FROM THE GUARDIAN
Giuseppe di Lampedusa's masterpiece The Leopard was rejected twice and published only after the author's death. What did he do with his life? Julian Barnes finds clues in the reticent Sicilian's letters from abroad
Most writers have a slightly paranoid sense of not having had their due; it's often part of what keeps them going. Most sensible writers, however, keep to hand examples of others who have had it far worse. Consider, for example, this abbreviated life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Born 1896. Publishes three scholarly articles in 1926-7, then falls silent. In 1954, begins to write The Leopard. May 1956, sends first version to the publishers Mondadori. December 1956, Mondadori turns it down. Winter of 1956-7, completes second version of the novel. February 1957, submits it to Einaudi. April 1957, diagnosed with lung cancer. 2 July, Einaudi rejects novel. 23 July, Lampedusa dies. November 1958, The Leopard is published by Feltrinelli, and world fame immediately ensues – for the novel, but too late for the novelist.
A puritanical response might be to ask: what on earth was he doing with his life anyway, and why didn't he get down to writing earlier? David Gilmour, in his well-judged biography The Last Leopard (1988), explained some of the reasons. Lampedusa was afflicted with several handicaps (not so much to being a writer, but to being thrustful enough to dream of, and then achieve, publication): extreme shyness; enough money never to need take a job; plus a sense that, as a Sicilian aristocrat, he came from an exhausted, irrelevant culture.
There were other factors too, including a major nervous breakdown in his 20s, and a domineering mother, Beatrice Palma. When Giuseppe made a late marriage to the equally formidable Latvian psychoanalyst Alessandra "Licy" Wolff, Beatrice made her son choose between the two of them. Giuseppe weakly opted for his mother and settled into a lengthy marriage-by-correspondence (in French) with Licy.
As for what he was doing with his life, there are two answers. The non-literary one would be: not very much. In his mature years, on a typical day, he might first visit the bookshop and cakeshop, then sit reading in a cafe for hours, return home for tea and buns, and perhaps go out to the film club in the evening. The literary answer would be: waiting. The nature and texture of that wait – and the extent to which it was necessary for Lampedusa to write The Leopard – thus become of interest. Except that a biography of waiting is the hardest sort to write.
In Gilmour's book the subject's extreme reticence and perfect manners make him not so much a still centre as a black hole, around which more interesting lives swirl. Even the doings of Lampedusa's dogs seem more vivid than those of their master. Giuseppe and Licy had a large number of dogs, some as well-bred as themselves, others rescued mongrels, and spoke to each of them in a different language. The most cherished was called Crab (named after Launce's dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), who was addressed in Italian. Giuseppe spent the second world war in Sicily with his mother (Licy was in Riga and Rome), and Crab's diet was its master's constant preoccupation. Crab's birthday would be celebrated with a special dinner – for the dog, that is, not the master. One such consisted of: "Pate, peas and meat, followed by bread and honey; afterwards he would spend an hour in the garden with permission to bark at as many cats as he liked."
As the naming of Crab suggests, Lampedusa was a deeply literary Anglophile. He thought of Britain as his "ideal country". He told his wife that he had an English temperament. In his late 50s he gave private lessons in English literature to a small group of students: his notes were posthumously turned into a 1,000-page book, English Literature, published – perhaps with a touch of retrospective shame – by Mondadori in 1990-91.
Letters from London and Europe usefully illuminates his Anglophilia, shows him at epistolary play, and gets a little behind his perpetual guardedness. His uncle was the Italian ambassador in London from 1922-27, and Lampedusa made five trips to England between 1925-31 (with perhaps another in 1934); his northern journeys sometimes included other cities, such as Paris, Berlin and Zurich. His letters were mainly addressed to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo – fellow-members of the Bellini Club, a Palermitan society for aristos only – who had nicknamed him "The Monster". He writes to them in the third person, describing the actions and reflections of "the wandering Monster", "the super-fed Monster", "the Monster made of delicate clay", "the Monster with a monogram on his rear", as he variously signs himself. (This sounds a little arch, and sometimes is; but more importantly, it seems to have been a distancing mode which helped relax the writer.) This additional, non-aristocratic title was awarded – it is a slight disappointment to discover – not for any scandalous or morbid behaviour, but for his "monstrous" habit of always having his nose in a book.
Even for an Anglophile, London came as a shock to the visitor from Sicily. Lucio Piccolo was so appalled by the city that he immediately took the first train home. Lampedusa found the place "dizzying, terrifying and fascinating"; it was "a most delightful inferno". Given that his entry-level was ambassadorial and aristocratic, he was protected from the grubbier realities of English life (he also preferred to visit cathedral towns rather than industrial cities). Though he could read English fluently, and says in one letter that he expressed himself in a "flowery and vaguely Elizabethan" English, other testimony suggests that he was too shy even to speak the language.
One advantage was that his working title happened to be "Duke of Palma": so he received many invitations addressed to "the Duke of Parma" – "perhaps in the belief", as Gilmour puts it, "that he was the heir of the former independent duchy rather than an impoverished nobleman whose title came from an obscure town in Sicily". The Sicilian connection did, however, get him to Powis Castle as a guest of Lord Powys's daughter Hermione, who was married to a Sicilian nobleman. Later, Hermione della Grazie said of her visitor that he was "a most 'shut-in' personality. One 'met' him but did not 'know' him."
Yet Lampedusa, for all his self-enclosure, was a writer-in-waiting: he saw more than he was seen. Sometimes his vision was filled with a distorted enlargement, or correction, of himself: the Anglophile meets the real English, the member of the Bellini steps into London's Clubland, the scion of a provincial aristocracy mixes with examples of the real thing. But the shy Sicilian was too intelligent, and too ironical, ever to kneel. "It is always a pleasure dealing with the English," he writes, "they are courteous and prompt, and their apparent stupidity is merely an immense and uncontrollable shyness."
Once he has overcome the dizzying terror of the metropolis, its great appeal is that it evinces "order without coercion". He loves London tailoring and London policemen. He delights in his English fountain-pen – or rather, his "lapis-lazuli Parker Duofold Senior Pen". He admires "the amazing serenity of the countryside". He reveres English cathedrals, which make him wish the Normans had stayed in Sicily five centuries longer than they did. He gazes wistfully at female typists on the train – "graceful creatures" he imagines taking to the movies. He likes the cinema, both the buildings and the latest films starring Monte Blue or Norma Shearer. Untypically for a foreign visitor, he even approves of English food: toast comes as a great and pleasant surprise; he looks forward, at the end of a meal, to "sinking a greedy spoon into the supplies of the lordly cheeses of Chester, rosy as onyx, or Stilton, green as aquamarine, or Cheddar, transparent and amber-coloured".
All this is playful, and funny, and mostly flattering to the British reader. But there are moments when the playfulness encloses more sober observation, when the seemingly irrelevant aristocrat from "the Iceland of the South", as he calls it, reveals his proper understanding of how the world works. Staying at the "Hotel Great Central, London NW1" in 1928, he finds that a fellow-guest is an African king from the Gold Coast, Nana Sir Ofori Atta. Lampedusa smiles and bows to him in the hotel corridor, and makes some period mock of him, but also notes that:
"He is one of the many princelings whom 'ruling Britannia' keeps chained to her steel trident and whom every now and then she is pleased to reward by inviting them to London so that they may admire the buses, the chorus girls, the artificial hares and other delightful British specialities, also not to forget the number and efficiency of the tanks, cruisers and bombers."
In 1930, he is in Berlin, and much enchanted by the city's "indecency". Scrutinising the "innumerable trollops" and rent-boys that crowd its bars and cafes, he notes how "overly elegant and overly shaven lads . . . sit and sigh at the corner tables until an old fat man, flushed and pop-eyed, decides to write something (what, ye Gods?) on the back of the bill and send a waiter with it to one of them. After that they sit at the same table and ten minutes later they go out together."
The moment passes; Lampedusa broadens his remarks to the German people in general, and "the zeal with which they pursue every activity to the extreme, and the desire for the absolute which always animates them." Here, he concludes, there is "an incredible ferment of life: within ten years they will, I think, send every nation a note, by means of the waiter . . ."
Throughout these letters, the sensibility of a monstrous reader is constantly present: thus a paragraph comparing the policemen of Zurich and London will naturally allude to Dante, while a description of a ball at the French Embassy in London brings in Paul Valéry, Herrick, Madame de Staël, Shelley, Yeats, Rossetti and Meredith. As this implies, the writer-in-waiting is never far away either. Replying to the Piccolos from Berlin, he takes up a point that one of them (presumably Lucio, the poet) has made about William Beckford's Gothic novel Vathek. "We must not forget," Lampedusa writes, "that Beckford is, basically, an 18th-century writer, and that therefore he regards [everything] with overarching irony." A comment which immediately launches us forward a quarter of a century to The Leopard, and to the overarching irony of Tancredi's famous line about the continuance of Sicilian aristocratic life: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
This enterprising publication is supported by Arts Council England. Jeremy Hunt might take a look at it; while Nick Clegg, who chose The Leopard as his book on Desert Island Discs, should definitely buy several copies.
Most writers have a slightly paranoid sense of not having had their due; it's often part of what keeps them going. Most sensible writers, however, keep to hand examples of others who have had it far worse. Consider, for example, this abbreviated life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Born 1896. Publishes three scholarly articles in 1926-7, then falls silent. In 1954, begins to write The Leopard. May 1956, sends first version to the publishers Mondadori. December 1956, Mondadori turns it down. Winter of 1956-7, completes second version of the novel. February 1957, submits it to Einaudi. April 1957, diagnosed with lung cancer. 2 July, Einaudi rejects novel. 23 July, Lampedusa dies. November 1958, The Leopard is published by Feltrinelli, and world fame immediately ensues – for the novel, but too late for the novelist.
A puritanical response might be to ask: what on earth was he doing with his life anyway, and why didn't he get down to writing earlier? David Gilmour, in his well-judged biography The Last Leopard (1988), explained some of the reasons. Lampedusa was afflicted with several handicaps (not so much to being a writer, but to being thrustful enough to dream of, and then achieve, publication): extreme shyness; enough money never to need take a job; plus a sense that, as a Sicilian aristocrat, he came from an exhausted, irrelevant culture.
There were other factors too, including a major nervous breakdown in his 20s, and a domineering mother, Beatrice Palma. When Giuseppe made a late marriage to the equally formidable Latvian psychoanalyst Alessandra "Licy" Wolff, Beatrice made her son choose between the two of them. Giuseppe weakly opted for his mother and settled into a lengthy marriage-by-correspondence (in French) with Licy.
As for what he was doing with his life, there are two answers. The non-literary one would be: not very much. In his mature years, on a typical day, he might first visit the bookshop and cakeshop, then sit reading in a cafe for hours, return home for tea and buns, and perhaps go out to the film club in the evening. The literary answer would be: waiting. The nature and texture of that wait – and the extent to which it was necessary for Lampedusa to write The Leopard – thus become of interest. Except that a biography of waiting is the hardest sort to write.
In Gilmour's book the subject's extreme reticence and perfect manners make him not so much a still centre as a black hole, around which more interesting lives swirl. Even the doings of Lampedusa's dogs seem more vivid than those of their master. Giuseppe and Licy had a large number of dogs, some as well-bred as themselves, others rescued mongrels, and spoke to each of them in a different language. The most cherished was called Crab (named after Launce's dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), who was addressed in Italian. Giuseppe spent the second world war in Sicily with his mother (Licy was in Riga and Rome), and Crab's diet was its master's constant preoccupation. Crab's birthday would be celebrated with a special dinner – for the dog, that is, not the master. One such consisted of: "Pate, peas and meat, followed by bread and honey; afterwards he would spend an hour in the garden with permission to bark at as many cats as he liked."
As the naming of Crab suggests, Lampedusa was a deeply literary Anglophile. He thought of Britain as his "ideal country". He told his wife that he had an English temperament. In his late 50s he gave private lessons in English literature to a small group of students: his notes were posthumously turned into a 1,000-page book, English Literature, published – perhaps with a touch of retrospective shame – by Mondadori in 1990-91.
Letters from London and Europe usefully illuminates his Anglophilia, shows him at epistolary play, and gets a little behind his perpetual guardedness. His uncle was the Italian ambassador in London from 1922-27, and Lampedusa made five trips to England between 1925-31 (with perhaps another in 1934); his northern journeys sometimes included other cities, such as Paris, Berlin and Zurich. His letters were mainly addressed to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo – fellow-members of the Bellini Club, a Palermitan society for aristos only – who had nicknamed him "The Monster". He writes to them in the third person, describing the actions and reflections of "the wandering Monster", "the super-fed Monster", "the Monster made of delicate clay", "the Monster with a monogram on his rear", as he variously signs himself. (This sounds a little arch, and sometimes is; but more importantly, it seems to have been a distancing mode which helped relax the writer.) This additional, non-aristocratic title was awarded – it is a slight disappointment to discover – not for any scandalous or morbid behaviour, but for his "monstrous" habit of always having his nose in a book.
Even for an Anglophile, London came as a shock to the visitor from Sicily. Lucio Piccolo was so appalled by the city that he immediately took the first train home. Lampedusa found the place "dizzying, terrifying and fascinating"; it was "a most delightful inferno". Given that his entry-level was ambassadorial and aristocratic, he was protected from the grubbier realities of English life (he also preferred to visit cathedral towns rather than industrial cities). Though he could read English fluently, and says in one letter that he expressed himself in a "flowery and vaguely Elizabethan" English, other testimony suggests that he was too shy even to speak the language.
One advantage was that his working title happened to be "Duke of Palma": so he received many invitations addressed to "the Duke of Parma" – "perhaps in the belief", as Gilmour puts it, "that he was the heir of the former independent duchy rather than an impoverished nobleman whose title came from an obscure town in Sicily". The Sicilian connection did, however, get him to Powis Castle as a guest of Lord Powys's daughter Hermione, who was married to a Sicilian nobleman. Later, Hermione della Grazie said of her visitor that he was "a most 'shut-in' personality. One 'met' him but did not 'know' him."
Yet Lampedusa, for all his self-enclosure, was a writer-in-waiting: he saw more than he was seen. Sometimes his vision was filled with a distorted enlargement, or correction, of himself: the Anglophile meets the real English, the member of the Bellini steps into London's Clubland, the scion of a provincial aristocracy mixes with examples of the real thing. But the shy Sicilian was too intelligent, and too ironical, ever to kneel. "It is always a pleasure dealing with the English," he writes, "they are courteous and prompt, and their apparent stupidity is merely an immense and uncontrollable shyness."
Once he has overcome the dizzying terror of the metropolis, its great appeal is that it evinces "order without coercion". He loves London tailoring and London policemen. He delights in his English fountain-pen – or rather, his "lapis-lazuli Parker Duofold Senior Pen". He admires "the amazing serenity of the countryside". He reveres English cathedrals, which make him wish the Normans had stayed in Sicily five centuries longer than they did. He gazes wistfully at female typists on the train – "graceful creatures" he imagines taking to the movies. He likes the cinema, both the buildings and the latest films starring Monte Blue or Norma Shearer. Untypically for a foreign visitor, he even approves of English food: toast comes as a great and pleasant surprise; he looks forward, at the end of a meal, to "sinking a greedy spoon into the supplies of the lordly cheeses of Chester, rosy as onyx, or Stilton, green as aquamarine, or Cheddar, transparent and amber-coloured".
All this is playful, and funny, and mostly flattering to the British reader. But there are moments when the playfulness encloses more sober observation, when the seemingly irrelevant aristocrat from "the Iceland of the South", as he calls it, reveals his proper understanding of how the world works. Staying at the "Hotel Great Central, London NW1" in 1928, he finds that a fellow-guest is an African king from the Gold Coast, Nana Sir Ofori Atta. Lampedusa smiles and bows to him in the hotel corridor, and makes some period mock of him, but also notes that:
"He is one of the many princelings whom 'ruling Britannia' keeps chained to her steel trident and whom every now and then she is pleased to reward by inviting them to London so that they may admire the buses, the chorus girls, the artificial hares and other delightful British specialities, also not to forget the number and efficiency of the tanks, cruisers and bombers."
In 1930, he is in Berlin, and much enchanted by the city's "indecency". Scrutinising the "innumerable trollops" and rent-boys that crowd its bars and cafes, he notes how "overly elegant and overly shaven lads . . . sit and sigh at the corner tables until an old fat man, flushed and pop-eyed, decides to write something (what, ye Gods?) on the back of the bill and send a waiter with it to one of them. After that they sit at the same table and ten minutes later they go out together."
The moment passes; Lampedusa broadens his remarks to the German people in general, and "the zeal with which they pursue every activity to the extreme, and the desire for the absolute which always animates them." Here, he concludes, there is "an incredible ferment of life: within ten years they will, I think, send every nation a note, by means of the waiter . . ."
Throughout these letters, the sensibility of a monstrous reader is constantly present: thus a paragraph comparing the policemen of Zurich and London will naturally allude to Dante, while a description of a ball at the French Embassy in London brings in Paul Valéry, Herrick, Madame de Staël, Shelley, Yeats, Rossetti and Meredith. As this implies, the writer-in-waiting is never far away either. Replying to the Piccolos from Berlin, he takes up a point that one of them (presumably Lucio, the poet) has made about William Beckford's Gothic novel Vathek. "We must not forget," Lampedusa writes, "that Beckford is, basically, an 18th-century writer, and that therefore he regards [everything] with overarching irony." A comment which immediately launches us forward a quarter of a century to The Leopard, and to the overarching irony of Tancredi's famous line about the continuance of Sicilian aristocratic life: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
This enterprising publication is supported by Arts Council England. Jeremy Hunt might take a look at it; while Nick Clegg, who chose The Leopard as his book on Desert Island Discs, should definitely buy several copies.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento