Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(18)

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.