D'Annunzio and Duse
WOLFE, ANN F.
d'Annunzio and Duse Wingless Victory. By Frances Winwar. Harper. 374 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Ann F Wolfe Contributor, N.Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" THE "faun of the Abruzzi" died in...
...The first major project was his volume of sensational lyrics, which, widely reviewed, he further press-agented by announcing the tragic "death" of the 17-year-old poet...
...The youth decided against simple manners and embarked on a lifetime publicity campaign for Gabriele d'Annunzio...
...But the perceptive Frances Winwar pretty much stands aside and allows the little romantic to reveal, largely in his own orchidaceous periods, the heights and depths of his paradoxical being...
...The extravaganza that was Gabriele d'Annunzio's life lent a rococo flourish to an era of hypocritical sedateness...
...In years arid of creation, the author of the tribute to Garibaldi, La Notte di Caprera, was to translate his patriotic sentiments into deeds...
...Child of a saintly mother and a dissolute father, he pondered Leopardi's dictum: "Most worthwhile men have simple manners, yet almost invariably simple manners are considered a sign of little worth...
...Later, he led an opera-bouffe march on disputed Fiume and held the city "in the name of poetry...
...He courted death in a pamphlet-dropping flight over Vienna...
...One of the least inspirational of the idylls resulted in his marriage at 20...
...In the hands of a less subtle interpreter, d'Annunzio might well have come off as a mere condottiere of letters and an antic sensualist driven by the furies of inner insecurity...
...His final 15 years, thanks to Mussolini, he spent under virtual house arrest, mourning his golden youth and crowding his "golden kennel" with personal and historical souvenirs...
...Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" THE "faun of the Abruzzi" died in 1938, but his legend belongs to the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent or one of the showier Sforzas...
...His aviation exploits and the Fiume heroics gave him a passport of sorts to history...
...Sebastian cultist-he parades at will through an opulent social scene under the lurid skies of a changing spiritual climate...
...For sheer theater, it turns out, d'Annunzio's masterpiece is the d'Annunzio legend...
...His rhetoric thrilled Europe and stirred Italy to a renewed sense of glory...
...The existence of an off-stage wife and children, however, failed to shorten the procession of ladies who flung themselves in petal-strewn sacrifice before the five-foot-three minotaur...
...The raptures, sufferings and impassioned letters of his soul-mates, each sure of his undying love, were frankly alchemized into plays, verse and fiction...
...It was the time, too, of Il Fuoco, the novelized version of their love affair that wounded and embittered the moody tragedienne...
...The box-office receipts, unfortunately, contributed little toward the solvency of the debt-haunted pair...
...The 9-year-romance with Eleanora Duse kept d'Annunzio in a creative ferment that swept him to the summit of his poetic achievement...
...Nevertheless, Duse insisted on promoting her sadistic lover's new plays, Francesco da Rimini, La Gioconda and, despite Sarah Bernhardt, La Citta Morta...
...He was a conscious and prolific artist, and his full-blown lyricism never lacked for the inspirations of the flesh...
...In scandalous erotic adventure, he out-Byroned Byron...
...The exhibitionism, however, was d'Annunzio's own idea...
...There are pagan overtones in the atmosphere of the ancient Abruzzi which adumbrated the thought and conduct of the region's most spectacular son...
...The precocious poet was very much alive in the service of his inseparable goddess furies-glory, love and pleasure...
...Such as he is-semi-mystic, charlatan, St...
...It was during the Duse liaison that the poet made himself heard as the nationalistic voice of Italy...
...As World War I aviator, the 52-year-old Commandante d'Annunzio became a national symbol...
...Disgrace, poverty, madness and, in one luminous instance, Carmelite saintliness lay in store for some of the discarded mistresses...
...This was "the time of the Alcione intoxication...
...In her handling of an extremely difficult subject Miss Winwar confirms her primacy as a modern creative biographer...
Vol. 39 • September 1956 • No. 38
