The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

They were carrying several bombs in cylinders fitted to the plane’s undercarriage. It became evident that one of them was jammed. D’Annunzio struggled to free it. ‘It’s impossible to pull it up.’ ‘Have we got any string?’

Miraglia gave him anxious directions: ‘You absolutely must not turn the screw … See if you can push it so it falls out, but don’t twist it.’ It might explode at any moment. Even if it didn’t, unless they could free it first it would almost certainly blow up when they touched down. ‘When we’re landing I’ll hold onto it with both hands,’ d’Annunzio told Miraglia. There have been those who sneered at d’Annunzio’s war record, but the dangers he ran were real, and so was the courage with which he met them.

They came in sight of Trieste, the white stone city luminous in the August sun against the backdrop of the Carso, the rocky wilderness which would be, for the next three years and more, a battlefield. They saw puffs of smoke way beneath them, signs that they were under fire. Soon they could hear the gunfire, and feel the hits (on their return they would find a bullet embedded in the fuselage a few inches from d’Annunzio’s elbow). They continued their descent. They saw the enemy submarines in the marina and dropped bombs on them. As they came in low, d’Annunzio hurled down his little bags, and watched the ribbons and pennants attached to them flutter down, some uselessly into the sea, others into Trieste’s grand waterfront piazza, with its palatial banks and customs houses. His purpose in dropping his pamphlets was not just to convey a message: it was also to show that where he had sent down words, he could have sent down explosives. He was there to encourage the pro-Italian population, but also to terrorise their Austrian rulers. Like most of his wartime exploits, this first flight was an attack not so much on enemy forces, as on enemy morale.

It was as they turned back that he and Miraglia discovered the malfunctioning bomb. D’Annunzio struggled awkwardly with it in his tiny cockpit, deafened by the engine noise, careful not to make any abrupt movement for fear of unbalancing their fragile conveyance. He had often longed for an heroic death: now he was bothered by the idea that the plane – coming down only to bounce up as it exploded – would look not tragic but ridiculous. Somehow (it is a measure of his insouciance that we don’t know how) he managed to deal with the problem – perhaps, as his and Miraglia’s notes suggest, with the help of a rag and d’Annunzio’s belt. They came safely back to earth.

From that moment onward, according to Damerini, the Venetian people engulfed d’Annunzio in ‘a wave of anxious affection’. He had been a privileged visitor in aristocratic circles. Now he became, in Venice as he already was in Rome, the people’s idol. His admirers mobbed him. They hung around outside the Danieli hoping to catch a glimpse of him. When he went out on foot crowds followed him along the Riva degli Schiavoni. When he came back by gondola or in one of the recently introduced motorboats they pressed so thickly around the landing stage he could scarcely make his way ashore.

He had embarked on his new life as national hero, and the character in which he had done so was both archaic and up to date. In preferring the weapons of propaganda to those of material destruction he was displaying a quintessentially modern sophistication. He was a new-fangled PR man, but he was also a hero from the age of chivalry, one who had exchanged his charger for an aeroplane. As the British Prime Minister Lloyd George put it, ‘the pilots are the Knighthood of the Air, without fear and without reproach. Every aeroplane fight is a romance, every record an epic.’ In a war which was becoming, on its every front, more brutal and more gruesome, d’Annunzio with his beribboned leaflets, skyborn and dancing invulnerable through the enemy anti-aircraft fire, seemed gallant, joyous and debonair.

He returned to the Danieli. We do not know whether the Countess Morosini telephoned that evening as promised, but we do know that the next day she sent d’Annunzio a little silver box engraved with her name and the date of his exploit, and that he thanked her, saying that he would carry it always because the day it commemorated was more precious to him ‘than all my odes’. After having been for decades a self-described genius and one of the most famous people in Europe, he had begun what felt like a second, and more important existence. ‘All the past flows together towards all the future,’ he wrote. ‘All my life I have waited for this hour.’

It is time to turn back from that point, and to map some of the streams flowing through his life and mind towards it, to see how far back they rise, how variously muddy or silvery fresh their sources are, to observe how they join and braid together and diverge again before merging at last, and to trace how they eventually debouch into a sea of blood.

II

STREAMS

WORSHIP

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO – Gabriel of the Annunciation. Everything about his own name was delightful to the poet: the aristocratic particle, the scriptural associations, the way it marked him out as superhuman. He was an archangel, bringing revelations to the wondering world. The name (so felicitous that some of his contemporaries insisted he must have made it up) was his real one, or at least a family name to which he was genuinely entitled. His father had been born Francesco Paolo Rapagnetta, but when Francesco’s childless uncle d’Annunzio made him his heir he changed his surname by deed poll. His son took the prompt. On the back of the winged dining chair d’Annunzio used during his period of greatest fame and fortune were carved the words: ‘The Angel of the Lord is with us.’

D’Annunzio was not a pious man but he revelled in the trappings of Christian worship. He surrounded himself with lecterns and prayer stools and censers and alabaster stoups originally carved to hold holy water. His addresses to his political supporters were structured, like the liturgy, as a sequence of calls and responses. To him soldiers were martyrs and battered weapons were relics. He was an arch-sensualist, but he was also an ascetic. After visiting Assisi he discovered an affinity between himself and St Francis, and liked to dress in a friar’s habit (the penitential roughness of the garment mitigated by the fact he wore it over a shift of mauve silk).

In Fiume he staged pseudo-sacred ceremonies in the cathedral of St Vito, and encouraged a cult of his own personality so fervid that the Bishop of Fiume noted furiously that his flock were forsaking Christ for this modern Orpheus. His last years were devoted to the conversion of his house above Lake Garda into a self-glorifying shrine. He revered no one but himself, but reverence fascinated him. If a deity’s defining act is that of creation, then d’Annunzio – whose creativity was so exuberant that nothing but physical exhaustion ever slowed his pen – was god-like. He thought so. The hero of his novel Forse che sì, Forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No), crash-lands his plane on a beach in Sardinia and, alone in a wild landscape, reflects: ‘There is no God if it is not I.’

Faith shaped the culture into which he was born: faith in the Christian God and his saints; faith in magic. As an adult, d’Annunzio would embrace modernity and all its racket, but he grew up in a world where the sounds were made by sheep and cattle, creaking carts and rustling straw. The Abruzzi was, in the 1860s, and to an extent remains, a place apart. Blocked off by the Apennines from the great cities of Italy’s western seaboard, it is bounded by bald mountains, where bears and wolves still live, and in whose foothills walled towns perch on crags fluted like the underside of mushrooms. From there the terrain slopes gradually to the Adriatic, across which Abruzzese mariners have, for centuries, traded with their counterparts on the eastern, Dalmatian shore. The land is edged by low cliffs or, near Pescara, the region’s capital and d’Annunzio’s home town, by flat sand and pine woods (most of them now felled to make way for beachside hotels). Returning in middle age, d’Annunzio was moved to be back among the stone walls, the low hills scattered with flowering trees. ‘A painted cart passes along the shore, drawn by a pair of white oxen. The sandy soil sloping down to the sea is ploughed almost to where the waves break. Rows of beans. Vines contorted like arthritic old hands. A blackened stack of straw. Parsimony, diligence … The mountain rearing grand above.’

All of this (especially the parsimony) d’Annunzio would put firmly behind him. But though he left the Abruzzi in fact, in his fiction and memoirs it was ever-present. He liked to hear its dialect. In middle age, at the height of his fame, he hired a fellow Abruzzese to be the steward of his household. He sought out its landscapes. At Marina di Pisa during his years in Tuscany with Duse, and at Arcachon on France’s Atlantic coast during his ‘exile’, he chose to live by pine-fringed beaches resembling the Adriatic coastline he had known as a boy. He wrote about the place repeatedly. And the aspect of it which charged his imagination most potently was the religious life of its inhabitants, a phenomenon he found both repugnant and fascinating.

In remote villages the church was not only a place of worship, it was the community’s totem, on whose decoration much hard work and devotion and the peasants’ meagre savings were lavished. Troops of pilgrims passed along the country paths ‘in profile as in the embroideries of our old bedspreads’. During d’Annunzio’s childhood an itinerant priest, known to his followers as the Messiah, wandered the region, wearing blue tunic, red cloak and wooden clogs, and calling on the people to leave their crops and herds and follow him. Hundreds did so, singing and begging their way from town to town. ‘A wind of fanaticism’, wrote d’Annunzio later, ‘ran through the land from one end to the other.’

In the Abruzzi, houses are modest and great churches scarce. The most remarkable monuments in the region are the high mountain hermitages – caves or crevasses in which solitary mystics lived a thousand or more years ago and around which their devotees have, over the centuries, constructed precarious shrines. In defining the kind of stock he came from d’Annunzio borrowed their image. ‘I come from an ancient breed,’ he wrote. ‘My ancestors were anchorites in the Maiella … They flagellated themselves till the blood came … They throttled wolves; they stripped eagles of their feathers, and they scratched their seals on giant rocks with the nail Helen took from the Cross.’ Lacking – to his enduring chagrin – the kind of aristocratic antecedents he gave his fictional heroes, he awarded himself membership of another kind of elite, that of the ferociously holy.

D’Annunzio’s father, Francesco Paolo, was far from being an anchorite. He was a petty landowner and wine merchant. During Gabriele’s childhood he was the Mayor of Pescara, a prominent man in a provincial town. In d’Annunzio’s first stories, set in or around Pescara, he conjures up a place where the bustle of port and barracks and market are contrasted with the frustration of women confined to small, dark rooms, who watch the life of the street through chinked shutters or small high windows. The church bell clangs out the hours. Priests pass in the streets carrying extreme unction to the dying. Young people, strictly segregated as a rule, furtively press up against each other in the merciful darkness when the church lamps are extinguished in Holy Week to mark Christ’s passion. Funerals, the bier followed by long lines of hooded mourners, their faces covered all but a slit for the eyes, or processions of girls in sacrificial white on the way to their first communion, provide the town’s main spectacles.

The sacred is all-pervasive. In the bedroom Gabriele shared with his brother, the main item of furniture, other than the beds, was a prayer stool. On the wall hung lithographs of religious paintings by Titian and Raphael. In one of d’Annunzio’s novels, set in the Abruzzi, a woman lightly remarks that before she and her lover can enjoy an afternoon in bed they will have to hang veils over the numerous saints’ pictures on the walls. God and his representatives were all around the boy d’Annunzio, and they were not a comfort so much as a form of surveillance.

Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio was a man of the flesh – self-indulgent and corpulent. In later life d’Annunzio was repelled by him (not least because he saw his father’s disorderly love life and compulsive overspending as a horrible caricature of his own); but in childhood he yearned to please him. Francesco Paolo’s extravagance could seem grand. During carnival he would stand on his balcony and, as custom demanded, toss handfuls of gold and silver coins down to the revellers in the street, deeply impressing the small son who would, in his turn, spend most of his life throwing his money away. Francesco Paolo liked a show and he liked to astonish (both attributes Gabriele inherited). He used to colour his white doves with the new-fangled aniline dyes, and released them to fly – pink, green, purple, orange – around the house’s inner court.

Gabriele was his parents’ darling. His father used to watch him gravely. ‘He never made light of me, nor ever mocked me.’ He had a brother (who became a musician and a swindler, before emigrating to America) and three sisters. But he was the prodigy, the little prince. He adored his mother, Luisa de Benedictis, mainly, as he tells it, because of the gratifying way she adored him: ‘Her glances made my heaven.’

The house was full of women – maids, his sisters, unmarried aunts, his grandmother – and he was everyone’s precious treasure. When ladies came to visit his mother he would sit on his own little stool in the middle of their circle, while they gazed at him admiringly as at ‘a rare beast’. Sent away to boarding school at the age of eleven, he wrote nostalgic letters home in which he conjured up luminous images of his early childhood, scenes that might have been lifted from accounts of the infancy of saints. ‘Do you remember how when I was little I used to come first thing in the morning into your room all sparkling with joy, and I used to bring you flowers? … No shadow of a cloud ever troubled my happiness.’

Actually, there were shadows. To live in the countryside (as the d’Annunzio family partly did – they had a second house, the Villa Fuoco, on their land outside town) was to be exposed to gory realities. Many of the stories d’Annunzio related about his childhood concern dying animals. There was the death of his little Sardinian horse, a bay with a white muzzle named Aquilino, whom he would feed with apples and sugar lumps in the peace of the night-time stable. There was the quail the farm manager gave him in a cage made of twigs. Half a century later d’Annunzio could still recall how the tiny creature dashed itself against its makeshift bars, gashing its head until the bone showed. On killing days the howling of the stuck pigs and their blood spurting into basins so appalled him that he would hide in a corner, face to the wall, his hand over his contorted mouth. ‘Life scared me as though it stalked me with a pig-sticking knife in hand.’ After the ‘massacre’ he sobbed all night.

Gabriele’s education was begun by a pair of devout, unmarried sisters whom he was to cruelly traduce in a story of disease and sexual desperation – The Book of the Virgins (later reworked as The Virgin Orsola). The passage in which he describes the two women’s lessons in reading, writing and religion sounds like actual experience recalled. ‘In solemn voices they spoke of sin, of the horrors of sin, of everlasting punishment, while all those wide eyes filled with amazement and all those small pink mouths opened aghast. In the vivid imaginings of the children, objects came alive … the Nazarene, bound with thorns and bloody drops, gazed from every side with agonised, haunting eyes, and beneath the great hood of the chimney each plume of smoke took on an atrocious form.’ Other children elsewhere might be terrified by the scissors man, the big bad wolf, or the fierce bad rabbit, but for d’Annunzio and his fellows, the bogeyman was one and the same with the deity.

Luisa was socially a cut above her husband. She would take her son to stay with her parents down the coast in Ortona. Their house, a rambling old structure wedged between the monastery and the fortress, was a complex of massive walls and hidden courtyards, of long corridors and cell-like rooms. As a tiny crawling child, d’Annunzio was fascinated by the floor tiles with their depictions of flowers and animals. Once upright and talking he would demand accounts of the fables illustrated on the ceramic panels let into the whitewashed walls.

The most wonderful part of his sojourns in Ortona were his visits to another relative, an abbess. She fed him with little twisted biscuits called ‘vipers’. When she told him she would teach him ‘glorious mysteries’ and gave him an amethyst rosary to hold, Gabriele, who was to become an insatiable collector of holy trinkets, and an inventive stager of pseudo-religious ceremonies, began to hyperventilate with excitement. Even more thrilling, she allowed him, as a favoured nephew, to pass through the visitors’ parlour into the convent. There in the secrecy of her cell, he watched her practising ‘her arts of divination’. He was nine years old, a boy in a place no male should ever have been permitted to enter, assisting at rituals forbidden by the Church. In a confused but ecstatic awareness of the multiple transgression, he watched while she threw aromatic herbs on the fire and peered at the homely ingredients of her spell, ‘the innards of a mullet, iridescent fish scales, sage leaves’. For all her neat wimple and nun’s bands, the old lady was a sorceress. He was afraid of her. She took his hands, and explained that his past and future were written on their two palms as a sacred story might be painted on a diptych. The room was full of smoke. Kneeling, arms outstretched, the sleeves of her habit hanging like sails, the Abbess seemed to go into a trance. Gabriele panicked. Beating frantically at the door he yelled until a novice appeared and released him.

Sorcery and divination had penetrated the convent walls. Outside they were ubiquitous. The people of the Abruzzi might be church-goers and observers of fasts and festivals, but Christianity coexisted in their culture with heathen magic. D’Annunzio witnessed cacophonous ceremonies when the frenzy of the ‘possessed’ was aggravated by a din of yells and whistles. In one of his stories a woman of Pescara seeks out a witch doctor, a bearded old man who rides into town on a white mule, wearing gold triangles in his ears and with silver buttons as big as the bowls of spoons on his coat. He is said to be able to make the blind see, and calm those possessed by wicked spirits. His wife, with whom he lives in a cave outside town, is an abortionist. In other stories d’Annunzio writes about an unsuccessful fisherman who believes himself to be cursed, about a dead dog, putrid and stinking, left across the door of a hut at night to keep away vampires, about a child dying as its mother declares it has been bewitched. Some of these magical practices he filched for his fiction from his friend, the folklorist de Nino. Others he observed as a child.

The Abruzzi is sheep country. Green roads, like rivers of grass, lead from the high mountain pastures down the long, long incline to the sea. D’Annunzio’s poem about the shepherds, who would bring their flocks down them annually ‘in the footsteps of ancient fathers’, was written long after he had ceased to return home with any regularity, but when he was a child their transhumance would have been one of the great public events of the year, marking the season as clearly as the harvest or the ripening of the first cherries. Those shepherds, and the peasants who farmed the coastal plain, preserved intact a rich cache of beliefs and ceremonies. D’Annunzio describes the endlessly repetitive, mournful chant which accompanied every solemnity from birth to death: the travelling songs sung in parts by groups of men and women on the road together ‘like a wave continually rising and falling’. He records a ritual which is still extant in the villages of the Abruzzi. ‘A white ox, fattened by a year of abundant grazing, caparisoned in vermilion, ridden by a little boy, processes in pomp to the church between banners and candles … arriving in the centre of the nave, it lets fall its droppings; in the heap of steaming matter the devout read the agricultural auspices.’

D’Annunzio described the elaborate praise-singing that was customary at harvest time. Lines of women, laden with food and wine in tall, painted jars, would process out into the fields, lauding the sun and the landowner and God as they went. When the men heard them coming they would lay down their scythes, and the foreman led the prayer – ‘inflamed with enthusiasm, he expressed himself spontaneously in couplets’ (this improvised rhyming is well documented) – and the rest of the gang roared out their responses ‘while the red light of sunset flashed reflected off the iron blades, and the topmost sheaf on the corn stook glittered like a flame’.

The child saw, and the man remembered, how a group of people could be bound together and excited by the power of the word.

D’Annunzio felt the lure of Christian devotion. During his recurring bouts of depression he would crave the peace of religious seclusion. So too he had his private rituals and a predilection for magical thinking. At birth he narrowly escaped being choked by the caul. Those so born were believed to have the second sight, and the caul itself was a charm which could save its wearer from drowning. D’Annunzio’s was preserved in a little package of silk hung on a cord which, as a child, he wore always around his neck. Recalling this as an adult, he wrote patronisingly about the ‘superstition’ of the women – his mother, aunts and nurse – who believed in its efficacy, but, throughout the Great War, whenever he went into action, he carried an amulet or two in his pocket.

He was always a ditherer. Frequently, when faced with a decision, he resorted to primitive forms of divination. He opened books at random and searched for messages in the first phrase he read (a practice he claimed to have taken from ‘the ancient priests of Cybele’). He looked for omens. Emeralds brought good fortune (both magically and – as it happens – practically: Eleonora Duse gave him two enormous emeralds, the pawning of which several times saved him from financial disaster). He visited clairvoyants, he consulted astrologers. He carried a pair of ivory dice in a little jewelled box with the Caesarean inscription ‘Alea jactae sunt’ (‘the dice have been cast’) and, when required to make a decision, would frequently allow the fall of the dice to make it for him. He abhorred the primitive religiosity of the peasants he knew as a child, but he took with him into his sophisticated adulthood many of the superstitions of the village society he had left behind.

When he was five or six years old, one of d’Annunzio’s sisters beckoned him aside and, opening her childish fist, showed him her treasure, an artificial pearl. At once he was seized by a craving for something similarly rounded and lustrous. There were swallows’ nests beneath the house’s eaves. He would steal an egg. He ran up to a top-floor room and out onto the narrow balcony, but he was too small to reach a nest. Going back indoors he found a bench and, struggling doggedly, dragged it out. Women at a window of the opposite house called out to him. He took no notice. He scrambled up onto the bench and thence onto the wrought-iron railing three storeys above the paved street below. Clinging to the slatted shutters, he groped upwards. The women called more loudly. Down in the street passers-by stopped. Shopkeepers came out to see what was going on, craning their heads upward. The little boy could hear a growing hubbub beneath him. He struggled to haul himself up, but his arms weren’t strong enough. Agitated swallows beat around his head.