Pleasure (2 page)

Gabriele D'Annunzio was among the first authors to consciously fashion himself into a media celebrity. When he published his first book of poems, at the age of sixteen, in 1879, he sent in a false account of his own death to a local newspaper in order to generate publicity and create the image of tragic youth.

The creation of his persona was D'Annunzio's principal vocation in life and art. He regarded life itself as a work of art, a credo he shared with some of his late-nineteeth-century contemporaries. “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” wrote Oscar Wilde, with whom D'Annunzio had much in common. In his first novel,
Pleasure,
published in 1889 when D'Annunzio was only twenty-six, he created an exceptionally complex game of life and art imitating each other in infinite regression, like a pair of opposing mirrors in which it is impossible to distinguish the object from the reflection.

While still a teenager, D'Annunzio moved from a Tuscan boarding school to Rome and set about taking the new capital of Italy by storm. He was eager to assert himself as a brilliant young poet, to win a place of renown among the wealthy noble families of Rome, to seduce its most beautiful women and scandalize its public. The protagonist of
Pleasure,
Andrea Sperelli, is an alter ego of the young D'Annunzio: a poet and refined aesthete, a dandy, a seducer, a slave to beauty and pleasure, utterly immoral and yet curiously appealing. And in the wake of
Pleasure
's spectacular and scandalous success, Sperelli became for an entire generation a type that many chose to imitate—as Goethe's Werther was for readers of the Romantic era, or Jay Gatsby for the Jazz Age. Modeled on the real D'Annunzio, Sperelli in turn became a model for others as well as for D'Annunzio himself, since others saw D'Annunzio through the lens of his fictional creation, who conferred stature and erotic allure on the young writer.

Having imbibed some Nietzsche, D'Annunzio saw himself as a kind of superman and was not content with mere literary fame. Observing the growth of modern democracy (which began in Italy with unification in 1870) and mass politics, he saw politics as a natural theater for the projection of his personality and the expression of his greatness. “The world . . . must be persuaded that I am capable of anything,” he wrote during his first electoral campaign in 1897, in which he presented himself as “the candidate of beauty.” D'Annunzio later played a crucial role in whipping up public support for Italy's intervention in World War I, haranguing crowds in Rome and urging them to storm the palaces of the cowardly politicians who were hesitating to commit Italy to the path of war and greatness. During the war effort, D'Annunzio, although now well into middle age, participated actively in combat, specializing in spectacular acts of derring-do, including flying over the enemy capital of Vienna to drop leaflets from a small propeller plane. In another mission, he lost an eye and was nearly killed. These exploits were accompanied by the simultaneous chronicle of countless love affairs—tragic stories of countesses and princesses leaving their husbands and children only to be abandoned by D'Annunzio when he tired of them, of women risking and losing everything, and attempting suicide for the great poet.

D'Annunzio published his last novel in 1910 and issued relatively little in the remaining twenty-eight years of his life, having become consumed increasingly by his role as a public figure and national hero. He emerged from World War I a major leader of Italian nationalism. Referring to Italy's “Mutilated Victory,” he led public opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, which awarded Italy less territory than many had hoped. In 1919 he led several thousand veterans on an illegal military mission to occupy the port of Fiume, a city on the Dalmatian coast that had been part of Austria-Hungary but was designated an independent city because of its multicultural and multilingual population. The occupation of Fiume, in defiance of international treaties, represents the first breach in the peace that was supposed to have followed the war to end all wars. D'Annunzio's legionaries were a mix of nationalists, patriotic-minded socialists, syndicalists—the same unstable mix of left and right that filled the ranks of the early fascist movement, which was starting at about the same time. In fact, during the Fiume occupation, which lasted about a year, D'Annunzio invented a lot of the pageantry and rituals that later became part of fascism. Some have referred to D'Annunzio as the John the Baptist of fascism, paving the way for Mussolini. He had a genius for political rhetoric and theater but none of Mussolini's tactical abilities. Mussolini appears to have feared D'Annunzio, recognizing him as one of the few figures charismatic enough to challenge his leadership. As a result, Mussolini helped support his extravagant lifestyle in his princely villa on Lake Garda. D'Annunzio was simultaneously honored as a kind of unofficial poet laureate of fascism and spied upon. He lived out his declining years still pursuing his erotic fantasies, but now with the help of drugs and prostitutes.

D'Annunzio became so closely associated with exasperated nationalism and fascism that his very real status as one of Italy's major writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has become obscured. The Italian writer Alberto Arbasino wrote that D'Annunzio is “the proverbial body hidden in the basement, one of the most cumbersome of all literature, of all countries, vilified, trampled, neglected.” D'Annunzio's place in the pantheon of great Italian poets is widely acknowledged, but it is easy to forget that such major twentieth-century authors as James Joyce and Marcel Proust were great admirers of D'Annunzio's novels. It is thus extremely valuable to return to D'Annunzio's literary contributions, starting with his extraordinary first novel,
Pleasure.

Lara Gochin Raffaelli has performed a real service by restoring
Pleasure
to an English-speaking public, or rather giving it to us, in effect, for the first time. The frank eroticism of
Pleasure
was so shocking at the time of its publication, especially in the prudish English-speaking world, that the novel was butchered almost beyond recognition to pass muster with British censors when it appeared as
The Child of Pleasure
in Georgina Harding's translation of 1898. The Victorian Harding had managed, in effect, to take the sex out of a novel in which sex is a central, if not the central, preoccupation. “Today, tomorrow, until death,” D'Annunzio wrote, “the work of the flesh is in me the work of the spirit, and both harmonize to achieve one sole, unique beauty. The most fertile creatrix of beauty in the world is sensuality enlightened by apotheosis.” Harding, for example, removes in its entirety the first chapter of the book, in which Sperelli awaits his former lover Elena, and relives their passionate affair in his mind. Elena has the “slightly cruel habit” of tearing the petals off the flowers that Sperelli has carefully arranged for their trysts and scattering them across the rug where the two of them evidently make love. D'Annunzio provides a memorable description of the nude Elena's feline body becoming increasingly excited as she stokes the fire in Sperelli's Roman palace, and of her imperious habit of making Sperelli tie her shoes after they make love: “Nothing could compare with the grace of the posture that she would assume every time, lifting her skirt slightly and putting forward first one foot and then the other, so that her lover, kneeling, could tie the laces of her shoe, which were still unfastened.”

One of the many striking things about reading
Pleasure
is its obsessive interest in things, in the buying and possessing of beautiful objects, of furniture and décor, drapes, bowls, bric-a-brac. Sperelli is obsessed with surrounding himself with beautiful things and is always careful to compose the room with objects as he conducts his love affairs. The objects themselves bear a kind of erotic charge that becomes bound up with the erotic bond between the two lovers.

For him, all those objects among which he had so many times loved and taken pleasure and suffered had taken on something of his sensitivity. Not only were they witness to his loves, his pleasures, his moments of sadness, but they had participated in them . . . And because he sought out these things with skill, like an aesthete, he naturally drew from the world of objects a great part of his exhilaration. This delicate actor could not comprehend the comedy of love without the backdrops.

In one of the many extraordinary scenes in
Pleasure,
Sperelli in effect wins over Elena at a public auction in which they are both bidding on beautiful objects being sold off from some venerable Italian collection. When Elena turns to him and says, “I advise you to buy this timepiece,” Sperelli senses that something has changed between them. “Is she advising me to buy it
for us
?” he wonders. As they hand the objects they have purchased back and forth, an erotic charge passes between them.

In Elena's aristocratic hands, those precious materials seemed to acquire value . . . It seemed that a particle of the amorous charm of that woman passed into them, the way some of the qualities of a magnet pass into a piece of iron. It was truly a magnetic sensation of pleasure, one of those intense and profound sensations that one feels almost only at the beginning of a love affair.

This scene is, frankly, much more interesting than the famous seduction scene in
Madame Bovary
in which Flaubert has Emma grant her favors to Rodolphe while we hear a cattle auction outside the window.

The world that D'Annunzio describes is the Rome of the nineteenth century, only recently the capital of Italy, with one foot in the old papal Rome, a sleepy, provincial, but extravagantly beautiful city dominated by the old aristocracy, and a newer world of lawyers, politicians, and a rising bourgeoisie. D'Annunzio—the lover of beauty—sides clearly with the first over the second.

Sperelli is a member of that dying breed of Italian aristocracy, which still has a feeling for refinement and beauty. And yet D'Annunzio, although from a family of minor nobility, was one of the thousands of provincials who descended on the new capital to make his fortune. In fact, D'Annunzio helped support himself in his first years in Rome in a quintessentially new profession, journalism, contributing hundreds of pieces to various lively, gossipy illustrated magazines that were part of a new mass culture made possible by high-speed printing presses. D'Annunzio wrote, among other things, about fashion and high society, which helps explain the novel's extremely fresh, minute descriptions of Roman life. He helped chronicle the aristocratic world he was anxious to be a part of, but in writing about it he participated in a process in which the nobles and their precious possessions became objects of consumption.

D'Annunzio describes an amazing scene in which the princesses and countesses of the Roman nobility contribute to a charitable fund-raising event by offering for sale objects they have touched. Some sell cigarettes they have lit in their own mouths, one sells glasses of champagne from which she has sipped, others sell pieces of fruit they have bitten sensuously into—which men purchase for the pleasure of placing their lips on something that has been in a beautiful woman's mouth. One princess even performs the stunt of selling cigars she has placed under her armpit: “—Every act of charity is blessed, the marchioness decreed. —I, with all my biting of fruit, managed to gather about two hundred
luigi
.”

Of course, the objects that Sperelli is most interested in possessing are women.
Pleasure
is a fascinating psychological novel about the mind of a seducer, with D'Annunzio clearly using himself as subject. One of the things that makes
Pleasure
so interesting is that D'Annunzio is pitilessly frank in his analysis of his alter ego, Sperelli: “The basis of his power lay in this: that in the art of love, he had no repugnance for any pretense, for any falseness, for any lie. A great part of his strength lay in his hypocrisy.”

Part of Sperelli's charm for women is his ability to make each one feel, in spite of much contrary evidence, that she is the only woman he has truly loved and will ever love: “He spoke to her in a low voice, kneeling, so close that it seemed he wanted to drink in her breath. His ardor was sincere, while his words sometimes lied.” D'Annunzio understands that eroticism is very much an affair of the mind and a matter of perception. He describes the way in which his conquest of Elena suddenly raises his status in the eyes of other women in the Roman aristocracy:

The contagion of desire is a very frequent phenomenon in modern societies. A man who has been loved by a woman of singular esteem excites the imagination in other women; and each one burns with desire to possess him, out of vanity and curiosity, competing with the others. The appeal of Don Giovanni is more in his fame than in his person.

At one point, when he is courting another woman, Maria, while also trying to win back Elena, Sperelli attends a concert with Maria and then notices Elena looking at them both, a gaze that is not lost on Maria either. Sperelli senses that a little jealousy may push the reluctant Elena back into his arms, while having a similar effect on Maria. “He was therefore on his way toward a double conquest,” D'Annunzio writes. As Sperelli imagines this “double conquest,” the two women become melded in his mind and transformed into a third:

How strange, Elena's tones in Donna Maria's voice! A crazy thought flashed into his head. That voice could be, for him, the element of an imaginative work: by virtue of such an affinity, he could fuse the two beauties in order to possess a third, imaginary one, more complex, more perfect, more
real
because she was ideal . . .

For D'Annunzio the erotic life and the life of the literary imagination are one and the same, and imaginary reality is the most real.

Although only twenty-six at the time of the novel's publication, D'Annunzio firmly resisted any attempts on his publisher's part to cut or soften
Pleasure.
Curiously, the passage that his publisher was most worried about was not an erotic one but a brief cryptic allusion to a painful contemporary political event: the slaughter of Italian troops at the hands of Ethiopian soldiers at Dogali, an inglorious moment in Italy's inglorious effort at African colonization. Politics hardly figures at all in
Pleasure,
and we experience the defeat at Dogali (which occurred just before D'Annunzio wrote the novel) in the form of a noisy rabble that slows down Sperelli's carriage. Sperelli dismisses the event by saying, “All for four hundred brutes, who died brutally!”