To read Lampedusa’s great novel, The Leopard—that ironic and nostalgic story about a prince by a prince, about a once-distinguished and always-prodigal family by the last of just such a family—is to wonder, as with Proust or A Portrait of the Artist, where the autobiography ends and the fiction begins. Who is Don Fabrizio Salina, the Leopard of the book’s title? Is he, as many have speculated, an hommage to Giulio Tomasi, the author’s great-grandfather, the Prince of Lampedusa during the days of Garibaldi? Or is he actually a veiled portrait of the author himself? Is The Leopard a historical novel about the passing of the old regime in Sicily in the 1860s or is it, as certain Italian intellectuals have charged, an out-dated aristocrat’s “right-wing” “reactionary” screed against the “progressive” modern Italian state? These questions—and many, many others about the author’s politics, literary antecedents, and very private life—were the stuff of international controversy when, some thirty years ago, the book appeared out of nowhere, the posthumous masterpiece of an obscure, impoverished nobleman who had published virtually nothing during his lifetime. The Italians had a name for all the spilt ink: they called it il caso Lampedusa. The hubbub has long since died away and The Leopard has assumed its place among the modern classics, yet the mystery surrounding the world of its author continues to intrigue. It is David Gilmour’s achievement throughout The Last Leopard, his excellent, brief biography of Lampedusa, to shed new light on all aspects of that world.¹

After a visit to Sicily in 1985, during which he picked among the ruins of the novelist’s childhood homes, Mr. Gilmour, an Edinburgh-based journalist and literary critic, resolved to write a book about Lampedusa, to untangle the strands of fact and fiction in his work. He had little hope of doing an “authorized life,” for Lampedusa’s widow, who jealously guarded his personal papers, had turned away all would-be biographers from the day of The Leopard’s publication, in 1958, to the day of her death, in 1982. Mr. Gilmour expected similar trouble from the current executor—the Lampedusas’ adopted son, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi—but upon meeting each other, in 1987, the two became instant friends. Mr. Lanza Tomasi took him in as a guest at his house in Palermo, the house where Lampedusa spent his last and most productive decade. There Mr. Gilmour was presented with “documents which had not been seen since Lampedusa’s death: the diaries of the last years, . . . letters, unpublished essays, a commonplace book,” and, most remarkable and important, “the thousand-page survey of English literature which Lampedusa had written for a small group of pupils near the end of his life.” In short, he had struck a biographical motherlode, material he has now orchestrated to great effect and with what, in this age of “pathography,” can only be called great good taste. There is nothing about Mr. Gilmour of the “publishing scoundrel,” eager to dish out the dirt and, by implication, prove himself and his readers superior to his subject. He is, indeed, that rather old-fashioned thing, a “publishing gentleman,” a biographer sympathetic to the troubles of the man and even-handed with the work of the artist. It is a distinctly British type, and one for which the Anglophilic Lampedusa, a connoisseur of such types, had a keen appreciation. It is easy, upon finishing this book and having learned something about his own taste in literature, to imagine Lampedusa taking pleasure in it and its rare combination of discretion, understatement, and a plain-meat-and-drink prose style.

Giuseppe Tomasi, the future Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa, was born in 1896, an only child with the run of a palace in the very heart of old Palermo. The palazzo was built in the 1620s, not long after the ancient family had moved from the Italian mainland to Sicily. The origins of the Tomasi are lost in legend—they were happy to believe their line was founded by Thomaso the Leopard, commander of the Imperial Guard under Tiberius—but their career in Sicily is richly documented. By the mid-1600s, they had established themselves as dukes of Palma, a town they had helped to settle on the southern coast, and in 1667 became princes of Lampedusa, which Mr. Gilmour describes as “a largely barren and usually deserted island nearer Africa than Sicily.” The sale of the latter property to the Bourbons in 1840 proved a windfall for the debt-ridden Tomasi, although an inordinate amount of the proceeds went to fireworks for Palermo city festivals. As Mr. Gilmour observes, “Nearly all the later members of the Lampedusa family combined financial incompetence with a total lack of interest in even attempting to make money.” Lampedusa himself never trained for a profession and lived a life of rather down-at-the-heels leisure; his income was fixed, his indulgences modest, and most of his mornings spent struggling over the legal problems that had tied up the family’s wealth for decades.

Lampedusa’s earliest memory was of the sight of his mother, the fashionable and highly cultivated Beatrice Mastogiovanni Tasca, combing her hair with the help of a maid; his fondest memories remained always of the “uncountable” rooms of the Palazzo Lampedusa. Although he later married and made a home with his wife, the palace and his mother were the two great loves of his life—and the eventual loss of them his greatest personal tragedy. Shortly before his death, in two lines that capture his longing for both of his now-gone loves, Lampedusa wrote that “until a few months before its destruction [by Allied bombs in 1943] I used to sleep in the room where I was born, five yards away from the spot where my mother’s bed had stood when she gave me birth. And in that house, in that very room maybe, I was glad to feel the certainty of dying.” For the aging Lampedusa, childhood—the world of the palace and his mother—was “a lost Earthly Paradise,” and death his only possibility of regaining it.

What is new here is Mr. Gilmour’s portrait of Beatrice di Lampedusa, and the account of her extraordinary influence over her son.

The chief source of information about Lampedusa’s earliest years is his abandoned memoir, “Places of My Infancy,” begun in the summer of 1955.² The introductory chapters of Mr. Gilmour’s book are in part a rehearsal of this charming work, especially in its descriptions of the Palazzo Lampedusa and of Santa Margherita, his mother’s family’s country palace some forty miles southwest of Palermo. What is new here is Mr. Gilmour’s portrait of Beatrice di Lampedusa, and the account of her extraordinary influence over her son. Although Lampedusa received his sense of family history and pride from his father, the two were never close; he received his cultural education from his mother, a woman brought up, Mr. Gilmour writes, “in a far more enlightened and European way” than her husband. (Beatrice was indeed so impressively intelligent and articulate that “long after her death it was rumored [among many who had known her] that she was the real author of The Leopard and that her son had merely found and corrected the manuscript.”) It was she who arranged for young Giuseppe’s education at home and who personally taught him French; it was in her and her family’s libraries that Lampedusa acquired a love for reading as he browsed through almost every work of the Enlightenment, numerous Napoleonic War histories, and the novels of such modern writers as Zola and Verga.

But Beatrice di Lampedusa’s relationship with her son was hardly entirely wholesome. Mr. Gilmour calls it “perhaps excessively close,” and this is perhaps excessively kind. Beatrice was more than merely over-protective, she was domineering, interfering, and uninterested in any happiness for her son that she could not give him herself. She was, in short, a monster, and her behavior toward her child monstrous.

This is nowhere more evident than in Mr. Gilmour’s account of the events surrounding Lampedusa’s wedding. His wife-to-be was one Alessandra Wolf, known as Licy, a stepdaughter of his paternal uncle Pietro. (Her father was a Latvian baron of German origin who had died in the Russian Revolution; after his death, she, unlike the rest of her family, remained in Riga to see after his huge estate.) Licy, whom Lampedusa first met in 1925, was a “handsome and intelligent woman with a formidable personality . . . a linguist with a wide knowledge of European literature”—that is, a woman in many ways not unlike his mother. She was also, quite extraordinarily, a practicing Freudian psychoanalyst, trained in Berlin and Vienna.

In 1932, when Lampedusa proposed to her, Licy was already married. Their wedding plans were made in secret, not only because Licy had to arrange her divorce, but because Lampedusa knew his mother did not approve of her. “A serious-minded and rather imperious woman, already thirty-seven, [Licy] cannot have seemed an ideal daughter-in-law to Beatrice,” writes Mr. Gilmour. But what woman could? Mr. Gilmour mentions that in the 1920s, Lampedusa had been engaged twice—“to an Italian girl and an English girl”—but that all details of these early romances, and of the reasons for their breaking off, are unknown. Mr. Gilmour speculates that, especially in his youth, Lampedusa “was shy and tentative with girls his own age” and so asked to be excused from these relationships; there is also the rumor that Lampedusa was impotent. But nowhere does the biographer suggest the obvious—that Lampedusa broke off these previous engagements for fear of his mother’s disapproval.

Lampedusa was married in August 1932, and postponed telling his mother until his wedding day. That morning, from a hotel in Riga, he wrote her an anxious letter declaring his love for Licy but pretending the wedding was still some months away. This letter, and another written days later petitioning for a reply to the first, would make pathetic reading from a boy of eighteen; Lampedusa was then thirty-five. “I beg you,” he wrote, “I know you wish me well, I know very well that all your thoughts are for me, but I beg you not to let yourself be carried away by a moment of irrational anger”; “One word from you will be enough to give us happiness that would move you if you could see it”; “I beg you to reflect before compromising a future so full of good omens with a thoughtless gesture.” Lampedusa knew exactly what was to befall him by marrying Licy: he’d become, as Mr. Gilmour puts it, “the battleground over which two powerful characters, his wife and his mother, would wage a long and acerbic battle.”

His women didn’t disappointment him. When the newlyweds expressed their desire to begin their life together in an apartment in Palermo, Beatrice made it clear that she “did not wish to deprive herself of her son,” and that they must come live with her. This was tried for a while, with predictably disastrous results:

Perhaps she would have settled elsewhere had it been within her means, or had her nemesis, Beatrice, been in better health. At any rate, it was not until 1945, thirteen years after their wedding and mere months before his mother’s death, that the Prince and Princess of Lampedusa made a home together that was truly their own, in an apartment on Palermo’s Via Butera.

In 1945, Lampedusa was nearing fifty and had little more than a decade left to him. Fully half of Mr. Gilmour’s book is devoted to these last years, and this feels right, for it is only then, after he’d ceased to be a professional son and caretaker of an estate, that Lampedusa turned his full attention toward literature. It had always been something more to him than a mere diversion; it had been his intellectual passion and, in his solitude, his greatest consolation. But in these years it became something even greater: a vocation and, at last, a commitment.

Lampedusa read everything, and all of it, except for Russian novels, in the original.

Lampedusa read everything, and all of it, except for Russian novels, in the original. As a child he had learned to read Italian, French, and German, and in his teens acquired English. By his middle twenties he had read all of Shakespeare, who would prove a lifelong obsession: Lampedusa thought him not only “the greatest poet who ever lived” but “the most glorious name in the history of humanity.” (It was the Bard, significantly, who provided the subject of small talk on Lampedusa’s first walks with Licy.) English literature was for Lampedusa “a solid block, without those crevices, those abeyances of talent which are so painful to behold” in other literatures. Besides Shakespeare, English could boast of Dr. Johnson (“the quintessential Londoner” and thus the very embodiment of English civilization) and Dickens (Lampedusa packed The Pickwick Papers whenever he traveled the way some people pack a Bible). There were also Marlowe, Keats, and Hopkins; Fielding, Sterne, and Emily Brontë; and, most recently, Eliot, Woolf, Waugh, and Forster. After the English, Lampedusa admired the French, but more selectively, writing off the entire eighteenth century as well as most of the nineteenth. In French there were, above all others, Montaigne (“the spirit of the Renaissance in its supreme state of distillation”) and Stendhal (Lampedusa could never decide whether The Red and the Black or The Charterhouse of Parma was the greatest novel in any language).

Of the literature of his own Italy, Lampedusa thought little, with the exception of Petrarch, Leopardi, Montale, and a handful of others. Italian writers, said Lampedusa, lack the single greatest virtue of the English people, namely a sense of humor. Even worse, they are di campanile—i.e., provincial—and so are their readers. (Lampedusa used to illustrate this point by recalling a woman who was returning to Palermo with him by car “after an absence of two days. On reaching Port Felice she made the sign of the Cross and thanked the Lord for allowing her to see her native city once more [‘O tu, Palermo, terra adorata’]. How is it possible that this lady could ever be interested in Conrad, who for twenty years wandered around the Pacific, or Kipling, who spent half his time between London and India?”) But worst of all, Italians have no taste for subtlety in art. This explains their mania for opera, which, wrote Lampedusa,

In the wake of Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi, how could one expect an Italian to respond to the muted artistry of, say, Jane Austen? One couldn’t. Because of all this “noisy foolishness,” said Lampedusa, Italy had become “the nation least interested in literature that exists, fed up . . . with opera, but unready to listen to anything else.”

As a young man of thirty, Lampedusa published three articles in a little Genoese journal—an essay on Paul Morand, another on Yeats, and a review of a biography of Julius Caesar. He did not continue to write for publication, however, perhaps because he thought it vain to address a “deaf” Italian public. Instead he read every afternoon and made copious notes on his reading, mostly in cafés, usually alone, over numerous pastries (Lampedusa was no small man). His mornings were spent browsing in bookshops, and many of his evenings spent reading aloud, from favorite authors, to Licy.

It was Licy who made, in the early 1950s, a suggestion that would change his life. She had long realized that, in the presence of strangers, indeed even of loved ones, her shy and tongue-tied husband could relax only when the subject was literature. Lampedusa had made a few young friends in the cafés of Palermo for whom he enjoyed holding forth on books and writers, and Licy proposed that he organize his thoughts into an informal series of lectures for their benefit. It was no sooner proposed than begun, and between the end of 1953 and January 1955, three nights a week at six o’clock sharp, Lampedusa conducted a course on English literature at his apartment on the Via Butera. In preparation for his talks, writes Mr. Gilmour, “[h]e wrote over a thousand pages on British writers from Bede to Graham Greene,” the most concentrated stretch of work he had yet done in his life.

“Lampedusa was knowledgeable about literary currents but despised critics,” writes Mr. Gilmour. “The only four … who escaped his scorn were Hazlitt, Lamb, Sainte-Beuve and De Sanctis.” One wonders, however, what Lampedusa thought of Taine, for his lectures bring to mind, at least in Mr. Gilmour’s brief description of them, nothing so much as Taine’s History of English Literature. Both are comprehensive workings-out, by a foreign writer for a foreign audience, of the characteristics of the English genius through the particularities of great—and on occasion merely typical—works of English literature. Like Taine, Lampedusa was concerned throughout his criticism with matters of biography and history and, according to Mr. Gilmour, “was fond of drawing attention to particular themes which he traced down through the centuries”:

Lampedusa also traced the effect on writers of England’s cultural institutions, not least among them the public-school system. “Even more than forming men of culture,” wrote Lampedusa, “[these schools] aim to form men of character. Separation from the family and a life with contemporaries eradicates that type of ‘momma’s boy’ so perniciously frequent the more one travels to the south [of Europe]; compulsory sports in the open air in any kind of weather prevent timidity and physical fear and train one for rapid decisions and teamwork . . .” Of this Mr. Gilmour comments: “It is surprising to find Lampedusa praising a system of which he had no direct experience and in which he would not have prospered.” But Lampedusa’s point in sketching his ideal Etonian was to criticize all that his sheltered upbringing did not allow him to become, just as his point in teaching Conrad was to offer his students “an antidote to the unbearable stagnation of Palermitan life.”

One of his students, Francesco Orlando, then a student of law at Palermo University, has published a memoir of his studies with Lampedusa. He remembers him as an excellent teacher, patient with his students’ ignorance and “generous and kind beyond all description,” lending freely from his library and even giving away books when a pupil showed a special interest. “He was undoubtedly happy to have broken his intellectual isolation,” writes Orlando, “to be able to talk so much about literature, to get to know young people and transmit something to them.” But toward the end of the course on English literature, a change came over Lampedusa, a change that grew more pronounced throughout the abbreviated course on French literature that followed. It is not that the quality of the lessons diminished—Orlando remembers Lampedusa at his summit as explicator of Eliot, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé—but that Lampedusa became “more reserved, less patient, prouder,” and stingier with his time outside of class. At the time, Orlando was confused and pained by this, but in retrospect he realized the reason behind it: through preparing his lectures Lampedusa had discovered his calling as a writer, and now, more than anything else, he was eager to devote his best energies to composing a novel.

According to Licy, Lampedusa had been turning over ideas for a book for more than twenty years, and may well have begun a draft of it before World War II, though no pages of it survive. What had kept him from writing were two “Sicilian” self-attributes which he loathed—namely, inertia and diffidence. What now shocked him into action was not only his success with his lectures but something even less expected: the literary success of his cousin and long-time intellectual companion, Lucio Piccolo. In the spring of 1954, Piccolo, a genuinely talented poet, sent his recently self-published Canti Barocchi to Eugenio Montale, with a cover letter ghost-written by Lampedusa. The timing was fortunate, for Montale had just been asked to take part in a literary conference at which he and other established figures of Italian letters would each introduce an unknown writer. Montale sponsored Piccolo, whom he would later call a “sedentary piper who can draw unheard-of melodies even from a broken reed,” and who, to Lampedusa’s bitter astonishment, became the sensation of the conference. As a result of this success, Piccolo’s little book of canti was soon picked up by the prestigious Milanese firm of Mondadori. Lampedusa later wrote to a friend: “Being mathematically certain that I was no more foolish [than my cousin], I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel.”

The book that was to become The Leopard did not come all of piece, in a fit of inspiration, but haltingly, after many false starts.

The book that was to become The Leopard did not come all of piece, in a fit of inspiration, but haltingly, after many false starts. What today stands as the first chapter was the product of many months’ writing and rewriting, and the rest of the chapters came later, scene by discrete scene, and in nothing like the sequence in which they were finally ordered. The Leopard has no plot, but it has a “situation,” which is dramatized in a series of indelible vignettes —the situation of Don Fabrizio, the heirless, star-gazing Prince of Salina, “watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move towards saving it.” The novel opens in Palermo, 1860, at the moment of its occupation by Garibaldi’s Redshirts, who will soon win Sicily from the Bourbons and bring it into a newly unified, Piedmont-controlled Italy. Fabrizio’s beloved, spirited, and penniless nephew Tancredi—himself, to the Prince’s ambivalence, a hero among the Redshirts—would like to marry Fabrizio’s pretty and passive daughter Concetta, but the Prince thinks the match not a good one for Tancredi. The world of the Salinas, like the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, is passing, or already past; Tancredi—whom Fabrizio fancies “the standard-bearer of a counter-attack which the nobility, under new trappings, could launch against the new social State”—must marry Angelica, the daughter of the Snopesish Mayor, a vibrant young woman who could bring him not only a considerable dowry but, through her grasping land-dealing father, political opportunity under the Piedmontese.

What gives the book its remarkable inner unity is not the story line—to which, as Montale pointed out, many more scenes could be added and certain others taken away—but rather the sensual, nostalgic controlling consciousness of Don Fabrizio. The old Prince silently mourns the end of his line, his Sicily, and, finally, his very life. When death at last comes for him, his thoughts are of these things as given form by his palace, Donnafugata, “the sense of tradition and the perennial expressed in stone and water, time congealed”:

Fabrizio is indeed a portrait of Lampedusa’s great-grandfather, Prince Giulio, in his astronomy, his sportsmanship, and his political situation. But, more than that, Fabrizio is, though Licy strenuously denied it, a fictional self-portrait—or, more precisely, the author’s alter ego, the prince that Lampedusa would have liked to be. “Lampedusa,” writes Mr. Gilmour, “did not have Salina’s arrogant confidence, his overt sensuality, his authority over others: the author’s own personality, largely moulded by his mother . . . made him a very different person. Lampedusa shared the Leopard’s ideas and reactions, had many of the inner thoughts and feelings, but his behavior was that of a milder animal.”

The figure of Tancredi, too, is a conflation of the historical and the personal. Prince Giulio did have a nephew among the Garibaldini, Corrado Valguarnera di Niscemi. But Tancredi, wrote Lampedusa, is, “so far as appearance and habits are concerned, a portrait of Giò”—that is, Gioacchino Lanza, Lampedusa’s dearest pupil and, as of 1956, his son by adoption. Young Lanza was the great joy of Lampedusa’s declining years, and in many ways another alter ego, exactly like the prince in his merits and defects: “He is sarcastic and indolent,” Lampedusa wrote to a friend, “has a vivid curiosity for intellectual matters, is full of spirit, has much superficial malice and a good deal of fundamental kindness. Besides, more than with me, one can see a mile off that he is a ‘gentleman’. In short, my wife and I are mad about him.”

Lampedusa died, at the age of sixty, on July 23, 1957. A week earlier, he had received word from the Sicilian novelist Elio Vittorini, acting as consultant to the firm of Mondadori, that he could not recommend The Leopard for publication. According to this leading Neorealist, Lampedusa’s book was “rather old-fashioned,” not to mention “essayish” and “unbalanced,” a verdict that upset the ailing novelist visibly. He knew he had no time to revise his work further, and no inclination to turn it into Vittorini’s sort of commodity. He instructed his family to pursue publication after his death, but forbade them to publish at their own expense.

It was less than a year later that a typescript found its way to Giorgio Bassani, author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and an editor of fiction for Feltrinelli. He published the book, with his own enthusiastic preface, in November 1958; by the end of the following year it had taken the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious award for fiction, and had gone through some fifty printings. It was already well on its way to becoming what it is today—the best-selling, most widely translated novel to have come out ofItaly in this century.

The initial Italian reviews of The Leopard were remarkable for their warmth.

The initial Italian reviews of The Leopard were remarkable for their warmth. Montale wrote one of the earliest, in which he called the book “almost perfect in form” and “the work of a mature and modern artist.” Then, with the huge sales, came the predictable backlash. Lampedusa’s critics, according to Mr. Gilmour, fell into four categories: “Sicilian apologists who were outraged” by his study of the island’s “stagnation”; “fervent Catholics who disliked his pessimism”; “Marxists who attacked his view of history and apparent denial of progress”; and, most vocal of all, “the literary Left which thought novels ought to be avant-garde and ‘committed’.” That the Strega should go to a dead aristocrat who wrote historical fiction in standard-Italian diction was too much for some advanced novelists to bear: “For the last thirty years,” complained Vasco Pratolini, “we have strained to advance our literature. Lampedusa has set us back sixty years.”

Of course no one was more stultified by the book’s success than Elio Vittorini. His well-publicized rejection of the novel had made him an intellectual laughingstock and called into question the successes of the whole Neorealist movement. An even greater blow to the Italian Left was landed by the French Marxist Louis Aragon. It was ridiculous, he said, for Alberto Moravia, Vittorini, and others to characterize The Leopard as a “right-wing book.” Aragon correctly saw that it was a “merciless~rdq criticism of the ultimate ineffectuality of Lampedusa’s own class and that, far from being old-fashioned, the book owed an immense debt to such modern writers as Proust and Joyce. No, even for the engagé Aragon, The Leopard was a masterpiece, “one of the great novels of all time, and perhaps . . . the only Italian novel.”

But Lampedusa is not read today because he conveniently serves the ideology of one or another political group. He is read, and reread, for the reason all great writers are read: the superb artistry with which he renders human experience. At the beginning of his memoirs, Lampedusa finds occasion to praise those of Stendhal, which he judges “a remarkable attempt to sweep away accumulated memories and reach the essence. And what lucidity of style! What a mass of reflections, the more precious for being common to all men!” And so posterity has come to judge The Leopard, that most mellow of twentieth-century novels, a valediction to the world by one who dearly loved it.

Notes
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