The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War — A Book That Sticks With You
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Pike was a terrific read. It really immersed me into the complexity of post-WWI peace in a way that will fuel me for many years. The book’s award-winning, cut-up non-linear style worked for the subject. It mirrors d’Annunzio’s own flamboyant, self-mythologizing autobiography and throws you into his world of contradictions without a dull linear plod. Only a minor quibble later.
Italy After Unification: Hunger for Glory
What staggered me most was the lust for conflict among Italy’s elites and officer class in the lead-up to, during and after the Great War. Italy had only recently unified into a kingdom in the 1860s–70s. The drive to restore national honour through acquisition of Italian-speaking enclaves and “lost” historic lands ran deep. Only about 8,000 out of 5.5 million mobilized soldiers actually volunteered. The rest were conscripts. Yet the upper echelons — poets, politicians, aristocrats, and ambitious officers — were often rabid for intervention on the Allied side in 1915, chasing irredentist dreams against Austria-Hungary. The ordinary soldier paid the price: roughly 650,000 Italian dead and 950,000 wounded. Those numbers hit harder after reading this.
Step forward the extraordinary character who embodied and amplified that elite fever: Gabriele d’Annunzio.
The Making of Il Vate
Born in 1863 to a fairly affluent but money-losing family on the Adriatic coast, d’Annunzio was a precocious child. Pampered yet driven, he devoured everything from the Classics to Nietzsche. He wrote poetry young, showed a knack for self-promotion that bordered on genius, and possessed a voice that must have been hypnotic in person. Physically, he was a diminutive figure who lost his hair early and was not conventionally handsome. None of that slowed him down.
He became probably the biggest shagger of upper-class (and often masculine-looking) women to street prostitutes, that I’ve ever come across in biography. The combination of high art, fastidious clothing sense, smooth words, and relentless approaches did the work. There are darker episodes too, including the rape of a peasant girl. His overriding quest was for historic glory fuelled by art, with complete disregard for money. Guys like this are usually venal and superficial. D’Annunzio wasn’t — or at least not only that.
He showed inarguable qualities: real courage in the early adoption of air battle flying and brutal Alpine ground conflict. He was extraordinarily hard-working. And he was a fabulous “noticer” of everything. Hughes-Hallett captures his eye for detail beautifully — three types of grey (pigeon, sky, and sea), the religious cross-like shadow that early biplanes cast on the ground. These observations are staccato across his writing, words and life.
Lifestyle, Creativity, and Debt
Money was only a means to an end. He was always in debt yet purchased exotic things wildly and spent what he had on absurd luxuries, like up to three or four shirt changes in a day, repeated many times over. A super creative guy — from “sub aqua glass organ” lines to the memorable pet names he gave those who stayed in favour throughout his life. He made notes of everything and anything. That archival instinct must have helped Hughes-Hallett enormously, though it also contributes to the book’s density.
The Book’s Style and a Small Niggle
This is where my only quibble comes in. The book is excellently researched and was uniformly praised for its cut-up non-linear style, probably inspired by Gabriele’s own autobiography. But there was just too much information in places. Tiny repetitions creep in. We’re told d’Annunzio was teetotal, then in one scene he’s drunk on champagne, and later reminded he was abstemious except for champagne (and cocaine, laudanum, etc.). Which is it? The same with the line about one lover, Marchesa Luisa Casati, being “the only woman who could astonish me.” Or the bloated bellies and hooves in the air of dead horses on the battlefield. Or that due to his baldness he no longer needed a brush. Or that his final home, the Vittoriale, was purchased by the state during his life, relieving him of the bills. Or the propaganda leaflets dropped with tiny sandbags from planes. These recursive echoes feel like the author occasionally forgot what she had written earlier. It’s a tiny niggle in an otherwise outstanding work.
Finest Hour: The Fiume Adventure
D’Annunzio’s finest hour — or at least the most theatrical — came after the war. He took over the enclave of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) against the Italian government’s wishes. He hypnotized the half-Italian population into demanding violent autonomy. He pledged never to leave, never to give up, and never to yield. For over a year he delivered speeches, staged rituals, and lived the dream of poetic politics. Then the first Italian Navy missile hit his property, and he was out of there. Gone never to return.
The Bullshitter and the Cost
In the end, d’Annunzio was a bullshitter for me. A spectacularly, gifted, courageous one, but still. His brand of aestheticized militarism and irredentist glory came at the expense of those 650,000 killed and 950,000 wounded. The ordinary stories are the ones I feel for much more, even if they are less interesting to write about than the extraordinary. Gabriele d’Annunzio is very much that — larger than life, contradictory, impossible to look away from.
The Pike does justice to the complexity. It doesn’t flatten him into hero or villain. It shows the man who preached war, noticed the shadows of biplanes like crosses, burned through firewood like a Zulu in the Arctic circle, and helped shape the volatile atmosphere from which fascism would later draw aesthetic fuel. If you have any interest in WWI’s aftermath, Italian history, or the strange intersection of art and politics, this one is worth your time. It’s the kind of book that stays with you.
One of his lines is my new motto - No day of drudgery was ever as fertile for me as a week of laziness.
