26 July – To Orlando at 3 for copying of The Leopard. At 5.30 to the Noto Clinic for second treatment to my nose. The “boys” come at 9 and we go to dinner at Spanò, while Licy goes to dine at Villa Igiea at invitation of the Rotary and the Soroptimists. After dinner we too go to Villa Igiea to fetch Licy and then to Lo Monaco’s.22
23 August – To Orlando’s at 11.15 to copy out the final part of The Leopard. At 1.30 to Castelnuovo with Orlando for lunch, then we get back to work till 5.50 and complete the task. Giò comes and drives me home.
During those months the manuscript was also read in the house of Bebbuzzo Sgadari and lent to a number of friends, including Corrado Fratta and my mother.23 Nobody saw in it a great novel, what proved most striking was how close it came to the factual history of Palermo in days gone by, which was both amusing and repulsive. Only the passages that did not relate to the situation in Palermo really carried home: the encounter with Chevalley and the death of the Prince. For her part Licy, and to some extent my mother, both immune to local partisanship, were both struck from the start by the book’s value as literature.
On 8 June 1956 in a letter to his sister-in-law Lolette Bianchieri, thanking her for the loan of a volume of Apollinaire, Lampedusa mentions the ups and downs of the novel’s writing and the apparently favourable outcome of the first attempt at publication.
To move from Apollinaire to an author of much smaller attainment, I am happy to say that my “Leopard”(as it is now called) has been sent by Lucio Piccolo to Mondadori. Much to our surprise, an answer came back by return of post, a thoroughly enthusiastic letter thanking Lucio for having brought such an interesting work to the publisher’s attention, and (implicitly) promising to publish it, but warning that owing to the number of prior commitments this would take time. I have to confess that my blameworthy vanity is highly satisfied.
I have written a fifth episode to slot in between the dinner at Donnafugata and the Prince’s death. It shows Don Fabrizio out hunting with the organist and airing his views on the political situation and the change in Tancredi. Some of it is graceful enough, other parts a great deal less so. My friend Orlando is at present much taken up with exams, but if he manages to type it out in time, I’ll send it to you with Licy; in its handwritten form it is illegible. You decide with Licy whether there is any need to talk to Uncle Pietro about it.
Other letters to his wife between June and November 1956 enable us to follow the flow of the writing. It is evident that the novel was in fact written in short bursts, like a series of inspirations put straight down on paper.
Friday 29 June 1956
To Licy [written in French with occasional switches to English]
Congratulations on the scientific achievement which I shall pass on to others as you wish. “After having both been the ‘scourge of the Woermannscher Partei . . .’ we are on the way to being ‘The scourge of Italian publishers’.” As for me, I am busy writing an episode that will be number 4: it will be followed by No. 5 (Angelica’s attempted adultery squashed by the Princess for the sake of family honour and out of affection for Tancredi). Thus it will be a proper novel and “enough”. What I have written since you left (first visit of Angelica after her betrothal, night-time arrival of Tancredi in a coupé) is not bad: poetic, worse luck.
Sunday 8 July 1956
To Licy
. . . I too have been totally caught up in my “Leopard”. Last night I was working till three in the morning. The problem was to convey in six lines all the nuances, historical, social, economic and amatory, of the first (public) kiss Tancredi gave his fiancée Angelica. I think I have brought it off well enough. The chapter is almost finished; it will be very long: all I have left is to write out the conversation of Don Fabrizio when the proposal is made to him to enter the Senate.
Write to me and give me full and honest news.
I too, what with business matters, backache, “boys” and “Leopard”, I do feel quite weary.
A whole lot of kisses from your M.24 who loves you
Monday 9 July 1956
To Licy
. . . Tomorrow I shall go to Orlando’s to get the new chapter of “Leopard” typed out. I think it’s the best one; the first part is tedious but I’ve tried to load it with a heap of social ideas: the second (the fairly advanced amours of Tancredi and Angelica, their voyages of discovery in the immense palace of Donnafugata) is full of life, not too bad in point of style, but I fear it’s overly snobbish, and maybe a shade too poetic. The perpetual spectacle of the “boys’” goings on has bred in me a mawkish sympathy for the goings on of Tancredi and Angelica. What do you think of the new bit I’ve sent you?
See the doctor! And don’t forget
Your M. who loves you
And who sends you a heap of kisses
Wednesday 11 July 1956
To Licy
. . . My “Leopard” is “practically” finished. Tomorrow the typing also will be completed. It’s monstrously hot.
Lots of loving and affectionate kisses
From your M. who loves you
Thursday 29 November 1956
To Licy
. . . While I was writing this letter, the lawyer Bono came to me at Mazzara’s to return the manuscript of “Leopard”. He was positively quivering with enthusiasm: he told me that never in a book had he been struck by so precise a sense of Sicily with its great charm and its great defects. He also said that it is of burning relevance to our time and predicted a huge success as a curiosity and in sales. What came through all of this was his manifest surprise because, clearly, he has an intimate conviction that I’m an ass.
The problems involved in getting the book published have served to feed the romantic myth of the Misunderstood Genius. The fact is that the readers at Mondadori and even Elio Vittorini, who first ran through the manuscript for Mondadori then gave it an attentive reading for Einaudi, committed a huge error, but commercial rather than critical: they did in fact recognise that The Leopard was the work of a real writer. Vittorini’s personal reply reached Lampedusa in Rome: “It’s not too bad for an appraisal, but there’s nothing about publication,” he told me the day before his death. If Vittorini was a man of letters capable of recognising a rival worthy of consideration, he also maintained that he was not the man to rally to his defence. And yet he was not radically averse to The Leopard. He suggested to Mondadori to keep an eye on this writer but, as Vittorio Sereni has told me, by mischance the pen-pusher on duty that day returned the manuscript with the usual accompanying blather instead of addressing him with a more provisional judgment. The eighteen months that passed between the manuscript being sent to Elena Croce, who forwarded it to Giorgio Bassani, then editor at Feltrinelli, and the work’s publication in Feltrinelli’s “Contemporanei” series would not have been an excessive time-lapse were it not that death moved faster. The tragedy was a human rather than a literary one.
In March 1958 Giorgio Bassani had come to Palermo on the track of The Leopard. The manuscript had been typeset, along with the episode of the ball, which had been passed to him in typescript at the Princess’s behest. Bassani suspected that the text in his hands was incomplete, and possibly incorrect, and the principal aim of his Sicilian visit was to get back to the source material. I then handed him the manuscript version of 1957. He used this to make amendments here and there to the proofs of the seven parts now in type, and as the sole source for Part V, “Father Pirrone Pays a Visit”. The Princess had not passed to him this peasant interlude: on account of some second thoughts of the author, which he had shared with her verbally, she concluded that it should be dropped from the novel. Thus the first Feltrinelli edition (1958) of The Leopard is based on the typescripts with the exception of Father Pirrone’s visit; it was checked against the 1957 manuscript for the variants (in moving from the typescript to the final manuscript the author made hundreds of corrections and insertions which Bassani often used in his edition); it was integrated, putting in at the start of the individual Pa
rts the summaries from the analytical index25; the punctuation was radically revised by the copy editor. This edition of the novel is the one on which all the early translations are based, including the English one by Archibald Colquhoun.
Up to 1968, when the work had been translated into virtually every language and Luchino Visconti’s film had been released, Bassani’s edition was never called into question. But that year Carlo Muscetta claimed that the published text had in a certain sense been rewritten by Bassani. Muscetta had received a photocopy of the manuscript from Bassani and had compared the hundreds of variant readings; and even if these did not substantially alter the novel, it seemed opportune to proceed to a fresh edition based on the 1957 manuscript. This edition came out in 1969 and has become the standard Italian text. As we now know, this is the one identified by the author in his will as the definitive one.
If, as the letter to Enrico Merlo confirms, the historical information in the novel is based upon precise genealogical and topographical references, what is even more in evidence is the input derived from the author’s exhaustive familiarity with the diaries of the period; and in particular the superficial elements of Tancredi’s conduct, his hot-headed way of playing the revolutionary, are to be found in Tre Mesi nella Vicaria di Palermo by Francesco Brancaccio di Carpino.26 This is one of the less heroic texts to be found among diaries of the Garibaldi venture. Brancaccio and his friends engage in the revolution of 1860 much as young men of good family are today tempted by high-powered motorcycles: a little adventure, not many battles, no discipline; and, in Brancaccio’s case, the book provides the excuse to mention among his comrades a good portion of the island’s notables. But inevitably Brancaccio’s depiction of reality is artificial, just as Lampedusa’s is based on fact. Utterances like “I shall return with the tricolour” belong so much to Tancredi à la Brancaccio that the author often feels the need to point up the emphasis, and justifies it on the grounds of opportunism. When they engage on their own account in political action, Tancredi and Angelica are the only characters partly constructed outside of the historical record or memory, but in a tenacious pragmatist like Lampedusa there is no substitute for experience. He was able to dramatise perfectly the inept but authentic entries in his grandfather Giuseppe Tomasi’s diary (where the day is framed by rosaries and devotional practices, the passion for horses, and, it has to be said, the drabness of the elder son, Paolo): these, rather than Brancaccio’s bluster, were the elements that contributed to a sense of realism. When Brancaccio permeates Tancredi’s behaviour, Lampedusa attaches to it a commentary of his own – to the ears of this great realist it otherwise gives out a false note and calls for a remedy. Here some help is at hand comparing, as Moravia suggests, The Leopard with Ipolito Nievo’s Le Confessioni di un Italiano, for both novels give an emotional description of a civilisation in decline; but Lampedusa sets off the alarm bells the moment the urge to describe gives way to artificiality, while Nievo can abandon himself to the rhetoric of fatherland and love for chapters on end. In literary terms Nievo is a splendid Venetian and a not very good Italian. Lampedusa, whose novel had a corrosive effect on the cult of Unity as much as Le mie prigioni 27 corroded the late-lamented merits of the Austrian Administration, stayed on his guard. The rhetoric of the Risorgimento was certainly more distasteful to him than the ideology of the Risorgimento which he did after all approve of (being a true Stendhalian, he could not but admire ideologies that had proved their effectiveness, and this made him a secret admirer of every revolution, including the October one); therefore, favoured as he was by the circumstance of describing the emergence of the Italian nation from a historical angle, with the ideological thrust by now exhausted in all too many undesirable outcomes, Lampedusa was to seek in his writing to correct the lapses of taste that every ideology inevitably brings in its wake.
Still, sometimes Brancaccio helps set the scene by providing a backdrop. For instance “La bella Gigougìn”,28 which is sung, according to Brancaccio, by the Garibaldini at the capture of Milazzo, recurs in The Leopard intoned by the mainland rascals during the campaign for the plebiscite; but nineteenth-century upheavals feature in The Leopard only to be derided: the song described by Brancaccio as a hymn to national concord features at Donnafugata as further evidence that Sicilians and their invaders have nothing to say to each other. Reduced to their simplest forms, the positive comments on Unification survive only in the fictional structure of the novel, and only seldom interfere with the minute description of that mineral kingdom, comprising animate and inanimate fossils, with which Lampedusa identifies the Sicilian condition. Bassani’s discovery and Vittorini’s rejection are no mere caprices of literary men. Bassani himself anatomises the losers, while the denial of transcendence, even at the level of ideology, is frankly disagreeable to anyone who believes he has something to contribute to Progress.
The question of the authenticity of text of The Leopard was not definitively laid to rest with the publication of the edition based on the 1957 manuscript. The most popular novel of the Italian post-war period became in fact the favourite object of study for certain Italian philologists, who noted forty-nine points of departure between the manuscript and the printed text – minor discordances that do not compromise an understanding of the text. In 1995 Mondadori published Il Meridiano Lampedusa which contained the author’s complete works. This included an initial fragment of Part IV of The Leopard, as recorded by Francesco Orlando in his Ricordo di Lampedusa, and subsequently cut by the author. This might be entitled “Don Fabrizio and Bendicò” if we follow the style of the analytical index. The fragment was contained in a foolscap exercise book with the handwritten heading “Notebook No. 7 of the First Draft”. It was found in the author’s library at Palermo. It is reproduced here in the appendix as “Fragment A”.
In 1998 Giuseppe Biancheri was sorting out the papers of his aunt, Princess Alessandra Wolff-Stomersee, the widow of Lampedusa, when he turned up various handwritten and typescript items relating to The Leopard, including the fragment of another part of the novel that I knew about. This piece is reproduced here as “Fragment B”. It carries the autograph heading “The Salina Canzoniere”. In the final version of the novel the love of Don Fabrizio for Angelica is not mentioned. But the drift of “The Salina Canzoniere” is towards a revelation of the Prince’s passion for Angelica, a passion masked in a sonnet sequence. Lampedusa had also hinted to me about the plot for another chapter in which Don Fabrizio diverts a scandal by arriving at the Hôtel des Palmes just before Angelica and a lover of hers are due to meet for a tryst. Don Fabrizio was to reach the Hôtel des Palmes before Angelica’s lover, probably Senator Tassoni, whose liaisons with Angelica are mentioned in Part VIII of the published text, and save the couple from the political and social ambush set up against them. The “Canzoniere” chapter carries the date 1863. This final chapter appears to have been intended to go between “The Salina Canzoniere” and “Death of a Prince”, after the war of 1866 and about the time of Tancredi’s first standing for parliament. The chapter was never written. Lampedusa outlined it for me because he was amused at the way he planned to handle the intrigue at the Palmes. This building had been known as the residence of the Inghams29 but after it was turned into a hotel it had become the favourite locale for the citizens’ affairs, and trysts at the Palmes still loomed large in Palermo’s erotic imagination at the time when the novel was being drafted. I remember, however, that Lampedusa had read “The Salina Canzoniere” to me, and I remember that the revelation of Angelica’s name was to appear in the guise of some rhetorical device, an acrostic for example (I think the text was supposed to divulge something like “Angelica mia!”) at the end of the poems.
“The Salina Canzoniere”, as it has come down to us, is not a significant addition to the novel, and it is incomplete. It was supposed to be a literary joke: the narrative was suspended, and in the sonnets the author embarked on an exercise based upon certain verse passages he particularly relished, notably Shakespeare�
��s sonnets. For the Italian versification, he referred to the sonnets of Michelangelo (Lampedusa’s opinion on Michelangelo’s sonnets was “strong in substance but mediocre as verse”). The preceding ode by Father Pirrone, however, is an erudite parody, taking off the local Jesuits’ stand as regards the affair of Port-Royal, and the hidebound dogmatism it brought to the correct Catholic reading of history, which Father Pirrone exhibits when he sets out his own reactionary approach to events, derived from classical antiquity and present-day models. The parody is based on a Canzonetta written by the actual Father Pirrone for the wedding of Lampedusa’s grandfather. Father Pirrone is also teased for his opinion of Racine’s Bérénice and for his satisfaction at the absence of corpses. The Jesuit considers Bérénice to be the only one of the author’s tragedies that is not bloodthirsty, while Lampedusa had made quite different commentary on it in his Letteratura francese: “The bodies remain intact, only the souls are destroyed”, a situation which Father Pirrone, like a good Jesuit, simply overlooks. The text of the two sonnets reflects certain literary games that Lampedusa and Lucio Piccolo used to play at Capo d’Orlando.30 The manuscript notebook of these games still exists, containing for the most part poems by Lucio Piccolo, written at the dictation of Lampedusa or me, a fragment in imitation of Racine, and a totally different draft, mostly in verse, of the ballet subsequently published and entitled Le esequie della luna by Piccolo. These last two texts feature as “wicked jokes” enacted during those afternoons at Capo d’Orlando. The two cousins would indulge in literary cartwheels and pirouettes, making their friends and acquaintances the butt of their jokes.
The discovery of the “Canzoniere” shows how Lampedusa was forever drawing on daily life in order to come up with satirical sketches in his writings, impish jests which did not go down too well with those he mocked when they heard about them, and which Lampedusa’s friends attributed to the malicious tongues of the Cutò sisters.31 I imagine that the skittish nature of the chapter, which often relates to Lampedusa’s inner circle, and the effort of writing in verse induced the author to abandon this section. It dates from autumn 1956. The six-part novel, as typed out by Francesco Orlando and submitted to Mondadori, and subsequently to Einaudi and to Elena Croce, was circulating among the publishing houses at this time, but Lampedusa had since written Part V (“Father Pirrone Pays A Visit”) and VI (“A Ball”) and had also started on “The Salina Canzoniere”.
The Leopard Page 2