ground, the aviators only showed their true qualities once propelled into the air by their machines. ‘Sit[ting] at his levers’, Rougier resembled ‘a great man at his writing desk’, calmly in control of the technology. Blériot, stoically confronting a technical problem that threatened his performance, was transformed once in the air: now ‘One sees his straight body over the wings, his legs are stretched down like a part of the engine’. Henri Rougier, the altitude champion who had reached the height of 190 metres, seemed, at the end of this literary report, ‘so high that you had the impression of his being able to determine his position only in relation to the stars’.
Gabriele D’Annunzio had not come to Brescia simply to shine in society, but also to collect material with a view to his next novel. This prodigious child of Italian literature had become famous in 1889 with his first novel, Il Piacere, inaugurating the decadent style in Italy. Five other successful novels followed until 1900. In the mid-1890s D’Annunzio became acquainted with the work of Nietzsche, and began to combine psychologizing introspection with the theme of the superman. From the start of the new century, however, his creative energy began to decline, and the decadent dandy sought literary subjects suited to the coming new age. This was his mission in Brescia. He persuaded Glenn Curtis and Mario Calderara to take him up in their planes in order to taste the sensations of flight. D’Annunzio emerged transformed by this experience. He had found the subject for his new novel, Forse che sì, forse que no, published the following year, 1910.3
Two plots dovetailed here: the first, anchored in the heritage of D’Annunzio’s decadent period, depicts the complicated relationship that the aviator Paolo Tarsis had with two sisters and their brother, while the second adopted a virile and warlike tone, that of the modern superman.4 Tarsis and his friend Giulio Cambiaso had been comrades in the navy. Dreaming only of battle and heroism, they fled from the ‘outward discipline’ imposed on the military in time of peace. They travelled the East in search of adventures, and in Cairo met a French ornithologist, who ‘revealed to them the static sense of three dimensions towards the sky’. Tarsis and Cambiaso then built a light plane in order to join the ‘little aristocracy’ of aviators.5
The plot, structured around the antagonism between decadent love and virile friendship, contrasts three pairs of themes. The first two – woman/man and earth/sky – are classic, but the third – cars/planes – is more surprising and resolutely modernist. The tone of the novel is set by the first sentence, shaken by ‘the heroic wind of speed’. In this first scene, Tarsis, in the company of his lover Isabella, drives a car at high speed, ‘imagining himself driving not a steed that grazes the ground but a steed that rises up’.6 Attached to the ground and to his woman, the automobilist hero only rises up in his imagination. In order to realize his truly human – and thus superhuman – essence, he has to detach himself from the ground, and by the same token, from women. It is only by flying that man is ‘no longer a man, but Man, man the master of the universe, lord of created things’, as D’Annunzio wrote again in the Paris newspaper Le Matin. Aviation heralded nothing less than ‘a new civilization, a new life’, along with ‘a profound metamorphosis of civic life, whether in peace or in war, in beauty or in domination’.7 It represented, therefore, a major stake, not simply in the field of war, and still less in terms of sporting records. It promised to revolutionize the whole of intellectual life, and consequently all social and political life as well – including property rights, frontiers, and border controls. Before long aerial cities would be built:
The republic of the air will banish the evil-doers, parasites, the unwelcome, the whole bad lot of them, and open itself to men of good will. On the threshold the elect will cast off the chrysalis of weight, they will glide and fly.
For us today, accustomed to associating air travel with security checks at airports, long hours of waiting, endemic delays and too narrow seats, all this lyricism seems decidedly out of place. But in the early twentieth century, D’Annunzio only expressed a widely shared sentiment. As far back as 1859, in The Legend of the Centuries, Victor Hugo dreamed of an airship that would free humanity from its ills:
Man finally takes up his sceptre and casts off his stick.
And we see him fly with Newton’s calculus
Mounted on Pindar’s ode …
This vessel, built from numbers and dreams,
Would amaze Shakespeare and ravish Euler.
Aircraft, a true marriage of science and poetry, would realize the realm of mankind, a fully human age.
Suddenly like an eruption of madness and of joy,
When, after six thousand years on the fatal path,
Brusquely undone by the invisible hand,
Gravity, bound to the foot of the human race,
Breaks away, this chain was every chain!
Everything in man takes flight, and furies, hatreds,
Chimeras, force, finally evaporates, ignorance and error,
misery and hunger,
The divine right of kings, the primitive or Jewish gods.
The invention of the celestial ship was not simply a scientific revolution, it was a spiritual event: ‘It bears man to man and spirit to spirit’, even able to ‘shine faith into the eye of Spinoza’.8
This was the legacy that the poets of the early twentieth century had to contend with. In another literary register, no longer lyrical but resolutely avant-garde, aviation was also the Futurists’ favourite subject. The most modernist aspects of D’Annunzio already draw on a literature that celebrates the fusion of man with machine, aviation here being the most perfect realization of this. In La nuova arma: la macchina, for example, Mario Morasso sees the machine as a true ‘vital force’, an ‘immense multiplication of life’ that possesses a ‘barbarian soul’.9 By fusing with man, it gives birth to ‘a creature half human, half metal tool; a composite monster’. The development of aviation thus has ‘philosophical implications’.10 These themes would be taken up and systematized by the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 – the same year that Blériot crossed the Channel – with the publication of the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti:
1. We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as common, daily practice.
2. Courage, boldness, and rebellion will be essential elements in our poetry…
9. We wish to glorify war – the sole cleanser of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.
10. We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of self-serving cowardice.
11. We shall sing of the great multitudes who are roused up by work, by pleasure, or by rebellion; of the many-hued, many-voiced tides of revolution in our modern capitals; of the pulsating, nightly ardor of arsenals and shipyards, ablaze with their violent electric moons; of railway stations, voraciously devouring smoke-belching serpents; of workshops hanging from the clouds by their twisted threads of smoke; of bridges which, like giant gymnasts, bestride the rivers, flashing in the sunlight like gleaming knives; of intrepid steamships that sniff out the horizon; of broad-breasted locomotives, champing on their wheels like enormous steel horses, bridled with pipes; and of the lissome flight of the airplane, whose propeller flutters like a flag in the wind, seeming to applaud, like a crowd excited.11
