Poet in Purple

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.

the earth, and heroes." and more than a score of blood-drenched novels (The Triumph of Death] and plays (The Dead City, The Ship}. His heroes were voluptuous and cruel. "Whv must there be a germ of sadist perversion in everyone who loves and desires?" the D'Annunzian hero asked himself as he pulled his beloved, and his beloved self, off a cliff, or in fake Renaissance fashion raped his sister.

Muse & Duse. D'Annunzio's manner of speech and dress was copied everywhere. Women tried to behave like his heroines, and competed for symbol status as his bedmates. Intellectuals, of course, were the main victims of D'Annunzio's style, which according to Rhodes was "like that of Venetian glass, redundant and stuffed with reminiscences of Greek and Roman splendor. pseudo-Biblical, pseudomystical." A whole generation of Italian youth accepted his vision of life as an opera with bogus lyrics but real swords. Filippo Marinetti, founder and chief exhibitionist of the crackpot futurist cult (he later proposed kidnaping Pope Benedict XV in an airplane and dropping him into the Adriatic), hailed D'Annunzio as "the prodigious seducer, the ineffable descendant of Casanova and Cagliostro."

In his Casanova role, D'Annunzio seemed at his most laughable--as was demonstrated by his celebrated affair with Actress Eleonora Duce. For once, his histrionics met their match; when she found another woman's hairpins in his guest room, she threatened to burn down his villa "because the temple has been profaned. Flame alone can purify it." But there was nothing preposterous about the poet when he left his muse and Duse to go to the wars. In 1915 D 'Annunzio was living on his fame in Paris, a revered symbol of Italy's risorgimento. but also a plumping man of 52. and no one would have blamed him if he sat out the war.

For a time, all Europe seemed to have accepted D'Annunzio's cruel philosophy, but he was at least willing to pay a Cinna's price and be torn for his bad verses. He survived 50 actions and almost as many uniforms--for the poet used his prestige to transform himself at will into a cavalry lieutenant, an infantry officer, a combat airman, and he conferred on himself the navy title of comandante. He lost the sight of one eye landing his aircraft and sank a merchantman from a torpedo boat. To the end he remained the most bellicose of belligerents, complaining only "of the stench of peace." Rant & Rave. The peace left Italy with little to show for its half million dead. Beginning with nothing but bluff, strut and 287 men. D'Annunzio made his famed "march" (by -truck much of the way) on Fiume. which Woodrow Wilson thought should belong to one of his creations--Yugoslavia. Eventually D'Annunzio was driven out of the city by Italian naval fire, but not before he had lived for 15 fantastic months like a Renaissance prince, entertaining streams of ambassadors, pilgrims and mistresses. Soon everyone was sick of this sort of stuff, and the Italians thoughtfully provided D'Annunzio with a title and the opportunity of being a live lion in a dead hero's palace, the Vittoriale on Lake Garda.

It had been D'Annunzio's rant and rave that prepared the way for Mussolini. But after he took power in 1922. the warrior poet lived out his life as the chief object of interest in a museum full of works of art. historic relics and junk. He died in 1938. not long before World War II brought Italy "the fountains of blood and tears" the poet had promised, and history made its final savage exegesis of his life-work--the butchered bodies of Mussolini and his mistress strung up by the heels.

Would you fight? Kill? See rivers of blood?

Great mountains of gold? Flocks of captive women? Slaves? Or other prey? . . .

But for some time before the poet's death, mercifully perhaps, D'Annunzio had been slightly mad. Mussolini and the poet's neglected widow were the chief mourners.

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