These qualities belong to a high order of creative writing, they can
never be the property of mere talent, they have no part in concessions
to popular and superficial demands. This does not necessarily imply
a criticism of the latter: it is not a crime to prefer happiness to
misery, and certainly the tangible facts of happiness are success
and the omnipotence of love. Tales and stories exist as a source of
pleasure, but men take their pleasures with a difference; and for any
who are moved by the heroic spectacle of humanity pinned by fatality to
earth but forever struggling for release “Tales of My Native Town” must
have a deep significance.
No one has abhorred brutality and deception more passionately than
Gabriele D’Annunzio, and no one has held himself more firmly to the
exact drawing of their insuperable evils. But this is not all; it is
not, perhaps, even the most important aspect: that may well be his
fascinating art. Here, above all, the contending elements, of his
being, the brilliant genius of the Renaissance, predominate; an age
bright with blood and gold and silk, an age of poetry as delicately
cultivated as its assassinations. It was a period logical and cruel,
lovely and corrupt; and, to an extraordinary degree, it has its
reflection in D’Annunzio’s writing.
Yet, in him, it is troubled by modern apprehensions, a social
conscience unavoidable now to any fineness of perception. His tales are
no longer simply the blazing arbitrary pictures of the Quatrocento;
they possess our own vastly more burdened spirit. In this, as well,
they are as American as they are Italian; the crimes and beggars and
misery of Pescara, the problems and hopes of one, belong to the other;
the bonds of need and sympathy are complete.
The tales themselves are filled with energy and movement, the emotions
are in high keys. At times a contest of will, of temptation playing
with fear, as in The Gold Pieces, they rise to pitched battles between
whole towns; the factions, more often than not led by Holy reliques and
statues, a sacred arm in silver or the sparkling bust of a Saint with a
solar disc, massed with scythes and bars and knives, meet in sanguinary
struggle. Or again the passions smoulder into individual bitterness and
scandal and mean hatred. The Duchess of Amalfi is such a chronicle, the
record of Don Giovà’s devastating passion for Violetta Kutufa, who came
to Pescara with a company of singers at Carnival.
Nothing is omitted that could add to the veracity, the inevitable
collapse, of this almost senile Don Juan; while the psychology of the
ending is an accomplishment of arresting power and fitness. There is
in The Duchess of Amalfi a vivid presentation of Pescara itself, the
houses and Violetta’s room scented with cyprus-powder, the square with
the cobblers working and eating figs, a caged blackbird whistling the
Hymn of Garibaldi, the Casino, immersed in shadow, its tables sprinkled
with water.
Around Pescara is the level sea, the river and mountains and the broad
campagnia, the vines, the wine vats and oil presses, the dwellings of
mud and reeds; the plain is flooded with magnificent noon, and, at
night, Turlendana, drunk, is mocked by the barking of vagrant dogs;
the men linger under Violetta’s lighted windows, and the strains of her
song run through all the salons, all the heads, of the town.... It is
as far away as possible, and yet, in its truth, implied in every heart.