Books: Poet in Purple

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D'ANNUNZIO: THE POET AS SUPERMAN (299 pp.)—Anthony Rhodes—Mc-Dowell, Obolensky ($4.95).

Any statement about Gabriele D'Annunzio is an understatement. Poets these days tend to be an almost muted species haunted by the dread that they may be understood by nonpractitioners of their private art. They do not. as did D'Annunzio. ride naked on horseback into the surf and don a purple cloak as a bathrobe, or drink wine from a virgin's skull.

Nor do they seduce many duchesses, boast of eating roast baby, or make royal asses of themselves in 50 fabulous ways.

Nor do they, as a rule, set the passions of a nation on fire.

D'Annunzio's fame as a writer has always been somewhat mysterious to non-Italians. Nor is the mystery cleared up by D'Annunzio's description of his method: "All I need are 20.000 sheets of my special paper made for me by Miliano di Fabriano, plenty of ink. the sight of 500 quills which have been specially collected for me from geese stripped alive. All this gives me an extraordinary desire to write." Anthony Rhodes, sometime lecturer in English literature at Geneva University, and a London Dally Telegraph correspondent in Eastern Europe, has fought his way through the blizzard of goose feathers to do a cool, curious biography.

Hero & Ham. When D'Annunzio was born, nearly 100 years ago. Italy was looking for a hero to match its heroic past. The second oldest civilization in Europe, it was also the youngest nation-state, and Mazzini was its architect.

How Mazzini's liberal vision turned into the gimcrack grandiosity of Mussolini's Italy is a story that gives historical dimension to this biography. Modern Italy, in Author Rhodes's view, is largely the work of two poets—Dante.'with his "conception of a revised Roman Empire which lay dormant in the Italian mind for nearly 600 years." and D'Annunzio. who grafted onto this conception a set of Machiavellian politics and alien Nietzschean notions of a Mediterranean superman.

D'Annunzio began his unlikely career by being born. not. as he claimed, in a bark at sea during a gale, but in the half-pagan, half-bigoted province of Abruzzi.

where his father was a small-town mayor.

At 16 he won premature fame with a handful of lush poems—/ crave infernal dances and insensate sounds The breasts of Grecian concubines to pass the night.

Although undersized (even as an adult he stood only 5 ft. 3 in.), D'Annunzio wore his school uniform with such an air of authority that soldiers saluted him. At 19 he was a journalist and cafe ornament in Rome. At 20 he married a lady of noble name, and soon afterward acquired a scalp wound in a saber duel with a literary enemy. Thereafter, his luxuriant chestnut hair fell out. leaving the poet bald—but romantically so. A marginal growth of beard, big, bulging blue eyes and a glorious voice rounded out his romantic panache. Through all this persisted a galloping logorrhea.

Wanting, he said, to "glorify above all things beauty and the power of the pugnacious, dominating male." D'Annunzio wrote poems praising "the sky. the sea.