Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(16)
Ah. If I had only written for permission, she told me, everything would have been all right. As it was, she was sorry, she could not permit it.
“But what objection,” I said, “can there be to making notes?”
“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.