STRANGE DECISION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22670, 6 March 1937, Page 15

STRANGE DECISION

ITALIAN POET'S PLAN HASTENING HIS OWN END LONDON, March 4 The correspondent of the British United Press at Gardone, Italy, states that the famous poet, dramatist and novelist, Gabriele d'Annunzio, is planning death by dissolving his body in a bath containing a powerful chemical compound invented by himself. According to a close friend he proposes to take this "death bath" when he feels that natural death is approaching. This, according to the friend, was the real meaning of a recent message sent by d'Annunzio to Signor Achille Starace, Secretary-General of the Fascist Party, in which he said: "I am an old, sick man, so I am going to hasten my end." The poet will bo 73 years of ago on March 12. Gabriele d'Annunzio, in January. 1931, ordered his favourite sculptor, Renato Brozzi, to construct a mausoleum for him. He telegraphed the order as urgent. It was reported at the time that d'Annunzio was suffering from frequent fits of moodiness and melancholy. As long ago as 1929 the poet was planning the manner of his death. "I want to go off with a bang with my boots on!" he was said to have declared.

It was suggested that it was his desire to die as adventurously as he had lived, which was behind his plan to fly the Atlantic alone in the summer of that year. "1 have a horror of becoming a doddering old man and seeing my mind grow weaker and weaker and then watching it flicker out like a used-up candle," he said in an interview. ".1 have always lived gloriously, and I want to die in the same way. 1 want a poet's passing—one final caress of earth and then the plunge into the infinite. "I shall take no chance of death creeping up on me unawares. My plans are all made, and when I hear my number being called J shall simply say goodnight and be off." Not long before that lie had conceived the idea of being shot from the mouth of a gigantic cannon toward tlio moon. He even made inquiries in the Italian Navy to ascertain if a suitable weapon was available. He was perfectly serious in his plan, but Signor Mussolini smilingly frowned on it.