Letters from London and Europe (1925-30)

Letters from London and Europe (1925-30), by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, translated by JG Nichols, Alma Books RRP£14.99, 288 pages

Published posthumously in 1958, The Leopard is a classic of Italian literature brocaded with reflections on death, and on the decay of things in general. In melancholy-tinged prose, the novel chronicles the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy on the eve of the unification of Italy in 1860, and the emergence of a bourgeois class that would evolve into the Mafia. Impressed by the book’s exploration of love and political ambition, in 1963 Luchino Visconti turned The Leopard into a ravishingly beautiful film starring Burt Lancaster as the beleaguered, world-weary Sicilian Prince of Salina.

No doubt, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa put something of his own personality into his fictional aristocrat. A Sicilian prince himself, for most of his life Lampedusa remained immersed in debt, yet helpless to resist the ruin of his own class. By the time he died in 1957, the Mafia had pervaded entire patrician quarters of the Sicilian capital of Palermo, his birthplace and home for 60 years. Wretchedly, the family’s Palermitan residence of Palazzo Lampedusa had been destroyed during the Allied bombardments of Sicily in 1943. Today the Lampedusa family line is extinct.

A lifelong smoker, Lampedusa died at the age of 61, a year before his masterpiece was published, so was spared knowledge of the controversy it provoked. The famous dictum expressed in The Leopard that “everything must change so that everything can stay the same” was interpreted by left-leaning Italian critics as a cynical defence of Sicilian conservatism and Sicilian fatalism. On ideological grounds, several publishers rejected the manuscript until it found a home with Feltrinelli Editore in Milan (ironically a gauchiste company).

To judge by the letters Lampedusa wrote during trips made to the continent in 1925-1930, he was indeed a deep-dyed conservative and not at first averse to Italian fascism. “Even if a revolution breaks out, no one will touch a hair on my head or steal one penny from me,” he comments in 1925 from Paris, “because by my side I have ... Mussolini!” Like the playwright Luigi Pirandello, a fellow Sicilian, Lampedusa saw in the cult of ducismo a robust alternative to parliamentary liberalism; indeed, the Duce’s attempts to uproot the Mafia were applauded by many Sicilians.

During his travels in England, Germany, France and the Baltic in the mid-1920s, the writer-prince enjoyed a burlesque correspondence with his cousins in Palermo, the Piccolos. In 30 or so surviving letters Lampedusa refers to himself in the third person, rather archly, as “the Monster” (the Piccolos were nicknamed variously as “the Magician”, “the Vizier”, “Sir Imbroglio”). What strikes one is Lampedusa’s extraordinarily wide-ranging knowledge of European literature. Before visiting England in his mid-twenties he had read all of Shakespeare, and was surely one of the first Italians to fathom the opacities of James Joyce; among his other literary idols were GK Chesterton (“Cestertonio”), Yeats, Rossetti, Goethe and Stendhal. Clearly, books afforded the Sicilian an escape from the sorry reality, as he saw it, of the times.

As well as providing a record of a now vanished Europe, Letters from London and Europe (edited by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi with a foreword by Francesco Da Mosto) reveals an occasionally perplexed fascination with other people’s customs. English foodstuffs and clothes are described in gently ironic if occasionally mocking terms (with ribald talk of Sicilian noblemen’s “testicles, bollocks, cojones” surprising in one who later wrote The Leopard). Above all other cities Lampedusa loved London; from his hotel off Marylebone Road he made forays to the Wallace Collection and the Tate Gallery. To the Piccolos he comments often on the British weather (“the sky is striving to resemble a Turner, often with success”), as well as the fabled British reserve (“their apparent stupidity is merely an immense and uncontrollable shyness”).

Berlin, by contrast, is a city distinguished by its gross beer-drinking and consumption of frankfurters. (“The amount these people eat is horrifying; one would think they never did anything else.”) Lampedusa is bewildered too by the variety of “nude magazines” on sale at Berlin street corners; Nazism, in his estimation, was a sort of debased nature cult, and Teutonic obsessions with health and efficiency were evidently not to his liking.

In the Latvian capital of Riga he is reunited with his future wife Alessandra (Licy) Wolff, a Baltic baroness. In the city’s art-nouveau cafés, Russo-Baltic delicacies made of “duck, celery and puff pastry” satisfy the “Monster’s tummy”, but such good things of Latvia will not last long. In 1939 Alessandra would be forced to flee her native Riga ahead of the invading Red Army, while the family estate was turned into a Soviet agricultural school. Again, the unstated theme of these extraordinary letters is death; not just the death of an aristocracy or a redundant way of life, but more broadly of Sicily – and of Europe.

Ian Thomson’s ‘The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica’ (Faber) won the 2010 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize