The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
believed he was working to create a new and better world order, a ‘politics of poetry’. So did observers from every point on the political spectrum, from the conservative nationalists who eagerly volunteered to join his Legion, to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who sent him a pot of caviar and called him the ‘only revolutionary in Europe’. His followers saw Fiume as a place where life could begin afresh – rinsed clean of all impurities, freer and more beautiful than ever before. But the culture created there rapidly took on a character which, seen in retrospect, is hideous. Black uniforms decorated with lightning flashes which made malign supermen of their wearers; military spectacles staged as though they were sacred rites; a cult of youth which degenerated into licensed delinquency; the bullying of ethnic minorities; the never-ending sequence of processions and festivals designed to glorify an adored leader: all of these phenomena are now recognisable as typical of the politics, not of poetry but of brute power. Later, Benito Mussolini encouraged the writing of a biography of d’Annunzio entitled The John the Baptist of Fascism. D’Annunzio, who saw the fascist leader as a vulgar imitator of himself, was not happy with the suggestion that he was a mere harbinger, preparing the way for Mussolini’s Messiah. But though d’Annunzio was not a fascist, fascism was d’Annunzian. The black shirts, the straight-armed salute, the songs and war cries, the glorification of virility and youth and patria and blood sacrifice, were all present in Fiume three years before Mussolini’s March on Rome.
A great deal has been written about the economic, political and military circumstances in which fascism and its associated political creeds flourished. D’Annunzio’s story provides a lens through which to examine those movements from another angle, to identify their cultural antecedents, and the psychological and emotional needs to which they pandered. To watch d’Annunzio’s trajectory from neo-Romantic young poet to instigator of a radical right-wing revolt against democratic authority is to recognise that fascism was not the freakish product of an exceptional historical moment, but something which grew organically out of long-established trends in European intellectual and social life.
Some of those trends were apparently unexceptionable. D’Annunzio was a man of broad and deep culture, thoughtful, widely read in the classics and in modern literature. He spoke for Beauty, for Life, for Love, for the Imagination (his capitals) – all of which sound like good things. Yet he helped to drag Italy into an unnecessary war, not because he believed it would bring any advantage but because he craved cataclysmic violence. His adventure in Fiume fatally destabilised Italy’s democracy, and opened the way for all the bombast and thuggery of fascism. He prided himself on his gift for ‘attention’, for fully experiencing and celebrating life’s abundance. ‘I am like the fisherman who walks barefoot over a beach uncovered at ebb tide, and who stoops, again and again, to identify and gather up whatever he feels moving under the soles of his feet.’ He posed as a new St Francis, lover of all living things. Yet his wartime rants are, in every sense, hateful. Italy’s enemies are filthy. He ascribes grotesque crimes to them. He calls out for their blood.
‘His gift for pleasing is diabolical,’ wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Even people who heartily disapproved of d’Annunzio found him irresistible. Similarly, reprehensible though the Europe-wide fascist movements were (and are), history demonstrates the potency of their glamour. To guard against their recurrence we need not just to be aware of their viciousness, but also to understand their power to seduce. D’Annunzio was never as supportive of fascism as Mussolini liked to make out. He jeered at the future Duce as a cowardly windbag. He despised Hitler too. But it is certainly true that his occupation of Fiume drastically undermined the authority of Italy’s democratic government, and so indirectly enabled Mussolini’s seizure of power three years later; that both Mussolini and Hitler learned a great deal from d’Annunzio; and that an account of d’Annunzio’s life and thought amounts to a history of the cultural elements that eventually came together, in the two decades following d’Annunzio’s annexation of his City of the Holocaust, to ignite a greater and more terrible holocaust than any he had ever envisaged.
The poet was fifty-six years old when he set out for Fiume, as notorious for his debts and duels and scandalous love affairs as he was celebrated for his wartime exploits and his literary gifts. A plane crash had left him blind in one eye, and, as he embarked on his great adventure, he was so weakened by an alarmingly high temperature that he could barely stand (something not to be taken lightly during a period when some fifty million people died of Spanish flu).
Small, bald, with narrow sloping shoulders and, according to his devoted secretary, ‘terrible teeth’, he was unimpressive to look at, but the long tally of his lovers included the ethereally lovely Eleonora Duse, one of the two greatest actresses in Europe (Sarah Bernhardt was her only rival), and he could manipulate a crowd as easily as he could entice a woman.
Poets nowadays are of interest only to a minority. But d’Annunzio was a poet, novelist and playwright at a time when a writer could attract a mass following, and deploy significant political influence. On the opening night of his play Più Che l’Amore (More Than Love) there were calls for his arrest. After the premiere of La Nave (The Ship) the audience spilled out of the theatre and processed through the streets of Rome intoning a line from the play, a call to arms. When he gave readings, agents of foreign powers attended, fearful of his influence. When he wrote polemical poems, Italy’s leading newspaper cleared the front page and published them in full.
Italy was a new nation. Its southern half (the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) was annexed to the northern kingdom of Piedmont two and a half years before d’Annunzio’s birth. He was seven years old in 1870 when the French withdrew from Rome and the new country was complete. The heroes of the Risorgimento had made Italy. Now someone had to ‘make Italians’ (the phrase recurs in the political rhetoric of the period). D’Annunzio, after spending much of his twenties writing erotic lyrics in archaic verse-forms and Frenchified fiction, accepted the task. Goethe in Germany and Pushkin in Russia had been celebrated, not just as authors of fine literature, but as the creators of a new national culture. So would d’Annunzio be. ‘The voice of my race speaks through me,’ he claimed.
He was much admired by his peers. In his twenties he was one of the acknowledged leaders of the aesthetes. As he matured he wrote works which won admiration not only from his own generation, but also from his younger contemporaries. James Joyce called d’Annunzio the only European writer after Flaubert (and before Joyce himself) to carry the novel into new territory, and ranked him with Kipling and Tolstoy as the three ‘most naturally talented writers’ to appear in the nineteenth century. Proust declared himself ‘ravi’ by one of his novels. Henry James praised the ‘extraordinary range and fineness’ of his artistic intelligence.
But though he was an author first and foremost, d’Annunzio was never solely a man of letters. He wanted his words to spark uprisings and set nations ablaze. His most famous wartime exploits were those occasions when he flew over Trieste or Vienna, dropping not bombs (although he dropped those too), but pamphlets. For d’Annunzio, writing was a martial art.
He was a brilliant self-publicist. He associated himself with Garibaldi, the romantic hero of the Risorgimento, whose image – poncho, red shirt, the dash of the guerrilla fighter combined with the integrity of a secular saint – was as important to the cause of Italian unity as his military prowess. D’Annunzio borrowed the lustre of figures from the past: he also identified himself with the dynamism of the future. He had himself photographed alongside torpedo boats and aeroplanes and motor cars – sleek, trim and modern from his gleaming bald pate to the toes of his patent-leather boots. Looking back, in his years of retirement, he saw exactly what had been his greatest strength as a politician. ‘I knew how to give my action the lasting power of the symbol.’ The hero of his first novel learns that: ‘One must make one’s life as one makes a work of art.’ D’Annunzio himself worked ceaselessly on the marvellous artefact that was his own existence.
He made canny use of the brand new mass media. As a young man he was a prolific hack, pouring out reviews and gossip and fashion notes and quasi-autobiographical sketches. His more earnest-minded friends thought he was debasing himself, but he wrote that the seed of an idea, sown in a journal, would germinate and bear fruit in the public consciousness more quickly and surely than one planted in a book. He describes one of his