When Liane de Pougy, one of the most celebrated Parisian courtesans, visited Florence, a famous admirer sent a carriage filled with roses to collect her. As she descended the steps, his servants threw more roses at her. "There before me was a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath, the manners of a mountebank and the reputation, nevertheless, for being a ladies' man." This was Gabriele D'Annunzio, the poet and lothario who sedu-ced Italy to wartime slaughter with his rhetoric, scandalised Europe with his writing and set up his own city state in a forerunner of fascism. The subject of this long, busy biography kept notebooks from early on and extraordinarily faithfully. D’Annunzio (1863–1938) also deliberately became one of the first modern celebrities, hard on the heels of Oscar Wilde, and as such he was voluminously documented. Add his many volumes of verse, best-selling novels, and very popular plays, and he offers his chronicler an embarrassment of source material. Hughes-Hallett paints a richly detailed portrait of an eminently civilized sociopath, incapable of restraining his appetites for sex, excitement, and the most exquisite furnishings and utterly insensible to the emotional and financial damage he caused. He went through houses, furnishings, clothes, jewelry, artworks, horses, cars, and airplanes (not boats—he never could conquer seasickness) as if they were water, almost never fully paying for any of them. His mistresses were legion, and among them were some of the era’s most famous performers. And then there were his one-night (or shorter) stands, all recorded, often obscenely, in his notebooks. A national chauvinist who lauded unending warfare and violence, he spearheaded the drive to get Italy into WWI and for 15 months of 1919–20 was the dictator of the Italian-majority Yugoslavian city, Fiume. In the process, he inspired the rising Mussolini, of whom he seldom approved but didn’t criticize because Il Duce paid for every extravagance of his last 15 years. D’Annunzio is appalling but, as Hughes-Hallett presents him, completely enthralling
Samuel Johnson prize 2013 shortlist
