Volume 46, Number 4 · March 4, 1999
Fire & Ice
By Garry Wills
Gabriele D'Annunzio: Defiant Archangel
by John Woodhouse
Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 406 pp., $45.00
Cabiria e il suo tempo
edited by Paolo Bertetto, by Gianni Rondolino
Milan: Editrice il Castoro, 397 pp., L65,000
Griffithiana: The Journal of Film History
edited by Davide Turconi
La Cineteca del Friuli, L40,000
Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) called himself fire and ice, and a combination of opposites had a great deal to do with his vast, mysterious, and largely unhealthy influence on Italian culture and politics. He began his career as the unlikely combination of rhapsodic poet and gossip columnist for Roman society. He went on to write novels and plays that combined a nostalgic decadence with the technological optimism of the Futurists. In 1897 he ran for parliament, successfully, on an elusive platform, 'the politics of beauty.' Since he rarely attended the legislature, his next attempt at office, in 1900, was defeated. Driven out of Italy in 1910 by overtoppling debts, he became a literary lion in Paris, where he collaborated with Debussy on a play with music, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, produced by Michel Fokine with sets by Leon Bakst. The role of Saint Sebastian was taken by D'Annunzio's lover, the dancer Ida Rubenstein, whose transvestism in the role brought denunciations from the Church.
Review, 4977 words
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