo Balla, in his hectic, swirling canvases, Forms Cry Long Live Italy and Patriotic Demonstration (both inspired by the turmoil of which d’Annunzio was part) conveys the violence and elation in the air. The Austrian embassy was cordoned off by infantry with bayonets fixed for fear of the mob. A crowd burst into the parliament building, the Palazzo Montecitorio, smashing furniture and terrifying the deputies. In the afternoon the King summoned Giolitti and asked him to form a government. Giolitti declined. His life was in danger. But it was not fear, but principle, that made it impossible for him to assume power. The King had signed the Treaty of London; his new premier would be obliged to implement it. Giolitti could not lead the country into a war to which he was so publicly and vehemently opposed. The King and Salandra had manoeuvred him into an impossible position. Declining the chance to govern, he lost his power to oppose.

That evening, d’Annunzio spoke at the Press Association and then moved on to Rome’s grand opera house, the Teatro Costanzi. Interrupting the scheduled performance, he stepped out onto the stage at the end of the first act. There he took it upon himself to make public the news that Italy would fight. His delivery was peremptory, dramatic (as a demagogue he had come a long way in the few days since he had delivered his piece of elaborate prose-poetry at Quarto). ‘Hear me!’ he began ‘Hear me! I have momentous things to tell you, things you don’t know. Keep silent. Listen to me. Then leap to your feet, all of you!’ Again he raved against Giolitti, ‘an icy lie armed with flexile cunning, as the horrible sac of an octopus is equipped with twining tentacles’ who ‘betrays the King, betrays the fatherland’. D’Annunzio urged ‘good citizens’ to take their vengeance. His speech was an incitement to murder. ‘If blood flows, such blood will be as blessed as that shed in the trenches.’ Afterwards some of his supporters hijacked a fire engine and used its ladders in an attempt to break into Giolitti’s house: they were driven off by the military guard.

The King invited Salandra to form a new government. Giolitti conceded defeat and left the city. The war party had carried out what historian Mark Thompson calls a ‘coup d’état in all but name’. The socialist leader Filippo Turati expressed his despair with the percipient words: ‘Let the bourgeoisie have its war. There will be no winners; everyone will lose.’ The road to war was open. But still d’Annunzio talked. The task he had set himself was greater than a simple change in government policy. He was assisting at the birth of a new, greater Italy. ‘The crowd howls like a woman in labour. The crowd writhes in giving life to its own destiny … Everything is ardour and clamour, creation and intoxication, peril and victory, beneath the murky sky of battle where the swallows flash and cry.’

Those hectic days in Genoa and Rome were to enter d’Annunzio’s personal mythology as ‘radiant May’, a period haloed in glory during which he created a masterpiece in a hitherto unknown art form. In 1906 he had watched his friend, the sculptor Clemente Origo, casting a bronze statue inspired by one of his own poems, a large and complex piece showing a centaur wrestling with a mighty stag. The scene in the workshop – the fierce heat, the courage of the foundry workers, the combination of artistry and danger – had haunted him. He used it in a novel. Now he repeatedly evoked it as an image of what he was doing to the Italian people. He was breaking up the decadent old forms of Italian society in order to make the nation anew, as a smith might smash up scrap metal ready for use in a new compound. He was cleansing his human material of its impurities. He was melting it down in the white heat of his eloquence. On 17 May he spoke on the Capitol Hill, and in his account of the occasion he likens his words to the blows with which the foundry man strikes out a plug to let the liquefied metal flow into the mould. ‘The tumult’ seems to him like a furnace’s fiery breath. The crowd is an incandescent mass of molten bronze ready to be shaped by his will. ‘All the mouths of the mould are open. A gigantic statue is being cast.’

There were swallows on the Capitol that day, a numerous flock of them squabbling noisily as they swooped around the green-bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. We know it, because d’Annunzio made a note about them. Surrounded by an ecstatic crowd whose excitement he himself was orchestrating, he was yet sufficiently detached to observe birds and flowers (the masses of red carnations in the Teatro Costanzi on the night he spoke there) or the feel of a horse’s rump under his hand.

He was fast developing a brilliantly manipulative oratorical technique. He allowed his public no break in his contrivance of their hysteria. He played on them with rhetorical tricks borrowed from religious liturgy or from classical drama. ‘Hear me!’ he cried ‘Listen to me!’ ‘Understand me!’ The crowd was urged to join him, howling out responses to his insistent ‘Evvivas!’ These were not speeches to be rationally appraised but acts of collective self-hypnosis. D’Annunzio’s works as a dramatist had frequently been grandiose in conception, spectacular in their staging and appalling for the violence of their sentiments, but never before had he produced anything like the shows he put on during that ‘radiant May’.

He had found his métier. Romain Rolland, recoiling, likened him to Marat. He had become the figurehead of a mass movement. When he drove away from the Capitol, ‘dishevelled boys, their faces crazy, dripping with sweat as though after a fight’, threw themselves at the car, nearly lifting it off the ground. ‘The battle is won. The great bell has sounded. The whole sky is on fire. I am drunk with the joy of war.’

Quite how much political effect this extraordinary sequence of public demonstrations had is a matter of dispute. The Treaty of London had been ratified already, before d’Annunzio returned from France, but it is conceivable that without his intervention Salandra and his cabinet might have failed to carry the electorate (the majority of whom dreaded war) with them. But, whatever the extent of his actual influence, it certainly appeared to the public that d’Annunzio – a private individual without any constitutional authority – had imposed his will on the elected government, and that he was the man who had taken them to war. He had done it by directing a stream of virulent abuse against representatives of Italy’s democratic institutions, and by urging the crowds that gathered around him to begin what might have amounted to a civil war. If anyone in Rome in those frenzied days was an enemy of the state it was surely not Giolitti, but d’Annunzio himself.

Nietzsche defined the state as ‘a remorseless machine of oppression’, a ‘herd of blond beasts of prey’. D’Annunzio – who fancied himself (in some moods) to be a Nietzschean Übermensch (superman), unshackled by social conscience or civic duty – had no respect for the electorate, and no compunction about undermining the authority of democratic institutions. A decade later Mussolini would refer to the events of May 1915 as a ‘revolution’ and boast that in that glorious month the Italian people, incited by d’Annunzio ‘the first Duce’, had risen up against their corrupt and lily-livered rulers, clamouring for the right to prove their honour and gain glory, and that those rulers had ignominiously surrendered. The truth is otherwise. But the spectacle of a government apparently harangued into action by a demagogue with no respect for the rule of law was ominous for constitutional democracy.

Immediately after the fierce excitement of his appearance on the Capitol, d’Annunzio withdrew and walked, alone and quiet, on the Aventine Hill. The lovers in his novel Pleasure had ridden the same way, ‘with ever before their eyes the great vision of the imperial palaces set alight by the sunset, flame-red between the blackening cypresses, and through it drifting a golden dust’. So had d’Annunzio himself with Elvira Fraternali, the great love of his Roman years. He thought about her that evening (although he was to leave the letter she wrote him that month unanswered: he did not like to see what age did to women he had once doted on). He brooded over the five years of his ‘exile’ in France. To return to the city where he had made his name, and married, and several times fallen in love, and been young (he wrote that year that he would give anything, even Halcyon, his finest poem-sequence, to be twenty-seven years old again) moved him deeply. By the gate of the Priorato of Malta, with its famous view through a keyhole of the dome of St Peter’s, he saw what looked like a tiny star hovering at the level of his eyebrows. It was a glow-worm, the first he had seen since he left Italy in 1910.

In his notebook, in his letters, in his memoir Notturno, the glow-worm is accorded almost as much space as the preceding oration. D’Annunzio’s case has always puzzled those simple-minded enough to believe that artistic talent and refined sensibility are incompatible with political extremism and an appetite for violence. Only hours after he had been raving against his political opponents and urging a mob on to murder, he was strolling – pensive and nostalgic – through the jasmine-scented Roman night, his appreciation of Rome’s multi-layered beauty that of a man of deep erudition; his response to a minuscule natural wonder that of a poet.

On the day Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, d’Annunzio dined with some of his supporters. Very late, as dawn was breaking, he spoke to them. This address makes a quiet, gravely ominous coda to the stridency of the public speeches. He looked forward to the ensuing carnage without compunction for his part in involving his country in it. He referred blasphemously to his days of non-stop oratory as ‘the Passion Week’. This was his night in the Garden of Gethsemane, the moment when he allowed himself and his hearers to feel the horror of what was to come. ‘All those people who yesterday were tumultuous in the streets and squares, who yesterday with a great voice demanded war, are full of veins, are full of blood.’ He had exulted in the idea of arriving at Quarto with a legion of sacrificial victims, ‘young blood to be spilt’. Now he looked forward to making the oblation of countless others’ lives to his ‘tenth muse, Energy’, who ‘loves not measured words but abundant blood’ and who was about to get her fill of it. He concluded with a muted prayer: ‘God grant that we find each other again, living or dead, in a place of light.’

Show over, d’Annunzio relaxed. In the summer of 1915, between his prodigious feats of oratory in May and his setting out for the front in July, he sank, according to his secretary Tom Antongini, into ‘the most abject state of frivolity’. He summoned Aélis from Paris to join him (Nathalie was pointedly not invited) and went, so Antongini tells us, ‘from a reception to a dinner and from an intimate tea to an even more intimate night’. As the forger of Italy’s new martial destiny he was the man of the hour: women found him less resistible than ever. D’Annunzio’s son Mario reports that a rich Argentinian lady took a room in the hotel expressly to be near him. (He accepted the flowers with which she presented him, but rejected their donor – ‘too thin,’ he said.) Isadora Duncan was there too, and perhaps more fortunate. His philandering did nothing to decrease his popularity with the public. His militancy added to his sexual allure; his sexual conquests enhanced his virile, iron-clad image.

He was not writing. Now he was a hero he was more marketable than ever, and the people he had hurried into war looked to him to compose their battle hymns. But no words came. ‘I have a horror of sedentary work,’ he wrote that summer. ‘Of the pen, of the ink, of paper, of all those things now become so futile. A feverish desire for action devours me.’

He had not, as a young man, shown much enthusiasm for the soldier’s life. He had been a resourceful evader of national service and, when he found himself unable to defer the evil day any longer, he served his country with extreme ill grace. ‘It is certain death for me,’ he wrote to his lover. ‘Ariel a corporal!’ (Like Shelley, one of the models for his own persona, he named himself after Shakespeare’s androgynous spirit.) ‘The delicate Ariel! Can you imagine it?’ He was obliged to live in barracks and groom his own horse. He left the army with relief. Now, a quarter of a century later, he was avid to rejoin it.

As he waited in Rome for instructions as to where he was to present himself he fretted over the difficulty of getting his uniforms made. Luigi Albertini, who was expecting a Song of War from him for publication in the Corriere della Sera, received instead a letter complaining about the difficulty of finding a tailor. Soon, though, he was wearing the elegant white outfit of the Novara Lancers, and experiencing curiously mixed feelings about it. ‘I already feel I belong to a caste, and that I am the prisoner of rules.’ He was to be attached to the staff of the Duke of Aosta – the King’s taller, more charismatic cousin who commanded the Third Army – and given almost unlimited licence to define his own war work. He had permission from the commander-in-chief, General Cadorna, to visit any part of the front and to participate in any manoeuvres he chose. He was to be, not a leader, but an inspirer.

His progress northward at the end of July was attended by almost as much excitement as his arrival in Italy had been. Minister Martini, who saw the pushy adolescent he remembered all too clearly in the world famous poet, wrote irritably that d’Annunzio would have done better to have gone directly and ‘in silence’ to the military base at Udine, ‘but he can’t live without réclame’. He went to Pescara to pay a farewell visit to his mother, who was by this time paralysed and mute, and was lavishly fêted by his fellow Abruzzese. He stopped off in Ferrara and presented the manuscript of his play ‘Parisina’ to the mayor in a public ceremony, declaring that he ‘carried the beauty of that city in [his] intrepid heart’. Martini wrote that this was ‘all foolishness which annoys the public’, but he was wrong: the public responded warmly.

As usual, d’Annunzio was spending money like there was no tomorrow – a natural response to the onset of a war perhaps, but one which was exasperating to Albertini, who was acting as his unofficial manager and saw all too clearly how close d’Annunzio was coming to another financial catastrophe. He was unable to settle his bill at the expensive Hotel Regina where he had stayed for two months; nearly three years later he was still trying to retrieve the trunks full of clothes and knick-knacks he was obliged to leave there in lieu of payment. He had to beg his book publisher, Treves, for an advance to pay for the two horses which, as a cavalry officer, he was expected to provide. Now Albertini urged him to go straight to the Duke of Aosta’s headquarters: good sensible advice. ‘There you’ll eat regular meals for four lire a day. Perhaps you won’t need to pay for lodging. They’ll give you 400 lire a month. See what horizons open up!’ Not the kind of horizons that drew d’Annunzio. On arrival in Venice he checked into the Hotel Danieli, then, as now, one of the grandest hotels on earth.

For Italians the Great War was fought along the border with Austria, in the mountains to the north and east of Venice. The city was drastically changed. The summer of 1914 had been, according to the contemporary Venetian historian Gino Damerini, an especially brilliant season. American, English, French, German, Hungarian, and Russian visitors packed out the hotels, restaurants and beaches, ‘each competing with the others in luxury, nudist exhibitionism, hedonist wildness, carnivalesque fancies and pretentious elegance’. The palaces along the Grand Canal, many of whose proprietors were d’Annunzio’s old acquaintances, were all open, flooding the hot, still nights with light and music. Then came the assassination at Sarajevo, and ‘at the echo of the first cannon shot all those people … the illuminations, the silk, the jewels, the kaleidoscopic game of devil-may-care sophistication … vanished, as though sucked away by a whirlwind’. By the time d’Annunzio arrived a year later, Venice had assumed the character of a military and naval base, and a city under imminent danger of attack. The larger canals were blocked. The altane, the rickety wooden roof terraces with which the land-starved Venetians have been consoling themselves for their lack of gardens since at least the fifteenth century, had been taken over by air-raid wardens: on the high platforms where Carpaccio painted courtesans bleaching their hair in the sun, there were now searchlights and sirens. Statues were hidden by mounds of sandbags. The palaces and churches stood stripped, their treasures removed and hidden. Hotels were hospitals. The entrance halls of grand houses sheltered refugees. At the brightest of times Venice is a place in which one easily loses oneself. Blacked out, it became a labyrinth through which its inhabitants fumbled at night as though blind.

En route north, d’Annunzio wrote in his notebook: ‘Sense of emptiness and distance. Life and the reasons for living elude me. Between two streams, between past and future … Tedium. Lukewarm water … Necessity for action.’ On arriving in Venice, finding action was, accordingly, d’Annunzio’s first priority. Within two days, he was on board the leading destroyer of a naval squadron on night manoeuvres, travelling east along the coast towards Austrian-held Trieste in the hope of encountering enemy vessels.

He made notes about the moonlight, the crisscrossing lines of the ships’ wakes, the sailors eating as they sat silent around their guns, all of which later found its way into his wartime writings. He was to be a witness: he was also to be an ‘inspiration’. Two weeks before his arrival the Italian cruiser Amalfi had been torpedoed and sunk. Scores of Italian seamen died. D’Annunzio addressed the survivors, who were being sent back into action. ‘Now is not the time for words,’ he said, for the first of many, many times; but words were what he brought them. Throughout the remainder of the war he was to speak again and again, to men going into battle, to men returning exhausted, to men burying their dead. He spoke of blood and sacrifice, of memory and patriotism, and the duty owed by the living to those who had died for Italy. His funeral orations posthumously awarded the wretched conscripts the dignity of heroes; his pre-battle harangues presented the bloody slog of modern warfare as noble sacrifice. His gift for oratory had become an instrument of war.

To urge others on, though, was not enough to satisfy him. He sought a role appropriate to a superman. He found it in the air. D’Annunzio had always been fascinated by flight. For decades he worked and reworked the myth of Icarus in his poetry. We have already seen him making his first flight at the 1909 Brescia air show. When he moved to France he frequented the airfield at Villacoublay, and several times he flew again. Shortly after arriving in Venice in July 1915, he made his way to the island airbase at Forte Sant’Andrea, at the mouth of the lagoon. There he met the young pilot, Giuseppe Miraglia.

Well connected (his father was director general of the Banco di Napoli and a political insider) and, according to d’Annunzio, bronze-skinned, with greenish-yellowish eyes flecked with gold, Miraglia was a paragon to his fellow servicemen, known for having gone alone into enemy-occupied Pola with only a pistol for defence. He was to be the first of a series of young men who became for d’Annunzio, during the war years, at once beloved comrades and incarnations of his ideals of youthful valour and fit sacrifice. ‘Blessed are those who are now twenty years old,’ he said. He worshipped and envied their beauty and took enormous pleasure in the opportunities the war afforded him to live alongside them as companions-in-arms. Their deaths were marvellous to him. When they were killed, as one after another they were, he took them into the pantheon he was elaborating in his writing and speeches, making them the martyrs and cult heroes of his new mythology of war.

From Miraglia, d’Annunzio learned that a bombing raid on Trieste had been proposed. Trieste, the cosmopolitan city at the head of the Adriatic, then Austria’s chief port, was one of the irredentists’ most yearned-after lost territories. Here was an exploit exactly to d’Annunzio’s taste. He was an aviator. Venice and Trieste are barely 150 kilometres apart, a short hop for a modern plane, but in 1915 a formidable distance. As a showman d’Annunzio saw how the flight could become a piece of splendidly theatrical propaganda. He determined to claim it for himself. He and Miraglia would drop explosives on the Austrian emplacements in the harbour but – more importantly as far as d’Annunzio was concerned – they would also drop pamphlets (written, of course, by himself) over the town’s main squares.

With Miraglia he began to talk of ways and means. He studied maps of the coastline they would overfly. He thought about the best design for the little sandbags to which the leaflets would be attached, and went himself to the Rialto market to buy the necessary canvas. He reflected happily that, thanks to his rigorous programme of exercise followed over many years, he was more than fit enough for the physical ordeal of the flight and confident of being able to hurl bombs or sandbags from the unstable perch of a tiny plane. He drafted a message to ‘the Italians of Trieste’, assuring them of his devotion to the cause of their imminent liberation, and copied it out over and over again in his own hand, taking care that his signature (often an exquisite but illegible arabesque) should be unmistakably clear.

Word got out, and reached a reporter. Anything d’Annunzio did was not only a gossip column item, but a news story. A Venetian journal announced the projected flight, and that the poet was to join it. The admiral commanding the tiny air force was doubly dismayed, firstly by the breach of security – clearly it was going to be hard to keep any operation in which d’Annunzio was involved secret from the enemy – secondly, by the risk of this inconveniently famous subordinate getting himself killed. D’Annunzio alive could help to encourage the troops and, if he continued to produce the kind of furiously nationalist poetry that he had been writing over the previous decade, help maintain the civilian population’s support for the war. His death, on the other hand, would have a deleterious effect on the entire nation’s morale.

The admiral vetoed the flight. D’Annunzio protested. The admiral consulted his superiors. Telegrams went back and forth between Rome and Venice and the military headquarters near the front at Udine. None of the authorities wanted to sanction the flight. The order came down: d’Annunzio’s life was ‘preciosissimo’ and must be conserved. He was forbidden to join this or any other dangerous operation. Furious, d’Annunzio went to the top. On 29 July he wrote an impassioned letter to Prime Minister Salandra.

He flattered: ‘You, whose own spirit is so hard-working and so generous, must understand me.’ He stressed his physical competence. He was not ‘a man of letters of the old type, in skull cap and slippers’. He was an adventurer. ‘My whole life has been a risky game.’ He boasted of his past daring. ‘I have exposed myself to danger a thousand times against the fences and hedges of the Roman Campagna’ (he adored fox-hunting). In France he had often been out on the Atlantic in chancy weather ‘as the fishermen of the Landes could tell you’. He had ventured repeatedly into enemy territory on the Western Front (he visited the front twice, staying on the safer side of the French lines). Most importantly, ‘I am an aviator … I have flown many times at high altitude.’ (This wasn’t strictly true either.) And he wasn’t only brave: he had knowledge and skills which could be useful. He knew Istria, he knew Trieste. He had an ‘observant spirit’.

Having presented his credentials, he made his request, in the most insistent terms. ‘I pray, I beg … repeal this odious veto.’ He hinted that if he were not allowed to risk his life in his own way he would deliberately endanger it by going straight to the front. To bar one with ‘my past, my future’ from living the heroic life would be ‘to cripple me, to mutilate me, to reduce me to nothing’. The troops, the press, the people of Italy all saw him as ‘the poet of the war’ – now the authorities were trying to treat him as an exhibit in a museum.

Minister Martini scoffed at the suggestion that fox-hunting and jaunts in pleasure boats provided the necessary experience for the kind of role d’Annunzio was claiming. But Salandra was impressed by d’Annunzio’s earnest tone. The ban was lifted. The flight would go ahead.

Exultant, d’Annunzio went shopping again. At the haberdashers he chose ribbons (red, white and green, the colours of the Italian flag) with which to adorn his missives to the people of Trieste. He filched a sandbag from among those banked up along the façade of St Mark’s. Its contents, sanctified by contact with the ancient building, the hub of the Venetian Empire, would give his little packets historical gravity as well as physical weight. He bought himself thick woollen vests and long johns and when all was ready, all the little bags stowed away in one big one, he danced ‘a pyrrhic dance of joy around them’.

The date of the enterprise was fixed for 7 August, which d’Annunzio considered an auspicious date. He prepared himself – as was only realistic in those early days of flying – for death. He would write a few months later about the mornings on which he set out for such missions, ‘the thought of returning was left in the vestibule, despised, as a vile encumbrance’, and recall how he sat once with a pilot before a flight, talking easily about routes and equipment, but aware that ‘each of us, by noon, could be a fistful of charred flesh, a crushed skull with gold teeth glinting in the mess’. He drew up a will, and entrusted it to Albertini.

On 6 August he and Miraglia made a test flight. D’Annunzio had flown before, but only rising briefly over airfields. Now he looked down on a great city, seeing Venice as only a handful of human beings had ever yet seen it. He was the first writer to record the experience. He wore, as all the aviators did, heavy leather gloves. When he took one off to help Miraglia tighten the elastic of his chinstrap he at once felt his fingers begin to freeze. All the same, belted into the forward seat, exposed to every wind in the shaky little flying machine, he persistently scribbled down his impressions. The diverging lines of a ship’s wake were like ‘the palms in the hand of Victory’. Venice’s islands, divided up by canals, resembled the segments of a loaf of bread. The long railway bridge was the stem to the city’s flower. The wind-ruffled water by the lagoon’s outlet was iridescent as a pigeon’s throat. The mainland – in August’s dryness – was blonde, feminine, girdled by the pale ribbons of dykes. Avidly absorbing these new sights, fixing them with similes, d’Annunzio makes no mention of discomfort, or vertigo or fear.

On the morning of the seventh he performed his usual toilette – a vigorous massage administered by his servant followed by a bath – and thought about the possibility that the body he was tending might, by nightfall, be stripped and laid out dead. After breakfast (strong coffee) he went shopping again, for another woollen jumper: he must have felt the cold the day before. Walking back towards the Hotel Danieli he encountered the Countess Morosini, with her daughter, the Countess di Robilant. It is one of the oddities of d’Annunzio’s war experience that on his way into action of the most serious kind he might find himself chatting with an acquaintance about a social engagement. Annina Morosini, known to the gossip columns as the ‘uncrowned Queen of Venice’, was the chatelaine of the Palazzo da Mula on the Grand Canal and a generous friend to the poet. That morning he noticed how lovely her eyes were, and jotted in his notebook ‘still desirable’ (she was fifty-one). He told her what he was about to do and asked her playfully to give him a talisman. She demurred, offering him only her blessing, but saying she would telephone that evening. He was offhand about the latter promise. ‘I don’t know what she’s calling for,’ he noted. Given his thoughts at bathtime, the coming evening must have seemed remote. Back in his hotel room he filled a cigarette case with cartridges, laid out his woollen flying gear and wondered: ‘Will it be cold up there, or down there?’ (The underlining is his.) He was thinking of the sea bed. Remembering that he might not die but be taken prisoner, he put six of the laxative tablets he swore by, and some cash, in his pocket, then went down and took the waiting gondola to the airfield. Miraglia was ready for him. They set off on the flight which would take them further than any Italian pilot had flown before, and well within range of enemy guns.

In the notebook d’Annunzio was carrying that day, his poet’s-eye observations – ‘the teeth of the breakwaters which gnaw at the unhappy sea’ – are interspersed with dialogue. The two men couldn’t speak to each other. The only complaint d’Annunzio makes about the physical circumstances of the flight are about the engine’s atrocious din: he regrets not having brought wax earplugs. He and Miraglia communicate by passing book and pen back and forth, d’Annunzio having to twist awkwardly in order to do so. Their initial exchanges are pleasantly companionable: ‘Are we still climbing?’. ‘You look like a bronze bonze [a Japanese Buddhist monk]’, says d’Annunzio to Miraglia. ‘Do you want some coffee? It’s really hot.’ Soon though, more urgent messages are passing between them. D’Annunzio was not just there to make notes on the landscape (‘in the pallor of the lagoon the twisting canals are green as malachite’), he was also the bombardier.

They were carrying several bombs in cylinders fitted to the plane’s undercarriage. It became evident that one of them was jammed. D’Annunzio struggled to free it. ‘It’s impossible to pull it up.’ ‘Have we got any string?’

Miraglia gave him anxious directions: ‘You absolutely must not turn the screw … See if you can push it so it falls out, but don’t twist it.’ It might explode at any moment. Even if it didn’t, unless they could free it first it would almost certainly blow up when they touched down. ‘When we’re landing I’ll hold onto it with both hands,’ d’Annunzio told Miraglia. There have been those who sneered at d’Annunzio’s war record, but the dangers he ran were real, and so was the courage with which he met them.

They came in sight of Trieste, the white stone city luminous in the August sun against the backdrop of the Carso, the rocky wilderness which would be, for the next three years and more, a battlefield. They saw puffs of smoke way beneath them, signs that they were under fire. Soon they could hear the gunfire, and feel the hits (on their return they would find a bullet embedded in the fuselage a few inches from d’Annunzio’s elbow). They continued their descent. They saw the enemy submarines in the marina and dropped bombs on them. As they came in low, d’Annunzio hurled down his little bags, and watched the ribbons and pennants attached to them flutter down, some uselessly into the sea, others into Trieste’s grand waterfront piazza, with its palatial banks and customs houses. His purpose in dropping his pamphlets was not just to convey a message: it was also to show that where he had sent down words, he could have sent down explosives. He was there to encourage the pro-Italian population, but also to terrorise their Austrian rulers. Like most of his wartime exploits, this first flight was an attack not so much on enemy forces, as on enemy morale.

It was as they turned back that he and Miraglia discovered the malfunctioning bomb. D’Annunzio struggled awkwardly with it in his tiny cockpit, deafened by the engine noise, careful not to make any abrupt movement for fear of unbalancing their fragile conveyance. He had often longed for an heroic death: now he was bothered by the idea that the plane – coming down only to bounce up as it exploded – would look not tragic but ridiculous. Somehow (it is a measure of his insouciance that we don’t know how) he managed to deal with the problem – perhaps, as his and Miraglia’s notes suggest, with the help of a rag and d’Annunzio’s belt. They came safely back to earth.

From that moment onward, according to Damerini, the Venetian people engulfed d’Annunzio in ‘a wave of anxious affection’. He had been a privileged visitor in aristocratic circles. Now he became, in Venice as he already was in Rome, the people’s idol. His admirers mobbed him. They hung around outside the Danieli hoping to catch a glimpse of him. When he went out on foot crowds followed him along the Riva degli Schiavoni. When he came back by gondola or in one of the recently introduced motorboats they pressed so thickly around the landing stage he could scarcely make his way ashore.

He had embarked on his new life as national hero, and the character in which he had done so was both archaic and up to date. In preferring the weapons of propaganda to those of material destruction he was displaying a quintessentially modern sophistication. He was a new-fangled PR man, but he was also a hero from the age of chivalry, one who had exchanged his charger for an aeroplane. As the British Prime Minister Lloyd George put it, ‘the pilots are the Knighthood of the Air, without fear and without reproach. Every aeroplane fight is a romance, every record an epic.’ In a war which was becoming, on its every front, more brutal and more gruesome, d’Annunzio with his beribboned leaflets, skyborn and dancing invulnerable through the enemy anti-aircraft fire, seemed gallant, joyous and debonair.

He returned to the Danieli. We do not know whether the Countess Morosini telephoned that evening as promised, but we do know that the next day she sent d’Annunzio a little silver box engraved with her name and the date of his exploit, and that he thanked her, saying that he would carry it always because the day it commemorated was more precious to him ‘than all my odes’. After having been for decades a self-described genius and one of the most famous people in Europe, he had begun what felt like a second, and more important existence. ‘All the past flows together towards all the future,’ he wrote. ‘All my life I have waited for this hour.’

It is time to turn back from that point, and to map some of the streams flowing through his life and mind towards it, to see how far back they rise, how variously muddy or silvery fresh their sources are, to observe how they join and braid together and diverge again before merging at last, and to trace how they eventually debouch into a sea of blood.

II

STREAMS

WORSHIP

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO – Gabriel of the Annunciation. Everything about his own name was delightful to the poet: the aristocratic particle, the scriptural associations, the way it marked him out as superhuman. He was an archangel, bringing revelations to the wondering world. The name (so felicitous that some of his contemporaries insisted he must have made it up) was his real one, or at least a family name to which he was genuinely entitled. His father had been born Francesco Paolo Rapagnetta, but when Francesco’s childless uncle d’Annunzio made him his heir he changed his surname by deed poll. His son took the prompt. On the back of the winged dining chair d’Annunzio used during his period of greatest fame and fortune were carved the words: ‘The Angel of the Lord is with us.’

D’Annunzio was not a pious man but he revelled in the trappings of Christian worship. He surrounded himself with lecterns and prayer stools and censers and alabaster stoups originally carved to hold holy water. His addresses to his political supporters were structured, like the liturgy, as a sequence of calls and responses. To him soldiers were martyrs and battered weapons were relics. He was an arch-sensualist, but he was also an ascetic. After visiting Assisi he discovered an affinity between himself and St Francis, and liked to dress in a friar’s habit (the penitential roughness of the garment mitigated by the fact he wore it over a shift of mauve silk).

In Fiume he staged pseudo-sacred ceremonies in the cathedral of St Vito, and encouraged a cult of his own personality so fervid that the Bishop of Fiume noted furiously that his flock were forsaking Christ for this modern Orpheus. His last years were devoted to the conversion of his house above Lake Garda into a self-glorifying shrine. He revered no one but himself, but reverence fascinated him. If a deity’s defining act is that of creation, then d’Annunzio – whose creativity was so exuberant that nothing but physical exhaustion ever slowed his pen – was god-like. He thought so. The hero of his novel Forse che sì, Forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No), crash-lands his plane on a beach in Sardinia and, alone in a wild landscape, reflects: ‘There is no God if it is not I.’

Faith shaped the culture into which he was born: faith in the Christian God and his saints; faith in magic. As an adult, d’Annunzio would embrace modernity and all its racket, but he grew up in a world where the sounds were made by sheep and cattle, creaking carts and rustling straw. The Abruzzi was, in the 1860s, and to an extent remains, a place apart. Blocked off by the Apennines from the great cities of Italy’s western seaboard, it is bounded by bald mountains, where bears and wolves still live, and in whose foothills walled towns perch on crags fluted like the underside of mushrooms. From there the terrain slopes gradually to the Adriatic, across which Abruzzese mariners have, for centuries, traded with their counterparts on the eastern, Dalmatian shore. The land is edged by low cliffs or, near Pescara, the region’s capital and d’Annunzio’s home town, by flat sand and pine woods (most of them now felled to make way for beachside hotels). Returning in middle age, d’Annunzio was moved to be back among the stone walls, the low hills scattered with flowering trees. ‘A painted cart passes along the shore, drawn by a pair of white oxen. The sandy soil sloping down to the sea is ploughed almost to where the waves break. Rows of beans. Vines contorted like arthritic old hands. A blackened stack of straw. Parsimony, diligence … The mountain rearing grand above.’

All of this (especially the parsimony) d’Annunzio would put firmly behind him. But though he left the Abruzzi in fact, in his fiction and memoirs it was ever-present. He liked to hear its dialect. In middle age, at the height of his fame, he hired a fellow Abruzzese to be the steward of his household. He sought out its landscapes. At Marina di Pisa during his years in Tuscany with Duse, and at Arcachon on France’s Atlantic coast during his ‘exile’, he chose to live by pine-fringed beaches resembling the Adriatic coastline he had known as a boy. He wrote about the place repeatedly. And the aspect of it which charged his imagination most potently was the religious life of its inhabitants, a phenomenon he found both repugnant and fascinating.

In remote villages the church was not only a place of worship, it was the community’s totem, on whose decoration much hard work and devotion and the peasants’ meagre savings were lavished. Troops of pilgrims passed along the country paths ‘in profile as in the embroideries of our old bedspreads’. During d’Annunzio’s childhood an itinerant priest, known to his followers as the Messiah, wandered the region, wearing blue tunic, red cloak and wooden clogs, and calling on the people to leave their crops and herds and follow him. Hundreds did so, singing and begging their way from town to town. ‘A wind of fanaticism’, wrote d’Annunzio later, ‘ran through the land from one end to the other.’

In the Abruzzi, houses are modest and great churches scarce. The most remarkable monuments in the region are the high mountain hermitages – caves or crevasses in which solitary mystics lived a thousand or more years ago and around which their devotees have, over the centuries, constructed precarious shrines. In defining the kind of stock he came from d’Annunzio borrowed their image. ‘I come from an ancient breed,’ he wrote. ‘My ancestors were anchorites in the Maiella … They flagellated themselves till the blood came … They throttled wolves; they stripped eagles of their feathers, and they scratched their seals on giant rocks with the nail Helen took from the Cross.’ Lacking – to his enduring chagrin – the kind of aristocratic antecedents he gave his fictional heroes, he awarded himself membership of another kind of elite, that of the ferociously holy.

D’Annunzio’s father, Francesco Paolo, was far from being an anchorite. He was a petty landowner and wine merchant. During Gabriele’s childhood he was the Mayor of Pescara, a prominent man in a provincial town. In d’Annunzio’s first stories, set in or around Pescara, he conjures up a place where the bustle of port and barracks and market are contrasted with the frustration of women confined to small, dark rooms, who watch the life of the street through chinked shutters or small high windows. The church bell clangs out the hours. Priests pass in the streets carrying extreme unction to the dying. Young people, strictly segregated as a rule, furtively press up against each other in the merciful darkness when the church lamps are extinguished in Holy Week to mark Christ’s passion. Funerals, the bier followed by long lines of hooded mourners, their faces covered all but a slit for the eyes, or processions of girls in sacrificial white on the way to their first communion, provide the town’s main spectacles.

The sacred is all-pervasive. In the bedroom Gabriele shared with his brother, the main item of furniture, other than the beds, was a prayer stool. On the wall hung lithographs of religious paintings by Titian and Raphael. In one of d’Annunzio’s novels, set in the Abruzzi, a woman lightly remarks that before she and her lover can enjoy an afternoon in bed they will have to hang veils over the numerous saints’ pictures on the walls. God and his representatives were all around the boy d’Annunzio, and they were not a comfort so much as a form of surveillance.

Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio was a man of the flesh – self-indulgent and corpulent. In later life d’Annunzio was repelled by him (not least because he saw his father’s disorderly love life and compulsive overspending as a horrible caricature of his own); but in childhood he yearned to please him. Francesco Paolo’s extravagance could seem grand. During carnival he would stand on his balcony and, as custom demanded, toss handfuls of gold and silver coins down to the revellers in the street, deeply impressing the small son who would, in his turn, spend most of his life throwing his money away. Francesco Paolo liked a show and he liked to astonish (both attributes Gabriele inherited). He used to colour his white doves with the new-fangled aniline dyes, and released them to fly – pink, green, purple, orange – around the house’s inner court.

Gabriele was his parents’ darling. His father used to watch him gravely. ‘He never made light of me, nor ever mocked me.’ He had a brother (who became a musician and a swindler, before emigrating to America) and three sisters. But he was the prodigy, the little prince. He adored his mother, Luisa de Benedictis, mainly, as he tells it, because of the gratifying way she adored him: ‘Her glances made my heaven.’

The house was full of women – maids, his sisters, unmarried aunts, his grandmother – and he was everyone’s precious treasure. When ladies came to visit his mother he would sit on his own little stool in the middle of their circle, while they gazed at him admiringly as at ‘a rare beast’. Sent away to boarding school at the age of eleven, he wrote nostalgic letters home in which he conjured up luminous images of his early childhood, scenes that might have been lifted from accounts of the infancy of saints. ‘Do you remember how when I was little I used to come first thing in the morning into your room all sparkling with joy, and I used to bring you flowers? … No shadow of a cloud ever troubled my happiness.’

Actually, there were shadows. To live in the countryside (as the d’Annunzio family partly did – they had a second house, the Villa Fuoco, on their land outside town) was to be exposed to gory realities. Many of the stories d’Annunzio related about his childhood concern dying animals. There was the death of his little Sardinian horse, a bay with a white muzzle named Aquilino, whom he would feed with apples and sugar lumps in the peace of the night-time stable. There was the quail the farm manager gave him in a cage made of twigs. Half a century later d’Annunzio could still recall how the tiny creature dashed itself against its makeshift bars, gashing its head until the bone showed. On killing days the howling of the stuck pigs and their blood spurting into basins so appalled him that he would hide in a corner, face to the wall, his hand over his contorted mouth. ‘Life scared me as though it stalked me with a pig-sticking knife in hand.’ After the ‘massacre’ he sobbed all night.

Gabriele’s education was begun by a pair of devout, unmarried sisters whom he was to cruelly traduce in a story of disease and sexual desperation – The Book of the Virgins (later reworked as The Virgin Orsola). The passage in which he describes the two women’s lessons in reading, writing and religion sounds like actual experience recalled. ‘In solemn voices they spoke of sin, of the horrors of sin, of everlasting punishment, while all those wide eyes filled with amazement and all those small pink mouths opened aghast. In the vivid imaginings of the children, objects came alive … the Nazarene, bound with thorns and bloody drops, gazed from every side with agonised, haunting eyes, and beneath the great hood of the chimney each plume of smoke took on an atrocious form.’ Other children elsewhere might be terrified by the scissors man, the big bad wolf, or the fierce bad rabbit, but for d’Annunzio and his fellows, the bogeyman was one and the same with the deity.

Luisa was socially a cut above her husband. She would take her son to stay with her parents down the coast in Ortona. Their house, a rambling old structure wedged between the monastery and the fortress, was a complex of massive walls and hidden courtyards, of long corridors and cell-like rooms. As a tiny crawling child, d’Annunzio was fascinated by the floor tiles with their depictions of flowers and animals. Once upright and talking he would demand accounts of the fables illustrated on the ceramic panels let into the whitewashed walls.

The most wonderful part of his sojourns in Ortona were his visits to another relative, an abbess. She fed him with little twisted biscuits called ‘vipers’. When she told him she would teach him ‘glorious mysteries’ and gave him an amethyst rosary to hold, Gabriele, who was to become an insatiable collector of holy trinkets, and an inventive stager of pseudo-religious ceremonies, began to hyperventilate with excitement. Even more thrilling, she allowed him, as a favoured nephew, to pass through the visitors’ parlour into the convent. There in the secrecy of her cell, he watched her practising ‘her arts of divination’. He was nine years old, a boy in a place no male should ever have been permitted to enter, assisting at rituals forbidden by the Church. In a confused but ecstatic awareness of the multiple transgression, he watched while she threw aromatic herbs on the fire and peered at the homely ingredients of her spell, ‘the innards of a mullet, iridescent fish scales, sage leaves’. For all her neat wimple and nun’s bands, the old lady was a sorceress. He was afraid of her. She took his hands, and explained that his past and future were written on their two palms as a sacred story might be painted on a diptych. The room was full of smoke. Kneeling, arms outstretched, the sleeves of her habit hanging like sails, the Abbess seemed to go into a trance. Gabriele panicked. Beating frantically at the door he yelled until a novice appeared and released him.

Sorcery and divination had penetrated the convent walls. Outside they were ubiquitous. The people of the Abruzzi might be church-goers and observers of fasts and festivals, but Christianity coexisted in their culture with heathen magic. D’Annunzio witnessed cacophonous ceremonies when the frenzy of the ‘possessed’ was aggravated by a din of yells and whistles. In one of his stories a woman of Pescara seeks out a witch doctor, a bearded old man who rides into town on a white mule, wearing gold triangles in his ears and with silver buttons as big as the bowls of spoons on his coat. He is said to be able to make the blind see, and calm those possessed by wicked spirits. His wife, with whom he lives in a cave outside town, is an abortionist. In other stories d’Annunzio writes about an unsuccessful fisherman who believes himself to be cursed, about a dead dog, putrid and stinking, left across the door of a hut at night to keep away vampires, about a child dying as its mother declares it has been bewitched. Some of these magical practices he filched for his fiction from his friend, the folklorist de Nino. Others he observed as a child.

The Abruzzi is sheep country. Green roads, like rivers of grass, lead from the high mountain pastures down the long, long incline to the sea. D’Annunzio’s poem about the shepherds, who would bring their flocks down them annually ‘in the footsteps of ancient fathers’, was written long after he had ceased to return home with any regularity, but when he was a child their transhumance would have been one of the great public events of the year, marking the season as clearly as the harvest or the ripening of the first cherries. Those shepherds, and the peasants who farmed the coastal plain, preserved intact a rich cache of beliefs and ceremonies. D’Annunzio describes the endlessly repetitive, mournful chant which accompanied every solemnity from birth to death: the travelling songs sung in parts by groups of men and women on the road together ‘like a wave continually rising and falling’. He records a ritual which is still extant in the villages of the Abruzzi. ‘A white ox, fattened by a year of abundant grazing, caparisoned in vermilion, ridden by a little boy, processes in pomp to the church between banners and candles … arriving in the centre of the nave, it lets fall its droppings; in the heap of steaming matter the devout read the agricultural auspices.’

D’Annunzio described the elaborate praise-singing that was customary at harvest time. Lines of women, laden with food and wine in tall, painted jars, would process out into the fields, lauding the sun and the landowner and God as they went. When the men heard them coming they would lay down their scythes, and the foreman led the prayer – ‘inflamed with enthusiasm, he expressed himself spontaneously in couplets’ (this improvised rhyming is well documented) – and the rest of the gang roared out their responses ‘while the red light of sunset flashed reflected off the iron blades, and the topmost sheaf on the corn stook glittered like a flame’.

The child saw, and the man remembered, how a group of people could be bound together and excited by the power of the word.

D’Annunzio felt the lure of Christian devotion. During his recurring bouts of depression he would crave the peace of religious seclusion. So too he had his private rituals and a predilection for magical thinking. At birth he narrowly escaped being choked by the caul. Those so born were believed to have the second sight, and the caul itself was a charm which could save its wearer from drowning. D’Annunzio’s was preserved in a little package of silk hung on a cord which, as a child, he wore always around his neck. Recalling this as an adult, he wrote patronisingly about the ‘superstition’ of the women – his mother, aunts and nurse – who believed in its efficacy, but, throughout the Great War, whenever he went into action, he carried an amulet or two in his pocket.

He was always a ditherer. Frequently, when faced with a decision, he resorted to primitive forms of divination. He opened books at random and searched for messages in the first phrase he read (a practice he claimed to have taken from ‘the ancient priests of Cybele’). He looked for omens. Emeralds brought good fortune (both magically and – as it happens – practically: Eleonora Duse gave him two enormous emeralds, the pawning of which several times saved him from financial disaster). He visited clairvoyants, he consulted astrologers. He carried a pair of ivory dice in a little jewelled box with the Caesarean inscription ‘Alea jactae sunt’ (‘the dice have been cast’) and, when required to make a decision, would frequently allow the fall of the dice to make it for him. He abhorred the primitive religiosity of the peasants he knew as a child, but he took with him into his sophisticated adulthood many of the superstitions of the village society he had left behind.

When he was five or six years old, one of d’Annunzio’s sisters beckoned him aside and, opening her childish fist, showed him her treasure, an artificial pearl. At once he was seized by a craving for something similarly rounded and lustrous. There were swallows’ nests beneath the house’s eaves. He would steal an egg. He ran up to a top-floor room and out onto the narrow balcony, but he was too small to reach a nest. Going back indoors he found a bench and, struggling doggedly, dragged it out. Women at a window of the opposite house called out to him. He took no notice. He scrambled up onto the bench and thence onto the wrought-iron railing three storeys above the paved street below. Clinging to the slatted shutters, he groped upwards. The women called more loudly. Down in the street passers-by stopped. Shopkeepers came out to see what was going on, craning their heads upward. The little boy could hear a growing hubbub beneath him. He struggled to haul himself up, but his arms weren’t strong enough. Agitated swallows beat around his head.

Suddenly he was being gripped around the waist and dragged down. His parents were there, his mother trembling, his father pale and threatening to beat him. He was lifted back through the window and laid, faint and shaking, on a bed. In retrospect he saw them – mother, father, child – as a secular trinity. His aunts hung over him weeping, as the sorrowing Marys wept over the dead Christ. But the family’s communion was interrupted. The crowd now gathered in the street, believing the child to be dead, began on the chilling ululations customary at funerals. Gabriele’s father picked him up, and carried him, limp and white-faced, back out onto the balcony. The keening turned to shouts of joy.

Describing the incident in old age, d’Annunzio made of this, his first balcony appearance, a portent. He was marked out from childhood, so he asserted, for a public life. More pertinently, it demonstrates how religious imagery pervaded his imagination. One of his school reports describes him as ‘very unbelieving’. At sixteen he was enthusiastic about Paradise Lost and Byron’s Cain, both poems whose heroes defy God. He admired Darwin. He shocked his teachers (most of them priests) by ‘gross heresies’, suggesting that if the deity existed at all he was a ‘villain or an imbecile’ who has ‘created mankind to amuse himself by watching us suffer’. But, for all that, it came naturally to him to see himself as Christ, and his parents as Mary and Joseph. The public life of the people among whom he spent his childhood, their faith, their songs and prayers, their spells and festivals, became part of the furnishings of his mind.

GLORY

TOWARDS THE END OF EACH AFTERNOON, when d’Annunzio was a child in Pescara, the paranze, the Abruzzese fishing boats with their wide sails the colours of oranges, or saffron or terracotta, would appear at the mouth of the river. One day when he was nine years old, Gabriele ran down to the quay to greet them. He had a friend on one of the boats who used to bring him gifts of cockles. Having received his offering, he carried it off to a niche in the dilapidated ramparts of Pescara’s fort, settled himself astride a rusty old cannon and began forcing open the shells with his pocket knife. It was hard. The knife slipped. He cut himself badly. Blood poured over his hand and down the cannon. He began to feel dizzy. His handkerchief was too small to use as a tourniquet. He cut off a sleeve of his shirt to bind up the wound. At once the bandage was soaked with blood.

The place was lonely and night was coming on. A goat’s head appeared over the ancient wall above him, regarding him with its mad, devilish eyes. He remembered that the vaults of the old arsenal were infested with spiders and that the local women used their webs to staunch bleeding. Trembling now, he made his way into the dark and ruinous chambers, yelling to scare off the horrid scampering things, cut down a web with his knife, and wrapped it around his bloody hand before staggering home half-fainting.

When, in middle age, he wrote his account of this escapade, d’Annunzio placed it in a splendid setting of distant mountains and fiery-coloured clouds. He cherished the scar on his thumb as ‘the indelible sign of my innate difference’. The essay in which he described the incident is entitled ‘The First Sign of a High Destiny’.

The images and stories of heroes surrounded d’Annunzio as he grew up. The main salon in the d’Annunzio family’s house in Pescara is decorated with a painting of Aeneas. In the background, Troy burns. Aeneas, undismayed, looks stagily outwards to the future, as he sets off to fulfil the great destiny his father Anchises has foreseen for him. So d’Annunzio was to be launched out into the world to fulfil his father’s ambitions.

He was growing up in an heroic age for Italy. The Abruzzi had been a part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled through the middle years of the nineteenth century from Naples by a Bourbon monarchy. Three years before Gabriele’s birth, Garibaldi led his thousand volunteers to Sicily and drove the Bourbon troops, who outnumbered them twenty-six to one, off the island. The King was nervous and vacillating. His officers were hopelessly demoralised. As Garibaldi swept on up through Calabria to Naples, the armies of the teetering monarchy changed sides, or stripped off their uniforms and ran for home. In one of his stories d’Annunzio recreates the scene, which he must have heard repeatedly described, of the day when the fort at Pescara was evacuated and ‘the troops scattered, throwing their weapons and equipment into the river’.

King Victor Emmanuel of Savoy came south at the head of his army to annex the regions Garibaldi had conquered. Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio was one of the delegation who travelled to his camp at Ancona to invite him to bring his troops into Pescara. When they did so, the King himself (shortly to assume the title of King of All Italy) passed a night under the d’Annunzio family’s roof. In their small way the family had assisted in the making of the Italian nation state.

It was the first age of mass reproduction. Prints of Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel adorned the walls of houses all over the peninsula, revered much as sacred paintings were revered. In d’Annunzio’s home they were juxtaposed with depictions of the exploits of classical heroes: it was as though the time for glorious deeds had come again. When Gabriele was seven years old the French withdrew their support for the Pope’s temporal power, and Victor Emmanuel’s troops marched into Rome. The state of Italy, independent and united, was complete. Years later d’Annunzio was to recall being wakened, after going to bed that September evening, by people parading though the streets with lighted torches, by raucous songs, fanfares of trumpets and cries of ‘Rome!’

When he was eleven, d’Annunzio was sent to a boarding school, the Royal College of the Cicognini at Prato, which was considered to be the finest in Italy. Francesco Paolo wanted him to be ‘Tuscanised’. The Tuscan dialect, the language of Dante and Machiavelli and Lorenzo the Magnificent, was to be the language of the new Italy’s elite.

The Cicognini is grand but grim. Behind its eighteenth-century façade lie long corridors, with vaulted ceilings and wrought-iron lanterns. There is a chapel and an elegant little theatre, but there is little to make a boy feel at home. Gabriele felt the misery of boarding-school children everywhere. In writing his recollections of his years there, he describes the college as his ‘prison’. He recalls the gloom with which he walked back through its ‘sad portal’ after the daily walk and the relief, on his few exeats, of escaping from its atmosphere of confinement and prohibition. He was not allowed back to Pescara, even for the long summer holidays, for four whole years.

Children obliged to fend for themselves in a loveless environment grow a shell around their hearts which can be hard to crack open later. D’Annunzio matured into an adult notably lacking in empathy, an exploitative friend, an unreliable lover and a negligent father, for whom people en masse seemed no more interesting than herds of cattle. Some at least of his emotional frigidity can probably be ascribed to his early banishment to school. At the time, though, he responded to his spartan treatment, not only dutifully, but with fervid enthusiasm and declarations of love. The mission that had been laid upon him, that of making a prodigy of himself, was one he accepted enthusiastically. In his first year he wrote to tell his ‘dearest Daddy’ he was top of his class. ‘Oh how sweetly these words flash from my lips, what joy I’m feeling now I have made your wish come true.’

Already, as a schoolboy, he was a passionate little patriot. He wrote, aged thirteen, that he had two missions: ‘To teach the people to love their country … and to hate the enemies of Italy to the death!’ The shrillness was not peculiar to him. Italy was an unstable new amalgam of regions with widely differing histories. Its peoples, whose dialects differed so markedly as to make them in many cases unintelligible to each other, were going to need to be taught to love it. Italian nationalism was both anxious and bellicose. The late nineteenth century was, for all Europeans, a nationalist age, but for newly forged, insecurely unified nations – Germany and Italy prominent among them – it was one where a simple loyalty to the state was linked to a complex web of quasi-religious, quasi-erotic impulses, among them the yearning for heroes to worship. For d’Annunzio those vaguely defined but extreme emotions coalesced around the idea of his own ‘high destiny’.

Francesco Paolo and Gabriele alike believed in that destiny. Aged fifteen, the son wrote to the father: ‘I love praise, because I know that you will enjoy praise offered to me; I love glory because I know that you exult to hear glory attached to my name.’

Glory, glory, glory: the word tolls through his adolescent correspondence. ‘He is entirely dedicated,’ reads one of his school reports, ‘to making a great name for himself.’ An early photograph shows a curly-haired teenager, his expression solemn, his eyes fixed. It is inscribed, in his own hand, with ‘To Glory’. His path there would be literary, but he prepared himself for it with the kind of self-punishing dedication that a religious novice might devote to asceticism, or a would-be soldier to physical training.

The standard curriculum was not enough. He learned to play the violin and the flute. He took singing lessons. He set himself holiday tasks – the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the compilation of a book of ‘observations’. When the signal was given for the end of evening study, and the rest of the boys prepared for bed, he went around collecting the others’ left-over lamp oil so that he could work far into the night. He wrote to tell his father he was top of the class again, adding, ‘If you knew what it had cost me to reach that position!’ He saw himself as a hero who bore the marks of his exploits written on his body. His left shoulder, he wrote later, was lower than the other, so many hours had he spent, as a growing boy, hunched over his desk.

When he was permitted to bypass an exam, he wrote to tell his mother how disappointed he was, ‘I am certain I would have taken first place.’ When he was sixteen he wrote six letters to his parents for Easter, one in Italian, the others in Greek, Latin, English, French and Spanish. The great book he felt certain he would write one day, was, he wrote, a ‘peak’ he would climb.

The College of the Cicognini was run on military lines. The boys wore smart little uniforms, turquoise trousers and tunics with frogging and epaulettes. They were students, but they were also toy soldiers. They were drawn up into two ‘companies’, each consisting of four ‘squads’, and well-behaved boys were honoured with officer status. In his second year d’Annunzio was made a ‘corporal’. Three years later he was promoted to the rank of ‘sergeant’ and in his last winter at the school he became ‘commandant’ (the title he would give himself at Fiume). The boys’ days were punctuated by drum rolls announcing the beginning and end of lessons and study periods; their exercise was drill, their excursions were route marches, their games were battles, their heroes were conquerors.

The study of the classics took up a high proportion of the students’ time. So it did at schools all over the Western world, but for an Italian child Latin literature and Roman history had a potent local significance. British schoolboys might be encouraged to cultivate the stoic virtues the Roman Republic had borrowed from Sparta, and to trace the similarities between Roman stoicism and late-Victorian stiff-upper-lippery. They might identify the British Empire with the Roman one, and, reading Macaulay’s Lays, compare the dogged courage of his Roman heroes with that of Britain’s own colonial officers. For Italian children no such imaginative effort was required. In Plutarch’s Lives, they found the stories of Italy’s own native heroes. Reading Ovid and Horace they were studying the poets whose genius constituted part of their own nation’s claim to greatness. Virgil’s Aeneid described the founding of the state which – after a hiatus lasting a dozen centuries – had newly re-emerged. Livy and Caesar told how that state had fought and conquered. Tacitus (this was especially pleasing) described how the Italians/Romans had defeated the Germanic peoples to the north, the forebears of the Austrians who had, in the boys’ parents’ and teachers’ lifetimes, ruled most of northern Italy. Towards the end of d’Annunzio’s life, Mussolini was to make a public cult of Romanità. To a child educated as d’Annunzio was, that cult was no artificially imposed construct, but a cluster of associations which had shaped his sense of history and his notions of virtue from the very beginnings of his intellectual life.

Glory was not confined to antiquity. For nineteenth-century Europeans the great conqueror was Napoleon. In a world where, as Thomas Carlyle lamented in 1848, great men were scarce, the memory of Napoleon’s rise from modest beginnings to become a Europe-bestriding superman was inspirational. Even those for whom he had been unequivocally the enemy (Englishmen like Byron, Russians like Tolstoy) were fascinated by him. For Italians it was even possible, with a little patriotic sophistry, to claim him as one of their own. One could dwell, not on the French Bonaparte’s invasion of Italy at the head of a French army, but on the Corsican Buonaparte’s success (however temporary) in driving out the hated Austrians. Napoleon had called upon Italians to rise up together, to unite. He had given them their tricolour flag. True, he had pillaged their art galleries and made their principalities perks for his relatives, but Italy could console itself by claiming a part in his glory.

Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio made use of his numinous memory in his efforts to make a hero of his son. Visiting Gabriele in Prato, he brought him a coin, bearing the image of Napoleon as King of Italy, and the Mémorial de St Hélène by the Comte de Las Cases. The count was one of Napoleon’s aides and was with the fallen emperor on his prison-island. His eight-volume memoir was a tremendous bestseller, and the essential source book for the cult of Bonapartism. Reading it, d’Annunzio became obsessed. He established the first of his many collections, a hotch-potch of rags and horse-shoe nails; he called it his ‘reliquary’. He became a worshipper, not of God, but of ‘Our Lord, who was called Napoleon Bonaparte.’

The teachers he found in Prato did not meet with d’Annunzio’s approval. He wrote to his old Abruzzese tutor complaining that ‘soft, plump’ priests could teach him nothing. Hard working he might be, but docile he was not. His memoirs of his schooldays describe the time he climbed out onto the roof and stayed there for a day and a night, and the food-slinging battles in the refectory, in which he was one of the warring generals. He was a rebel, in approved romantic tradition; brilliant but unruly.

He was aware, though, that he needed guidance and sponsorship. Francesco Paolo did what he could, but d’Annunzio wanted more fathers, influential older men with connections in the great world of letters, who could help him on. With breathtaking self-confidence, he set about creating for himself a kind of inverted academy, one where, instead of a sage and those eager to learn from him, there was to be just one student – himself – and an illustrious team of sages.

At the age of fifteen he was at last allowed home for the summer. Stopping over in Bologna on his way back to school he bought a copy of Carducci’s Odi Barbare (Barbarian Odes). Giosuè Carducci was Italy’s acknowledged master poet. His manner was famously brusque. His views were contrarian. Attacking Christian values in general and the Catholic Church in particular, he was the most eloquent Italian advocate for a return to the holy sensuality of paganism (a theme English aesthetes, Pater and Swinburne among them, had already explored). His most celebrated work was entitled Hymn to Satan. D’Annunzio, the boy who jeered at God, was immediately impressed by Carducci’s work, and set himself to imitate it. A few months later he wrote to the great man, using the vocabulary not of a student but of a warrior. He felt vibrating though all his fibres ‘the genius of battles’, inflaming him with a mania for ‘glory and hard blows’: ‘I want to fight at your side, O Poet!’

Carducci does not appear to have replied to this oddly belligerent fan letter. D’Annunzio had begun by imploring him not to ‘consider me a presumptuous boy, as empty as the peel of a squeezed lemon’ who wrote to the famous just so that he could boast of their correspondence. There would have been little reason at this point why Carducci should think him anything else. Soon though, d’Annunzio would begin to prove himself.

His first poem to appear in print was an ode written in the month he turned sixteen, and addressed to King Umberto. Francesco Paolo had it printed, and he distributed copies to the people assembled to listen to the band playing in Pescara’s main piazza on the King’s birthday. A few months later, Gabriele’s first volume of poems, Primo Vere – a title punning on the words for ‘spring’ and ‘first verses’ – was published (again at his father’s expense). D’Annunzio himself described the poems as ‘rosy flashes of youthful life’, full of ‘sky-blue serenity and smoky darkness’. Their subject matter was so erotic, so perverse, that the teachers at the Cicognini wondered whether they ought to ban the volume from being brought into the school, or even perhaps expel d’Annunzio, brilliant student though he was. His subject matter was disgraceful: ‘With trembling agitation I laid you on the water lilies and kissed you with convulsed lips, crying “You are mine!” … Like a viper, you writhed and groaned.’ But his command of syntax was perfect, his employment of classical verse-forms correct. He was allowed to stay on.

Carducci had ignored his letter, but d’Annunzio had his calling card now. Still at school, still only sixteen, he made overtures to another distinguished stranger. Enrico Nencioni was a critic and lover of English literature. D’Annunzio wrote to him from school – ‘my sad prison’ – enclosing Primo Vere. Nencioni invited the boy to visit him in Florence, a conveniently short train ride from Prato. Soon the two, despite an age gap of nearly twenty-six years, were close friends.

Nencioni was lanky and nervous. He had long hands with which he gestured expansively as he recited poetry and ‘something tremulous about his every attitude’. D’Annunzio was to liken their relationship to that of Socrates with the beautiful Alcibiades, the lordly youth with whom the philosopher was besotted. Nencioni’s influence on the young poet was immense. Much later, d’Annunzio described the day they first met as a kind of religious rite of passage, his ‘confirmation’.

Nencioni showed him prints of pre-Raphaelite paintings by Burne-Jones and Rossetti. He advised him to read Walter Pater, an Oxford don whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance (first published in 1873, the year before d’Annunzio went to the Cicognini) was to provide the English aesthetes, and d’Annunzio himself, with their creed. The book combined a re-evaluation of the art-historical canon (it was Pater who promoted Botticelli to the small number of the acknowledged great) with fervent declarations of faith in the value of beauty and passion. Life is short: ‘A counted number of pulses are given to us of a variegated, dramatic life.’ Nothing – certainly not convention or received morality – should hold the aesthete back from pulsating with ardour, from burning, in Pater’s most famous phrase, with a ‘hard gem-like flame’. D’Annunzio was a receptive student. All his life he would pride himself on his wide-openness to each transient pleasure, each glimpse of loveliness.

Nencioni introduced him to the works of Thomas Carlyle, whose On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History would confirm d’Annunzio’s veneration for great men, and reinforce his conviction that it was not economic forces, as the socialists maintained, but the actions of superb individuals that shaped human history. Under Nencioni’s tutelage he read Keats, whose voluptuous way with words he was to emulate, and, with especial enthusiasm, the two English Romantics who had spent large part of their adult lives in Italy: Shelley and Byron. There are some traces of their poetry’s influence in his, but it was what he learned of their personalities and their politics which seemed most significant for him. Later in life he owned a ring which he claimed had belonged to Byron, and liked to dwell on how much he and Byron had in common: their prowess at swimming; their periods of ‘exile’ (self-inflicted in both cases); their love of Venice; their promiscuity; their prodigious fame.

Both Shelley and Byron were aristocrats who had scandalised their compatriots, defying convention and cutting themselves off from home and family. Both were passionately political. Shelley’s radical egalitarianism didn’t chime with d’Annunzio’s veneration for imperial glory, but his impatience with the dreariness and moral corruption of everyday life, his striving after visions of transcendental glory, excited d’Annunzio immeasurably. ‘He fights for light,’ wrote d’Annunzio, against ‘law, faith, tyranny, superstition.’ He was a demi-god, ‘one of the greatest poets in the world’.

Byron was an even more alluring model. He was remembered as the sexually irresistible libertine, an aspect of his fame intensely interesting to the teenage d’Annunzio. He was also a poet whose work had brought him large sums of money and – even more enticingly – the kind of celebrity previously only enjoyed by victorious warriors or heads of state. He was politically active. In the early 1820s, living in Venice, Byron had contacts with the Carbonari (the ‘charcoal burners’), the Italian nationalists whose outlawed revolutionary organisation was a precursor of the movement that, a quarter of a century later, would become the Italian Risorgimento. He had called the vision of a free and united Italy the ‘very poetry of politics’. Thrillingly for d’Annunzio, his example suggested that a poet could also be a hero, that poetry and politics could merge, and lead on to glory.

Still busily promoting himself and his work, d’Annunzio obtained some kind of introduction to Cesare Fontana, a rich Milanese, a connoisseur of the arts and a prodigal spender of his own considerable fortune. D’Annunzio sent him a ‘psychological sketch’ of himself.

He pulsates, he writes, with ‘the first fires of approaching young manhood’. He has ‘an inordinate desire for knowledge and for glory, which burdens me often with a dark, tormenting melancholy’. He cannot tolerate any ‘yoke’. He despises ‘meanness of spirit’. He is ‘an ardent lover of new Art and lovely women: most unusual in my tastes: most tenacious in my opinions: outspoken to the point of harshness: prodigal to the point of ruin: enthusiastic to the point of madness … What else? Ah! There’s something I forgot: I’m a wicked poet and an intrepid chaser of dreams.’ Apparently so artless, with its disdain for punctuation and exclamation marks, this letter is a deft piece of self-advertisement. In it d’Annunzio fits himself to the model of the romantic hero. He lays claim to sophisticated vices (those beautiful women, those wicked poems). He slips in a gentle reminder of how very young he still is. Several times over the next two years he asked Fontana to put in a word for him with editors in Milan.

Further copies of Primo Vere were sent out. One went to the influential critic Guiseppe Chiarini. In approaching him, d’Annunzio wrote, he felt as bashful as a loutish peasant who, on being introduced to a distinguished person, turns red as a boiled prawn and twists his hat in his hands unable to say a single sensible thing. Having summoned up this image of sweet diffidence, the shameless self-publicist proceeded to make such a good impression on the older man that the two were soon corresponding genially about their shared love of Heine and Horace. D’Annunzio had found himself yet another first-rate master (he addresses subsequent letters to Chiarini: ‘Mio carissimo Signor Professore’) and he had also got himself some invaluable press coverage. In May 1880, Chiarini reviewed Primo Vere in the widely read Roman journal, the Fanfulla della Domenica. He hailed the now just seventeen-year-old d’Annunzio as ‘a new poet’ with an ‘uncommon aptitude’. Within days d’Annunzio had sent him his next volume, along with a letter asking the question that was always on his mind. If he is going to be ‘charming’, ‘pleasing’, and no more, he’ll give up writing straight away. He can’t stand ‘little artists … little poets’. He’d much rather be an engineer, or a lawyer. He’d even rather be a small-town mayor (like his father). So the important question was: ‘Can I cover myself with glory?’

Within a year of his first book’s appearance, d’Annunzio, whose collected works were eventually to run to forty-eight volumes, had brought out two more. In Memoriam, dedicated to his grandmother, who had recently died, was published in May 1880, followed in November by a second edition of Primo Vere with forty-three new poems (throughout his career d’Annunzio was to repeatedly revise, re-package and re-sell his work). In each case Francesco Paolo paid the printer’s bills, but d’Annunzio himself was personally responsible for the books’ design. He was already knowledgeable about book production and literary business. Writing from his school desk to the printer, he fussed over paper quality and font sizes. He argued vigorously over the printer’s terms and negotiated a distribution deal with a local bookseller. As for the books’ promotion, father and son each did their part of the work. To celebrate the appearance of Primo Vere (second edition), Francesco Paolo gave a banquet on the terrace of the Villa Fuoco. Gabriele found a more ingenious way of attracting attention to the work.

Reading the English Romantics, he had reflected on the ways Keats’s and Shelley’s early deaths had left their names enveloped in a glimmering haze of pathos. It was a few days before Primo Vere’s second publication that the editor of the Florentine Gazzetta della Domenica received a postcard from Pescara, from an unknown informant (d’Annunzio himself), advising him that the ‘young poet already noted in the republic of letters’ had died suddenly after falling from his horse. The editor ran the story prominently. The news was picked up by papers all over Italy. In Turin the tragic death of the ‘last-born of the Muses’ was lamented. In Ferrara tribute was paid to the marvellous boy who was ‘the joy of his parents, the love of his friends, the pride of his masters’. The schoolboy poet had ceased to be someone spoken of only in the ‘republic of letters’. He had become a celebrity. He might not yet have achieved glory, but he had attained fame.

LIEBESTOD

A DAY OF TUSCAN SPRING SUNSHINE, a stream running between banks starred with flowers; nearby the cupola of a church glinting, tall cypresses rising above the walls of an ancient villa; in the background blue hills. Along the path comes a dark maiden: black eyes, black hair, black eyebrows, pale, pale face. A young man walks towards her. Days later he writes to tell her that he is hers forever.

It could be a tableau painted by Dante Gabriel Rosetti or Burne-Jones, prints of whose work Gabriele had seen in Nencioni’s rooms. It could be a scene from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, or from Swinburne’s Laus Veneris (In Praise of Venus). Gabriele had been reading both poets. It was in fact the meeting of two flesh-and-blood teenagers as described by one of them: d’Annunzio, in Florence for the Easter vacation before his last term at school, falling precipitately in love with the seventeen-year-old daughter of his favourite teacher.

It wasn’t his first erotic experience, but it was the first of his romances. In d’Annunzio’s case the ambiguous word is the right one. All of his love affairs were at once real relationships – carnal and ardent – and literary creations. Vivere scrivere was one of his mottoes – ‘To live to write’. Sexual experience especially fuelled his creative energy. Looking back years later on his first kiss, he wrote that it was ‘the very moment when my life began to be my art and my art began to be my life’. In love, he reached for his pen.

The black-eyed girl by the stream was Giselda Zucconi. Dark-haired and heavy-jawed (like Gabriele’s mother, like several more of the women he would love), she was unusually well-educated for a girl, and a competent pianist. Her father, Tito Zucconi, taught modern languages at the Cicognini, and had become yet another of d’Annunzio’s mentors. Zucconi was a dashing figure, a teacher very different from the ‘greasy-handed priests’ about whom d’Annunzio wrote so contemptuously. He had fought alongside Garibaldi: he was himself a poet. He befriended the brilliant student, took him for long walks on days off and invited him to visit his family in Florence.

D’Annunzio, looking back regretfully in middle age, describes himself as he looked then: ‘the brow smooth beneath the dense mass of dark hair. The eyebrows drawn in such a pure line as to give something indefinably virginal to the melancholy of the big eyes. The beautiful half-open mouth.’ Self-regarding as it is, the description matches the photographs. Giselda was entranced. D’Annunzio had begun writing short stories set in the Abruzzi, heavily influenced by Guy de Maupassant and Giovanni Verga. On his second visit to the house he read Giselda one of them, a morbid tale involving a dumb beggar and the frozen corpse of a little girl. When he first encountered Giselda walking by the stream he had felt ‘an I-don’t-know-what’. When he saw her eyelashes wet with tears as she listened to his story he decided it was love.

He returned to school. Back in Prato he confessed his love to Tito, who gave him permission to write to Giselda. Within days she had told him she loved him in return. In the school dormitory d’Annunzio stayed awake until dawn, kissing her photograph and writing her long letters. Sometime he expressed himself as any teenager might: ‘I am happy, happy, happy.’ Or, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ Sometimes his letters show how unusual he was. ‘Kiss me Elda, kiss me. Thrust your little hands into my hair and hold me nailed down and quivering like a leopard enchained.’

D’Annunzio’s erotic career began early. As the smartly uniformed boys of the Cicognini marched around Prato he was much inclined, so one of his teachers noted, to turn and stare at passing young women. Spending his school holidays with family friends in Florence, he escorted the daughter of the house (aged seventeen to his fourteen) to the Museum of Archaeology and kissed her in the Etruscan Room, falling on her mouth (as he recalled years later) as ravenously as a famished labourer might fall on food at the end of a day’s hard work and thinking – with a kind of delirious horror – about the other secret ‘mouth’ beneath her skirts. On a school trip he slipped away from his teacher, and sold his grandfather’s gold watch to pay for his initiation by a prostitute. That summer, sixteen years old and allowed home at last, he flirted with several young ladies in Pescara’s polite small-town society, and – according to his own later account – raped a peasant girl who struggled and babbled and shook with terror as he hunted her down in a vineyard and knocked her to the ground.

By the time he met Giselda two years later his craving for sex had become entangled with an appetite for suffering and with fantasies of death. It was the sight of Giselda’s tears that had first fired him with love. ‘I want to make those tears fall again,’ he wrote to her. He imagined she would be sobbing, frantic for a word from him. He luxuriated in the idea of her unhappiness. He even told her how much he would like to see her corpse. He loved it that she was deathly pale, like ‘the Blessed Damozel’, the dead girl of Rossetti’s famous poem and painting, but he would have preferred her even paler. He told her that he would go around all the florists in the city, fill a carriage with assorted flowers, and come to bury her beneath them. ‘Yes! To bury you! I want to make you die!’

He wrote to Tito Zucconi, not, as one might expect, promising to cherish and protect Tito’s daughter, but announcing: ‘I and Elda cannot live long.’ Both he and Giselda were, so far as we know, in perfectly good health, yet d’Annunzio wrote: ‘Our cold bodies will fall to the earth to feed the flowers; and we will be swept away, unconscious atoms, in the irresistible currents of the universal force.’ D’Annunzio had not yet heard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (on which his novel The Triumph of Death would be a variation) but the fantasy of Liebestod already possessed him. ‘If you were here now,’ he wrote to Giselda, ‘we would kill each other … Don’t you feel all the tragic terror of this passion?’

Letters began to pass between the young couple almost daily. She sent him her photograph and pressed flowers (her father acting as emissary). He sent her words, thousands upon thousands of them (around 500 letters in under two years). This was a love affair all made of words on paper. D’Annunzio wrote proudly to Chiarini, only six days after he had met Giselda, that he had found his ‘Beatrice’. So d’Annunzio was the new Dante and poor Giselda had been assigned the role of the girl whom Dante (if his poeticised account of their meetings is to be taken literally) laid eyes on only twice, who inspired his poetry and personified his ideal, but in whose actual life he played no part at all.

D’Annunzio set about remaking Giselda as an accessory suited to his own self-image. He deplored the conventional pose (‘so, so common’) of the photograph she had given him. He wanted her to look like a ‘proud and pensive queen, on the arm of her poet’. He renamed her (he would give all his lovers new names). ‘I want to call you Elda,’ he wrote. The name was more caressing than the full-length Giselda, more fitting for the child he wanted her to be. ‘You’re not a great big woman,’ he wrote. (He was to address many of his lovers, even when they towered over him, as ‘Little One’). He called her ‘bimba’ (baby), and imagined nursery scenarios, in which she played a petulant child. ‘It’ll do you no good to stamp your little feet on the ground … Come Elda … Baby, little pretty pretty pretty one. Forgive me? … You’re laughing, aren’t you?’ But if he liked to infantilise and dominate her, he also liked to be dominated. He told her that she was ‘bad’, ‘wicked’. He instructed her to wear black. ‘I detest, detest, detest pale colours on a woman.’ It would set off the pallor of her skin and it was appropriate to the other role he had assigned her, that of a ‘witch’, like Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ or Tennyson’s Morgan le Fay.

Term ended, the young lovers could at last meet for the first time since they had declared themselves. ‘What happy hours we had yesterday!’ d’Annunzio wrote to Giselda the next day. ‘Do you know that for twelve hours we were always in each other arms, always kissing with those long long kisses which made us tremble in every limb, always whispering those soft words?’ Of course she knew, but for d’Annunzio an experience was insubstantial until he had written it down. During the eleven days he stayed in Florence he wrote several of the lyrics which would appear the following year in his next collection, Canto Novo, with its dedication to Elda, ‘the great the beautiful the most adored inspiration’. By the time he left for Pescara he considered himself engaged to her. Tito, who knew that his daughter had caught the eye of an exceptionally talented boy, made no objection. D’Annunzio confidently told both father and daughter that his own parents doted on him. They would agree to anything that would make him happy. And so off he went to Pescara.

In his first novel, Pleasure, d’Annunzio describes his hero, Andrea Sperelli, anguished by his bewitching mistress’s sudden and inexplicable announcement that she is leaving him. She stops her carriage. He descends. He is in despair. ‘What did he do, once Elena’s carriage had disappeared in the direction of the Four Fountains? – Nothing, to be honest, out of the ordinary.’ Sperelli goes home, changes into evening dress and goes to a dinner party, not apparently to give Elena much thought until they meet again by chance two years later. Sperelli is by no means a faithful self-portrait of his creator (he is very much richer and more aristocratic), but author and fictional character have a great deal in common, and this trait is one they share. There is no reason to suppose that d’Annunzio was cynical in his treatment of Elda. He was, for a while, in love with her. He probably really thought of marrying her. And yet, once he had left Florence, he doesn’t seem to have missed her very much.

Life was sweet for d’Annunzio that summer. Eighteen years old, finished with school at last, he was poised to enter the adult world where his reputation, going before him, would guarantee him a welcome. Returning to places he loved and a growing circle of entertaining friends, he enjoyed a long, delicious and productive summer by the sea. His family were gratifyingly proud of him. Francesco Paolo had had the titles of the poems in Primo Vere written into the frescoes on the drawing-room walls. He was working fast, writing the stories of peasant life that would be published the following year in Terra Virgine, and more poems for Canto Novo. He was also enjoying himself. He rode, he swam, he went boating by moonlight.

His letters to Elda are full of tactless hints of how full and merry his life was without her. People burst in on him while he’s writing to her. ‘Curses! There is an absolute eruption of friends in the room … Forgive me if I leave off … They’ve taken all the foils and sabres out the rack and they’re making the most awful din.’ (Then and later, d’Annunzio loved to fence.) He was doted on and fussed over. Preparing for a trip, he reported that his mother, his three sisters and his two aunts were all in the room helping him to get ready. When he wanted other female company the resort town of Castellamare, just the other side of the Pescara river, provided – by his own account of the following year – plenty of diversions. There were bathers on the long sandy beach, and on the promenade ‘what vaporous floating of veils around women’s heads! What feline flexibility of bodies confined by the arabesques or flower patterns of an outfit à la Pompadour! … What flurries of young laughter ringing out from beneath big hats laden with flowers!’ The Abruzzese journalist Carlo Magnico would describe d’Annunzio bobbing around a group of such young women ‘cocky as a wagtail’. As dapper as a glossy little bird, preening under the attention afforded a local hero, full of energy and self-love, he enjoyed himself while Elda pined.

He had been wrong, as it turned out, to assure her that his parents would consent to their engagement. His father, especially, was far too proud of him to welcome the idea of his committing himself so young to marrying a mere schoolmaster’s daughter. Somehow it was settled that, rather than enrolling at the University of Florence, where he could have continued his studies while seeing Elda as often as the two of them pleased, he would go instead to Rome. How far Gabriele resisted the decision is unrecorded. Rome, the capital, was surely the place for an ambitious young man, and d’Annunzio was very ambitious indeed. Besides, his need to be with Elda does not appear to have been all that urgent.

He wrote to her daily; he composed poems celebrating her bewitching beauty. But when she suggested that he could perhaps make a scappata, a ‘jaunt’, to Florence to see her, he treated the idea as absurd. She has no idea of distances, he wrote. ‘You really think Pescara to Florence is a “jaunt”?’ Perhaps, he adds, he’ll stop off on his way home from visiting the Exhibition of Fine Arts in Milan. (He didn’t do so.) Elda might well ask why, if he was able to go to Milan, he should find it impossible to reach Florence, which was so much nearer. ‘If I can’t kiss you again I’ll die,’ he wrote, but still he allowed time to slip by without doing so. ‘Just think,’ he wrote, on the eve of his departure for Rome in November, ‘it is five months, five long, long months, since we saw each other’ – a fact for which he had no one to blame but himself.

Finally, at Christmas, half a year after their last meeting, he took the train from Rome to Florence to see her again, and stayed until Twelfth Night. By the time he left Elda’s mouth was sore and swollen from all their ‘savage kisses’. There followed another six months, during which he assured her almost daily by post that he ‘was all yours, all yours, all yours for ever’. Giselda wrote again and again imploring him to come to her; but always there was some excuse. He had deadlines to meet; he had to sign the university register on a regular basis in order to avoid being called up for national service; his parents were coming to visit. On 15 April, the anniversary of their first meeting, he wrote lamenting his inability to be with her and elaborating a happy vision of their future domestic life. He will have a lovely bright study, he writes, full of pictures and antique weapons and rare fabrics, ‘and I will break off in the middle of a hexameter to come and give you a kiss on the mouth’. It is noticeable that he seems to have put more creative energy into picturing the room than into imagining her.) It is so hard, he says, that he cannot run to her. He seems to hear her crying out to him. And yet, he says, he cannot possibly visit her. He doesn’t explain why not.

Two weeks after writing that letter he went to Rome’s railway station with two friends who were on their way to Sardinia. He intended only to see the others off, and then on an impulse, he went along too, declaring he couldn’t pass up the opportunity of seeing the full moon rising over the sea. He was wearing a white rose in his buttonhole and carrying nothing but a cane with a lotus-flower handle. (For aesthetes of his generation, the lotus, the ‘sceptre of Isis’, was both a phallic symbol and a kind of shorthand for all things Orientalist and exotic.)

The trip was hilarious, its planning shambolic. On the train the young men fell in with some aristocratic acquaintances in hunting gear, who were going out to the marshes to shoot quail. Much jovial talk, then, once the huntsmen had got out, the remaining three lay full-length along the seats, dangling their feet out of the window. At Civitavecchia, where they were to embark, d’Annunzio dithered. First he said that he wasn’t going any further, then he said he’d come but wandered off and ordered a vermouth in a bar, thereby nearly missing the boat. That night, at sea, he began by strolling on deck, jotting down notes for an ode on the moonlight. The weather changed. A wind got up and he abruptly turned first yellow, then green and went below, where he spent a miserable night retching and shivering in his linen suit.

The trip to Sardinia began as a boyish lark, but developed into a mind-altering experience. The friends visited the mines at Masua, and d’Annunzio wrote a powerful account of the hellish conditions in which the miners lived and worked. They went down into the lightless, foul-smelling tunnel, where ‘the hot viscid mass of vapour embraced us; we felt it on our faces like a soft, wet tongue; it seemed as though two hands drenched in sweat were wringing our hands’. He wrote to tell Giselda about it, but she – poor girl – was struck only by the fact that he had been free to leave Rome at a moment’s notice for a three-week trip, while declaring himself unable to spare even a day or two to be with her. The following month he was with her in Florence for ten days before going onto Pescara for the remains of the summer. There he named a rowing-boat Lalla, but the frequency of his letters to the real Giselda dwindled. In February 1883, he wrote to her for the last time.

D’Annunzio was rapidly to acquire the reputation of a Don Giovanni who seduced and deserted his women without a qualm. In fact he always found it immensely hard to take his leave. It was partly that he was chronically indecisive: his havering on the quay at Civitavecchia is characteristic of the man. And it was partly that he could say neither ‘no’ nor ‘goodbye’ to anyone. He never turned down commissions. He would agree to anything, and then default on his promise. Years later, when he was a great man plagued by fans or presumptuous ex-friends, he was incapable of bringing tedious conversations to a close. Instead he would mutter something enigmatic and leave the room. His visitors would wait, expecting him to return at any moment, but they would wait in vain. He found it dreadfully hard to dismiss a servant. When he was living on the French coast he once went to Paris (a day-long train journey) to avoid being present when his major-domo, on his orders, sacked his groom. Rather than give a straight ‘no’ to unwelcome invitations he would invent preposterous excuses: he once got his chauffeur to telephone his host for a lunch with the information he had gone up in a balloon and might not be coming down to earth for some time.

There is a further reason why his love affairs had such protracted endings. The more unhappy a woman was, the more interesting to him she became. The more he tantalised Elda with promised visits which were repeatedly deferred, the more adorable her image seemed to him. ‘You must be sad, immensely sad, my poor angel!’ he wrote. ‘You will be thinking of me with desperate desire.’ The idea of her disappointment – denied his ‘savage kisses’ – was one he liked to dwell on. Seeing her so seldom, he was really in no position to report on how pale and wan Elda really was, but he addressed her in a rapture of sadistic pity as: ‘My pallid Ophelia, my poor betrayed virgin.’ That he himself was the betrayer he seldom directly acknowledged. Instead he responded to her reproaches by becoming, or so he tells it, frenzied with grief.

The d’Annunzio who wrote the letters was as much a fictional construct as the girl to whom they were addressed. The Sardinian escapade ended with a scene that might have been lifted from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. D’Annunzio and his two friends, who had been overly familiar with the local women, were chased down to the ferry by a crowd of hostile male Sardinians. A comical (though probably frightening) episode, it gives us a glimpse of the real-life ‘wagtail’ d’Annunzio – a very young man strutting and flirting on a trip out of town. One of his companions on the voyage wrote: ‘He would be off and then, before he’d even been missed, he’d be back like a cat with a mouse in his jaws’ – the ‘mouse’ being a young woman.

Writing to Elda he was a very different person, palpitating with love and anxiety, frequently suicidal. ‘I am surrounded by a terrifying abyss,’ he wrote after she had threatened to break off their relationship. ‘I am alone on a pinnacle of rock. I see no light, I have no hope, you have taken everything from me.’ His very last letter must have been bewildering for her to read. ‘We love each other always,’ he writes, but then, ‘the memories disperse inexorably like empty dreams.’ He dwells with repellent arrogance on the unhappiness he’s caused her. The letter ends in a cruel sequence of contradictions. ‘Addio’, he writes repeatedly. He is sad, he says. To write more will only make her sad as well. ‘Addio’ again, but then ‘I kiss your mouth with a desire beyond words.’ More maddening pity – ‘Oh my poor martyr!’ Again ‘Addio, addio.’ And then finally, the by-now-evident-untruth twice affirmed: ‘Yours, always yours.’ He was just about to turn twenty. Four months later he was married, and not to Elda.

In 1921, after a silence of thirty-eight years, Giselda wrote to d’Annunzio asking for his permission to sell his letters. She hoped that they would fetch enough money to allow her son to marry. She was unusual among d’Annunzio’s women in having kept them so long. At the end of each of his subsequent love affairs he wrote his once-beloved woman a letter full of mellifluous expressions of regret for the fading of a great passion, but ending with a brusque request for the return of his letters. He replied to Giselda by suggesting she hand the letters over to his lawyer. He did not invite her to visit him.

HOMELAND

THE BOISTEROUS GROUP who burst into Gabriele’s room, making a distracting racket with the fencing foils, were not his only companions in the Abruzzi. A few miles south of Pescara, in Francavilla, lived the painter Francesco Paolo Michetti, who was to become the most loyal and generous of all d’Annunzio’s friends. Michetti was eighteen years older than Gabriele, old enough to become one of his extra fathers, and a successful artist. During the summers he was joined in Francavilla by a creative group of comrades who called themselves – with playfully blasphemous arrogance – the ‘Cenacolo’ (the word translates as dining club, or dining room, but in Italian it is most frequently used of the Symposium over which Socrates presided, or of Christ’s Last Supper). The most constant guests were Francesco Paolo Tosti, the composer who would later set many of d’Annunzio’s verses to music, and the sculptor Constantino Barbella.

By the summer of 1880, when Gabriele was seventeen, with another year of school ahead of him, he was already an established member of the Cenacolo, riding over from Pescara or moving in to stay, initially in Michetti’s small house by the sea and later in the rambling deconsecrated convent which Michetti transformed into his studio and home. ‘Oh beautiful days of Francavilla!’ he wrote later, recalling the ‘solitary beachside house’, through all of whose rooms blew the salty sea wind: ‘There life bloomed.’ He was, by more than a decade, the youngest of the group, several of whom were men with well-established reputations. If Nencioni and his other invited mentors had been the tutors who saw him through his secondary education, the Cenacolo was his university. He and Michetti talked and talked, ‘seven hours on end’, he told Elda, ‘and always about Art, always about Art’.

It was not, primarily, a literary group. Among Michetti’s friends, poets were outnumbered by artists, musicians, scholars. One of d’Annunzio’s great strengths as a writer and as a cultural commentator was that he was as knowledgeable about music and the visual arts as he was about literature, and valued them as highly. He was always intensely observant of visual effects. He was an exhaustive sightseer. His plan to visit the exhibition of contemporary art in Milan was not just a ploy to put Elda off. He was really excited by the prospect. Artworks perform important functions in his novels and plays, as symbols, as points of reference, as inspiration, as aphrodisiacs. One of his heroes models himself on a portrait by Leonardo. Another propositions a woman by telling her that he can see from her hands that her naked body would be as lovely as that of Correggio’s Danae. His poetry is full of colour. He frequently dresses his novels’ heroines in grey, but not just any old grey. He specifies each shade: the grey of ashes, of pigeon feathers, of pewter or a pale sky. At Francavilla he was learning to see through his painter-friend’s eyes. His early stories are full of brilliant unexpected colour: scarlet poppies luminous against a bleached background of dry rock, sky the colour of beryl or turquoise, purple mountains, a beggar’s crimson jacket, a river bright green with reflected trees and – over and over again – the almost fluorescent brilliance of orange and tawny-brown sails on a silver or lead-grey sea. These were the scenes Michetti painted. D’Annunzio’s task was to convert his images into words.

His ear was as discriminating as his eye. His most anthologised poem, La Pioggia nel Pineto (Rain in the Pine Wood), is a piece of beautifully modulated word-music which at once describes and imitates the sounds made by rain falling on leaves. He boasted that he once astounded the conductor Toscanini by detecting which instrument in an orchestra was out of tune. Throughout his life music was one of his greatest pleasures. ‘No one,’ wrote Romain Rolland, ‘could hear music better than he.’

At Francavilla he could talk about composition with composers, and observe how a sculptor and a painter gave form to their visions. There he would write, so he tells us, in rooms papered with his host’s sketches, with the sculptor Barbella modelling a bust beside him, with another comrade playing Schubert on a mandolin, and Tosti singing the refrain of a lullaby. ‘[Michetti’s] villa is truly the Temple of Art and we are its priests.’

It was in that temple that d’Annunzio began to see his native region as a fit subject for literary treatment. With Michetti he embarked on long rides into the region’s mountainous hinterland. These outings took him into a world at once archaic and exotic. The rural people were ‘almost dwarfs, with snub noses and flattened lips’, but dressed with a kind of ‘oriental’ splendour. D’Annunzio described a wedding party as a riot of ‘silk dresses, brocade scarves, big gold earrings; toasts accompanied by the delirious-making hum of guitars … gunshots … hailstorm of confetti … joyful cries’.

The members of the Cenacolo all shared an interest in the traditional culture of the Abruzzi. Tosti was collecting folk songs. Michetti’s friends also included Gennaro Finamore, author of a vocabulary of the Abruzzese dialect and a transcriber of folk tales, and the ethnologist Antonio de Nino, whose Abruzzese Customs and Costumes ran to six volumes. The poet Bruni wrote verse in the Abruzzese dialect, which Tosti set to music for a ‘chorus of youths’ to sing during an al fresco ceremony on Easter Monday. The subject of all Michetti’s art, wrote d’Annunzio later, was the ‘ancient vital race of the Abruzzi, so vigorous, so thoughtful, so full of song’.

For over a century European intellectuals had been searching in isolated rural communities for remnants of obsolete folk cultures. Ethnography was practised most enthusiastically in situations where nationalism needed to assert itself against an alien regime. James Macpherson, ‘discovering’ ancient Gaelic poems (most of them, published under the name of Ossian, his own forgeries) and his admirer and successor Sir Walter Scott, collecting songs and tales in the Scottish Highlands, were intent on demonstrating that Scotland had as rich a cultural heritage as England, its politically dominant neighbour to the south. While Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were growing up, the majority of German states were under Napoleonic rule. Their collecting of fairy tales ‘found among the common German peasantry’ was not just conservationist, it was ‘imaginative state-building’. The Gaelic League, set up in Ireland in 1893 for the preservation and promotion of Gaelic language and literature, aimed to provide inspiration for an independent Irish state.

So Michetti, touring the Abruzzi in search of picturesque peasant girls in embroidered bodices and home-spun red skirts, and Tosti, with his transcriptions of the songs sung by harvesters in the fields, were providing the cultural underpinnings for the new Italian nation. But it was not easy, as many patriotic ethnographers discovered, to identify authentic relics of indigenous culture. Several of the stories the Grimms collected to provide the new Germany with an unadulterated German back-story were in fact imported by French Huguenots. So d’Annunzio’s Italian friends were swayed by non-Italian influences. Their subject matter was local, but their interest in it was aroused by foreign examples. Michetti’s paintings owe much to the French realists: Corot, Courbet and Millet. Even the name of their fellowship was a borrowing. Over half a century earlier, in Paris, Victor Hugo had presided over a ‘Cénacle’.

At Francavilla, d’Annunzio swam: he was an exceptionally strong swimmer. ‘We bathed down there, like savages on the bare beach.’ He galloped his horse along the sand and rowed his little boat offshore. He and his friends cooked for each other, as inexpertly as young men accustomed to being waited on by servants or mothers have always cooked; he was to remember with pride a gigantic omelette he managed. Michetti posed his guests for photographs on the beach: d’Annunzio looks as faunlike as he liked to imagine himself – curly hair falling forward, a slight body taut with energy. There are women in some of the pictures, incongruously overdressed by contrast with the men, in long-sleeved gowns and big hats. This was not the monastic retreat d’Annunzio suggested in writing to Elda.

In the evenings there was wine, although d’Annunzio – then and for the rest of his life – was an abstemious drinker. There was opium, which he took to with gusto (‘in no time I became a passionate opium eater’). Aware that he was being ‘stunned’ by the drug, he soon left off taking it (‘but what beautiful moments I had!’). At night, sitting out among olive trees whose branches had been turned silver by the full moon (an effect d’Annunzio would use repeatedly in his fiction), they sang the choruses and lullabies that Tosti had been collecting and weaving into his newly composed ‘serenades’. Sometimes they would hear those eerie, repetitive melodies echoed back to them by unseen workers in the countryside around.

During the summer of 1880, Michetti and d’Annunzio made two excursions which were to be particularly fruitful for both of them. One took them to the village of Tocco di Casauria at harvest time. There they witnessed a scene involving a handsome young woman and some drunken harvesters. Michetti began that winter to make studies for one of his most celebrated paintings, La Figlia di Jorio (Jorio’s Daughter), which was finally exhibited at the first Venice Biennale fourteen years later. It shows a peasant girl, in a scarlet dress and shawl, hurrying past a group of leering men. D’Annunzio was to make something much more violent of the subject. He described the event in an interview: ‘Suddenly there burst into the little square a beautiful young woman, crying and dishevelled, followed by a throng of harvesters, brutalised by the sun, by wine and lust.’ From that one tableau he would devise a story of sexual transgression and mob violence which, nearly a quarter of a century later, became his most successful play, also called Jorio’s Daughter.

The other memorable outing was their visit, on a suffocatingly hot summer’s day, to the church of San Pantaleone at Miglianico. The church was crammed with pilgrims who had come to celebrate the saint’s feast day, to expiate sins and pray for miracles. Michetti depicted the scene in his painting The Vow, which was exhibited in Rome in 1883 to great acclaim. He makes a grand spectacle of the gorgeous colours of the girls’ embroidered costumes, the slanting light from the church’s high windows and the tragic drama of the dying come to beg for grace.

To d’Annunzio, though, the scene in the church was a horror show. In his account an animal stench rises from the bodies crammed together in the dimly lit church. At the centre of the crowd a kind of furrow is left open, a narrow passage walled with humanity, along which crawl devotees. ‘Three, four, five lunatics came writhing with their bellies on the ground, with their tongues on the dust of the tiles, with their feet rigidly flexed to support the weight of their bodies. Reptiles.’ There is blood on their feet and hands. They are licking the floor before them as they inch forward, drawing crosses with their own saliva. ‘The red stains that one fanatic has left, are rubbed by the dry tongue of the next fanatic.’ The crawlers, one by one, approach the silver effigy of the saint, each one grasping him around the neck ‘with a supreme effort which seemed akin to hatred’ and each fix a bleeding mouth to the saint’s metal mouth and hang there, ‘with a kind of convulsion of pleasure’. The watchers moan.

D’Annunzio was to return to the scene again and again. His fullest description of what he had seen at Miglianico would not be published for another fifteen years, forming part of The Triumph of Death, but in his early stories he repeatedly plays variations on the themes of religious solace, religious frenzy, and the power of the mob.

During his last winter at school, d’Annunzio wrote several of the short stories which would be published in his first prose collection, Terra Virgine. Probably prompted by Tito Zucconi, he was reading Zola (in particular The Sin of Father Mouret), Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Giovanni Verga’s newly published Life in the Fields. Soon, he discovered de Maupassant and Flaubert. Each new addition to his reading list can be detected in his own writing. He lifts a great deal from his foreign examples. He repeats phrases and reproduces syntactical construction. His plots are borrowed (one of his tragic-comic lovers is a bell ringer who pines away for love of a gypsy girl). His structures are ready made (The Virgin Anna follows the progression of Flaubert’s Un Cœur simple movement by movement). More importantly, the other writers’ realism had shown d’Annunzio that he could make use of the material he had found in his native province.

D’Annunzio was not a sentimentalist like Victor Hugo, nor a campaigner for social justice like Zola. When he describes the stultifying hardness of the lives of peasants or labourers, he does so not with compassion but with something closer to disgust. His stories of the Abruzzi are full of stupid violence. A beggar exhibiting his crippled child, a fisherman’s love perverted by jealousy, a pathetic idiot who takes pleasure in killing lizards very, very slowly. D’Annunzio took these examples of human degradation and embroidered around each of them a piece of carefully wrought prose. Michetti and his friends had taught him to pay attention to the culture of his homeland, with its rich heritage of ritual and belief. They had not persuaded him to like it. He has one of his fictional alter egos reflect that to discover that the countryside, whose beauty he loves, is home to so much primitive fear and credulity, is like running one’s fingers through a woman’s scented hair only to find, hidden beneath, ‘a teeming mass of lice’.

D’Annunzio’s sense of homeland would become an important theme in his politics and his self-presentation – ‘I carry the soil of the Abruzzi on the soles of my feet,’ he wrote – but he certainly didn’t want to live there. In 1914 the Pescaran authorities offered to give him a house in recognition of his status as the region’s great man. He declined. He was by then bankrupt in Italy and amassing enormous debts in France too, but for him the Abruzzi was a philistine backwater and Pescara a place redolent of old age and gross, squalid sins. Despite professing the greatest affection for what he called ‘my Abruzzi’, he much preferred swindling hoteliers or sponging off his admirers to being confined to his homeland.

YOUTH

SING THE IMMENSE JOY … of being young,’ wrote the eighteen-year-old d’Annunzio. ‘Of biting the fruits of the earth/With sound, white voracious teeth.’ The clandestine nationalist movement which Giuseppe Mazzini had founded in the 1830s, and which eventually drove the Risorgimento, was called Young Italy, signalling that the new nation was to be, not an amalgam of the decrepit statelets it united, but a vigorous new entity. D’Annunzio would employ the same rhetoric once he began his political career, but he also prized youth for its own sake. And when he first arrived in Rome he could exult in being the youngest of his circle of friends and patrons.

That circle was ready. The night before he set out for Rome in November 1881, he wrote to Elda, pretending to complain about his precocious celebrity. ‘So, so many friends are waiting for me there, so many admirers. It’ll be a fearful bore for the first few days!’

He was registered at the university’s Faculty of Literature, he may even have attended a few lectures. But most of his energies were directed elsewhere. While he was still at school his first published stories had appeared in the Fanfulla della Domenica, whose editorial board included his mentor Nenciono and in whose pages Chiarini’s generous review of Primo Vere had been published. Another useful contact was a fellow Abruzzese, Edoardo Scarfoglio, poet and editor of the weekly paper Capitan Fracassa – irreverent, satirical, written by and aimed at the young. It was Scarfoglio who, yawning at his desk one day, had been so electrified by d’Annunzio’s first appearance in his office, and it was Scarfoglio with whom, the following summer, d’Annunzio would take off for Sardinia. With his already published volumes as calling-cards, d’Annunzio was soon a prolific freelance writer, selling poems, stories and occasional pieces to the journals springing up to feed the new market of educated middle-class readers.

Scarfoglio saw him as something from the pages of Chateaubriand or Victor Hugo, ‘the incarnation of the romantic ideal of the poet’. Another of his new acquaintances described his ‘chestnut locks, slick and scented with unguents’ (all his life he tended his body as carefully as any courtesan), and his ‘forehead as smooth and white as that of a small angel in a Church procession’. Before long he met Angelo Sommaruga, a risk-taking young impresario (who would soon be facing criminal charges for bribery and extortion). Sommaruga prided himself on his readiness to take on potentially scandalous new work. Soon he had d’Annunzio contributing to his magazine, and had undertaken to publish the young author’s next volume of verse, and his first collection of stories.

It was only just over a decade since the Pope had ceded his temporal power to Italy, and the Italian government, formerly based in Turin, had moved to Rome. For centuries the city had been a beautiful backwater. By 1881 it was an enormous building site. Olive groves and cow pastures and aristocratic gardens which had survived within the ancient walls for a millennium were being built over to accommodate the hordes of politicians and courtiers and civil servants and journalists and entrepreneurs who had descended on the newly booming city.

D’Annunzio lodged initially in an attic room in the heart of the city, between the Corso and the Piazza di Spagna. Close by was a brothel. When he returned home at night he would find its clients leaning against his front door or attempting to kick it in. Physically energetic, he went to the fencing schools in the mornings, and rode out into the countryside in the afternoons. He enjoyed his new friends. The Capitan Fracassa’s editorial office, facetiously nicknamed the ‘yellow drawing room’, was a single room above a beer shop, whose two windows gave onto a narrow alley. Its yellow wallpaper was covered with sketches and slogans left by the writers, artists, actors and politicians who came there to deliver their contributions and to pick up gossip. It was always buzzing with conversation, and when more space was needed the regulars would move on to the pastry shop nearby, where they had euphoric dawn breakfasts after the journal had been put to bed each week. Sommaruga’s Cronaca Bizantina had grander premises in the Palazzo Ruspoli and a more louche atmosphere. D’Annunzio described himself taking the stairs one morning ‘with great leaps’, hopeful of finding there ‘a magnificent, unlettered lady’ for whose favours he and some of his fellow writers were competing.

Michetti provided introductions. There were convivial evenings in the Caffè Roma or the elegant eighteenth-century Caffè Greco. The latter was a favourite meeting place for painters, several of whom would become d’Annunzio’s friends and the illustrators of his books. There were evenings with Paolo Tosti ‘in a mysterious apartment full of dark corridors’. Tosti would improvise at the piano for hours on end, while the singer Mary Tescher, in black lace and jet jewellery, sang Schubert’s Lieder and the guests lolled on sofas or on the floor. There were gatherings at the studio of the sculptor Moïse Ezekiel inside the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. There were evenings in a house down by the Tiber where a ‘pleiade’ of young artists lived and worked. There were available women. D’Annunzio wrote to an Abruzzese friend boasting that he had inscribed some verses ‘on the white shoulders of a lascivious hetaera’. The tableau evoked is literary – d’Annunzio is modelling his self-image here on the cynical Vicomte de Valmont in Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. But what he is describing is a visit to a brothel.

In the year and a half between his first arrival in Rome and his marriage, d’Annunzio wrote a sequence of poems in which lubriciousness alternates with a nauseous revulsion from sex. The sonnet L’Inconsapevole epitomises the mood. It describes luxuriant foliage fertilised by the rotting flesh of a corpse, and someone reaching out to pluck a flower like a bloody wound and finding his hand stung by a bitter poison. The poems triggered off a heated public debate about ‘indecency’. D’Annunzio boasted that in them he described sex in impeccable prosody and with a frankness unknown since the work of the Renaissance pornographer, Pietro Aretino.

He writes about letting his tired head fall at dawn on sloping breasts, about ‘ascending a furrow’ between feminine loins. He devotes a sonnet to the sensation, vividly described, of fellatio. He was pursuing pleasure both in bed and on paper, but he was not happy about it. ‘Atrocious sadness of the unclean flesh when the flame of desire is extinguished in icy disgust and no veil of love is cast around the inert nakedness.’ In his first novel he gives his own taste for Aretino to a wholly unsympathetic character, a debauched English milord. He told Scarfoglio that he was craving the bracing cold of an Abruzzese winter, that he was feeling jaded and seedy. ‘The strength of my barbarous youth lies slain in the arms of women,’ he wrote in Sed non Satiatus. For him the female was always somehow overripe. Youth was pure, clean, strong, barbaric, male.

NOBILITY

ONE SUNDAY MORNING in May 1879 a troop of the Cicognini boys, preceded by the school band, marched in military order from Prato to Poggio a Caiano, some ten kilometres distant. They stopped for a picnic breakfast of bread, salami and wine in a park en route and picked between them an immense bunch of daisies. Somehow (because that was the kind of boy he was) it fell to Gabriele d’Annunzio to present the bouquet to the head teacher’s wife.

With flowers in their buttonholes and their cap bands, the boys marched on into Poggio. They were met by another band from the town, and, with shouts of ‘Long Live the King!’ they proceeded on to the Villa Medici, built by Giuliano di Sangallo for Lorenzo the Magnificent, and by this time a (seldom-used) royal residence.

D’Annunzio was enraptured. Here was a setting for the kind of life he dreamed of. ‘Great rooms painted with flowers and adorned with immensely valuable paintings: elegant and mysterious bedrooms; and everywhere a profusion of lamps, of mirrors, of carved chests, of marble tables, and over all something entrancingly venerable and ancient.’ He hung back as the other boys hurried out into the gardens. For a quarter of an hour he stayed alone in the frescoed salon that Vasari once called the most beautiful room in the world, indulging in a reverie that was part erotic fantasy, part awed contemplation of the glamour and grandeur of the Italian aristocracy. ‘I seemed to hear the rustle of Bianca Capello’s silk dress, to hear her yielding sighs and sweet words.’ Bianca Capello was a sixteenth-century beauty whose portrait by Allori d’Annunzio could have seen in the Uffizi. She and her Medici lover died mysteriously on the same day in 1578, probably poisoned by his relatives. D’Annunzio was thrilling himself with a tale of murder and forbidden passion. Any moment, he told himself, he might see a knight in armour, ‘his eyes flaming behind his visor, his sword unsheathed’.

The boys ate their lunch al fresco and went boating, but then it began to rain. An arched colonnade runs all around the villa at ground level. The boys took shelter there, and began to dance. It was a jolly scene, but for d’Annunzio, as precocious sexually as he was intellectually, it lacked a certain something. He had been eyeing the major-domo’s three daughters. He slipped into the house ‘for a glass of water’, and asked the prettiest of the trio if she would dance with him – ‘Just one waltz?’ She assented. They passed into the great salon. Soon some other boys joined them. ‘So we had a real dancing party … a bacchanal.’ He was twirling over the floor where Lorenzo the Magnificent had once trod, between walls decorated by some of the most revered artists of Italy’s golden past. ‘I enjoyed myself,’ the sixteen-year-old d’Annunzio told his mother; ‘very much; perhaps even very, very much.’

As a child in Pescara, d’Annunzio was a person of consequence, the mayor’s eldest son, living in one of the best houses in town. At the Villa Fuoco, the family’s country retreat, there were wide balustraded terraces, with stone pilasters topped by terracotta pots in the shape of the busts of kings and queens, their crowns formed by living aloe plants. When his father’s profligacy obliged the family to sell some land Gabriele watched the peasants, their dependants, crowding around his mother, as though around a queen going into exile. People brought offerings, a branch laden with apricots, a carafe of wine, a lamb. ‘Some of them knelt to kiss the hem of her dress. Others kissed my hands, bathing them with tears.’ Gabriele grew up with an expectation of deference. He would play with other children, but one of them later recalled that if anyone tried to question his leadership, ‘he would fire up, his face went red and three veins would swell visibly on his forehead’. At home in the Abruzzi he seldom met anyone to whom he felt socially inferior.

In Rome things were different. Later he was to write that the human race was divided into those superior beings who had the leisure and the capacity to think and feel and, on the other hand, those who must work for their living. He never doubted that he belonged by nature to the first class, but circumstances, to his great chagrin, consigned him to the latter. He was a hired scribbler, a hack. He couldn’t make enough by selling his poems alone. Soon, as well as reviewing books and music and exhibitions, and writing about shops and cafés and the best way to incorporate the newly fashionable Japanese knick-knacks into the décor of a European drawing room, he had become a gossip columnist, the kind of social parasite the snobbish narrator of Henry James’s Daisy Miller (James was also living in Rome at the time) calls a ‘penny-a-liner’.

Seven years after he arrived in Rome, d’Annunzio took himself off to Francavilla, and there, in six months, wrote his immensely successful first novel Pleasure. It recounts the amorous adventures of Andrea Sperelli, Count Ugenta. He loves first Elena Muti, a young widowed duchess, beautiful, wilful and depraved, who first signals her availability by asking Sperelli to buy her an enamelled death’s-head, and who loops her feather boa around his neck in a closed carriage and draws him wordlessly into her dangerous embrace. Abandoned by Elena, and vulnerable after being wounded in a duel, Sperelli subsequently falls in love with Maria Ferres, equally beautiful but high-minded and pure-hearted, a gifted pianist who succumbs to Sperelli’s seduction only after protracted hesitations and is ruined by him.

Into the novel went observations d’Annunzio had been recording as a journalist throughout those seven years. He describes a race meeting, a charity auction, a concert, the bustle around the antiquarian jewellers’ shops in the Piazza di Spagna. All these were venues where a writer obliged to work for his living could stand alongside the members of the otherwise so inaccessible upper classes. The great d’Annunzio scholar Annamaria Andreoli has noted the poignancy of the fact that Elena Muti is first seen from behind and below, as she mounts the steps of the palace where she is to dine. D’Annunzio, newly arrived in Rome, was the outsider on the pavement, watching those more privileged going through doors he was not invited to enter. And even when some of those doors began to open to him, they did so, not as to a welcome guest, but to a barely tolerated reporter.

The nobility were everywhere visible in Rome, even to those who would never get to know them. D’Annunzio saw carriages driving up and down the Corso, ladies lying back in them, heavily veiled and lapped in furs. In Spillman’s cake shop he listened in on a pair of princesses chatting ‘indolently’ as they bought bonbons, and noticed their headgear: ‘a tiny hat of black lace’; ‘an aigrette of ostrich plumes and heron feathers’. He went to the races and stood among the crowd, composing verses to the ‘goddesses’ in the stands: to the ‘unknown blonde Diana’ with the ‘hippopotamus husband’, whose marble-white arms were loaded with gold bracelets and half concealed by flower-patterned tulle; to the Amazon in the green dress and the red-plumed hat. At the opera he sat in the stalls and gazed up at the ladies in the boxes, taking fashion notes for his column. The Princess di San Faustino, in a ‘dress of palest blue, shading into sea green, flowing, almost transparent … over her bare shoulders a blonde beaver fur, trimmed with red satin … a half-moon of brilliants glittering on her high-piled hair’. The Countess Chigi-Londalori in white satin, ‘slender as the stem of a lotus’. The Princess di Sciarra and the Duchess di Avigliana, both in black brocade. The Countess Antonelli in a tight dress of turquoise-striped silk. And so on and so forth. Day after day, week after week, he poured out these lists of names and jewels and textiles, caressingly itemising the physical attributes and expensive accessories of women he didn’t know.

He was resentful when ladies kept their furs on in the opera house. ‘They don’t show the moon-pale arch of their shoulders.’ After the publication of Pleasure his public would assume that Sperelli was d’Annunzio’s self-portrait, but the lordly Sperelli is a very different person from the young reporter with a notebook, whose only chance of glimpsing a grand lady in evening dress is to peer up at her from the opera house’s stalls hoping that she’ll feel inclined to remove her stole.

On returning to Rome from the Abruzzi for his second winter in the capital, the nineteen-year-old d’Annunzio had himself measured for a suit of evening dress, and wrote to tell his father he was embarking on the ‘high life’ (his English). As a ‘penny-a-liner’ he would not have been accorded the same kind of welcome as better-entitled guests, but gradually he gained entry to the concerts, the balls, the ‘pique-niques’ (indoor events which began around midnight, but which featured oriental tents and forests of hot-house plants). He was working his way in.

Scarfoglio was shocked. D’Annunzio, who had arrived in Rome with a sheaf of neo-classical poems and high-minded realist stories, had transformed himself into a frivolous sycophant to the idle rich. ‘For six months he has been going from one ball to another, from a morning’s riding in the Campagna to a supper party at the house of some pomaded old idiot furnished with nothing more than a set of quarterings. Not one serious thought enters his head. He is a puppy dog on a silken string.’ One night when some of the Cenacolo were having an unpretentious, Abruzzese-style supper together, the two quarrelled. Scarfoglio was irritated by the way d’Annunzio cherished and protected his spotless white cuffs (laundry was expensive). D’Annunzio was seriously annoyed when Scarfoglio – probably deliberately – dropped some bread crumbs on the poet’s black suit.

There was a part of d’Annunzio that agreed there was something shameful about what he was doing. The need to earn his living was abhorrent to him, as it would always remain. ‘What craven humiliations, Elda … Here men are sold like cattle.’ But there was nothing wrong, in his opinion, with popular journalism. He wanted readers, plenty of them. Besides, when he wrote about shops and table settings and ladies’ hats, he didn’t feel he was demeaned by his subject matter. To Scarfoglio these might be trivia, but d’Annunzio was observing and recording aspects of life which delighted him.

He gave a lot of thought to clothes. The heroines of his novels have wonderful dresses, minutely described. For a walk in the garden, Maria Ferres wears a Fortuny-style pleated gown. D’Annunzio devotes two full paragraphs to the cut of its sleeves, and its ‘strange, indefinable colour’, like rust, or like the stamen of a crocus. He tells us about the sea-green ribbon around its waist, the turquoise scarab brooch with which the collar is fastened and the hat, wreathed in hyacinths, which completes the outfit. In doing so he alludes to the Italian primitives, and to two of his favourite contemporary painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. To him fashion was an extension of the visual arts. He saw no reason why the décor of a drawing room or a woman’s dress should not be considered as worthy of serious attention as a landscape or a painting.

High society was not just a pleasing spectacle. The ‘ancient Italic nobility’, wrote d’Annunzio in Pleasure, had ‘kept alive, from generation to generation, a family tradition of elite culture, of elegance and of art.’

Everywhere around him he saw monuments to that tradition. Rome is a palimpsest, and d’Annunzio was an indefatigable explorer of the ruins of its multi-layered past. He clambered across the temples and fallen arches of the forum. He rode over the outlying hills past convents and basilicas, and out into the Campagna with its outcrops of titanic masonry, its aqueducts and tombs. He wandered through the immense ruins of imperial palaces. He went from church to church, listening to music, making notes on the statuary. But what moved him most was not the Rome of the Caesars, or the Rome of the Popes (the two predecessors Italian nationalists had in mind when they talked about the capital of the new nation as ‘the third Rome’). The Rome to which d’Annunzio responded most passionately was the Rome of the great aristocratic families.

He loved the patrician villas. He admired their façades from the outside only, but in many of their grounds he was free to wander. Topiary, fountains, cypresses and obelisks echoing each other’s forms; broad, curved steps; pergolas draped with wisteria; marble benches supported by carved lions: these gardens were marvellous places. He stored them away in memory to feed his imagination for years to come. He took his women into them on summer nights, to carve their names onto mossy stone parapets, to kiss, to hear the nightingales, and on at least two occasions that we know of, to strip off all his clothes and make love.

Those gardens, like landscapes glimpsed in a dream, were under threat. ‘We must build Italy in Rome,’ declared Francesco Crispi, the nationalist statesman who was to dominate Italian political life for the next two decades. Every open space was a target for speculators. The Aventine and Gianiculum Hills were being divided up into lots for sale. The Corso Vittorio Emmanuele was being driven through the city centre, at the expense of a swathe of mediaeval and baroque alleyways. Within months of d’Annunzio’s arrival in the capital, Augustus Hare, an English resident, wrote that in twelve years the new regime had ‘done more for the destruction of Rome, with its beauty and interest, than the invasions of the Goths and Vandals’.

D’Annunzio was to become, once fame gave him influence, an energetic conservationist. It is, for instance, largely thanks to his advocacy that Lucca still has its mediaeval walls. As a young journalist though, all he could do was lament the desecration. Parks ‘where, last spring, the violets appeared for the last time, as numerous as blades of grass’, were covered with white hillocks of plaster and piles of red bricks. In groves where nightingales had sung undisturbed for centuries ‘the wheels of wagons screech. The cries of artisans alternate with the hoarse yells of carters.’ The laurels of the Villa Sciarra, whose grounds had been sold for development, ‘lie felled, or stand, humiliated, in the little gardens of stockbrokers and grocers’. In the gardens of the Ludovisi family’s magnificent Villa Aurora, to be sacrificed to the apartment blocks of the newly widened Via Veneto, he saw ancient cypresses uprooted, their blackened roots ignominiously exposed to the sky. A wind of Barbarism was blowing over Rome, he wrote. ‘Even the box hedges of the Villa Albani, which appeared as immortal as the caryatids and the herms, tremble at the presentiment of the market and of death.’

That wind was a metaphor for the influx of middle-class officials and tradesmen and businessmen who had followed the new Italian administration into the city. In Rome in the 1880s, d’Annunzio’s fervent patriotism, which might have led logically to joy at Italy’s recent liberation and devoted loyalty to the regime running the unified country, came into conflict with his artistic sensibilities. The culture that he credited the aristocracy with having kept alive was in danger of being engulfed by ‘today’s grey democratic flood … which is drowning in meanness so many beautiful and rare things’.

He wasn’t uncritically admiring of the aristocrats he gradually began to meet. But, debauched or silly though the upper-class characters in his novels may be, they still have graces denied lesser beings. D’Annunzio’s imaginary Count Andrea Sperelli, standing ‘on guard’ at the beginning of a duel, displays in every line of his person the ‘sprezzatura of a great lord’. In another novel, d’Annunzio describes a refined young man’s revulsion on seeing his bourgeois mistress’s bare feet. They seem to him deplorably vulgar, suggestive of squalor and meanness. Even the curve of an upper-class instep was somehow more noble than that of a plebeian.

On that school outing to Poggio, d’Annunzio had gained access to a grand house by ingratiating himself with the girls. In Rome as an adult he played the same game. In the fencing schools and stables he encountered the young men of the upper classes; he saw them striding, immaculately dressed, up the steps of their clubs; he might share a compartment on a train with them; but he was not one of them. He was a brave horseman, but it would be another twelve years before he became a member of the Circolo della Caccia, the exclusive fox-hunting club. Women, however, were more approachable. Scarfoglio took it for granted that d’Annunzio’s enthusiasm for high society was sexually motivated. ‘As winter opens the doors of the great Roman houses, so he ceded to the flatteries of ladies.’

The three or four streets between the Piazza di Spagna and the Corso – then full of antique shops and jewellers – were his hunting ground where, as he tells it, open-air ‘flirtation’ (his English) was rife. In a teasing piece for La Tribuna he described the erotic opportunities shopping afforded. ‘Your hand can brush furtively against a lady’s, in feeling an embroidered silk.’ Advice on the choice of a Christmas present, he explained to his readers, can have ‘an infinity of madrigals’ as its subtext. ‘You can tell her you have seen an unusual object in a little-known curio shop and offer to accompany her there, and as the two of you bend over to inspect the knick-knack in question you will feel your ear tickled by her hair.’ And then, a little later, you can play on the memory of that intimacy. ‘“Do you remember Duchess … You were wearing a chestnut-coloured mantle trimmed with chinchilla, and you were so fair, at Janetti’s shop, standing in a ray of sunlight, between a piece of marquetry and a screen of leather tooled with silver and rose-coloured chimeras … You were so beautiful that morning … And you were so kind … and sweet … etc. etc. Do you remember?” If the Duchess remembers, you’ve almost certainly made a conquest.’

It is not hard to guess of whom he was thinking. In April 1883, a couple of months after he wrote his last letter to Elda, d’Annunzio attended a gathering of high-ranking ladies in the Palazzo dei Conservatori. The piece he wrote is his usual confection of artistic references, fashion notes and social gazette. He mentions the Duchessa di Gallese, serene in crushed velvet, and notes that she smiles frequently at her blonde daughter, Maria, who stands by a marble statue and wears a white plume. D’Annunzio ends the piece with an enigmatic reference to a pair of ‘living turquoises speckled with gold’ beneath long eyelashes. In his scandalous poem, Peccato di Maggio (Sin in May) published the following month, he describes seducing a young woman with just such eyes. Shortly thereafter he and Maria di Gallese eloped.

He wrote to Nencioni: ‘Finally, I have given myself up entirely to love, forgetting myself and everything else.’ The Duchessina Maria Hardouin di Gallese (pictured overleaf with their son Mario) was a year younger than him, described by a contemporary as ‘a graceful creature, fragile, an eighteenth-century pastel … the image of poetry’.

The family bore a noble name, but neither of Maria’s parents was born into the ancient aristocracy. Her father was the son of a clockmaker from Normandy, who had come to Rome as a junior officer in the French army in 1849. Billeted in the Gallese palace, or perhaps just frequenting the stable yard, he had met, wooed and won the widowed duchess, marrying her and – thanks to a special papal decree – sharing her title. When she died he married again, to a much younger woman of the bourgeoisie. But however come by, the duke’s title was ancient and respected; his home, the fifteenth-century Palazzo Altemps, was imposing; his second wife, Maria’s mother, was a court insider and lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

Persistent gossip suggests that it was the duchess who first became interested in d’Annunzio. She was described by her neighbour, Count Luigi Primoli, who would become a good friend of d’Annunzio’s, as ‘graceful, seductive, but as hysterical as the heroine of a novel’. Primoli adds that she was constantly going about with poets. In her salon writers and artists met high society. This was the kind of inclusive circle into which d’Annunzio could have been invited. Or perhaps he met mother and daughter with Primoli, who also made a practice of inviting ‘the two aristocracies, of the mind and the blood’, to meet. D’Annunzio certainly visited his house at about this time, and wrote fondly of a ‘mysterious corner’ where a little low divan in a heavily curtained alcove, half screened by a palm tree, provided the perfect place to ‘converse in peace with a lady’.

Whatever may have passed between d’Annunzio and the duchess, he soon transferred his interest to her daughter. Count Primoli, recounting the affair in his diary, imagines Maria finding him in a corner of the palace. ‘A young poet … as beautiful as a mediaeval page. Was he there for her mother? She took him for herself.’ It wasn’t difficult for the young couple to meet. Later, Maria wrote nostalgically to Primoli of how she would ooh! and aah! at the lovely things in Janetti’s shop window, or buy violets from the flower stall in the Piazza di Spagna (in Pleasure all the ladies carry little posies of violets inside their muffs). D’Annunzio was frequently there too. Soon they were meeting while out riding as well. And if Sin in May is to be taken as the description of an actual event, those outdoor assignations were soon deliriously pleasurable. In a wood where blackbirds sing, the poem’s narrator falls to his knees before his ‘slim blonde companion’. His hands play upon her body like a harp. She hangs over him, swaying, swooning. They lie down. Her tumbled hair forms a bed on which she stretches out: ‘I felt/The points of her breasts rising, at the lascivious/Approach of my fingers, like fleshy flowers …’. A rigor as of death freezes her, but ‘she revives as on a wave of pleasure./I bend entire over her mouth, as if to drink from a chalice, trembling at the conquest.’

The woman in the poem is called Yella (a diminutive of Mariella, a common variant of Maria). D’Annunzio was being flagrantly indiscreet, perhaps having calculated that the only way he could win Maria was by compromising her beyond redemption. The duke might himself be an upstart who had entered the ranks of the nobility by way of the bedroom: it did not follow that he would welcome a son-in-law who followed his lead. Quite the reverse. Some time early that summer Maria became pregnant (Mario d’Annunzio was born the following January), but still her father adamantly refused to sanction her marriage to the ‘penny-a-liner’.

On 28 June 1883, Gabriele d’Annunzio and Maria di Gallese took the train to Florence. Their flight was widely reported: d’Annunzio himself had probably tipped off the press. There was some attempt to veil the impropriety: most journalists covering the scandalous elopement alleged that the pair were met at the railway station (telegrams flying faster than trains) by the prefect of police, and sent straight back to Rome. It was a polite fiction. It was not until the following morning that the prefect found them at the Hotel Helvetia. Maria was hustled back to Rome, but by passing the night together in a public place the lovers had ensured that Maria’s parents would be obliged to permit their marriage.

To permit, but not to approve or bless. The duke was so outraged at a mere writer having carried off his girl that he wouldn’t attend their wedding in the chapel in the Palazzo Altemps. Worse, he refused to give Maria and her new husband any financial support, or ever to meet them. To do him justice, d’Annunzio has left no sign that he was disappointed by Maria’s lack of dowry, or by the fact that as an outcast she was unable to provide him with an entrée to the aristocratic circles that fascinated him so. The couple left town to enjoy a marital idyll. Maria was d’Annunzio’s pearl-pale, high-born damozel and he was her curly-headed page, and for a while they were entirely happy. He took her off to Pescara and lived there with her for over a year in his father’s Villa Fuoco, revelling in his freedom to enjoy a legitimate ‘horizontal life’ with his delicately lovely wife. When eventually he returned to Rome he took on another dependant. Maria’s parents separated soon after their daughter’s hasty marriage and, for a while, the duchess lived with d’Annunzio and Maria. If d’Annunzio was a fortune-hunter, he was an inept one. Instead of riches and position, he had acquired for himself two disgraced and dependent women whose upkeep he could ill afford.

BEAUTY

WHEN D’ANNUNZIO FIRST WENT to Count Primoli’s house he might have had something to say about the host, a pioneering photographer and a flamboyant dandy who took pictures of himself dressed in velvet knickerbockers. Primoli was to become another of d’Annunzio’s mentors, and played the part of go-between in two of his later love affairs. But in his account of one of his first evenings at the count’s, d’Annunzio ignores the human and lingers over the inanimate.

A large room painted Chinese red, a mass of flowers, glass lampshades shaped like birds or lilies, every surface cluttered with things. D’Annunzio made notes. ‘A dazzling shimmer: a gold-embroidered sash encircles a Hispano-Moresque platter, a length of Venetian velvet is secured by a samurai sword: a sixteenth-century globe and a mauve cope are the backdrop to a profane picture by an ultra-modern artist.’ This rich jumble, in which the very old and very new, the beautiful and the bizarre, are juxtaposed, was a model for the interiors d’Annunzio later created in his own homes, spaces which were both settings for the drama of their creator’s life and works of installation art.

D’Annunzio wrote about his contemporaries’ ‘bric-à-bracomania’. ‘Every drawing room in Rome … was laden down with “curiosities”, every lady covered her cushions with a bishop’s cope or arranged her roses in an Umbrian pharmacist’s jar or a Chalcedon goblet.’ It was a craze he entered into with enthusiasm. He rummaged through the stalls in the Campo dei Fiori, looking for coins and prints and figurines. He frequented auction houses. In Pleasure, Sperelli and Elena Muti attend the sale of a dead cardinal’s effects. Tiny, exquisite objects are passed round for prospective buyers’ inspection – Roman cameos, illuminated missals, jewels made by the goldsmiths of the Borgia court. When Elena touches something particularly fine, her ‘ducal’ fingers quiver a little, a frisson which pleases Sperelli both as boding well for her capacity for sexual ecstasy, and as evidence of the fineness of her aristocratic taste.

A shop that d’Annunzio particularly enjoyed was that run by the Beretta sisters, selling all things Japanese. He loved its clutter – ‘lacquers, bronzes, textiles, earthenware, all the rare and precious things are scattered about in a wonderful confusion of colours and shapes’. Japanese artefacts had been gradually reaching the West since the 1850s and by the time d’Annunzio arrived in Rome they were quite the fashion. Identifying a vogue, be it for a new style of hair ornament, an innovative narrative technique or a political theory, was already one of his talents. He was devouring the writings of his French contemporaries, alive to the Parisian dernier cri as well as to what was being worn, read and thought in the Italian capital. He reviewed Judith Gautier’s translations of Japanese poetry; he praised the Goncourt brothers for the way they promoted oriental art. The Berettas’ shop, with its crimson walls and glossy black woodwork, its air scented with cedar and sandalwood, was another of the places which would shape his own style.

Rare and precious things, unfortunately, are expensive, and in the early 1880s, d’Annunzio, for all the volume of his work, was not earning nearly as much as he thought he needed. Meanwhile his responsibilities were growing. He and Maria passed the first fifteen months of their married life in Pescara, Francesco Paolo having allowed them the Villa Fuoco. There, in January 1884, their son Mario was born. D’Annunzio was not to prove a dependable father, but the birth moved him. ‘I went round and round the room like a beast in a cage … I could hear a feeble, sweet mewling … I don’t know how to tell you what I felt.’ He wrote dotingly about the little pink creature with blue eyes and a tiny, tiny mouth, and made plans for him. Mario would be a painter, or perhaps a scientist. His second novel, The Innocent, contains lovingly detailed descriptions of a baby’s tiny hands and wet gums, its wildly waving arms and unfocused eyes. The novel ends though, with the fictional father killing the infant, which is impeding its parents’ love life. Less than a month after Mario was born d’Annunzio reported that he had sent his baby to stay with its grandparents. ‘It yelled too much.’

In the Abruzzi he completed another collection of stories, heavily influenced by Flaubert, describing the sexual cravings of upper-class women. The volume was published that summer of 1884 by Sommaruga, with a jacket design featuring three nude women. D’Annunzio protested that the image was ‘indecent’. Author and publisher exchanged heated letters in the columns of the journals, but it has been plausibly suggested that this apparent falling out was contrived between them in order to publicise the book.

D’Annunzio was also sending articles back to the Roman journals, but he was running out of material. A piece on the brass bands which processed around Pescara on public holidays was a particularly desperate bit of barrel-scraping; privately d’Annunzio admitted to detesting the bands’ raucous music. He was missing his friends. ‘No one comes to see me,’ he wrote to Scarfoglio. He felt out of touch. He begged to be sent the latest journals. ‘Nothing reaches me here and I’m desperate.’ In November 1884, still only twenty-one years old, he returned to Rome, taking his wife and baby with him, to take up a job as an editor and regular contributor to La Tribuna.

Over the next four years, day after day, he was to write literally hundreds of pieces, vignettes of Roman social and cultural life. Sometimes he played the erudite critic: he reviewed books and exhibitions. In discussing Renan’s Life of Jesus he launched into a discursive piece on Homer’s Elysian fields. More often he was an observer of the frivolous ‘high life’. He wrote about funerals and race meetings, about concerts and parties. He gave a lasciviously detailed account of a meal eaten after a day’s hunting: hare with rosemary and thyme; goose-liver pâté with a glaze scented with truffles; champagne. He prescribed the most graceful way to take snuff. He laid down rules about what it was appropriate for a gentleman to wear to the opera.

He had a multiplicity of names. He wrote as Sir Charles Vere de Vere; as Lila Biscuit; as Happemouche; as Bull-Calf; as Puck or Bottom (in 1887 he announced that he was about to publish a translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – it never appeared); as Miching-Mallecho (another Shakespearean reference); as the Japanese Shiun Sui Katsu Kava and – most frequently – as Duke Minimo. These fake personae were not just names, but fully developed characters, each with their own servants, houses and social lives. He invented peccadilloes for them and spoke through their differentiated voices. Sir Charles Vere de Vere describes his friend Donna Claribel, and then quotes at length from the diary she keeps in a notebook bound with wild ass’s skin (d’Annunzio had discovered Balzac). Doubly distanced from its actual author, Donna Claribel’s account of a meet of the foxhounds is an airy piece of fiction, light and funny. D’Annunzio’s major works give no hint that he had any sense of humour whatsoever, but these early pieces are playful and droll. The hack-writer was not only observing settings and characters and situations which would be recreated by the novelist. He was also trying out fictional techniques.

His most-used pseudonym was a noble one, but there was a sad irony in the name Duke Minimo (least of the dukes). In one of the ‘Duke’s’ pieces he records how he and a group of friends have been refused access to a railway carriage. ‘We were repelled by main force, as though we were so many journalists.’ D’Annunzio was well aware how the person he actually was was viewed by the kind of person he aspired to be.

Andrea Sperelli, his fictional alter ego, lives in a huge, sumptuously decorated apartment in the Palazzo Zuccari, at the top of the Spanish Steps, around the corner from where d’Annunzio had rented one attic room next to a brothel. Elena Muti, d’Annunzio’s imaginary duchess, has an apartment in the Palazzo Barberini, where room after room is furnished with carved chests, classical busts, bronze platters and curtains embroidered with golden unicorns. D’Annunzio and his family lived in a cramped rented apartment in a narrow street nearby. In 1886 his second son, Gabriellino, was born. Veniero followed a year later. When Andrea Sperelli returns to his tapestry-hung rooms after a lunch party, he is at leisure to stretch languidly in front of his fire and muse on beauty and art until his manservant reminds him that it is time to dress for a dinner. His creator had deadlines to meet, bills to pay and, increasingly, creditors to placate. What he called the ‘miserable daily grind’ permitted him no respite.

Before going to a ball, Sperelli is invariably invited to dinner in one of Rome’s great palaces. D’Annunzio, by contrast, eating alone once in a beer shop, dozed off and dreamt of a ballroom all hung around with camellias and cradles. In each cradle there is a baby: each baby is crying loudly. The noise is excruciating. As the ballroom fills with couples, the gentlemen each take up several babies and attempt to dance while carrying them on their shoulders or under their armpits or beneath their waistcoats. The babies scream and wriggle, and poke their fingers into the dancer’s eyes, setting up such a hullabaloo that eventually the dreamer/writer awakes. It’s a dream that any exhausted new parent can identify with, that of a young father living in a small apartment with (at the time this piece was written) two children under the age of two and a half, striving to lead the exquisite life he so admired and coveted, but sleep-deprived and encumbered night and day by his offspring.

D’Annunzio’s need for money troubled him perhaps less than it ought to have done. Maria relates that, on receiving a fee desperately needed for the payment of household bills, he went ‘light and gay as a little bird’ to squander it all on a jade ornament. His compulsion to spend was at best reckless, at worst pathological.

He was not unmercenary. His correspondence demonstrates how much of his energy went into wheedling or browbeating his publishers into advancing him inordinately large sums against books as yet (and in some cases always to remain) unwritten. Once his novels were being published abroad, he studied exchange rates and timed his demands for the payments of his foreign royalties accordingly. When, in his famous middle age, he heard that a hotelier had, rather than banking his cheque, kept it for the sake of his autograph, he wondered if there was any way of persuading others to do likewise. But acquisitive as he was, he was also incorrigibly extravagant. While Maria, housekeeping for the first time in her hitherto privileged life, struggled to find cash for the butcher and baker, her husband allowed Sommaruga to pay him for his contributions to the Cronaca Bizantina with credit at the florist’s shop.

After two years at La Tribuna he wrote to the proprietor, Prince Maffeo Colonna di Sciarra, a letter which was in part a request for a pay rise, in part another literary self-portrait. ‘By temperament and by instinct I have a need for the superfluous.’ He must have beautiful things about him. ‘I could have lived very well in a modest house … taken tea in a threepenny cup, blown my nose on handkerchiefs at two lire the dozen … Instead, fatally, I have wanted Persian carpets, Japanese plates, bronzes, ivories, trinkets, all those useless, lovely things which I love with profound and ruinous passion.’ There is nothing apologetic about this self-description. An archangel cannot be expected to match his expenditure to the means available, after the manner of a penny-pinching tradesman. Nor can one of those superior beings whose role it is to ‘think and feel’. Prodigality is an aristocratic vice, a perverted form of largesse. Besides, d’Annunzio was not simply a self-indulgent squanderer (although he was that too). He was, in the most literal meaning of the word, an aesthete, one for whom the cult of beauty took the place of morality.

Writing art reviews and journalistic essays, d’Annunzio was pleased to be following the lead given by Baudelaire in the previous generation. The author of Les Fleurs du mal was also an influential art critic, and his essay on the ‘dandy’ defined a new kind of hero. ‘These beings have no other aim, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.’ Baudelaire had many followers among the French Decadents and Symbolists whom d’Annunzio was reading greedily – Théophile Gautier, Henri Régnier, Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1882, d’Annunzio’s first year in Rome, Walter Pater, whom d’Annunzio had read with Nencioni, visited the city for the first time, subsequently writing Marius the Epicurean, a novel in which homoerotic fantasy entwines itself around philosophical musings. Meanwhile Oscar Wilde, who called Pater’s essays ‘the holy writ of beauty’, was touring the United States. There Wilde, in velvet frock coat and satin breeches, lectured on the ‘House Beautiful’, not so much a style of interior decoration as an aspiration closely parallel to the d’Annunzian injunction that a life must be made in the same way as a work of art.

That beautiful life was at once ancient and modern. ‘All the literature of the present day is abject rubbish,’ wrote Giosuè Carducci. ‘Let us return then to true art, to the Greeks and the Latins. What ridiculous little dwarfs are these Italian realists!’ D’Annunzio had been one of those dwarfs, but the poems written during the first year and a half of his marriage, which would be published under the collective titles of La Chimera (pseudo-classical) and Isaotta Guttadauro (pseudo-mediaeval), are newly written examples of centuries-old verse-forms. Their words are archaic, their imagery (lilies, pomegranates, ailing damozels) is pre-Raphaelite. Their rhyme-schemes are tight, their rhythms song-like. Jewels and flowers heavy with erotic symbolism are disposed around the figures of noble maidens and their knightly suitors. Even the spelling is pseudo-antique. Soon after the publication of Isaotta Guttadauro a parody appeared, entitled Risaotto al Pomidauro (tomato risotto – spelt in an equally faked-up olde-worlde manner).

Scarfoglio had published the parody. D’Annunzio, ostensibly deeply offended, challenged him to a duel, which took place without injury to either party. It was widely suspected that (like the spat with Sommaruga over the ‘obscene’ jacket illustration) the parody, challenge and duel had been got up between the two friends as a way of drawing attention to the poems.

ELITISM

IN SEPTEMBER 1885, d’Annunzio quarrelled with a journalist, Carlo Magnico, and challenged him to a duel. At school d’Annunzio had been a prize-winning fencer. In Rome he had kept himself in training, but Magnico, who had the advantage of being considerably taller, bested him. D’Annunzio received a wound to the head, only a shallow cut, but it rattled him. (Pleasure’s hero comes close to being killed in a duel.) The writer and editor Mathilde Serao was present at the fight. She relates that the doctor, alarmed by the amount of blood d’Annunzio was losing, poured iron perchlorate over the wound. The bleeding was staunched, but the chemical did irreparable damage to d’Annunzio’s hair follicles – or so Serao, perhaps prompted by d’Annunzio, maintained. Soon afterwards he was bald.

The story, which has been repeated by all d’Annunzio’s biographers, doesn’t stand up. Photographs of d’Annunzio show no noticeable scar on his bald pate. What they do show is his hair receding gradually and along the usual lines. He goes bald just as other men go bald. But d’Annunzio did not want to be as other men. He had been proud of his ‘forest of curls’. The beginning of the end of his life as an ‘ephebe’ (a favourite word of his) was painful, and required transformation. The banal misfortune of losing his hair was reimagined as a battle wound. No longer an androgynous sprite, he began to construct a new persona for himself, that of the virile hero.

Many Italians were looking for such a hero, an autocratic Great Man. Italy’s parliamentary democracy was (as it has remained) desperately unstable: in its first forty years it saw thirty-five different administrations. In the 1860s, the first decade of its existence, it was stained by a scandal surrounding a manifestly corrupt deal over the tobacco monopoly. By 1873 one of its members described parliament as ‘a sordid pigsty, where the most honest men lose all sense of decency and shame’.

The aristocrats who had previously had a monopoly of power despised parliament as a talking shop for the vulgar. Politicians on the left complained that its members represented no one but the wealthy. Elections were all too obviously rigged. Even where the ballot boxes were untampered with, few votes were truly free. Initially the electorate was tiny, and successive reform bills extending the franchise only served to shore up the forces of reaction. The lower down the social scale the voter, the more likely he was to vote docilely as his priest or his landlord instructed him. In the countryside the new democracy looked much like mediaeval feudalism. British historian Christopher Duggan sums up: ‘Bribery of all sorts was commonplace – money, food, offers of jobs, loans – and in many parts of the south men with a reputation for violence – bandits, or mafiosi – were widely deployed to intimidate voters. Election days were frequently turned into carnival occasions with landowners marching their supporters, as if they were a feudal army, off to the polling stations accompanied by musicians, priests and dignitaries.’ Those few ‘new men’ who attained a seat in parliament were perceived (largely correctly) as being as self-serving as their predecessors, and ill-educated to boot.

In 1882, a few months after d’Annunzio’s arrival in Rome, Giuseppe Garibaldi died. Garibaldi had been extremely troublesome to Italy’s government up to the end of his life but, dead, he became its totem. Francesco Crispi, who had been one of his lieutenants, announced, paraphrasing Carlyle, that ‘in certain periods of history … Providence causes an exceptional being to arise in the world … His marvellous exploits capture the imagination, and the masses regard him as superhuman.’ Garibaldi was such a being. ‘There was something divine in the life of this man.’

In his lifetime Garibaldi had proposed that he should be made a ‘dictator’. The word was a long-unused Latin title, which had yet to acquire the fell associations it now has, meaning one granted extraordinary powers for a limited period at a time of national crisis. On occasion, explained Garibaldi, he had wished for such powers as, in his time as a seaman, he had sometimes seized the ship’s helm, knowing he was the only man on board who could steer it through a storm. In the Italy he had helped bring into being there were many who, disenchanted with the corruption and incompetence of their parliamentarians, longed for just such a ‘dictator’. ‘Today Italy is like a ship in a mighty storm,’ wrote a political commentator in 1876. ‘Where is the pilot? I cannot see one.’

D’Annunzio read Darwin while he was still at school, and quickly grasped the salient point that evolution was a continuing process. It followed that, in any generation, there will be some individuals who are more highly evolved than others. Men (and women) were not, in d’Annunzio’s view, born equal. As Pleasure’s Andrea Sperelli passes from palace to palace he is depressed by the sight of workers in the streets. Some are injured or sick. Others are swaggering arm in arm, singing lewd songs. They are jarring reminders that, outside the warm, scented drawing rooms in which the god-like aristos indulge themselves, swarm the lesser kind of humans, most of them ‘bestial’.

D’Annunzio wrote to a composer friend: ‘Make much of yourself, for God’s sake! … Don’t be afraid of the fight: it is Darwin’s struggle for life [d’Annunzio’s English], the inevitable, inexorable struggle. Down with him who concedes defeat. Down with the humble!’ His friend should not be scandalised by these ‘unchristian maxims’, he goes on. Altruism and humility must be laid aside. ‘Listen to me … I have much experience of fighting furiously with my elbows.’ He is aggressive and competitive and proud of it. D’Annunzio had yet to read Nietzsche but already he was thinking along Nietzschean lines. ‘The reign of the nonentity is finished. The violent ones rise up.’

MARTYRDOM

WHEN I MARRIED MY HUSBAND,’ the Duchessina Maria said once, ‘I thought I was marrying poetry. I would have done better to buy, for three and a half lire, each of his volumes of verse.’

Their idyll was short-lived. Shortly after d’Annunzio brought his wife and baby back to Rome he began an affair with a fellow journalist, Olga Ossani, who wrote for the Capitan Fracassa under the name of Febea. Olga had, according to her new lover, the head of Praxiteles’ Hermes. D’Annunzio was pleased by her ‘strange bloodless face’ and her prematurely white hair. She was clever and unconventional: it was by no means common for a woman to write for the press. He described her at a press ball in the month their liaison began, stretched out on a sofa, laughing and exchanging witty ‘little impertinences’ with the gentlemen besieging her.

D’Annunzio was attracted to independent-minded women. He liked to try out his ideas on them, inserting into his love letters extended passages of prose which would reappear in his essays or novels. He wanted them to be discriminating readers, and to be capable of entertaining him. He had called Elda ‘child’ (which, given her age when they met, was almost literally descriptive), but he didn’t usually choose infantile partners. Olga Ossani, a few years older than d’Annunzio, was one of a line of mature, talented women who were to become his lovers.

They used to meet in a room rented for the purpose (a reckless extravagance for a man who could barely pay for his main home) which he decorated with Japanese screens and swathed with green silk. Or they would walk in the gardens of the sixteenth-century Villa Medici (then and now the French Academy of Rome). Henry James called the villa’s mannerist gardens ‘the most enchanting in Rome’. James loved the wooded hill which rises above the formal parterres. ‘The Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm … a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion of tender grey-green tones.’ One day, after a bout of love-making during which Ossani had covered him with ‘the bites of a vampire’, d’Annunzio left their room with his body ‘as spotted as a panther’. The following evening they met again in the Villa Medici’s ‘dusky forest’. ‘Sudden fancy. The moon was shining through the holm oaks. I hid. I took off my light summer suit. I called her, leaning against an oleander, posing as though I was tied to it. The moon bathed my naked body, and all the bruises were visible.’

A fashionable parlour game of the period was that of tableaux vivants: players dressed up (often very elaborately) and posed as historical or legendary characters. Other party guests were required to identify them. Olga guessed d’Annunzio’s conundrum at once. ‘“Saint Sebastian!” she cried.’ As she embraced him, he felt, with a delicious shudder, that invisible arrows were thrust through his wounds and fixed into the tree behind.

Soon after that night, d’Annunzio wrote to Olga, signing himself ‘St Sebastian’, and urging her to read Salammbô, Flaubert’s novel set in ancient Carthage, in which a physically splendid Libyan warrior allows himself to be tortured to death for love of a priestess, and in which scores of human victims are sacrificed to a pitiless god. ‘Your exquisite intellect will derive from this reading one of the most extended and profound of voluptuous pleasures,’ he told her.

The association of pain with pleasure was a commonplace of late nineteenth-century art and literature, and it often manifested itself in biblical stories or legends of the saints. Flaubert wrote about the self-inflicted tortures endured by Christian saints. ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean!’ wrote Swinburne, ‘the world has grown grey from Thy breath,’ but Swinburne’s poetry, like d’Annunzio’s, is replete with religious imagery. Oscar Wilde (like Flaubert before him) would soon be writing a jewelled and sadistic version of the story of Salome and John the Baptist. Biblical themes provided both an oriental setting and an antique grandeur, combining the two exoticisms of place and time, and the cult of the martyrs added to the mix the intoxicating stench of blood.

St Sebastian is a sexually suggestive martyr. Vasari tells us that a painting of him by Fra Bartolommeo had to be removed from its altar because it ‘sparked lascivious desire’ in women who saw it. Nearly three centuries later, Stendhal reported that the problem hadn’t gone away. Guido Reni’s paintings of St Sebastian (of which there are several) had been taken down because ‘pious women kept falling in love with them’.

Sebastian was a Roman officer at the beginning of the fourth century, condemned to death for his Christian beliefs. The Golden Legend, the thirteenth-century compendium of saints’ lives, relates that he was shot full of arrows and left for dead. He revived and returned to the imperial palace in the hope that his miraculous escape would convince the co-emperors, Diocletian and Maximianus, of Christ’s divine power. The emperors remained obdurate. Sebastian was condemned a second time. He was beaten to death and his body thrown into the main sewer.

In early representations he is a mature, bearded man, fatherly and fully dressed as befits an officer. But by the fourteenth century it had become conventional for painters to depict him as a beautiful youth stripped bare. In the 1370s, Giovanni del Biondo showed him hoisted on a stake, nude but for a loincloth, in a pose which invites comparison with Christ’s crucifixion, and so bristling with arrow shafts he looks – as an early iconographer remarked – ‘like a hedgehog’. Subsequent depictions are more graceful, more erotic. Piero della Francesca, Antonello da Messina, Mantegna, Guido Reni and numerous others have him standing or leaning, head falling back as though in an ecstasy of pain, his beautiful nearly naked body cruelly pierced.

Arrows are associated with Cupid. To be struck by them is to be inflamed by sexual passion. When d’Annunzio and Olga had their tryst in the Villa Medici gardens, Sigmund Freud had yet to begin studying nervous disorders, but d’Annunzio would not have needed psychoanalytic theory to point out to him that the vision of a physically perfect youth helplessly exposed to penetration by his tormentors’ shafts is a potent image of ravishment.

D’Annunzio shared his preoccupation with the saint with a number of his celebrated contemporaries: writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde (who assumed the name Sebastian after his release from prison) and the photographer Frederick Holland Day. These men, and subsequent Sebastianophiles Yukio Mishima (whose ideas and life story in many ways reflect d’Annunzio’s), film-maker Derek Jarman, and the photographers Pierre et Gilles, were all, at least to some extent, homosexual. Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering German sexologist and contemporary of d’Annunzio, identified pictures of St Sebastian as being among the images in which an ‘invert’ would take special delight. D’Annunzio’s Sebastian cult raises unavoidable questions about his sexual orientation.

That d’Annunzio was an eager lover of women is a copiously documented fact. Whether he also enjoyed sex with men is unknown. Some of his schoolboy letters could be interpreted as suggesting so, but it was not unusual in d’Annunzio’s lifetime for same-sex friends to write to each other as sentimentally as lovers. Here is his account of an adolescent friendship with another boy: ‘We smiled at each other, scarcely, scarcely glancing at each other from beneath the corners of our eyelids … and I have never forgotten that moment of our friendship; which glows for me with an inexplicable beauty.’ Writing to his elder patrons he was flirtatious and emotional. He told Cesare Fontana: ‘I have read and reread your lovely letter twenty times … What can I say in return for so many sweet, fond, expressions of affection? That I love you too? … Oh believe it, believe, dear friend.’

If d’Annunzio did have sexual contact with any of these boys or men, it would not be surprising that he didn’t publicly admit to it; few men at this time would have dared do so. But given the quantity of his private writings – letters, notebooks, jottings – to which we now have access, and given his compulsion to note everything, even the most intimate details of his love life, the absence of any recorded trace of a homosexual affair strongly suggests that he never had one. In his memoirs he explicitly distinguishes his sentimental ‘friendships’ with other boys, from the ‘love’ which he had yet – at the time recollected – to experience. In his late novel, Maybe Yes, Maybe No, he imagines a pair of male friends, comrades who undertake a sequence of masculine adventures together. Their comradeship is so strong precisely because it is ‘clean’. Like a great many other men of his generation, he idealised male companionship as an escape from the erotic, from the clinging, energy-sapping, over-ripeness of the women whom he bedded.

Whatever his orientation, though, there was something sexually ambiguous about d’Annunzio. The adolescent whose feminine prettiness and girlish voice had so enchanted Scarfoglio, matured into a small man with wide womanly hips who took a far greater interest in clothes and flowers and table-settings than was generally considered consonant with heterosexual masculinity.

People, especially women, whose gender identity was equivocal, interested him. One of the things that pleased him about Olga Ossani was her ‘fine androgynous head’ and his fictional Andrea Sperelli is writing a ‘Story of a Hermaphrodite’. In his fiction d’Annunzio was repeatedly to conjure up pairs or trios of women, sisters or close friends, between whom the hero must choose, or into whose sensuously intimate sorority he must insert himself. Maria Ferres and her hostess, both in love with Sperelli, remember with delight their voluptuous pleasure in brushing each other’s hair at boarding school and there are two overtly lesbian characters in Pleasure. One of them is a great lady with a ‘strong masculine voice’ whose black eyes, in the course of a lunch party in a princely residence, ‘all too often meet and mingle with the green eyes of the Princess’. The other is a demi-mondaine, heavily made-up but with her curly hair so short it looks like an astrakhan cap, and wearing a jacket and waistcoat of masculine cut, a monocle and a starched cravat. She smokes at the dinner table, and swallows oysters greedily. Sperelli is attracted by the suggestion of ‘vice, of depravity, of the monstrous’ in her manner and appearance.

Eleonora Duse, d’Annunzio’s lover for eight years, was rumoured to be bisexual. Romaine Brooks, with whom he had an affair during his years in France, was overtly lesbian. Ida Rubinstein, the actress and mime, and the eccentric millionairess Luisa Casati – with each of whom he had great friendships and minor affairs – both played theatrical variations on their gender identities, appearing naked in public, or cross-dressing. But when, a quarter of a century after that night in the Villa Medici gardens with Olga, d’Annunzio would write a play (with music by Debussy) of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, he wrote it expressly for Ida Rubinstein. Sebastian – victim-hero of so many gay male fantasies – would be played in d’Annunzio’s version by a woman.

Probably not an active homosexual, then, but certainly a sado-masochist. Exploring Rome and its treasures, d’Annunzio was particularly moved by Michelangelo’s Pietà. He elaborated a self-regarding fantasy in which he imagines his mother as Michelangelo’s Madonna and himself as the dead Christ, thus placing himself imaginatively in another tableau vivant in which he plays a beautiful, tortured nearly nude young man.

The cult of the dying youth was one of the themes d’Annunzio had found in the English Romantics. He alluded frequently to Keats, the tragic poet ‘half in love with easeful death’, whose last home on the Spanish Steps d’Annunzio walked past almost daily; and to Shelley, who mourned Keats so mellifluously in Adonais, before dying himself, aged thirty, drowned whilst out sailing. In 1883, d’Annunzio wrote his own Adonis, which concludes: ‘Thus died the youth, in a great mystery of Pain and Beauty as imagined by my Dream and Art.’ In Pleasure, Sperelli takes Maria Ferres to the English Cemetery in Rome. (Oscar Wilde, visiting Keats’s grave there, mused on the resemblances between Keats and St Sebastian, each of them ‘a Priest of Beauty, slain before his time’.) D’Annunzio’s fictional lovers are mournful: Maria takes off her black veil, wraps it around a bunch of white roses and leaves them on Shelley’s grave. ‘He was our poet.’

Six decades after Shelley’s death, Romanticism had ripened into the late Romantic melancholy of Tennyson and Baudelaire, and then over-ripened into decadence. The exquisite sadness clinging to the Romantic image of doomed youth had given way to a more feverish mood and a more knowing discourse. Posing for his sexual partner as a martyred saint, d’Annunzio was titillating himself with the image of a young man tortured and killed. Later he would have plentiful opportunities to see that image made reality. In 1915 he planned his arrival at Quarto at the head of a troop of young volunteers whose ‘blood was ready to be spilt’, human sacrifices like the slaves killed in the ‘holocaust’ Flaubert describes in Salammbô. Throughout the Great War, d’Annunzio was to refer over and over again, and in increasingly exalted tones, to dead soldiers as ‘martyrs’, whose deaths must be honoured by the sacrifice of further beautiful youths. What had begun as an erotic fantasy shaped by an aesthetic trend would become a motive for slaughter.

SICKNESS

ELVIRA FRATERNALI LEONI, whom d’Annunzio called Barbara or Barbarella, was a year or two older than him, golden-skinned with huge pale eyes. He made her acquaintance at a concert in April 1887, when he was just twenty-four and his wife was pregnant with his third child. By the end of the month he and Barbara were meeting almost daily, initially in the studio of one or other of d’Annunzio’s artist friends, and soon in a room he rented for the purpose.

‘Neither the strength of Hercules nor the beauty of Hippolytus has as much power to thrill a woman as fame does,’ wrote d’Annunzio. By now he enjoyed fame of a particularly seductive kind. He was the poet celebrated for his erotically transgressive verses, and the lover whose elopement had been scandalous. He was both a serious artist, acclaimed by his peers, and a known libertine. ‘How sweet it must be for the loving women to be able to say … I possess, body and soul, this mysterious being, the flight of whose chimeras makes women swoon with passion.’ In other words the poet was a star, and like any star he had his groupies. A male friend wrote that d’Annunzio was a ‘Siren. No one could resist him.’ By the time he met Barbara he had had at least one fleeting affair since parting from Olga. There were probably other, undocumented liaisons. But with Barbara he fell abjectly in love. When she left Rome briefly, he haunted the post office, desperate for her letters, and sat uncharacteristically silent in the Caffè Morteo, until, overcome, he left in tears.

Barbara was not one of the aristocrats about whom he wrote. Her parents were lower-middle class, devout Catholics who spoke with a pronounced regional accent. She had been married off when she was twenty to a Count Leoni, a Bolognese businessman whose title may have been spurious. Leoni treated her so brutally that she left him within weeks and returned to live with her parents, but from time to time he would reappear, demanding his marital rights. When Andrea Sperelli’s mistress tells him, after her marriage, that if he wishes to continue their affair he will have to share her sexual favours with her husband, he refuses, aghast. In real life, in this and several other instances, d’Annunzio was obliged to accept the situation. He even seems to have relished the fact that Barbara was bruised and shaken after one of Leoni’s visits.

Barbara was alluring: photographs show a chic young woman, with a full-lipped, painted mouth and eyes uplifted to reveal an arc of dazzling white beneath the irises (‘the most beautiful eyes in Rome’, according to one of d’Annunzio’s contemporary biographers). D’Annunzio, delighting as usual in gender confusion, praised her boyish figure and masculine little hats. She was well read and intelligent: it was she who recommended to her lover the newly translated works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She was a skilled pianist who had studied at the Milan Conservatory. Most fascinating of all, or so it seems from d’Annunzio’s many hundreds of letters to her, she was chronically ill. She was epileptic, and she suffered from some sort of gynaecological complaint. She may have contracted a sexually transmitted disease from her husband; she may have undergone a botched abortion; or perhaps she had some congenital malformation. Either way, she was ailing and often in pain.

All of this was very exciting for d’Annunzio. As a student he had neglected the lectures and classes he should have attended, but he had sat in on the course given by the noted physiologist Jacob Moleschott. His early stories are full of images of disease and wounding, described with unflinching exactitude. He would turn to Barbara to corroborate the details of the ailments of his heroines Elena Muti (in Pleasure), Giuliana Hermil (The Innocent) and Ippolita (The Triumph of Death), all of whom are, like their real-life prototype, especially alluring when their illness makes them temporarily untouchable. Brows damp with sweat, pale skin, cracked lips, clouded eyes are described as though they were the signs of sexual rapture. Illness as an aphrodisiac was a commonplace of Decadent literature, but it was one to which d’Annunzio responded with particular enthusiasm. In Pleasure he would give an intensely erotic account of a sickbed seduction. Barbara provided that thrill in real life. ‘Sick and tired like this you please me,’ he wrote to her when she was ill in bed. ‘Your beauty is spiritualised by illness … Your face takes on a profound, superhuman pallor … I think that when you are dead you will reach the supreme light of beauty.’

There were times, including the first few occasions they were alone together, when Barbara’s complaint made penetrative sexual intercourse impossible for her. No matter: the impediment to their love-making seems only to have heightened their pleasure. D’Annunzio wrote letters full of ecstatic gratitude, reminiscing about their protracted kisses, telling all over again how he licked and sucked and bit every inch of her body. He described how they wound themselves around each other, head to tail, on and under a big armchair in their rented room. ‘As I write in a fever (how I tremble!) I can still feel between my lips the little soft folds of your rose, which I sucked greedily as one sucks the juice from a fruit. Do you remember?’ (The rose for d’Annunzio, as for the mediaeval poets he had been reading, stood for the female genitals.) He recalls delicious hours in bed as he lay, eyes shut, wondering on which part of his body he would next feel her cool lips. And then there were the days when they no longer needed to hold back. His letters tell of a ‘savagely’ urgent coupling in a railway carriage (he would repeat the passage almost verbatim in The Triumph of Death).

His relationship with Barbara gave rise to his Roman Elegies, the first of his mature poem-cycles. Their title is borrowed from Goethe. Their philosophical underpinning is provided by Shelley and Schopenhauer. Their insistence on the correspondances between the material world and human emotion is inspired by the French Symbolists whom d’Annunzio had been reading, but the dazzling achievement of the elegies is d’Annunzio’s own.

By this time the poet was fully in control of his medium. He stretches his verse-form to its limits; he twists it to his emotional purpose, he exploits its rhythms to make effects now plangent, now joyful. In one of the poems Barbara is named. In all of them she is the ‘the one who was at my side’, and she was among his first readers. In the poems describing the early stages of their affair, happiness beats through the lines. One afternoon, in the gardens of the Villa d’Este with Barbara, d’Annunzio wrote two versions of an elegy in which he claims that the fountains, the roses, the trees, every leaf and stalk of the marvellous Tivoli gardens owed their beauty and their gushing life to her. Both manuscripts survive, one dated five o’clock and one six o’clock of the same June afternoon.

He couldn’t get enough of Barbara; he was racked whenever they were apart by his insatiable craving for her body. Several of his biographers have described her as the love of his life, but the word he uses most often in his letters to her is not ‘love’, but ‘desire’. Readers of Pleasure imagined the novel’s author to be a nonchalant seducer like Andrea Sperelli, who makes love to his friend’s mistress for no reason whatsoever, out of idleness and vanity. But d’Annunzio was not a careless Don Juan. His appetite for sex has been the occasion for much salacious merriment, in his lifetime and ever since, but it was often cruel, to others and to himself as well.

Centaurs, chimeras, satyrs and other hybrid beings recur in his imaginative work. Repeatedly, he describes himself as a faun: a feral half-human, smooth-skinned homo sapiens from the waist up, a hairy beast below. Fauns were fashionable. D’Annunzio had read Mallarmé’s famous poem, but for him the image expressed a fundamental conflict. Sometimes the self-description is gleeful, the conceit of a physically self-confident young man pleased to see himself as a mischievous animal. Sometimes it hints at self-loathing and shame.

A few weeks after he met Barbara, d’Annunzio was summoned to Pescara to help deal with a family crisis. His father, Francesco Paolo, had been running through money at a disastrous rate. D’Annunzio’s mother’s inheritance was all but gone. There was little chance of finding dowries for his sisters. Over the next six years, d’Annunzio was to find his own financial problems greatly aggravated by his father’s. He would be sending handouts to his mother for the rest of her life.

It is nearly always unwise to imagine one can deduce anything certain about a novelist’s life from a reading of his fiction, but d’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death (begun in 1889 and published in its final form five years later) is an exceptional case. It is a novel in which the author’s own love letters are quoted verbatim, and one which describes in exact detail the place in which it was first written. D’Annunzio told Romain Rolland that it was ‘not imaginary at all’. Its hero, Giorgio Aurispa, a sophisticated young city-dweller like d’Annunzio, revisits his family in the Abruzzi. His fictional father is a portrait of d’Annunzio’s real one. More painfully, it is also a kind of self-portrait: the author as seen in a hideously distorting glass.

When he went to see Francesco Paolo that summer of 1887, d’Annunzio himself was already spending way over his income. Aurispa’s father, like d’Annunzio’s, is plundering his wife and children’s home to pay his mistress’s expenses. D’Annunzio was renting a room for his meetings with Barbara with money desperately needed by his legitimate family. The fictional father is shifty, telling transparent fibs. D’Annunzio, still living with his wife but meeting Barbara nearly every day, must have been lying hour by hour. Aurispa is fastidious and physically refined. So was d’Annunzio, the neat little man who even as a schoolboy was already spending inordinate sums on laundry. Aurispa contemplates his father: ‘Fat, full-blooded and powerful, a hot breath of carnal vitality seemed to emanate from his whole person … His face bore the impress of a violent and harsh nature … All this inspired him [Aurispa] with a feeling akin to nausea … And I, I am the son of this man!’ Looking at his real-life father, d’Annunzio likewise recoiled as though from a hideous caricature of himself. Like the picture in Dorian Gray’s attic (Oscar Wilde’s novel would be published in the same year as the first instalment of The Triumph of Death), Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio was the image of his son’s worst faults. If the son was a faun – a pretty creature from an artificial pastoral – the father was the stinking goat that begot him.

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