New York Times Book Review, Sunday 5 June, 1932
D’Annunzio finishes a new book
A great many years have passed since Italy’s poet last produced a work of general interest. Notturno, written during the war and published immediately after, although it contained a great many superb passages, was not widely read outside of Italy. During the last decade the almost complete seclusion in which he lives has led to frequent rumors about his activity, rumors which he has never troubled to contradict. Among these may be classed the legend that he is writing his memoirs, which has been repeated so often that an American publisher has actually gone so far as to deposit £50,000 in an Italian bank to guarantee the contract. The book has, of course, not even been started, and it is highly improbable that it ever will be. D’Annunzio has published sixty volumes of memoirs, but it is hardly to be expected that he will bring himself to sit down and give names and facts, dotting the i’s and crossing, in visible fashion, all his t’s. Only a publisher is capable of imagining that another line could be added to the description of the poet’s relations with Eleonora Duse; and indeed what is perfectly legitimate to translate into a work of art would be of questionable taste if narrated in the first person and denuded of the veil of fancy.
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D’Annunzio’s latest volume will appear shortly, not in English, and not even in Italian, but in French. The manuscript is some 600 pages (one of which, ‘the longest page ever written’, its author claims, is a yard and a half long, by force of continual additions and annexes) and will be published by Calmann-Lévy. Its title is Endosmé ou le Banquet des Philogastres.
The way in which the book originated is characteristic. La Pisanelle, it will be remembered, was written in French and translated into Italian, but not by the author himself. Now that all his works are being republished in the sumptuous Opera omnia, the question arose which should be chosen, the French text or the translation. The poet naturally insisted on the former. The publisher pointed out that it was rather short to fill a volume by itself, whereupon d’Annunzio offered to write an introduction to it, which has gradually grown until it has reached its actual size.
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A young deaf mute goes to Paris in the suite of Brunetto Latini. One day he wanders into Sainte Chapelle during mass, when the King, St Louis, is present. The beauty of the music, the perfection of the singers’ art, so stir the saint-King’s heart that he bursts into tears. And the young Italian, watching, not only sees the saint’s tears, but hears the King’s weeping. For the first time in his life he hears. And so, crying out at the miracle, he leaves the chapel and appears before his master and fellow-disciples with all the wonder of his new gift.
But later, when he is alone, he remembers that the miraculatus can also, in the space of a day, perform miracles in his turn. And he wanders about in skeptical, thirteenth-century Paris, with his strange and brief powers, and what he does forms the main body of the book, of which it is premature for the present to tell more.
The style of the entire narrative is a remarkable tour de force. D’Annunzio is not satisfied with the French language as it is written today; nor does he find the modern literary vocabulary sufficiently spacious. The common negative ‘ne… pas’ irritates him. Possessing in Italian a vocabulary twice as large as that of Shakespeare he cannot be cooped up within the limited phraseology imposed by French classical traditions. ‘No one’, he declares proudly, ‘has used the French language as I have’- and the verdict is sure to be echoed by French critics, even if with enthusiasm varying, perhaps, in degree and quality.
In spite of his long absence from France, d’Annunzio has not lost his hold over the hearts of the French where his works and the books that deal with him are widely translated and read. The Fiaccola sotto il Moggio, produced in Paris a few years ago, won a veritable triumph. One of his French translators once told me that his knowledge of the language is miraculous, and that he alters almost every line of the original version.
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The poet of the Laudi has aged. Not physically, perhaps, for his step is as lithe as ever and his form as slim. Not intellectually. But he himself feels the approach of ‘aegra senectus’, he who so recently proclaimed himself ‘prince of youth’, principe della giovinezza. He lacks less than a year to reach the psalmist’s span of life. In every letter, in every conversation, the words ‘old’, ‘old age’, crop up, again and again. The severe fasts to which he subjects himself during the long nights of work have also affected the ‘dolorous sack’. So many old friends have died, so many new friends are estranged. The glory that he desired so eagerly when he was young has become an obstacle to his movements; he does not to visit Milan, Paris, or our America, which he finds so fascinating at a distance, for fear of the publicity entailed- that publicity that he would have enjoyed so much, perhaps, when he was less sure of it. Fame has not brought comprehension. ‘No one’, he declares, with a bitter smile, ‘no one has written about me what should be written. I can only be seen properly at a distance- now I am still too near’. The younger generation are jealous of his prestige, and tend to belittle him, like the young Heine in face of the Olympian Goethe. His mind runs on the thought of death, and he has taken up again what is perhaps his prose masterpiece, the Contemplazione della Morte, and is writing a long introduction to the English translation. The war, the death of his mother and of his nearest friends, have changed his views. The Christian belief in a personal survival no longer convinces him, he says. No doubt for such an artist, who knows that he will live on in his works, such a belief is superfluous. But what does he really believe? Who can know him or understand him? The old Prince of Montenevoso is the most baffling personality of our age.