Pleasure Read Free Page A

pleasures, his moments of sadness, but they had participated in them . . . And because he sought out these things with skill, like an aesthete, he naturally drew from the world of objects a great part of his exhilaration. This delicate actor could not comprehend the comedy of love without the backdrops.
    In one of the many extraordinary scenes in
Pleasure,
Sperelli in effect wins over Elena at a public auction in which they are both bidding on beautiful objects being sold off from some venerable Italian collection. When Elena turns to him and says, “I advise you to buy this timepiece,” Sperelli senses that something has changed between them. “Is she advising me to buy it
for us
?” he wonders. As they hand the objects they have purchased back and forth, an erotic charge passes between them.
    In Elena’s aristocratic hands, those precious materials seemed to acquire value . . . It seemed that a particle of the amorous charm of that woman passed into them, the way some of the qualities of a magnet pass into a piece of iron. It was truly a magnetic sensation of pleasure, one of those intense and profound sensations that one feels almost only at the beginning of a love affair.
    This scene is, frankly, much more interesting than the famous seduction scene in
Madame Bovary
in which Flaubert has Emma grant her favors to Rodolphe while we hear a cattle auction outside the window.
    The world that D’Annunzio describes is the Rome of the nineteenth century, only recently the capital of Italy, with one foot in the old papal Rome, a sleepy, provincial, but extravagantly beautiful city dominated by the old aristocracy, and a newer world of lawyers, politicians, and a rising bourgeoisie. D’Annunzio—the lover of beauty—sides clearly with the first over the second.
    Sperelli is a member of that dying breed of Italian aristocracy, which still has a feeling for refinement and beauty. And yet D’Annunzio, although from a family of minor nobility, was one of the thousands of provincials who descended on the new capital to make his fortune. In fact, D’Annunzio helped support himself in his first years in Rome in a quintessentially new profession, journalism, contributing hundreds of pieces to various lively, gossipy illustrated magazines that were part of a new mass culture made possible by high-speed printing presses. D’Annunzio wrote, among other things, about fashion and high society, which helps explain the novel’s extremely fresh, minute descriptions of Roman life. He helped chronicle the aristocratic world he was anxious to be a part of, but in writing about it he participated in a process in which the nobles and their precious possessions became objects of consumption.
    D’Annunzio describes an amazing scene in which the princesses and countesses of the Roman nobility contribute to a charitable fund-raising event by offering for sale objects they have touched. Some sell cigarettes they have lit in their own mouths, one sells glasses of champagne from which she has sipped, others sell pieces of fruit they have bitten sensuously into—which men purchase for the pleasure of placing their lips on something that has been in a beautiful woman’s mouth. One princess even performs the stunt of selling cigars she has placed under her armpit: “—Every act of charity is blessed, the marchioness decreed. —I, with all my biting of fruit, managed to gather about two hundred
luigi
.”
    Of course, the objects that Sperelli is most interested in possessing are women.
Pleasure
is a fascinating psychological novel about the mind of a seducer, with D’Annunzio clearly using himself as subject. One of the things that makes
Pleasure
so interesting is that D’Annunzio is pitilessly frank in his analysis of his alter ego, Sperelli: “The basis of his power lay in this: that in the art of love, he had no repugnance for any pretense, for any