Rome

Catholique in Paris, whose widely circulated book The Gospel and the Church argued that the findings of radical Biblical criticism dissolved the Protestant threat to faith by dismissing Biblical literalism as merely naive, because they implied that there was no getting back behind the tradition of the Church to an “unmediated” Christ.

He did, however, spell certain liturgical reforms which the Church needed. Italian church music had been invaded by opera, stressing bravura passages and ensemble instrumentation. Pius would have none of this secular stuff, and in 1903 he called for a return to the ancient tradition of plainsong and the classical polyphony of the Counter-Reformation, especially in the Kyriale, Graduale, and Antiphonary. Pius favored a return to Gregorian chant. He also explicitly forbade women to sing in church choirs.

This was all very well, and he backed it up with a program of restoration of dilapidated churches—always a problem in the Eternal City, which by now was beginning to seem not very eternal—that did little but good.

Initially, he even forbade Italian Catholics to vote, on the grounds that the Italian state, being secular, had made the pope a “prisoner in the Vatican,” and that to vote at all for a secular state which had confiscated the enormous papal domains would be to acquiesce in it. But later, when it became obvious that neither Victor Emmanuel nor any elected Italian politicians who valued their votes were going to tolerate backsliding on the issue, this was relaxed. From now on, the size of the papal domains would remain tiny—although the numerical size of the Catholic Church would be enormous, and ever-growing.

This softening on the voting issue did not imply a softening in papal doctrine. In 1907, Pius X formally condemned some sixty-five propositions regarding the nature of the Church and the divinity of Christ as wrong and heretical, and soon afterward compelled all priests to take a sacred oath against modernism in general. “Modernism” was an extremely wide-ranging term. As understood by Pius X and his curia, it meant any effort to square the ideas of more recent philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, with the traditional teachings of the Church. Such attempts were viewed with horror by theological traditionalists like Pius X, because they implied that the Church’s teachings on faith and morals were neither eternal nor immutable. Gradually the battle lines between church orthodoxy and modernism were firming up.

¹ Victor Emmanuel II (1820–78), eldest son of Charles Albert of Sardinia and Maria Theresa of Austria, had assumed the throne of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1849, following the abdication of his defeated father.

² The narrative of gods versus giants probably symbolized the Pergamene conception of its own dynasty defending the Hellenic ethos against “barbarian” invaders from the North.

³ There are photos of the sculptors who worked on the project crammed, rather uncomfortably, around bottles of vermouth inside the cavernous belly of the horse, like tipsy Greeks approaching Troy.

⁴ “Mentally disturbed” is perhaps too strong, though the pope did suffer from a well-attested and much-discussed affliction: epilepsy.

11

Futurism and Fascism

Poets have seldom had political influence. There were few exceptions to this in the twentieth century. In England, none, except Rudyard Kipling. In America, none at all. In Russia, one might mention Vladimir Mayakowsky. But the outstanding figure in this regard was Italian: a bizarre, hyperactive, and fantastically egotistical writer named Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), a man hell-bent on turning himself into a living legend, and one who succeeded, though most writers who try it fail.

He had been born in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, and raised in the Abruzzi, then a brutishly backward part of Italy, with a tiny educated elite and an illiterate, superstitious majority of peasants. This seemed to be the eternal order, and contempt for the masses was to be the mainspring of D’Annunzian politics. His father, Francesco Paolo, was an intelligent, loathsome bully, whose contempt for the underdog was fully inherited by his son. The world, he wrote, was divided into masters and slaves, with nothing in between:

To the superior race, which shall have risen by the pure energy of its will, all shall be permitted; to the lower, nothing or very little. The greatest sum of well-being shall go to the privileged, whose personal nobility will make them worthy of all privileges. The plebeians remain slaves, condemned to suffer.…

All his life, D’Annunzio would be pursued by the specter of his own provincial origins and by that of his piggish father’s sexual opportunism: sex wasn’t real sex unless it was also rape. He married young, but almost as soon as he got to Rome, in 1881, to seek his literary fortune, he dumped his Abruzzese wife in favor of a string of socialites, whores, principesse, and actresses, culminating in his prolonged affairs with the two most famous tragediennes of the day, Sarah Bernhardt and her Italian rival, Eleonora Duse. (The wife would presently commit suicide by jumping from a window.) His bed-hopping was ruthless. There was nothing modest about the transfiguration D’Annunzio expected of his sex life: “The work of the flesh is in me the work of the spirit, and both harmonize to achieve one sole, unique beauty. The most fertile creatrix of beauty in the world is sensuality enlightened by apotheosis.”

D’Annunzio practiced most kinds of writing, with increasing public success. He started publishing his juvenilia —verses and short stories—when he was sixteen; to get publicity for his first book of verses, he sent the newspapers a fake report of his own death in a fall from a horse. He wrote a series of novels, beginning in 1889 with Il piacere (The Child of Pleasure), followed in 1891 by L’innocente (literally “the innocent one,” but appearing in English translation as either The Victim or The Intruder!), Giovanni Episcopo (1892), Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894), La vergine delle rocce (The Virgin of the Rocks, 1896), and Il fuoco (The Flame of Life, 1900). Most of these were best-sellers in Italy, and some in France, where D’Annunzio had also developed an avid following. He was constantly in trouble with the Italian clergy, building a hypnotic reputation as a decadent and a sex maniac, which did his sales no harm at all. Il fuoco was a roman a clef based on D’Annunzio’s scandalous and hugely publicized love affair with Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt had also prompted him to turn to the theater, with noisy if variable success. His two great dramatic hits, La citta morta (The Dead City, 1898) and Francesca da Rimini (1901), were written for her as their tragic heroine.

In addition to the plays, the novels, and several collections of lushly decadent and hortatory verse published around the turn of the century, D’Annunzio collaborated with the composer Claude Debussy on a musical play, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, and even wrote a screenplay for a silent movie based on Salammbo, Gustave Flaubert’s lurid novel about the fall of Carthage. He also has the distinction of being the only poet in history after whom an airport is named—the Gabriele D’Annunzio Airport, in Brescia.

His poems had their moments, but most were of an old-fashioned sort, echoing English writers like Swinburne, Rossetti, and Keats, and tailor-made for the fin-de-siecle fascination with erotic necrophilia:

As from corrupted flesh the over-bold