Gabriele d'Annunzio

In the category of madmen who lived more exciting lives than you or I ever will, I give you the Italian poet, dramatist, lover, pilot, and man of action Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938).

D'Annunzio first rose to fame as a poet of the Decadent school, allied to the French Symbolists and other literary bad boys of the late nineteenth century. Here is one of his verses, which I found posted without title, date, or translator's name:

There murmur swarming through my drowsy head
In this vast furnace of a summer day
Relentless verses clamoring to be said,
As beetles round a putrid carcass play.

I search with open mouth and burning breath
A little coolness on the shadowed sward,
Beyond, the Adriatic, still as death,
Shows dreadful dazzlings like an unsheathed sword.

Far in the cloudless sky, malignly fair
And motionless, the sea gulls disappear
Without a cry in far-off whitish throngs;

And now and then, through odors of salt air,
Like voices of the ship-wrecked, dim with fear,
Tremble the weary wings of dying songs.

Or this, which is from the Intermezzo de Rime of 1883, translated by Luciano Mangiafico

As from corrupted flesh the over bold
Young vines in dense luxuriance rankly grow
And strange weird plants their horrid buds unfold
O’er the foul rotting of a corpse below…
Even so within my heart malignant flowers
Of verse swell forth…

In the 1890s he turned to novels and wrote more than a dozen of those. For a time he was Italy's most famous writer, much praised by Proust, James Joyce, Henry James, and others of Europe's literary elite. He used his fame and poetic skill to become a famous lover as well -- yes, in Italy you can (or could, anyway) become a famous lover. These are from a review in the TLS of a new biography of d'Annunzio by Lucy Hughes-Hallett:

The dancer Isadora Duncan found her emotional defences crumbling in the face of his verbal sallies as she walked with him in a French forest: "Oh Isadora . . . All other women destroy the landscape. You alone are part of it. You are part of the trees the sky, you are the supreme Goddess of Nature." "What woman," she confessed, "could stand up against such flattery?"

. . . D'Annunzio in Paris in 1910 throwing himself at the feet of the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein and kissing her famous long legs from ankle to crotch -- to the consternation of Maurice Barres, Edmond Rostand and luminaries standing by. . . .

When D'Annunzio read Nietzsche, he immediately announced that he was the superman.

Then came World War I. Italy was not part of the war at the beginning, but many prominent Italians viewed this as a disgrace rather than a blessing. D'Annunzio was prominent among the voices calling for Italy to give up its shameful ease and join the heroic struggle. Italy should not be Byzantium, he said, but Rome; it should "Fit out the prow and set sail for the world." "Blessed are the young, who hunger and thirst for glory," he said. After a year of wrangling, the Italian government gave into this pressure and voted to join the war on the side of France, Britain, and Russia. The ensuing three years was mostly a disaster for Italy, with much slaughter and little gain. D'Annunzio himself became a pilot and fought with great bravery. Toward the end of the war he led a squadron of seven planes on the "Flight to Vienna," a daring mission to drop leaflets over the Austrian capital. His reputation was transformed from poet to war hero.

The allied victory in the war led to territorial gains for Italy, but not so great as many Italian nationalists hoped. One of the places not granted to Italy was the city of Fiume, now in Croatia, which had an Italian majority. In 1919 D'Annunzio led a band of about two thousand patriots to the city and proclaimed it part of Italy. He mobilized the people of the city through marches, rallies, and fiery speeches delivered from balconies. When the Italian government refused to ratify his seizure, he declared Fiume independent. Eventually, though, the Italians blockaded the city and bombarded it from the sea, and the patriots gave up and went home.

This act had a huge influence on Italy's growing fascist movement. The fascists loved "action," and wanted to be led by men of action. Fiume seemed to them to show what bold men would be capable of, if they could oust the Byzantine bureaucrats from their control of the state. For a time D'Annunzio was a rival to Mussolini for the leadership of the party. In the end, though, he was too poetic, impractical, and drug-addled to assume that role. Fascists instead honored him as their "John the Baptist," the one who proclaimed the way that Mussolini followed. At D'Annunzio's funeral in 1938, Mussolini vowed, "Italy will arrived at the summit you dreamed of."

Instead Italy was battered to pieces between the Wehrmacht and the Anglo-American war machine, and D'Annunzio's calls to greatness were seen by almost everyone as both crazy and wrong. Once so popular and praised, he is now hardly read. His most innocuous lyrics seem tainted with fascism and defeat, his novels little more than extended speeches. John Woodhouse wrote of him,

D’Annunzio’s sole concern was self-gratification and glory: to make his existence as interesting and preferably as joyful as possible for himself, whatever the consequences for others; to create a work of art from his life and to immortalize it in words. 

D'Annunzio revolts, but fascinates; his biographers admit that he was a horrible person but still feel compelled to write about him. He has a big internet presence in both Italian and English. He lived the life that most of us are too -- what? -- to live. Too good and caring? Or too frightened? He has the Jesse James appeal of the rule-breaking rebel, but also great intelligence, literary talent, and enough political skill to have made him the liberator of Fiume. As an artist he won both financial success and the praise of literary greats. He seduced, he said, a thousand women, and nobody seems to doubt him. He lived as he wished, everyone else be damned.