Finding Sicily in the Imagination
I had planned to be in Sicily next month, but that was then and this now. A new novel has, however, taken me there in spirit and re-awakened my admiration for the greatest Italian novel of the last century; the Sicilian sun is shining in my imagination.
The Canadian writer, Steven Price, who has conjured this effect in his new novel, Lampedusa, has enviable writerly chutzpah; only an exceptional novelist could evoke the final years of the celebrated author of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) with such assurance.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, was the last incarnation of the ancient line of Princes of Lampedusa (a small island off Sicily that, incidentally, he never visited) which from his grandfather onwards was in steady decline. How far the central figure in The Leopard, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, was drawn from the life of his grandfather has been much debated but unresolved. What is certain though, is that many aspects of that Princely life and of the lives of his own family in Sicily at the time of the re-unification (Risorgimento) of Italy in the mid-19th century, were reflected in his novel.
Written in the 1950s when the physical and moral degradation of Palermo had been worsened by the Second World War, Lampedusa portrayed an aristocratic Sicilian way of life under threat and in Don Fabrizio a landowner ready to sell his patrimony to the powerbrokers of a new Italy. The Leopard is a beautifully rendered piece of fiction, richly textured and profoundly evocative of Sicily’s landscape and deeply layered history. It is also a bleak portrait of the irremovable sovereignty of the powerful, old and new.
In the formation of the newly re-unified Italy, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and its Bourbon rulers succumbed to the dominance of the ‘North’, of Piedmont and the House of Savoy which would rule Italy until 1946. The re-unified country was effectively the result of a takeover of the ‘South’ by the ‘North’ and proud Sicily felt it acutely as a new kind of colonialism. In the character of Don Fabrizio and of his swashbuckling and amoral nephew, Tancredi, Lampedusa pivots Sicily at a moment of great political change but a change which is fundamentally superficial. New wine is formed in old bottles and the wealthy arrivistes ensure little really alters in Sicily.
What Steven Price captures so well in Lampedusa are the similarities, even continuities, with the decaying world in The Leopard. The fictional character of Lampedusa – and Price closely tracks his actual life – is, like Don Fabrizio, the last of his line and the Princedom will die with him. Like Don Fabrizio, his life and his world is crumbling and he will soon depart. After re-unification Sicily’s relative decline was seemingly inexorable. The ’new men’, Don Fabrizio’s landowning successors, were no less self-regarding than he had been, just less stylish and less embedded in the island’s long history.
In the years immediately following twenty years of Fascism and war, the ‘new men’ were no more appealing to Lampedusa than their 19th century equivalents had been to his fictional creation, Don Fabrizio. In the late 1940s Lampedusa was deeply downhearted about Sicily and the human condition in general. Widely read in European literature he had written virtually nothing of consequence before he gravitated late in his life to fiction, and, in The Leopard, to express his reflections about Sicily’s past and present. Cosmopolitan as he was – married to a Baltic noblewoman, fluent in at least three languages and frequently in England in the 1920s – his doleful pessimism infused The Leopard. No character in his novel is wholly likeable and joy and optimism are rare and never more than incidental and often sourly expressed. The only unbridled cheer is reserved for his depiction of Don Fabrizio’s wayward and over-indulged dog, Bendico.
Price captures in Lampedusa all the tones of the eponymous writer’s actual life. The colouring is suitably dark ochre like the Sicilian landscape itself. Palermo is depicted full of fractured or dilapidated buildings. Lampedusa’s social life is narrowly cast and conducted mainly with favoured cousins whose properties he visits elsewhere in the island, each reminiscent of his family’s more spacious former lives, as portrayed in The Leopard. News of his emphysema and the attendant risk of continued smoking shortening his life are disregarded by Lampedusa. He takes enjoyment from his literary tutoring of three young acquaintances and adopts one of them as his son and eventual heir to the Dukedom of Palma (his subordinate title). He and his caring but often distant wife walk to a Palermo cafe each afternoon with their beloved spaniel dogs. Price’s fiction is as it had been in actual fact; but Price makes those dry bones truly live and blood flows in his characters’ veins.
Price’s Lampedusa is a pleasure to read and his themes of personal decline and the impending death of the Prince from the ravages of his emphysema, is melancholy but not depressing. What lifts the melancholy is Lampedusa’s absolute absorption in the novel he is writing and which he shows to only a few people. He is assured by such readers that he is crafting a masterpiece but his efforts to find a publisher weary him almost directly to death. He dies in Price’s novel as he did in life with his draft of The Leopard still in his study drawer. Though Price is far too accomplished a novelist to say so directly, the reader is subtly aware that there will be a literary resurrection for Lampedusa.
Only a short while after his death Lampedusa’s novel would find a publisher and though initially criticised on a number of fronts (by left wing critics for its aristocratic and allegedly reactionary themes and by Catholic critics for his unredeemable fatalism), it would not be long before The Leopard became what it has remained, Italy’s most celebrated 20th century novel.
Price’s Lampedusa stands on its own considerable merits; but any reader who has not yet read The Leopardwill want to do so almost immediately. Our debt to Price is therefore twofold – for what he has written and for what he has illuminated.