Lucy Hughes-Hallett on Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Lover, Monster

The seducer. "I have just met D'Annunzio. Can this be the man the great Duse loved? He is small, he is bald, and his teeth are in three different colours."

The warrior poet in a plane over Vienna. "Today I drop words; next time I will drop bombs" 

Lucy Hughes-Hallett returned to the show to talk about The Pike, her prize-winning biography of Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863–1938): poet, novelist, war hero, serial seducer and proto-fascist. Italy's most celebrated writer since Dante (his own assessment, though not only his), D'Annunzio spent decades scandalising Europe with his writing and his love life before helping to drag Italy into the First World War. Hating the 'mutilated victory' that followed, he took over the town of Fiume and ruled as a mini dictator defying both the Allies and his own government. Mussolini watched and learned.

Along the way: an ode to a torpedo, a chest of drawers stuffed with ladies' gloves, a Beethoven concert followed by a mock battle fought with real grenades, half a battleship installed as a garden ornament and the seduction secrets of a man once described as a bulldozer with a scented handkerchief under the pillow.

Transcript

Welcome And Who D’Annunzio Is

Russell 0:03

Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, Russell Hogg. My guest today is Lucy Hughes- Hallett. Lucy came on the show before to talk about her book The Scapegoat, which was her life of the Duke of Buckingham. She is a critic, a writer of fiction, an historian, and a multi-prize-winning biographer, so I'm delighted to have her back on the show. And today we're going to be talking about another of her books, which is The Pike, and this is a biography of Gabriele D'Annunzio, and it won the Samuel Johnson Prize, and it won the Costa Book Award for Biography. D'Annunzio is maybe not so well known today, at least in this country, but he was in his time he was an enormously famous writer. He was born in Italy in 1863. He was a seducer of women on a truly colossal scale. He became a war hero in his 50s, and then he engineered a kind of mini-revolution and took over a city on the Adriatic, which he ruled as a kind of dictator for 15 months. And that was when he he more or less invented the style that Mussolini and the fascists would borrow and make their own. Anyway, welcome back, Lucy, to the podcast.

Speaker 2 1:19

Thank you very much for inviting me back. Delighted to be here.

Russell 1:23

So maybe you could introduce D'Annunzio a little and just set the scene a bit and maybe tell us a bit about the world that he was born into.

Speaker 2 1:32

Okay. Well, you've already said it very well, Russell. But D'Annunzio considered himself to be the greatest Italian poet since Dante. He had a very high opinion of himself. And he held that opinion from very early, from when he was barely in his teens. He was seeing himself as a great man, great man and a great artist. And he published his first volume of verse when he was just 16 and still at school. And he wasn't just good at writing, I mean I mean he really was. He was admired not only by himself, but also by most of his most distinguished contemporaries. And his talent was evident even then when he was still an adolescent. So he he started off life with this vast self-confidence, which came from being extremely clever. Actually, you know, there are a lot of very clever people who don't end up being denunciates, and goodness knows really where he came from. People saw him as a monster, he saw himself as a prodigy, and he was very good at writing, he was very, very good at seducing women, as you say. Again, that began very, very early in his life. He had his first affair also while he was still at school with one of his teacher's daughters, and then when he was only just twenty, he eloped with the Duke's daughter, thereby kind of elbowing his way into the aristocracy. He himself came from a much more sort of ordinary middle class background. And then, you know, that his long, long list of his lovers was to include Eleonora Douza, the greatest actress of her generation, with the possible exception, her only rival in Europe really was Sarah Bernhard, with whom D'Nunzio also had a quick fling. And all of this despite the fact that he was hideous. You know, people who met him first, very, very common response would be to for them to go home and write to a friend or write in their diary, I'm just met D'Annunzio. Can this be the man that the great Dooza loved? He's he's small, he's bald, he has terrible teeth. One very beautiful French actress who succumbed to his charms said that he was the only man she'd ever met who had teeth in three different colours white but also yellow and black. So, you know, there's the poetry, there's the sex, and then in in middle age he became extremely interested in politics, and then, as you say, eventually in 1919, he had his great moment on the world stage when he took over Fiume, it's now called Ryaka, Croatia, which it's not a huge city, but it's a strategically important one because it has a deep harbour, and it was really the outlet to the sea for the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So it had been an important city and a very polyglot one with a mixed race population. That had been the case for generations. But Denunzio decided at the end of the world, second first, sorry, at the end of the First World War, when the victorious allies were in Paris carving up the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, Yugoslavia was just coming into being, brand new nation or state anyway, never really a nation. And meanwhile, there were Italians, D'Annunzio included, who were saying, no, it has a big Italian population, it was a Venetian city in the during the medieval period when Venice controlled the whole of the Dalmatian coast. It must become Italian again. And so D'Annunzio, he was he was a terrific uh performer. He had a very early understanding of the fact that politics is largely a matter of performance, something as I think every modern politician knows, but was quite new in his generation. And so he he marched on Fumay with to begin with, uh when he began his march on the other side of the Istrian Peninsula, he had about 200 followers. By the time he arrived in the city, a further 2,000 had joined them. And over the next couple of months, tens of thousands of volunteers streamed into Fume to become part of D'Nunzio's extraordinary city-state.

Russell 6:28

So

Making Italy And Making Italians

Russell 6:29

when he's a young man, Italy has just been reunified, is that right? What kind of place is Italy at this time?

Speaker 2 6:37

Well, as you say, it it's only just come into being. It has been a peninsula, and as Bismarck famously said, it was um not a country, it's a geographical, and what's he called, a geographical expression. And so Italy was a place, but it wasn't a nation. D'Aruncio, born in 1863, in the in the heroic age of the Risorgimento, only three years after Garibaldi had led his great expedition with the frozen volunteers to s to Sicily, and Garibaldi had defeated the kingdom of the two Sicilies, the Borgon monarchy. And then a few years later, in 1870, when Demunzio was seven years old, finally the French were driven out of Rome, and Italy was united at last. Theoretically united anyway. But of course, historically, you know, the Papal States, the Dukedom of Tuscany, the Kingdom of Piedmont, the Kingdom of the Bourbons in Naples, it was a very fragmented place, and each of those little statelets had a completely different, not just a different history, but a different culture and a different language. They couldn't really speak to each other. So there was a lot of work to be done, and the great catchphrase of the period when Dunzio was growing up was so the heroes of the Risorgimento have made Italy. Now we have to make Italians.

Russell 8:11

So the heroes have made the geographical entity, and now we have to sort of people it with something that's unified in some way.

Speaker 2 8:18

And Dunnuzio saw himself as being the man who could do that. He saw it when he was, you know, still in his teams, he was describing himself as the voice of his race. And I mean, as Pushkin in Russia and alias of Goethe in Germany, to some extent, their poetry had given a uh given a shape to German consciousness, Pushkin to Russian consciousness. Every nation, or maybe it's this isn't really true of more self-confident older established nations, but every new nation needs a poet, or needed. I mean, you know, I'm talking about poetry. Here in the 21st century, poetry is a minority interest. But in D'Anunzio's lifetime, to be a poet was was probably more like being a rock star.

Russell 9:11

And was he as good as people sort of I mean, it seems an odd thing to say, was he as good as people thought he was, because if they thought he was good, presumably he was good. But I mean, I've never read any of his stuff, and I I don't get the sense he has a reputation today.

Speaker 2 9:24

He's not known in this country, um, partly because his poetry is very, very hard to translate. He uses these very, very intricate rhyme schemes, which um work very well in Italian. Italian has a lot of similar word endings, I mean words with similar endings, so that rhyming is a great deal easier for Italian poets than it is for English. And people have made valiant attempts to translate his work, but you're never really gonna get the beauty of it unless you can read Italian, I'm afraid. So that's one reason why he's not knowing here. And another is that when he started to write fiction, which he did very soon in his twenties, um his novels were so sexually explicit that translators translating them into English bowdlerized them so extremely that if you read those fast translations, you cannot understand what's going on. I mean that the whole plot is chopped to pieces. So he's his work hasn't really ever caught on outside of Italy, except in in France. He actually became rich and successful in France before um before he did in his native Italy, which was partly simply because France was the kind of the cultural centre of Europe at that time, late 19th century. And so it was in French translation that his work was first acknowledged as being absolutely fantastic.

Russell 11:05

But I don't think you've really answered the question, which is was he any good?

Speaker 2 11:09

Yes, yes. Okay. Um I can read Italian, I'm happy to say. I've spent eight years reading Italian in the course of research in this book, and yes, it's extremely good. Um when I say that, I mean some of it is. He was amazingly prolific. Um he once said that you know he could write as far as his hand could move, and it was true, he just never stopped churning out work. And I think that his his lyric poetry, his love poems, his poems about nature, um are they're ravishingly beautiful. But then later in life, once he became a political activist, he started pouring out bombastic propaganda verse. And no, I wouldn't bother with that.

Russell 11:58

And is it worth just mentioning his his habit of keeping notebooks at this stage?

Speaker 2 12:03

Definitely, definitely. I mean, he he was, as I say, he was such a prolific author. He just couldn't stop himself. And he always had a notebook with him, and a lot of those notebooks, they were, you know, little, he was very fussy about his stationery, they were all uniform size, very beautifully bound. And a lot of them are preserved in the Vittoriale, which was his last home, where he retired in the 1920s and spent the last 17 years of his life kind of converting what had been a very attractive, kind of ordinary Italian farmhouse into this amazing sort of monument to himself. And all his notebooks are there. And he is he writes so much. You you know, he describes meeting someone on the street, and then he describes getting into bed with them, or he's uh he might be flying, he became an aviator, and he's up in the air in one of those tiny flimsy little planes with anti-aircraft fire, you know, whizzing around him, or he's at the front during World War I, again, under fire, and he's making notes. And you think, how when did he get time to write this?

Russell 13:23

And he's writing notes on on kind of the tiny little details. He's not it's not the big, oh my god, you know, it's anti-aircraft fire. He's he's noting, you know, the the shape of a handkerchief or something like that.

Speaker 2 13:36

Exactly, exactly. Which of course was such a gift to me as his biographer. I mean, I could know not only what he was doing, but what he was thinking, right, what he was eating for lunch, who he went to bed with, and exactly what they did together in bed. It's um it it's sort of a bit overwhelming. Yes, of course.

Seduction As Performance And Power

Russell 13:59

So so you say you said that he was he was not a good-looking man. He was short, he was bold, he had shockingly bad teeth. And yet Well, I mean, how many lovers does he have? And and and and and why is he so irresistible to women? Is is it just that he's good at the act of sex and word gets around?

Speaker 2 14:21

I mean, what's the there may be a bit of that. And if the word got around, it wasn't because the women were blabbing, it was because he was boasting. And his very sexually explicit uh literary works do kind of you know they they kind of you know tell you what you're gonna get if you say yes to him. But there uh the but there's more than that. I mean, there was um there's a wonderful, very funny description by Isadora Duncan, the great dancer, and he tried it on with her, probably successfully. She doesn't actually tell us whether she consented, but she describes how he would you know get up very close to you and talk very quietly and insinuatingly into your ear, and and he would be sort of gazing into your eyes, and the whole performance was very, very flattering. And Isadora says you you felt that you and he, even if you were in the middle of the party, you were alone together among fields of Asphodel. You know, you were somehow transported into paradise. And there's another account of being seduced uh by Denitsio by an anonymous lady who uh tells us that somehow he she went right to see him one afternoon. He'd said, Come, come alone. So she did, so she knew exactly what she was getting herself into, at which point he was she found him wearing a kimono. Uh he was very keen on Japanese arts and artifacts, and he he'd laid out a silver tray with exquisite china tea, which was quite a rare and precious thing at that point. Um, and everything was lovely, you know, on the tea tray, there were rose petals scattered everywhere, and there were flowers, the room was full of flowers. And he sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, and she was sitting on a chair, and he took her two hands and his two hands, and he gazed into her eyes. And she doesn't tell us what he what he was saying, but he had this wonderful, mellifluous voice. And somehow, the way she tells it, it's as though she kind of lost consciousness, so she wasn't fully responsible for her actions. I think we deduced she was a married lady and really shouldn't have been there at all. Uh, but so she somehow swooned into his bedroom and you know what you might imagine then took place.

Russell 16:51

And did you find yourself, as with all these descriptions, did you find yourself thinking, yep, if I'd have been there, I'd you know, he'd have been whispering in my ear and I'd have been swooning into his arms?

Speaker 2 17:03

Funnily enough, when when when I was talking about him at literary festivals a lot when the book had just come out, um it was almost always the first question from the floor was, what do you think? W would you have said yes? And I don't know, you know, some very sensible women did, but they most of them lived to regress it. He was, you know, he he could be fantastically seductive. And and he wasn't just, you know, his life wasn't a series of one-night stands. He had some very ardent and loving and passionate relationships with some extremely distinguished women. I mean, Eleanor Uduza.

Russell 17:44

Well just say, who is who is Eleanor Uduza? I mean, what's what I mean I mean, obviously nowadays, well, not known.

Speaker 2 17:52

Yeah, I mean, there are there are tiny fragments of film recording some of her performances, but you know, she lived in the priest in our age, and sadly acting is a very ephemeral art before we get the camera. But we we do have still photographs of her. She was so we know for certain she was very, very beautiful, really fabulous looking. And there are a lot of descriptions of her performances. She was apparently very, very good at at um performing sorrow. She could she could weep on the stage like nobody else. And D'Anuncio, this is another thing which doesn't make us like him very much, he loved to make her cry because the way she cried was so elegant and beautiful. And and the other thing about Dusser was apart from being an actress who people, you know, people found her ethereal, refined, moving. Um, people said her face was as fluid as water, and and you know, she could assume different personas like Quicksilver. She, you know, she was much admired. But apart from her performances, she was also her own manager. So, you know, she was clever, practical, efficient. You know, she would assemble her own her own company and then take them on tour. She travelled all over Europe, she went to the States, she went to Moscow, she went to Egypt. You know, she actually was she wasn't just a pretty face, she was also a brilliant, brilliant impresario of her own work. So she was a very impressive person for him. Donatsio spent eight years with her. But he'd also, you know, one of his earlier lovers was, and actually his last lover, were both concert pianists working at a very high level. Um he didn't waste time on bimbos. He only the best.

Why He Is Called The Pike

Russell 19:52

Only the best will do. So the name of your book is The Pike, and I and I know he got that nickname, I think, because somebody said, Oh, he was always stealing other people's ideas and like lurking beneath the surface, ready to sort of snatch somebody's idea. But I wondered if you called him the Pike because, you know, sort of the sense of preying on people, and I wondered what what your reason for calling it the Pike was.

Speaker 2 20:15

Um yes, you're absolutely right. I did have that idea of him as being a rather frightening predator, because you know, by the end of his life and he became more politically visible. Um he was calling out for war, he was calling out for violence. He said repeatedly in slightly different words that he had a great thirst for blood. So, you know, he was a frightening person. But he also, and the past Romain Roran, who first caught him the pike, was referring to the way that D'Anuncio had a fantastic knack for just knowing what was hip and cool and new and exciting in the culture around him. And it might be a hairstyle or it might be a new way of tying your cravat, but equally it might be a political tendency. And he was just so quick and sharp at sensing what was what was coming along. And a lot of the people, a lot of the people who um came to prominence in the next generation had really taken from D'Annunzio ideas which he had been the first to pick up. And I'm thinking of Marinetti, the spokesman to the futurist movement. Almost all of Marinetti's statements in the famous Futurist Manifesto are, I just, you know, he's ripped them off from Denuncia.

Russell 21:42

You say it's this famous Futurism Manifesto, but I wonder, you know, the futurism is in the past now, I wonder.

Speaker 2 21:48

Yes.

Russell 21:49

Just say what futurism was and why it was so why it was so attractive at the time.

Speaker 2 21:55

Right. Well, I think that um Maraneshi is another fascinating. Character, but we won't get into him because we've got to stay focused. But he was a very flamboyant character and a journalist, as Domutsi also had started out as a journalist. And Marinetti in 1910 he published his Futurist Manifesto, in which he proclaimed a whole new aesthetic. And the the aesthetic was somehow a political program as well. It was as though the old theoretical kind of politics had been superseded by a kind of a taste, a hunger for speed and modernity for machines. So, you know, Marinetti was writing about aeroplanes and modern everything that was fast and sleek and metallic and new. But actually, 30 years before him, D'Nunzio had written an ode to a torpedo. So Dunzio definitely got there first. And actually Dunzio was the first man in Tuscany to get a telephone installed in his house. He made great friends with the Signor Fiat. And Dunzio had one of the first Fiets in existence, great big, shiny red car, and he roared around the little narrow roads of Tuscany at an absolutely shocking speed of 30 miles an hour.

Speaker 4 23:28

Well I bet the I bet the roads were probably you know, that was probably pretty quick for the roads.

Speaker 2 23:34

Yeah, they were car tracks, you know, no one had needed sort of mutar map before. And and then of course he became an aviator. So he he started flying long before anybody else.

Money Addiction And Life On Credit

Russell 23:45

Can we just say a bit about his his attitude to money? Because it seems extraordinary he's he's like this this wildly successful writer, and he must have a pretty good income. And yet he ends up fleeing, I think, to France, you know, because because the creditors will are literally at his door, you know, carrying out the furniture.

Speaker 2 24:08

Yes, literally, literally. I mean, he repeatedly had to move to escape from the bailiffs. And because, although Italy was supposedly unified, actually it was still divided up into separate sort of administrative areas. So you could be, you know, in bad trouble financially, your your creditors suing you, trying to take you to court in Florence, but you know, hop over to Naples and you were okay for a bit, or go to Venice. And that is one of the reasons why D'Nunzu actually did move house so very, very often. But another reason was that he loved houses, he loved cramming them with brick-a-brac and things, he adored clothes. In his early years as a journalist, when he was, you know, in his very early twenties, he was writing fashion notes for newspapers and um social chit-chat. And his more sort of high-minded friends were saying, you know, what are you doing? This is beneath you, you're prostituting your talent. Go back to the poetry. But he he was fascinated by by clothes and by jewellery and flowers, and he just spent he he spent crazy sums of money. And often he would he was interested in money. He liked the idea of earning a lot, and he drove quite a hard bargain. But then often he'd he'd forget to collect it, you know. He wouldn't send in his invoice.

Russell 25:40

But you know, there's the I mean there's examples in your book where you know he's escaped from his creditors and he's you know he turned up penniless and he books himself into the most expensive hotel in the new town that he's he's moved into. I think there's something psychologically a bit weird here.

Speaker 2 25:57

Definitely. Oh, definitely. It was obviously sort of I don't know what we call it, but it it was a kind of compulsion and addiction. He just wanted things. And and he was a small man, but he liked living living surrounded by enormous items of furniture, sort of pseudo-renaissance, heavy pieces of carved wood. Uh, he had life-size effigies of saints and not just, you know, one in the corner of the drawing room, but eight of them around his bed. He he he liked having a load of stuff.

Calling For War Then Fighting It

Russell 26:36

Okay, so we should probably move on to the war. And I guess that was the bit in your book that that genuinely shocked me. Um, I mean, Italy doesn't join the war when it breaks out in 1914, and actually it doesn't need to join at all. There's there's really no reason for it to join. And then, you know, the horrors of the Western Front, everybody knows how horrific the war is. And in fact, D'Annunzio, I think, he's in France, so he so he sees it up close. And yet, and yet he's thrilled with the idea of Italy joining the war, and and he seems to be thrilled by the idea of people dying. I I just I don't really I don't really uh understand it.

Speaker 2 27:18

Yeah, it I agree. It's shocking. Um, and it I mean you can sort of trace it back into his earlier life. Um, I think it's very interesting that he grew up in the obrupzi in Pescara, which was not as sort of advanced culturally as the great cities on the western coast of Italy, you know, Naples, Rome, Florence. Um Pescara was, you know, it was quite a backwater, and the church was still very dominant. And Donuzia describes memories from his childhood of processions of pilgrims walking through the town, flagellating themselves, and and ceremonies in the church when you know penitent penitent people would be crawling over the floor of the nave, um, again with blood pouring from them, abasing themselves before the altar. So I think that he responded to this kind of uh Christian religious imagery of of suffering, of torture, of sacrifice, in a way that you know wasn't wasn't normal. And and then once he became sexually active, he certainly he liked his women to be ill. I mean, as several of them were. One of the women he loved most had TB, and he wrote to her saying, I love you at your best when you are sick and suffering. Again, quite shocking, actually, very shocking. And then when he moves that um that kind of excitement, that sort of zest for pain and and suffering into the political sphere, it becomes even more toxic. And in the years before the Great War, the first world war breaks out, D'Anuncio and and quite a lot of other Italians are you know they're they're militarist, they're aggressive, they're very keen on virility. D'Anuncio called himself the poet of virility, and to their idea, a real man is a man who fights. And in a nation at peace, men just don't get the chance to show how manly they can be. And they're frustrated by that, in his eyes in his view. And this was something Marinetti also agreed. Um, and so for years before the war actually began, D'Annuzio was thrilled by warfare and writing about it and thinking about it. And then, as you say, in 1914, he was in France. He'd been he lived in Paris for five years, mainly to escape his creditors in Italy. And but during that first year of the war, while Italy remained neutral the first eight months, he was writing from Italy, sorry, from France, he was writing contributions to the Italian journals, newspapers, um, poems, horribly, hideously bloodthirsty poems, and vitriolic abuse against the Austrians, who he saw as the hereditary enemy of the Italians, as he put it, crying out to the Italian government to man up and go to war. And then in 1915, he returned to Italy, gave a terrific speech on the beach from which Garibaldi had led his thousand volunteers all those years before, to begin the process of liberating Italy. And then Donizia went on to Rome, and he he was there for two weeks. He was speaking over and over again, often three times a day, on the Capitol, in the opera house, and you know, in huge public spaces, calling on the Italians, and by this time what he's asking them to do is to rise up against their democratic representatives in parliament, um, if necessary, to lynch those parliamentary deputies who are of the peace party and saying we have got, we have got to join the war.

Russell 31:29

I suppose one thing you can say to his credit is that when when the government decides for whatever reason, perhaps because they're offered bribes by the Allies, perhaps because they realize they just can't hold back the public thirst for war anymore. But I mean, at least he does then go off and fight. I mean, he's in his fifties, but he does go off and fight, and he and he and he does, you know, he does properly put himself at risk. So so what are his sort of adventures in the war, if I can put it like that?

Speaker 2 32:00

He was, you're quite right, he was very, very brave, and people were astonished by it, and in some cases rather annoyed by it. He was in his fifties, there was absolutely no pressure on him to see action. And certainly the military authorities were extremely pleased to have him as a propagandist, uh someone who could, you know, help morale by addressing the troops before they went into battle. Uh, he spoke at the dreadful uh mass funerals after battles when hundreds of these wretched teenage conscripts were being buried on us. Um so, you know, everyone was pleased about that. I mean, all the Italian authorities. But they didn't want him to get killed because, you know, his presence near the front was encouraging for the troops, they thought. But if he'd been killed, that would have been a blow to Morat. But he insisted on putting himself in the front line. And he he had a kind of a sort of open brief. He could attach himself to, you know, to ships, to uh to to the troops, and also to the Air Force. Air Force, which was only just coming into being. I mean, planes were so new and so flimsy and so fragile and dangerous. Um, but uh so he was on the front lines with the troops, and as you say, the the Italian front was even worse than the Western Front, with which we're more familiar. I mean, you know, in in Flanders it's a matter of being muddy trenches, that the Italians were fighting uphill, or actually not uphill, up mountain. The you know, the Austrians were along the ridges of the range that forms the frontier between northern Italy and Austria. And the Italian troops were having to march, or not much, crawl, scramble, climb up towards the Austrian troops who didn't even bother to waste ammunition. They just rolled rocks down, knocking the Italians off the mountainside. It was uh it was awful, and it's it was there, and you're right, one does have to give him credit for that. He wasn't asking anyone to do something that he wouldn't have done himself. And there were several occasions when, you know, he'd be standing and the person next to him would be shot dead. So he was brave. And and then the I mean the flights were amazing. Um he never actually learned to pilot himself, but he wasn't just a passenger, often he was the bombardier. And you know, there were open panes, there was nothing over your head. And if you were sitting in in the in the not the cockpit, because that's where the pilot was, if you were, you know, the bombardier in front, you literally picked up the bomb and threw it over the side. It was, you know, it was all very, very primitive.

Russell 34:54

Well, of course, D'Annunzio sometimes he would throw bombs, sometimes he would chuck out some leaflets that he'd written for the purpose.

Speaker 2 35:01

Exactly, exactly. I mean, he he saw words as being weapons of war. And he composed these pamphlets. I mean, famously he and a pilot overflew Trieste, um, which was then in Austrian hands, with these pamphlets calling upon the people of Trieste to rise up against the Austrians and drive them out, and then he and the other Italians would come to their aid and they could rejoin the mother Italy.

Russell 35:33

I mean, he flew over Vienna, didn't he? When it's a huge long-range mission.

Speaker 2 35:37

He flew over Vienna and he'd been intending to do that throughout the war, throughout all the years. He was based in Venice, uh, which of course was a lovely place to spend your time, but it was very close to the front, so you know there were good reasons for him to be there. And he tried to persuade the High Command from very early on to let him fly to Vienna, and it actually just wasn't possible. The little planes, they couldn't carry enough fuel to get to get there and back until the very, very end of the war in August 1918. The technology had advanced to the point where it was feasible, you you you perhaps could do it. Um but you know, there was a mountain range in the way, and it wasn't going to be easy. And D'Nunzio set out, by this time he was commander of a squadron of fighter planks, and he and his his squad set off into the air again carrying pamphlets, which he was going to drop over Vienna. And what the pamphlet said was, We are come to liberate you. Not sure whether the Viennate Viennese went wanted the Italians to liberate them, but there you go. And so, you know, rise up, throw out your rulers. Um but if you don't, today I'm dropping words, next time I come, I will be dropping bombs. So it was it was menacing as well as being a kind of flamboyant piece of propaganda.

Russell 37:07

Some people really took a dislike to him in the war because I'm thinking of one incident in particular where he sort of organizes some pointless attack, and a lot of the troops, you know, are gunned down, a lot surrender, and then he arranges for the artillery to be called down on the surrendered Italian troops. And I think somebody, I can't remember who, you know, just remarks on this, you know, what a what a vicious act that was.

Speaker 2 37:36

Yes, I mean he had no pity or no sympathy for those soldiers who finding themselves in an impossible situation, you know, flung up their hands and waved the white flag. He believed in fighting to the death. And all his sort of wartime rhetoric is about blood and sacrifice and the nobility of sacrifice, and how proud and glad these wretched teenage conscripts ought to feel about being slaughtered. And certainly, I mean, the incident you referred to is really shocking. It's sort of against all the rules of war. So the Italian, the Italian artillery fired on Italians who'd been taken prisoner. And so, I mean, obviously they were also shooting at those Austrian troops who'd taken them prisoner. But all the protocols say you do not fire on prisoners for your own your own side. It was deeply shocking. And he was um I mean that the fact that he saw war as glorious and noble and did tend to uh I mean it led him to I mean, thank goodness he wasn't commander-in-chief.

Russell 38:52

Well, you say that he couldn't have done a worse job than Luigi Cadorna.

Speaker 2 38:56

Well, that's true. That that that is true. I mean, General Cadorna thought pretty much the same. I think in Cadorna's case it was more to do with stupid stupidity, you know, rather than having a, you know, this great cult of of of glory that D'Annunzio aspis. Cadorno just, you know, he'd been taught that you make war by marching on the enemy. And I mean, when in the end the Austrians counter-attacked, instead of crossing the mountains, they simply went round them. Clever, you know?

Russell 39:30

Yeah, he was he was shocking. And then when they finally get round to removing him, he refuses to go. And he's like the worst general in the in in World War One, which is a pretty stiff competition, and yet he sort of clings on and says, No, no, I'm the man for the job. It's just it's incomprehensible. And I wonder, did did uh Dancio have an opinion of him?

Speaker 2 39:52

I think he I think he respected him. Um but because he saw him as an improper manly posing man. But um I don't I don't think I don't think Denuncio ever admired anyone much apart from himself.

The Mutilated Victory And Irredentism

unknown 40:10

Okay.

Russell 40:10

And then just just move well, I s I say moving on from the war. I think he came up with this phrase even while the war was going on because they were worried what would happen when it finished. And he had this phrase, I think it was Denuncio's phrase anyway, this idea of the mutilated victory. And you just want to explain what that was and what it then what it then led to.

Speaker 2 40:30

Yes. So D'Anuncio obviously hoped that at the end of the war, the Italians, who were, after all, fighting with the Allies, ended up on the winning side, that they would be rewarded. And what he wanted was the restoration to Italy of what were known to Italians of Denuncia's way of thinking as the unredeemed territories. People who thought about this called themselves irredentists because when Italy was unified in 1870, uh to Donuncia's way of thinking, uh, not all Italy was included. And he was thinking of basically the the cities along the Dalmatian coast on the eastern shore of the Asiatic Sea, in what is now uh well what became Yugoslavia and is now mostly Croatia and the others, Montenegro and the other states along that coast. And Donunzio wanted them all back. And so he started towards the end of the war, and even more in the few months after the armistice, to give a whole series of inflammatory speeches in great huge public spaces, in which he called upon this lost wing. He he saw Italy as being like the victory of Samothrace, you know, that great statue in the Louvre of the woman who represents victory with huge wings. And he said Italy has lost one of its wings because he saw that, you know, that Dalmatian coast as being an essential part of the complete Italy. And that's why he he called the peace settlement a mutilated victory, because Italy was left one-winged.

Marching On Fiume Against Rome

Russell 42:16

Sunny decides to do something about it, and he mentioned it in the introduction. He this crazy march on Fiume were you know, in complete, complete opposition to his own government, and yet nobody seems able to stop him.

Speaker 2 42:31

That's right. I mean, so the Italians were obviously they, you know, they were part of the Allied high command. And and Italy, not just Italy, all Europe, was in chaos in that first year after the war. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed, so by the way, had the Russian Tsarist regime, and nobody knew what was happening next. There was a general feeling of everything being up for grabs. And the peacemakers in in Paris were, you know, hammering out the Versailles Treaty. And honestly, drawing lines on the map, map of places they hadn't been, and a lot of the very, very bad decisions made during that year are still causing trouble for us. But Dunazio realized that Italy was not going to get what it wanted. The Italian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister together came away from Paris. They walked out on the peace negotiations, saying that they they they couldn't stand what was being done to Italy. Italy was not being given its due share of the spoils of war, effectively.

Russell 43:42

Well, they had sort of been promised spoils of war if only they would come in on the Allied side, and then they'd lost, you know, the best part of a million men. And so they sort of did have did have sort of a bit of a point.

Speaker 2 43:56

They certainly did have a point. And if you read the correspondence. Around those negotiations in Paris. It's absolutely shocking the way the French and the British particularly talk about the Italians. And, you know, Lloyd George, Harold Nicholson, people like that. They refer to the Italians as ice cream salesmen. You know, they they have no respect for the Italians, despite the fact that, you know, as we've both been saying, the Italians fought very bravely and lost an enormous number of men. And D'Annunzio and others like him had seen this their experience of warfare as being what D'Annunzio called a baptism of blood, which and from which Italy would emerge as an acknowledged great power. It would have proved itself. But no, these sort of snooty English gentlemen were still referring to them as sort of, you know, the kind of chap you meet acting as a waiter on your honeymoon. You know, terrible racist remarks. And so there were a lot of Italians who felt very angry. And D'Annunzio was their their front man, their mouthpiece. And so there was a the the the history of quite how it happened is pretty complex, so let's not go into it. But basically, uh D'Annunzio put himself at the head of a group of 200 disaffected Italian soldiers who'd mutinied and deserted from the Italian army. And they wanted, they'd been, they'd been stationed in Fume, then they'd been sent out of it to make way for uh, I think, French troops who were coming in to sort of hold the place while it was decided who was going to get Fume in the end. And and those troops mutinied, they wanted to go back to Fume. They asked Donatsu to lead them there. He didn't come immediately because he had some parties to go to in Venice and a new mistress who actually was to become the last great love of his life. And but eventually, a few days later, he agreed and he led the march on Fume. He didn't actually do any marching. He was in an enormous red sports car leading them.

Russell 46:16

But he goes through and and the troops that are sent out to confront him, they either move to one side or they follow him, or they actually switch sides completely. And now he's in Fiume, he's in charge.

Speaker 2 46:28

That's right.

Russell 46:28

It's extraordinary.

Speaker 2 46:30

So the Allied, the Allied command, uh so you know we've got to stop him, but the only troops, the only Allied troops in the in the region at that point, as Donunzio was crossing the Istrian Peninsula, were were Italian. I mean, they were under the Allied High Command, but they were Italian. And most of them, including a lot of the officers, liked what Donunzio was doing. So they were under direct orders to stop him, if necessary, by shooting him dead, but they didn't do it. And D'Annunzio, um, I mean, he, as I've said, you know, he was a great performer. He he understood the theatre of politics and propaganda. He's he stepped forward, he stepped out of his car, stepped forward, uh, threw back his cloak, showing all his medals, and said, shoot me. And they didn't, they they turned round and followed him back into Fume.

Russell 47:26

Do you think he was uh copying Napoleon on his his march to Waterloo?

Speaker 2 47:30

Oh, definitely. Yes, no, I he was very aware of how uh he used the heroes of the past, Napoleon. Uh he often compared himself to Garibaldi, who of course you know counted from war in Italy, and and you know, great Roman generals. He he was always invoking classical heroes as parallels with himself.

Carnival Politics With Real Violence

Russell 47:53

It did sound rather fun. I mean, there were some dark moments, but it did seem rather fun, some of the occupation of Fiume, because it sounded like you know the women were very agreeable, there was uh you know plenty of parties, there was plenty of cocaine to go around. And uh, you know, D'Nunzio had the time of his life giving speech after speech after speech.

Speaker 2 48:12

It was amazing. It was an extraordinary place for the Italians, by the way. Um I I think that you know the Slav population of Fume, it's a very mixed population town. On the whole, the Italians lived in the old city, and the Croatians and Serbs lived on the other side of the river, which divides the town in two, and Fiume was means river, and so does Riakka, which is its modern name. So over the water, people weren't so happy. But in the old town, which was dominated by by the Italians, who tended to be more prosperous than the starvate populations, it was just one non-stop street party for months. And D'Onunzio would come out onto his he took over the Governor's Palace, which is still standing, it's very grand, and has an immense balcony overlooking the piazza. And D'Onunzio come out onto the balcony and he would deliver these amazing speeches. And even people who absolutely detested him had to agree he was a fantastic orator. You know, he'd step out and they're probably thinking, who is this funny-looking little man? And then he'd open his mouth, and he had a beautiful voice, which must have been astonishingly powerful. I mean, he would address crowds, I mean, in Fume, for instance, in a big piazza, but you know, in the previous year he'd been addressing crowds in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, which is a massive space. And remember, you know, no loud speakers, no microphones, no amplification of any kind. And so obviously the people at the back couldn't really hear what he was saying. But he had a kind of presence which uh which worked. And, you know, a lot of people have tried to describe it, but it's, you know, it's quite hard to work out how he did it. But he thought about it very carefully, and he rehearsed. His speeches appeared to be just outpourings of passion. But uh he himself describes in his notebooks how he would rehearse and practice the pacing and how he would start off quite quiet and slow, and then you know, the volume would build, and it would come these great crescendoes and get louder and louder. And and the clever thing he did was to get his audience, public, shouting back at him.

Speaker 50:40

Right.

Speaker 2 50:41

Again, something that he took from his you know childhood memories of of liturgical practice, you know, in the church service, the priest says something and then the the congregation replies. And that kind of call and response means that you know the public are never left just you know feeling a bit bored as an audience. They're part of the show. And and then, you know, speech done, Damonseo would lead uh his followers, he called them his legion, out into the countryside outside the the city, and they would march sort of singing over the hills and then down to the waterfront. It you know, the whole it was like kind of um, I don't know, it was like the take the storming of the basti, it was happening every every single day.

Russell 51:30

Sort of a Disneyland of revolution.

Speaker 2 51:33

Yeah, yeah. No, it was thrilling. And um and also, as you say, well, it was fun. I mean, we're talking about young men who had been fighting for for years. Um, most of the people who came to to Fume who wanted to volunteer to support Demonsian were people who'd had who shared his appetite for violence. They'd they'd they'd been excited by warfare. And I think that um is something that you know, we quite rightly dwell on the horrors of war. But uh I think it's also important to remember that wars wouldn't happen if people didn't actually sometimes enjoy them. And that, you know, there are always some people like that, and uh those people who had been in the forefront of the fighting on the Italian front, uh seched up in Fiume, particularly a group called the Arditi, who were kind of the the the crack troops of the Italian army, who were always in the front line and they they didn't carry guns, they only carried daggers and hand grenades. And when the an attack was about to happen on the Italian front, the Arditi went forward and fought hand to hand with the Austrians while you know the regular troops came up behind them bringing you know bringing the weaponry. And so th that you know, those were those were desperate guys. And indeed, they formed a group in Fiume called La Disperata, you know, they were desperados. And so it was they were they were wild guys. And so there was an atmosphere of carnival, but it was quite a quite a scary kind of a carnival.

Russell 53:23

Well, there was a I mean you say there were French troops there, but I mean I think they were colonial troops, I think they were um Vietnamese uh ethnicity, and I think some of them ended up being lynched by, I don't know what was the Arditi or who it was.

Speaker 2 53:37

They did, yes. That was actually before D'Anuncio arrived. So that so that the um the the Italians in Fume, uh not all of them, of course, but a sizeable portion, were very nationalist. They felt isolated as they were, you know, they were a they were a sizeful population in the city, but all around them were Croatians, you know, the the city was um it was a sort of a little island of Italian-ness in in a in a foreign country, a a fairly hostile foreign country. I think that um a lot of the British and French perhaps failed to quite understand that for for the British and French, the Croatians and the Serbs, and all the other former parts of the Austro-Hungarian, Austro-Hungarian Empire, were you know people who were claiming their freedom, the empire had collapsed, they were people whose liberation should be celebrated. But to the Italians, the Italians throughout the war had been fighting against Austrian armies who had largely made up of Croatians or Serbs. They're the enemy. So, you know, they were the enemy.

Russell 54:58

And then sort of D'Anuncio kind of, he kind of gets everything he's asking for, insofar as it is in the Italian government's power to give it to him. I mean, I think twice he gets offered the best deal they can manage. And I think is there not a vote taken on it, and everyone thinks this is a splendid idea?

Speaker 2 55:19

That's right. So only a few months after D'Annunzio arrived, the Italian government offered what they call a modus viventi, a w a way of coming to terms with the situation, which was pretty good, um, which said that they, you know, they're not going to insist, they, the Italian authorities, are not going to insist on annexing Fiume, but they're going to hold a a plebiscite, uh, a referendum, in which the people of Fume can vote as to whether or not they want to they're given three options. They can be a part of Italy annexed, they can become a part of the new Yugoslavia, or there's a sort of middle way where they become a sort of a free state and just, you know, manage themselves. And the plebiscite happens just before Christmas. So Delozio has arrived in Fume in September. And for those few months, it's all quite cheerful. And it feels and um there is an undercurrent of violence. There's certainly already a sort of ethnic hostility between the Slav population and the Italian population, but it hasn't turned too nasty. But then the plebiscite happens, the deal is really pretty good, and the inhabitants of Fiume vote in favour of accepting the Italian government's offer by four votes to one. And as part of the deal, D'Annunzio must withdraw, taking all his rather disruptive, wild volunteer supporters with him. And he doesn't want to go. He's having a great time. And so he he just refuses to go. He says, you know, the vote is null and void, I'm ignoring it. And at which point a lot of the more sensible, moderate people who've been there with him as part of his government, as well as just, you know, volunteer fighters, they leave. And meanwhile, a lot of more scary people arrive. And so from the end of 1919 for nearly a year, he stays on in Fumay as the head of a kind of rabble of discontents of various different kinds. And some of them, a lot of them actually, are high-minded idealists. They love poetry, they respect, they love Donuncio's poetry, they're writing poetry of their own, an awful lot of them. Um, and they see Fume. I mean, I I I liken it to, you know, hate Ashbury under the hippies in 1968 in the summer of love. It's a sort of place where anyone who feels unhappy at home thinks they can go and try out a more exciting, more beautiful, new kind of life. And um, you know, lots of them have beautiful ideals, but lots of them are criminal. You've already mentioned drugs and drug dealers locked into the city. Big fashion for cocaine. Dinocia had it had quite a serious cocaine habit by the time he left. We got a lot of young male people coming into the city, and so an awful lot of prostitutes have followed them. And one of the visitors says that sex was cheaper in Fume than he'd ever known it anywhere else ever. And then there are these weird, and these extraordinary acts of sort of street theatre. At one point, Toscanini, the great conductor, arrives in Fume with his orchestra. And Dunzio's delighted, Dununzio's great lover of music, welcomes Toscanini, and arranges for him to do a great open-air concert on the waterfront of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which will be followed by a mock battle. But the battle between two parties of D'Nunzio's legionaries, as he calls them, that it's not mock. They're using real hand grenades. And and quite a number of them are seriously injured, including some of the musicians. You know, it's it's it's this party has become far too wild.

Italy Fires On Him To End It

Russell 59:43

So how so how do they persuade him to leave in the end? How does it all end?

Speaker 2 59:48

Well, right up until the end of the story, uh Domenzio was appearing on his balcony still day after day, delivering these great orations, saying that his slogan was uh few fume or more dead, fume or death. Basically, you know, I'm not leaving here alive, ignorance you, we're all gonna fight to the death. It was never quite kind of spelled out in these speeches. And this is something Denuncio is very good at, delivering uh rhetoric which was very stirring and exciting, but you could quite work out what he meant. And in these speeches, he never specified who he was going to be fighting against. And it turned out, so nearly a year after the modus vivendi had been offered and rejected, Italy, just ignoring Demunzio, entered into a treaty, the Treaty of Rapalo, with the new country of Yugoslavia. And basically, in a way, they they they went behind Denunzio's back and just said, we're going to form a peace treaty. We will slightly leave the question of uh Fume on one side, but we are now allies. So there was no question of it, no longer was possible even for Denuncio to pretend that he was fighting for Italy against their enemy, the newborn state of Yugoslavia, because Yugoslavia only given our allies. And so many people tried to persuade Domencio to leave, including his own sort of his own ministers, the people who were, you know, with him there, were saying to him, look, really, it's, you know, it's beyond a joke now. We've got to go. But he wouldn't go and he wouldn't go and he wouldn't go. And finally, um the Italian authorities sent a warship which fired a single shell from out in the harbour, which struck the governor's palace where Dunizio had his headquarters. Uh, the plaster from the ceiling fell on his head as he was sitting in there. And he still fought on it for there was sort of fighting in the streets for three days, but eventually it became obvious that you know it was ridiculous. And anyway, he saw himself as the great Italian patriotic hero. What was he doing fighting against Italy? Even he couldn't quite, you know, make sense of that. So he gave another speech in which he explained that it some somehow everything had changed, and he left.

Russell 1:02:25

Right. I mean, there is a very serious side to this because this is a man who's defying the constitutional government, the democratic government. He is bad-mouthing them, he is talking about them as if they were absolute scum. Uh, and this is going on for months and months and months. I mean, it's not very healthy politics. And this is the time when you know Mussolini is just beginning to sort of, you know, pop up and the socialists are getting stronger, and the people resisting the socialists, the fascists are getting stronger. It's an extremely unhealthy uh development, isn't it?

Speaker 2 1:03:03

Definitely. Yes, you're absolutely right. Uh D'Netzio had been calling out on the people to rise up against their elected representatives in parliament um ever since he returned to Italy in 1915. But while he was in Fume, his language got more and more extreme and violent. And he was, and he was still, right up until the very end of the Fume adventure, he was still seeing himself as a great patriotic hero. He maintained he was doing what he did for Italy, but not for the Italian government. I mean, Nitti, who was the Prime Minister through most of that time, Denunzio called him Cagoia, a word which I am not going to translate, but it's filthy. And uh, you know, he was he was uh verbally abusing the Italian government, he was calling them cowards, he was calling them traitors to their country. He was, I think that a lot of people were expecting him, once he'd established control over Fiume, to cross over into the mainland and and lead a kind of right-wing revolution. Uh he never did so. Um maybe, I mean, no one could really quite explain why he didn't. There would have been a lot of people who would, I think, have been on his side had he tried to. Italy was in such a volatile and chaotic state at that point. I think the reason he didn't was simply that he loved all the theatre of politics. He loved marching into Fumay at the head of his volunteers with, you know, his car loaded up with flowers and the singing and the theatre and the dancing and so forth. He actually found government very boring. You know, he wasn't interested in taxation, he wasn't interested in making the trains run on time. But, as you say, there was another person standing in the wings who was ready to do not only the theatrical side of politics, but also the hard work, and that was Mussolini. And D'Anunzio despised Mussolini. He saw Mussolini as being his sort of slavish imitator, which is true, and was the fascists took an awful lot of their kind of rituals, their style, their theatre from D'Nunzio and what he was doing in Pumay. So he was an imitator, but to D'Nunzio's mind, Mussolini was a very cheap and vulgar follower of himself.

The Vittoriale And Mussolini’s Shadow

Russell 1:05:35

One of the most satisfying bits of your book is actually the last bit where you interweave what's going on in D'Annunzio's life with what's going on in Italian political life, and in particular the rise of the fascists. I find that terrific because D'Annunzio, he then basically goes into retirement uh into this new villa that he's found. What's life Like for him in this new villa? Is he uh he's getting older? I mean, is his presumably is his is his sex drive calming down now?

Speaker 2 1:06:08

Is he uh uh and and uh I I as far as as far as he would let us know, his sex drive never calmed down. He was very boastful of his um ability to rut like a goat, right up to the end into his 70s. But he he he withdrew from active political life. After Fumei, he he was tired. I think he really was exhausted.

Russell 1:06:33

I mean he was injured in the war, he was quite badly injured in the war, in fact.

Speaker 2 1:06:37

He was blind in one eye, and the the the good eye, so-called good eye, um, you know, was not very good. He didn't see very clearly out of it, and he had sort of a he saw kind of lightning flashes in his eye all the time, and it was painful. So that was, you know, that was debilitating. He was old, he was taking far too much cocaine. There were a lot of rumours that he had syphilis, although I'm not sure I believe that, but you know, it's it's certainly possible. So, you know, he wasn't as strong as he had been. And but I think also he was he was tired and a bit maybe cut his head up. During the last months of his time in Fumay, the sort of English man of letters Osbert Sitwell visited him. And Donutsu was delighted to welcome him. Donuts who spoke very good English, and they had wonderful conversations and about poetry, including the poetry of Osbert Sitwell's sister Edith, who was one of the best of the new English poets. And Donutsu said to him, Ah, it's so lovely to be able to talk to you like this. I just I'm here, all these all these soldiers, they're not much fun. And so I think he he wanted to return to, you know, the cultural life and to start writing again. And apart from you know, his his his speeches, he hadn't really been writing anything while he was so politically active in Fume and in the immediately preceding years. And also, he was having great fun. So he bought this house and he turned it into actually to begin with, he rented it very seldom bought property because his past life had taught him that he was likely to have to make a run for it quite quickly when his creditors caught up with him. But he did eventually buy this. Or he got the stake to buy it on his behalf, he was good at that, too. But he he filled it with memorabilia, some of it from his personal life. I mean, whenever he took a woman to bed, he would ask her to give him a glove. And the the it's all still there. I mean, you can go and you can see the chest of drawers absolutely crammed with ladies' gloves. And um and then, but also, you know, uh souvenirs of his his wartime exploits. And when I say souvenirs, I mean the there is a whole plane uh which is suspended f inside a dome on in the grounds, and set into the side of the hillside in the garden. There is half a battleship which which sort of juts out into mid-air, which Denunzio just treated it as a garden ornament. It's a bizarre place, it's open to the public. I mean, go visit. It is quite creepy there. It's very although it's it has all these big things in it, all of the rooms are quite small. And Dunzio, by the time he got there, he was old and frail, and uh you know, as I've said, we he was half blind. And so the rooms are very dark because bright light hurt his eyes. And it it's a strange and creepy place to visit, actually. But with a wonderful view.

Russell 1:09:50

But you do get the sense that the fascists are quite nervous about Denuncio, and he's almost I mean, I think you say in your book he's almost under a sort of sort of house arrest. It's like, you know, we're very happy that you're there, but but stay there.

Speaker 2 1:10:07

Definitely. Um Mussolini even sort of famously said once Mussolini came to power, someone asked him, you know, what are you going to do about Denuncio? And he said, Well, if you've got a problem with one of your teeth, you cap it with gold. And so basically he he gave Denunzio money, he gave Denunzio almost everything he asked for, uh, except for a landing strip. Dunzio was not going to be allowed to fly away. And he also, Mussolini did, kindly gave him a kind of upper servant, uh that's a person who the secretary type who would help him with his affairs, who was a spy, who was reporting everything back to fascist headquarters. And Dunzio was well aware of that, and he would quite often feed this man sort of preposterous stories as a kind of joke.

Russell 1:10:55

But do you think D'Annunzio was silenced by Mussolini, or did D'Annunzio silence himself in the sense that he may not have he may have thought Mussolini was preposterous, but perhaps he thought that the path that Italy was going on, you know, with marital glory was was was the right one?

Speaker 2 1:11:13

I think it it was a mixture. I think that he really was he was tired. He he didn't want to be politically active anymore. Um I think that he did he did approve of Mussolini. You know, he thought that all this romanita and virilità and you know masculine militarist expansionist uh policy. Donunzio was was was quite in favour of all that. Uh maybe, you know, had the socialists come to power instead, I think D'Nunzio might well have stepped forward and tried to do something about it. But um as it was, he he retreated. So people uh through the next years, and he lived until 1938. So for seven 17 years, he was in the Vittoriale on Lake Garda, and people came to visit him there. Some of them who were further right, more aggressive than Mussolini, uh, people who didn't like, for instance, that Mussolini had made his peace with the church. Um Mussolini, once he came to power, you know, he had to do real grown-up politics, you know, he which often involves compromise. And the more extreme fascist sympathizers would come to D'Nunzio and say, you know, he's getting soft. Why don't you come and take over? And D'Nunzio didn't listen to them. But equally, and this in this sort of paradox swallows D'Annunzio through his life, really, because you know, he'd shown himself to be a great poet, a lover of beauty. Um, there were people who thought, well, you know, he's a poet. Poets are nice people, aren't they? And so, you know, people would come to him and say, How can you stand by and watch this brutal regime? Um, you know, they're so they're so crass, they're so cruel, they're so violent.

Russell 1:13:06

Um I mean, they do murder people. I mean, they do murder their opponents. This is not uh just uh just beating people up.

Speaker 2 1:13:14

Absolutely, absolutely. And so there, you know, there were people who thought that D'unizio would be maybe maybe gentler. And so they were coming to him, you know, from the more liberal end, saying, you know, free free us from this brutal regime. And D'Annazio didn't do it. And whether he was sort of knobed by the fascists and told if you if you move you're going to be in trouble, I don't know for certain, but I suspect there was a bit of that. But I think also he just didn't want it anymore.

Speaker 1:13:46

Hmm.

Russell 1:13:48

Yeah. Well it's quite funny. You mentioned that Mussolini has his uh has his spy there. It turns out the place is uh is filled with spies because at the end when he dies, his sort of German part-time lover, she sort of hot foots it back to the fatherland because she's been a German spy the whole time.

Speaker 2 1:14:06

That's right, absolutely. And she turns up on the staff of von Ribbentrop, sits and you know, she was lovish, she was blonde, she was sexually available, and and maybe Dunazio guessed, maybe he didn't care. But certainly she would have been reporting back. Yeah.

Judgement Then Lessons For Now

Russell 1:14:23

So I guess we should uh we should bring it to an end. Um I mean one thing in your book, I think people have commented on this, you you steer clear of giving a very direct personal opinion on d you know, making a personal judgment on Denuncio. Presumably that was a decision that you made. So what was the thinking here? And and do you think there's a danger that it lets Denuncio off too lightly, or what do you think?

Speaker 2 1:14:52

Uh no, I don't think it lets Denuncio off lightly. I think I make it very clear how much he revelled in violence, how he called out for blood, how he helped to take Italy into a war from which Italy could have stood back and thereby saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Um he was awful to his women. Uh but I I think that to me, just saying isn't he ghastly, is is is not very interesting. And I also think that he's not exceptional. And you know, this idea that warfare is heroic and noble and grand is unfortunately prevalent today, as it was in his lifetime. There are still young men who think that it's somehow glorious and honourable to go off and kill young men of other nations and women too, even when the cause is, you know. I mean, I think that in recent years, right now, even there are wars going on where the war aims are not clear and maybe the wars are necessary. So this sort of rhetoric of Denuncia is this glorification of violence is something that we can't just uh kind of step away from it saying, oh well, only horrid people like Donuncia think like that. Lots of people think like that. And we need to investigate it and understand where that thinking comes from and how we can counter it.

Russell 1:16:24

Yeah. And also we can learn from his uh love making techniques thanks to his uh notebooks. Uh few you we could use the notebooks, uh you know, you could uh you know make love the denuncian way or something like that. I think that would be a bestseller.

Speaker 2 1:16:40

It involves putting a scented handkerchief under your pillow that's a bulldozer.

Russell 1:16:44

I don't think it's gonna work for me, but I'll give it a go. Anyway, okay. Uh okay, well, uh I think we should leave it there. So uh Lucy Hughes Hallett, thank you very much indeed.

Speaker 2 1:16:55

Thank you very much. I've enjoyed this conversation a lot.