Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(19)
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.
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.