{"product_id":"gabriele-dannunzio-isbn-9780307276551","title":"Gabriele D'Annunzio","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction\u003cbr\u003eWinner of the Costa Biography Award\u003cbr\u003e**\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e Best Books of 2013**\u003cbr\u003e**\u003ci\u003eEconomist\u003c\/i\u003e Best Books of 2013**\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis fascinating life of Gabriele d’Annunzio—the charismatic poet, bon vivant, and virulent nationalist who prefigured Mussolini—traces the early twentieth century’s trajectory from Romantic idealism to Fascist thuggery.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eD’Annunzio was Italy’s premier poet at a time when poetry could trigger riots. A brilliant self-publicist, he used his fame to sell his work, seduce women, and promote his extreme nationalism. At once an aesthete and a militarist, he enjoyed risking death no less than making love, and he wrote with equal enthusiasm about Fortuny gowns and torpedoes. In 1915 his incendiary oratory helped drive Italy into the First World War, and in 1919 he led a troop of mutineers into the Croatian port of Fiume, where he established a delinquent utopia. Futurists, anarchists, communists and proto-fascists descended on the place, along with literati and thrill-seekers, drug dealers and prostitutes. Three years later, when the fascists marched on Rome, they belted out anthems they’d learned in Fiume, while Mussolini consciously modeled himself on the great poet. Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s compelling biography is a revelation both of d’Annunzio’s flamboyant life and of the dramatic times he helped to shape.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A stunning portrait of a . . . decadent poet and proto-Fascist firebrand. . . . Reads like a picaresque novel.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A richly detailed portrait of an eminently civilized sociopath. . . . Appalling but, as Hughes-Hallett presents him, completely enthralling.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Compulsively readable. . . . D’Annunzio was arguably the finest Italian writer of his time, an aesthete who made Oscar Wilde look like a bourgeois, a sexual charmer of Casanovan suavity and appetite . . . a political zealot and spellbinding orator.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post \u003c\/i\u003e(Best Books of 2013)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A wonderful biography. . . . Although himself the least empathetic of men, [d'Annunzio] has attracted a biographer of rare sensibility who has set out not to condemn but to understand. The result is a magnificent and beautifully written book that makes readers feel they have really come to know d’Annunzio, his many faults, his fewer virtues, and his enormous talent for life.\" —\u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Deeply evocative . . . It is not easy to make sense of the life of a man who was a silk-swathed aesthete, prophetic versifier, manic aviator and martial demagogue all in one. . . . Hughes-Hallett is a strong match for her subject. . . . Her style is rich, ironic and pugnacious; she jousts willingly with him and the reader becomes a spectator of this subtle and fascinating contest.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Dazzling. . . . A shrewd, challenging analysis that links his sadomasochistic psyche to his pitiless ideology. The result is a resonant study of the themes of power, masculinity, violence, and desire that made D’Annunzio such a striking emblem of his age.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hughes-Hallett crafts an appealing combination of genres, blending elements of biography, fiction, and cultural, social, and military history to create about as complete an image as possible of this most protean personality. . . . Readers will delight in touring the deep, tangled wood of a most astonishing life with a most engaging and learned guide.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews, \u003c\/i\u003estarred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A splendid subject for a biography . . . Hughes-Hallett dances her way through this extraordinary life in a style that is playful, punchy and generally pleasing. . . . In death, as in life, the amazing story of D’Annunzio is painted in primary colours, but with the darkest shadows.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Observer \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“As gripping a page-turner as the most sensationalist novel—and infinitely more rewarding. . . . It is an amazing story [told] with the vivid narrative thrust of a novel. . . . The book is a revelation, an insight into a murky but significant segment of history.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Telegraph \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hugely enjoyable. . . .  Hughes-Hallett has a great talent for encapsulating an era or an attitude . . . Pleasurable and readable.” —\u003ci\u003eSunday Times \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A magnificent portrait of a preposterous character. . . . D’Annunzio was deplorable, brilliant, ludicrous, tragic, but above all irresistible. . . . His biographer has done him full justice.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Mail on Sunday \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Beautiful, strange, and original. . . . An extraordinarily intimate portrait. . . . If you want to understand fascism, you must start with d’Annunzio; and if you wish to understand him, then here is your book.” —\u003ci\u003eNew Statesman \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“How a rather diminutive poet, novelist and dramatist, with a compulsive urge to transgress, priapic sexual instincts, and a fascination with cruelty, blood and death came to be Italy’s most celebrated man of action and a precursor of Fascism is the subject of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s engrossing and superbly written biography.” —\u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Remarkable . . . a terrific piece of work—as audacious as it is gripping, as thorough as it is insightful and as stirring as it is shocking.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Daily Mail \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)\u003c\/p\u003eLucy Hughes-Hallett is an award-winning cultural historian and critic. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eHeroes: A History of Hero Worship\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eCleopatra: Histories, Dreams, and Distortions.\u003c\/i\u003e She has written on books, theater, and television for most of the leading British newspapers. For five years she was the television critic for the \u003ci\u003eEvening Standard\u003c\/i\u003e and has long been a regular contributor to \u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times \u003c\/i\u003e(London) Books Section. She has judged a number of literary prizes, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover Edition\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChapter One \u003cbr\u003eThe Pike\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In September 1919, Gabriele d’Annunzio—poet, aviator, nationalist  demagogue, war hero—assumed the leadership of 186 mutineers from the  Italian army. Driving in a bright red Fiat so full of flowers that one  observer mistook it for a hearse (d’Annunzio adored flowers), he led  them in a march on the harbour city of Fiume in Croatia, part of the  defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire over whose dismemberment the victorious  Allied leaders were deliberating in Paris. An army rep- resenting the  Allies lay across the route. Its orders from the Allied high command  were clear: to stop d’Annunzio, if necessary by shooting him dead. That  army, though, was Italian, and a high proportion of its members  sympathised with what d’Annunzio was doing. One after another its  officers disregarded instructions. It was, d’Annunzio told a journalist  later, almost comical the way the regular troops gave way, or deserted  to follow in his train.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e By the time he reached Fiume his  following was some 2,000 strong. He was welcomed into the city by  rapturous crowds who had been up all night waiting for him. An officer  passing through the main square in the early hours of that morning saw  it filled with women wearing evening dress and carrying guns, an image  that nicely encapsulates the nature of the place—at once a  phantasmagorical party and a battle- ground—during the fifteen months  that d’Annunzio would hold Fiume as its Duce and dictator, in defiance  of all the Allied powers.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Gabriele d’Annunzio was a man of  vehement, but incoherent, political views. As the greatest Italian poet,  in his own (and many others’) estimation, since Dante, he was \u003ci\u003eil Vate\u003c\/i\u003e,  the national bard. He was a spokesman for the irredentist movement,  whose enthusiasts wished to regain all those territories which had once  been, or so they claimed, Italian, and which had been left\u003ci\u003e irredenti\u003c\/i\u003e (unredeemed) when Italians liberated themselves from foreign rulers in  the previous century. His overt aim in coming to Fiume had been to make  the place, which had a large Italian population, a part of Italy. Within  days of his arrival it became evident this aim was unrealistic. Rather  than admitting defeat, d’Annunzio enlarged his vision of what his little  fiefdom might be. It was not just a patch of disputed territory. He  announced that he was creating there a model city-state, one so  politically innovative and so culturally brilliant that the whole drab,  war-exhausted world would be dazzled by it. He called his Fiume a  “searchlight radiant in the midst of an ocean of abjection.” It was a  sacred fire whose sparks, flying on the wind, would set the world  alight. It was the “City of the Holocaust.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The place became a  political laboratory. Socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and some of  those who had begun, earlier that year, to call themselves fascists,  congregated there. Representatives of Sinn Féin and of nationalist  groups from India and Egypt arrived, discreetly followed by British  agents. Then there were the groups whose homeland was not of this earth:  the Union of Free Spirits Tending Towards Perfection who met under a  fig tree in the old town to talk about free love and the abolition of  money, and YOGA, a kind of political-club-cum- street-gang described by  one of its members as “an Island of the Blest in the infinite sea of  history.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e D’Annunzian Fiume was a Land of Cockaigne, an  extra-legitimate space where normal rules didn’t apply. It was also a  land of cocaine (fashionably carried in a little gold box in the  waistcoat pocket). Deserters and adrenalin-starved war veterans alike  sought a refuge there from the dreariness of economic depression and the  tedium of peace. Drug dealers and prostitutes followed them into the  city: one visitor reported he had never known sex so cheap. So did  aristocratic dilettantes, run- away teenagers, poets and poetry lovers  from all over the Western world. Fiume in 1919 was as magnetic to an  international confraternity of discontented idealists as San Francisco’s  Haight-Ashbury would be in 1968; but, unlike the hippies, d’Annunzio’s  followers intended to make war as well as love. They formed a  combustible mix. Every foreign office in Europe posted agents in Fiume,  anxiously watching what d’Annunzio was up to. Journalists crammed the  hotels.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e D’Annunzio was already a bestselling novelist, a  revered poet, and a dramatist whose premieres were attended by royalty  and triggered riots. Now he boasted that in Fiume he was making an  artwork whose materials were human lives. Fiume’s public life was a  non-stop street- theatre performance. One observer likened life in the  city to an endless fourteenth of July: “Songs, dances, rockets,  fireworks, speeches. Eloquence! Eloquence! Eloquence!”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e By the  time his occupation of Fiume came to an end, d’Annunzio’s dream of an  ideal society had deteriorated into a nightmare of ethnic conflict and  ritualised violence. For over a year it suited none of the great powers  to bestir themselves to eject him, but when, eventually, an Italian  warship arrived in the harbour and bombarded his headquarters, he  capitulated after a five-day fight. But for the duration of his command,  Fiume was—precisely as he had intended it should be—the stage for an  extraordinary real-life drama with a cast of thousands and a worldwide  audience, one in which some of the darkest themes of the next  half-century’s history were announced.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e D’Annunzio believed he  was working to create a new and better world order, a “politics of  poetry.” So did observers from every point on the political spectrum,  from the conservative nationalists who eagerly volunteered to join his  Legion, to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who sent him a pot of caviar and  called him the “only revolutionary in Europe.” His followers saw Fiume  as a place where life could begin afresh—rinsed clean of all impurities,  freer and more beautiful than ever before. But the culture created  there rapidly took on a character which, seen in retrospect, is hideous.  Black uniforms decorated with lightning flashes which made malign  supermen of their wearers; military spectacles staged as though they  were sacred rites; a cult of youth which degenerated into licensed  delinquency; the bullying of ethnic minorities; the never-ending  sequence of processions and festivals designed to glorify an adored  leader: all of these phenomena are now recognisable as typical of the  politics, not of poetry but of brute power. Later, Benito Mussolini  encouraged the writing of a biography of d’Annunzio entitled The John  the Baptist of Fascism. D’Annunzio, who saw the fascist leader as a  vulgar imitator of himself, was not happy with the suggestion that he  was a mere harbinger, preparing the way for Mussolini’s Messiah. But  though d’Annunzio was not a fascist, fascism was d’Annunzian. The black  shirts, the straight-armed salute, the songs and war cries, the  glorification of virility and youth and \u003ci\u003epatria\u003c\/i\u003e and blood sacrifice, were all present in Fiume three years before Mussolini’s March on Rome.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e A great deal has been written about the economic, political and  military circumstances in which fascism and its associated political  creeds flourished. D’Annunzio’s story provides a lens through which to  examine those movements from another angle, to identify their cultural  antecedents, and the psychological and emotional needs to which they  pandered. To watch d’Annunzio’s trajectory from neo-Romantic young poet  to instigator of a radical right-wing revolt against democratic  authority is to recognise that fascism was not the freakish product of  an exceptional historical moment, but something which grew organically  out of long-established trends in European intellectual and social life.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Some of those trends were apparently unexceptionable. D’Annunzio was a  man of broad and deep culture, thoughtful, widely read in the classics  and in modern literature. He spoke for Beauty, for Life, for Love, for  the Imagination (his capitals)—all of which sound like good things. Yet  he helped to drag Italy into an unnecessary war, not because he believed  it would bring any advantage but because he craved cataclysmic  violence. His adventure in Fiume fatally destabilised Italy’s democracy,  and opened the way for all the bombast and thuggery of fascism. He  prided himself on his gift for “attention,” for fully experencing and  celebrating life’s abundance. “I am like the fisherman who walks  barefoot over a beach uncovered at ebb tide, and who stoops, again and  again, to identify and gather up whatever he feels moving under the  soles of his feet.” He posed as a new St. Francis, lover of all living  things. Yet his wartime rants are, in every sense, hateful. Italy’s  enemies are filthy. He ascribes grotesque crimes to them. He calls out  for their blood.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e ‘His gift for pleasing is diabolical,” wrote  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Even people who heartily disapproved of  d’Annunzio found him irresistible. Similarly, reprehensible though the  Europe-wide fascist movements were (and are), history demonstrates the  potency of their glamour. To guard against their recurrence we need not  just to be aware of their viciousness, but also to understand their  power to seduce. D’Annunzio was never as supportive of fascism as  Mussolini liked to make out. He jeered at the future Duce as a cowardly  wind- bag. He despised Hitler too. But it is certainly true that his  occupation of Fiume drastically undermined the authority of Italy’s  democratic government, and so indirectly enabled Mussolini’s seizure of  power three years later; that both Mussolini and Hitler learned a great  deal from d’Annunzio; and that an account of d’Annunzio’s life and  thought amounts to a history of the cultural elements that eventually  came together, in the two decades following d’Annunzio’s annexation of  his City of the Holocaust, to ignite a greater and more terrible  holocaust than any he had ever envisaged.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The poet was  fifty-six years old when he set out for Fiume, as notorious for his  debts and duels and scandalous love affairs as he was celebrated for his  wartime exploits and his literary gifts. A plane crash had left him  blind in one eye, and, as he embarked on his great adventure, he was so  weakened by an alarmingly high temperature that he could barely stand  (something not to be taken lightly during a period when some fifty  million people died of Spanish flu).\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Small, bald, with narrow  sloping shoulders and, according to his devoted secretary, “terrible  teeth,” he was unimpressive to look at, but the long tally of his lovers  included the ethereally lovely Eleonora Duse, one of the two greatest  actresses in Europe (Sarah Bernhardt was her only rival), and he could  manipulate a crowd as easily as he could entice a woman.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Poets  nowadays are of interest only to a minority. But d’Annunzio was a poet,  novelist and playwright at a time when a writer could attract a mass  following, and deploy significant political influence. On the opening  night of his play Più Che l’Amore (More Than Love) there were calls for  his arrest. After the premiere of La Nave (The Ship) the audience  spilled out of the theatre and processed through the streets of Rome  intoning a line from the play, a call to arms. When he gave readings,  agents of foreign powers attended, fearful of his influence. When he  wrote polemical poems, Italy’s leading newspaper cleared the front page  and published them in full.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Italy was a new nation. Its  southern half (the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) was annexed to  the northern kingdom of Piedmont two and a half years before  d’Annunzio’s birth. He was seven years old in 1870 when the French  withdrew from Rome and the new country was complete. The heroes of the  Risorgimento had made Italy. Now someone had to “make Italians” (the  phrase recurs in the political rhetoric of the period). D’Annunzio,  after spending much of his twenties writing erotic lyrics in archaic  verse-forms and Frenchified fiction, accepted the task. Goethe in  Germany and Pushkin in Russia had been celebrated, not just as authors  of fine literature, but as the creators of a new national culture. So  would d’Annunzio be. “The voice of my race speaks through me,” he  claimed.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e He was much admired by his peers. In his twenties he  was one of the acknowledged leaders of the aesthetes. As he matured he  wrote works which won admiration not only from his own generation, but  also from his younger contemporaries. James Joyce called d’Annunzio the  only European writer after Flaubert (and before Joyce himself) to carry  the novel into new territory, and ranked him with Kipling and Tolstoy as  the three “most naturally talented writers” to appear in the nineteenth  century. Proust declared himself “ravi” by one of his novels. Henry  James praised the “extraordinary range and fineness” of his artistic  intelligence.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e But though he was an author first and foremost,  d’Annunzio was never solely a man of letters. He wanted his words to  spark uprisings and set nations ablaze. His most famous wartime exploits  were those occasions when he flew over Trieste or Vienna, dropping not  bombs (although he dropped those too), but pamphlets. For d’Annunzio,  writing was a martial art.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e He was a brilliant self-publicist.  He associated himself with Garibaldi, the romantic hero of the  Risorgimento, whose image—poncho, red shirt, the dash of the guerrilla  fighter combined with the integrity of a secular saint—was as important  to the cause of Italian unity as his military prowess. D’Annunzio  borrowed the lustre of figures from the past: he also identified himself  with the dynamism of the future. He had himself photographed alongside  torpedo boats and aeroplanes and motor cars—sleek, trim and modern from  his gleaming bald pate to the toes of his patent-leather boots. Looking  back, in his years of retirement, he saw exactly what had been his  greatest strength as a politician. “I knew how to give my action the  lasting power of the symbol.” The hero of his first novel learns that:  “One must make one’s life as one makes a work of art.” D’Annunzio  himself worked ceaselessly on the marvellous artefact that was his own  existence.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e He made canny use of the brand new mass media. As a  young man he was a prolific hack, pouring out reviews and gossip and  fashion notes and quasi-autobiographical sketches. His more  earnest-minded friends thought he was debasing himself, but he wrote  that the seed of an idea, sown in a journal, would germinate and bear  fruit in the public consciousness more quickly and surely than one  planted in a book. He describes one of his fictional alter egos as being  drawn to his public as a predator is drawn to its prey.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Reaching a mass audience, d’Annunzio became a new kind of public figure.  The first television broadcasts were made only in the last years of his  life, but his influence was akin to that of a modern mass-media pundit.  Instead of looking up the social scale and the political hierarchy,  seeking endorsement from the ruling class, he looked to the people,  turning popularity into power. As the historian Emilio Gentile has put  it, what fascism took from Fiume was not a political creed but “a way of  doing politics.” That way has since become almost universal.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In December 1919, d’Annunzio called for a referendum in Fiume. The  people were to decide whether he was to stay and rule them, or to be  expelled from the city. He waited for the result of the vote sitting in a  dimly lit restaurant, sipping cherry brandy with his supporters. He  told them about a life-size wax effigy of himself that, so he claimed,  was in a Parisian museum. Once his present adventure was concluded, he  said, he would ask to be given the figure and seat it by the window of  his house in Venice, so that gondoliers could point it out to tourists.  He was aware that someone like himself had two existences, one as a  private person, the other as a public image. He knew that his celebrity  could be used—to amuse trippers, to make himself some cash, to boost an  army’s morale, perhaps even to overthrow a government.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304311083237,"sku":"NP9780307276551","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307276551.jpg?v=1767727827","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/gabriele-dannunzio-isbn-9780307276551","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}