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