Pleasure Read Free Page B

falseness, for any lie. A great part of his strength lay in his hypocrisy.”
    Part of Sperelli’s charm for women is his ability to make each one feel, in spite of much contrary evidence, that she is the only woman he has truly loved and will ever love: “He spoke to her in a low voice, kneeling, so close that it seemed he wanted to drink in her breath. His ardor was sincere, while his words sometimes lied.” D’Annunzio understands that eroticism is very much an affair of the mind and a matter of perception. He describes the way in which his conquest of Elena suddenly raises his status in the eyes of other women in the Roman aristocracy:
    The contagion of desire is a very frequent phenomenon in modern societies. A man who has been loved by a woman of singular esteem excites the imagination in other women; and each one burns with desire to possess him, out of vanity and curiosity, competing with the others. The appeal of Don Giovanni is more in his fame than in his person.
    At one point, when he is courting another woman, Maria, while also trying to win back Elena, Sperelli attends a concert with Maria and then notices Elena looking at them both, a gaze that is not lost on Maria either. Sperelli senses that a little jealousy may push the reluctant Elena back into his arms, while having a similar effect on Maria. “He was therefore on his way toward a double conquest,” D’Annunzio writes. As Sperelli imagines this “double conquest,” the two women become melded in his mind and transformed into a third:
    How strange, Elena’s tones in Donna Maria’s voice! A crazy thought flashed into his head. That voice could be, for him, the element of an imaginative work: by virtue of such an affinity, he could fuse the two beauties in order to possess a third, imaginary one, more complex, more perfect, more
real
because she was ideal . . .
    For D’Annunzio the erotic life and the life of the literary imagination are one and the same, and imaginary reality is the most real.
    Although only twenty-six at the time of the novel’s publication, D’Annunzio firmly resisted any attempts on his publisher’s part to cut or soften
Pleasure.
Curiously, the passage that his publisher was most worried about was not an erotic one but a brief cryptic allusion to a painful contemporary political event: the slaughter of Italian troops at the hands of Ethiopian soldiers at Dogali, an inglorious moment in Italy’s inglorious effort at African colonization. Politics hardly figures at all in
Pleasure,
and we experience the defeat at Dogali (which occurred just before D’Annunzio wrote the novel) in the form of a noisy rabble that slows down Sperelli’s carriage. Sperelli dismisses the event by saying, “All for four hundred brutes, who died brutally!”
    When his publisher suggested the line would offend patriotic sentiment, D’Annunzio reacted with apparent outrage: “That phrase is spoken by Andrea Sperelli and not by Gabriele D’Annunzio, and it fits well in the mouth of that monster.”
    Sperelli was thus a perfect foil for D’Annunzio, a character he could both inhabit and disown as needed, hero and monster.
    Perhaps with D’Annunzio in mind, Luigi Pirandello, a writer of a very different kind, wrote, “Life: either you live it or you write it. I have never lived it except by writing.” This was a division D’Annunzio did not accept: he lived writing and wrote living, a dynamic and explosive combination that lasted for about twenty years, until his public life crowded out his writing.
    ALEXANDER STILLE

Pleasure

 
    To Francesco Paolo Michetti
    This book, composed in your house as a welcome guest, comes to you as an offering of thanks, as an
ex-voto.
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    In the tiredness of the long and heavy exertion, your presence was as fortifying and consoling to me as the sea. In the disgust that follows the painful and captious contrivance