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Slightly Foxed No 11 Autumn 2006Editions
ReviewThis issue contains an article by Johnny about David Gilmour's The Last Leopard I first read The Leopard while I was in Palermo in 1981, at the age of 18. It was one of those defining reading experiences for me, which those of us whose lives are touched by what we read can point to with a readiness that may seem bizarre or in some way ‘pretentious’ to casual readers. It is not always easy to say exactly what has affected us, but it has to do with a deep sense of recognition. Primarily, it is a response to the text itself: through the alchemy of fictional characters and the ways in which they engage with their world, you are taken somewhere (psychologically, morally, emotionally) that you do not usually expect to go, and the journey reveals to you something about yourself and the world you inhabit. But when this process induces something of the awe of revelation, it is liable to be accompanied by the additional recognition that the author has achieved something of extraordinary value. Who is this person, and what did it feel like to create this phenomenon? One does not necessarily expect an answer to the second part of this question in an author’s biography, but if it is there then you might get that fuzzy feeling of awe all over again. David Gilmour’s biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa was published in 1988. It made a great impression on me, and I have sold it ever since with confidence whenever possible (I am a bookseller). But as the years passed I started to wonder if I wasn’t misled by inexperience. I was young when I read it, and how many other biographies of writers had I read? How would it measure up now? I knew it was out of print because we had bought up the end of the print run, and Mr Horse’s Mouth at Random House told me lately, on enquiry, that however many copies a couple of fancy independent shops might sell over the next few years, it would never find its way back to the shelves of high street shops and therefore – hands were wrung, I swear – a reprint could not reasonably be contemplated. That’s the way things are. This anticipated answer, and the imminent 50th anniversary of The Leopard’s first publication, were just the necessary incentives to drive me crossly, protectively, back to the book. The facts – who Lampedusa was, and what he did – are almost comically simple. Born in Palermo in 1896, he was the only son of an old aristocratic family whose patrimony was already very diminished. Cosseted as a child, he soon developed a passion for literature. As Gilmour remarks with some surprise, it seems never to have occurred to Lampedusa that he might work, but he served briefly as a soldier during the First World War and as a rather testy Red Cross official in Sicily during the Second World War. Otherwise he read, sat in cafés, occasionally went to cocktail parties which he detested, travelled to England and France from time to time, and also to Latvia. For though he never had children, he married a Baltic baroness called Licy, who was a distinguished psychoanalyst. Until late in the war she preferred to stay at her castle in Latvia than with her husband in Sicily, where she had to compete for his attentions with his over-fond mother. But after the war, when his palace had been bombed and hers was taken over by the Soviets, they lived together in genteel decay in a draughty, second-division palazzo with a leaky gas boiler. For a few years he gave informal lessons in literature to a couple of young friends, and in 1955, after being diagnosed with emphysema, started writing a novel ‘pour m’amuser.’ He died in July 1957 and The Leopard was published in November the following year. It became the best-selling book in Italian literary history. The subject spent most of his life on a chair, and if he wasn’t reading then he was groaning at the prospect of his own, and his family’s, extinction. How on earth can such unpromising material be made into a riveting book? The apparent contradiction – ‘read this book, it’s a gripping account of a man who did nothing all his life’ – is undoubtedly part of the book’s anecdotal charm. But it is also underlies why it is so remarkable, for Gilmour demonstrates that there is in fact no contradiction. Lampedusa’s life was integrated, and he was intimately connected to his world. He did not do nothing. There is a temptation to see the dramatic shape supplied by the masterpiece at the end as somehow artificial, too good to be true: isn’t it just sentimental retrospective piety that makes us want to make sense of this layabout’s life as a grand preparation? Gilmour shows that it is not. And if Lampedusa had not written The Leopard? What then of the life? It is not quite enough to say that the question is academic because he did write it: we are forced to recognise the value of the life on its own terms, irrespective of the stupendous posthumous validation. The early chapters are entitled ‘Inheritance’, ‘A Sicilian Childhood’, ‘The War and Fascism’ and ‘The Wanderer in England’. On the last page of the next one, ‘A Baltic Marriage,’ we read of a young man who sat beside Lampedusa at the aristocratic club in Palermo and could ‘get nothing from him but monosyllables’. By now, the reader has been treated to a sharp portrait of Lampedusa’s background and early life that is reflected in many respects in The Leopard, but though Gilmour writes beautifully and displays a keen sense of the absurd, we might be forgiven for thinking that if the subject isn’t quite dead yet then he might as well be – were it not for the mysterious phenomenon that we know is to come. Why is Lampedusa different from his contemporaries, whose behaviour he described as ‘the tragic jerking of a class which was watching the end of its own land-owning supremacy, that is of its own reason for existence and its own social continuity’? An answer begins to surface in the next chapter, ‘The Troubles of Don Giuseppe.’ The heading refers to the Lampedusas’ domestic arrangements – Licy’s final departure from Latvia, the destruction of Palazzo Lampedusa, problems with the Red Cross, the death of the prince’s mother. But embedded in it is a brief account of his relationship with his Piccolo cousins, in particular Lucio, with whom Lampedusa had a literary rapport ‘so strong and long-lasting that neither of them bothered to look for other intellectual friends.’ But if Lampedusa sometimes seems other-worldly, the Piccolos seem positively alien. ‘They not only believed in the existence of spirits but could even sense their presence.’ ‘The manner in which the Piccolos were able to insulate themselves from the horrors of the Second Wolrd War,’ says Gilmour after listing the menu for lunch on Easter Sunday 1942,‘was remarkable.’ It is interesting that this home-bound Southerner should marry a Northern intellectual, but it is fascinating that a man described by Berenson as ‘bashful, modest, timid, incredibly courteous’ should feel most comfortable in a nest of nutcases. And as Gilmour starts to describe the prince’s life together with Licy after the war, we see him come into his own. ‘…once the diffidence had been conquered, he revealed sides to his character which few people would have suspected: pride, original thought, powerful opinions and a bitter, ironic sense of humour.’ Licy’s nephew describes visiting them and finding that lunch did not exist for them because she was still in bed after working until four in the morning, while he would be out of the house, returning later in the afternoon with a few pastries, following his own thoughts and routines. Clearly he was always conscious that his identity was bound up with the land of his birth, but, privately, he was always deeply eccentric. The most conspicuous feature of this eccentricity is Lampedusa’s passion for reading. His Piccolo cousins called him ‘il mostro’ (‘the monster’) because of his astonishing learning. But it was not the product of formal study, and it was only late in life that he found, among young people, some pleasure in sharing it, first in conversations in a café and then, at Licy’s suggestion, during informal literature courses at home. He wrote a thousand pages of notes on English literature from Bede to Graham Greene. ‘Not only had he read and remembered all the novels of Scott,’ writes Gilmour; ‘he knew the plays of the lesser Elizabethan playwrights and the poems of the most minor Restoration poets.’ He was similarly erudite in French literature, and his knowledge of literature in Russian and Spanish (which he read in the original) was also startling. He believed that people could be understood through their literature and their history but also ‘that it was important to investigate everything, not just the large trees in isolation but the undergrowth and flowers as well. They were all part of the great body of literature and contributed to each other’s growth.’ It is salutary to read this now, when every book is required by publisher, media and chain-bookseller to be a masterpiece. And then there is the matter of The Leopard itself. It seems that what drove him to write was the spectacle of his cousin Lucio getting a prize at a literary festival. Lucio had sent his poems out of the blue to Eugenio Montale, who impulsively invited him to a literary festival at San Pellegrino in Lombardy. Being apprehensive, Lucio asked il mostro to accompany him for moral support. There is a hilarious description of the elderly, unknown Sicilian gentlemen turning up and saying nothing. But on his return to Palermo, in a note about the obscure English novelist Martin Tupper, Lampedusa wrote that he was ‘now mathematically certain of being the only person in Italy to have read him, Cecchi and Montale do not know about him, let it be said to their credit…’ Gilmour notes drily, ‘It is unlikely that Lampedusa could have acquired this information without speaking to them.’ But mathematics was on Lampedusa’s mind: he wrote to an old friend in Brazil, ‘Being mathematically certain that I was no more foolish [than Lucio], I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel.’ The story of the novel’s creation is intensely moving because Lampedusa evidently sensed his vocation in the process of writing. Knowing he was ill, urgency suddenly infuses all his activities. He didn’t want to die any more because he had things to do. It appears that it was a mistake ever to identify sluggishness with his preoccupation with his own extinction. He was never mentally sluggish, just solitary and ironic. Despite his illness, he had huge resources of energy to apply to his new project. Although an analysis of The Leopard hardly seems inappropriate in a biography of its author, someone recently said to me that he thought there was too much lit crit at the end of The Last Leopard. Yet the story of the The Leopard’s critical reception is of great relevance – not least because the dogfight contributed to its success. The book became a bestseller very quickly once it was published, but it had been turned down by several publishers first and was severely criticized by many distinguished critics for reasons that remain intriguing. Besides the Catholics who disapproved of Lampedusa’s pessimism and the Sicilian apologists who didn’t like his portrait of Sicily, there were Marxist historians who attacked what they imagined to be his view of history and there were influential critics from Italy’s intelligentsia who had spent the years since the Second World War advocating their own rigid interpretations of ‘commitment’, ‘progressiveness’ and ‘experimentation’ in literature. Lampedusa’s beautiful prose and well-drawn characters did not fit the mould. ‘Lampedusa has put us back sixty years,’ Pratolini complained. The particular issues provoking what now looks like ridiculous wrong-headedness may have shifted somewhat, but we have our equivalents and they affect what happens to books. When Gilmour wrote The Last Leopard, the critics already seemed dated. In the last two decades, historical novels and our attitudes towards them have changed further. If a novelist creates a character in all his individuality and manages also to reveal how he is connected with his times, it is understood that he opens, by extension, a window on ourselves and, perhaps, our relations with our own times. It doesn’t necessarily matter where or when the novel is set, so long as it is done with skill and vision. But thanks to Gilmour’s shrewd inspection of The Leopard’s reception, the light shed on that novel also functions as a warning on our own times and culture. It is pleasing to hail yesterday’s ‘reactionary’ as a luminary, but the transformation should alert us to the possibility of follies in our own discriminations. And it is instructive too, in any context, to read how ground-cover literature matters as well as the trees. Whether The Last Leopard is a tree (as I think) or just a flower, it should be read by anyone who loves reading. - review by Johnny de Falbe |
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