The Child of Pleasure

Andrea Sperelli is less a character than a theory of living: every room he enters, every fabric and gesture and love affair, gets described with the same worshipful attention, because for D'Annunzio's aesthete beauty isn't a value among others, it's the only one. The novel's famous epigraph, that one must make one's own life as one would a work of art, is the thesis Andrea spends four hundred pages testing to destruction, since a life organized entirely around aesthetic sensation turns out to have no mechanism for choosing between two women, or for honesty toward either.

Elena and Maria are constructed as opposites, the femme fatale of memory against the innocent of the present, but D'Annunzio's real interest is in how thoroughly Andrea's aestheticism has hollowed out his capacity to actually distinguish them once desire is running. A war wound sustained early in the book, in a pointless duel, becomes the physical correlative for what's happening underneath: his will is withering exactly as elegantly as everything else about him. Even his convalescence is staged for effect, described in the same lush, appreciative prose D'Annunzio gives a tapestry or a sonnet, so that the reader absorbs Andrea's own habit of aestheticizing everything, including his own decline, well before the plot forces him to pay for it.

D'Annunzio's debt to À rebours is total and openly stated, but transplanting French Decadence into a Catholic, aristocratic Rome changes its temperature: where Des Esseintes withdraws entirely from society to curate sensation in private, Andrea performs his aestheticism in public, across salons and love affairs, making decadence a social competition rather than a hermit's discipline. The result founded a genuinely Italian strain of the movement, one D'Annunzio would spend the rest of his flamboyant public life living out rather than just writing about, first as literary celebrity and later as the self-styled soldier-poet who seized Fiume.

D'Annunzio's sentences accumulate ornament the way Andrea accumulates lovers and objects, clause after clause of fabric, scent, and gesture stacked until narrative incident nearly disappears under description. That's not a stylistic excess incidental to the book's argument, it is the argument: a novel about a man who has made style his whole ethics has to be written in a style willing to risk the same excess, and D'Annunzio's willingness to let the prose become as self-indulgent as its subject is what makes the critique land rather than read as mere moralizing from outside.