Sunday Whatever: The Canadian Poet and the Sicilian Prince by Michael Bloor

‘Lampedusa’ (2020), the second novel of the Canadian poet, Steven Price, is an imagined account of the last years of the Sicilian author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957),  as he struggled with illness and self-doubt to complete his only work of fiction, ‘The Leopard’ (1963). That book, ‘Il gattopardo’ in Italian, won the Strega Prize, Italy’s top literary award, and became an international best seller. It was made into a Hollywood film, directed by Visconti, in 1963 (re-released in 1983), starring Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster. Apparently, Visconti wanted Laurence Olivier for the part, but the producers chose Lancaster.

‘The Leopard’ was internationally acclaimed, but the acclaim came too late for Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: his book, having been turned down by two publishers, was still unpublished at the time of the author’s death.

So Price’s book, Lampedusa, was written about a writer writing a book. And this piece of mine is written about the writing of a book about a writer writing a book. You can’t get much more dilettantish than that. What’s more, Steve Price clearly knew a great deal about the life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, whereas I know almost nothing about Steven Price, an academic as well as a poet, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. But my interest is in what Price wrote, whereas Price’s interest was in Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s life.

[Still with me? Thank you for your dogged persistence.]

Firstly then, a brief account of Price’s subject…

Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was the 11^th Prince of Lampedusa, 12^th Duke of Palma, Baron of Montechiaro, Baron La Toretta, and Grandee first class of Spain. Henceforth, ‘Guiseppe’. His ancestors had largely frittered away his patrimony and WWII American shelling had ruined his palazzo in Palermo. His wife was Alexandra von Wolfe-Somersee, of Baltic German descent and a practising psychoanalyst. They met when he was staying in London with his uncle, the then Italian ambassador. He fought in Italy’s disastrous Alpine campaign in WWI and was captured by the Austrians. He was fluent in Italian, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Latin and Greek; he was a lifelong voracious reader. To privately entertain and instruct some young Sicilian students, he wrote

a thousand-page-manuscript history of English literature from Bede to Graham Greene. His favourite authors were Stendhal, Shakespeare, and Dickens.

It follows then that this Sicilian prince was born into a family of great privilege, on an island still feudal in many respects. He was a man of considerable intellectual gifts, with a love of literature and the leisure to pursue that love. Yet his Canadian narrator portrays Guiseppe as a discreetly sorrowful person, writing that ‘he could not recall a time when his own pleasure had been untainted by loss’ (p.149).

Price attaches considerable importance to a family tragedy and scandal that took place in 1911, when Guiseppe was just fourteen. His father was a remote figure, and Guiseppe’s strong bond was with his mother, one of five lively, talented, Sicilian sisters who lived for each other. Two years previously, one of the sisters had died in the Messina earthquake, a death which had hit Guiseppe’s mother very hard. Then, in 1911, a scandal broke over the death of another sister, Guiseppe’s aunt, Guilia. She was a friend and lady-in-waiting of the Italian Queen, Elena, at the royal court in Rome. Guilia had been drawn into an affaire with an erratic gambler, Baron Vincenzo Paternò del Cugno. She had tried to end the affaire and the baron had threatened to expose her and demanded money to settle his gambling debts. Guilia appealed to her family for help, and it was arranged that the blackmailing baron, an army officer, should be posted away from Rome. Two months later, the baron went absent without leave and, in a shabby Roman hotel, stabbed Guilia to death and then shot himself in the head. The death was public knowledge: sorrowing crowds greeted Guilia’s coffin on her return to Sicily.

Guilia’s death quite unhinged Guiseppe’s mother, she wailed and wept, refused visitors and refused to go out. Then she fled with Guiseppe, first to Tuscany, and then to the house of a sculptor in the south of France. On their return, his mother was shocked once more to discover that the blackmailer had not died: after nine months in a private hospital, he was declared well enough to stand trial. Guiseppe’s mother was required to appear as a witness. She had to listen to her sister’s passionate love letters being read out in court, letters that were later published in the newspapers. Counsel for the baron implied that the five sisters were a dissolute family, speculations that were followed up in the Sicilian press. Guiseppe’s mother wept in court and her youngest, unmarried, sister committed suicide.

According to Price, Guiseppe’s mother’s horror ‘was like a small bell striking in [Gioseppe’s] heart’ (p.120). His mother lived on, altered and embittered. Price believed that Guiseppe too had undergone a subtle but enduring change. Certainly, the world around him offered him little encouragement to lift his spirits or exercise his gifts – the slaughter of WWI and the ennui of the PoW camp, the corruption of public life in Mussolini’s Italy, the mass emigration of the Sicilian peasantry to America and Argentina, the Mafia kidnapping of a wealthy relative.

The second event that Price believed to have shaped Guiseppe’s life, was a diagnosis of emphysema (he died of lung cancer a couple of years later). Price wrote that, as he left the doctor’s office, Guiseppe confronted the thought that, all his life, ‘he had avoided any gesture that might be noticed or considered worthy of remembrance’ (p.140).

One imagines that there’s no way that Price could know what Guiseppe’s thoughts were on leaving the doctor’s office. Price was writing fiction, not biography. But fiction can have a ring of truth. It’s certainly plausible that past events could have conspired to cause Guiseppe to value his privacy and conceal his talents. And it’s certainly the case that, in the aftermath of his diagnosis, and secretly at first, he settled down to complete what would become ‘The Leopard.’

The main character in The Leopard (Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina) is more than partly based on Guiseppe’s aristocratic great-grandfather, who lived through the political and social turmoil that began in Sicily in 1860, with Garibaldi’s invasion of the island with his thousand-strong volunteer army of ‘Redshirts’, an invasion that led eventually to the unification of Italy, for the first time since the Roman Empire. It’s no accident that Don Fabrizio’s character has more than a few similarities with Guiseppe. He’s a talented person, a celebrated amateur astronomer.  And he understands, but carefully avoids, the political upheavals of the day.

For some time, Guiseppe failed to tell his wife of his diagnosis, likewise his young Sicilian friends, although they were all aware of his breathlessness and his heaving, hacking cough. He did eventually confide that he was writing something, but he belittled it. When he finally read the early chapters to his wife, she immediately told him it was a masterpiece [no wifely soft-soaping there – remember she’s a psychoanalyst].

A degree of self-belief had finally crept into Guiseppe’s life. One of the young friends was engaged as a typist. A cousin, Lucio, who was a published poet, was asked to find a publisher. Guiseppe worked through his illness to complete the final chapters. Childless, he and his wife asked another of the young friends to be their adopted heir.

Lucio’s contact wrote back to Lucio that he did not think it publishable. The letter must’ve been painful to Guiseppe. Another publisher then turned ‘The Leopard’ down. Guiseppe died in 1957. One of Guiseppe’s young friends had asked permission to send the manuscript to a contact, which eventually led to a publishing contract a year after Guiseppe’s death. It was an immediate best-seller. Multiple translations appeared, the first English one in 1960; the Visconti film followed soon after..

Price doesn’t treat as a tragedy the fact that Guiseppe died before his book was published and lauded. It’s just a guess, but I reckon that both Price and Guiseppe di Lampedusa would agree with a favourite Scottish author of mine, William Mcilvanney, who wrote, ‘I don’t believe life’s about success – this is about the honour of endeavour.’

Steven Price (2019)’ Lampedusa, a Novel’, Picador, London.

Guiseppe di Lampedusa (1963) ‘The Leopard’, Fontana, London.

William Mcilvanney http://www.personaldispatches.com

Michael Bloor