Pleasure Read Free

later became part of fascism. Some have referred to D’Annunzio as the John the Baptist of fascism, paving the way for Mussolini. He had a genius for political rhetoric and theater but none of Mussolini’s tactical abilities. Mussolini appears to have feared D’Annunzio, recognizing him as one of the few figures charismatic enough to challenge his leadership. As a result, Mussolini helped support his extravagant lifestyle in his princely villa on Lake Garda. D’Annunzio was simultaneously honored as a kind of unofficial poet laureate of fascism and spied upon. He lived out his declining years still pursuing his erotic fantasies, but now with the help of drugs and prostitutes.
    D’Annunzio became so closely associated with exasperated nationalism and fascism that his very real status as one of Italy’s major writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has become obscured. The Italian writer Alberto Arbasino wrote that D’Annunzio is “the proverbial body hidden in the basement, one of the most cumbersome of all literature, of all countries, vilified, trampled, neglected.” D’Annunzio’s place in the pantheon of great Italian poets is widely acknowledged, but it is easy to forget that such major twentieth-century authors as James Joyce and Marcel Proust were great admirers of D’Annunzio’s novels. It is thus extremely valuable to return to D’Annunzio’s literary contributions, starting with his extraordinary first novel,
Pleasure.
    Lara Gochin Raffaelli has performed a real service by restoring
Pleasure
to an English-speaking public, or rather giving it to us, in effect, for the first time. The frank eroticism of
Pleasure
was so shocking at the time of its publication, especially in the prudish English-speaking world, that the novel was butchered almost beyond recognition to pass muster with British censors when it appeared as
The Child of Pleasure
in Georgina Harding’s translation of 1898. The Victorian Harding had managed, in effect, to take the sex out of a novel in which sex is a central, if not the central, preoccupation. “Today, tomorrow, until death,” D’Annunzio wrote, “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.” Harding, for example, removes in its entirety the first chapter of the book, in which Sperelli awaits his former lover Elena, and relives their passionate affair in his mind. Elena has the “slightly cruel habit” of tearing the petals off the flowers that Sperelli has carefully arranged for their trysts and scattering them across the rug where the two of them evidently make love. D’Annunzio provides a memorable description of the nude Elena’s feline body becoming increasingly excited as she stokes the fire in Sperelli’s Roman palace, and of her imperious habit of making Sperelli tie her shoes after they make love: “Nothing could compare with the grace of the posture that she would assume every time, lifting her skirt slightly and putting forward first one foot and then the other, so that her lover, kneeling, could tie the laces of her shoe, which were still unfastened.”
    One of the many striking things about reading
Pleasure
is its obsessive interest in things, in the buying and possessing of beautiful objects, of furniture and décor, drapes, bowls, bric-a-brac. Sperelli is obsessed with surrounding himself with beautiful things and is always careful to compose the room with objects as he conducts his love affairs. The objects themselves bear a kind of erotic charge that becomes bound up with the erotic bond between the two lovers.
    For him, all those objects among which he had so many times loved and taken pleasure and suffered had taken on something of his sensitivity. Not only were they witness to his loves, his