Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(17)
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When Mussolini, with whom he had been on intimate terms, seized power in 1922, D’Annunzio had already withdrawn to the villa where he remained for the rest of his life.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 language 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.