Gabriele d'Annunzio: Aesthete and Übermensch The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio - Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. By Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Fourth Estate; 400 pages; £25. IS GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO, controversial poet and evangelist of war, ripe for rehabilitation yet? Lucy Hughes-Hallett, a British biographer and critic, in a deeply evocative new biography, suggests probably not. There is too much blood on his hands both from the first world war and from the 15 bizarre months in 1919-20 when he was the charismatic duce of a rogue state in the Adriatic port of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia). His treatment of women, his exhausting "maximalism" as a poet, his astonishing vanity and his chilling nationalism do not fit him well for a place among the heroes of the birth of the modern era. And yet there is greatness in the man. D'Annunzio's lyric poetry (about which the author has next to nothing to say), though languorous and little-read today, can be compelling; his moulding of Italian literary language, of which he styled himself the greatest practitioner since Dante, was innovative and streaked with genius. During the great war, on which he had so influentially preached to his countrymen, he was capable of acts of heroism and even chivalry, as the author herself admits. So wherein lies the problem? The links between d'Annunzio's thinking and the rise of fascism in Italy have been well aired by historians, and the author, to her credit, shows that the connection is not quite as simple as it is often made out to be. The problem with d'Annunzio lies instead with his suffocating and relentless self-centredness and need for fame. His life, his dress, his lovemaking, his going to war - everything was so minutely stage-managed with an eye to how it would appear in the press or in the histories. Although Ms Hughes-Hallett valiantly (but ultimately without conviction) teases out a few timorous examples to the contrary, it is almost impossible to believe in any spontaneous act of humility or empathy in the man. There are acts of beauty, but these are often sinister and his story serves largely to show the moral emptiness of pure aestheticism. D'Annunzio's was a life of consummate theatricality in a country where theatre permeates everything from eating to politics. At first, the audience applauded him act after act; but by the end it tired of the posturing. A new protagonist who had for some time been watching and learning in the wings stepped on to the stage and d'Annunzio was brushed aside by his own monstrous progeny in the person of Mussolini. Ms Hughes-Hallett evokes the edgy relationship between these two unaccommodating egos with particular adroitness. D'Annunzio is best seen away from the realm of politics. He was a writer, after all; a turbine of extraordinary creativity, an intense observer of the nuances of light, of faces, landscape, flowers, the gore of war and of every conceivable inflection of the sexual act. He exhausted himself with the sheer expenditure of energy, and then recharged his depleted resources with the thrill of his most remarkable passion: aviation. Yeats's "lonely impulse of delight" drove him to that "tumult in the clouds." For him it was both sublime and superhuman. Dropping bombs or propaganda from on high behind enemy lines and returning, mostly unscathed, time after time, d'Annunzio admitted to feelings of ecstasy. He believed himself to be the Übermensch he had ached to become when he first read Nietzsche. Flying theatrically, far above the unseemly mess of footsoldiery in the trenches, he could once again be the heroic protagonist. It is not easy to make sense of the life of a man who was a silk-swathed aesthete, prophetic versifier, manic aviator and martial demagogue all in one. But in telling the story of his life, Ms Hughes-Hallett deftly unpicks the strands that compose and ultimately resolve these incongruities. She is a strong match for her subject, something that so many of the women in d'Annunzio's life were lamentably not. Her style is rich, ironic and pugnacious; she jousts willingly with him and the reader becomes a spectator of this subtle and fascinating contest.