Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  For nearly all the other years of his life, however, he enjoyed a degree of respect and admiration which few authors achieve before death. During the time he spent in Paris, he was both revered and feared, and no one ever opposed his wishes or his habits, for example, dining every night in the same place and at nine o’clock sharp, or never drinking white wine, however good it might be. Apparently, an oculist had assured him that white wine was ruinous to the eyesight, and Joyce took great care of his delicate eyes. Threatened by glaucoma, he had to undergo eleven operations during his lifetime, which is why some photographs show him wearing a large and very obvious eye patch, and this is perhaps also why Djuna Barnes saw in his eyes “the same paleness seen in plants long hidden from the sun”. He did not, therefore, wear it in order to be noticed: Joyce’s pose as genius was quite sufficient, and he did not need to disguise himself as a hunter or to run with the bulls in Pamplona. On the contrary, he was far from flamboyant, and to have to sit by his side at a supper or a social gathering was agony, at least for anyone even moderately talkative, since, in these circumstances, Joyce would not deign to open his mouth, but expected to be kept entertained with chatter while he remained silent, “an easy but absolute silence” in the words of Ford Madox Ford. His fellow diners would struggle to come up with subjects that might interest him, but Mr Joyce (everyone but Djuna Barnes called him that) would reply only with a “Yes” or a “No”. Unlike the characters in his novels, all of whom were interior gasbags, the author was always taciturn and disdainful, at least in society.

  In private and alone, he was very different, although no less haughty. He would drink until well into the small hours and was friendlier and more talkative, although he did, all too often, propose theological subjects that were of no interest to anyone else, or would begin reciting, in sonorous Italian, whole chunks of Dante, like a priest before his congregation. On one occasion, in the Brasserie Lutétia, his companion mentioned that he had seen a rat running down the stairs, and Joyce’s reaction was anything but serene. “Where? Where?” he asked in alarm. “That’s bad luck.” Joyce was highly superstitious, and a second after uttering these words, he fainted in terror. He was also very afraid of dogs, having been badly bitten as a child by an Irish terrier. What terrified him most, though, both in childhood and adulthood, were storms, although, as an adult, he was better able to disguise this. As a child, it wasn’t enough to close windows, draw curtains, and pull down the blinds, he had to shut himself up in a closet. According to malicious tongues, even as a grown man, he used to clap his hands over his ears and behave in a most cowardly manner; kinder tongues deny this and say only that if he was out in the street during a storm, he would wring his hands, scream and run.

  As well as being a heavy drinker when he drank (for he had periods of abstinence too), he was a great devourer of books and had, in his youth, been a frequenter of prostitutes. Although he used to go with prostitutes, he did not like them, which is perhaps why, when he wrote to his wife, Nora, he chose to imagine scenes which, for all their theatricality, may well have borne some relation to reality. Joyce had, after all, once said that he “longed to copulate with a soul”. These obscene letters achieved notoriety some years ago, and in them the author expressed his high hopes for the day he and Nora would be together again (he was in Dublin and she in Trieste, where they usually lived), and in them he even found some momentary happiness, given that at the end of more than one letter he confesses that he came (his words) while he was writing her this filth: he is doubtless one of the few writers to have achieved such intense gratification with his pen. To judge by this correspondence, James Joyce wanted his wife to put on weight so that she could beat him and dominate him and practise other excesses, and he had very precise ideas about what undergarments she should wear (his invariable preference was that they should be slightly soiled) and showed a clear predilection for the aerial or even depository capabilities of the woman he had met as Nora Barnacle; in short, he was a coprophiliac. This, however, is not the most lurid aspect of the letters, but, rather, the inquisitive spirit in which he interrogates Nora about her past and her present, in order to feed his books. The interrogation resembles, more than anything, that of a Catholic priest in the confessional, as one can see from this extract: “When that person … put his hand or hands under your skirts, did he only tickle you outside or did he put his finger or fingers up into you? If he did, did they go up far enough to touch that little cock at the end of your cunt? Did he touch you behind? Did he ask you to touch him and did you do so? If you did not touch him did he come against you and did you feel it?” Or in another letter: “Tonight … I have been trying to picture you frigging your cunt in the closet. How do you do it? Do you stand against the wall with your hand tickling up under your clothes or do you squat down on the hole with your skirts up and your hand hard at work in through the slit of your drawers? Does it give you the horn now to shit? I wonder how you can do it. Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit?” No one can deny that Joyce was a scrupulous man with a love of detail.

  James Joyce suffered various misfortunes in his life, but, generally speaking, he did not show his feelings. Five of his nine brothers and sisters (he was the oldest) died as children, and his response to these deaths made even his mother think him heartless. On the other hand, when his daughter Lucia had to be admitted to various psychiatric hospitals, Joyce was all solicitude and never lost hope of her recovery. He wrote her numerous letters. According to his brother Stanislaus, however, for James Joyce “unhappiness was like a vice”. He was cold and distant except with those closest to him, but when, on his mother’s death, he discovered a bundle of letters that his father had written to her before they were married, he spent the whole afternoon reading them “with as little compunction as a doctor or a lawyer … puts questions”. When he had finished, Stanislaus asked him: “Well?” “Nothing,” James Joyce answered curtly and rather contemptuously. Nothing, thought Stanislaus, for the young poet with a mission, but clearly something for the woman who had kept them through all those years of neglect and poverty. Stanislaus burned them, without reading them himself.

  James Joyce had a habit of sighing. Another mother, his wife Nora’s, noticed this and said that he would destroy his heart by doing this. Joyce, however, did not die from a heart destroyed by grief, but from a perforated ulcer, in a hospital in Zurich, on January 13, 1941, when he was almost fifty-nine. They buried him two days later, after a brief ceremony, in the cemetery of that city.

  His own wife, Nora Barnacle, who never bothered to read Ulysses, once summed him up. She said: “He’s a fanatic.”

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in Class

  THE SADDEST THING about the whole rather sad story of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is the publication of his one world-famous novel The Leopard, because it could be said that it was the only extraordinary thing to have happened in his life, and even that happened, in fact, in death, sixteen months after he had departed this world. This is why he is one of the few writers who never felt he was a writer or lived as if he were one, even less so than others who also failed to publish anything during their lifetime, for the simple reason that he did not even attempt to do so until almost the end of his days. Not only did he make no attempt to get published, he hardly even attempted to write.

  He was more of a reader, insatiable and obsessive. The few people who knew him well were astonished at his encyclopaedic knowledge of literature and history, on both of which subjects he possessed a vast library. He had not only read all the important and essential writers, but also the second-rate and the mediocre, whom,
especially as regards the novel, he considered to be as necessary as the great: “One has to learn how to be bored,” he used to say, and he read bad literature with interest and patience. Buying books was almost his sole expense and sole luxury, although the possibilities that Palermo offered in this respect to a man who knew English, French, German and Russian (as well as Spanish in the last year of his life) were desperately limited. Nevertheless, given the futile existence he led, that of a provincial aristocrat, he would spend at least a couple of hours each morning inspecting the bookshops, especially one called Flaccovio, which he visited every day for ten years.

  The truth is that Lampedusa’s mornings must have appeared to his fellow citizens to be mornings of utter idleness, which they doubtless were. While Licy, his Latvian psychoanalyst wife, recovered in bed from the hours which, by her own choosing, she spent working late into the night, Lampedusa would get up early and walk to a café-cum-patisserie where he would take a long breakfast and read. On one occasion, he did not move for four hours, the time it took him to finish a large novel by Balzac, from start to finish. Then he would undertake his long tour of the bookshops, after which he would go to another café where he would sit but not mix with a few acquaintances of his with semi-intellectual pretensions. He would listen (to “their nonsense”) and hardly say a word, then, after all these marathon sittings and feeble peregrinations, return home on the bus. He is always described as walking wearily along, looking very distinguished, but with a somewhat careless gait, his eyes alert and holding in his hand a leather bag crammed with the books and cakes and biscuits on which he would have to survive until evening, since lunch was never served at home. He carried that famous bag with great nonchalance, quite unconcerned that volumes of Proust should be sitting cheek by jowl with titbits and even courgettes. Apparently the bag always contained more books than were strictly necessary, as if it were the luggage of a reader setting off on a long journey, who was afraid he might run out of reading matter while away. According to his wife, he always had some Shakespeare with him, so that “he could console himself with it if he should see something disagreeable” on his wanderings.

  So passionate was Lampedusa’s love of books that he even used them as strongboxes: he was in the habit of placing small quantities of money between the pages of various volumes, always forgetting afterwards, of course, in which book those notes were to be found. This was the basis for his remark that his library contained two different kinds of treasure.

  Money, as you can imagine, never constituted a problem for him, but less because he was very rich than because he lacked all ambition. While it is true that he was wealthy enough never to have to work, a shared inheritance and the various crises of the century made of him very much a nobleman come down in the world. His habits were modest: apart from bookshops, these consisted in frequent visits to the cinema and occasional meals out at a restaurant; he did not even travel, although he had done so fairly often in his youth. He noted down in his diary which films he had seen (two or three a week), along with a single adjective: when he saw 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the adjective he chose was spettacolare.

  In 1954, three years before his death, he wrote: “I am a very solitary person. Out of the sixteen hours I spend awake each day, at least ten are spent in solitude. I do not, however, spend all that time reading; sometimes I amuse myself by concocting literary theories …” This is not entirely true, since, after his death, he did not leave behind him anything that could be described as literary theory. What he did leave were about a thousand pages on English and French literature, and the astonishing thing is that, initially, these pages were intended for just one person, Francesco Orlando. He was a young man from a bourgeois family (and now an illustrious teacher and critic) to whom Lampedusa, in his final years, offered to teach both English and a complete course on the literature of that language. Occasionally, that only student was not alone, but this was very much the exception. Three times a week, at six o’clock in the evening, Lampedusa would receive Orlando in his house and have him slowly read out the lesson that he, the prince, had written for this purpose, or else they would read together, especially Dickens and Shakespeare. This generous, selfless and idiosyncratic method of teaching changed Lampedusa’s life, and in it may lie, in part, the origin of his belated decision to write. At any rate, this contact with young people and the chance to “transmit something to them” (the literary talks, if not the classes, spread to other friends the same age as Orlando) revitalised him and filled his evenings with something more than mere solitary reading. He took these classes very seriously indeed, as evidenced by comments he made bemoaning their bad or hasty preparation: “the worst pages ever written by human pen”, is how he described what he had written on the life of Byron, “an utter abomination”. His gentle irony led his pupil to believe that, once read by him and, indeed, as soon as he left the house, the fate of these texts was to be consigned immediately to the fire. Fortunately, however, Lampedusa kept them, and these pages—not at all scholarly, but full of wisdom, humour, seriousness and refinement—are now beginning to be published.

  He was very interested in writers’ lives, believing, like Sainte-Beuve, that in those lives, or in their most secret anecdotes, could be found the key to a writer’s work. Perhaps that is why—as well as making the work of exegetes more difficult—he left very few anecdotes himself, and if there were secrets in his life, he did his best to ensure that they remained so (that is, he kept them secret). The only scrap of gossip about Lampedusa, of the kind he liked to know about his idols, was that he may have been impotent, as suggested by the fact that he had no children (but then he was thirty-seven when he married his wife) and by his apparent lack of passion for Licy, with whom, in the early years, when she found Sicily hard to bear and spent a large part of the year at the palace in Latvia where she had been born, he kept up what has been called un matrimonio epistolare—“an epistolary marriage”. Any other anomalies belonged not to him, but to his ancestors, the closest being the murder of an aunt of his, stabbed to death in a seedy Roman hotel by the baron who was her lover.

  Lampedusa was as eccentric and obsessive as all writers, even though he did not know he was a writer: he hated melodrama and Italian opera, which he considered a barbarous art; in fact, he hated anything explicit. His favourite Shakespeare play was Measure for Measure, but he preferred, above all, Sonnet 129. He suffered from insomnia and from nightmares, but only at the end of his life did he deign to recount one of these to his psychoanalyst wife: in the dream he was walking down corridors asking for information about his imminent execution. He drank only water, but he ate well (he was plump) and smoked heavily, not even noticing the ash sprinkling his jacket. He would shake the hand of the person being introduced to him without looking the person in the face; in society, he was shy, taciturn, solitary and sad, so much so that many people believed that, in certain circumstances, he simply refused to speak. In private, on the other hand, with his few close friends and even fewer pupils, his conversation was brilliant and precise, pleasant and always slightly sarcastic. He could be pedantic: he spoke to each of his dogs in one of the various languages he knew. Francesco Orlando said of him that he had the air of “a vast, abstracted feline”.

  Little is known about his political views, if, indeed, he had any very clear views, apart from his hatred of Sicily and the Sicilians, although this was a superficial hatred, for it carried with it a large dash of love. But he condemned all of Sicily’s social classes. He was anticlerical, in the old-fashioned way, and believed, anyway, that everything ended “down here”. Gentle in manner, he accepted with irony
and sorrow the initial rejection of his novel by some publishing houses, while his wife noted eloquently in her diary: “Refus de ce cochon de Mondadori” (“Rejected by that pig from Mondadori”). According to Lampedusa, what finally made him decide to write was seeing one of his cousins, Lucio Piccolo, another late starter, win both a prize and the applause of Montale for a volume of poems he had written. “Being mathematically certain that I was no more foolish than Lucio, I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel,” he said in a letter to a friend. He was convinced that The Leopard deserved to see the light of day, but he also had his doubts: “It is, I fear, rubbish,” he remarked to Francesco Orlando, who claims that he said this in good faith.

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa died of lung cancer on the morning of July 23, 1957, at the age of sixty, at the house of some relatives in Rome, where he had gone for treatment. He was sleeping, and his sister-in-law found him.

  Lampedusa believed that one always had to leave people to make their own mistakes. He, of course, made his, and knew nothing of the success that chose not to hurry for him. One of the misfortunes of his life, he said, had been a certain hardness of heart, and he once gave this warning to his beloved cousin Gioacchino, who was forty years his junior and whom Lampedusa finally adopted: “Be careful,” he said. “Cave obdurationem cordis.”