Gotham Diary:
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10 June 2013
Dreary as it is today, it is slightly difficult to remember by what a stroke of readerly providence it was that I came to the end (for the second time) of Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) shortly after noon on a brilliant summery Sunday in June. While Kathleen was at Mass, no less, at the church where we were married nearly thirty-two years ago, no less. It was all extremely concordant, and I felt that a Sicilian tenacity was holding my world in place, much as it did the Prince’s. In Lampedusa’s magisterially conservative Weltanschauung, nothing changes and nothing remains the same: passing away and becoming are the same thing. His writing ascends to such a pitch that one can fairly hear the music, not of the spheres, but of Kepler’s polyhedra, grating smoothly against each other at the occasional point of contact. Cosmic, in a word.
The Leopard is a book for older readers. It won’t do young readers any harm, although I expect it might bore them; I myself didn’t read the novel until I was in my early fifties, but even then I found it somewhat extended. This time round, it had the concision of a prose poem. There is also something faintly liturgical about it, as if Lampedusa were observing what we might call the Rite of the Novel. The book consists entirely of set pieces that are studded with memories. The family saying the rosary; the discussions with Fr Pirrone and Tancredi; the voyage to Donnefugata; the bourgeois comedy of marital misalliance, seen from the opposite perspective; a fantasia on fairy tale themes that follows the young lovers on their escapades through the vast, unmapped palace; the Ponteleone ball, summa and summary of Le temps retrouvé; the death of the just man, satisfactorily according with the Prince’s reaction to the copy of the Greuze painting in the preceding chapter; and closing with the family — now reduced to three of the Prince’s daughters (with his daughter-in-law looking on) — not saying the rosary but trying to hold on to the right to hear Mass in its chapel, a chapel (and a privilege) unknown in the Prince’s day.
Each of these scenes — I neglected the intermezzo in which Fr Pirrone visits his ancestral village and patches up a family quarrel — is as suave and shapely as the very best of European literature, and far more stylish than anything written in English (except by Henry James). The art lies not only in the beauty of the prose but in the concentration of significance, which is often effected by inverted sequences. Take, for example, the trip to Donnefugata, which takes up twelve pages in the Pantheon edition. We begin near the end, on the third day of the journey, with an extended rest stop — a scene by Corot. Then we flash back to an evening at the villa outside Palermo: a “Piedmontese” general arrives, together with his entourage (including Tancredi, the beloved, mercurial nephew) and asks to see the frescoes (!); this general is said to have been useful in arrangement the safe-conducts for the family’s crossing of the island from Palermo. Now Lampedusa returns to the journey, this time cataloguing its horrors and hardships (“…the Prince had found thirteen flies in his glass of fruit juice, while a strong smell of excrement…”). At the outskirts of the town, the cortege is welcomed by the “authorities.” And then, instead of retiring to the palace, the family proceeds to the cathedral for a Te Deum. Everything in this extended passage is massive, arduous, slow, and lighted by menace. The Salina family is impervious, but it treads on nothing more substantial than nuance. If you are severely pressed, these twelve pages will do a passable job of standing in for the novel as a whole.
The Leopard makes me envy Umberto Eco, because I believe that you would really have to be he in order to get everything that this novel has to offer. I don’t mean to suggest that The Leopard is at all obscure. But it, too, treads on nuance, on quiet references to Italian culture and history (and beyond) that I register without fully comprehending. The book’s political talk (not that there is so very much of it) must be so much more tensely allusive to well-educated Italians. And how the aristocratic writer would be cackling (silently, I imagine) at the current state of Italian politics. Talk about foretold!
***
I was still basking in the afterglow of Lampedusa’s masterpiece when Will and his mother arrived, a visit that, while it prolonged the concordance, prorogued my daydreams about the House of Salina. For the first time, we were able to enjoy the balcony as a family, and the balcony was fine place for would-be messes, such as playing with Kathleen’s collection of stamps and inkpads. Always fascinated by the three-gallon watering can that he has never been able to lift, Will found a new use for it when he discovered that his feet were “thirsty” and in need of immersion (up to the knee). Only one leg at a time, though! Happily, there isn’t room for both; if there were, Will and the watering can would have tipped over for sure, spilling a small lake of water that would immediately subside beneath our faux-brick flooring only to flood the neighboring balcony.
Like everybody, Will likes to have a choice. For quite a long time, he has been subsisting on milk, fruit, French fries, and the odd bit of vegetable. That is all we get to see, anyway. Signs that his original omnivorousness may be returning have begun to glimmer, however. For his dinner last night, we ordered a grilled cheese sandwich deluxe from the “dinner store” across the street (read “coffee shop”), so that Will could feast on the deluxe — the fries. The grownups were going to eat Chinese, which was a different order, so while Kathleen and Megan chatted indoors, waiting for that to arrive, I sat with Will at the table on the balcony while he tucked into his food. The stamps and the inkpads were nearby, and he seemed interested in playing with them while he ate, but I gently forbade that and he did not persist. I asked him to try a bit of his sandwich and he declined. Then I had a very low idea. I offered to let him play with the stamps while he ate if he took two bites of the sandwich. He at once put down the French fry in his hand, picked up half of the sandwich, and took the tiniest of bites. When it was objected that this did not count, he took a slightly larger one. Presently, he had taken two real bites and I reached for a third. To my surprise, he didn’t balk. The third bite was followed by a purely voluntary fourth, a fifth, and so on. Will seemed unable to put down the sandwich. This was gratifying in itself, but I was also piqued to observe that he showed no interest in playing with the stamps. It was the option that he wanted. And, only then, as he discovered, a grilled cheese sandwich