The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

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 (#ulink_ed7a96e2-b165-58bb-8cbc-b550b2e42f41)

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 (#ulink_c896b077-3d30-5a62-be7f-31a05132bc5f)

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.’