Addled egghead
Isabel Quigly
D'Annunzio Philippe Jullian. Translated by Stephen Hardman (Pall Mall 0.86) i; The Latin habit of naming streets after real people always seems an appalling source of potential embarrassment, since poets and politicians date and nowhere more than in the Latin countries. After the last war, redfaced city fathers all over Italy were renaming streets and piazzas named after Gabriele d'Annunzio with respectable abstractions like Liberty and the Republic and the Resistance. Embarrassment (as always after an ideological cataclysm) was fierce. In a sense it still is, where d'Annunzio is concerned: other manifestations of his age can be more easily dismissed but he hangs about, a perky ghost that won't be laid because he embodies so much that is recognisable in the Italian character, because he wasn't an aberration, something obviously outside the normal course of (Italian) nature, but an intensification of a particular side of it, a kind of Scarfe cartoon of it, hideously recognisable and therefore shaming. There are frosty Italians whose manner and whole way of life seem dedicated to repudiating this dannunzian image: the rhetoric, the poses, the tasteless clutter (in art as in living), the whole outsize enormity of the man Forster called, with comical inadequacy, a "cad ". Nor is he even outsize, in re-rosnert. mnet nf the time he seems ludicrous, the maggoty underside of his age rather than the glamorous creature it took 'him for: of fascism and nationalism, of the whole cult of the superman with his gospel of "Desire, Voluptuousness, Pride and Instinct."
He never, I think, had much of a vogue here, even in his heyday. In spite of some translations by Arthur Symons (and some pretty terrible ones by others) even the literary English tend to think of him as a marginal figure out of this or that memoir (one of Isadore Duncan's lovers, say) rather than as a writer, thinker or political figure to be taken seriously, or even considered in the context of the decadents or of fascism. As a great lover he strikes one, from this distance and the photographs, as hilarious, but then beauty and sexual attraction don't necessarily overlap. Still, when one hears from a contPmnnrarv of " his smallnesq. the shoulders less broad than the haunches, the minute feet, a feeling of fat arms and legs which was almost bisexual . . . protruding eves, without eyelashes or eyebrows (with) the bluish-green of soapy water" and of "teeth of three colours, white, yellow and black ", it is hard to credit that, as another woman put it at the time: "He was all the rage. The woman who had not slept with him became a laughing stock." Then there was Harold Nicolson's "I could not have believed that anything not an egg could have looked so like an egg as d'Annunzio's head ". This egelike condition was achieved with a dramatic suddenness and absurdity typical of the man. after a duel in which his opponent, so shortsighted he had no idea what he was up to. slashed at d'Annunzio's head and drew torrents of blood, whereupon a panicstricken doctor poured some staunching liouid over it, doing something to the hair follicles but nothing, it seems, to d'Annunzio's self-esteem.
Ah well: he couldn't help his looks and poets don't often look poetical. In spite of them his effect on women was electric, though some of the electricity was no doubt eenerated by comoetition, envy and oneupmanship among his conouests. But is he, at this distance, worth considering at all except as a piece of period kitsch left over from the belle epooue to embarrass the fascists? When he died in 1938, "a decrepit Priapus," as M. Jullian calls him, he was still officially one of them, therefore treated as soldier, airman, politician and man of action rather than as sensualist, philosopher, dreamer or poet. Mussolini led the mourners at his funeral and the body lay in state on the prow of the cruiser Puglia, which d'Annunzio had had hauled from Lake Garda a thousand feet up to his garden. He left a vast house full of creepy clutter, every inch covered with something, every something with something else; as in his writing he couldn't stop adding and qualifying and colouring (and finally smudging his effects with over-emphasis), so in his house he couldn't stop putting knobs on everything and mottoes wherever a space was left.
His end was pathetic, of course: the ladykiller who had once bartered with two rich women over which should give him thirty thousand francs a year reduced to paying prostitutes; the man who had occupied Fiume with his own troops and lived for months like some small-town Alexander knowing that militarily he no longer existed and even politically he no longer counted; the father who had cared little for his children and know nothing of the atmosphere of a home, only the domesticated excesses of a brothel; the writer whose talent had been wasted; above all the man whose delusions were so vast, so spongey, so allenvel-ning. that th-v made it irnnossible for him to see that he had no human relationships based on respect, no real friendships, only servants and mistresses and the "network of procuresses and policemen" who scoured the villages for more and more women. Yes, the situation was pathetic, but he, curiously enough, was not; perhaps It is a limitation of this biography that he doesn't seem so, that he never arouses a glimmer of pity; or perhaps it is just that the posing never stopped and that et last he was buried beyond any kind of humanity in his own falseness, his own kitsch.
Philippe Jullian's attitude to him is ambivalent. He sees d'Annunzio's life as a mixture of the bizarre and the sublime, he lingers over its humiliations, yet he seems carried away, at the end, to a dannunzian appraisal of his hero, referring to his "mighty corpse" and suggesting that "the glory of d'Annunzio is beginning to shine again for all who are bored by the mediocre democracy and by the conformism of prosperity ". Glory? That the antidote to our modern ills in an outlook as poisonous as d'Annunzio's is a terrifying thought, because we haven't got away from his evil (which was basically the cult of violence), we have merely altered its image. Today, his superman of ferocious sensuality may be called Manson and be dirty and drugged and hairy and to many of us unappealing; but the poison is similar. None of this seems to cross M. Julliari's mind, which is besotted with "the great ladies of Italy (who) still live like the poet's heroines, in defiance of the wave of vulgarity which has been raised by the prosperity of the multitude ". Vulgarity? A bigger vulgarjan than d'Annunzio it would be hard to find if you .combed the multitude (from which anyway, social climber that he was, he came). And so on. and so on: on its outlook, you keep harking your critical shins. There is a kind of vagueness about it, too, and a number of mistakes and slips so obvious that you wonder about the accuracy of the rest of it. Perhaps it is taking d'Annunzio too seriously to say that it trivialises him; certainly it fails to consider most of the questions his outlook raises. To me, there is no " glory " about his memory but there is more to his life (more that is sinister, as well as interesting) than this catalogue of love affairs suggests.
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