‘I opened the letter. I read it, and lo! Everything turned bright!’
When the war began, the previous year, Italy remained neutral. Prime Minister Antonio Salandra and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino, aware that their armed forces were ill-prepared for conflict, announced that they would observe the terms of the 1882 Triple Alliance, whereby Italy had agreed with Austria and Germany to refrain from making war on each other. To d’Annunzio that neutrality seemed shameful. Italy should fight, not for advantage but as a matter of pride. Too many people around the world thought of the country as ‘a museum, an inn, a holiday destination, a horizon touched up with Prussian blue for international honeymoons’. They must be shown otherwise. Throughout the winter of 1914/15, d’Annunzio had been calling on the Italian government, through the pages of journals both French and Italian, to intervene on the side of France (Britain and Russia’s part in the war was of no interest to him) against the Teutonic ‘horde’. ‘This war is not a simple conflict of interests, which might be transient, sporadic or illusory,’ he wrote, ‘it is a struggle of races, a confrontation of irreconcilable powers, a trial of blood.’
The French government was naturally eager to encourage d’Annunzio to bring his compatriots into battle on their side. The evening before he read the letter from Genoa, a French official, Jean Finot, came to see him. D’Annunzio didn’t like him much. ‘A little hunched man, held upright by a kind of dried-out vanity.’ Nor was he impressed by the plan Finot had come to discuss. Peppino Garibaldi’s volunteer legion had been fighting heroically: a quarter of the men, including two of Garibaldi’s other grandsons, had been killed. Now the survivors were to be sent home to rouse their fellow Italians to action. Madame Paquin, the couturier, had promised 2,000 red shirts of the kind that the great Garibaldi’s own men had worn half a century before, but made of silk this time. The venture was something like a coup d’état, something like a piece of political theatre. As the former it seemed incompetent: as the latter it felt muzzily ill-directed. D’Annunzio was anxious. After Finot left he applied a mustard plaster to his chest – he had a bad cough – and went to bed, but lay for a long time restless. All his life his moods oscillated between prodigious energy and depression. On this night he was very low. He waited for sleep, ‘as for death’.
When he read the letter from Genoa the following morning he was instantly high again. ‘I will go. I will lead the Garibaldini Legion, the red wave,’ he told his notebook. ‘To reach Quarto … to cross the Tyrrhenian Sea with a ship loaded with blood eager to be spilled!’ An ‘Apollonian providence’ had come to his aid.
Peppino Garibaldi came to see him in the afternoon. The two men paced around the room, both of them too excited to sit down. D’Annunzio small, neatly groomed as always; Garibaldi tall, with his deeply lined face and brilliant eyes, in the blue tunic and red breeches of a colonel in the French army. D’Annunzio expounded his vision: ‘Two thousand young men in arms … encircling the solemn monument ready to set out from there to conquer and to die.’ He himself as creator, director and star of this martial show. ‘It is impossible that Italy, however blind or deaf, does not see the sign, does not hear the appeal, rising up from the rock of Quarto.’ Garibaldi was equally moved. It will be a flame, he said, or a poem. D’Annunzio, who had woken that morning feeling seedy, with a touch of ‘the humiliating little complaint’ (either piles or a recurrence of the venereal disease which he had contracted the previous year), ended the day enraptured, swept away on ‘a torrent of interior music’.
Just over three weeks later came the sad day of Fly’s death, and a mournful Easter spent with Nathalie, followed by the melancholy process of packing up. ‘Life flows from the house as though from an open vein,’ wrote d’Annunzio, watching the removal men dismantle his Parisian home. He gave away some of his best greyhounds – two of them to Pétain, the future Marshal. D’Annunzio was, as usual, badly in need of money. To finance his journey he pawned some splendid emeralds which Eleonora Duse had given him. With another month to go before he was due in Quarto, he set out for his villa on the Atlantic coast at Arcachon. There he poured his energies into writing two furiously bellicose articles and the speech for Quarto, and into his last love affair on French soil, with a surgeon’s daughter, a fine horsewoman (d’Annunzio admired ‘Amazons’) to whose presence in the neighbourhood his housekeeper-cum-concubine-cum-procuress Amélie Mazower (whom he called ‘Aélis’) had alerted him.
Back in Paris, assiduous as ever in self-promotion, he gave a press conference. The Revue de Paris correspondent was positively shocked by the splendour of his wardrobe. His secretary had been busy chasing up the suits he had on order from his tailor, and his accounts for that month reveal he had also bought a prodigious number of new cravats. He delivered the text of his speech to Salandra, the Italian premier, and to newspaper editors in Paris and Milan, with strict instructions that it was to be embargoed until the morning of 5 May. He told the editor of Le Figaro, ‘the die is about to be cast’. The verbal flourish reveals that he saw himself as a second Julius Caesar, imposing a heroically martial destiny on an unwilling Rome.
He was given a grand send-off at the Gare de Lyon. ‘Women rushed to the station,’ he wrote. ‘Almost all of them were acquainted with my bed.’ Nathalie was not on the platform. D’Annunzio, who had begun referring to her as ‘the nuisance’, had sent her back to the farm. But the Amazon from Arcachon was in the crowd gathered to see him off, and so, probably, were several of his other lovers. The lesbian novelist Sibilla Aleramo, like him a member of the sexually ambiguous coterie who met at Nathalie Barney’s salon, and a friend of the painter Romaine Brooks, whose only male lover he was, alleges he had been carrying on affairs with ‘four, five or six’ women simultaneously during the previous year.
On 4 May 1915, just over five years after he had left Italy bankrupt and with ignominious haste, he recrossed the border. While he had dallied in Paris through the first months of the war, ordering haute-couture outfits for his dogs (red and blue, made by the couturier Charles Worth), teaching himself glass-blowing and twiddling at the recipe for his patent perfume, d’Annunzio had become, in his compatriots’ collective imagination, the man who could save their national honour. He had left the country as a celebrity whose escapades, however amusing, were becoming undignified. He returned as a nationalist messiah.
Giosuè Carducci, the great poet of the previous generation, had heralded the advent of such a man. ‘Prepare the way for the master who is to come, for the spirit of Italy, grand and great, for the genius, the beatings of whose approaching wings we already hear.’ So had d’Annunzio himself, writing enigmatically that ‘He will come from the silence, defeating death,/The necessary Hero.’ During his absence in France he had, for Italians of a nationalist and militarist persuasion, acquired the status and glamour of such a messianic hero. In Milan, his supporters organised a series of readings of his poems to celebrate his advent. ‘Rapt in his sublime visions, he seemed to have forgotten his beautiful fatherland,’ wrote an admirer. ‘But no! As soon as the new dawn appeared in the skies, he arose proudly and with a shudder of love he ran to the breast of the great mother.’
As d’Annunzio’s train approached the great mother’s border, he bound his eyes, lest, as he explained, the first sight of his homeland prove too emotionally overwhelming. Once he was on Italian territory, he was met at every stop by enthusiastic crowds. Young women climbed on the train’s running board, kissing the glass of his compartment’s windows and handing him flowers. In Turin, according to the following day’s Corriere della Sera, ‘thousands of hands reached out to him’, while d’Annunzio, with a catch in his throat, addressed them from the window of the train. As he approached Genoa, a professor at the university cancelled a lecture, urging his students not to learn history but to go meet d’Annunzio at the station and ‘live history’ instead.
With difficulty d’Annunzio was got into a motor car and driven through the press of people. Safely arrived at his hotel, he came out onto a balcony and spoke to the excited crowd. ‘Five long years of absence and sadness lie behind me, abolished!’ There had, in fact, been nothing but his own inclination to prevent him returning to Italy earlier, but he referred to his absence as an ‘exile’. ‘Now I live, I wish only to live, a new life.’
The next day he spoke on the waterfront. Having read the text of his oration, King Victor Emmanuel