BOOKS
The Poet as Fascist
By DENIS MACK SMITH
IT is hard to conceive that D'Annunzio died only in 1938. He already belongs to such a remote world, to a fin de siècle which savours of Mun- chausen, Ruritania and the preposterous non- sense of Futurism. He was a man of many parts. Beginning .as an unspoilt boy from the wild Abruzzi, he travelled to Rome in 1881 to make his fortune and rose by way of the boudoir to become the first gossip columnist of modern times. This gave him an irresistible position of power and an entrée into society, after which he never looked back until Mussolini in 1924 created him Prince of Montenevoso. Everything that he crammed into these forty years was pic- turesque and picaresque. He became a famous eccentric, a notorious duellist and amorist. He conquered Fiume in 1919 and ruled it flamboy- antly as an acknowledged duce for fifteen months. He also convinced most of his biographers that he was a heroic soldier. And Osbert Sitwell thought him a far better writer than Byron.
This is the accepted legend. The reality is even more fascinating. The great lover of Eleonora Duse and a hundred others astonished Walter Starkie by turning out to be a bald dwarf, goggle- eyed, 'truly sinister in his grotesqueness like a tragic gargoyle,' and never in love except with himself. The supreme ;esthete was simultaneously a cheap vulgarian. The eccentric was a bore, the duce a pirate, the hero a cad, the politician an operatic buffo. The soldier could show great bravery on occasion, but was for preference a chocolate soldier and medal-hunter, fighting luxuriously from the Danieli hotel, pettily jealous of Marconi's promotion above him. Even the Italian patriot in 1920 formally declared war from Fiume against the Italian State.
D'Annunzio's literary work was his most serious activity and some of his lyrics have sur- vived, but the celebrated novelist and dramatist is now unreadable. He tried to emulate a Wag- nerian orchestra in his writing, and this helps to explain why the sonorous rhetoric fails in English translation. Overloaded with endless metaphors and similes, his baroque prose manages to convey a minimum of meaning in a maximum of space, and both the sentiments and situations of his novels now sound false. Just as he carefully selected his amours in order to arouse the utmost jealousy and shock, so too witethe characters in his books : none of them are sympathetic or in any sense admirable, and most are stridently unbalanced. They are usually de- liberate projections of his own sensualism and brutality. Like himself they are phrase-makers, exhibitionists who always seem to be striking some artificial pose.
D'Annunzio was eventually to win fame by exploiting the exaggerated nationalism of Italy, but already before then he had achieved notoriety as an immoralist and libertine. He had led the crusade against Victorianism, preaching the con- venient doctrine that all should be 'forgiven to the creative artist, who was a superman; above ordinary mortals as he was above paying his debts. His life had to be spent in search of novel sensations, the more luxurious and sensational the better. As a precocious voluptuary of sixteen, D'Annunzio had invoked Breasts of Grecian concubines to pass the night. 1 crave long orgies and strange unknown forms of love.
But after he had exhausted these unknown dis- sipations, his muse still remained extravagant and insatiable, demanding yet greater passion, a more scandalous private life, a still more violent assault on convention. Through his lush, crepus- cular imagery he allowed people to discern half- concealed visions of unmentionable splendour and excitement. Again and again he came up with a successful formula, in this way reflecting but also moulding Italian taste. 'I think it should please the public,' he wrote of II libro delle vergini, for 'its scenes alternate between the church and the brothel, between the odour of incense and the stink of decay.' In this perpetual search after sensationalism he developed a fixa- tion on blood, lust, incest and murder. He came to love mutilations on the stage and the gouging of eyes. 'As the arrows penetrate his body, the Saint cries "More! More!" and the archers bend their bows in a kind of savage desperation.' We are not surprised to discover that D'Annunzio used to froth at the mouth over his more excited passages.
Probably it would need an endocrinologist to explain some of his less amiable eccentricities. Mr. Rhodes has resisted the temptation to moralise or psychologise in his new biography.* But he gives a striking picture of the capering dandy about town, with his hundred suits, drenched in scent (a bottle of 'Borgia' lasted him less than a week). A memorable scene is the poet's rapturous delight in 1915 as he watched the burning of Rheims cathedral while the bishop vainly tried to put out the flames. Mr. Rhodes brings out the panache in all this, though Ojetti, who was present at Rheims, is clear that there were no flames, not even a breath of smoke. D'Annunzio's attitudinising thus becomes infec- tious if taken too seriously. The poetic superman was a born liar, and there is no need, for in- stance, to accept his heroic explanation of his baldness, nor his claim to have amazed Tos- canini by his musical ability. The theatrical pose mattered far more to D'Annunzio than did the truth, and his statements about himself were de- signed to impress rather than to elucidate. Like- wise his actions were often governed just by his desire to give offence or provoke envy. In public life his flirtation with Socialism was simply another rhetorical flourish designed to irritate the bourgeois. With an exuberant gesture, the 'member for beauty' crossed from the extreme right of Parliament to the extreme left at a moment well timed for dramatic effect and the maximum of publicity.
In this way the single-minded pursuit of self-
* THE POET AS SUPERMAN: A LIFE OF GABRIELE IYANNUNZIO. By Anthony Rhodes. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 25s.)
indulgence led D'Annunzio into politics. Love, literature, political excitement, all was grist to the mill of his colossal vanity. He needed to conquer, to possess, to achieve power and notoriety. The same blood lust of his St. Sebastien was trans- ferred to real life in the unbalanced imperialism after 1911 which made him such a maleficent influence in Italian life. He insisted that the Slays had to be slaves, while Italians might again be- come i padroni del niondo, and that war was something beautiful and cleansing. In 1915 the Italian Government seems to have rushed this demagogue back from France whither he had fled his creditors, because Salandra urgently, needed to work up popular frenzy in order to override Parliament and force Italy into a disastrous war. War was Salandra's one hope of retaining power. and he cared little that this cynical move signified the downfall of parliamentary government. D'Annunzio for his, part never recovered his equipoise after the immense applause which greeted his incendiary speeches in May, 1915. Corrupted by admiration he went on to proclaim a crusade against 'the stinking cesspool' of Parlia- ment, and hard-won Italian liberties thus became the incidental victim of his magniloquent searching after excitement and effect. Drunk with rhetorical notions about the old Roman Empire, he treated Italians as he had treated his mistresses, exploit- ing them to the top of his bent, until he became bored. The fatal crack in national morale after 1918 was largely the result of his bad example.
Mr. Rhodes is relatively indulgent to the Fiume episode and denies that D'Annunzio was a forerunner of Mussolini. But the concordia discors between these two men was surely more involved and consequential than he suggests. He does not answer the interesting question of who paid for D'Annunzio to go on living so far above his income. Nor does he properly decide whether officialdom connived at the 'march on Fiume.' Nor has he been able to explain D'Annunzio's mysterious fall from a window just before Mussolini's 'march on Rome.' Mussolini and D'Annunzio were privately jealous of each other in 1919-22, but they also admired each other more perhaps than they admired any other Italian. Mussolini lacked D'Annunzio's picturesque imagination, and on his own later confession he needed the other's example and the free dress rehearsal of Fiume for his own coup d'etat. Much of the claptrap and choreography of Fascism was to be lifted straight from D'Annunzio, and some distinguished Italians have concluded that D'Annunzio was playing as deep a game and had more to answer for in these early decisive years.
This new biography includes most of the plums, but it is not an unqualified success. Mr. Rhodes has made his subject a tragi-comedy, but the impressicin remains that the reality was a little more comic and far more tragic than he allows. His book is also littered with unforgivable errors of simple fact, sometimes three or four to a page. Prime Ministers, Popes, Kings and other public figures are indiscriminately muddled. Dates are wrong by the dozen, and the sequence of events is often turned quite upside down. It is easy enough to make slips, but here their frequency takes one's breath away. The Banca Romana scandals are incidentally likened to 'a sort of Italian Stravinsky affair.' And no one who talks of hoisting a battleship up to the Vittoriale can have visited the place, nor can anyone who thinks that Italy under Umberto was gradually becom- ing pacific, liberal and parliamentary know even the basic history of the period. In particular, those who value relevance and accuracy would be advised to skip the long preface about Dant* and Machiavelli.
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