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Gabriele D'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the Costa Biography Award
**Washington Post Best Books of 2013**
**Economist Best Books of 2013**
This fascinating life of Gabriele d’Annunzio—the charismatic poet, bon vivant, and virulent nationalist who prefigured Mussolini—traces the early twentieth century’s trajectory from Romantic idealism to Fascist thuggery.
D’Annunzio was Italy’s premier poet at a time when poetry could trigger riots. A brilliant self-publicist, he used his fame to sell his work, seduce women, and promote his extreme nationalism. At once an aesthete and a militarist, he enjoyed risking death no less than making love, and he wrote with equal enthusiasm about Fortuny gowns and torpedoes. In 1915 his incendiary oratory helped drive Italy into the First World War, and in 1919 he led a troop of mutineers into the Croatian port of Fiume, where he established a delinquent utopia. Futurists, anarchists, communists and proto-fascists descended on the place, along with literati and thrill-seekers, drug dealers and prostitutes. Three years later, when the fascists marched on Rome, they belted out anthems they’d learned in Fiume, while Mussolini consciously modeled himself on the great poet.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s compelling biography is a revelation both of d’Annunzio’s flamboyant life and of the dramatic times he helped to shape.
Winner of the Costa Biography Award
**Washington Post Best Books of 2013**
**Economist Best Books of 2013**
This fascinating life of Gabriele d’Annunzio—the charismatic poet, bon vivant, and virulent nationalist who prefigured Mussolini—traces the early twentieth century’s trajectory from Romantic idealism to Fascist thuggery.
D’Annunzio was Italy’s premier poet at a time when poetry could trigger riots. A brilliant self-publicist, he used his fame to sell his work, seduce women, and promote his extreme nationalism. At once an aesthete and a militarist, he enjoyed risking death no less than making love, and he wrote with equal enthusiasm about Fortuny gowns and torpedoes. In 1915 his incendiary oratory helped drive Italy into the First World War, and in 1919 he led a troop of mutineers into the Croatian port of Fiume, where he established a delinquent utopia. Futurists, anarchists, communists and proto-fascists descended on the place, along with literati and thrill-seekers, drug dealers and prostitutes. Three years later, when the fascists marched on Rome, they belted out anthems they’d learned in Fiume, while Mussolini consciously modeled himself on the great poet.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s compelling biography is a revelation both of d’Annunzio’s flamboyant life and of the dramatic times he helped to shape.
608 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 2013
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June 10, 2017
Not the easiest read. It's the very convoluted story of a small man with a Napoleonic complex and the money, talent and intellect to try to put his grandiose ideas into practice. His ideas included a town run as a fascist republic, with himself at the helm, naturally. He was as devoted to poetry, and to aesthetics and the style of the rich and famous as he was to flying planes and his extreme nationalism. D'Annunzio's very dangerous politics, if not his poetry, inspired Mussolini who easily identified with the evil of the man.
Reading the book, sometimes I thought D'Annunzio was an amazing adventurer, playboy, devotee of the arts and an altogether wonderful chap to have round for dinner in one of those games of 'who would you invite from history for a dinner party?' Other times I thought, the man is a monster, sit him beneath the salt at any party Hitler attended, despite the distance they'd have plenty in common to talk about.
Evil yes, not one who contributed in a good way to Italy. The best that can be said about him is that this very complex, clever, talented man at least entertained a lot of people on his rise to fame, power and riches - and equally so on his way down into the mire, if not the pit of hell.
Recommended - not really. It's too dense, the writing doesn't do the subject justice with the author wanting to include every element of D'Annunzio's life. A better editor could have sorted through what was important and what trivia didn't add anything to the biography. Judicious edition would not only have tightened the book much shortened it into a much more readable and enjoyable tome. 3.5 stars.
Read Feb 6, 2013
Re-reviewed June 8th, 2017
Reading the book, sometimes I thought D'Annunzio was an amazing adventurer, playboy, devotee of the arts and an altogether wonderful chap to have round for dinner in one of those games of 'who would you invite from history for a dinner party?' Other times I thought, the man is a monster, sit him beneath the salt at any party Hitler attended, despite the distance they'd have plenty in common to talk about.
Evil yes, not one who contributed in a good way to Italy. The best that can be said about him is that this very complex, clever, talented man at least entertained a lot of people on his rise to fame, power and riches - and equally so on his way down into the mire, if not the pit of hell.
Recommended - not really. It's too dense, the writing doesn't do the subject justice with the author wanting to include every element of D'Annunzio's life. A better editor could have sorted through what was important and what trivia didn't add anything to the biography. Judicious edition would not only have tightened the book much shortened it into a much more readable and enjoyable tome. 3.5 stars.
Read Feb 6, 2013
Re-reviewed June 8th, 2017
Read
October 24, 2018A long book about a silly man.
I wondered after a few hundred pages why Lucy Hughes-Hallet decided to write a biography of this person, it took me a couple hundred pages more to realise that I could ask myself a related question - why was I reading it? I suppose the answer in both cases was the same - because it's there. It felt disturbing contemporary at times, with political figures denouncing the compromises of democratic societies, eager for war and the bloodshed of others, unsettling, though not quite enough to grab the spade and start digging an air-raid shelter.
long brief survey
Gabriele D'Annunzio was a leading literary figure in Italy from the 1880s, he was translated in to French, Proust, Henry James, James Joyce, and Earnest Hemingway among others all had complementary things to say about his literary style. He was decadentish, a symbolist, somewhat similar to Oscar Wilde and Huysmans according to Hughes-Hallet, his political edge was maybe always more apparent or perhaps only in retrospect. Typical I felt of the book was the author's surprise after a discussion of his fascination with the story of Saint Sebastian that D'Annunzio appeared not to be homosexual
D'Annunzio was one of those who was excited by the outbreak of the First world war, the blood and death he thought, would be wonderful and transformative, he held consistently to this view and eventually returned to Italy (from self-imposed exile in Paris to escape his Italian debts) spoke in favour of war at a time when the government was feeling it's way to joining the allies in return for the promise of territorial gains, and despite having spent his youth avoiding military service did create a military role for himself giving inspiring speeches to soldiers and as a pioneer of air warfare - he never learnt to fly, so specialised in dropping bombs and propaganda leaflets instead. His principal claim to fame was in long distance air raids even as far as Vienna.
After the war he was disappointed, the arrival of Wilson and the Americans threatened that Italy would not get all the territories that the nationalists wanted, partly because they were inhabited by a majority of non-Italians, partly because the victorious allies preferred to established something called Yugoslavia instead. D'Annunzio eventually led a number of soldiers on a march (actually a drive) to seize one of these contested territories, the town of Fiume (Rijeka, Croatia). Soldiers deployed to prevent his entry to the town deserted to him, after delaying the march to allow a film crew to get in to position - the revolution will be televised - D'Annunzio occupied Fiume and was to head a city-state there for over a year.
Eventually he is forced to abandon the territory and retires to a house in Northern Italy where he devotes himself to a life of interior decorating, sex, and cocaine. With Mussolini's seizure of power this retirement becomes ever more decorous, the two have an awkward relationship however, but eventually D'Annunzio dies following on from an overdose.
so what's it all about?
The title details the concerns of the book. The pike refers to the fish rather than to a turnpike, the idea was that D'Annuzio like a pike lounged in the waters swallowing up ideas, recycling them in his literary output. Seduction, sexual relationships are interwoven with his literary creativity, he had the habit of detailing in his letters to his lovers what they had done together, so we are remarkably well informed about his sexual habits, or at least what he wrote about them, and his sexual adventures take up a fair slab of this book, D'Annunzio was married but he tended to have two or three relationships ongoing at anyone time plus prostitutes and one night stands, he came close to being imprisoned for adultery in Naples, divorce apparently was not to be legalised in Italy until 1974. So that is the seducer bit, poet, well he started off writing poetry - he announced his own death in a riding accident to gain publicity before the publication of his second collection of verse, and Preacher of war he was consistently upbeat about war and war deaths - empathy was not a particular skill of his and the thought that some people might prefer to be alive rather than memoralised as martyrs didn't trouble him.
But what does all this amount to? There is a certain amount of the biography given over to the fin de Siecle artistic and intellectual world, a certain amount of the artist as activist and creativity as events and happenings, the creation of a public (and private) personas as works of art in themselves, Equally we see something of the roots of Fascism in racism, Bonapartism and ultra-nationalism, a sense of being perpetually aggrieved over the position of the nation in the world, a joyful abandonment to a Dionysian liberty indulging in violence and fuelled by opiates. While a champion of the new and the modern D'Annunzio was also one for the old, for the glorious heroic past. He didn't like democracy or being reasonable, instead he believed in the politics of beauty, the practical expression of which was dropping bombs on a fleeing enemy from an areoplane.
The problem I have with this book is that it all feels a bit directionless and unfocused, you could say that this impression enhanced by the author's technique - she chops up the timeline a bit and revisits some events twice - and it perhaps fairly reflects D'Annunzio's character. I suppose the lasting impression is that D'Annunzio could have been anything he wanted to be: publicist, propagandist, politician, poet, but ultimately wanted to do a little bit of everything and to fuss more over the flowers than the flour supply. As a one city dictator, he stirred people up, but couldn't decide to lead them anywhere or not. In the end perhaps it was the sex and the drugs which were the main thing for him - everything else just decoration. He seems half way between Salvador Dali and Mussolini, chronically indebted and enjoying several sexually transmitted diseases.
His father was a small town major in the Abruzzi, on Italy's Adriatic coast, chronically indebted and a devoted philanderer who had somehow acquired the grand sounding family name. His son was sent off to a boarding school - not to return even during long summer holidays for years on end to be (mis)educated into admiration of all conquering heroes, a fan of Napoleon Bonaparte for beating the Austrians. If the book ultimately is a warning about the dangers of boarding school or the fatal influence of hereditary and environment, I am undecided.
I wonder if both speeches and the sex were both about stirring up others in a search for sensation? He was a relentless recycler, Hughes-Hallett suggests his writings are strongly autobiographical, while she sees his politics as of the Zeitgeist, typical in their yearning for his country to be a great power.
D'Annunzio is interesting as a pivot figure looking forwards (with relish) to aerial bombardment, speed boats and fast cars and backwards to the Venetian Empire. Merging a certain Gothic sensibility (tropes of incest, castles and decadent aristocrats) with Modernism and Futurism, at the centre of literary and artistic life for a while, he ended up on the margins for political reasons.
I wondered after a few hundred pages why Lucy Hughes-Hallet decided to write a biography of this person, it took me a couple hundred pages more to realise that I could ask myself a related question - why was I reading it? I suppose the answer in both cases was the same - because it's there. It felt disturbing contemporary at times, with political figures denouncing the compromises of democratic societies, eager for war and the bloodshed of others, unsettling, though not quite enough to grab the spade and start digging an air-raid shelter.
long brief survey
Gabriele D'Annunzio was a leading literary figure in Italy from the 1880s, he was translated in to French, Proust, Henry James, James Joyce, and Earnest Hemingway among others all had complementary things to say about his literary style. He was decadentish, a symbolist, somewhat similar to Oscar Wilde and Huysmans according to Hughes-Hallet, his political edge was maybe always more apparent or perhaps only in retrospect. Typical I felt of the book was the author's surprise after a discussion of his fascination with the story of Saint Sebastian that D'Annunzio appeared not to be homosexual
D'Annunzio was one of those who was excited by the outbreak of the First world war, the blood and death he thought, would be wonderful and transformative, he held consistently to this view and eventually returned to Italy (from self-imposed exile in Paris to escape his Italian debts) spoke in favour of war at a time when the government was feeling it's way to joining the allies in return for the promise of territorial gains, and despite having spent his youth avoiding military service did create a military role for himself giving inspiring speeches to soldiers and as a pioneer of air warfare - he never learnt to fly, so specialised in dropping bombs and propaganda leaflets instead. His principal claim to fame was in long distance air raids even as far as Vienna.
After the war he was disappointed, the arrival of Wilson and the Americans threatened that Italy would not get all the territories that the nationalists wanted, partly because they were inhabited by a majority of non-Italians, partly because the victorious allies preferred to established something called Yugoslavia instead. D'Annunzio eventually led a number of soldiers on a march (actually a drive) to seize one of these contested territories, the town of Fiume (Rijeka, Croatia). Soldiers deployed to prevent his entry to the town deserted to him, after delaying the march to allow a film crew to get in to position - the revolution will be televised - D'Annunzio occupied Fiume and was to head a city-state there for over a year.
Eventually he is forced to abandon the territory and retires to a house in Northern Italy where he devotes himself to a life of interior decorating, sex, and cocaine. With Mussolini's seizure of power this retirement becomes ever more decorous, the two have an awkward relationship however, but eventually D'Annunzio dies following on from an overdose.
so what's it all about?
The title details the concerns of the book. The pike refers to the fish rather than to a turnpike, the idea was that D'Annuzio like a pike lounged in the waters swallowing up ideas, recycling them in his literary output. Seduction, sexual relationships are interwoven with his literary creativity, he had the habit of detailing in his letters to his lovers what they had done together, so we are remarkably well informed about his sexual habits, or at least what he wrote about them, and his sexual adventures take up a fair slab of this book, D'Annunzio was married but he tended to have two or three relationships ongoing at anyone time plus prostitutes and one night stands, he came close to being imprisoned for adultery in Naples, divorce apparently was not to be legalised in Italy until 1974. So that is the seducer bit, poet, well he started off writing poetry - he announced his own death in a riding accident to gain publicity before the publication of his second collection of verse, and Preacher of war he was consistently upbeat about war and war deaths - empathy was not a particular skill of his and the thought that some people might prefer to be alive rather than memoralised as martyrs didn't trouble him.
But what does all this amount to? There is a certain amount of the biography given over to the fin de Siecle artistic and intellectual world, a certain amount of the artist as activist and creativity as events and happenings, the creation of a public (and private) personas as works of art in themselves, Equally we see something of the roots of Fascism in racism, Bonapartism and ultra-nationalism, a sense of being perpetually aggrieved over the position of the nation in the world, a joyful abandonment to a Dionysian liberty indulging in violence and fuelled by opiates. While a champion of the new and the modern D'Annunzio was also one for the old, for the glorious heroic past. He didn't like democracy or being reasonable, instead he believed in the politics of beauty, the practical expression of which was dropping bombs on a fleeing enemy from an areoplane.
The problem I have with this book is that it all feels a bit directionless and unfocused, you could say that this impression enhanced by the author's technique - she chops up the timeline a bit and revisits some events twice - and it perhaps fairly reflects D'Annunzio's character. I suppose the lasting impression is that D'Annunzio could have been anything he wanted to be: publicist, propagandist, politician, poet, but ultimately wanted to do a little bit of everything and to fuss more over the flowers than the flour supply. As a one city dictator, he stirred people up, but couldn't decide to lead them anywhere or not. In the end perhaps it was the sex and the drugs which were the main thing for him - everything else just decoration. He seems half way between Salvador Dali and Mussolini, chronically indebted and enjoying several sexually transmitted diseases.
His father was a small town major in the Abruzzi, on Italy's Adriatic coast, chronically indebted and a devoted philanderer who had somehow acquired the grand sounding family name. His son was sent off to a boarding school - not to return even during long summer holidays for years on end to be (mis)educated into admiration of all conquering heroes, a fan of Napoleon Bonaparte for beating the Austrians. If the book ultimately is a warning about the dangers of boarding school or the fatal influence of hereditary and environment, I am undecided.
I wonder if both speeches and the sex were both about stirring up others in a search for sensation? He was a relentless recycler, Hughes-Hallett suggests his writings are strongly autobiographical, while she sees his politics as of the Zeitgeist, typical in their yearning for his country to be a great power.
D'Annunzio is interesting as a pivot figure looking forwards (with relish) to aerial bombardment, speed boats and fast cars and backwards to the Venetian Empire. Merging a certain Gothic sensibility (tropes of incest, castles and decadent aristocrats) with Modernism and Futurism, at the centre of literary and artistic life for a while, he ended up on the margins for political reasons.
October 24, 2018
I found Gabriele d'Annunzio to be a thoroughly odious little man. Whenever I open a book I always check to see if there are photos included within and this was indeed the case here. On page 146 I was faced with a somewhat exuberant Annunzio naked on the beach and it was not a pretty sight. He was obviously under thirty as he had lost most of his hair by that time but then that’s all a question of genetics and certainly not his fault. On page 103 there is another photo of him on the beach but thank heavens he was covered here! I certainly didn’t want a repeat experience of his naked state.
That said this is a brilliant biography but regrettably it documents in quite precise detail the sexual antics of d’Annunzio and I really didn’t want to hear about that. He actually, would you believe, documented all of his sexual experiences whether they were divine or awful. And if he went three days without sex he was very distressed. His greated tryst was with the great actress Eleonora Duse but then fitted this in with all of his other women.
I’m really surprised that he managed to fit in all of his writing, poetry, war efforts, his political beliefs, leading of a troop of mutineers into the Croatian port of Fiume and establishing a delinquent city-state. This section was beautifully documented. He loved both gowns and torpedoes. He was indeed a man of taste but still he reminded me of a gnome.
We have here the life story of a remarkable, flamboyant individual and in essence I loved the writing style of the biography. It’s just a shame that it was about d’Annunzio.
That said this is a brilliant biography but regrettably it documents in quite precise detail the sexual antics of d’Annunzio and I really didn’t want to hear about that. He actually, would you believe, documented all of his sexual experiences whether they were divine or awful. And if he went three days without sex he was very distressed. His greated tryst was with the great actress Eleonora Duse but then fitted this in with all of his other women.
I’m really surprised that he managed to fit in all of his writing, poetry, war efforts, his political beliefs, leading of a troop of mutineers into the Croatian port of Fiume and establishing a delinquent city-state. This section was beautifully documented. He loved both gowns and torpedoes. He was indeed a man of taste but still he reminded me of a gnome.
We have here the life story of a remarkable, flamboyant individual and in essence I loved the writing style of the biography. It’s just a shame that it was about d’Annunzio.
April 8, 2017
D’Annunzio was not a fascist, but fascism was D’Annunzian
Lucy Hughes-Hallett explains why she felt Gabriele D’Annunzio’s was a story worth telling. She repudiates the description of him as ‘psychotic’ and remarks that his pugilistic politicking is all too often reproduced in the contemporary era.
Nonetheless, the accounts of Italy’s political landscape before and after WWI had my eyebrows permanently reaching for the sky. It seems I will never cease to be astonished by the horrors my fellow humans can feel moved to advocate.
D’Annunzio proposed a ‘politics of poetry’ but what he meant by this was both horribly violent and incoherent. How should political thought make use of the aesthetic? For D’Annunzio, it is a way to deny responsibility and obligation, to make personal whim the arbiter of justice, to make his predilection for violent death the cardinal value of a culture, to ignore pragmatic questions such as how will people get enough food to eat. The Italian fascists and futurists worshipped youth and energy as well as the ‘race’ and state. D’Annunzio’s work and political life helped to inspire these movements, and in some ways this is ironic, because he often took a conservationist attitude to classical artefacts and ideals, and he was in his late fifties when he became, for a brief and chaotic period, the ruler of Fiume.
D’Annunzio was a seductive personality and figure; many people who met him seem to have become enthralled by him, and he was well known for his promiscuity. Somehow, despite pathological levels of profligacy, financial irresponsibility and faithlessness (he constantly broke promises), he seems to have got most of what he wanted out of life.
Hughes-Hallett is seems, is not seduced. She writes that ‘disapproval is not an interesting response’ but her demythologisation of D’Annunzio is effective. His and others’ efforts to present him as a superman or an elemental force of history fail in the face of her carefully constructed narrative, which tidily takes every opportunity of bringing the aviator down to earth. The contradictions between his ideas, his public and private personae, his own and others’ views of him, are allowed to make him as ridiculous as he deserves to be. Mussolini is also cut down to size as a sometimes-imitator of D’Annunzio, especially in his style of propaganda. D’Annunzio’s influence is perhaps the best reason to know about him. He named Fiume ‘The City of the Holocaust’ during his fifteen-month reign. He originated much of the ideology of fascism, and the methodology of modern politics; although he was extremely elitist and disdained ordinary people and democracy, he operated by stirring up those very ‘masses’ with inflammatory speeches.
The earlier, more disjointed part of the book worked best for me; here Hughes-Hallett takes an innovative approach, scattering material like scenes from a film that need to be assembled by the reader. Trying to put the fragments together, to see if the streams would converge or dissipate under my hands, to see if I could form my own image, my own narrative of D’Annunzio, allowed me a creative participation in the book that involved me deeply. In the more traditional, chronological later sections, I had to be disciplined to maintain my attention, as I am not a good reader of history. Still, she intercuts scenes from the large canvas where violence on the scale of cities and field battles happen with intimate, sometimes bathetic or ridiculous moments, skillfully capturing the absurdity of real life, and the deep contradictions in (proto-)fascist ideology.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett explains why she felt Gabriele D’Annunzio’s was a story worth telling. She repudiates the description of him as ‘psychotic’ and remarks that his pugilistic politicking is all too often reproduced in the contemporary era.
Nonetheless, the accounts of Italy’s political landscape before and after WWI had my eyebrows permanently reaching for the sky. It seems I will never cease to be astonished by the horrors my fellow humans can feel moved to advocate.
D’Annunzio proposed a ‘politics of poetry’ but what he meant by this was both horribly violent and incoherent. How should political thought make use of the aesthetic? For D’Annunzio, it is a way to deny responsibility and obligation, to make personal whim the arbiter of justice, to make his predilection for violent death the cardinal value of a culture, to ignore pragmatic questions such as how will people get enough food to eat. The Italian fascists and futurists worshipped youth and energy as well as the ‘race’ and state. D’Annunzio’s work and political life helped to inspire these movements, and in some ways this is ironic, because he often took a conservationist attitude to classical artefacts and ideals, and he was in his late fifties when he became, for a brief and chaotic period, the ruler of Fiume.
D’Annunzio was a seductive personality and figure; many people who met him seem to have become enthralled by him, and he was well known for his promiscuity. Somehow, despite pathological levels of profligacy, financial irresponsibility and faithlessness (he constantly broke promises), he seems to have got most of what he wanted out of life.
Hughes-Hallett is seems, is not seduced. She writes that ‘disapproval is not an interesting response’ but her demythologisation of D’Annunzio is effective. His and others’ efforts to present him as a superman or an elemental force of history fail in the face of her carefully constructed narrative, which tidily takes every opportunity of bringing the aviator down to earth. The contradictions between his ideas, his public and private personae, his own and others’ views of him, are allowed to make him as ridiculous as he deserves to be. Mussolini is also cut down to size as a sometimes-imitator of D’Annunzio, especially in his style of propaganda. D’Annunzio’s influence is perhaps the best reason to know about him. He named Fiume ‘The City of the Holocaust’ during his fifteen-month reign. He originated much of the ideology of fascism, and the methodology of modern politics; although he was extremely elitist and disdained ordinary people and democracy, he operated by stirring up those very ‘masses’ with inflammatory speeches.
The earlier, more disjointed part of the book worked best for me; here Hughes-Hallett takes an innovative approach, scattering material like scenes from a film that need to be assembled by the reader. Trying to put the fragments together, to see if the streams would converge or dissipate under my hands, to see if I could form my own image, my own narrative of D’Annunzio, allowed me a creative participation in the book that involved me deeply. In the more traditional, chronological later sections, I had to be disciplined to maintain my attention, as I am not a good reader of history. Still, she intercuts scenes from the large canvas where violence on the scale of cities and field battles happen with intimate, sometimes bathetic or ridiculous moments, skillfully capturing the absurdity of real life, and the deep contradictions in (proto-)fascist ideology.
July 29, 2014
It became rather tedious after a while reading of D' Annunzio's womanizing and bravado. His aesthetic sense was much more admirable, but I would rather read of the life of, say, Oscar Wilde. (This from a veteran and worshiper of the female form.) D' Annunzio's companionship would have been a bit too boring for my romantic blood. However, I have not read the novels of D' Annunzio.
December 25, 2021
The best argument for Carlyle's Great Man Theory is the lives of people like D'Annunzio. His life oscilates between his writing, duels, sexual thrifts, his participation in the Great War and it all culminates as he conquers Fiume.
At first, it seems like he did it all for his patria, or for popularity, or for the women. But all these seem incidental to his life. Ultimately his conquering of Fiume was the same as any other piece of art he created, simply a manifestation of his will. It really seems like all of Italy post 1900s was just a dream that D'Annunzio had in-between romantic liaisons.
The book itself is very well written and structured despite its size and the sheer scope of events. The book repeats through some events, each time adding more layers of depth. The writer gives the dues owed to the man while maintaining an ironic distance that only an aging single Anglo woman can maintain to someone so striking as D'Annunzio.
At first, it seems like he did it all for his patria, or for popularity, or for the women. But all these seem incidental to his life. Ultimately his conquering of Fiume was the same as any other piece of art he created, simply a manifestation of his will. It really seems like all of Italy post 1900s was just a dream that D'Annunzio had in-between romantic liaisons.
The book itself is very well written and structured despite its size and the sheer scope of events. The book repeats through some events, each time adding more layers of depth. The writer gives the dues owed to the man while maintaining an ironic distance that only an aging single Anglo woman can maintain to someone so striking as D'Annunzio.
July 27, 2014
This is an overly long book written by an excellent -- in places remarkably fluid -- writer, but a writer who seems fundamentally censorious of everything her subject did. For example, she takes care in the introduction to inform readers that she can write objectively about a notorious playboy warmonger, despite being a female pacifist. She also, incoherently, pronounces her opposition to the war in Afghanistan. Glad to know!
Hughes-Hallett's work seems remarkably patterned after my favorite movie, Paul Schrader's Mishima bio-pic, "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089603/ And I can see the similarities: a man of letters finding harmony in pen and sword. But Mishima was, by far, the better writer, and the more dramatic; D'Annunzio's "moment" came at the dog-ends of WW1, and he died before WW2. On the other hand, D'Annunzio actually governed, sort of, a city-state, for nearly a year. Hughes-Hallett explicitly recognizes the parallel, saying that Mishima's "ideas and life story in many ways reflect d'Annunzio's". Unfavorably for Hughes-Hallett, this work jump-cuts back and forth for no discernible reason, as if she's deliberately cueing for a flashback scene in the script she looks forward to writing.
This is a very long book--and yet, it doesn't stop to assess the why's (as opposed to the what's) of his life. The last section (documenting d'Annunzio's "John the Baptist"-like relationship with Mussolini and Fascism) is by far the best. Still, there's remarkably little context for his acts, writing, romantic or military.
I didn't get a sense of his poetry, or novels, nor his plays. Aside from a classical revival, what were his major themes?
I think Hughes-Hallett took particular delight in having access to d'Annunzio's diaries, and thus incredibly intimate details about each sexual encounter. I don't think of myself as particularly prudish; I merely objected to the repetition.
"The conjunction of a war hero and a returning army is a danger to any civilian state. As one of d'Annunzio's most perceptive biographers remarks: 'the Rubicon has never really been forgotten in Italy.'"
"D'Annunzio saw the fascists as crude imitators of himself. They were potentially useful supporters, but they were lamentably brutal in there methods and unrefined in their thinking. Mussolini was "a companion in faith and violence," but he was a subordinate partner, when he was included at all."
"On 29 May he received a telegram from one of the leaders of the National Council of Fiume. 'We look to the only firm and intrepid Duce of the Italian people. Command us. We are ready."
"'Italians of Fiume,' he began. 'Here I am.' He repeated himself insistently. 'Here I am. . . Here is the man. . . Ecce Homo.'"
"Fiume's economy was floundering. What had been a busy port and manufacturing town found itself cut off from its suppliers of raw materials and its markets."
"[Because the city's legal system still was Hungarian law, which permitted divorce] the only business flourishing was that of ending marriages."
"His finite political ambitions (the unseating of [Italian Prime Minister] Nitti, the annexation of Fiume to Italy) seemed, for the time being anyway, to have failed. He reacted by enlarging the scope of his enterprise. He was no longer in Fiume to redeem a bit of Italian territory. He was building Utopia."
"Drugs were as readily available as sex."
"[Italian Prime Minister Nitti's proposed] Modus Vivendi stopped short of any firm promise that Fume would be annexed to Italy, but it guaranteed the people of Fiume's right to decide their own destiny. The city was to be an independent corpus separatum under Italy's protection."
"[Although the city voted 4:1 for the Modus Vivendi, d'Annunzio] declared the vote null and void. The future of Fiume was to be decided by him and him alone. He would never abandon the city (however clearly it might express its wish that he should do so)."
"'Madam, in [the] future, beauty will be bald.' Unlikely as it may have seemed, his prediction was realized. In Fiume his devotees became, as the Bishop of Fiume noted, "so many caricatures of the Commandant." They shaved off their hair (initiating skinhead fashion)."
"The bishop wrote: 'The contagion of greatness was the greatest peril for anyone living in Fiume; a real contagious madness which everyone caught."
"De Ambris proposed a pact with Mussolini for a joint uprising in Italy in which d'Annunzio would provide the "genius" and Mussolini the manpower. But Mussolini, more confident now of his own authority, wasn't interested in raising a revolt on someone else's behalf, and d'Annunzio, true to form, couldn't make up his mind."
The fascists resolve to find a replacement for Mussolini, and "visit d'Annunzio at the Vittoriale. They invite him to assume the leadership of "national forces." As usual when confronted with a decision, d'Annunzio dithers, and takes refuge in real or pretended superstition. He must first control the stars, he says. The night sky is overcast. His visitors will have to wait. Perhaps changing their mind about his suitability, [the fascist leaders] leave."
"But still the poet withheld any public demonstration of support. He was untrustworthy and dangerously influential: he had to be kept on side. Mussolini granted him every favor he requested, with one exception. He was refused permission to build a private airfield near his villa. He was to have anything he wished for except an escape route."
D'Annunizo's last girlfriend lived with him for four years. "Emy Huefluer, d'Annunzio's blonde girlfriend, leaves the Vittoriale immediately [after his death]. Shortly afterwards she is in Berlin working for Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. She is a Nazi agent who has been planted in d'Annunzio's household to spy on him."
"Mussolini, accompanied by most of the highest-ranking fascists, arrives at the Vittoriale the next day to claim the role of cheif mourner and to ensure that, however evasive the poet has been in life, in death he will be securely claimed for the fascist cause."
Hughes-Hallett's work seems remarkably patterned after my favorite movie, Paul Schrader's Mishima bio-pic, "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089603/ And I can see the similarities: a man of letters finding harmony in pen and sword. But Mishima was, by far, the better writer, and the more dramatic; D'Annunzio's "moment" came at the dog-ends of WW1, and he died before WW2. On the other hand, D'Annunzio actually governed, sort of, a city-state, for nearly a year. Hughes-Hallett explicitly recognizes the parallel, saying that Mishima's "ideas and life story in many ways reflect d'Annunzio's". Unfavorably for Hughes-Hallett, this work jump-cuts back and forth for no discernible reason, as if she's deliberately cueing for a flashback scene in the script she looks forward to writing.
This is a very long book--and yet, it doesn't stop to assess the why's (as opposed to the what's) of his life. The last section (documenting d'Annunzio's "John the Baptist"-like relationship with Mussolini and Fascism) is by far the best. Still, there's remarkably little context for his acts, writing, romantic or military.
I didn't get a sense of his poetry, or novels, nor his plays. Aside from a classical revival, what were his major themes?
I think Hughes-Hallett took particular delight in having access to d'Annunzio's diaries, and thus incredibly intimate details about each sexual encounter. I don't think of myself as particularly prudish; I merely objected to the repetition.
"The conjunction of a war hero and a returning army is a danger to any civilian state. As one of d'Annunzio's most perceptive biographers remarks: 'the Rubicon has never really been forgotten in Italy.'"
"D'Annunzio saw the fascists as crude imitators of himself. They were potentially useful supporters, but they were lamentably brutal in there methods and unrefined in their thinking. Mussolini was "a companion in faith and violence," but he was a subordinate partner, when he was included at all."
"On 29 May he received a telegram from one of the leaders of the National Council of Fiume. 'We look to the only firm and intrepid Duce of the Italian people. Command us. We are ready."
"'Italians of Fiume,' he began. 'Here I am.' He repeated himself insistently. 'Here I am. . . Here is the man. . . Ecce Homo.'"
"Fiume's economy was floundering. What had been a busy port and manufacturing town found itself cut off from its suppliers of raw materials and its markets."
"[Because the city's legal system still was Hungarian law, which permitted divorce] the only business flourishing was that of ending marriages."
"His finite political ambitions (the unseating of [Italian Prime Minister] Nitti, the annexation of Fiume to Italy) seemed, for the time being anyway, to have failed. He reacted by enlarging the scope of his enterprise. He was no longer in Fiume to redeem a bit of Italian territory. He was building Utopia."
"Drugs were as readily available as sex."
"[Italian Prime Minister Nitti's proposed] Modus Vivendi stopped short of any firm promise that Fume would be annexed to Italy, but it guaranteed the people of Fiume's right to decide their own destiny. The city was to be an independent corpus separatum under Italy's protection."
"[Although the city voted 4:1 for the Modus Vivendi, d'Annunzio] declared the vote null and void. The future of Fiume was to be decided by him and him alone. He would never abandon the city (however clearly it might express its wish that he should do so)."
"'Madam, in [the] future, beauty will be bald.' Unlikely as it may have seemed, his prediction was realized. In Fiume his devotees became, as the Bishop of Fiume noted, "so many caricatures of the Commandant." They shaved off their hair (initiating skinhead fashion)."
"The bishop wrote: 'The contagion of greatness was the greatest peril for anyone living in Fiume; a real contagious madness which everyone caught."
"De Ambris proposed a pact with Mussolini for a joint uprising in Italy in which d'Annunzio would provide the "genius" and Mussolini the manpower. But Mussolini, more confident now of his own authority, wasn't interested in raising a revolt on someone else's behalf, and d'Annunzio, true to form, couldn't make up his mind."
The fascists resolve to find a replacement for Mussolini, and "visit d'Annunzio at the Vittoriale. They invite him to assume the leadership of "national forces." As usual when confronted with a decision, d'Annunzio dithers, and takes refuge in real or pretended superstition. He must first control the stars, he says. The night sky is overcast. His visitors will have to wait. Perhaps changing their mind about his suitability, [the fascist leaders] leave."
"But still the poet withheld any public demonstration of support. He was untrustworthy and dangerously influential: he had to be kept on side. Mussolini granted him every favor he requested, with one exception. He was refused permission to build a private airfield near his villa. He was to have anything he wished for except an escape route."
D'Annunizo's last girlfriend lived with him for four years. "Emy Huefluer, d'Annunzio's blonde girlfriend, leaves the Vittoriale immediately [after his death]. Shortly afterwards she is in Berlin working for Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. She is a Nazi agent who has been planted in d'Annunzio's household to spy on him."
"Mussolini, accompanied by most of the highest-ranking fascists, arrives at the Vittoriale the next day to claim the role of cheif mourner and to ensure that, however evasive the poet has been in life, in death he will be securely claimed for the fascist cause."
April 18, 2019
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, the Costa Biography Aware, the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Political Book Awards' Biography of the Year, Lucy Hughes-Hallet's " The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War" is indeed something quite special. In it the author shows how a great poet created the cultural and political conditions that allowed fascism to triumph over liberal democracy and communism in Italy in the early 1920s. At the same, time the book offers a delightfully racy tale of the life of a profoundly depraved individual obsessed by puic hair. Finally, it describes with tremendous insight how the decadence of the "Fin de siècle" evolved in the Futurism of the Machine Age. All in all, "The Pike" is a very rich and rewarding work.
Hughes-Hallet's narrative builds towards D'Annunzio's seizure of power in September 1919 of Fiume a city being claimed by both Italy and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). D'Annunzio would rule the Free State of Fiume for 15 months before being removed by the Italian government. Nonetheless because of D'Annunzio's actions Fiume would be incorporated into Italy where it would remain until the end of WWII. Hughes-Hallet's book then is everything that a reader interested in history could wish for.
In her introduction, Hughes-Hallet expresses her gratitude towards Christopher Duggan (who was at the time of his death in 2015) the leading academic expert in the Anglo-Saxon world on Italian history of the first half of the 20th Century. "The Pike" dovetails very nicely with Duggan's "The force of destiny: a history of Italy since 1796". Like Duggan she argues that D'Annunzio and his Futurist followers were not Fascists. Rather the Fascists were Futurists and followers of D'Annunzio. D'Annunzio gave the fascists a style and a discourse. Through his actions in Fiume, D'Annunzio showed the fascists how to acquire political power, intimidate adversaries, rule and disseminate propaganda.
If there is a weakness in "The Pike" it is Hughes-Hallet's perfunctory treatment of D'Annunzio's poetry of which she manages to say nothing of substance. Fortunately she writes in much greater depth on D'Annunzio's novels and makes many perceptive comments. She is ultimately at her best as analyst of D'Annunzio the author in the way in which she puts D'Annunzio's work in the context of the era. She shows how D'Annunzio's writings relate to those of authors such as Joyce, Proust, Huysmans, Rolland, Barres, Gide, andd Pirandello, to composers such as Verdi, Debussy, Franchetti, Zandonai and Puccini and finally to the futurist painters such as Michetti, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, and Severini.
It must be recognized that "The Pike" will seem long in place for the reader who has no taste for smutty humour. Hughes-Hallet makes it very clear that D'Annunzio was a completely unrestrained satyr with a pronounced taste for cunnilingus. The book contains a truly staggering volume of sordid anecdotes that some readers might consider to be excessive. Hughes-Hallett however insists that she has simply presented what she found in D'Annunzio's correspondence and diaries.
For good and bad reasons, "The Pike" is great fun that should be read by anyone interested in either futurism or fascism.
Hughes-Hallet's narrative builds towards D'Annunzio's seizure of power in September 1919 of Fiume a city being claimed by both Italy and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). D'Annunzio would rule the Free State of Fiume for 15 months before being removed by the Italian government. Nonetheless because of D'Annunzio's actions Fiume would be incorporated into Italy where it would remain until the end of WWII. Hughes-Hallet's book then is everything that a reader interested in history could wish for.
In her introduction, Hughes-Hallet expresses her gratitude towards Christopher Duggan (who was at the time of his death in 2015) the leading academic expert in the Anglo-Saxon world on Italian history of the first half of the 20th Century. "The Pike" dovetails very nicely with Duggan's "The force of destiny: a history of Italy since 1796". Like Duggan she argues that D'Annunzio and his Futurist followers were not Fascists. Rather the Fascists were Futurists and followers of D'Annunzio. D'Annunzio gave the fascists a style and a discourse. Through his actions in Fiume, D'Annunzio showed the fascists how to acquire political power, intimidate adversaries, rule and disseminate propaganda.
If there is a weakness in "The Pike" it is Hughes-Hallet's perfunctory treatment of D'Annunzio's poetry of which she manages to say nothing of substance. Fortunately she writes in much greater depth on D'Annunzio's novels and makes many perceptive comments. She is ultimately at her best as analyst of D'Annunzio the author in the way in which she puts D'Annunzio's work in the context of the era. She shows how D'Annunzio's writings relate to those of authors such as Joyce, Proust, Huysmans, Rolland, Barres, Gide, andd Pirandello, to composers such as Verdi, Debussy, Franchetti, Zandonai and Puccini and finally to the futurist painters such as Michetti, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, and Severini.
It must be recognized that "The Pike" will seem long in place for the reader who has no taste for smutty humour. Hughes-Hallet makes it very clear that D'Annunzio was a completely unrestrained satyr with a pronounced taste for cunnilingus. The book contains a truly staggering volume of sordid anecdotes that some readers might consider to be excessive. Hughes-Hallett however insists that she has simply presented what she found in D'Annunzio's correspondence and diaries.
For good and bad reasons, "The Pike" is great fun that should be read by anyone interested in either futurism or fascism.
April 1, 2014
Lucy Hughes-Hallet's trip through the mind of this twisted, self-important little man is a roller-coaster ride that never lets up and never lets down. D'Annunzio was many things: deluded, bloodthirsty, narcissistic. But he's never boring. I'm exhausted from having ridden with Il Vate and now I have to sit down for awhile...
April 14, 2016
When you are planning to write a paper on some subject, you develop a kind of unconscious snobbishness, which had lead me to consider with undue suspicion the realm of "popular biographies": Hughes-Hallet's is definitively a popular biography, and it performed the salutary job of reminding me of how great can those be. What is a popular biography, you might ask? Well let's look at the present book:
First of all, no foot-notes - despite the book being composed of and built around innumerable quotations from the titular D'Annunzio, those who bore witness to his actions, and historical actors who reflected on the period, the reader would be hard-pressed to trace such utterances to their printed source. This will frustrate the researcher. I'll give you an example: "The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building." This is attributed not, mind you, to Pirandello, but to Mussolini. That's exciting stuff, especially for those keen to read fascism in a jamesonian lens as I do, but if you turn to what stand for "notes", you have an enumeration of the sources for the whole chapter from Mack Smith to Gentile, many of which happen to hang out on my book shelves, but there is no chance I could track down that quote (and a Google search will reveal memes and quote-sites which are no more helpful)...
So yes - a popular biography has not foot-notes, which means we must take the author's word for the accuracy and reliability of her sources. Now this freedom from academic constraint allows for the second trait of the popular biography, namely the emphasis on narration. The primary aim is not to present original analysis or research in a structured way, but rather to gather the information provided by others, primary and secondary sources, and to collate them into a narrative which need to have rhythm, suspense, variety and humour, none of which Hughes-Hallet's book is lacking.
In part the author practice the very kind of ekphrasis which D'Annunzio himself was know to pepper his works with (the very kind of showy historicism that the avant-garde would reproach him!) : D'Annunzio's life, as Hughes-Hallet is acutely aware, was designed as the grand synthesis of a modern advertising campaign and a romantic Gesamtkunstwerk. Despite the occasional discrepancy between his real experience as we can reconstruct it, and the account of it he gives, one of the man's few redeeming features is the courage and dedication which often led him to act rather than pretend, in an age when the second would have sufficed to his success. As such, he provided the perfect material for a novelised biography, and in many regards that is what we have here.
Save for the occasional flashback or anticipation, the book is roughly chronological, starting from D'Annunzio's puglian childhood, going on to his meteoric rise as Rome's number-one dandy, his exile in France, his return in the guise of a military hero and his regency of Fiume, down to his last years in the Vittoriale and his ambiguous relationship to Fascism.
In no small part the fascination of the character, despite the hollowness which the modern eye cannot help but notice at every turn of his story, can be accounted for by the length and variety of his interests; As many in his age-group, D'Annunzio honed his skills in the inclusive tradition of italian verism, before turning to the late-romantic nebula which was then rising in Rome. Hughes-Hallet is wrong to dismiss his fashion and high-society journalism as irrelevant hack-writing, as it provided him, as it did for Mallarmé, with material support both financial and conceptual in the development of his decadent style.
His turn to nationalism could have received more attention: this truly constitute for me D'Annunzio's historical importance. The exact influence of his napolitan friends or the florentine fin-de-siecle journals like Il Marzocco still elude me, and I wish for a study which could show how the religion of art became the religion of the nation, but obviously such considerations would have been out of place in the present volume. There's a great PHD dissertation by Elena Borelli (“Action or Contemplation”) which look at the Italian fin-de-siecle and its turn from the ideals of the turris eburrae to those of the nation. Fifteen years before the futurist manifesto, and in the context of unswervingly decadent poetics, Burger's attack on the “art institution” took place far, far-away from all marxism...
Despite being one of (maybe the) best paid writer of his age, D'Annunzio his whole life lived above his means, in fact so far above he had long lost sight of the real. His whole life he was hunted down by creditors, by bailiffs, and many of his moves, to France for example, are revealed by Hughes-Hallet to have been motivated, or more exactly forced, by his dire financial situation. There is something likeable about someone whose scorn for accounting and pedestrian matters forces him to a nomadic life. Yet when we see with the author that this same irresponsability extended from his own personal comfort to that of the children he fathered but rarely if ever met or supported, and of the devoted men and women who lent money, goods or time to allow for his irresponsibility to go unchecked, we start to see that D'Annunzio, beyond a caricature of the post-romantic, was also a herald of consumer and spectacle societies.
Another near-pathological trait on which Hughes-Hallet dwells with gusto is his incessant philandering, which lead many women in disrepute and misery, and quite a few into madness and suicide. This, again, might seem like his fiction stretching its arm, greedy for tragedy and for excess, into the world of life – but the formulaic and mechanical aspects of the romances makes it all too clear that the practice had more to do with canny self-publishing and assuaging his insecurities, than with any of the courtly or mystical allegories he lifted his words from.
Hard work and refined craft do not seem to preclude grotesque levels of self-indulgence: Hughes-Hallet's “popular” aspect lead her to leave out much consideration of style or craft, which is where D'Annunzio's true labour took place. We see him act rather than read, and once again this is a concession to her public. How D'Annunzio, and many of his contemporaries, could grow up in the age of historicism, could devour methodically the life of the ancients, and the most varied and often obscure works of literature, and come out of it with nothing but a set of very naïve ideas about heroes, about genius, about faith or about youth, should have us pause. Knowledge he accumulated much like the trinkets and plaster-copies of classic works in his Vittoriale. But at the end of the day, I suspect the quantity mattered much more than the meaning.
First of all, no foot-notes - despite the book being composed of and built around innumerable quotations from the titular D'Annunzio, those who bore witness to his actions, and historical actors who reflected on the period, the reader would be hard-pressed to trace such utterances to their printed source. This will frustrate the researcher. I'll give you an example: "The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building." This is attributed not, mind you, to Pirandello, but to Mussolini. That's exciting stuff, especially for those keen to read fascism in a jamesonian lens as I do, but if you turn to what stand for "notes", you have an enumeration of the sources for the whole chapter from Mack Smith to Gentile, many of which happen to hang out on my book shelves, but there is no chance I could track down that quote (and a Google search will reveal memes and quote-sites which are no more helpful)...
So yes - a popular biography has not foot-notes, which means we must take the author's word for the accuracy and reliability of her sources. Now this freedom from academic constraint allows for the second trait of the popular biography, namely the emphasis on narration. The primary aim is not to present original analysis or research in a structured way, but rather to gather the information provided by others, primary and secondary sources, and to collate them into a narrative which need to have rhythm, suspense, variety and humour, none of which Hughes-Hallet's book is lacking.
In part the author practice the very kind of ekphrasis which D'Annunzio himself was know to pepper his works with (the very kind of showy historicism that the avant-garde would reproach him!) : D'Annunzio's life, as Hughes-Hallet is acutely aware, was designed as the grand synthesis of a modern advertising campaign and a romantic Gesamtkunstwerk. Despite the occasional discrepancy between his real experience as we can reconstruct it, and the account of it he gives, one of the man's few redeeming features is the courage and dedication which often led him to act rather than pretend, in an age when the second would have sufficed to his success. As such, he provided the perfect material for a novelised biography, and in many regards that is what we have here.
Save for the occasional flashback or anticipation, the book is roughly chronological, starting from D'Annunzio's puglian childhood, going on to his meteoric rise as Rome's number-one dandy, his exile in France, his return in the guise of a military hero and his regency of Fiume, down to his last years in the Vittoriale and his ambiguous relationship to Fascism.
In no small part the fascination of the character, despite the hollowness which the modern eye cannot help but notice at every turn of his story, can be accounted for by the length and variety of his interests; As many in his age-group, D'Annunzio honed his skills in the inclusive tradition of italian verism, before turning to the late-romantic nebula which was then rising in Rome. Hughes-Hallet is wrong to dismiss his fashion and high-society journalism as irrelevant hack-writing, as it provided him, as it did for Mallarmé, with material support both financial and conceptual in the development of his decadent style.
His turn to nationalism could have received more attention: this truly constitute for me D'Annunzio's historical importance. The exact influence of his napolitan friends or the florentine fin-de-siecle journals like Il Marzocco still elude me, and I wish for a study which could show how the religion of art became the religion of the nation, but obviously such considerations would have been out of place in the present volume. There's a great PHD dissertation by Elena Borelli (“Action or Contemplation”) which look at the Italian fin-de-siecle and its turn from the ideals of the turris eburrae to those of the nation. Fifteen years before the futurist manifesto, and in the context of unswervingly decadent poetics, Burger's attack on the “art institution” took place far, far-away from all marxism...
Despite being one of (maybe the) best paid writer of his age, D'Annunzio his whole life lived above his means, in fact so far above he had long lost sight of the real. His whole life he was hunted down by creditors, by bailiffs, and many of his moves, to France for example, are revealed by Hughes-Hallet to have been motivated, or more exactly forced, by his dire financial situation. There is something likeable about someone whose scorn for accounting and pedestrian matters forces him to a nomadic life. Yet when we see with the author that this same irresponsability extended from his own personal comfort to that of the children he fathered but rarely if ever met or supported, and of the devoted men and women who lent money, goods or time to allow for his irresponsibility to go unchecked, we start to see that D'Annunzio, beyond a caricature of the post-romantic, was also a herald of consumer and spectacle societies.
Another near-pathological trait on which Hughes-Hallet dwells with gusto is his incessant philandering, which lead many women in disrepute and misery, and quite a few into madness and suicide. This, again, might seem like his fiction stretching its arm, greedy for tragedy and for excess, into the world of life – but the formulaic and mechanical aspects of the romances makes it all too clear that the practice had more to do with canny self-publishing and assuaging his insecurities, than with any of the courtly or mystical allegories he lifted his words from.
Hard work and refined craft do not seem to preclude grotesque levels of self-indulgence: Hughes-Hallet's “popular” aspect lead her to leave out much consideration of style or craft, which is where D'Annunzio's true labour took place. We see him act rather than read, and once again this is a concession to her public. How D'Annunzio, and many of his contemporaries, could grow up in the age of historicism, could devour methodically the life of the ancients, and the most varied and often obscure works of literature, and come out of it with nothing but a set of very naïve ideas about heroes, about genius, about faith or about youth, should have us pause. Knowledge he accumulated much like the trinkets and plaster-copies of classic works in his Vittoriale. But at the end of the day, I suspect the quantity mattered much more than the meaning.
December 8, 2021
Lucy Hughes-Hallett's The Pike is a bizarre, frustrating quasi-biography of Gabriele D'Annunzio, the flamboyant novelist, playwright, adventurer and Godfather of Italian fascism. "Quasi" because it doesn't really take the form of a biography: the book is more a thematic exploration of different aspects of D'Annunzio's life, though it's clear which ones interest the author most. We're treated to endless descriptions of D'Annunzio's love life, from his famous romance with singer Eleanora Druse to a million other, lesser liaisons, from Paris to Fiume. Hughes-Hallett seems to revel in recounting the drug-fueled debauchery of D'Annunzio's private life, though readers may find it less congenial or helpful in understanding his character. We're treated to intermittent smatterings of his writings, though mostly how they reflect upon his insatiable appetites; some discussion of his friendships with European literary figures, though they feel insubstantially explored. The book does come to life when Hughes-Hallett takes in D'Annunzio's momentous rise as a demagogue, from his military service in World War I to his avenging the "mutilated victory" by seizing the port of Fiume with a private army. Ultimately D'Annunzio is eclipsed by Mussolini, who apes the writer's style and rhetoric but weds it to a (somewhat) more coherent political program and pushes his mentor out of the spotlight. The book can't help be interesting in parts, but it's so rambling, poorly-organized and obsessed with D'Annunzio's amatory adventures that it's hard to recommend. For a real understanding of what made this bizarre yet consequential figure tick, readers are advised to look elsewhere.
June 10, 2014
A fascinating read of an intriguing yet repellant figure, full of contradictions, exposed by his own frank diary and letter writing. He used his skills as an author and playwright for warmongering and public oratory. After the end of WW I, he led a group of followers into the disputed town of Fiume and took over, while the League of Nations were still discussing if it belonged to Hungary, Yugoslavia or Italy. Having recently read about post war negotiations in the Middle East in "Lawrence in Arabia", I realize that the reconstruction of the post war world was complex, and the present day is still feeling the aftermath of those decisions. It seemed relatively easy to take over Fiume, and I compare this to the current situation in the disintegrating Ukraine.
D'Annunzio seems not to have been Fascist, but many of his themes inspired Mussolini. I had never heard of him before, even though he was Italy's self appointed Bard. That he was Arrogant, serial womanizer and always living beyond his means, lead to a book that is never dull. The book also is informative as to how Fascism came to power in Italy.
D'Annunzio seems not to have been Fascist, but many of his themes inspired Mussolini. I had never heard of him before, even though he was Italy's self appointed Bard. That he was Arrogant, serial womanizer and always living beyond his means, lead to a book that is never dull. The book also is informative as to how Fascism came to power in Italy.
Want to read
February 14, 2013Even within Italy, though firmly entrenched in the literary canon, he is most commonly recalled with a sort of collective cringe. For once upon a time, in the fervid fin de siècle - for reasons variously literary, political, military and, not least, sexual - he was one of the towering figures of European culture. Think Wilde crossed with Casanova and Savonarola; Byron meets Barnum meets Mussolini - and you would have some of the flavours, but still not quite the essence, of this extraordinary, unstoppable and in many ways quite ridiculous figure.
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/gordo...
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/gordo...
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May 1, 2015inspired wastrel creates fascism in one city, others take note.
This is an in-depth biography of a very interesting person. As with D'Annunzio's own works and life, at times more is definitely more, but at points Hughes-Hallett's vivid and detailed reconstructions of all the extravagant methods by which D'Annunzio burnt his way through lovers and money start to blur. There's so much, and so many Gabriele D'Annunzios to grapple with and despite the author's unstinting efforts by the end I was still left puzzled as to how these wild personas could have fit into a single person.
This is an in-depth biography of a very interesting person. As with D'Annunzio's own works and life, at times more is definitely more, but at points Hughes-Hallett's vivid and detailed reconstructions of all the extravagant methods by which D'Annunzio burnt his way through lovers and money start to blur. There's so much, and so many Gabriele D'Annunzios to grapple with and despite the author's unstinting efforts by the end I was still left puzzled as to how these wild personas could have fit into a single person.
July 3, 2020
This book is terrible. The author has not read or understood The Triumph of Death or the Venice book and from the start completely mischaracterizes his writings and (to a lesser degree) his influence, in an attempt to create a good and easy to understand story.
These works of popular cultural history are inappropriate for a writer like D'Annunzio, who is best left to the dust heap of history. Read The Triumph of Death if you must, it is uniquely fascinating, and really should tell you everything you need to know. Normalizing and simplifying him in this fashion is deplorable, he was a great aid to the fascists, but he was even worse than that.
These works of popular cultural history are inappropriate for a writer like D'Annunzio, who is best left to the dust heap of history. Read The Triumph of Death if you must, it is uniquely fascinating, and really should tell you everything you need to know. Normalizing and simplifying him in this fashion is deplorable, he was a great aid to the fascists, but he was even worse than that.
January 23, 2025
Not knowing anything of Gabriele d'Annunzio, I went into this biography blind. D'Annunzio was a Italian poet and author, a celebrity of his time. And, what a character he was: one of a kind. I found him to be repellent but by all accounts he was charismatic in person.
A serial seducer who cheated on all of his partners and sent some of them mad, an aesthete who would fill his carriage and cars with roses, an inveterate spendthrift who avoided paying his debts, a thrill-seeker e.g. he would feed his horses numerous sugar lumps to send them crazy, a trickster who once sent out an announcement that he had died in order to drum up publicity for a book and most notably, a fascist and a polemicist who glorified war.
Probably what I admired most about him was his work capacity although his preternatural confidence was quite something too. He kept copious records, most notably detailing his sexual experiences, wrote many letters, worked as a journalist, wrote many books, plays and poems. How enduring his work is, I am not sure. Hughes-Hallett talks about how derivative he was - he would take a lot of ideas from other people.
Hughes-Hallett's argument is that d'Annunzio was an important figure in the birth of fascism. Like Nietzsche he believed in a superhuman figure who is justified in aggressively taking all. Like Nietzsche he was an aesthete and used the poetry of language to propagate his views but d'Annunzio did engage in war, flying airplanes that sent down bombs and most famously, he occupied the state of Fiume for fifteen months.
D'Annunzio wanted to annexe Fiume for Italy but ever the narcissist or entranced by power (very common - people rarely want to give power up once they have it), when the people of Fiume democratically voted him out, d'Annunzio ignored it. More than that he could not simply relinquish it to Italy, even giving Fiume a constitution of its own. This culminated in the Italian army having to forcibly remove him which is just a little bit awkward when d'Annunzio was a patriot.
Despite technically being a traitor, Mussolini, by now on the scene, recognised d'Annunzio's power of celebrity, using him to enhance Mussolini's own fascist ideologies even if d'Annunzio rejected them probably because they did not feature himself as the most important person, allowing him to retreat to a house called the Vittoriale overlooking Lake Garda to spend the rest of his life developing it, decorating it, taking cocaine and engaging in numerous sexual liaisons with women as always.
No doubt the d'Annunzios of the world give colour to it but he was a very strange person; a poseur more than a substantial person in most things.
A well-written and thorough biography, though like other reviewers have said, probably too long.
A serial seducer who cheated on all of his partners and sent some of them mad, an aesthete who would fill his carriage and cars with roses, an inveterate spendthrift who avoided paying his debts, a thrill-seeker e.g. he would feed his horses numerous sugar lumps to send them crazy, a trickster who once sent out an announcement that he had died in order to drum up publicity for a book and most notably, a fascist and a polemicist who glorified war.
Probably what I admired most about him was his work capacity although his preternatural confidence was quite something too. He kept copious records, most notably detailing his sexual experiences, wrote many letters, worked as a journalist, wrote many books, plays and poems. How enduring his work is, I am not sure. Hughes-Hallett talks about how derivative he was - he would take a lot of ideas from other people.
Hughes-Hallett's argument is that d'Annunzio was an important figure in the birth of fascism. Like Nietzsche he believed in a superhuman figure who is justified in aggressively taking all. Like Nietzsche he was an aesthete and used the poetry of language to propagate his views but d'Annunzio did engage in war, flying airplanes that sent down bombs and most famously, he occupied the state of Fiume for fifteen months.
D'Annunzio wanted to annexe Fiume for Italy but ever the narcissist or entranced by power (very common - people rarely want to give power up once they have it), when the people of Fiume democratically voted him out, d'Annunzio ignored it. More than that he could not simply relinquish it to Italy, even giving Fiume a constitution of its own. This culminated in the Italian army having to forcibly remove him which is just a little bit awkward when d'Annunzio was a patriot.
Despite technically being a traitor, Mussolini, by now on the scene, recognised d'Annunzio's power of celebrity, using him to enhance Mussolini's own fascist ideologies even if d'Annunzio rejected them probably because they did not feature himself as the most important person, allowing him to retreat to a house called the Vittoriale overlooking Lake Garda to spend the rest of his life developing it, decorating it, taking cocaine and engaging in numerous sexual liaisons with women as always.
No doubt the d'Annunzios of the world give colour to it but he was a very strange person; a poseur more than a substantial person in most things.
A well-written and thorough biography, though like other reviewers have said, probably too long.
Read
May 30, 2025Less fascism than expected, much more sex
October 21, 2020
This is an unusual biography. While following a roughly chronological course covering the main events in her subject's life, the public side of the man, author Hughes-Hallett also devotes much attention to his eccentric private life, his conceits, his amours, his art, his drug abuse. Often treated as a 'proto-fascist', D'Annunzio is not so easily pegged, his fluid self-mythologization, the personal side, being entwined with myth making as regards the Italian nation and its history. Unlike Mussolini, who had to govern, D'Annunzio, even during those months in Fiume, never much bothered. For him the pleasure, and his real aptitude, was in the art--the art of poetry, of dramaturgy, of literature, of seduction and of public speaking. He was, I imagine, a kind of Dali, one with real political influence. While Mussolini consistently attempted to have him endorse his fascist enterprise, D'Annunzio consistently kept his distance--but not so much as to jeopardize state subsidization of the various whims of his retirement.
Stepping back, what this book serves is to remind one of how very different the world looked during the inter-war period. D'Annunzio, Mussolini and other 'fascists' and their movements were objects of romance and of promise to a world recently wracked by war, economic depression and social upheaval. D'Annunzio especially, with his eroto-poetic politics, bridged the gulf between a idealized past and an alluring future.
Stepping back, what this book serves is to remind one of how very different the world looked during the inter-war period. D'Annunzio, Mussolini and other 'fascists' and their movements were objects of romance and of promise to a world recently wracked by war, economic depression and social upheaval. D'Annunzio especially, with his eroto-poetic politics, bridged the gulf between a idealized past and an alluring future.
July 8, 2015
A sophisticated and thorough look at the life of Gabriele d'Annunzio, that explores his life, his writing and his influence on the political figures who followed him. Avoiding the simplistic labelling of d'Annunzio as a proto Fascist, Lucy Hughes-Hallett looks at his aesthetic and nationalist philosophies in detail, skilfully and painstakingly unpicking all the elements that made up a very complex character.
The book avoids the standard chronological plod through from birth to death, setting the scene with a number of memorable episodes that give us a flavour of the poet, dramatist, and war hero. This makes this an engaging biography, where personality and actions are put into context. Never excusing, but always generous to her subject, the biographer shows us the promiscuity, drug taking and profligacy for which d'Annunzio was famous, along with his literary brilliance and his innovative approaches to literature and politics. Eventually d'Annunzio's innovations are taken over and subverted by Mussolini and his Fascists. Poignantly, Hughes-Hallett charts d'Annunzio's physical and artistic decline through vignettes contrasting his later life with the rise to power and dictatorship of a man he always regarded with suspicion.
A brilliant biography, thoughtful and illuminating, and a challenge to all the preconceptions about this fascinating, if often repellent, literary giant.
The book avoids the standard chronological plod through from birth to death, setting the scene with a number of memorable episodes that give us a flavour of the poet, dramatist, and war hero. This makes this an engaging biography, where personality and actions are put into context. Never excusing, but always generous to her subject, the biographer shows us the promiscuity, drug taking and profligacy for which d'Annunzio was famous, along with his literary brilliance and his innovative approaches to literature and politics. Eventually d'Annunzio's innovations are taken over and subverted by Mussolini and his Fascists. Poignantly, Hughes-Hallett charts d'Annunzio's physical and artistic decline through vignettes contrasting his later life with the rise to power and dictatorship of a man he always regarded with suspicion.
A brilliant biography, thoughtful and illuminating, and a challenge to all the preconceptions about this fascinating, if often repellent, literary giant.
April 28, 2014
To enjoy a book the reader should really have a good relationship with the author. We may not get on, or desire to meet socially, but the reader should respect their writing, research and opinions. With biographies, there are three of us in the relationship, which complicates things somewhat. In the case of this book, the current reviewer forged an excellent relationship with Ms Hughes-Hallett, admires her work and looks forward to her next book. But, my word, how he came to detest the subject of this biography! Gabriele D'Annunzio was a playwright and poet, but so were many others. He also incited a young Italy to go to war, and annexed a Slav City for his own purposes. He was obsessed with sex, ugly, bald, short, had bad teeth and loads of girlfriends. He built up debts and never even tried to repay them. A social snob, an aesthete, a proto-Fascist, but brave enough to fly some of the first planes as part of World War One - this reviewer had to place this book down for a few days and tackle something else, not because of the writing (which is suburb) but because the subject matter just got on his wick so much. Not a phrase said subject would approve of, which is why he uses it. A horrible man, but a brilliant book.
January 25, 2013
From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Lucy Hughes-Hallett charts the life of Italian politician and poet Gabriele D'Annunzio
Lucy Hughes-Hallett charts the life of Italian politician and poet Gabriele D'Annunzio
September 10, 2016
this book gave me syphillis
September 18, 2016
To long, to detailed, but damn intersting and fluently written. Must read if you want to understand facism, 19th century Romanticism or Italy.
April 30, 2014
I have read this entire book under the misapprehension that I was reading a second book by the author of "The immortal dinner: a famous evening of genius and laughter in literary London, 1817" (which I reviewed about 18 months ago). I gave that 3 stars, which may have been more than it deserved. This is a book of an entirely different stamp. A little Wikipedia research leads me to believe that the author of "The immortal dinner", Penelope Hughes-Hallett, is the mother of Lucy, the author of "The Pike".
I have observed in some other review that authors usually make very dull subjects for biography, but there are occasional spectacular exceptions (such as Arthur Rackham, a biography of whom I reviewed at about the time I reviewed "The immortal dinner"). Gabrielle d'Annunzio is such an exception. In the intellectual ferment of early 20th century Europe, when it must have seemed that no orthodoxy was safe from the artistic and philosophical avante garde, d'Annunzio was making a name for himself as a force in the arena of letters. Whatever we may think of the man's character, it would be hard to deny that he had talents for which the only apt word is "genius": he was precocious as a youth, profoundly well-read in several European languages, capable of turning his hand to almost any emerging or archaic style of poetry or prose, and in many ways a literary and aesthetic pioneer. He had from an early age a great flair for publicity, particularly self-promotion. At the age of about 17, on the eve of publishing his second book of verse, he misled a national newspaper into reporting the death in a riding accident of the extraordinarily gifted young poet Gabrielle d'Annunzio. The surge of public sympathy generated by the false report created considerable demand for his new book of verse.
D'Annunzio was a Neitzcheian even before he read Neitzche. Some of his quite early fiction and drama features characters (male) to whom the rules simply don't apply, so-called "supermen". Naturally he saw himself as just such a man. He had Oscar Wilde's extravagant tastes, sexual magnetism such as most men can only dream of and, in wartime, proved himself to be (to borrow a phrase from Ernest Hemingway, who considered d'Annunzio to be in most other respects a "jerk") "divinely brave". He was an advocate of force in political and international affairs, and an Italian nationalist who did much to propagate a myth of Italy as the inheritor of the values of Imperial Rome. He could sway a crowd in a way that we normally associate with the grandstanding of Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, both of whom learned their craft from the example of the maestro d'Annunzio.
The defining event of d'Annunzio's public life was his annexation, at the head of a force of some 2000 volunteers and Italian army mutineers, of the Adriatic port city of Fiume (modern day Rijeka, in Croatia) to assert a territorial claim which had been rejected by the League of Nations (particularly the American president Woodrow Wilson) and was unsupported by the Italian government itself. He ruled Fiume, a polity armed and fed by piracy and little else, for 18 months until Italian government forces drove him out. A charismatic and utopian dreamer (but a totally incompetent administrator), d'Annunzio created in Fiume the rhetoric, the panoply and ritual, the aesthetic and the ideology which Mussolini would later adapt (much of it little altered) and call Fascism. It is no exaggeration to assert that without d'Annunzio there might have been no Fascism and no Nazism as we now know them, and Adolf Hitler might never have achieved the near destruction of Europe as he did.
We should be cautious about condemning historical figures who have held views which now put them on the wrong side of history. Few have the prescience to see where powerful and influential ideas may ultimately lead. When the Great War broke out d'Annunzio saw it as a splendid opportunity, as did so many who enlisted, to participate in something heroic and historic that would change everything; but Italy was neutral. He preached war as a transcendent thing that would cleanse Europe with the blood of heroes and make Italy great once more, and he vilified the cautious pragmatism of the Italian administration. Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies, once it became apparent that the Germans and Austrians could not win, and d'Annunzio, "divinely brave", was there at the front celebrating the arrival of "new blood" to feed the god of war. His influence was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Italian youths, but it is well to remember that the ideas which he championed so effectively were not uniquely his own. He led, others clamoured to follow. D'Annunzio was certainly guilty, but his guilt is part of a collective guilt, the ideology which he proclaimed a sort of pathology of ideas infecting even some of the most intelligent minds in Europe.
I've said much about the subject of this biography without much evaluation of the book itself. I think the man d'Annunzio deserves to be much better known than he is outside of Italy, so I've talked him up. The book is, as far as I can tell, very well researched; it's certainly packed with information. Hughes-Hallett's prose is clear and informative. There is a slight structural weakness in the book: the second section, called "Streams", focusses on themes in d'Annunzio's thought and works, one per chapter, and illustrates the points it makes with incidents from his life which after a while gave me an irritating sense that I was being drip-fed biographical information and made me impatient to get on with the real action of the story. This is a minor gripe, and I'm not sure that I wouldn't have found a rigidly chronological treatment more tiresome.
Highly recommended, and I think well deserving of its awards (2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and 2013 Costa Book Awards Biography of the Year). I have meant to put my toe in the water and read something of d'Annunzio's fiction for years, in Italian of course. I've got a copy of L'innocente on my Kindle, and just as soon as I finish the very long French novel I'm currently reading I'll begin.
I have observed in some other review that authors usually make very dull subjects for biography, but there are occasional spectacular exceptions (such as Arthur Rackham, a biography of whom I reviewed at about the time I reviewed "The immortal dinner"). Gabrielle d'Annunzio is such an exception. In the intellectual ferment of early 20th century Europe, when it must have seemed that no orthodoxy was safe from the artistic and philosophical avante garde, d'Annunzio was making a name for himself as a force in the arena of letters. Whatever we may think of the man's character, it would be hard to deny that he had talents for which the only apt word is "genius": he was precocious as a youth, profoundly well-read in several European languages, capable of turning his hand to almost any emerging or archaic style of poetry or prose, and in many ways a literary and aesthetic pioneer. He had from an early age a great flair for publicity, particularly self-promotion. At the age of about 17, on the eve of publishing his second book of verse, he misled a national newspaper into reporting the death in a riding accident of the extraordinarily gifted young poet Gabrielle d'Annunzio. The surge of public sympathy generated by the false report created considerable demand for his new book of verse.
D'Annunzio was a Neitzcheian even before he read Neitzche. Some of his quite early fiction and drama features characters (male) to whom the rules simply don't apply, so-called "supermen". Naturally he saw himself as just such a man. He had Oscar Wilde's extravagant tastes, sexual magnetism such as most men can only dream of and, in wartime, proved himself to be (to borrow a phrase from Ernest Hemingway, who considered d'Annunzio to be in most other respects a "jerk") "divinely brave". He was an advocate of force in political and international affairs, and an Italian nationalist who did much to propagate a myth of Italy as the inheritor of the values of Imperial Rome. He could sway a crowd in a way that we normally associate with the grandstanding of Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, both of whom learned their craft from the example of the maestro d'Annunzio.
The defining event of d'Annunzio's public life was his annexation, at the head of a force of some 2000 volunteers and Italian army mutineers, of the Adriatic port city of Fiume (modern day Rijeka, in Croatia) to assert a territorial claim which had been rejected by the League of Nations (particularly the American president Woodrow Wilson) and was unsupported by the Italian government itself. He ruled Fiume, a polity armed and fed by piracy and little else, for 18 months until Italian government forces drove him out. A charismatic and utopian dreamer (but a totally incompetent administrator), d'Annunzio created in Fiume the rhetoric, the panoply and ritual, the aesthetic and the ideology which Mussolini would later adapt (much of it little altered) and call Fascism. It is no exaggeration to assert that without d'Annunzio there might have been no Fascism and no Nazism as we now know them, and Adolf Hitler might never have achieved the near destruction of Europe as he did.
We should be cautious about condemning historical figures who have held views which now put them on the wrong side of history. Few have the prescience to see where powerful and influential ideas may ultimately lead. When the Great War broke out d'Annunzio saw it as a splendid opportunity, as did so many who enlisted, to participate in something heroic and historic that would change everything; but Italy was neutral. He preached war as a transcendent thing that would cleanse Europe with the blood of heroes and make Italy great once more, and he vilified the cautious pragmatism of the Italian administration. Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies, once it became apparent that the Germans and Austrians could not win, and d'Annunzio, "divinely brave", was there at the front celebrating the arrival of "new blood" to feed the god of war. His influence was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Italian youths, but it is well to remember that the ideas which he championed so effectively were not uniquely his own. He led, others clamoured to follow. D'Annunzio was certainly guilty, but his guilt is part of a collective guilt, the ideology which he proclaimed a sort of pathology of ideas infecting even some of the most intelligent minds in Europe.
I've said much about the subject of this biography without much evaluation of the book itself. I think the man d'Annunzio deserves to be much better known than he is outside of Italy, so I've talked him up. The book is, as far as I can tell, very well researched; it's certainly packed with information. Hughes-Hallett's prose is clear and informative. There is a slight structural weakness in the book: the second section, called "Streams", focusses on themes in d'Annunzio's thought and works, one per chapter, and illustrates the points it makes with incidents from his life which after a while gave me an irritating sense that I was being drip-fed biographical information and made me impatient to get on with the real action of the story. This is a minor gripe, and I'm not sure that I wouldn't have found a rigidly chronological treatment more tiresome.
Highly recommended, and I think well deserving of its awards (2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and 2013 Costa Book Awards Biography of the Year). I have meant to put my toe in the water and read something of d'Annunzio's fiction for years, in Italian of course. I've got a copy of L'innocente on my Kindle, and just as soon as I finish the very long French novel I'm currently reading I'll begin.
August 21, 2024
Si pensáis que habéis visto a algún personaje alguna vez es porque no conocéis a D'Annunzio.
Egocéntrico como el que más, derrochador a niveles absurdos (no paraban de perseguirle sus numerosos acreedores), inspirador del fascismo, aún sin ser él fascista, pero claramente Mussolini cogió muchos elementos dannunzianos ("D'Annunzio no es fascista, pero el fascismo es claramente dannunziano"), poeta, novelista, dramaturgo aviador, belicista y mucho más es un básico resumen de la vida de este señor.
Esta lectura ha sido apasionante, no podía dar crédito a lo que iba leyendo en este recorrido por su vida, intensa como pocas.
Como dato divertido, pasó de ser un poeta sensible, alguien delicado, a un instigador de la guerra, exigiendo al gobierno italiano en que entrara en la IGM cuando se quedó calvo.
Por favor buscad D'Annunzio Fiume si queréis alucinar
Egocéntrico como el que más, derrochador a niveles absurdos (no paraban de perseguirle sus numerosos acreedores), inspirador del fascismo, aún sin ser él fascista, pero claramente Mussolini cogió muchos elementos dannunzianos ("D'Annunzio no es fascista, pero el fascismo es claramente dannunziano"), poeta, novelista, dramaturgo aviador, belicista y mucho más es un básico resumen de la vida de este señor.
Esta lectura ha sido apasionante, no podía dar crédito a lo que iba leyendo en este recorrido por su vida, intensa como pocas.
Como dato divertido, pasó de ser un poeta sensible, alguien delicado, a un instigador de la guerra, exigiendo al gobierno italiano en que entrara en la IGM cuando se quedó calvo.
Por favor buscad D'Annunzio Fiume si queréis alucinar
August 6, 2024
Although thoroughly researched and well-written, Hughes-Hallett cannot resist interjecting her personal assessments of d'Annunzio's personality and allowing her political views to mar her explanations of his theories. As such, the reader is forced to constantly reconstruct d'Annunzio's beliefs out of the wreckage which Hughes-Hallett attempts to make of them. Hughes-Hallett has also opted to arrange this biography in non-linear order; while not difficult to follow, this disordering contributes very little to the text.
December 29, 2021
Truly an enchanting, eccentric man. I guess it comes with the territory that he always remained a slave to his urges, because his urges are also what made him do the things I admire as well.
March 22, 2025
Both remarkable and refreshing.
December 6, 2023
‘Posing for his sexual partner as a martyred saint, Gabriele d’Annuncio was titillating himself with the image of a young man tortured and killed.’
The Pike, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annuncio, is an unrivalled story of decadence and hedonism requiring, at times, a suspension of disbelief. Death, sadism and eroticism are constant and intertwining themes, to the extent that I wondered, when d’Annuncio urged young Italians into World War 1, whether he did so for the glory of Italy or for his own sexual pleasure. Hughes-Hallett has no scruples on the matter. ‘Throughout the Great War, d’Annuncio was to refer over and over again, and in increasingly exulted 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.’ (1)
Before World War 1, Italy was a poor, politically unstable country wracked by feudal lords and mafiosi, and the exodus of families looking for a better life had already begun to give the world its plethora of Italian restaurants. (Read Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (2), written after Mussolini had locked away the mafia and made the trains run on time.) Abiding by a belief that war, hatred and bloodshed would strengthen it and in order to redeem territory promised to it at the Secret Treaty of London in 1915, Italy deserted its allies, Austria-Hungary and Germany, and sent its young men to World War 1 on a salary of a third of a lire per day (3). My husband’s grandfather travelled from Turin to fight on the northeastern frontier. Because he was illegitimate he was put on the front line in the hope that he would be shot first. It was not until he died in 1971 that the Italian government sent his daughter his war medals which she promptly sent back.
Italy is a strange country, held together by dreams of ancient Rome, the Renaissance and a hasty revision of its modern history textbooks. The last time I was in Turin I went for a walk along the Po and read there a series of mounted plaques glorifying the Risorgimento and the rise of the Italian military, both historical failures and examples of the importance to Italy of its own propaganda.
Indeed, what would Italy do without words? It is built entirely upon them, as The Pike proves. It is a very long book, but it is d’Annuncio’s self-styled takeover of Rijeka (Fiume) in 1919, surfing in on a wave of alcohol and cocaine, that concerns my study of War in the Balkans.
At the time Italy had a population of over 38 million and Croatia just 3 million. It was hardly surprising then that d’Annuncio and his contemporaries could claim Rijeka, Istria and Dalmatia as Italian merely because a few Italian businesses had crossed the Adriatic and doubled the population in the cities. Yet it is doubtful for how long even this had been going on, for according to Viscountess Strangford who visited Rijeka in 1863, ‘There was but little Italian to be heard, but much more German, and all the rest Slavonic or Hungarian.’ (4) That there had been an increase in Italian settlers since then is likely, because I noticed a steady increase in Italian surnames in the church registries of my mother's village in Istria after Italian unification in 1860. Nevertheless, in 1910, Maude M Holbach, another British visitor to Dalmatia, recorded the following, ‘The population of Dalmatia at the census of 1890 was 507,000 souls of whom 417,000 are of Croatian stock, 90,000 of Serbian, and 16,000 were returned as Italian, the rest being Austrians, Hungarians and Poles.’ (5)
The chapters in The Pike concerning the fate of Italian soldiers during the war are horrifying and, after the bloodbath when Italy demanded the Slavic territories promised it in 1915, America's Woodrow Wilson retorted, ‘Why does Italy want all these countries that don’t speak Italian?’ (3)
The answer in part was Gabriele D’Annuncio, the voice of irredentism. Irredentism was an Italian word which meant land that should be considered unredeemed Italian territory. The criteria were:
i) it had once been part of the Roman Empire,
ii) it had once been part of the Venetian Empire,
iii) a few Italians lived there,
iv) a few Slavs lived there who wanted to be Italian (my grandmother)
v) it was south of the Alps and thus its acquisition made the map of Italy look better (the South Tyrol and the western third of Slovenia).
Istria was a good fit for points i) to iv). My mother, however, felt displaced in Italy and after World War 2, took on Yugoslav citizenship. Of Istria she said, ‘We were Austrian then Austria lost the war, then we were Italian and Italy lost the war.’ These Venetian-speaking Istrians lived on the west coast in a strip so thin that my mother told me that Croatian speakers came to her village of Tar in the 1920’s to buy fish. In the days before refrigeration, they couldn't have lived very far away.
It is evident from The Pike that Gabriele D'Annuncio was a metaphorical magician. Though small and unattractive (some would call him odious and repellent) he cast his spell over countless women who didn’t like the look of him but slept with him anyway, actresses, editors, musicians, politicians, the great mass of the Italian populace and sundry minor aristocracy. His mastery with words and manipulation of emotions invariably got him what he wanted, and it’s only a shame that he didn’t live long enough to see Italy after World War 2 lose all the territory his efforts had gained it.
But let us return to Rijeka in 1919.
The war was over and d'Annuncio was 'foremost among those shaping the story of the war's end as one of Italian humiliation, Italian victimisation.' (1) In Paris, the Allies allowed Italy only temporary occupation of the Croatian coast but delayed in granting it the territory promised in the Secret Treaty of London. D'Annuncio 'swore to fight on for the cause of an Italian Dalmatia' even as Italy slumped into depression and civil war. In an ugly mood, a million and a half demobbed soldiers trained in violence filled the cities and countryside, including the elite Italian troops, the arditi. Feared by the people, these arditi were unwelcome at home, they had nothing to do, and they were itching for a fight. They and d'Annuncio were mutually attracted.
Ignoring Italy's dire economic position, D'Annuncio then produced a series of incendiary speeches in Rome to the effect that Italy should 'seize by force what the peace-makers in Paris refused to grant them.' For his efforts in destabilizing an already unstable country, he was kicked out of Rome by the military authorities and sent back to Venice.
Anxious to belong to a Greater Italy, Rijeka's Italian population wrote to d'Annuncio asking him to lead them. The local arditi prepared to mobilize. Emotions ruled the day and violence towards non-Italians quickly overcame the city. D'Annuncio's ego was fueled and, although the government in Rome would not sanction any action against the city by him, on 11th September 1919 he decided to satisfy his fans and enter Rijeka. As if under d'Annuncio's spell, the Italian general protecting the city for the Allies let him and his arditi pass.
Once installed, however, the poet had no idea how to run a city in ways that didn't mimic his own lifestyle, and Rijeka swiftly became 'a bordello, a refuge for criminals and prostitutes...disorder, corruption and craziness.' 'D'Annuncio ‘staged pseudo-sacred ceremonies in the cathedral…and encourage a cult of his own personality so fervid that the Bishop…noted furiously that his flock were forsaking Christ for this modern Orpheus.’(1)
After three months, the government in Rome offered the citizens of Rijeka the option to remain a free city under the protection of Italy, and a plebiscite voted d'Annuncio out. Yet still he remained, ruling his totalitarian city-state by intimidation while the government commenced a blockade.
Finally, as the new wave of violent fascism erupted around Trieste and Italian ships trained their guns on Rijeka's harbour, d'Annuncio was ordered to vacate the city by 6pm on Christmas Eve 1920. Three days of fighting came to end when the city begged him to leave.
Gabriele d'Annuncio departed Rijeka on 18th January 1921 and in October 1922 Mussolini marched on Rome.
References
1. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy The Pike WF Howes 2014
2. Levi, Carlo Christ Stopped at Eboli, Einaudi 1945.
3. Duggan Christopher The Force of Destiny, Penguin 2008
4. Strangford, Emily Anne Beaufort Smythe The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863. Richard Bentley, London 1864
5. Holbach, Maude M Dalmatia, the Land Where East Meets West, 1910. William Clowes and Sons Ltd, London.
The Pike, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annuncio, is an unrivalled story of decadence and hedonism requiring, at times, a suspension of disbelief. Death, sadism and eroticism are constant and intertwining themes, to the extent that I wondered, when d’Annuncio urged young Italians into World War 1, whether he did so for the glory of Italy or for his own sexual pleasure. Hughes-Hallett has no scruples on the matter. ‘Throughout the Great War, d’Annuncio was to refer over and over again, and in increasingly exulted 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.’ (1)
Before World War 1, Italy was a poor, politically unstable country wracked by feudal lords and mafiosi, and the exodus of families looking for a better life had already begun to give the world its plethora of Italian restaurants. (Read Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (2), written after Mussolini had locked away the mafia and made the trains run on time.) Abiding by a belief that war, hatred and bloodshed would strengthen it and in order to redeem territory promised to it at the Secret Treaty of London in 1915, Italy deserted its allies, Austria-Hungary and Germany, and sent its young men to World War 1 on a salary of a third of a lire per day (3). My husband’s grandfather travelled from Turin to fight on the northeastern frontier. Because he was illegitimate he was put on the front line in the hope that he would be shot first. It was not until he died in 1971 that the Italian government sent his daughter his war medals which she promptly sent back.
Italy is a strange country, held together by dreams of ancient Rome, the Renaissance and a hasty revision of its modern history textbooks. The last time I was in Turin I went for a walk along the Po and read there a series of mounted plaques glorifying the Risorgimento and the rise of the Italian military, both historical failures and examples of the importance to Italy of its own propaganda.
Indeed, what would Italy do without words? It is built entirely upon them, as The Pike proves. It is a very long book, but it is d’Annuncio’s self-styled takeover of Rijeka (Fiume) in 1919, surfing in on a wave of alcohol and cocaine, that concerns my study of War in the Balkans.
At the time Italy had a population of over 38 million and Croatia just 3 million. It was hardly surprising then that d’Annuncio and his contemporaries could claim Rijeka, Istria and Dalmatia as Italian merely because a few Italian businesses had crossed the Adriatic and doubled the population in the cities. Yet it is doubtful for how long even this had been going on, for according to Viscountess Strangford who visited Rijeka in 1863, ‘There was but little Italian to be heard, but much more German, and all the rest Slavonic or Hungarian.’ (4) That there had been an increase in Italian settlers since then is likely, because I noticed a steady increase in Italian surnames in the church registries of my mother's village in Istria after Italian unification in 1860. Nevertheless, in 1910, Maude M Holbach, another British visitor to Dalmatia, recorded the following, ‘The population of Dalmatia at the census of 1890 was 507,000 souls of whom 417,000 are of Croatian stock, 90,000 of Serbian, and 16,000 were returned as Italian, the rest being Austrians, Hungarians and Poles.’ (5)
The chapters in The Pike concerning the fate of Italian soldiers during the war are horrifying and, after the bloodbath when Italy demanded the Slavic territories promised it in 1915, America's Woodrow Wilson retorted, ‘Why does Italy want all these countries that don’t speak Italian?’ (3)
The answer in part was Gabriele D’Annuncio, the voice of irredentism. Irredentism was an Italian word which meant land that should be considered unredeemed Italian territory. The criteria were:
i) it had once been part of the Roman Empire,
ii) it had once been part of the Venetian Empire,
iii) a few Italians lived there,
iv) a few Slavs lived there who wanted to be Italian (my grandmother)
v) it was south of the Alps and thus its acquisition made the map of Italy look better (the South Tyrol and the western third of Slovenia).
Istria was a good fit for points i) to iv). My mother, however, felt displaced in Italy and after World War 2, took on Yugoslav citizenship. Of Istria she said, ‘We were Austrian then Austria lost the war, then we were Italian and Italy lost the war.’ These Venetian-speaking Istrians lived on the west coast in a strip so thin that my mother told me that Croatian speakers came to her village of Tar in the 1920’s to buy fish. In the days before refrigeration, they couldn't have lived very far away.
It is evident from The Pike that Gabriele D'Annuncio was a metaphorical magician. Though small and unattractive (some would call him odious and repellent) he cast his spell over countless women who didn’t like the look of him but slept with him anyway, actresses, editors, musicians, politicians, the great mass of the Italian populace and sundry minor aristocracy. His mastery with words and manipulation of emotions invariably got him what he wanted, and it’s only a shame that he didn’t live long enough to see Italy after World War 2 lose all the territory his efforts had gained it.
But let us return to Rijeka in 1919.
The war was over and d'Annuncio was 'foremost among those shaping the story of the war's end as one of Italian humiliation, Italian victimisation.' (1) In Paris, the Allies allowed Italy only temporary occupation of the Croatian coast but delayed in granting it the territory promised in the Secret Treaty of London. D'Annuncio 'swore to fight on for the cause of an Italian Dalmatia' even as Italy slumped into depression and civil war. In an ugly mood, a million and a half demobbed soldiers trained in violence filled the cities and countryside, including the elite Italian troops, the arditi. Feared by the people, these arditi were unwelcome at home, they had nothing to do, and they were itching for a fight. They and d'Annuncio were mutually attracted.
Ignoring Italy's dire economic position, D'Annuncio then produced a series of incendiary speeches in Rome to the effect that Italy should 'seize by force what the peace-makers in Paris refused to grant them.' For his efforts in destabilizing an already unstable country, he was kicked out of Rome by the military authorities and sent back to Venice.
Anxious to belong to a Greater Italy, Rijeka's Italian population wrote to d'Annuncio asking him to lead them. The local arditi prepared to mobilize. Emotions ruled the day and violence towards non-Italians quickly overcame the city. D'Annuncio's ego was fueled and, although the government in Rome would not sanction any action against the city by him, on 11th September 1919 he decided to satisfy his fans and enter Rijeka. As if under d'Annuncio's spell, the Italian general protecting the city for the Allies let him and his arditi pass.
Once installed, however, the poet had no idea how to run a city in ways that didn't mimic his own lifestyle, and Rijeka swiftly became 'a bordello, a refuge for criminals and prostitutes...disorder, corruption and craziness.' 'D'Annuncio ‘staged pseudo-sacred ceremonies in the cathedral…and encourage a cult of his own personality so fervid that the Bishop…noted furiously that his flock were forsaking Christ for this modern Orpheus.’(1)
After three months, the government in Rome offered the citizens of Rijeka the option to remain a free city under the protection of Italy, and a plebiscite voted d'Annuncio out. Yet still he remained, ruling his totalitarian city-state by intimidation while the government commenced a blockade.
Finally, as the new wave of violent fascism erupted around Trieste and Italian ships trained their guns on Rijeka's harbour, d'Annuncio was ordered to vacate the city by 6pm on Christmas Eve 1920. Three days of fighting came to end when the city begged him to leave.
Gabriele d'Annuncio departed Rijeka on 18th January 1921 and in October 1922 Mussolini marched on Rome.
References
1. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy The Pike WF Howes 2014
2. Levi, Carlo Christ Stopped at Eboli, Einaudi 1945.
3. Duggan Christopher The Force of Destiny, Penguin 2008
4. Strangford, Emily Anne Beaufort Smythe The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863. Richard Bentley, London 1864
5. Holbach, Maude M Dalmatia, the Land Where East Meets West, 1910. William Clowes and Sons Ltd, London.
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