by James Salter
“Don’t you see, if we let you do it then all the writers will want to come and do it,” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “How obvious.”
No one wrote like D’Annunzio; no one, not even Byron, led so scandalous and unforgivable a life, and no one has seen his legend vanish more quickly. He was not just the national poet of Italy, he was a Great Poet, that phenomenon which appears only once in a century like a comet, and he saw himself rise and rise further still until he seemed to be as bright as anything in the heavens. At the time of his fame, in the period just before and after the First World War, he was the most romantic and perhaps the greatest figure of the century. But the verdict seems to have come in early. He will not stand with Dante. He will not stand with Wagner. He will not stand with Napoleon.
Gabriele D’Annunzio was born in Pescara, a town in the Abruzzi, in 1863. It was the same year in which Cavafy was born, Chekhov was three. Joseph Conrad six, and Tolstoy was thirty-four. He was the youngest child and a superior student. In those days education was classical. He read Latin and Greek, he knew French perfectly and some English. He had, from the first, an extraordinary ear, an eye that was smitten by beauty, and a desire that was to earn him a place in literature. His first book of poetry was published while he was still in school. It was youthful, passionate, and well-written. He sent a copy with a flattering inscription to the reigning poet of the time, Carducci, and was noticed by the critics. One called him an extraordinary talent. Another, in a phrase that could be applied to him throughout his life, said he deserved a medal and a sound thrashing. With a taste for the extravagant which was to be both his strength and weakness, he sent a false report of his death to a newspaper. Obituaries appeared throughout the country. He was launched.
In Rome he was the very picture of a young poet, romantic and unspoiled, but within a few years the skimpy black suit had vanished and he was summoning waiters in cafés with imperious raps of the cane and borrowing money from them as well. He met the great Carducci who had been his model. He married, in a great scandal and over the fierce objections of her family, the very eligible daughter of the Duke of Gallese. He had no money and expensive tastes. Soon after his marriage he began the series of love affairs that were to continue uninterrupted for more than thirty years and were to include some of the most highly placed women of his time. Meanwhile, he was writing, volume after volume of poetry, journalism, and in 1888 the first novel, Il Piacere (The Child of Pleasure).
His writing was opulent, dazzling, sensuous. He made no distinction, he used to say, between the soul and the flesh. It was a fatal lack. He had abandoned his wife and three children. His mistresses, the important ones, began with a beautiful, middle-class Roman he had first caught sight of standing outside a bookstore. There followed a Sicilian princess, then Eleonora Duse and a marchesa whose father was nothing less than prime minister. All of these and the ones after were infamous. He stood trial for adultery. He fought duels. He was detested by fellow writers, by decent people, the church, many critics, and not a few husbands. He was amoral, grasping, shrewd, and the greatest writer in Italy.
As is the case with all Don Juans, his power came from within. He was anything but handsome. He was short, baldheaded, with bulging eyes and a prominent nose. His hips were broader than his shoulders. His teeth were described as yellow, white, and black. There was something faintly vulgar about him, something ordinary. And yet, women wrecked their lives for him and, abandoned, remembered him forever. It was quite simple: he was a god, and they believed he was. Their letters, their vows, their acts of self-immolation are all the same. The intoxicant he used was his fame.
By 1898 he had settled in a villa outside of Florence where he was to remain for twelve years, the most productive of his life. It was the periodo solare, his years of the sun. Duse had a house close by and their collaboration was one of both spirit and flesh. She was, next to Sarah Bernhardt, the most celebrated actress in the world. “A noble creature, chosen by me, who ruined herself for me,” he later wrote. It was D’Annunzio’s practice to take his novels directly from his personal life. Like George Sand, he wrote his notes almost literally on the body of his partner. In the case of Duse, he did not even wait until they had separated, but in 1900 published Il Fuoco (The Fire), which revealed brutally frank details of their relationship. “I love you but I shall make use of you,” the hero says. It was a huge success and immediately translated into six languages.
During the same period, however, he wrote plays for her, almost one a year, and the poetry which is considered to be his imperishable achievement. When in 1910, hopelessly in debt from years of lavish spending, he went to France, he took with him a world reputation. He spent five years of self-imposed exile there. They were years of excess, even for a man who was used to everything. Then in 1914 the war broke upon France like a thunderstorm.
Now began one of the most exalted phases of his life. Though he was a voluptuary, there was another side to D’Annunzio. He came, it must be remembered, from a region that was both primitive and violent. Virility was his creed. He believed Italy was a great nation, that it had been and was to be again. For a young nation the path to greatness was war. Though the horrors of the conflict were already apparent, D’Annunzio did all he could to bring Italy into it. His fiery speeches in Genoa and Rome were a major factor. On May 23, 1915, Italy joined the Allies.
In anguish at the bitterness of no longer being young and exhausted by years of pleasure, he nevertheless succeeded in joining the army. He was fifty-three. The military authorities recognized he would be of greater value if allowed to fill an unconventional role, and as a result he saw action on land, at sea, and in the air. Although he was in a privileged position, there is no question of his valor. He won the highest decorations. He lost an eye in an aircraft accident. The apogee of his military career was a spectacular raid over Vienna in which he led his squadron and dropped leaflets instead of bombs.
In the end he was disappointed. The fever of the war was over. Like many other men he found it difficult to face peace. Italy had spent too much, there was little to show for it. A year after the war he had one final adventure, he led a force of volunteers, the arditi, into Fiume, a seaport east of Trieste, to seize it for Italy. For over a year he remained there, making speeches from a balcony and refusing to be dislodged. The government finally took courage and moved against him. He capitulated. He was not punished.
When Mussolini, with whom he had been on intimate terms, seized power in 1922, D’Annunzio had already withdrawn to the villa where he remained for the rest of his life. Although he may have had a certain contempt for the Fascists, he had inspired them, helped prepare the ground for them, and was sympathetic with their aims. He continued to write; a national edition of his works comprised some forty-nine volumes.
He was still the greatest of heroes to two generations of Italians. In 1924 he was made a prince, a hereditary title, the Prince of Montenevoso. He fervently supported the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. His teeth were gone, he was a trembling old man, addicted to cocaine. The last photographs show someone looking close to ninety, the nose swollen in a collapsed face, the chin that of a tortoise. The Vittoriale, he had enlarged with state funds into a museum and monument. It was, as well, a mausoleum, a shrine, a tomb like that of the kings. He died suddenly on March 1, 1938, and lay in state in the uniform of a general of the air force. On his finger was his mother’s gold ring. On the photograph of her kept near his bed was written, non pianger piu . . . from a line of Dante’s, “Weep no more, your beloved son is coming home.”
Ariel. A name he called himself and often signed, sometimes as Gabriel Ariel. In every poet, to some degree, there is this lyric angel and the sheer beauty of language is his domain.
Bacca a Luisa. The last of the women. She was a young pianist that he met in Venice during the war and who was with him thereafter. D’Annunzio was passionately devoted to music. He believed the Italian langua
ge possessed musical elements that were Wagnerian in their power. He felt himself, in fact, to be the heir to Wagner whose death in Venice with the hero carrying the coffin is the closing scene of one of the novels.
Canto Novo (New Song). The second book of poems, published when he was nineteen. In it was exuberance, sensuality, and an assured voice which cried, “. . . Sing of the immense joy of living, of being strong, of being young, of biting the fruits of the earth, with strong, white, ravenous teeth . . .” Suddenly he was famous.
Capponcina. The villa on a hillside at Settignano, overlooking Florence. The city at that time had great cultural prestige. He remodeled the villa, which was rented, to conform to his taste. The rooms were various shades of gold, there was heavy furniture, statuary, pillows, brocade, and bric-a-brac of every description. He had horses, servants, dogs, and two apartments in town. He lived the life of a gran signore, traveling frequently, often with Duse, and writing prodigiously, plays, novels, his greatest poems. From the furnace of his mind, as he said. Towards the end, when Duse had been replaced, the scale of living went from extravagant to ruinous and favorite horses were sleeping on Persian rugs. In 1911, when he had gone to France, the contents of the villa were put up at auction to satisfy the creditors. Everything was sold, furnishings, horses, pictures, even the dogs.
Duse, Eleonora. She was born in a hotel and died in one. The child of traveling players, her name was on posters when she was six. At sixteen she played Juliet in Verona and scattered roses on the body of Romeo; her ascension had begun. She was plain, with a high forehead, faded-looking, austere. She used no makeup. She made herself up morally, she used to say. She was Bernhardt’s great rival, playing in competition in the same city on many occasions and once in the same theater. They died within a year of each other, Bernhardt in 1923, Duse in 1924.
When she was twenty she was seduced by a newspaper publisher and had a child, who died. She carried the coffin to the cemetery herself, it was in Marina di Pisa, a small seaside town where she would later go with D’Annunzio. When she was twenty-three she married a minor actor. They had a daughter. The husband, she ultimately left in Buenos Aires. She formed her own company and became the mistress of the poet Arrigo Boito. Divorce was nonexistent in Italy then, they could not marry. She was playing Ibsen, Shakespeare, Sardou and Dumas and reading the morning papers in an old shawl and tortoise-shell glasses. There were tours to England, America, all of Europe.
She had been urged to read D’Annunzio by a friend and found herself both attracted and repelled. Boito was eighteen years her senior, wise, idealistic, paternal. Now came the incandescent young poet trailing scandalous relationships and an immense reputation. Amori et dolori sacra—26 Settembre 1895—Hotel Royal Danieli—Venezia is written in his notebooks with an asterisk. Sacred love and pain. It was the night they became lovers. Even before this she had recognized in him the inspired poet the theater had been waiting for and he at last had found his heroine.
In the nine years that they were together, he wrote many plays for her and she determinedly kept them in her repertoire even though they were unsuccessful, even sending him money and false reports from half-empty houses in America. His best play, La Figlia di Iorio, he gave to another actress, just as he had given an earlier one to Bernhardt. Still they traveled and went on tour. They planned a national theater they would have at Albano, immortal plays beneath the stars. Meanwhile, beneath her nose he was writing the novel that exposed her before the world. She could have stopped its publication but chose not to. What was her suffering, she said, compared to the question of giving Italian literature another masterpiece? At the same time she felt soiled and ashamed. The character in the novel, who was called Foscarina, had invaded her life.
The following year she put out 400,000 lire, then an enormous sum, to open his newest play. “To the divine Eleonora Duse,” it was dedicated. By 1903 his unfaithfulness was flagrant. It was the end. In desperation she wrote to her successor begging for a share of D’Annunzio’s life. She then disappeared, in a sense, into tours and distant cities. After several years she retired and bought a small house in the country. Rilke tried to raise money for a theater for her but was unsuccessful. She had a slight limp. During the war she acted a little and worked in hospitals. Her path crossed D’Annunzio’s once, in Udine; he passed in a cheering crowd. Their last meeting was in Milan. She was in her sixties and wanted to produce one of his plays. As he left her he is reported to have said, “How you have loved me!”
She was on tour in America when she died, in Pittsburgh, on April 21, 1924. Her body was returned to Italy and is buried in the cemetery of Asolo, in the theater where we will all act someday, as she liked to say. All of D’Annunzio’s letters to her were burned. To the end, though, she still blessed him, the great giver of life who had made her what she was. Before him, she said, she had not existed.
Exile. 1910 to 1915. He went first to Paris where he lived at the Hotel Meurice and quickly met everyone of importance. This was the Paris of Isadora Duncan, Proust, Diaghilev, and Stravinsky. He divided his time between the capital and a small summer resort near Bordeaux and resumed the life he had been living in Italy, mirrors, divans, damasks, women in emeralds and pearls. He seduced and was seduced. He caught syphilis. He raced greyhounds. Also, he triumphed. He was a figure, a cult. Plays poured forth, vast works of pretension and self-indulgence. Among these the grandest was The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.
Fantasia. The yacht on which he went to Greece, with four companions including his French translator, Herelle, in 1895. D’Annunzio spent the days lying naked in the hot sun and having the sailors cool him with buckets of water. The conversation was mostly of cities and women and on a vulgar level. They read little or nothing and asked the guides to take them to brothels. In Athens they visited museums—the treasures of Mycenae had recently been discovered by Schliemann. From this trip and from notebooks that contained laundry lists and women’s addresses came the first book of the Laudi, the series that includes D’Annunzio’s finest work. When he returned with Duse some years later, he gave a speech saying that he owed to Greece the maturity of his mind.
Father. Francesco Paolo D’Annunzio, mayor of Pescara, landowner and bankrupt. He was born Rapagnetta but took the name of an uncle who had adopted him, providing his son with a priceless legacy although Gabriele D’Annunzio was called Rapagnetta by detractors all his life. The father had small eyes, full lips, dyed hair when he was older, and an unquenchable sexual appetite. He arranged to send his son to the finest school, however, and paid for the printing of his first book of poems. He died in 1893. D’Annunzio did not return home in time for the funeral.
Flying. He flew for the first time in 1909 with the American pilot Glenn Curtiss. He experienced rapture, comparable only to the purest sensations of art and love, he said.
Some of his best descriptions are those of pilots who were his comrades and whom he could still recall vividly even when an old man.
Genoa. It was here he came in 1915, returning from exile in France with his eyes blindfolded as he neared the border should the emotion of seeing his homeland again prove too powerful. Here he delivered the first of the orations that helped to bring Italy into the war. Italy had an alliance with the Central Powers but had entered into negotiations with the Allies to see who would offer the most for her participation. It is likely D’Annunzio knew of this; his speech had been submitted for government approval. The occasion was the anniversary of Garibaldi’s sailing fifty years earlier, there were some of his white-bearded veterans in the crowd. D’Annunzio was not just a writer standing up to speak. He had taken curtain calls, delivered eulogies, gone on lecture tours. He was an actor playing the role of his life. The reaction of the crowd was frenzied. He felt the drunkenness that comes from a feverish mob. He went on to Rome where 40,000 people were waiting for him at the station. “No!” he cried in a speech, “We will not be a museum, a hotel, a vacation resort, a horizon
painted Prussian blue where foreigners come for their honeymoons . . .” He was constantly interrupted by applause. His rooms at the hotel were drowned in flowers. He was summoned to meet the king who held out his hand, D’Annunzio said, to the good fighter who expressed the feelings of his people. A few days later Italy was at war.
Hardouin, Maria. Daughter of the Duke of Gallese, she was for fifty-five years the wife of D’Annunzio and his widow for sixteen. As a young girl she was slender, blonde, and unassuming. D’Annunzio had been invited to the family palace by her mother. The daughter was then eighteen with a taste for poetry and art. Soon they were exchanging notes and meeting secretly. They tried to elope but were caught. The affair was made even more infamous by D’Annunzio’s poem, “Sin of May,” that told of a blonde virgin and the gift she gave the poet, not to mention newspaper articles and his many confidences to friends. Three months pregnant and over the fierce objections of her father she was married without dowry in an almost empty church. After the honeymoon they settled for a while in Pescara. There were a few years of happiness, but she had made a terrible mistake, she would have done better to buy his books than to marry him, she later said. She discovered the first infidelities from a letter which fell out of his pocket. She bore him three sons; by the time the last one arrived D’Annunzio merely telegraphed instructions as to its naming.
Il Fuoco (The Fire). The most swinish book ever written, as one critic said. The scene is Venice, an autumnal city where a famous actress past her prime is desperate and wandering. The Hero is tormented by never having possessed her just after one of her triumphs on the stage when she was still hot from the breath of the crowd. Duse was five years older than he, but in the novel D’Annunzio makes it twenty. It was a work of pure invention, he insisted. People did not understand the real essence of the book which was “an act of gratitude.”
La figlia di Iorio (The Daughter of Iorio). His most successful play and the only one which remains popular. He wrote it in thirty-three feverish days at Nettuno in the summer of 1903. The summer was his favorite time for work. He would begin at four in the afternoon, have a light meal at eight, and work until dawn. He preferred to be near the sea.
