Salgari was also a great experimenter of the Italian language with which he hypnotized the reader by teleporting him into the exotic environments of his novels. He here is an example of teleportation taken from the first chapter of The Brahmin of Assam:
“An enormous cart, formed of heavy beams connected with iron hooks and with very high wheels, all full, stood still, a little sunk in the rich earth, in the middle of a superb forest bristling with gigantic tares, tamarinds, coconuts and of eatables. It didn't look at all like the Indian tciopaya, big wagons too, but more elegant, because their chests are always painted in sky-blue and decorated with flowers and divinities, with beautiful columns. It looked more like a rolling rampart, which only the unlimited strength of elephants, especially coomareahs, could move."
Umberto Eco in his essay on Kitch compared some passages of his imaginative prose to that of Marcel Proust and Tomasi di Lampedusa.
A great writer, a great prose writer, but a terrible businessman, happiness did not smile on Salgari, which is not always the twin of talent. The epilogue of his inner anguish is the tragic decision to leave at the age of just 49 in a way that also seems scripted. He ripped open his chest and slit his throat with a razor in an attempt to emulate the ritual sacrifice of the samurai of that Far East that he had so often described. And he left of his own free will launching a very heavy accusation.
Who does not know Salgari! Who hasn't read a few novels by him as a boy! Who hasn't been enthralled by Sandokan, the black corsair, the pearl of Labuan and the countless other characters he brought to life! Salgari has managed to make countless readers dream, in a number that is difficult to quantify, but in the order of millions and millions in Italy alone and tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions in the rest of the world. All this thanks to 82 novels and over 100 short stories, composed in just over 25 years, at a breakneck pace. But he got out of this mass of books little more than crumbs than he should have rightfully deserved. In all likelihood he was the writer who handled his outstanding literary creativity worst of all.
The debut
It all began in 1883, the same year in which Pinocchio's extraordinary journey towards immortality began, and shortly before De Amicis put his hand to his Cuore, which he was to compose in the first months of 1886. It was in that 1883 that he shapes the other great character of our children's fiction: Sandokan.
Its author was a twenty-one-year-old young man, born in Verona in 1862, into a family of cloth merchants. At 16 he enrolled in the nautical institute, with the hope of wearing the guise of captain of the navy, but he did not complete his studies, even if he would always boast of the title of captain, never actually achieved. The only embarkation that he really carries out is up and down for three months along the shores of the Adriatic, for duty of service. But it is more than enough to feed one of the most fervent fantasies of adventure fiction, which would have led him to describe the seas and oceans, forests and deserts, prairies, mountains, glaciers and all places on the planet .
The long journey in fiction
At the age of 20, Salgari set sail on a "real" journey, yes, very long and interminable, through the boundless territories of "literature", which would only end with his death. In 1882, a first story appeared in four installments published in a Milanese weekly, entitled The Savages of Papuasia. The following year, 1883, on "La Nuova Arena" in Verona, Le tigri di Mompracem was published, again in installments, later collected in volumes. It was immediately a great success: Sandokan was born, the protagonist of the story and one of the most exciting figures in youth literature. And next to him the many characters that surround him: Yanez, Lady Marianna, Tremal-Naik, Lord Brooke and many others.
An instant hit
Success was immediately resounding, the magazine experienced a very significant increase in sales and the name of the young author began to circulate not only among insiders, but among the general public.
What appears to be one of the most promising signatures of our editorial panorama, however, makes little change from it, it even looks like just a pastry cake, won almost by bet, foreshadowing from the beginning what would have been a constant in her life, namely the poor ability to manage the relationship with publishers. In this, his figure is much closer to that of Collodi, also destined for a ridiculous fee for his Pinocchio, than to that of De Amicis, who was instead a very skilful negotiator and then a shrewd manager of the fruits of his own ingenuity.
Salgari's literary activity, however, started and from this moment the innumerable characters and the infinite stories that would have fascinated readers from all over the world began to take shape.
The author composes them at a prohibitive pace, it was said. He has no other income than what comes from his books, and with that he has to support a large family. He writes continuously, 3-4 novels a year and as many, if not more short stories. He gets by drinking liquor and smoking 100 cigarettes a day, in a house, at least the last one, the one on the outskirts of Turin, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a courtyard, where he lives with his wife, 4 children, mother-in-law, 17 cats, a dog , a hen, a monkey, a squirrel, a parrot, a goose, some canaries.
An endless production
In this, to say the least, "dispersive" context, the myriad of stories, situations, plots, characters take shape.
We recall, among the many, the main cycles, each in turn composed of several novels: first of all the cycle of the pirates of Malaysia, then the cycle of the corsairs of the Antilles, followed by the cycle of the corsairs of Bermuda, by the cycle of the adventures of the Far West, from the cycle of adventures in India. Then there are minor cycles and a multitude of other novels and stories, including science fiction ones, which provide a typology of situations, settings and characters of extraordinary richness and variety.
The stories are set all over the planet. Salgari places them in the seventeenth century, but also in the nineteenth century and even in the future. The characters are characterized by some constants that remain fixed: the speed of the action, the sincerity of the positive figures, always courageous, sincere and attractive; the cowardice of the negative ones. His narration takes on a Manichean edge, and in his heroes the action, even if marked by ferocity, remains inspired by eternal values, such as honesty, honour, friendship, courage, a sense of justice.
This is the world that Salgari brings to life from the work table, in the midst of the daily hubbub of a large family, day after day, hour after hour, with an incredible methodicalness.
The marriage
In 1892 he marries a minor theater actress, Ida Peruzzi, with whom he will have four children in eight years, and for the writer a troubled family relationship begins, marked by continuous financial hassles and extremely saddened by the mental illness of his wife, in need of continuous and expensive treatments, which will end his days in a mental hospital. Three years earlier, in 1889, the writer's father had committed suicide, believing himself to be afflicted with an incurable disease.
A resounding success…
Despite the enormous success that his novels obtained right from the start, and which made the Veronese writer an authentic goose that lays golden eggs, the publishing world was as miserable with him as with anyone else. It almost seems that he does not know how to forgive his fruitful creative vein, that he considers his works of little value, B-series novels, compared to those of the great names in literature, and as such to be paid miserably. Just as was happening to the other authentic "hen of Italian literature", as Antonio Gramsci called her, Carolina Invernizio, whose existence however was infinitely more calm, orderly and serene.
…paid in a shameful way
Both received little more than the crumbs of the immense wealth they were able to produce, certainly also due to their congenital inability to manage themselves in a difficult world, such as the publishing world. Yet the most skilled, with D'Annunzio in the lead, obtained far more substantial earnings. But theirs was "high" literature, not second-series products, as the books by Salgari and Invernizio were then considered.
Until 1900, every novel was paid to Salgari on a flat-rate basis, first with the sum of 100 lire, then more and more, up to 350. Finally, but only in a few cases, 500 lire per title, even if they were published by publishers of the caliber of Treves, Paravia or Bemporad. Subsequently Salgari gets to be paid on a monthly basis, like any employee, but never as a percentage of sales, a considerable handicap for someone like him who guarantees very high circulations.
The meeting with the publisher Donath
In 1898, at the age of 36, he entered into an exclusive partnership with the publisher Donath of Genoa and his economic conditions improved slightly, but his wife's deteriorating health forced him to make further expenses and huge debts.
And then she has four very young children to raise; the last one, Omar, was born in 1900. In 1904 he renewed his contract with the publisher Donath of Genoa, for 4.000 lire a year, in exchange for three novels a year and the editorship of a magazine, “Per terra e by sea”, on which he publishes his other short stories to round off.
It's not little. A civil servant earns between 1.000 and 1.500 lire a year, as does a teacher. But they are on average three pages a day to throw down, including Sunday; if one day he gets sick or wants to rest, the next day there are six pages. Furthermore, he must inquire, at least in the atlas and in the encyclopedia, about the places and characteristics of the places in which he sets his novels. And then he runs a magazine, in which he also writes stories. Meanwhile he also has to look after the family menage, which his increasingly ill wife is unable to take care of.
The transition to the Bemporad
In 1906 he broke with the Genoese publisher and moved to the Bemporad of Florence, with whom he agreed double the fee under the same conditions: 8.000 lire a year, a respectable sum, but at the beginning the publisher had to keep half of it to pay the penalty for breaking with the Donath. Only at the top of the state career could that figure be reached. But for a writer who produces books in a continuous stream that are literally snapped up, that sum is almost an affront, a pittance, a piece of bread. From 1907 to 1911 alone he will publish 19 books with Bemporad, and 3 will be published posthumously. Due to his wife's mental condition which worsens year by year he is always financially in trouble. Money is never enough for him. He tries to keep her wife in a private clinic at great expense, but in the end he can't take it any more than her and is forced, with great moral suffering, to lock her up in a mental hospital to reduce expenses.
In 1963 the magazine "Quattrosoldi" calculated that in that year Sandokan's father would have earned 100 million net royalties. And it was lire in 1963, when, to always make a comparison with current salaries, a civil servant could earn a million and a half a year, and an apartment could cost just over a million a room.
Throughout his life, according to an estimate by his son Omar, Salgari earned 87.000 lire, divided over the twenty-eight years of his career, a figure that certainly could not relieve him of the poverty in which he always lived.
Suicide
In 1909 he attempted his first suicide, but his eldest daughter Fatima found him in time and managed to save him. Two years later, in 1911, following his wife's hospitalization in a mental hospital, at just 49 years of age, he killed himself, as his father had already done, and as two of his sons would later do.
They find him in the woods with his stomach and throat slashed: he had done harakiri, as one of his heroes would have done.
In his farewell letter to his children, he writes that he considers himself a "loser", one defeated by life. He bequeathed 150 lire, plus another 600 in credit. Shortly before taking his own life he had asked his publisher for an advance of 800 lire, but the latter was late in sending it to him.
The tragedy also struck his wife and children, as if there were a curse that raged over his family. His wife died in a mental hospital in 1922, the eldest daughter Fatima died 3 years after her father of tuberculosis, she was just 22 years old. Romero, the only one of the four children who would give him a grandson, committed suicide in 1931. The second son Nadir lost his life in 1936 in a tragic motorcycle accident. He was a reserve lieutenant and was 42 years old. The last child, Omar, the youngest, also died by suicide in 1963.
The indictment against the publishers
Before committing suicide, Salgari had also left a contemptuous letter to his publishers: "To you who have enriched yourselves with my skin, keeping me and my family in continuous semi-misery or even more, I only ask that in return for the earnings that I have given you think of my funeral. I greet you by breaking the pen."
Following an investigation conducted many years later to shed light on the tragedy of Salgari, Arnaldo Mussolini, brother of the Duce, withdrew the card of the National Fascist Party from the publisher Bemporad, accused of having vilely exploited the writer. And to think that he had been the most generous editor of all with his author.
However, even Salgari's death was a deal for the publisher, who at the time of signing the contract with the author had taken out an insurance policy on the life of his precious novelist, and when he died he collected 20.000 lire, but according to his son Omar they were actually 50.000.
A sad story
At his death, a real uproar broke out over his writings. Many appeared, more than a hundred, almost all false, attributed to him and often released with the complicity or agreement of his children with unscrupulous publishers, who relied on the everlasting appeal of his name, and which gave rise to legal disputes which they dragged on for years and years.
In short, a bitter and painful story, certainly the saddest of all those we have encountered so far.
