The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson Read Free Book Online Page A

become almost unreadable. Love lyrics, idylls on classical themes, patriotic dramas, and trashily plotted novels about supermen figures who are transparently the author himself: D’Annunzio’s output was formally varied, but the variety is skin-deep. Mummified at its centre lies an effigy of the poet himself. The hosts of characters in his collected works are, with few exceptions, shadows or silhouettes, denied individuation by the monotonous gaudiness of his language, styled to hypnotise and overmaster a reader. The historical themes and political ideas that he discusses are ciphers of himself, pretexts for rapture. Meanwhile the waves of swooning rhetoric roll on, rising to crescendos of alliteration before subsiding in cycles as incessant and oceanic as the poet’s self- regard. It was an ideal style to promote a policy of ‘sacred egoism’.
    D’Annunzio was a spectacular case of arrested emotional development, arguably a natural fascist. The otherness of other people – a puzzle that haunts modern thought and art – could not fascinate him because other people existed as objects of appetite or will, research opportunities in a quest to investigate the effects of denying himself nothing. The lovers he venerated came to repel him when sex led to expectations that limited his freedom. The actress Eleonora Duse, herself an international celebrity, was lavish with inspiration and money for nine years. Among the surviving shreds of their correspondence is an exchange from summer 1904, when the relationship foundered. Reproached by Duse, who was driven to despair by his infidelities and excuses, D’Annunzio found nothing to regret: ‘The imperious needs of a violent, carnal life, of pleasure, of physical risk, of happiness, have kept me from you. And you… can you cry shame on me for these needs of mine?’
    Duse’s reply still carries a charge: 
Do not speak to me of the imperious ‘reason’ of your ‘carnal’ life, of your thirst for ‘joyous existence’. I am tired of hearing those words. I have heard you repeat them for years now: I can neither entirely go along with your philosophy nor entirely understand it. What love can you find which is worthy or profound if it lives only for pleasure? 
    Her question would have made no sense to D’Annunzio, who found a philosophical alibi for egotism in a selective reading of Friedrich Nietzsche. He had no use for Nietzsche the prophet of radical uncertainty, unstitching the assumptions of Western philosophy, the mocker of ‘profundity’, the ironic psychologist, the teasing critic of repression by grammar. For D’Annunzio, as for the German and Italian fascists after him, Nietzsche was the champion of life as endless expression, the revaluer of good and evil, scorning normal experience, unmasking Christian ‘slave morality’, and the discoverer of the Will to Power as the wellspring of human motivation.
    Above all, he was the author of the concept of the Superman. D’Annunzio’s first book to show the impact of Nietzsche’s ideas was The Triumph of Death (1894). The novel’s hero, Giorgio, is haunted by his search for someone who can be ‘the strong and tyrannical master, free of the yoke of every false morality, secure in the feeling of his own power … determined to lift himself above Good and Evil through the sheer energy of his will, capable even of forcing life to keep its promises.’ The Virgins of the Rocks followed in 1895, replete with Nietzschean insights: 
The world is the representation of the sensibility and the thought of a few superior men, who have created and adorned it in the course of time and will go on adding to it and adorning it further in future. The world as it appears today is a magnificent gift bestowed by the few upon the many, by free men upon slaves: by those who think and feel upon those who must labour. 
    D’Annunzio detested socialism. For him the emancipation of the masses was an absurdity, if not a crime.
    While the