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Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa, was born in 1896 to an old aristocratic Sicilian family. He was a lance-corporal during the first world war. Captured in Austria, he escaped and returned home on foot. During the second world war he travelled extensively in Europe. He met his Italian-Latvian wife, Alessandra Wolf Stomersee, in London and married her in Riga. After the war, he returned to Palermo, where he died of cancer in 1957. His masterpiece, The Leopard, was turned down by a number of publishers until it was accepted by Giorgio Bassani for Feltrinelli: to the annoyance of conceited publishers, haunted by the good books they have rejected, it has since become the best-selling Italian novel of all time.
During his travels, Lampedusa wrote extensively to friends and family. His correspondence (Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi tells us in an informative introduction to this edition), consists of two collections: the large one, comprising almost 400 letters between Lampedusa and his wife, is still being edited for publication in Italy; the smaller one covering the years 1925 to 1930, made up of 70 letters addressed to various friends and acquaintances, especially the Piccolo brothers, Casimiro and Lucio, his childhood friends.
In a short memoir, Places of My Infancy, Lampedusa writes : ‘I can promise to say nothing that is untrue, but I don’t think I shall want to say all; and I reserve the right to lie by omission. Unless I change my mind.’ The correspondence is a fine example of this deliberately deceptive style. It appears factual, veers towards the confidential, seems to turn to derision and sarcasm, then adopts a serious, even melancholy tone. Reading the letters today, over the dead shoulders of their recipients, we wonder what to believe. It all sounds so true and so made-up at the same time. For instance, what are we to make of this missive addressed from the Hotel Excelsior in Bressanone to ‘Lucio, crowned with laurel’?
The Monster is doing really well in this little town of abbeys, cloisters, powerful bishops and clear flowing water and decorous hills. And he is reading and making shrewd annotations on the profound lyrics of the respectable dean of St Paul’s. I have learnt of the numerous tragic deaths which have gladdened the summer over there. O my cradle, O city of my childhood, why within the iron-coloured circle of your hills are you so filthy, sad and desperate? And why do you elect as your perpetual inhabitants, Tragedy without a soul and Grief without any light ?
Here the editor’s notes are invaluable. Literary readers may recognise the Dean of St Paul’s as John Donne and the elegiac lines about ‘the city of my childhood’ as an adaptation of Dante’s, but it also helps to know that it was Lucio Piccolo himself who nicknamed Lampedusa ‘the Monster’ for his voracious reading habits.
But in this letter, as in most of the rest of his correspondence, the pleasure for the unintended reader comes not from the slightly prurient feeling of putting one’s nose in someone else’s private business, but from the discovery, in the raw as it were, of the brilliant literary intelligence, the flare for language (exquisitely rendered into English by J. G. Nichols), the passionate interest Lampedusa had in the affairs and quirks and dramas of his fellow humans.
Early readers of The Leopard in its unfinished manuscript form (mainly dogmatic Italian Marxists for whom no aristocratic character could possibly be a worthy artistic subject) derided a style so far removed from the modernist experimentation and a theme so rooted in remembrance of things past. Today, when the status of The Leopard as a modern classic is no longer in dispute, the reading of Lampedusa’s travel correspondence brings to light a draft, an essay of a certain voice, a first glimpse of that certain identifiable mixture of tenderness, wisdom and irony that became Lampedudsa’s incomparable style.
Because you read about book reviews
Also by Alberto Manguel
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