Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  On the heels of Sarah’s dismal failure in The Dead City—because of it, in fact—Eleonora became fixated on mounting what she hoped would be a successful Italian run of the play. Bernhardt’s version had been criticized for its uninspired sets and costumes; Duse was determined not to repeat that mistake. In keeping with d’Annunzio’s theory of “complete theater,” every aspect of the production—from scenery to lighting, costumes to wigs—was to bear equal weight and contribute to an artistic whole. Even the actress herself was to be no more important than the decor. Eleonora respectfully complied with her lover’s vision. “She plays a part of renunciation,” wrote a reporter, “a part subdued and gray, in contrast with the brilliant opposing character.” The Poet is the hero, naturally, in d’Annunzio’s play; Duse’s character, the blind seer Anna, plays more of a supporting role.

  For the other cast members, Duse commissioned flowing costumes designed in monochrome hues to evoke Greek statuary. A stunning hip-length wig was woven for the actress playing Bianca, giving her the splendor of an Aphrodite. The silken hair flowed freely as she glided innocently across the stage, turning the heads of the married Alessandro and, far more ominously, of her own brother, Leonardo.

  The opening night audience, while lulled by the sensuous scenery and lyrical lines, was shocked at the brutality of the finale, when Leonardo drowns his own sister so as not to succumb to her allure. “Assassino!” shouted an outraged man from the gallery. But the ending’s devastation was by design.

  As a journalist wrote: “The playwright effects a brilliant contrast by introducing one scene of pure joy before all are plunged into abysmal horror.” Then Anna, the blind seer, has the final words.

  While Sarah had shuddered and shrieked as she came upon Bianca’s cold, lifeless body—those were the stage directions—Eleonora made a subtler choice. “Her eyes, which—though open throughout the play—had seemed dead, slowly came alive,” explained actress Eva Le Gallienne. “One saw her see for the first time. . . . For several moments she was completely still, until the realization that she was actually able to see slowly penetrated her consciousness. Then she gave a cry . . . of wonder at seeing, of horror at what she saw, and mingled joy and anguish at the gift of sight coming to her at such a price.” Her final line (Vedo! Vedo!) came in such a low voice, it was as though she could scarcely believe it.

  It was powerful and deeply moving. Unlike the Paris run, which came and went within a fortnight, Duse’s production of The Dead City had legs enough to warrant a tour of several cities, including Genoa, Bologna, Florence, Rome, and finally Venice, where d’Annunzio delivered a rousing, nationalistic address with belligerent calls to rearm the Italian navy.

  Though he’d lost his reelection bid, d’Annunzio was still a well-known figure who was blending art and politics to impressive effect. Patriotic fervor helped to prime the local audience in his favor, and he was called to the stage again and again for countless curtain calls, accompanied by cries of “Viva d’Annunzio!”

  Duse and d’Annunzio glanced at each other in incredulous delight as they took their bows hand in hand. This was the antithesis of the reception to La gloria, where the crowd had demanded the author’s death. Suddenly d’Annunzio was no longer a pariah. Critics hailed The Dead City as “the most beautiful of d’Annunzio’s plays.”

  Duse received surprisingly little credit for The Dead City’s success, even when the play had failed miserably in Sarah’s hands. It was Duse’s more subtle performance that had made his oft-belabored words more palatable. But d’Annunzio had a way of seizing center stage, so most of the adulation focused on the poet. One hagiographic review put the work in a class unto itself:

  The Dead City stands alone among recent dramatic literature for beauty of phrase and workmanship. . . . On every page . . . one may hold [a] festival. . . . I consider it to be of the most memorable and significant dramas I have read.

  Emboldened by his triumph in Venice, d’Annunzio set to work on another play—this one even more ambitious. Francesca da Rimini was inspired by the famous episode from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno. Francesca, the daughter of the lord of Ravenna, has been forced for political reasons to marry the crippled Gianciotto Malatesta. But Francesca is secretly in love with her husband’s handsome brother, Paolo. When Malatesta discovers the affair, he kills them both.

  The narrative was well known in Italy, having already inspired fourteen operas, numerous paintings, a symphonic work by Tchaikovsky, and an iconic sculpture by Rodin. (The Kiss was originally entitled Francesca da Rimini.)

  While the plot was fairly straightforward, d’Annunzio’s vision for his fifth theatrical endeavor was grandiose. Influenced by Wagner, who had mined Germany’s medieval past, d’Annunzio dreamed up a historical pageant requiring twenty-six actors and an original musical score. He set his love triangle against the backdrop of a war between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, a schism of rival political factions that had consumed parts of Italy for centuries. Though it had little to do with the central love triangle, the conflict allowed d’Annunzio to feature all manner of weaponry on the stage, including mortars, catapults, and heavy crossbows that actually fired. D’Annunzio’s script called for molten lead to pour down from the battlements, along with “Greek Fire,” an early form of napalm.

  He had written the magnum opus while standing at a lectern, sometimes for fourteen hours at a stretch, interrupted only by the occasional horseback ride, which he often enjoyed naked. He had once singed the mane of his horse with a match to fill his nostrils with the pungent odor of burned hair in an effort to conjure the feeling of the battle scene he was writing.

  D’Annunzio insisted on being involved in every detail of the production, from props to hairstyles. It was not uncommon for an author, particularly a celebrated one, to be part of a theatrical production of his work—but d’Annunzio began codirecting the actors with Eleonora, which led to rifts and confusion within the cast. Still, the company appreciated d’Annunzio’s tireless commitment; he was present at every rehearsal, whether giving fencing lessons, finding props, or even performing menial chores.

  After two months of rehearsals—standard for Duse, but twice as long as Bernhardt would have taken for a new play, even one this elaborate—Francesca da Rimini opened in December 1901 at the Teatro Costanzi, Rome’s newest and largest opera house, where Puccini’s Tosca had recently premiered. It was the event of the season.

  “All of Italy talked of nothing else,” reported the Giornale d’Italia. Attendees included the great actress Adelaide Ristori, now eighty-five, along with gifted young playwright Luigi Pirandello, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize.

  The first act went well enough. As was common practice, the audience summoned the writer to the stage for recognition. D’Annunzio received three curtain calls, and there was another one for the company. But what followed in act two, as recounted by d’Annunzio’s secretary, Tom Antongini, was “unique in the annals of the theater.”

  During a siege, “a thick, acrid smoke, scientifically obtained by the chemist Helbig, blinded and left breathless some hapless spectators, who abandoned the theater, howling and booing.” Worse was still to come, when “a big stone hurled by a mangonel [catapult] knocked down a wall of the stage.”

  As the extravaganza hobbled along, the audience became exhausted and confused. Though there were smatterings of applause, whistles and boos dominated, followed by cries of “Basta!” (Enough!). D’Annunzio hastily marked up his manuscript during intermission to cut portions of act five.

  In the end, Luigi Pirandello wrote: “I believe I have never suffered so much in the theater.” He was especially indignant about what d’Annunzio’s text had done to Duse: “The art of the great actress seemed paralyzed, indeed downright shattered by the character the poet drew with heavy strokes. . . . For me, and I believe for many others, the impression then provoked a deep and sad nostalgia for the Marguerite Gautier [Camille] that Duse had brought back to life.” Adelaide Ristori
was likewise disappointed.

  But d’Annunzio, as always, had his supporters. Future Nobel Prize recipient Romain Rolland called Francesca “the greatest Italian work since the Renaissance.” Duse, undoubtedly relieved, went on to support the play vigorously in an interview:

  In the theater one has been content with bad translations or mediocre provincial dramas written in barbarous jargon. Now, on the old boards, between potboilers, one hails the unexpected reappearance of poetry. . . . As an artist and as an Italian, I consider it a great honor to be able to lend my name and my firm determination to this effort of renewal. . . . I am doing my duty, placing myself at the service of a beautiful and fertile idea.

  Duse, ever the idealist, took d’Annunzio’s leviathan production on a tour of Italian cities, and while it was by no means a hit, the public came, if only out of curiosity for the sheer spectacle. In a time of growing patriotism, there was a certain admiration for d’Annunzio’s ambition to resurrect Italy to its former glory, both artistically and militarily. The ancient Romans, after all, had invented the ballista, the mangonel, and the other martial technology on Francesca’s stage. The theme likewise played well in the Germanic countries; when Duse took the play to Vienna and then Berlin, it was hailed as the theatrical event of the season. In a blizzard of flowers, Eleonora was summoned to the German stage over thirty times. They were hailing her, at last, along with the glorious play.

  • • •

  All of Italy was talking about it: d’Annunzio’s new novel, The Flame, was on every bookshelf from Pisa to Palermo. Despite its fictionalized pseudonyms—Stelio (for d’Annunzio) and La Foscarina (for La Duse)—the protagonists’ identities were clear. They were among the most celebrated couples in Europe: the poet and his world-renowned muse.

  The Flame revealed some of their deepest secrets; d’Annunzio had been working on it clandestinely for years. He included detailed descriptions of their most intimate moments—in the bedroom, certainly, but also stories she had whispered to him after lovemaking, like her first encounter with The Grace at age fourteen. This was a deeply private matter for Eleonora. The Grace could be fragile, even fickle at times. She didn’t want her spirituality to be the subject of gossip. But there it was on d’Annunzio’s pages for everyone to read. Nothing was off limits for d’Annunzio. Duse, for her part, remained torn.

  Writers, she believed, were entitled to draw upon details from their lives, particularly when the themes were worthy. And what could be more worthy than a narrative exploring the creative process, the source of inspiration, and the human struggle between flesh and spirit? Eleonora had read portions of early drafts, so she was aware of d’Annunzio’s intentions.

  “I know the book, and have authorized its publication,” she wrote to her manager, José Schürmann, who had heard rumors about the novel and was rightly concerned. Like the heroine of La Gioconda, Eleonora appeared willing to sacrifice herself in the name of Art. “My suffering, whatever it may be, does not count,” she told Schürmann, “when it is a question of giving another masterpiece to Italian literature.” Instead of feeling betrayed, she appeared to be flattered.

  In The Flame, writer Stelio has found a partner in his quest for “Art.” And she, a celebrated actress like Duse, is no single archetype as a muse. La Foscarina is a shape-shifter who can channel the qualities of several mythic figures of antiquity: “the heroic fidelity of Antigone, the fury of Cassandra . . . the sacrifice of Iphigenia.” In certain passages of the novel, these attributes seem to surge forth and overwhelm La Foscarina, who momentarily “becomes” one of those Greek heroines, and so fodder for her lover’s plays; the two artists, thus, are almost cocreators of the works.

  Eleonora was passionate about words and wrote copiously; her letters to d’Annunzio alone amount to 1,400 pages. But she didn’t think of herself as a writer, so it was a distinct honor to feel she was actually contributing to a work of literature. That’s why, at least initially, the publication of The Flame did not offend Duse as it did those around her. She felt the book was a shared offspring, a symbiosis of their energies, which had comingled in art, love, and life.

  But the public read the novel like a tabloid. The Flame trumpeted d’Annunzio’s serial infidelities, and, even worse, his disgust of Duse. Eleonora was only five years older than d’Annunzio, but he chose to exaggerate that age difference, making La Foscarina appear decrepit:

  . . . troubled by cruel dismay, and the impossibility of closing her weary eyelids again, for fear that he might observe her sleep, and see in her face the marks of the years, and be repelled by them, and yearn for a fresh, unaware youthfulness.

  D’Annunzio knew these words would hurt Duse. He admitted to Hérelle, his French translator, that the book “would cause great sorrow.” And many of Eleonora’s friends and supporters were outraged by his humiliating portrayal of an aging actress struggling to hold on to her youthful lover. One critic referred to The Flame as “the most swinish novel ever written.” As Adelaide Ristori, the Grande Dame of Italian theater, remarked: “Nobody would be surprised if it ended with a revolver.”

  Over time, the dismay and disgust of friends began to get to Eleonora. In rereading the novel, Eleonora came to see another meaning in the text: she began to see how La Foscarina was expendable in d’Annunzio’s mind. She could easily be replaced.

  D’Annunzio had inserted yet another eternal triangle into the novel’s plot, introducing the virginal character of Donatella Arvale, a striking beauty and singer of considerable talent, modeled after Giulietta Gordigiani, Duse’s traveling companion whom d’Annunzio had tried to seduce. Donatella immediately captivates Stelio’s attention; and it is not simply a matter of lust—Stelio sees in Donatella the potential for a new muse.

  Duse hadn’t connected it to her own life initially. In the whirlwind surrounding The Flame’s release, Duse had shut down emotionally. Now in rereading her lover’s words, she felt heartsick. In one passage, Donatella begins to haunt the protagonist’s dreams:

  Suddenly . . . the Song-maiden reappeared on a background of shadow, such as he had first seen her in the crimson and gold of the Great Hall holding the fruit of the flame in an attitude of dominion. . . . Her power over his dream seemed to return with her absence. Infinite music welled up from the silence that filled her empty place in the supper-room. Her Hermes-like face seemed to withhold an inviolable secret.

  How easily she could become obsolete! Rather than become angry, however, Duse was deeply saddened by the whole affair. “I thought [the novel] was true art; I tried to defend it,” she blurted finally to an acquaintance: “It’s terrible, terrible.”

  Later authors have been more forgiving of the book than most of its readers at the time. Along with the scandal came plenty of praise. The couple’s Settignano neighbor, art historian Bernard Berenson, was forced to admit “there are exquisite and sublime pages in this filthy book.” James Joyce believed d’Annunzio had surpassed Flaubert as a novelist and took inspiration from his lyrical prose. Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, and Ernest Hemingway were also admirers. They found in d’Annunzio a writer who sanitized nothing. Intoxicated with the flesh, he was also disgusted by it and wrote about his revulsion with an unflinching and graphic candor that most writers avoided.

  Twenty years later, Thomas Mann’s masterpiece Death in Venice would bear striking similarities to d’Annunzio’s novel. Venice is where the hero of both texts—a writer in crisis—encounters a beguiling object of desire that becomes his creative muse. For Stelio, it is La Foscarina; for Gustav von Aschenbach, a young boy in a sailor suit. But the plots diverge when—in the battle between erotic and artistic urges—Mann’s writer succumbs to his obsession and therefore to death, while d’Annunzio’s protagonist succeeds in sublimating Eros to Art.

  It was this very ideal—the power of true Art to be transcendent—which Eleonora revered, just as she clung to the stubborn hope that d’Annunzio would meet her there and fulfill his promise.

  • �
� •

  And so the love affair dragged on. Duse wrote d’Annunzio in anguish from London on May 21, 1900; she wrote him three letters on Savoy letterhead that day, in fact, two months after publication of The Flame. The first was fatalistic:

  If you loved, then, the beautiful creature—I don’t fault you—it was your right. I, first of all, (—and perhaps only I) understood. If you sang her praises in your book, you did well—this, too, was your right.

  More than anything, Duse wanted to give d’Annunzio complete artistic freedom—the same emancipation she had worked so hard to earn. But this noble desire couldn’t stop her from spending days in her hotel room, shedding tears. “If you are making Art, why should we cry?” she wrote d’Annunzio.

  In spite of trying to justify her lover’s many betrayals, she couldn’t bear the thought that d’Annunzio could be seeking a spiritual connection with another. Her second letter became despairing, the third cut to the core of the betrayal:

  The only great, deep sorrow . . . was just one: here it is:

  —THE SECRET—given so freely, to the mob.

  —Everyone talked about it, and knew about it.

  You’ll say, but no!—

  —THE SECRET was OURS.

  Now—it’s done.

  The Secret was sacred. It’s what happened when two souls beheld each other with open hearts, made a pact, and Art flowed down from heaven. Duse realized suddenly that d’Annunzio wanted to find that Secret with someone else.

  On the matter of The Flame, even Bernhardt closed ranks with her rival. When d’Annunzio sent Sarah a signed copy of his novel she pointedly returned it—apparently unread.

  • • •

  Drop d’Annunzio or I’ll drop you, was the message from impresario José Schürmann as he and Eleonora discussed the potential for another tour of the United States. It had been six years since her last visit, and Americans were ravenous for their “Doozy.” But d’Annunzio’s scandalous novel had tarnished his reputation, and Schürmann did not want that to interfere with his client’s tour. Duse had no intention of touring America without d’Annunzio, however. The last time she had done that, in 1896, he had snuck off to Paris to meet with Sarah Bernhardt. She wanted him at her side this time. Schürmann’s ultimatum offended Eleonora, and the two parted ways.