The Leopard—Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Nothing lasts but nothing changes
The novel takes place during the Risorgimento, the liberation and unification of Italy that began around 1860. We follow a family of the Sicilian nobility during that momentous transition from the old order to the new. I confess I dreaded starting this book, because I didn’t want to endure either an autobiography or a history lecture. Instead, I got a delightful treat: A sort of irascible, Sicilian Proust, more interested in planetary motions than in the raucous, smelly history unfolding on each side of him. Lampedusa plays the loquacious docent for us as we sightsee that tumultuous moment in Italian history. His descriptions call up all our senses as well as a menagerie of religious, mythological, and literary associations. Indeed, even from the first paragraph, he whisks the reader off to Italy, where every wall, floor, spandrel, and ceiling pullulates with contorted flesh and undulating cloth. Lampedusa’s euphuistic prose perfectly captures the fading carnal exuberance of the ancestral palaces in which the story unfolds.
The Leopard symbolizes the Salina dynasty, and it recurs throughout the novel both visually and thematically. The papa leopard of the novel, one Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, would, in the hands of any other author, play only a supporting role, smoldering or flaring up as needed, a domineering, imperious, patriarch—someone feared or pacified by the other characters, yet never treated seriously by the author. But Lampedusa takes us into the mind of this otherwise unlikable paterfamilias, so that, whatever we may think of him at first, we end up loving him and siding with his grouchy, assessments of family, friends, and countrymen. Offstage, Garibaldi’s Redshirts may have their little revolution, but the Prince goes about the serious, centuries-old business of running the dwindling family estate, escaping into his amateur observatory whenever the mundane duties become too vexatious. Many people around him get caught up in the political upheaval, but he glides across the surface of his vanishing aristocratic world, dropping a cynical remark here and there about the chaos engulfing his world. As the revolution approaches, the distant hillsides twinkle with bonfires. But he won’t greatly worry about such fires, “stoked by men who were themselves very like those living in the monasteries below, as fanatical, as self-absorbed, as avid for power or rather for the idleness which was, for them, the purpose of power.”
I have little to say about the plot. The Prince’s beloved nephew, Tancredi, intends to ask him for the hand of one of the Prince’s daughters, Concetta, but instead falls totally under the spell of Angelica, the daughter of an upwardly mobile merchant. The jilted Concetta remains single all her life, while the eventual marriage of Tancredi and Angelica though will never live up to its promise. Or so the narrator cynically assures us. I got the impression that Lampedusa would rather leave the chronicling of a failed marriage to the Tolstoys of the literary world. A wise decision, I think.
If an American director had made a film of this book, the plot would have turned around the insufferably trite love affair between Tancredi and Angelica. But how could a movie ever convey the humor and overwrought analogies of passages such as this?
When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been the days when desire was always present because always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success; a preparation, however, in a way sufficient to itself, exquisite and brief; like those overtures which outlive the forgotten operas they belong to and hint in delicate veiled gaiety at all the arias which later in the opera are to be developed undeftly, and fail.
My favorite chapter, “A Ball,” nicely captures my own impression of almost all events that feature dancing. Don Fabrizio thinks of his daughters as “incomprehensible beings for whom a ball is fun and not a tedious worldly duty.” Walking among through the crowded rooms, he observes
… the drawing-rooms were now filled with a mob of girls incredibly short, improbably dark, unbearably giggly. They were sitting around in huddles, letting out an occasional hoot at an alarmed young man, and destined, apparently, to act only as background to three or four lovely creatures such as the fair-haired Maria Palma, and the exquisite Eleonora Giardinelli, who glided by like swans over a frog-filled pool.
Of the people surrounding him, Fabrizio hated no one, loved only a few, but accepted all. This latter trait endeared him to me. For instance, even though aware of the young couple’s ingenuous affection for each other, his response to Angelica’s and Tancredi’s suggestion that he dance succinctly captures his indulgent frame of mind. “Don Fabrizio could not make out if they had thought up this suggestion to please him or to mock him. It didn’t matter; they were dear creatures all the same.” And again, in the midst of the ball, “Don Fabrizio felt his heart thaw. His disgust gave way to compassion for these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms. How could one inveigh against those sure to die? […] Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.”
Much of the story consists of old-man regrets and amusement at so much youth wasted on the young.
They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love, dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor. … Neither was good, each self-interested, turgid with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies destined to die.
Of the politics surrounding him, he cared little and expected less. When Cavalier Chevalley, a representative of the Kingdom of Sardinia visits the Prince to ask him to join the new government then forming, Chevalley expresses the optimism rampant at the time, “This state of things won’t last; our lively new modern administration will change it all,” the Prince replied,
“All this shouldn’t last; but it will, always; the human ‘always’ of course, a century, two centuries … and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards and lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”
Lampedusa continues,
“They thanked each other and said good-bye. Chevalley hoisted himself up on the post-carriage, propped on four wheels the colour of vomit. The horse, all hunger and sores, began its long journey.”
I enjoyed researching the history of the Risorgimento. I also enjoyed the intimacy of the narration, feeling myself in the presence of a kindred spirit. I loved Lampedusa’s wry observations. The setting of this novel strike me not so much as a history lesson as an excuse for exploring the dusty corridors of an aristocratic mind. As the narrator points out,
Nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, annihilated by imagination and self-interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves on the fact and tear it to pieces …
Next week, I hope to say something about Nothing, by Henry Green.
Amazon links to works related to this post.
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Nothing by Henry Green
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