The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
in which he imagines his mother as Michelangelo’s Madonna and himself as the dead Christ, thus placing himself imaginatively in another tableau vivant in which he plays a beautiful, tortured nearly nude young man.
The cult of the dying youth was one of the themes d’Annunzio had found in the English Romantics. He alluded frequently to Keats, the tragic poet ‘half in love with easeful death’, whose last home on the Spanish Steps d’Annunzio walked past almost daily; and to Shelley, who mourned Keats so mellifluously in Adonais, before dying himself, aged thirty, drowned whilst out sailing. In 1883, d’Annunzio wrote his own Adonis, which concludes: ‘Thus died the youth, in a great mystery of Pain and Beauty as imagined by my Dream and Art.’ In Pleasure, Sperelli takes Maria Ferres to the English Cemetery in Rome. (Oscar Wilde, visiting Keats’s grave there, mused on the resemblances between Keats and St Sebastian, each of them ‘a Priest of Beauty, slain before his time’.) D’Annunzio’s fictional lovers are mournful: Maria takes off her black veil, wraps it around a bunch of white roses and leaves them on Shelley’s grave. ‘He was our poet.’
Six decades after Shelley’s death, Romanticism had ripened into the late Romantic melancholy of Tennyson and Baudelaire, and then over-ripened into decadence. The exquisite sadness clinging to the Romantic image of doomed youth had given way to a more feverish mood and a more knowing discourse. Posing for his sexual partner as a martyred saint, d’Annunzio was titillating himself with the image of a young man tortured and killed. Later he would have plentiful opportunities to see that image made reality. In 1915 he planned his arrival at Quarto at the head of a troop of young volunteers whose ‘blood was ready to be spilt’, human sacrifices like the slaves killed in the ‘holocaust’ Flaubert describes in Salammbô. Throughout the Great War, d’Annunzio was to refer over and over again, and in increasingly exalted tones, to dead soldiers as ‘martyrs’, whose deaths must be honoured by the sacrifice of further beautiful youths. What had begun as an erotic fantasy shaped by an aesthetic trend would become a motive for slaughter.
ELVIRA FRATERNALI LEONI, whom d’Annunzio called Barbara or Barbarella, was a year or two older than him, golden-skinned with huge pale eyes. He made her acquaintance at a concert in April 1887, when he was just twenty-four and his wife was pregnant with his third child. By the end of the month he and Barbara were meeting almost daily, initially in the studio of one or other of d’Annunzio’s artist friends, and soon in a room he rented for the purpose.
‘Neither the strength of Hercules nor the beauty of Hippolytus has as much power to thrill a woman as fame does,’ wrote d’Annunzio. By now he enjoyed fame of a particularly seductive kind. He was the poet celebrated for his erotically transgressive verses, and the lover whose elopement had been scandalous. He was both a serious artist, acclaimed by his peers, and a known libertine. ‘How sweet it must be for the loving women to be able to say … I possess, body and soul, this mysterious being, the flight of whose chimeras makes women swoon with passion.’ In other words the poet was a star, and like any star he had his groupies. A male friend wrote that d’Annunzio was a ‘Siren. No one could resist him.’ By the time he met Barbara he had had at least one fleeting affair since parting from Olga. There were probably other, undocumented liaisons. But with Barbara he fell abjectly in love. When she left Rome briefly, he haunted the post office, desperate for her letters, and sat uncharacteristically silent in the Caffè Morteo, until, overcome, he left in tears.
Barbara was not one of the aristocrats about whom he wrote. Her parents were lower-middle class, devout Catholics who spoke with a pronounced regional accent. She had been married off when she was twenty to a Count Leoni, a Bolognese businessman whose title may have been spurious. Leoni treated her so brutally that she left him within weeks and returned to live with her parents, but from time to time he would reappear, demanding his marital rights. When Andrea Sperelli’s mistress tells him, after her marriage, that if he wishes to continue their affair he will have to share her sexual favours with her husband, he refuses, aghast. In real life, in this and several other instances, d’Annunzio was obliged to accept the situation. He even seems to have relished the fact that Barbara was bruised and shaken after one of Leoni’s visits.
Barbara was alluring: photographs show a chic young woman, with a full-lipped, painted mouth and eyes uplifted to reveal an arc of dazzling white beneath the irises (‘the most beautiful eyes in Rome’, according to one of d’Annunzio’s contemporary biographers). D’Annunzio, delighting as usual in gender confusion, praised her boyish figure and masculine little hats. She was well read and intelligent: it was she who recommended to her lover the newly translated works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She was a skilled pianist who had studied at the Milan Conservatory. Most fascinating of all, or so it seems from d’Annunzio’s many hundreds of letters to her, she was chronically ill. She was epileptic, and she suffered from some sort of gynaecological complaint. She may have contracted a sexually transmitted disease from her husband; she may have undergone a botched abortion; or perhaps she had some congenital malformation. Either way, she was ailing and often in pain.
All of this was very exciting for d’Annunzio. As a student he had neglected the lectures and classes he should have attended, but he had sat in on the course given by the noted physiologist Jacob Moleschott. His early stories are full of images of disease and wounding, described with unflinching exactitude. He would turn to Barbara to corroborate the details of the ailments of his heroines Elena Muti (in Pleasure), Giuliana Hermil (The Innocent) and Ippolita (The Triumph of Death), all of whom are, like their real-life prototype, especially alluring when their illness makes them temporarily untouchable. Brows damp with sweat, pale skin, cracked lips, clouded eyes are described as though they were the signs of sexual rapture. Illness as an aphrodisiac was a commonplace of Decadent literature, but it was one to which d’Annunzio responded with particular enthusiasm. In Pleasure he would give an intensely erotic account of a sickbed seduction. Barbara provided that thrill in real life. ‘Sick and tired like this you please me,’ he wrote to her when she was ill in bed. ‘Your beauty is spiritualised by illness … Your face takes on a profound, superhuman pallor … I think that when you are dead you will reach the supreme light of beauty.’
There were times, including the first few occasions they were alone together, when Barbara’s complaint made penetrative sexual intercourse impossible for her. No matter: the impediment to their love-making seems only to have heightened their pleasure. D’Annunzio wrote letters full of ecstatic gratitude, reminiscing about their protracted kisses, telling all over again how he licked and sucked and bit every inch of her body. He described how they wound themselves around each other, head to tail, on and under a big armchair in their rented room. ‘As I write in a fever (how I tremble!) I can still feel between my lips the little soft folds of your rose, which I sucked greedily as one sucks the juice from a fruit. Do you remember?’ (The rose for d’Annunzio, as for the mediaeval poets he had been reading, stood for the female genitals.) He recalls delicious hours in bed as he lay, eyes shut, wondering on which part of his body he would next feel her cool lips. And then there were the days when they no longer needed to hold back. His letters tell of a ‘savagely’ urgent coupling in a railway carriage (he would repeat the passage almost verbatim in The Triumph of Death).
His relationship with Barbara gave rise to his Roman Elegies, the first of his mature poem-cycles. Their title is borrowed from Goethe. Their philosophical underpinning is provided by Shelley and Schopenhauer. Their insistence on the correspondances between the material world and human emotion is inspired by the French Symbolists whom d’Annunzio had been reading, but the dazzling achievement of the elegies is d’Annunzio’s own.
By this time the poet was fully in control of his medium. He stretches his verse-form to its limits; he twists it to his emotional purpose, he exploits its rhythms to make effects now plangent, now joyful. In one of the poems Barbara is named. In all of them she is the ‘the one who was at my side’, and she was among his first readers. In the poems describing the early stages of their affair, happiness beats