His Name Writ in Air:

...But D'Annunzio did no more than point a pistol at Giovanni Giolitti...

...He sat briefly in Parliament, though he failed to be re-elected in 1900...

...the savage exposed to civilization may combine the worst of two cultures...

...his good fortune lay in a persuasive charm of manner that illustrates how far a man may go who constantly asserts his own genius...

...Gabriele D'Annunzio was an extraordinarily lucky man...

...Their affaire gave him material for yet another novel, Il Fuoco, with which "he suddenly had a European, a world reputation...

...The lack of humanity in so much of D'Annunzio's work derives from this, that he was at once a barbarian and a decadent...

...For a little over a year D'Annunzio ruled in Fiume...

...Rhodes presents us with the final irony that D'Annunzio, who was a national figure and never failed to see himself as a national leader, should have been enshrined, still living, in the national monument of Il Vitloriale degli Italiani, where the eagle of the pamphlet raid over Vienna had become a kind of magpie, his trophies decorating his nest...

...Rhodes does not, however, make the mistake of denying that the spectacle was an achievement, nor is he tempted to emphasize the merely spectacular, nor does he make easy fun of a character so vulnerable, in an Anglo-Saxon view, to ironic appraisal...

...The early part of D'Annunzio's career, then, is concerned with his literary work in which the figure of the superman of the Mediterranean begins to take form...

...Rhodes observes, "In the list of books drawn up personally by the aging poet there are 80 titles (not 44), because the list also contains books to be published, which he had not yet written...

...When all is said, the poet, who used past, present and future as decorations of his work and personality, was himself used as a decoration of the Fascist state...

...The novels of D'Annunzio, which chronicle his more flamboyant affairs, seem to have a coupling of savagery with a fingering sensuality altogether too self-conscious...

...And he attracted the world's attention...

...The dannunzian qualities, and they have been dignified by the creation of an adjective, tended more to the excessive than to the superlative, and more to the alertness of the connoisseur than to the selectivity of the artist...

...Violence is sudden, sin remorseless...

...His political interests were better satisfied in his literary work, and his play, Le Nave, appealed to the growing Italian ambition for imperial expansion so greatly as to cause riots in Rome at its first night, and was the means of his triumphal tour in Italy...

...It would be unfair to the scope of the book to dwell too long on D'Annunzio's literary work...

...Rhodes' book falls into two parts, conforming to the division of D'Annunzio's life...

...He made a great stir, but contrasted with other poet-statesmen—Milton, Lamartine, Yeats—he left as his memorial only gestures in the air...

...The test of Fiume might have been made in Italy...

...Except where the senses are directly concerned, he plays chiefly upon the prestige values of things...

...In his own country he became, in his 30s, the poet of that country's ambitions and the admiration of its youth...

...One year was probably enough, before the Esthetic State degenerated into a debauch...

...Clearly Mussolini feared him, and might have had practical reason to do so had D'Annunzio accepted the invitation of his old Fiumian Legionaries to meet them in Rome before the democratic Facta Government fell...

...In a moral sense Signor D'Annunzio is magnificently sincere in his interests, his admirations, his tastes, but he remains superficial...

...In Paris, during his "French exile," he fascinated the French literary world, ready for a taste of Latin sensationalism, and from Paris his fame spread to England and America...

...Now they lived in his city...

...In his introduction, Rhodes states his intention to illustrate the change in Italy within 50 years from Mazzinian idealism— "where shortly a great council of mankind would sit, to rule in harmonious collaboration with everyone else in the world"—to the barbarous excitement with which Vittorio Mussolini viewed the bombing and gassing of Ethiopian villages...

...In 1926, a collection of D'Annunzio's works, in 44 volumes, was published, a mixture of toy and bribe for their author, one of the maneuvers by which Mussolini distracted the poet from possible interference with consolidation of the Fascist party...

...and his life spanned the period of national self-assertiveness with which he identified himself...

...D'Annunzio is a symbol of that change and of the flamboyance of mind that gave color to a tawdry chauvinism...

...where he was partly the chieftain of a pirates' lair, partly the ruler of a private state...

...It is not known if D'Annunzio feared arrest, was attracted by the bribe of a Princedom or simply became sulky...

...crime, especially passional and political, is widespread...

...This is a telling comment on the energy and complete self-acceptance of a man whose life was a spectacular achievement...

...Reviewed by Robert E. Cosgrove Instructor, Flint Junior College THERE IS presumably a caustic touch in the subtitle of Anthony Rhodes' book on Gabriele D'Annunzio...

...Dannunzian oratory had been the very expression of Italian imperial ambitions in Africa, and became the trumpet that summoned Italy to World War I. During the war he distinguished himself, freelancing in private raids, in the air and at sea...

...After the armistice he occupied Fiume...

...It does not sound very attractive as Rhodes tells it: "Blood, music, poetry, voluptuousness and death—these had often been proclaimed by the poet in his work...

...We are shown, with considerable narrative skill, the poet in a variety .of poses, with his energy, his unquestioning acceptance of the necessity of all his actions, his ruthlessness in manipulating his own advantage, his spendthrift abandon and his sense that he is a prophet of the future...

...The light blockade by Italian forces drove Fiumians to piracy, and after the Treaty of Rapallo the blockade tightened, and Fiume capitulated under the threat of shelling...

...Rhodes says D'Annunzio "had experienced the peculiar satisfaction, given to few individuals in history, of holding up powerful governments at pistol point, of rendering the 'power men' temporarily powerless...

...Desmond MacCarthy, writing in 1918 of a performance in England of La Cilta Morta, says, "There is about it a too-much-ness, a kind of facility akin to vulgarity...

...his hard-headed enemy of 20 years...

...His gifts were those of the orator...

...Rhodes does not intend to give us a criticism of D'Annunzio's art, nor an apologia for his personality, but he finds it necessary, in order to explain some of the violence and cruelty in the novels and plays, to comment on the poet's Abruzzi inheritance...

...The fault of extremely civilized people is perhaps inertia, the ease with which they slip into the role of spectator...

...This is all very well, but seems to identify the "extremely civilized" and the "decadent...

...In the first, we see the arrival of the young man from the provinces, starting as a gossip columnist, marrying a Roman aristocrat whose family ostracized her for the gesture, emerging as the dominant literary figure of his country, a social success, with the scandals of his life widely admired for the bravura with which they were conducted...

...Both the extremely civilized and the extremely barbarous are cruel, the second by instinct, the first by a kind of mental erethism...

...He may have well had in mind a project for his own march on Rome, but here he was forestalled by Mussolini, who could use dannunzian oratory without being intoxicated by it...

...Eleonora Duse heightened his reputation by interpreting his heroines and becoming his mistress...

...Decadence, which we define more clinically nowadays as sickness, is still a paying proposition, as Tennessee Williams has shown...

...He made no move to avert the Fascist March on Rome...

...The artistic faults of D'Annunzio's imagination are better illustrated in his plays...

...The charge of insincerity has only a meaning in criticism when it is equivalent to the charge of superficiality...

...The story of Fiume really footnotes a historical whimsy...