The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

      A fashionable parlour game of the period was that of tableaux vivants: players dressed up (often very elaborately) and posed as historical or legendary characters. Other party guests were required to identify them. Olga guessed d’Annunzio’s conundrum at once. ‘“Saint Sebastian!” she cried.’ As she embraced him, he felt, with a delicious shudder, that invisible arrows were thrust through his wounds and fixed into the tree behind.

      Soon after that night, d’Annunzio wrote to Olga, signing himself ‘St Sebastian’, and urging her to read Salammbô, Flaubert’s novel set in ancient Carthage, in which a physically splendid Libyan warrior allows himself to be tortured to death for love of a priestess, and in which scores of human victims are sacrificed to a pitiless god. ‘Your exquisite intellect will derive from this reading one of the most extended and profound of voluptuous pleasures,’ he told her.

      The association of pain with pleasure was a commonplace of late nineteenth-century art and literature, and it often manifested itself in biblical stories or legends of the saints. Flaubert wrote about the self-inflicted tortures endured by Christian saints. ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean!’ wrote Swinburne, ‘the world has grown grey from Thy breath,’ but Swinburne’s poetry, like d’Annunzio’s, is replete with religious imagery. Oscar Wilde (like Flaubert before him) would soon be writing a jewelled and sadistic version of the story of Salome and John the Baptist. Biblical themes provided both an oriental setting and an antique grandeur, combining the two exoticisms of place and time, and the cult of the martyrs added to the mix the intoxicating stench of blood.

      St Sebastian is a sexually suggestive martyr. Vasari tells us that a painting of him by Fra Bartolommeo had to be removed from its altar because it ‘sparked lascivious desire’ in women who saw it. Nearly three centuries later, Stendhal reported that the problem hadn’t gone away. Guido Reni’s paintings of St Sebastian (of which there are several) had been taken down because ‘pious women kept falling in love with them’.

      Sebastian was a Roman officer at the beginning of the fourth century, condemned to death for his Christian beliefs. The Golden Legend, the thirteenth-century compendium of saints’ lives, relates that he was shot full of arrows and left for dead. He revived and returned to the imperial palace in the hope that his miraculous escape would convince the co-emperors, Diocletian and Maximianus, of Christ’s divine power. The emperors remained obdurate. Sebastian was condemned a second time. He was beaten to death and his body thrown into the main sewer.

      In early representations he is a mature, bearded man, fatherly and fully dressed as befits an officer. But by the fourteenth century it had become conventional for painters to depict him as a beautiful youth stripped bare. In the 1370s, Giovanni del Biondo showed him hoisted on a stake, nude but for a loincloth, in a pose which invites comparison with Christ’s crucifixion, and so bristling with arrow shafts he looks – as an early iconographer remarked – ‘like a hedgehog’. Subsequent depictions are more graceful, more erotic. Piero della Francesca, Antonello da Messina, Mantegna, Guido Reni and numerous others have him standing or leaning, head falling back as though in an ecstasy of pain, his beautiful nearly naked body cruelly pierced.

      Arrows are associated with Cupid. To be struck by them is to be inflamed by sexual passion. When d’Annunzio and Olga had their tryst in the Villa Medici gardens, Sigmund Freud had yet to begin studying nervous disorders, but d’Annunzio would not have needed psychoanalytic theory to point out to him that the vision of a physically perfect youth helplessly exposed to penetration by his tormentors’ shafts is a potent image of ravishment.

      D’Annunzio shared his preoccupation with the saint with a number of his celebrated contemporaries: writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde (who assumed the name Sebastian after his release from prison) and the photographer Frederick Holland Day. These men, and subsequent Sebastianophiles Yukio Mishima (whose ideas and life story in many ways reflect d’Annunzio’s), film-maker Derek Jarman, and the photographers Pierre et Gilles, were all, at least to some extent, homosexual. Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering German sexologist and contemporary of d’Annunzio, identified pictures of St Sebastian as being among the images in which an ‘invert’ would take special delight. D’Annunzio’s Sebastian cult raises unavoidable questions about his sexual orientation.

      That d’Annunzio was an eager lover of women is a copiously documented fact. Whether he also enjoyed sex with men is unknown. Some of his schoolboy letters could be interpreted as suggesting so, but it was not unusual in d’Annunzio’s lifetime for same-sex friends to write to each other as sentimentally as lovers. Here is his account of an adolescent friendship with another boy: ‘We smiled at each other, scarcely, scarcely glancing at each other from beneath the corners of our eyelids … and I have never forgotten that moment of our friendship; which glows for me with an inexplicable beauty.’ Writing to his elder patrons he was flirtatious and emotional. He told Cesare Fontana: ‘I have read and reread your lovely letter twenty times … What can I say in return for so many sweet, fond, expressions of affection? That I love you too? … Oh believe it, believe, dear friend.’

      If d’Annunzio did have sexual contact with any of these boys or men, it would not be surprising that he didn’t publicly admit to it; few men at this time would have dared do so. But given the quantity of his private writings – letters, notebooks, jottings – to which we now have access, and given his compulsion to note everything, even the most intimate details of his love life, the absence of any recorded trace of a homosexual affair strongly suggests that he never had one. In his memoirs he explicitly distinguishes his sentimental ‘friendships’ with other boys, from the ‘love’ which he had yet – at the time recollected – to experience. In his late novel, Maybe Yes, Maybe No, he imagines a pair of male friends, comrades who undertake a sequence of masculine adventures together. Their comradeship is so strong precisely because it is ‘clean’. Like a great many other men of his generation, he idealised male companionship as an escape from the erotic, from the clinging, energy-sapping, over-ripeness of the women whom he bedded.

      Whatever his orientation, though, there was something sexually ambiguous about d’Annunzio. The adolescent whose feminine prettiness and girlish voice had so enchanted Scarfoglio, matured into a small man with wide womanly hips who took a far greater interest in clothes and flowers and table-settings than was generally considered consonant with heterosexual masculinity.

      People, especially women, whose gender identity was equivocal, interested him. One of the things that pleased him about Olga Ossani was her ‘fine androgynous head’ and his fictional Andrea Sperelli is writing a ‘Story of a Hermaphrodite’. In his fiction d’Annunzio was repeatedly to conjure up pairs or trios of women, sisters or close friends, between whom the hero must choose, or into whose sensuously intimate sorority he must insert himself. Maria Ferres and her hostess, both in love with Sperelli, remember with delight their voluptuous pleasure in brushing each other’s hair at boarding school and there are two overtly lesbian characters in Pleasure. One of them is a great lady with a ‘strong masculine voice’ whose black eyes, in the course of a lunch party in a princely residence, ‘all too often meet and mingle with the green eyes of the Princess’. The other is a demi-mondaine, heavily made-up but with her curly hair so short it looks like an astrakhan cap, and wearing a jacket and waistcoat of masculine cut, a monocle and a starched cravat. She smokes at the dinner table, and swallows oysters greedily. Sperelli is attracted by the suggestion of ‘vice, of depravity, of the monstrous’ in her manner and appearance.

      Eleonora Duse, d’Annunzio’s lover for eight years, was rumoured to be bisexual. Romaine Brooks, with whom he had an affair during his years in France, was overtly lesbian. Ida Rubinstein, the actress and mime, and the eccentric millionairess Luisa Casati – with each of whom he had great friendships and minor affairs – both played theatrical variations on their gender identities, appearing naked in public, or cross-dressing. But when, a quarter of a century after that night in the Villa Medici gardens with Olga, d’Annunzio would write a play (with music by Debussy) of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, he wrote it expressly for Ida Rubinstein. Sebastian – victim-hero of so many gay male fantasies – would be played in d’Annunzio’s version by a woman.

      Probably not an active homosexual, then, but certainly a sado-masochist.