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

ELITISM

      IN SEPTEMBER 1885, d’Annunzio quarrelled with a journalist, Carlo Magnico, and challenged him to a duel. At school d’Annunzio had been a prize-winning fencer. In Rome he had kept himself in training, but Magnico, who had the advantage of being considerably taller, bested him. D’Annunzio received a wound to the head, only a shallow cut, but it rattled him. (Pleasure’s hero comes close to being killed in a duel.) The writer and editor Mathilde Serao was present at the fight. She relates that the doctor, alarmed by the amount of blood d’Annunzio was losing, poured iron perchlorate over the wound. The bleeding was staunched, but the chemical did irreparable damage to d’Annunzio’s hair follicles – or so Serao, perhaps prompted by d’Annunzio, maintained. Soon afterwards he was bald.

      The story, which has been repeated by all d’Annunzio’s biographers, doesn’t stand up. Photographs of d’Annunzio show no noticeable scar on his bald pate. What they do show is his hair receding gradually and along the usual lines. He goes bald just as other men go bald. But d’Annunzio did not want to be as other men. He had been proud of his ‘forest of curls’. The beginning of the end of his life as an ‘ephebe’ (a favourite word of his) was painful, and required transformation. The banal misfortune of losing his hair was reimagined as a battle wound. No longer an androgynous sprite, he began to construct a new persona for himself, that of the virile hero.

      Many Italians were looking for such a hero, an autocratic Great Man. Italy’s parliamentary democracy was (as it has remained) desperately unstable: in its first forty years it saw thirty-five different administrations. In the 1860s, the first decade of its existence, it was stained by a scandal surrounding a manifestly corrupt deal over the tobacco monopoly. By 1873 one of its members described parliament as ‘a sordid pigsty, where the most honest men lose all sense of decency and shame’.

      The aristocrats who had previously had a monopoly of power despised parliament as a talking shop for the vulgar. Politicians on the left complained that its members represented no one but the wealthy. Elections were all too obviously rigged. Even where the ballot boxes were untampered with, few votes were truly free. Initially the electorate was tiny, and successive reform bills extending the franchise only served to shore up the forces of reaction. The lower down the social scale the voter, the more likely he was to vote docilely as his priest or his landlord instructed him. In the countryside the new democracy looked much like mediaeval feudalism. British historian Christopher Duggan sums up: ‘Bribery of all sorts was commonplace – money, food, offers of jobs, loans – and in many parts of the south men with a reputation for violence – bandits, or mafiosi – were widely deployed to intimidate voters. Election days were frequently turned into carnival occasions with landowners marching their supporters, as if they were a feudal army, off to the polling stations accompanied by musicians, priests and dignitaries.’ Those few ‘new men’ who attained a seat in parliament were perceived (largely correctly) as being as self-serving as their predecessors, and ill-educated to boot.

      In 1882, a few months after d’Annunzio’s arrival in Rome, Giuseppe Garibaldi died. Garibaldi had been extremely troublesome to Italy’s government up to the end of his life but, dead, he became its totem. Francesco Crispi, who had been one of his lieutenants, announced, paraphrasing Carlyle, that ‘in certain periods of history … Providence causes an exceptional being to arise in the world … His marvellous exploits capture the imagination, and the masses regard him as superhuman.’ Garibaldi was such a being. ‘There was something divine in the life of this man.’

      In his lifetime Garibaldi had proposed that he should be made a ‘dictator’. The word was a long-unused Latin title, which had yet to acquire the fell associations it now has, meaning one granted extraordinary powers for a limited period at a time of national crisis. On occasion, explained Garibaldi, he had wished for such powers as, in his time as a seaman, he had sometimes seized the ship’s helm, knowing he was the only man on board who could steer it through a storm. In the Italy he had helped bring into being there were many who, disenchanted with the corruption and incompetence of their parliamentarians, longed for just such a ‘dictator’. ‘Today Italy is like a ship in a mighty storm,’ wrote a political commentator in 1876. ‘Where is the pilot? I cannot see one.’

      D’Annunzio read Darwin while he was still at school, and quickly grasped the salient point that evolution was a continuing process. It followed that, in any generation, there will be some individuals who are more highly evolved than others. Men (and women) were not, in d’Annunzio’s view, born equal. As Pleasure’s Andrea Sperelli passes from palace to palace he is depressed by the sight of workers in the streets. Some are injured or sick. Others are swaggering arm in arm, singing lewd songs. They are jarring reminders that, outside the warm, scented drawing rooms in which the god-like aristos indulge themselves, swarm the lesser kind of humans, most of them ‘bestial’.

      D’Annunzio wrote to a composer friend: ‘Make much of yourself, for God’s sake! … Don’t be afraid of the fight: it is Darwin’s struggle for life [d’Annunzio’s English], the inevitable, inexorable struggle. Down with him who concedes defeat. Down with the humble!’ His friend should not be scandalised by these ‘unchristian maxims’, he goes on. Altruism and humility must be laid aside. ‘Listen to me … I have much experience of fighting furiously with my elbows.’ He is aggressive and competitive and proud of it. D’Annunzio had yet to read Nietzsche but already he was thinking along Nietzschean lines. ‘The reign of the nonentity is finished. The violent ones rise up.’