Gabriele D'Annunzio: A Taste Too Far

Image from Edoardo Sylos Labini's production of

  Gabriele D'Annunzio, Tra Amore e Battiglie, 

Teatro Manzoni (Milan) 2013

Since a couple of commenters on my 2016 recap mentioned Gabriele D’Annunzio, I thought I’d go back and see what I could make of the few notes I’d written about him. Certainly, D’Annunzio’s name had loomed among those of authors I’d skirted so far in my reading of Italian literature. D’Annunzio looms in a lot of contexts, from his playboy lifestyle to his rogue military missions to his super-charged reputation as the Fascist hero who might well have been Mussolini had not Mussolini steered him away from party leadership. In the literary realm, he looms thanks to a singular, provocative, flourishingly lyrical and melodramatically decadent style. The Fascism and the style have both made D’Annunzio something of a bête noir in Italy; a taste of his writing is almost enough to hypothesize that the mid-century return towards realism in Italian arts and letters might have had as much to do with D’Annunzio’s excesses as with the ravages of war. One can hardly imagine a writer more likely to produce in the reader, as the most generous response one could ever hope to have, a love-hate relationship.

Curiously, there’s a relative paucity of D’Annunzio’s works available in English, or at least in English that hasn’t been scrubbed and tidied up in translations that tamp down the works’ sexual elements. It took until 2013 for a bravely non-prudish translation of D’Annunzio’s best-known prose work, Il Piacere (Pleasure), to appear in English.

Though I read about half of that novel, I’m going to skip it and go straight to my entry point for D’Annunzio: a collection of short works translated by Raymond Rosenthal: Nocturne and Five Stories of Love and Death (1997). “Nocturne,” the book’s signature piece, represents a fragment of D’Annunzio’s lengthy prose poem Notturno, the first complete English translation of which also appeared only recently, in 2014. I read some of that new edition, and found the poem itself - a long meditation on war, patriotism, injury, recovery and memory, amplified with melodrama – little more interesting than the circumstances of the poem’s composition: the author, his eyes completely bandaged from being nearly blinded in a plane crash, composed the entire poem on tiny, individual strips of paper. These were just large enough for a single line and thus provided a means for measuring, in a tactile way, what he was writing, a method given typical D’Annunzian sentiment by his comparing it to “the way of the Sybils, who wrote their brief sentences on leaves scattered to the winds by fate.”

The conceits around which D’Annunzio builds the five stories in the collection are conceptually simple and punitively cruel. In “The Virgin Orsola,” a young teacher awakens from a near fatal case of typhoid fever to discover her sexuality, only to have this blossoming cut down by a brutal rape and subsequent pregnancy. In “The Sea-Going Surgeon,” a rapidly growing abscess on the neck of a sailor at sea becomes catastrophic when his inept shipmates attempt an amateur treatment. The narrator of “Giovanni Episcopo” recounts (perhaps to the person who has come to arrest him?) an abject tale of self-abasement and submission that leads him to murder. In “Leda Without Swan,” a chance love affair begins badly, and worse remains ahead. Even the book’s sunniest piece, “A Vigil,” involves a couple who, previously kept from expressing their feelings for one another by the man whose funeral they prepare together, now copulate next to his corpse.

I think it hardly matters that I reveal these plots, since, although they give a flavor of D’Annunzio’s adolescently provocative interests, nearly all of the stories’ attraction lies in their explosive, voluptuous, vital language. From the first pages of “The Virgin Orsola,” which opens the book, D’Annunzio’s hyper-rich prose announces a writer of impressive linguistic dexterity, and one who, far from shrinking from the ugliest scenes life has to offer, seems to exalt in them:

Supine on her bed lay the virgin Orsola in the grip of a feverish stupor, of an inert somnolence, her rapid breathing broken by sharp, rattling gasps. On the pillow rested her head almost completely striped of hair and her face of an almost bluish color in which the lids half-hid her viscous eyeballs and the nostrils seemed to be smeared with soot. With her fleshless hands she made small, uncertain gestures, vague attempts to seize something from the void, weird, startling signs which gave those around her a feeling almost of terror; her pale arms were shot through by muscular contractions, twitchings of the tendons; and now and then an unintelligible babble came from her lips, as if the words were caught in the soot on her tongue, the clinging mucus on her gums. 

A similar appetite for the lurid appears in “The Sea-Going Surgeon,” when the sailor’s abscess worsens:

…the next day the cuticle covering the abscess was forced up by a blood-colored serum and split open, And the entire areas took on the appearance of a wasp’s next from which a flow of purulent matter oozed profusely. The inflammation and the suppuration went deeper and spread very rapidly.

In “Giovanni Episcopo,” the narrator encounters his fiancée’s father, turned to alcoholism due to being forced out of work by an eye disease, and accompanies the man to a tavern, where he gets a good look at the man’s face for the first time:

He lifted his glasses; and so much had the expression of his face changed, it almost seemed to me that he lifted a mask. His lids were lacerated, swollen, without lashes, filled with decay, horrible; and in the midst of that redness and that swollenness barely opened two tear-filled pupils, infinitely sad, with the profound and incomprehensible sadness one can see in the eyes of a suffering animal.

Such theatrical descriptions are often as not accompanied by rafts of meditations, or rather rhetorical questions, since usually D’Annunzio seems prepared to supply ready-made answers that offer little assurance or optimism (again from “Giovanni Episcopo”):

What can we change? Do our tears have any effect? – Each man is just anyone, to whom just anything can happen. This is the whole story; there is nothing else. Amen.

Has is ever happened to you, when looking for a long time at a woman, to suddenly lose all notion of her humanity, her social condition, the emotional ties which bind you to her, and to see, with an obviousness that terrifies you, the bestiality, the sheer femaleness, the blatant brutality of sex?

I liked D’Annunzio best when he left his questions open-ended and dialed his “vitality” back a bit (and compared to the lavish language and profligate rhetoric of Pleasure, these five stories are practically models of restraint). His descriptions can then turn from gaudily ornamental to supple and even delicate. Here, for example, from “The Virgin Orsola”:

Little by little, in the unconsciousness of sleep, Rosa’s head, almost tracing a semi-circle on the wall, bent towards the perturbed cleric. The slow reclining of that beautiful feminine head inspired a melting tenderness; and, since the movement somewhat altered the woman’s sleep, between her ever so slightly parted lids the rims of the iris appeared and immediately disappeared in the white cornea, like the petal of a violet floating in milk.

And lest I give the unfair impression that D’Annunzio’s writing is little more than a succession of grotesqueries and weighty, pedantic pronouncements, the narrative drive in these stories shows, despite D’Annunzio’s playing for effect, an ability to tell a compelling story with glimpses of human sympathy. In “Giovanni Episcopo,” for example, the story begins poignantly as the anguished narrator recounts to his unidentified listener the story of his 11-year-old son’s death. But such sympathy rarely lasts for long in D’Annunzio’s pessimistic world. What can one say about a writer who, with scarcely a trace of irony, can deliver lines like “No human creature loves another human creature – man has never been loved by another human creature,” or “Truly, the sun is the saddest thing in the universe”? Though Episcopo utters these words, the punishing endings to these stories suggest that D’Annunzio himself might have willingly spoken them.

Nonetheless, I suspect that I may not be done with D’Annunzio. Not many writers wallow as much in overblown, hyperbolic, eye-rolling melodrama as D’Annuzio does, but neither can many make one sit up straight when confronted with such density of voluptuous language. And while D’Annunzio makes an easy target, almost inviting criticism that could serve as equal and opposite reaction to his extravagances, it would be a mistake to dismiss him as a hack. Linguistic power like this doesn’t come along every day. I doubt I will ever be a subscriber, but the mere act of writing this post has my curiosity slightly piqued with regard to his late work about Venice, Il Fuoco (The Flame). Obsessed with that city as I am, I feel almost obligated to read the novel at some point. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not a little afraid. And besides, life is short.

Leaving 2016

Hello.

It’s February already, almost spring, rather late for a “best of” post for 2016, and rather like cheating after a year in which I wrote scarcely a dozen posts on seraillon. But though I left little here in the way of writing, I nonetheless managed to read some 70 works, including more Italian literature, a few classics, a few should-be classics, two exceptionally rewarding group reads (of Jean Giono’s Hill and of Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies), a more-than-usual number of mysteries, a few travel books, and no shortage of odds and bits, from Petronius to Dorothea Tanning, from John Aubrey to Olivia de Haviland. Here are some highlights:

Best Italian Discovery

Giuseppe Bonaviri: Nights on the Heights, Dolcissimo and Saracen Tales. Bonaviri presents a remarkably unified vision across these three books, the only ones I could find in English. This extraordinary writer’s work, firmly rooted in regional particularities, seems to ingest the most miniscule aspects of Sicilian history, culture and landscape, transforming them into strange and richly imaginative configurations such that this island crossroads of the Mediterranean appears suspended in time and space, its myriad influences, histories and natural characteristics collapsed together vertically, horizontally, and in every which way. (Many thanks to JLS for leading me to Bonaviri).

Holocaust Literature: A Balkan Contribution

The Use of Man and The Book of Blam, by Aleksander Tišma. Including these two novels as a single entry is not entirely unreasonable: both concern the fate of individuals in the Serbian city of Novi Sad during WWII. I’d never heard of Tišma before picking up The Use of Man, but his unsentimental depictions of people attempting to navigate totalitarianism from day to day impressed me so deeply that I immediately rushed to read his The Book of Blam. Tišma’s focus on the Serbo-Croatian experience makes his work unusual in the canon of Holocaust literature, as does a distinctive, recursive style, in which relationships fractured by events of the war and by the ways in which individuals rebel, adapt or submit are viewed prismatically through time. Moments of life and death thus become illuminated in sudden stark clarity, such that any rationalizations a character might make about his or her situation can evaporate in a brutal instant. This is not to say that Tišma is without warmth or humor – far from it. These clear-eyed, deeply affecting works easily merit inclusion among those of other great witnesses of the Holocaust such as Primo Levi, Vassily Grossman and Anne Frank, and share with French writer Patrick Modiano a pervasive, obsessive concern with the individual’s struggles between past and present when confronted with monstrous events.

Best Big Fat Early 20th Century English Novel I Read This Year

The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett. I regret that I did not push harder for a group read of this exceptional novel. While I at first found the narrative less engaging than two Bennett novels I read last year, The Old Wives’ Tale gradually and completely won me over by its daring central conceit and by the painstaking manner in which the author traces the diverging and converging lives of two sisters across the entire span of their lives, probing the question of how a person can end up as a person ends up. At turns tender, caustic, funny and furious, Bennett’s novel is both expansive and intimate, with several grandly conceived, unforgettable scenes – a book I’ll return to again, perhaps with others to read along with me.

A Massive Family Saga From the Great Plains

Beyond the Bedroom Wall, by Larry Woiwode. This may be the greatest surprise of the year. I’d never heard of Woiwode before a chance reference put me on his trail. “A Family Album,’ the subtitle of this North Dakota novelist and long-time Poet Laureate’s 1975 opus, suggests his narrative approach: snapshots that accumulate to tell the story of a family, in this case the Neumillers, German-American homesteaders who arrived in central North Dakota in the 19^th century and whom Woiwode closely follows into the 1970’s. Woiwode writes of North Dakota’s near infinite flatness, simultaneously tedious and mesmerizing such that people spend long hours simply staring out at the space; of brutalizing winters and scorching summers; of the difficulties of eking out an existence from such a harsh environment; and above all of the interrelationships between the Neumiller family members and those around them. Woiwode offers a rare and profound depiction of rural, working class life and of the intricate and trying complexities of familial relationships, particularly among siblings, but also delving into subtle nuances of how marriage, economic anxiety, aging, illness and death act as bonds and wedges. He demonstrates an exceptional ability to range across an astonishing variety of subjective experiences, from describing farm chores to getting inside the head of a child with a life-threatening fever. Stylistically Woiwode seems to have ingested everyone from Flaubert to Faulkner, from Willa Cather to the experimental narrative devices of his contemporaries, such as employment of a variety of forms of texts, including diary entries and newspaper clippings. Ultimately I found the novel frustrating – a principal character’s move to Manhattan reveals Woiwode’s limitations regarding urban experience, and the book ends in a perfunctory, pat, even capitulating manner. But I found Beyond the Bedroom Wall an enthralling work, among the best fiction I’ve encountered from or about the Great Plains, among the finest portraits of a family that I’ve come across in all my reading, and a showcase for virtuoso writing.

You Wanted More Leopoldo Alas? You’ll Get More Leopoldo Alas!

His Only Son and Doña Berta, by Leopoldo Alas. I did not join a group read last summer of La Regenta, a book that made my best of list for 2014, but I was thrilled to read Alas’ only other novel, His Only Son and the accompanying short story, “Doña Berta,” which offer readers of English (thanks to translator Margaret Jull Costa) a fortunate further entrée into one of 19^th century Spain’s most significant writers. Readers of La Regenta may find these two later works more subtle, tempered and intimate, less vituperative. But Alas’ knife remains sharp, and his characters unforgettable. In His Only Son Alas takes the case of a timid middle-class music lover’s attempts to stretch beyond his confining marriage and social circumstances and uses it to slice and dice the provincialism and hypocrisy of a small city and a stale marriage. In the intimate and moving “Doña Berta,” Alas turns his attention to the captivating and redemptive power of art – and to its frustration.

Most Fun Had While Laughing Then Not Laughing

Thus Bad Begins, by Javier Marias.  I think I had more pure fun with Javier Marias’ new novel, Thus Bad Begins, than with any book I read this year, though the novel’s themes are anything but sunny, and the behavior of some of its characters is odious. A return to the more overtly political context of Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Thus Bad Begins employs the clever narrative device of plopping into the narrative an actual character, a young writer, to function in the manner normally reserved for an omniscient narrator. Through this unusually intimate insertion into the lives of a married couple with significant secrets, Marias explores the roles and moral responsibilities of the observer, simultaneously playing with the overt and clandestine vehicles for such observation, occasionally through scenes constructed with almost slapstick comedy. But the novel is also genuinely moving and weighted with the gravity of a favorite Marias motif: the residual weight of the past and of its denial on the present, both in the personal and political spheres

Russian Kaleidoscope

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. I wish I’d read this decades ago, when many of my peers were reading it, as this is the kind of book capable of turning a young person into a literature fanatic. Bulgakov entwines a delirious story of the devil wreaking havoc in Moscow with a beautifully executed retelling of Christ’s condemnation and crucifixion, while also playing hide-and-seek with disturbing themes concerning political oppression and the totalitarian surveillance state - an appropriate novel to keep one company during the ascendancy of a paranoid, law and order autocrat. 

B.C.E. and C.E.

The Nature of Things, by Lucretius. I had long wanted to read Lucretius’ lengthy, poetic inquiry into the nature of phenomena. I’d also wanted to return to the stunning classicist/poet A. E. Stallings (her collection of poems, Hapax, made a prior best-of-year list). Et voilà: astonishingly, here they were together. Stallings’ translation of Lucretius takes startling liberties in updating the poem for today’s readers, explicitly linking the poet’s observations and theories to their contemporary manifestations, thus the references to genetics, particle physics, nanoscience and other current scientific pursuits. But it works beautifully, making The Nature of Things a wonder, bursting with ancient insights into natural phenomena that have been born out by modern science, yet also presented with a lyricism and wit that make the book an intoxicating delight.

Most Rewarding Re-Encounter With a Writer I’d Previously Read

Hill (Colline) and Que ma joie demeure, by Jean Giono. Hill I have reviewed, so I won’t say much here except that I am immensely grateful to my group read co-host Dorian and to the other bloggers who joined me in reading it. I also loved revisiting Giono’s Que ma joie demeure (in English translation as Joy of Man’s Desiring). Set in the same general area of rural southeastern France as Hill, Giono’s later novel is earthy, pungent, poetic, profound, radiantly alive and filled with the genuine magic and mystery of the natural world and those who depend upon it for their lives and their joy.

Some Late Tolstoy

Hadji Murat, by Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s final, short novel begins and ends with its narrator’s attention fixed upon a broken Russian thistle in a plowed field, a snapshot that germinates and terminates the story of the daring Muslim revolutionary Hadji Murat in the mid-19^th century Caucasus. A concentrated, beautifully structured and exquisitely nuanced portrait of dignity amid revolutionary fervor and compromise, the book is also an indignant condemnation of violence, brutality and institutional militarism. I read the Pevear/Volokhonsky edition, but plan to re-read the novel this year in a different translation.

Book I Read All The Way Through That I’d Expected Just to Skim

Italian Journey, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe has a lot to say about Italy, but says even more about writing, drawing and painting, and the volume must certainly count among the great depictions of the growth of an artist, filled with memorable mini-essays on art and artists, writers, people, and charming Italian escapades. Tonysreadinglist also took on Italian Journey this year, as I recently discovered, so head over to his place to read about it.

Story of a Wild Hair

Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb. Szerb’s melancholic/comic novel follows a confused young character who, confronted with a sudden memory, abandons his new marriage in an effort to track down his past, wandering in a picaresque labyrinth of sentimentality, erotic adventure and both self-absorption and a quest for self-realization. Though Szerb and his cast of characters are Hungarian, I relished the fact that the story takes place in various Italian settings.

Gabrielle D’Annunzio

I can’t leave off 2016 without mentioning Gabrielle D’Annunzio, the out-sized Italian military hero, playboy, and near ascendant to the Fascist leadership of Italy (had Mussolini not schemed to deprive him of that role). Though I’m unlikely ever be a real fan, reading my first page of D’Annunzio is an experience I’ll never forget: a completely overwhelming sense of rococo excess, of density and furious energy, a lyrical plunge into a decadent abyss. I read a collection of short stories (Nocturne and Five Tales of Love and Death), with plots simple and cruel; a good number of poems; and the first English translation (2013) of Pleasure to have kept D’Annunzio’s prurience intact - though I abandoned the novel half-way through despite an initial compulsion to want to recite the first pages aloud to anyone who would listen. As with most things decadently rich, one can take only so much at a time. But I’m glad to have had this introduction. D’Annunzio is an incontrovertible fact of 20^th century Italian literature, a tremendous stylist well worth confronting at some time or another – even if Italian Neo-Realism now seems at least in part an attempt at flight from what D’Annunzio (over)wrought.

Patti Smith!

M Train. I grew up admiring Smith’s music and assumed that her book would focus on her musical career. But this is not a musician’s autobiography. Smith barely mentions her music, aside from the scattered singing she does to birds, objects, and the occasional lecture audience. Instead, M Train, narratively “moving backwards and forwards in time,” focuses tightly and intimately on the mind of the artist, her daily life, visions, dreams, travels, efforts to write, all punctuated by a daily compulsion to find good coffee and pay homage to her pantheon of heroes, usually through visiting and photographing talismanic objects. Smith’s attention to those who’ve gone before serves as the bass line to an overarching theme: a powerful gesture of remembrance of her late husband Fred, which makes M Train a moving testimony of loss, survival and memorial. The book itself ended up feeling like a talisman I wanted to carry around.

Thank you to all who visited seraillon in 2016. I wish all of you a happy, healthy, peaceful and defiant 2017, and, now that most of the challenges of the past six months appear to be behind me, I hope to see you with more frequency.

"The hell it can't!"

...Doremus went on: “If Bishop Prang, our Savonarola in a Cadillac 16, swings his radio audience and his League of Forgotten Men to Buzz Windrip, Buzz will win. People will think they’re electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there’s been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America…Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!”

            “Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.”

            “The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical – yes, or more obsequious! – than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio – divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most American have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the – well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée Semple McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?...Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?...Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition – shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor – no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade – only of adults – right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!”

            “Well, what if they are?” protested R. C. Crowley. “It might not be so bad. I don’t like all these irresponsible attacks on us bankers all the time. Of course, Senator Windrip has to pretend publicly to bawl the banks out, but once he gets into power he’ll give the banks their proper influence in the administration and take our expert financial advice. Yes. Why are you so afraid of the word ‘Fascism,’ Doremus? Just a word – just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours – not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini – like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days – and have ‘em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. ‘Nother words, have a doctor who won’t take any back-chat, boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!”

            “Yes!” said Emil Staubman. “Didn’t Hitler save Germany from the Red Plague of Marxism? I got cousins there. I know.”

            “Hm,” said Doremus, as often Doremus did say it. “Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism? Funny therapeutics. I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis!”

            “Think that’s nice language to use in the presence of Reverend Falck? raged Tasbrough.

            Mr. Falck piped up, “I think it’s quite nice language, and an interesting suggestion, Brother Jessup!”

            “Besides,” said Tasbrough, “this chewing the rag is all nonsense, anyway. As Crowley says, might be a good thing to have a strong man in the saddle, but – it just can’t happen here in America.”

            And it seemed to Doremus that the softly moving lips of the Reverend Mr. Falck were framing, “The hell it can’t!”

                                                               - Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here, 1935

Image proposed by Atelier Lawnmeadow for unrealized book jacket for It Can't Happen Here
featuring The News Photographer, San Francisco City Hall, John Gutmann, 1935