The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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