by James Salter
Laudi (Praises). The four books which contain the best of D’Annunzio’s poetry. They were part of a projected series of seven, each to bear the name of one of the Pleiades. The full title is In Praise of Sky, Sea, Earth, and Heroes. Of the four, Alcyone, published in 1904, is generally conceded to be the finest. It describes the sensations of a Tuscan summer, the sounds, smells, glare, the burning noons. Many of the poems are of astonishing beauty, and when asked in old age which of his works he would like to see preserved, he said, “Alcyone.”
Leone, Elvira. The dark-haired woman he had seen in front of a bookstore, she was the first important mistress. He saw her a second time at a concert. It was the spring of 1887, she was just recovering from a long illness. Within a week he had possessed her and renamed her Barbara. They had seven days of love in a small hotel in Albano. Their desire was, in his words, irreparable and unhealable. She was separated from her husband and lived with her parents. She would come to D’Annunzio in the room where he worked and give herself to him. He made detailed notes of her body which she found and read. These, as well as her letters, he used in a novel, Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death), in which she is the heroine. “There is but one intoxication on earth,” the hero says, “the certainty, the absolute unshakable certainty of possessing another human being.”
Libyan War. In 1911, stimulated by the conquests of her powerful neighbors, Italy entered the final phase of the colonial era like the last stock buyer before the crash. Italian regiments sailed for North Africa to fight for the desert, and D’Annunzio’s poems in praise of the adventure, written from exile and published prominently in the pages of the Corriere della Sera, made him a national poet at last.
Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien (The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian). A zeppelin of the theater, written in French, in five “mansions,” as the acts were called, with music by Debussy and a cast of two hundred. It was created for the dancer Ida Rubinstein. The costumes and decor were by Bakst. A glittering audience attended the premiere on May 22, 1911, and it was three in the morning when the last curtain fell. Proust found it boring despite the climax when the dancer was bound half naked to a tree and, avid for martyrdom, died beneath a rain of arrows. There were only ten performances although it reappeared after the war in Milan and more recently in Paris.
Mistresses. A hysterical Sicilian princess with whom D’Annunzio had two children followed Barbara Leone. Her name was Maria Gravina. She had run away from her husband and it was he who had them tried for adultery; they were convicted but never went to prison. She was moody, suicidal, and jealous to the point of madness, she used to wait for D’Annunzio with a loaded revolver in her hand. After six years he finally parted from her by packing a small suitcase and saying he was going to Rome for twenty-four hours. He never returned. Next came Duse and after her, the tall, blonde Alessandra di Rudini who came to the Capponcina on a path the servants had strewn with rose petals, D’Annunzio at her side in a suit of white silk. She was a widow at twenty-six and a noted horseman. Nike, he called her. It was she who introduced D’Annunzio to the Lake Garda region where she had a house.
Nathalie de Goloubeff was Russian, a singer, she had been sculpted by Rodin. She had two children and a rich husband; D’Annunzio always preferred other men’s wives, proven women, as it were. She dreamed of performing in his Phaedra. She began learning the part, had costumes made, took singing lessons. Telegrams with secret words flew between them. Mixed with fervent expression were powerful erotic acts. “A great naked bee with beautiful tresses,” he called her. When, after several years, he became indifferent, she retired to a farm outside Paris where she cared for his greyhounds and pitied her lost life. He sometimes visited her there. Until 1932 she held on to the farm though the dogs were gone and she had lost everything in the Russian revolution.
He would weep if he saw her again, she wrote. She sold his letters, stipulating that they not be published during his lifetime. She died a beggar in a small hotel in Meudon in 1941. Among her few possessions was a handsome dog collar with the name of their great greyhound, Agitator, that had won at St. Cloud.
Montesquiou, Robert de. The tall, arrogant, homosexual poet who was the model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus. He introduced D’Annunzio to the society of Paris in 1910 and was his greatest champion. It was Montesquiou who took him to the dressing room of Ida Rubinstein after a performance of the ballet Cleopatra. D’Annunzio fell to his knees and, looking up at the boyish body, the long legs, the narrow head, whispered, “Saint Sebastien.”
Mussolini. Their paths crossed after the war when Mussolini was editor of Popolo d’Italia and still a Socialist. He supported D’Annunzio’s march into Fiume and even encouraged him to go further, to overthrow the government in Rome. Dear Comrade, it was, and My Dear Friend. D’Annunzio did not have the talent or instinct for such a coup, however. Mussolini later cooperated with the government to bring the Fiume occupation to an end. From this time on he was central to D’Annunzio’s life, paying him, flattering him, and in a sense confining him. He made a number of visits to the Vittoriale, the last in March 1938 when he walked behind the coffin.
Ortona. D’Annunzio’s mother’s birthplace near Pescara and the seat of his candidacy for parliament in 1899. He ran successfully as a conservative. He was not and never had intended to be only a poet; the world had to understand that he was capable of everything. His political career consisted of two speeches, a duel, and a dramatic change of party when he walked across the Chamber of Deputies from the right to the left, from death to life, he said. In the following election he ran from a district of Florence and was soundly defeated.
Vienna. It was described as one of the greatest exploits of the war. The mission had been cancelled several times. At last the weather was right. On August 12, 1918, the planes took off at dawn, one by one, and reached the Austrian capital by midmorning. “Over Vienna a pale mist lay,” D’Annunzio reported. “Our manifestos drifted down like leaves falling in autumn.”
People of Vienna. We are flying over Vienna and could drop tons of bombs, on the contrary, we leave a salutation and a flag with its colors of liberty . . .
There was scrambling in the streets for the leaflets. Seven hundred miles, the newspapers hailed, with two crossings of the Alps and the stormy Adriatic. D’Annunzio delivered a speech: “We passed in our flight . . . the Isonzo, like a ribbon fallen from heaven, and forgotten Sabotino . . . Caporetto, like the Despair, which climbed up to tear our wings, all our slaughterhouses, our cemeteries, our Calvaries, our holy places. No, comrades, don’t weep . . . Remember, remember, remember . . .” Elated by his success he planned a series of flights over all the capitals of Europe, flying directly over Mont Blanc, the highest point on the continent, as a symbol, but the war ended.
World War I. He saw action on land, with the 77th Regiment. He led a raid by torpedo boats against the harbor of Buccari. He commanded a flying squadron, made speeches to troops, won medals, fell to his knees to kiss the earth of battlefields. In Venice, while convalescing and half-blind, he wrote on slips of paper handed to him by his daughter the book that is regarded as his finest prose, Notturno (Nocturne). The war exhilarated him. At the head of his bed was a banner, on the dressing table, talismans and perfume. He flew in patent-leather boots with high heels and sometimes held the bombs between his knees. In the air over Italy he was battered by his age, the passions of his heroines crashing back to him, the memories, the trampled lives. He had no fear, he said, because he expected every mission to be his last and he could desire no greater glory than to die for Italy with “her beautiful limbs, from which harvests, artists and heroes were born.” Death, he described as the male genius to whom youth was consecrated. Blood, wounds, and sacrifice, they were woven into themes to create an invincible nation, a great Italy rejoicing in just battle. “You with us,” the blue and white banner of his squadron said, “We with you.”
He had seduced a nation. He had
as much as anyone brought his country into war. And afterwards the seizure of Fiume. He had spent himself. He had always considered himself a god and behaved as one, but physically and psychologically he was exhausted. The cloak of heroism which he had fashioned for himself had become heavy. With such a cloak, how much further could he march?
He went as far as Lake Garda. His uniforms are there, his letters from Rostand and Anatole France, his signed copies of Wagner’s librettos. His death mask is there, as well, the nose larger, the eyes closed and at peace or at least in repose like a performer resting, like a gambler who need no longer play.
The Paris Review
Fall/Winter 1978
Cool Heads
As a pilot I came close to being killed twice, once in a spectacular training crash and the second time in combat, in Korea, though oddly enough not by the enemy. It was the airplane itself that almost killed me. This was an F86, a Sabre, the first swept-wing fighter and at the time the best we had.
I was coming back from a mission and turning steep onto final at about five hundred feet. The landing gear and flaps had just come down when suddenly, without warning, the controls froze. The stick would not budge; it felt as if it was set in concrete. I was headed straight for the ground. There was no time to call or say anything. I might have ejected with a chance my chute would open in time, but I was afraid I was too low. In those last seconds I shoved the throttle forward and trimmed back on the stick, the only possible chance, however slight, of moving the horizontal stabilizer and getting the nose up enough to clear the ground. At the same time I pulled up the gear. This last, almost insignificant detail saved me. Something had gone haywire in the hydraulic system and extending the landing gear somehow froze the stick.
I climbed shakily and at a safe altitude tested it. There was the identical result.
“K14 Tower, I’m having some control problems. I’m declaring an emergency and would like permission to make a straight-in.”
I don’t know what my voice sounded like. In my memory, which is the only record, it was as calm as one could hope for. Why this, instead of, “Oh, my God! You know what happened? I nearly killed myself out here!” For one thing, other planes were trying to land; no one was interested in my emotional state. I was an element leader. This was a veteran wing.
You were trained to be cool. It was a mark, in fact a requirement. Frightened, inaccurate transmissions could clutter the air, spread confusion. Extreme coolness was greatly admired. It showed nerve, ability, control. After the event, sometimes hours after, the fear that had been subdued might make its appearance. A pilot I knew bailed out once at three hundred feet with his plane literally tumbling end over end. His chute barely blossomed before he hit. To his leader who’d circled back and was passing over he held out an upraised thumb—I’m OK. It was not until he was in the club that evening that his knees began to shake uncontrollably.
I made a straight-in approach to K14 that day, rounded out a little above the runway, and at the last moment extended the gear. The stick froze and the plane settled in to a smooth landing.
My knees didn’t shake afterwards. It had all been too quick for that. Fear is more likely, more distinct when you see the enemy turning towards you from far off, many of them. They see you and are coming to kill you. Anyone can feel fear. There were jolts of it when the MIGs were firing and getting in behind you, and sometimes between missions, I felt a simmering fear for no apparent reason, but it would soon give way to normal concerns. The point is to go on. We had pilots—a few—who were unable to do that, but I never asked them why. They were, in a way, outcasts. They lived with their own nightmares, sleeplessness, concealed shame.
Afterwards, back in the states, I carried a feeling of superiority. I’d been a flight leader in combat, I had a victory, I’d been in the thick of it. Slowly all that faded. In the years of ordinary life that followed I worried, felt anxiety, sometimes lost heart, but the facing of fear in the raw sense never came up. The lessons I had learned didn’t translate. I was living in a different hierarchy with different values. Deep inside however there still exists that ethic, long drummed in and well-remembered: don’t lose your nerve and, more important, don’t appear to be losing it. As the beach boys in Hawaii used to say, “Cool head main ting.”
Joe
1999
An Army Mule Named Sid Berry Takes Command at the Point
Douglas MacArthur sat in this room. Through the windows, the Hudson is visible, the great gray river that American revolutionary forces at West Point once guarded. It is a large room, somber, paneled in oak. At one end a fireplace, in pale, gothic stone. On all four walls, high up, a solid band of portraits, each exactly the same size, of the men who have been superintendents of West Point.
This is the heart room a cadet never sees. The only way to see it, they say, is if you’re the first captain or getting kicked out of school. There’s one other way: you become Supe.
The new Supe is Sidney Berry, who at age forty-eight is one of the youngest major generals in the army. Behind him lies a brilliant record as a field commander. His hair is gray, going to white and cut exceedingly short. His face radiates intelligence, a cold face, proud, unyielding. On his finger is a heavy gold wedding band; on his wrist a chronometer that gleams like a surgical instrument. His arms are revealed by short khaki sleeves. They are sinewy. The word “Ranger” is on the point of one shoulder. Maxwell Taylor was forty-four when he became superintendent—four years younger than Berry. Robert E. Lee was forty-five; Westmoreland, forty-six. Douglas MacArthur was thirty-nine.
Numbers do not prove everything, but this year over 11,000 young men applied for admission to West Point—a record. Something like 6,100 were nominated by their congressmen, and 1,435 were finally admitted, one of the largest classes ever.
“The country, the army, and West Point have emerged from Vietnam,” Berry says. “We are looking ahead.” But since he recently took over as superintendent, Berry must look as much to the present as to the future. He is, in a sense, still in training—just like the new cadets in their first summer, whose faint sounds can be heard from the far-off parade grounds. These roaring hot days of July and August have long been known as Beast Barracks, “beast” being cadet slang for an incoming fourth classman. They are the crucible months. The ancient tradition was for them to be filled with unending humiliation and debasement, as if a man had to be reduced to nothing before he could be recreated. Over the years this has gradually changed. The hazing, like many things from a time now past, was once far more fierce.
And it was impractical. The task here is to produce the best possible soldier leader. It is approached somewhat like breeding cattle. The good points are preserved, the bad are gotten rid of. The day of highhanded authority is over. The emphasis now will be on building upon the natural dignity of the young men. There is no longer a place at West Point for learning what cannot be of later use in the army. This does not mean things academic, for the curriculum has been broadened and enriched considerably and a cadet has more freedom to choose among courses than ever before. It is the technique and attitudes of leadership, things that have always been the academy’s special interest, that now demand fresh definition and attention.
They call West Point “The Factory,” both in admiration and scorn; it is dedicating itself to making certain that everything learned there is transferable to the career which follows. “Career” is a word Berry hates. He is a man of ideals. His conscience is written all over him, like that of a fine Southern lawyer. “‘Service’ is the key word,” he says quietly, “something other than personal gain.” But Berry, as he well knows, must address himself to a new army that has emerged from Vietnam. A chastened army. A volunteer army. An army with a radically new racial composition, nearly 20 percent black.
When Berry was a first classman in 1948, there was hardly a black face in the Corps. Between 1900 and 1969, only seventy black
men graduated. Today 268 out of some 4,300 cadets, about 6 percent, are black—including 82 in the incoming class. Berry would like to see the proportion of blacks and other minority groups become at least as great as in the population at large. “We are encouraging all minority groups in every way to enter.”
Berry was not an outstanding athlete. Academically he was in the middle of the crowd. But he was well liked and popular. “Setting his standards by his father and Wendell Willkie . . .” the yearbook reads. He rose to be a cadet captain.
He was sent to the occupation forces in Japan. It seemed a kind of exile. Everyone was requesting duty in Germany. Nobody had foreseen the Korean War. For Berry it was a great piece of fortune, the first of many. One needs luck to go with ability. Luck may even be part of ability, in fact. When in the later days Napoleon no longer knew all the officers in his army who were being promoted to general, he would put a mark by names he did not recognize and ask in the margin, “Is he lucky?” Berry was wounded in Korea and twice promoted on the battlefield, from first lieutenant to major. Fifteen years later he was wounded again in Vietnam—shrapnel, sixteen holes. The man next to him was killed. He has won a Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star—four times—and the Air Medal an improbable forty-two times. The days are gone when a single bit of ribbon on a man’s chest was a sign of heroic achievement. But wounds are still not cheap. And perhaps, God willing, he is lucky.
The superintendency has often served as a stepping-stone to the very top. Berry has all the credentials. He was military assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the Pentagon. He earned a master’s degree at Columbia. He taught history. The proper mixture of education, exposure at high levels, the sound of guns. Like a racehorse making its move, he began to come to the front. He was the first in his class at the academy to earn a general’s star.
