Pagan Light by Jamie James

Author:Jamie James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The key fits the lock exactly, a concise thumbnail biography of Romaine Brooks more than a fictional impression of her, with the possible exception of its characterization of the love affairs, which is difficult to confirm. The record of Brooks’s private life is vague: the main source is her memoir, which is discreet more than secretive. She refers to every one of her female lovers as “my friend.”

Hall omits to mention that the Italian poet who was the subject of the portrait bought by the Musée du Luxembourg was Gabriele D’Annunzio, with whom Brooks carried on an intense love affair. A reader with no other source of information than Brooks’s memoir would conclude that he was the great love of her life. Several writers have been called the last Romantic, but D’Annunzio’s claim to the distinction is stronger than most, both because of the florid exuberance of his poetry and his novels of doomed love and specifically because of his parallel career as a man of revolutionary action, in the mold of Byron. Today, D’Annunzio may be just as well-known as the most successful Don Juan of his day, with a catalogue of conquests to rival the canonical 1,003 of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, as for his literary works; yet at the time that Romaine Brooks succumbed to his charms, D’Annunzio was the most influential Italian poet of his era. His intensely romantic novels were international bestsellers, and his historical stage plays, such as La gioconda and Francesca da Rimini, were acclaimed as masterpieces and rapturously received by the public. His posthumous reputation has suffered in part because of his sexual mania, in part because he did not follow the modernist orthodoxy, and in particular because Mussolini embraced him as the national poet of the Fascists.

The potency of D’Annunzio’s seductive charm was all the more remarkable because his person was, by all accounts, repellent. Liane de Pougy, a celebrated courtesan who eluded his grasp, described him as “a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath, [and] the manners of a mountebank.” Brooks met him at a lunch given by the Italian artist Leonetto Cappiello, where she saw in him “the great lapidé of our times.” One of the principal themes of Brooks’s memoir is her sympathy and identification with heroic individuals who are stoned (lapidé) by the Philistine mob, martyrs for art. “His true personality was all but eclipsed by his notorious reputation,” she wrote of D’Annunzio. “Stoned out of his own country, he was to face even more stoning in Paris.”

Her admiration for D’Annunzio was electrified when they first met, by a chance remark. Cappiello’s vibrantly colorful posters for Cinzano and Campari were plastered all over Paris, and when he showed his guests some new designs, D’Annunzio whispered in Brooks’s ear, “And to think how much can be expressed without any color at all.” Impulsively, she invited him to come see her paintings. “When he entered the studio,” she wrote, “D’Annunzio, paying scant

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