CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA
TITLE PAGE
FOREWORD
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
I. INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCE
II. DONNAFUGATA
III. THE TROUBLES OF DON FABRIZIO
IV. LOVE AT DONNAFUGATA
V. FATHER PIRRONE PAYS A VISIT
VI. A BALL
VII. DEATH OF A PRINCE
VIII. RELICS
APPENDIX
AFTERWORD
FRAGMENT A
FRAGMENT B
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
COPYRIGHT
About the Book
In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.
About the Author
Giuseppe Tomasi was a Sicilian nobleman, Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa. He was born in Palermo in 1896 and died in Rome in 1957. He lived the life of a literary dilettante, was familiar with the great literatures of the world, and was widely travelled. He published nothing during his lifetime, but bequeathed, in addition to his great novel, a memoir, some short stories, an incomplete novel and some fascinating appraisals of English and French literature. Much of this is collected in The Siren and Selected Writings.
ALSO BY GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA
The Siren and Selected Writings
The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
Translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun
With a Foreword and Afterword by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi
Foreword and Appendix Translated from the Italian by Guido Waldman
FOREWORD
* * *
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was unable to see his works through to publication. In April 1957 he was diagnosed with a tumour on the lung and although at the end of May he set out hopefully for Rome, he was to die there on 23 July. He had been trying to find a publisher for The Leopard for a year. The novel had been submitted to Mondadori and turned down. It had gone on to Einaudi and, a few days before his death, the author had received another rejection letter. However, Lampedusa was convinced that the book had merit. Before leaving for Rome, he had drawn up two testamentary letters, one addressed to his wife Alessandra (Licy) Wolff Stomersee1 and the other addressed to me, his adopted son.2 On 30 May he had also written to Enrico Merlo regarding the work.3 The letter to Merlo and the testamentary letter to me were discovered in 2000 by Giuseppe Bianchieri, the Princess’s nephew, in a volume of The Voyages of Captain Cook. The Princess had picked up her husband’s habit of using books as hiding places for private papers. Sometimes both spouses would lose documents this way (and also sometimes hidden banknotes): to forget which book had been used was the equivalent of forgetting one’s password nowadays.
The letter to Enrico Merlo accompanied a typescript of the novel with a brief description of how the characters corresponded to real people. The identifications are unambiguous, except for Tancredi, whom Lampedusa claimed to have based on me physically and on the careers of the two Senators Francesco and Pietro Lanza di Scalea. Francesco, exiled in Tuscany and then appointed to the Senate by the King on Unification, had been a supporter of the centre-left, and had run, unsuccessfully, for the post of Mayor of Palermo. His son Pietro had been Minister of War in the Facta government and Minister for the Colonies in the first Mussolini government. Pietro was a professional politician; Under-secretary at the time of the war with Libya, he moved from the centre-left to the right. Thus he matched the description of Tancredi that Lampedusa wrote in the unfinished chapter of The Leopard, “The Salina Canzoniere”: “Tancredi was still too young to aspire to any particular government office, but his energy and his fresh supply of funds made him indispensable wherever he went. He campaigned in that highly profitable grey area of ‘The extreme left of the extreme right’, a magnificent springboard that was later to allow him to perform some admirable and much-admired acrobatics. However, he wisely masked his intense political activity with a nonchalance, a levity of expression, that left everyone disarmed.”
In the days of long-hand writing the extent of a correspondence was determined by the size of a sheet folded in four. The writing proceeded until space ran out, and often the correspondent was constrained to write the final sentence and the signature across the lines. For an author explaining the meaning of his novel to a cultured and expert Sicilian, the letter to Merlo is a laconic communication, an example of understatement raised to a model of ethical and aesthetic behaviour at one and the same time.
N.H.
Baron Enrico Merlo di Tagliavia
S.M.
30 May 1957
Dear Enrico,
In the leather folder you will find the typescript of The Leopard.
Do please treat it with care, for it is the only copy I possess.
Do please also give it an attentive reading, because each word has been weighed up and many things are not made explicit but only hinted at.
It seems to me to offer a measure of interest because it evokes a Sicilian nobleman at a moment of crisis (not to be taken to mean simply that of 1860), how he reacts to it and how the degeneration of the family becomes ever more marked until it reaches almost total collapse; all this, however, seen from within, with a certain connivance of the author and with no rancour as is to be found, for instance, in The Viceroys.
No need to tell you that the “Prince of Salina” is the Prince Lampedusa, my great-grandfather Giulio Fabrizio; everything about him is real: his build, his mathematics, the pretence at violence, the scepticism, the wife, the German mother, the refusal to be a senator. Father Pirrone is also authentic, even his name. I think I have given them both a greater degree of intelligence than was in fact the case.
Tancredi is, physically and in his behaviour, Giò; morally a blend of Senator Scalea and his son Pietro. I’ve no idea who Angelica is, but bear in mind that the name Sedàra is quite similar to “Favara”.
Donnafugata as a village is Palma; as a palace, Santa Margherita.
I’m particularly fond of the last two chapters: The death of Don Fabrizio who had always been alone even though he had a wife and seven children; the question of the relics which sets its seal on everything is absolutely authentic and witnessed by me in person.
Sicily is Sicily – 1860, earlier, forever.
I believe the whole thing is not without its elegiac poetry.
I’m leaving today; don’t know when I’ll be back; if you want to get in touch, write to me c/o Signora Biancheri, Via S. Martino della Battaglia 2, Rome
With fondest greetings,
your
Giuseppe
[On the back of the envelope]
N.B.: the dog Bendicò is a vitally important character and practically the key to the novel.
This testamentary letter demonstrates the author’s gift. It is written in a style appropriate to this sort of letter, but at the same time it reveals a way with words that conveys a powerful feeling of affection along with a close control of vocabulary and phraseology. Lampedusa’s readings of Stendhal had made him a disciple.
For Giò
May 1957
My dearest Gioitto,
I am anxious that, even with the curtain down, my voice should reach you to convey to you how grateful I am for the comfort your presence has brought me these last two or three years of my life which have been so painful and sombre but which would hav
e been quite simply tragic were it not for you and darling Mirella.4 Our lives, Licy’s and mine, were on the point of running into the sands, what with worries and age, but your affection, your constant presence, the gracious way in which you lived shed a little light in our darkness.
I have been enormously fond of you, Gioitto; I have never had a son, but I do think I could never have loved one more than I have loved you.
[…]
This sort of letter normally ends by asking pardon for offences committed; I have to say that however much I search my memory I really have no recollection of having ever wronged you; if you can remember anything, do believe it was never intended; I beg your pardon at all events.
I should also like to ask you to try to find a publisher for The Leopard.
I ask you to convey to Giovanna, Casimiro and Lucio5 how very grateful I am to them for the constant warmth I have always found in them; La Piana has been one of the few oases of light in these my latest years which have been plunged in darkness; and tell them I beg they transfer to you and Mirella all the affection they might have felt for me.
Do please read this letter to Licy.
I close with a big hug for you and Mirella and so much love, and wishing you all possible happiness.
During these same final days of May Lampedusa also drew up his will, which he enclosed with a letter entitled:
Last will, private – the will is to be found in a separate envelope.
It expresses the anger of a man certain to die.
It is my desire, indeed my firm wish, that my death should go unannounced either in the press or by any other means. The funeral should be kept as simple as possible, and at some inconvenient hour. I want no flowers and nobody to accompany me apart from my wife, my adopted son and his fiancée.
I would have either my wife or my son write to Ing. Guido Lajolo6 (Rua Everlandia, 1147 São Paolo, Brazil) informing him of my death.
I want all possible steps to be taken to publish The Leopard (the manuscript in question is the handwritten one contained in a single fat notebook); needless to say, this does not mean having it published at my heirs’ expense; I should consider this a gross humiliation.
Should the work be published, one copy with dedication should be sent to each of the following: Signora Iliaschenko,7 Lolette,8 Uncle Pietro,9 Corrado Fatta,10 the Piccolos, Francesco Agnello,11 Francesco Orlando,12 Antonio Pasqualino,13 and Ing. Guido Lajolo. Also to Avv. Bono14 and Ubaldo Mirabelli15 and Sig. Aridon.16
I ask pardon of anyone I might have offended and I declare in all honesty that I write without ill feelings for anyone, not even for those who have been most bent on causing me grief.
I declare, however, that among all living persons the only ones I love are my Wife, Giò, Mirella. And I beg you take the greatest care of Pop,17 who means a great deal to me.
I think there is nothing left to say: should I have forgotten anything, I am sure my heirs will attend to it of their own accord, in the spirit of this my last will.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Palermo, 24 May 1957
These last private arrangements came to light in the course of preparing an edition of the author’s and his wife’s correspondence. They also put an end to the numerous disquisitions concerning the text of The Leopard as approved by the author.
Lampedusa had written the occasional article on French literature and history for a Genoese cultural monthly, Le Opere e I Giorni, around about 1926–7, but he did not take up his pen again until 1954. The author’s lethargy had lasted until a meeting in the summer of that year at San Pellegrino Terme. He had gone to accompany his cousin Lucio Piccolo to the Kursaal salon, where Piccolo was presented to the literary world by Eugenio Montale. Seen at close quarters, the said world did not impress Lampedusa very much. To work as a writer can come to the same thing as being a writer, and not many of the geniuses foregathered at San Pellegrino had all that much to show. Lucio Piccolo’s poetic activities and his success, a couple of days at San Pellegrino wresting him from his solitude, the afternoon lessons he gave to Francesco Orlando, a poet and narrator himself in those days: all provided a spur to action. At the end of 1954 he was already at work, and in the last thirty months he had to live, Lampedusa was writing on an almost daily basis, heedless of success, which it was his fate not to achieve in his lifetime. When he died in July 1957 he was preparing a second novel, I Gattini ciechi. He might also have added another chapter or two to his Leopard.
The Leopard was published in the autumn of 1958, edited by Giorgio Bassani, and no doubts were raised on the authenticity of the text until 1968 when Carlo Muscetta, who taught Italian Literature in the University of Catania, announced that he had spotted hundreds of variants, some quite conspicuous, between the manuscript and the printed text. Thus the question arose as to the authenticity of the Bassani version and the authority of the various sources, a question raised by Francesco Orlando in his Ricordo di Lampedusa.18 As Orlando notes, The Leopard exists in three drafts all prepared by the author to submit to publishers: a first draft, handwritten and filling several exercise books (1955–6), a six-part draft typewritten by Orlando and corrected by the author (1956), and an eight-part autograph copy (1957), the title page stating “The Leopard (complete)”, which the author handed to me before leaving for Rome.
Of the three drafts the first one certainly has no claim to being a definitive version. The manuscript notebooks used for dictating the typewritten version to Francesco Orlando have not yet turned up among the family papers, and their version of the text has been overtaken by the typescript edition used by the author as early as May 1956 when he was looking for a publisher. Five typewritten sections, then a sixth, were sent to Count Federici at Mondadori with a covering letter from Lucio Piccolo. The typescript thus earned the author’s endorsement, even if only provisionally. It is carefully corrected and includes a few handwritten insertions: page and part numbering; each part preceded by a note of the relevant month and year to locate it in the time frame; even an occasional word altered. A study of the typescript confirms my own recollection on the development of the drafts. When he started, Lampedusa told me, “We’re looking at twenty-four hours in the life of my great-grandfather, the day Garibaldi landed.” And a little later, “I can’t do a Ulysses.” Then he wanted to fall back on a plan comprising three twenty-five year periods: 1860 and the landing at Marsala; 1885 and the death of the Prince (the actual date of his great-grandfather’s death – I don’t know why it was pulled back to 1883); 1910, the end. The typescript shows that “Death of a Prince” was originally Part III, and “Relics” was the fourth and concluding Part. I am certain that Lampedusa started work on his Memories of Childhood after The Leopard, and probably the wealth of recollections stirred up by a mental reconstruction of Santa Margherita, and the impetus of the narrative, resulted in the material overflowing the banks of the preconceived plan.
Gradually, as he went on writing, the author was assailed by the impatience to share his work. From his pocket diary for 1956 I include here the days in which there is a mention of the “Histoire sans nom”, as the book was called before it acquired the title The Leopard. They are private jottings that reveal the author’s anxieties and enthusiasms.
22 February – Sunny in the morning. Clear and cold in the evening. At 6.30 the “boys”. Gioitto gives me the “Lope de Vega”. With him I read La moza de cántaro. Work on the novel.
28 February – Weather improved, almost fine. At Massimo [the first bar on the morning rounds was the Pasticceria Massimo], Aridon, to whom I read Uncle Piero’s letter. Unexpected arrival of Lucio. More encouraging news via Butera. To M. [M. stands for Mazzara, the café frequented by the author around 10 am] first Fratta, then Lucio returns, then Agnello and finally Gioitto, who had been tipped off. With him and Lucio lunch at Renato, much merriment and mirth. Home at 4. No Orlando. At 4.30 Giò comes for the analysis, during which I’m in a stew over that Prince of mine.
29 February – Wea
ther more or less promising. Phone Corrao19 before leaving. After Massimo’s, on to Palazzo Mazzarino20 (for second meeting with Lucio, still in Palermo). Left by train with Giò at 10.40. Reached Sant’Agata, and Capo d’Orlando 1.15. House empty, the only inhabitants a new telescope and a globe. Lucio arrives shortly after. After lunch Gioitto had a long sleep and, after the afternoon milk, a reading of my “Histoire sans nom”, which was completed after dinner. Fairly successful but nothing approaching enthusiasm.
1 March – Fine day. Capo d’Orlando. At 6 Daneu21 arrives and stays to dinner and leaves at 9.15. During the evening, a further reading to the general public.
7 March – To M. Aridon’s. Afterwards, a long session writing “Histoire sans nom”. At 6.30 Giò and Mirella. They both of them talk to me about Agnello. Dinner with the “boys” at the Pizzeria. It seems that Mirella really has been bitterly complaining to Licy about Giò to the point of threatening to drop him.
8 March – Fine morning; showery and thunder in the evening. To M. Aridon’s. Then I stop my “Histoire sans nom”. At 6.50 Orlando, to whom I read what I’ve written today.
17 March – Hazy but fine and warm. To Massimo Aridon’s. To M. Corrado Fratta’s. At 4 Orlando to whom I read a lot of Tomasi and not much Werther. At 7 (late) the “boys” who bring me Della Valle’s tragedies from her, a tie from him. Mirella has a lesson on the Renaissance; Gioitto wants to read Góngora with me, but instead undergoes a reading of Tomasi. Both of them remarkably affectionate.
The following entries refer rather to the typewritten version.
16 June – To M. Giò with bad news about Mirella’s mother’s health. At 3.30 Licy leaves for Rome. Comes at the last minute to greet Giò. With him to Orlando where I copy the manuscript. At 6.30 Giò turns up (Las famosas asturianas). Evening reading of first chapter of The Leopard to Signora Iliaschenko who can’t make head nor tail of it.
The Leopard Page 1
