Wingless Victory - A Biography of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Eleonora Duse

Part One

CHAPTER I

What’s in a Name?

SINCE dawn there had been great bustling round the substantial house of Don Francesco-Paolo d’Annunzio in the usually quiet town of Pescara. His wife, Donna Luisa, was in labor. As Angeladea Mungo, the midwife, and Rachele Catena, the hairdresser, had been hurriedly summoned, it was obvious that Don Francesco would soon know whether at last he would have an heir. At twenty-five he already had two daughters. But girls, except in royal families, were not much good at carrying on a name, and his was a high-sounding one of which he was all the more proud because he had not been born with it.

Besides the hairdresser and the midwife who had seen a good part of Pescara’s population into the world, many relatives had also arrived. There were the two sisters of Don Francesco, Donna Rosalba and Donna Maria. There was Don Camillo Rapagnetta. There was also Donna Luisa’s father, Don Filippo de Benedictis, who had come from Ortona with a load of silver piasters in case his daughter should have a boy. There were besides a gathering of lesser kin and a crowd of expectant celebrants, anxious to show their regard for the prosperous Don Francesco.

It was eight o’clock when the child came into the world, but it took several minutes and the prompt action of the midwife before it could announce its coming. At birth I was gagged by death . . . d’Annunzio was to write. I would not have drawn my first breath . . . if ready and expert hands had not . . . torn away a sort of smothering shroud.¹

The infant was small but compact and well made. Kissing the completely bald head of her first boy, Donna Luisa said: You were born in March and on a Friday. Who knows, my son, how great you will be in the world!²

Whatever the superstitions attached to the month and the day, there was certainly a portent in the name they chose for him, Gabriele, after the luminous angel who stood in the presence of God. As it was, the d’Annunzio house that morning seemed like an antechamber to heaven with all the sanctities it contained. The midwife’s first name was Angel of God, Donna Luisa’s patronymic clearly indicated that she was of the blessed, while d’Annunzio meant of the Annunciation. The name of the archangel was common in the Abruzzi region. Don Antonio d’Annunzio, grandfather by adoption of the newborn child, had a favorite vessel called Lu Gabriele which used to transport spices from Dalmatia, and a brother by that name who died at sea.

What’s in a name? True, a rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but one would not like to associate its fragrance, say, with a turnip. It was only the accident of a timely adoption that made the boy who might have been born a ludicrous Rapagnetta, a Gabriel of the Annunciation. Indeed, for many years after d’Annunzio’s rise to fame, his enemies insisted that he was really called Rapagnetta, as if by ridiculing the name they could obliterate his art. Their evidence came from a wilful misreading of the birth data in the Pescara archives.

In the year 1863, on the 13th of March, read the birth certificate, at four o’clock in the afternoon, there came before us, Silla de Marinis, mayor and officer of the civil state of Pescara, Don Camillo Rapagnetta . . . aged 68, by profession a landowner, living in Pescara, who brought before us a boy child—the which we ascertained by ocular evidence—and declared the same to be the son of Donna Luisetta de Benedictis, aged 25 . . . and of Don Francesco-Paolo d’Annunzio, aged 25, by profession a landowner . . . born on the 12th day of the aforesaid month at eight o’clock. . . . The aforesaid declared that he had given the boy the name of Gabriele. . . .

How does Don Camillo enter the picture to report the birth of Don Francesco d’Annunzio’s son? By blood he had every right to do so since he was the father of Don Francesco and the grandfather of Gabriele. However, the legal parent, whose name Don Francesco bore, was Don Antonio d’Annunzio, a well-to-do proprietor at Pescara and the owner of a fleet of cargo ships that sailed the Adriatic. As he had had no children to inherit his wealth, he and his wife had decided to adopt a son. The wife’s sister, as it happened, was married to Don Camillo Rapagnetta, rich in children but poor in worldly goods. Don Antonio, therefore, proposed to adopt Camillo’s firstborn son. Since the future of his boy would be assured, Camillo agreed, and so, by a fortunate stroke of the pen, Francesco-Paolo Rapagnetta became both a d’Annunzio and Don Antonio’s heir. Consequently Gabriele was legitimately born to the name which was to be the symbol of his destiny.

Don Francesco hardly contained his joy at Gabriele’s arrival. Ordering the wine casks broached, he flung the door wide to everyone who would share his rejoicing, which meant nearly all of Pescara. All day long the people came and went and the glasses clinked to merry songs and brindisi.

While the midwife was wrapping the infant in its swaddling clothes, Grandfather de Benedictis stood by, tucking silver piasters between the sturdy linen bands—four hundred coins, providing a solid if uncomfortable cuirass for the newborn babe. Gabriele received another and most curious gift, a pair of diamond earrings, from Donna Rachele, his godmother.

Nothing was too good for the heir. When they carried him to the church of San Cetteo for baptism on St. Gabriel’s day, he was enveloped in a blue silk covering embroidered in floral designs as if he had been the Infant Jesus. His sisters Anna and Elvira had never had anything so splendid, nor did the youngest girl, Ernestina, or his brother Antonio, born anticlimatically late, enjoy any such pomp. Whether because of his male primogeniture or by virtue of the caul with which he was born—he wore it round his neck in a reliquary during his infancy—Gabriele was considered someone apart.

He had his mother’s nose and brow. His hair, when it grew out, was a mass of golden ringlets. His eyes, abnormally large in the small face, were the color of the sea with which his ancestors had lived so intimately and so dangerously and which he was always to love. When his imagination developed he wished he had been born on the water, and when he was famous enough to make people believe him, he invented a romantic birth, on the brigantine Irene, on the Adriatic. He also made himself a year younger. A French journalist, Amédée Pigeon, to whom he told the tale, gave it publicity, and for many years it confounded biographers to the delight of d’Annunzio who liked nothing better than to mystify.³

Donna Luisa early remarked in Gabriele this tendency to romanticize himself. To her pious mind, as literal as it was upright, it became a source of worry, but she adored him all the more for being different from the rest. With the anxiety of one who loves too dearly she was afraid of losing him. Not a night passed, d’Annunzio remembered, but she would rise with a sudden sense of dread and come into my room and watch over my sleep and place a hand on my heart, leaning over me to drink my breath . . .⁴ Had she not fashioned him after the image of the angel whose name he bore, and were not the forces of evil constantly laboring to overthrow the good?

Certainly good and evil made a battlefield of that house in the unappeasable if silent conflict between the personalities of Donna Luisa and her husband. They had married at the abnormally early age of fifteen—they were just a few months apart—and it had been a love match. For some years they had been happy, but when their divergent characters matured they found that they had little in common except their children. Donna Luisa was considered by all who knew her as indeed of the blessed for her piety and goodness. But virtues are notoriously hard to live with, if only for the mirror they are constantly setting up before people of lesser clay—and Don Francesco had more than his share of Adam’s mixture.

A hearty man of Herculean proportions, with thick dark hair, a mustache like a wide circumflex and the tuft of an imperial under his chin, he looked on the world through small lecherous eyes and savored its fruits with an eager mouth, the lower lip outthrust in unabashed sensuality. In his garb he was every inch the solid bourgeois. The collar, cravated and pinned with a showy jewel, supported the jowl that grew heavier with years and lust. A velvet waistcoat, tightly buttoned, set off a massive gold chain that hung from the top button and fell in a long and heavy loop down his chest to tuck itself in his left pocket. His coat, lavish and well cut, betrayed the dandy in the wide revers of a light color and the black velvet collar. Altogether he was an imposing figure which well suited his future office of mayor of Pescara,

He was also witty, generous and of ingratiating manners. In his sexual appetite, however, he was so exigent and unbridled, so untrammeled by moral law, that he might have been a survival of one of those pagan demigods, traces of whose cult might still be found in the remoter villages of Abruzzo. His life was certainly no mystery, either in Pescara or in the region where he had a handsome country property, Villa del Fuoco. He had an illegitimate household there, and, as time passed and his proclivities grew worse rather than better, it was rumored that he even slept with the daughters born of his concubinage.⁵

Donna Luisa suffered in silence but her mute accusation is betrayed in every one of her portraits. She cannot be described as beautiful. Her features, except for the dark, sorrowful eyes and the fine brow are disproportionately spaced, presenting a face like an unskillful landscape with too much horizon for the meager foreground. Her chin almost disappears below the heavy underlip which makes her nose seem too long and too large. Her brooding gaze adumbrates a storm. But it was a storm that never broke. She was too patient and too dutiful. Besides, she had the memory of the first few years of a marriage for love at the height of her youth and of her husband’s affection, and she had Gabriele.

The boy, meanwhile, absorbed everything about him. His wide, blue-green eyes captured every detail and his retentive brain never let it go. Outwardly he lived the life of any child of a middle class family in a house that enjoyed comfort and pretended to elegance. In his room he had a carved prie-dieu on which he was early taught to kneel for prayers. As he lay in bed he could look up at the vaulted ceiling and wonder at the painting of a city in flames and of a youth rescuing an old man long before he could identify the city as Troy and the men as Aeneas and Anchises. He could enjoy other representations in the dining room, too, which had been frescoed with scenes from the adventures of Telemachus. But Gabriele particularly liked the salon with its blue tapestries that set off the red satin of the divan and the matching armchairs. The chief attractions there, however, were the pictures of his two heroes, Napoleon on horseback over the satin of the divan that looked like a sea of blood, and Garibaldi, wrapped in his poncho, dreaming of a free Italy.

Don Francesco told him many things of the two men and took pride in Gabriele’s burgeoning intelligence. He himself had some pretensions to culture which he aired in the circles of the signori with a pompous, old-fashioned grace. At home he nurtured Gabriele’s lively and eager mind. A warm comradeship developed between father and son, tempering an atmosphere otherwise cloying with doting femininity. The trouble was that Don Francesco never remained at home for very long so that Gabriele naturally grew to expect the idolizing attentions of the women who treated the male heir as if he were already the master of the house. Fortunately Donna Luisa’s biblical rectitude got the better of her overanxious love so that she never hesitated to give him a smart box on the ear for his improvement. But he did not often need such reminders of his human imperfection. He was a reasonable, obedient child, though he would sometimes have sudden bursts of temper that crimsoned his face and made the veins swell on his forehead as he struggled for self-control.

He was also subject to moods which Donna Luisa wisely tried to ignore. One evening when his aunt Elena came visiting and did not see him about, she asked where he was. He’s in bed. He’s not sick but in a bad humor, for some reason, said Donna Luisa.

Donna Elena went at once to his room. What’s the matter, Gabriele? she asked. Don’t you feel well? Is anything wrong? He made no answer. Where does it ache? Tell Auntie about it, she insisted.

Turning his eyes on her solemnly, he said: Send for the carpenter right away and tell him to make me my coffin. I want to shut myself up in it Then, pulling the coverlet up over his ears, he refused to say another word.⁶

Whatever it was that had troubled him no one ever discovered, but the anecdote is significant as the first recorded instance of d’Annunzio’s predilection for death which was to play a large part in his works and, subsequently, in his life.

Fortunately the boy was not often so morbid. The sea and the Abruzzo country kept his imagination alive and hardened his small but vigorous body. He swam in the Adriatic with the boys and watched the sails coming in from the mysterious, beautiful and treacherous sea which the wives of the fishermen addressed as if it were a living creature, praying for the safety of their men and threatening and cursing it when it had been cruel. He listened to the talk of the old mariners, capturing their salty speech, his own dialect, which could be a gentle lullaby on his mother’s lips and the harsh lashing of the storm in the quarrels that often broke out among the men. He learned of adventures which the sailors half invented and listened to stories of perils and heroisms that were all the more marvelous for being true.

Sometimes of a late afternoon he would steal away to wait for the rusty-sailed fishing smacks nosing into the barbor. He had a friend, a young sailor boy, who would bring him sea urchins and other good things to eat in a crimson cap dripping with brine. Gabriele would then scramble up the ramparts with the booty and, astride his favorite cannon, a relic of Bourbon times, he would pry open the fruits of the sea, round and prickly as pincushions, to dig out the morsels of bright orange pulp that had the tang and the bitterness of the sea.

Once, while forcing open one of the shellfish, he gashed his left thumb with a forbidden jackknife which he had secretly carried away. The wound bled so much, even after he had bound it with a strip torn from his shirt, that he was frightened. But he did not cry, not even at the throbbing that made every motion an agony. He was still bleeding when he returned home, but though he bit his lips, his eyes remained dry. The pain, unendurable, was his own. He would not betray it, not even to his mother, who rushed to him with frightened shrieks. When she tried to penetrate his stoical secrecy he would only answer: "But it was something else"—words that she was to repeat with gentle reproach, her hand caressing the scar left by the wound, whenever he had other secret hurts which he would have kept from her.⁷

Even more than the sea Gabriele loved the soil of Abruzzo, the sunbaked fields, the hills baring their rocky skeletons and, far away, the solemn simplicity of the presiding mountain, the Maiella. He knew its strength to be part of himself, like the sun that burned him and the parched but vigorous clods that toughened his bare feet. My little Maiella wolf, his mother called him. Indeed, he seemed to be all things and to participate in the wonder-working of nature. Most of all he loved the spring plantings at Villa del Fuoco, done by such grand old men as Giovanni di Scordio, walking . . . across the field with measured slowness. . . . A small white sack full of seed hung about his neck from a leather thong and fell to his waist. He held the sack open with his left hand, while with his right he scooped up the seed and scattered it about. . . . As it flew from his hand the seed flashed in the air for a moment with a golden glitter and then fell in an even rain upon the wet furrows. His whole person was simple, godly. . . .⁸

He was to re-evoke many such scenes and men in passages that give permanence to his prose. For, with all his affectations, d’Annunzio remained the child of Abruzzo, never, for all his traveling, too far outside the shadow cast by the Maiella.

However, like all children, the boy lived for his all-important day-by-day experiences, like the promenade along the right bank of the Pescara, his hand in his mother’s. Now and then he would look up at her, and she would meet his eyes with a gentle smile. The walk always ended at the foot of the slope where the graves were. It was a melancholy pilgrimage, but with its own kind of poetry.

He also loved the autumn when at Villa del Fuoco they would gather in the grapes. What merriment in the vineyards, what joyful voices as the young men hung the cool clusters on the ears of the peasant girls who pretended to protest. Long after sundown their songs could be heard mingling with the clatter of their carts and the sleepy tinkling of the donkey bells, as they drove away, happy and tired.

But some incidents had no joy in them, as on the day his father had come back from Chieti with the provision of wine and the steward to help him move it. The immense storeroom was a special haunt of Gabriele’s for the swallows that nested there, so many that the vaults were covered over as with an enormous frieze by the accretion of their clay nests. Suddenly, he heard the anguished shrilling of the swallows. On rushing in he saw the steward with a long bamboo pole knocking down the nests.

They fall to the ground in fragments. The tiny pearly eggs are smashed, the downy feathers are blown about. In desperation the swallows fly hither and yon, crying, shrieking. They struggle blindly, they knock against the vaults, against the vats, against the casks, as if to beat themselves to death. I cry and sob and curse and call names. The pole of that barbarian is breaking my heart as it is breaking up those nests. . . . I sink down in a heap grinding my teeth in convulsions . . . in that welter of devastated nests . . . of dead swallows and dead fledglings. . . . My mother comes running and leans over me. She too begins to shriek. She too breaks into sobs. . . . But even my mother cannot comfort me and life seems filled with horror. . . .⁹

There were other swallows in the Pescara house to console him, however, as well as a drowsy cat and an ancient turtle that used to crawl familiarly round the dinner table for tidbits. It was the special pet of a spinster aunt whom the novelist was to satirize as the gluttonous Zia Gioconda in one of his works.¹⁰ An uncle also shared the hospitable house, a withdrawn soul whom life had somehow hurt. He would spend his days in his room from where sometimes came the sound of music from his violin. He played sensitively, and Gabriele, listening, felt for him a spiritual kinship that he seldom experienced toward his father.

But the relative he loved best was his grandmother. Ever since he could remember he had shared with her a world of dream and fantasy, peopled by the Purple Dragon, by the doughty Guerin Meschino of endless adventure and by other fabulous creatures. She would sit by the firelight, her hands fluttering like white moths at her knitting, while she talked to the clicking of the needles in a hushed, awed voice as if some mysterious being were speaking through her. Now and then she would let the work drop upon her lap and then her fingers would comb gently through Gabriele’s hair as he snuggled at her feet.

Despite his extramarital preoccupations Don Francesco recognized his son’s intelligence and sent him to school, against the protests of the women of the family. The boy’s lot did not change, however, for again he found himself under feminine dominion. Instead of his aunts, two spinsters, Adele and Ermenegilda del Gado, now told him what to do. But Gabriele enjoyed the change and learned his letters, especially since the ascent to Parnassus was made agreeable by rewards of sweets.

The child’s mind, of a precocious awareness, let nothing go unnoticed in that household, outwardly so neatly respectable yet with an uneasy atmosphere which only the adult was to reinterpret. What could a little boy have known of unfulfillment in those kindly elderly ladies who gurgled with delight at the children’s efforts to pronounce the French they insisted on teaching them and who, with tender solicitude, used to fasten the quills to fingers too small to hold them?

Gabriele soon learned all they had to impart, and Don Francesco found him a tutor in Eliseo Morica, a man of Rousseauistic tendencies who believed in the benevolent influence of nature. In fair weather he would close up the schoolroom and lead his charges on long walks to the pine woods, or along the banks of the river to the sea, conducting the lessons as if they were a game. When Morica too was outgrown, Gabriele continued his education in the school of Maestro Giovanni Sisti.

The boy was now old enough to reveal whatever promise was in him. Maestro Sisti quickly discovered it and from the first began to foster it. Save these papers, he said to Don Francesco when, a few years later, he read Gabriele’s compositions. They are a treasure. . . .

A stern preceptor of the old school, he saw how easy it would be to spoil this pretty child, too much pampered by everyone. Accordingly he dealt with him man to man, never afraid because of Don Francesco’s position to exercise necessary discipline. Long before anyone else, he was so convinced of the boy’s future that he gave his teaching an air of dedication. It brought out the best in his pupil, but it also encouraged that overconfidence which made Gabriele’s daring stop short at nothing.

It was a handsome document that Gabriele took home on his graduation at the age of eleven. Written in the cursive hand of Maestro Sisti, it declared among other things that in all the elementary courses the young man consistently maintained an exquisite sense of good breeding and in every way distinguished himself for his intelligence and devotion to his work. . . .¹¹

Such praise made Don Francesco aim high for his son, as high as the Cicognini College of Prato, in Tuscany. For a South Italian, cognizant of the traditional geographical prejudices, it was a gauntlet flung at convention. But Gabriele was an unusual boy—Don Francesco had Maestro Sisti’s confirmation—and he, for one, was going to give him every opportunity.

On the 14th of September, 1874, therefore, he made formal application for Gabriele in a letter to the rector. The sounding fame of the Royal College . . . and the high praise I have heard from distinguished men, have implanted strongly in my heart the desire to place with you a son of mine. . . .¹²

Perhaps the desire so strongly implanted, or perhaps Don Francesco’s ponderous flattery, moved the exclusive Cicognini. At any rate, it accepted the new pupil.

It was not the first time that Gabriele had left Pescara for Don Francesco loved to travel and the family knew every place of interest in the Abruzzi. Gabriele had seen Guardiagrele, the ancient Aelion with its surviving Greek traditions, and the quiet town of Francavilla by the sea, and San Clemente of Casauria whose ruinous abbey and crypt, unexorcised of their pagan mysteries, had left their spell upon the boy’s imagination. In a remoter part of the region, among the Marsians, he had listened to an old snake charmer who might have come out of a heathen temple, playing upon a pipe made of the bleached bone of a stag. As he blew the eerie music through the five holes of his flute, one could see the excited snakes bulging the leather sack hanging from his shoulder.

Such scenes Gabriele had witnessed and remembered. They were all part of a way of living and of a culture rooted three thousand years deep in a pagan past. As the train hurried him north with his parents, he carried with him the invisible burden of his heritage and of his formative years in the Abruzzi. Wherever he might be they would always be with him, the fertilizing soil of his life and art.

CHAPTER II

At the Sign of the Stork

AT THE CLOSE of the spiritually restless seventeenth century a good churchman of Prato, Don Francesco Cicognini, and two other conscientious citizens invited the Company of Jesus to found a school in their city. They had the means and the students and had only to wait for the edifice. The long, low building, with its three rows of windows and ornate façade was finished by February of 1699. On the first day of March it was inaugurated by the Jesuits and the student body. For the next three-quarters of a century the Jesuits carried on their activities unmolested. Then Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, entered upon the scene, armed with the Papal Bull, Dominus ac Redemptor nosier, and drove them out of his domain.

The Cicognini Institute, however, stood fast by virtue of the adjective Royal whereby it modified its name to suit the political stiuation, and for the next hundred years its christenings and rechristenings synthesized the march of history. From the Royal Cicognini, in 1814 it became the Imperial because of Napoleon and then, until 1859, the Imperial and Royal. After that it enjoyed variously the titles of Royal Cicognini Institute and Royal Cicognini Academy.

The building itself had held its own through time and history, suffering only slight modifications. When d’Annunzio stood before its columned portals the façade still evoked another century while the regimented rows of windows marked it an institution, a place far different from the home he had left.

Holding his mother’s hand, he looked up at the surmounting cross and, below, at the sculptured emblem of a stork on a turret top, clutching a snake in its beak. Why a stork? It was a pun on the name Cicognini, from cicogna, a stork. The truth-loving stork, it seemed, was the bitter enemy of the snake, the symbol of evil, and fought it everywhere.

Gabriele then made out the Latin inscription, Missus est Angelus Gabriel, and his heart leaped. It was as if, when the sculptors had been carving those words long ago, they had thought of him, another Gabriel, marked out by his name for a great mission. As yet he could not know the nature of it but he knew he had it. His parents’ pride confirmed it and so had the words of Maestro Sisti at parting: Study hard, Gabriele, and be an honor to your country, to your family and to me.¹

When the d’Annunzios were admitted by the porter into the large inner court they found about a dozen men and women waiting with their young sons, new students like Gabriele. It was late afternoon and the resident Storks were expected back from the neighboring villa where they had spent their vacation. After a few minutes the sound of marching steps came from the street, and soon some forty boys between the ages of eight and eighteen came filing past in military formation. There were quick and tearful good-byes, after which the new students were ordered into the ranks. They were seven, all about Gabriele’s age. A brisk roll of the drum, and the new boys, not daring to turn for a last look, trudged up the staircase and into the building which for the next seven years was to take the place of the homes they had left.

In the reception hall the newcomers received their instructions. Before they could catch their breath or feel homesick, they were marched into the chapel and, after a brief prayer, to the refectory. They did not eat with the hearty appetite of the old, and now and then looked uneasily at the three formidable personages who kept pacing back and forth throughout the meal. They were the Director, the Vice-Director and the Censor.

Gabriele soon realized that instead of the center of an adoring household he was just one small unit in the miniature social body of the Cicognini. In order of registration he was number 53. He slept in bed 11 and worked at desk number 8 in the study hall. At the roll of the drum at six-thirty he got up, and at seven went to chapel and then to breakfast which had to be rushed a bit so that he could get to his studies at seven-thirty. An hour later classes began and continued until half-past twelve with brief rest periods. Then came dinner in the commons, after which digestion was agitated, if not exactly aided, by fencing and then dancing. The afternoon repeated the morning routine except that at four o’clock the Storks were taken out for an airing. The rest of the afternoon went by in studies and gymnastics. Chapel and dinner followed at eight-thirty. An hour later, when the trumpet sounded, the Storks retired for silence and rest.

It was a drastically different life from that at Pescara. Gabriele missed his mother; he missed his friends, Filippo de Titta and Enrico Seccia. At the drum rolls and trumpet blasts he longed for the little band of Piannella that used to come to play on the town square for the feast of San Cetteo. During gymnasium he wished himself back on his Bourbon cannon or climbing the masts of the ships in the harbor.

But there were compensations. The school library and the natural history museum were full of fascination. He also liked his uniform, handsomer than anything he had ever worn, and almost like that of a military officer, with its trim dolman embroidered in crimson and silver braid down the front and up the sleeves, and its belt fastened by a shiny buckle.

He was ardently patriotic and soon gathered about him a group of young hotheads. His childhood had been cradled in the memory of Garibaldi and his Thousand. While still under the spell of his grandmother’s fairy tales he also heard of the hero’s march on Rome, of his capture, of his escape from Caprera to fight again for a united Italy. These exploits now filled Gabriele’s dream, and to his old schoolmaster at Pescara he confided his hopes, in the falsetto of a fledgling chanticleer: My first mission on this earth is to teach the people to love their country and to be honest citizens. The second is to hate to the death all the enemies of Italy and to wage eternal war against them. Scoundrels! May shame and malediction ever fall upon your heads!—But I am allowing myself to be carried away! . . .²

Despite such emotional boiling over, Gabriele’s patriotic zeal was genuine and unquenchable. The notebooks in which he copied favorite passages from his reading contain many samples of inspiriting eloquence from sources ranging over a field that included Greek, Latin, English, French as well as Italian authors. The juxtaposition is sometimes startling, as when Samuel Smiles rubs shoulders with Seneca; but the selections afford revealing glimpses of the boy’s mind.

My spirit turns with rueful gratitude, he copied from Augusto Conti, toward those men . . . who, when Italy seemed to be the last among nations, wrote . . . prose and verse which we learned by heart and made us weep with shame and hope. It is well that our grandchildren remember this so that they may know the portentous worth of a virile literature. . . .

F. D. Guerrazzi’s Siege of Florence furnished: God dwells in heaven. An independent heart inflamed with the sacred love of country is the temple He prefers above all others. Also, If a people lives in slavery it is not because such slavery is forced upon it but because of its own baseness, and it is therefore unworthy of liberty.

Man is a wolf unto other men, he translated from Plato.

With loyal affection he also included several stanzas of a humanitarian poem by his Pescara schoolmaster.³

However, side by side with such quotations appear passages of embarrassing mawkishness on the subject of mother love. Noble poems have been written on the edifying emotion, but when the theme is played with the mute it sinks to sentimentality. Gabriele’s abnormally strong attachment to his mother warred with his judgment, and so he copied down without discrimination the good and the bad. What emerges from the notebook is the fact that the two strongest passions he was ever to feel had already taken root.

He was also tentatively shaping the future man. It is curious to note that almost all worthwhile men have simple manners, he copied from Leopardi’s Thoughts. Yet almost invariably simple manners are considered a sign of little worth.

How should a wise man behave in this dilemma? Should he let his unaffectedness expose him to being considered a simpleton? Or would it be a test of his wisdom to affect unusual behavior to astound the crowd? It was something to be pondered.

He was unusual enough, however, to impress his teachers who had nothing but praise for his excellence as a scholar. They could have wished him to conform to the other Storks, but they were slow in realizing that somehow a swan had found its way to their brood. The boys, less obtuse, discovered Gabriele’s difference at once, to laugh at him. First it was the oddness of his Abruzzo accent They tittered so shamelessly when he was called upon to recite that he swore to surpass them in the perfection of his speech.

Then they could not understand his sudden moods of withdrawal, when he was as difficult to approach as if he had been blind and dumb. But soon they recognized him as a rebel leader and formed a sort of Bonapartist faction about him. On one occasion, when meat balls had appeared on the refectory menu four times a week for a succession of weeks, the protest he initiated resulted in such damage to the school crockery that Gabriele was punished with ten days in the prison under the roof while Don Francesco, wholly innocent in the matter, was made to pay a steep fine for the damages. In vain the Censor, Demosthenes Chiappelli, warned the Storks: Beware, my children! Don’t listen to the bad Archangel! He will only gull and decoy you. They found the bad Archangel irresistible.

But then Gabriele would have soft moods as when, during some country walk, the smell of mint among the dill and marjoram made the tears start to his eyes. The Storks could not know that he was thinking of the jingle his mother used to repeat:

Who finds sweet mint and does not breathe its breath

Will not see the Madonna at his death.⁴

Had the classical scholar as yet discovered the parallel between Donna Luisa’s belief and the ancient Greek superstition that the smell of wild thyme implied the presence of divinity?

Certainly his odd ways puzzled the teachers as well as the students. The master who used to take the group out on its afternoon airings could not understand why Gabriele who was first at school insisted on being last on the line. The good man would have been even more perplexed had he known the reason. Gabriele had fallen in love. Not with a flesh-and-blood girl but with a group of dancing angels.

On the days when the itinerary led them past the Romanesque-Gothic cathedral with its square bell tower, like a model of Giotto’s in neighboring Florence, Gabriele would manage to lag behind. As they neared the building, its alternating bands of white and green marble subdued in the evening light, he tilted back his head for the intoxication of the vision: Donatello’s sculptured pulpit clinging like a nest for cherubs to the right-hand angle of the cathedral façade. He knew all those joyful angels on the dancing frieze, whose marble had mellowed to the yellow of cornmeal. Yet whenever he passed by he had to gaze on them hungrily, turning his head and looking backward until he could see them no more. Beauty assumed a transubstantiation, as if indeed the meal-colored stone had turned into bread to nourish his spirit. To the imaginative boy whose mind his omnivorous reading had forced to early expansion, hunger for beauty had become an urgent need.

He found appeasement at various sources: first in the sights and sounds of Prato, so small within its circle of gentle, low Tuscan hills, yet so rich in its heritage from the Renaissance. Filippo Lippi had drawn inspiration there, and Luca della Robbia, Michelozzo and Angelo Gaddi, men who came closer to his spirit than the people about him. He found it in the ancient monuments, in the September fair, with the crowds and the hubbub and the barter and the horse races and, finally, in the blessing of the Bishop who would climb into Donatello’s pulpit and exhibit to the people the precious relic of the Holy Girdle. But he found it most of all in Florence whose streets and narrow alleys, whose squares and bridges, were still populated by the shades of the great who had created her.

Much of the time, however, he sought it in escape from reality, after he discovered that imagination could bring thrills as exciting as actual experience. Books then became the open-sesame to wonder. At night, when the trumpet sounded for lights out, Gabriele did not go to sleep like the rest but hurried to inspect the lamps on the study tables. Cautiously he unscrewed the reservoir of his copper urn and methodically went from lamp to lamp, emptying into his container whatever oil was left. Then he would settle down at his writing table to study or read far into the night.⁵

Next to the school library he was lured by the natural history museum. His enthusiasm had won him the good will of the curator who encouraged his zeal by allowing him to prowl among the glass cases and stuffed specimens whenever he had a free hour. One Sunday, when Gabriele had to remain at school for punishment while the others went out on their promenade, he managed to bribe the porter into letting him have the keys. Immediately he rushed down the stairs, through the infirmary and to the museum. The place was deserted. With guilty joy he went from one cabinet to another, opened them and had the thrill of touching, as well as seeing, the sacred cats, the ibises, the monkeys, the hawks, imagining himself a young Pharaoh among those mummies.

At one of the cases he paused in curiosity before an object, like ivory, among the other specimens. Its shape and texture intrigued him. On taking it in his hands, he was amazed by its lightness, as if it were the shell, the wisp of a bone. It was, of all things, the shoulder blade of a pelican. He did not know anything about pelicans, but a sharp acquisitiveness took hold of him. Just then the clock struck the hour. Everybody would soon be coming back. With his finger he traced on the pane of glass, misted by his breath, the perfect Latin hexameter: Callidus effracta ossiculum fur abstulit area—A clever thief stole the little bone from the violated cabinet.⁶ Then wrapping the bone in his handkerchief he scrambled up the stairs, flung the keys to the astonished porter and made for his desk in the study hall, just in time to hear the trudge of his companions returning from their outing. Furtively he opened the drawer and unwrapping his loot slipped it in, leaving enough space for him to look at it. It was dusk. His was the first lamp to be lighted on his books and on his guilt.

At the three drum rolls, the hall began to fill for the study period. Gabriele, hunching his shoulders and shielding his face with his hand, pretended to be engrossed in the Paradiso while gazing at the fascinating bone. All of a sudden the voice of the supervising pedagogue broke the silence: "Student Gabriele d’Annunzio! In the study hour non est capiendum furtim et ruptim fruit cake from Siena. . . ."⁷ The boys tittered and for a moment amusement broke the boredom. Gabriele silently thanked his stars that he was being accused of gluttony and not of theft.

Then he began to worry. What if his confession were still legible on the glass of the cabinet? In a way he hoped it was and that for the sake of Ovid, born like him in the shadow of the Maiella, all would be forgiven. But then another voice whispered that perhaps he should keep the bone and graft it into his spirit like some wonder-working talisman. No, he must find a way of restoring it to its place without being discovered. Already he heard the Censor chastising him: Tantillus puer et tantus peccator.—Such a little boy and such a great sinner.

The Censor would have been even more emphatic had he known of the bad Archangel’s other exploits. Like most of the Storks, Gabriele would go home during his vacation. One summer—he was fifteen—he had gone with Don Francesco to Villa del Fuoco. It was harvest time and in the vineyards the grapes hung heady and purple. For several days he had been watching a peasant girl, the daughter of one of the laborers. She was about his own age with a glory of hair which, in the sunlight, made her visible afar off. They called her Splendore for her shining aureole, a name which her Abruzzo accent changed to Sblen-dore.

Bored with loitering on the terrace of the house with its busts of crowned kings, Gabriele went wandering off in the fields, searching he did not know for what. A strange restlessness had for some time possessed him. Vaguely he knew it was part of his growing up. Just as vaguely he linked it with the burst of inspiration that had recently come over him making him cover pages with verses that leaped out of him like flames and were altogether different from his exercises in emulation of favorite poets. That ardor was still in him, now mingled with the languor of late summer and the glow of Sblendore’s hair.

He came upon her toward dusk in the deserted vineyard. From his hiding place among the vines he could see her start in fright and stare at him like a hunted animal. She was far enough away for her to think he had not seen her, yet at the same time she realized that she would have to pass him, not without danger, as she knew from the siege he had been laying upon her. Quickly, with a primitive instinct of self-protection, she plucked a bunch of black grapes and began to crush them against her brow, her cheeks, her whole face, till she was covered with a thick, sticky mask of juice. A young bacchante terrified at her first encounter. As she bent down to hide from him he was drawn toward her by something stronger than himself. He felt his body trembling as he approached. Sblendore, he called softly. Sblendore!

Taking her hands, he kissed her smeared face, tasting the sweetness of the grape and the tears of terror. Suddenly she broke away from him and, crouching as if to become one with the ground, burst into a fit of sobbing. He left her, shaken by her tears.

"I believe that for me at that point it was again something else, as when I wanted to pry open that other shell. And there is a hidden meaning, for my genius as for my destiny, even in this. . . ."⁸

Perhaps the meaning lies in the simultaneous awakening of his eroticism and his poetry. Certainly they were to be indissolubly linked in all his production. For the adolescent, however, it was a troubling conjunction that kept him in a double excitement. Every woman was to be desired; every desire had to find expression in words more enduring than the transient emotion.

In November, on his way back to the Cicognini, Gabriele stopped off for a few days at Bologna with his father. Among the books he bought was the volume of Carducci’s Odi Barbare. They became a revelation and a spur. Back at Prato he wrote poems, he penned letters, he jotted down thoughts. The inspirers were as many as the impulses that tormented him. While he was addressing fervent words to Maria Ciccarini and Linda Pomàrici at Pescara, his brain was seething with strophes for Clemenza Coccolini, the daughter of a retired colonel in Florence, and for Emilia Corsani in Prato, whose face was like a shining lamp, whose legs had the slim elegance of Salome’s in Fra Filippo Lippi’s painting in the cathedral.⁹ They agitated his nights and troubled his hours of study. Now and then, however, he contrived to enjoy more than the fantasies of his erotic imagination.

One day he had gone with Clemenza Coccolini to visit the Etruscan Museum in Florence. She was a handsome young woman, about ten years older than himself, with rounded cool arms that she was fond of showing. When they arrived the museum was empty. Hand in hand they wandered through the silent halls till they came to the room of the Chimera. For a long time they stood in awe before the triple monster of brownish-green bronze, whose mouth still seemed to be spurting flame. In a sudden impulse Gabriele thrust his hand with such force into its maw that he drew it back quickly with pain.

Is her mouth still hot? asked his companion in excitement, her face almost against his. Tell me, Gabriele, did you feel her mouth still burning?

To the boy it was as if she had become a thing of fire, like the Chimera, and the precocious male suddenly asserted itself as in a shameless delirium.¹⁰

Let me feel if your mouth is burning, he stammered. In a