The Last Leopard
Gilmour, David
/n Italy, whenever a southern aristocrat nately close to his mother, and remained so of a certain era dies, the obituaries all his life. He spent World War I in the ar mourn the loss of "the...
...After the Soviets turned Licy's castle into an agricultural school at the end of the war, the two lived together in Palermo...
...Lucio overindulged in a dinner of pasta and was too sick to go through with the plan...
...The result was II Gattopardo, which means ocelot, but is translated as The Leopard...
...Licy, as Giuseppe called her, was a practicing psychoanalyst who had just divorced her husband of fourteen years—a homosexual Estonian baron rather inevitably characterized by Gilmour as being of "considerable charm...
...tillery, was wounded and captured at TrenThe allusion is to The Leopard, by tino, and in the confusion of the war's end Giuseppe di Lampedusa...
...There are "a number of mysteries about Giuseppe's university career...
...Yet despite his family's es...
...The nurse turned out to have a boyfriend...
...Aman so reserved and so idle poses a problem for biographers...
...It has become a game: Lampedusa has been compared to Stendhal, Ariosto, Leopardi, Verga, De Roberto, Pirandello, Brancati, Gogol, Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, D'Annunzio, and, by Gilmour, to Conrad...
...The Prince of Salina—arrogant, melancholic, and cold—is not a nice man...
...full of romance and absurdity...
...The events I have mentioned above come from the years 1900, 1915-19, 1926, 1932, and 1955-57...
...Per- When Mussolini came to power, Giuseppe sonages from Puccini to the Kaiser were en- at first looked upon Fascism as an effective tertained in Palermo's casas, as chic Paler- hedge against the Bolsheviks, then soured mitans referred to their palazzos, and a on it, finding its bluster "boring and rather sailor-suited Giuseppe met Napoleon III's ridiculous...
...York City...
...Sicilian—was enjoying its golden age...
...Even if Lampedusa is a shadowy figure for most of the book, the image of two fat, gentle, learned, clueless aristocrats barreling off to Palermo to proposition a nurse for the sake of the family honor is vivid and comic and touching...
...After a The Last Leopard is Lampedusa's story...
...Much of the book's appeal lies with its protagonist, Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina...
...Giuseppe had become Prince of Lampedusa (a barren island off the African coast, inhabited by a handful of Maltese) on his father's death in 1934...
...CI The American Spectator February 1992 63...
...Until World War II he lived with his parents, in his childhood room...
...They kept in touch...
...It is one faced by novelists, too: how to turn a colorless person into an interesting "character...
...The result is a watery, journalistic account...
...Giuseppe, duke of a dusty village, be62 The American Spectator February 1992 came an anglophile while in England, admiring the reserve, irony, and eccentricity that, along with fatuousness, make up the English character...
...There are scenes—dinners, a hunt, and a ball—and characters that are vaguely familiar, especially the Piedmontese contino who woos the wealthy Concetta with no success, as the comical Denisov, with his affected plunger's lall, does Natasha...
...Within a year the book had gone through fifty-two editions, won the prestigious Strega prize, and was on its way to becoming an international bestseller...
...He was tied to Sicily and his mother, and so the two of them carried on a matrimonio epistolare in French...
...In 1926 he visited his uncle, widow, who reportedly exclaimed "Quel joli who was Italian ambassador to the Court of petit...
...II Gattopardo was rejected by several publishers during the last year of the Prince's life...
...He also met Alessandra, a strapping Latvian baroness and stepdaughter of his uncle the ambassador...
...David Gilmour's escaped from his Austrian captors...
...They ate well, kept vicious dogs, and sometimes obliged guests to play an assigned role...
...In the fifties he gave private lectures in literature to some young friends as an amusement...
...Personal likability and literary likability sometimes overlap, but they are unrelated...
...It is famous for violets and cheese...
...He was born After the war he had a nervous breakin Palermo in 1896, when "one of the least down, possibly as a result of his war distinguished aristocracies in Europe"—the wound, which may have left him impotent...
...James's...
...His friend, cousin, and rival Lucio Piccolo had just received a prize for his poetry, and Giuseppe was "mathematically certain" that he was no stupider than Lucio...
...Gilmour's biography is hardly a success, but not all of its problems can be put at his feet...
...There are others: here an interminable burble of Proustian dependent clauses, there the glitter and minutely calibrated psychology of one of Tolstoy's dinners...
...Even when his palazzo was destroyed by American bombing during the war, his quiet routine remained unchanged...
...Known at the time by the courtesy title of With some careful cutting and pasting, Duke of Palma, Giuseppe attributed his inone could construct an amusing biography of dulgent treatment to the ducal coronet emGiuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, one broidered on his uniform...
...Then, in early 1955, he began writing a novel...
...The splendor of his estates and palazzi will be transformed, he predicts, into "pots of quickly swallowed foie gras" and "noisy little women, as transient as their rouge...
...Now an Italian province, Parma was an princely poverty Giuseppe insisted that his ancient duchy, ruled by the Farnese and latwas an idyllic childhood...
...Yet as a character he is irresistible, and he is as lodged in the Italian popular imagination as James Bond and Holden Caulfield are in ours...
...The prince accepts the union, accepts that the world is changing, even embraces the political upheavals...
...ful life, a luminous book...
...Palma is a dusty village in SiciRichard Lamb is a writer living in New ly...
...Yet as he dies he mourns the fact that he will be the last to have a sense of the unique traditions that define a noble family...
...Lampedusa characterizes him as a scientist, half-Teuton, whose interest in mathematics is almost a "sinful perversion," and who is alienated from his peers, "isolated, not as he thought, from respect, but from fear...
...He was inordi- er the Bourbons...
...It first, unsuccessful, attempt to escape, he is a slim volume about an enigmatic man was obliged to pay his train fare back to the who wrote, towards the end of his unevent- prisoner-of-war camp as punishment...
...there are "even more mysteries about Lampedusa's military career...
...Lucio was an amateur astronomer, occultist, mathematician, poet, composer, and Greek and Persian scholar, who spent much of his time writing an unfinished Magnificat...
...One exception is Gilmour's portrait of Lampedusa's relationship with his odd, Sitwellesque cousins the Piccolos...
...Yet the shambling fatalism, the prickly wit, the erudition of the man are deeply endearing, and Gilmour rarely brings them to life...
...It is in their company that Giuseppe seems most alive in The Last Leopard...
...There is a frustrating lack of information about Giuseppe's relations with other people during this period [in England...
...Then, only months after he died of lung cancer in 1957, Lampedusa's widow was contacted by the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, who had received a copy of the manuscript by circuitous means, and with whom she signed a disadvantageous contract...
...It is about an aristocratic family headed by a proud prince...
...It is still in print, and on the back of the peach-colored Pantheon paperback edition you will see that the English novelist L. P. Hartley called it "perhaps the greatest novel of the century," which may be as close as Hartley himself came to a bid for immortality...
...One visitor was asked to play a bishop, and behave like "a hypocrite and false mediator...
...As one might expect from a first novel by someone so well-read, there is a ghostly chorus of predecessors echoing throughout the book...
...Scenes such as the one in which he tried to fix Lucio up with a nurse, so she could provide him with an heir, are a delight...
...That leaves fifty-one years in the life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa about which there is little to say...
...He is sympathetic to Lampedusa, even to the point of being a quasi-apologist for his rather pathetic marriage...
...Certainly it is not insurmountable—who would want to be trapped in an elevator with Emma Bovary?—but Gilmour doesn't succeed...
...Like Bond, who is by his creator's assertion fastidious and "old-maidish," or Holden, who is mentally ill and something of a loser, Fabrizio has come to fill an unintended niche: he has been taken up as the archetypal southern Italian aristocrat...
...The nephew, Tancredi, is poor, his forebears having "romped through half a dozen fortunes...
...He spent World War I in the armourn the loss of "the last leopard...
...The book is frequently described as having been written in "the grand manner," and Lampedusa lauded for ignoring literary fads...
...In 1932, Giuseppe traveled from Palermo to Riga by way of Munich and, without telling his parents, married Alessandra in a Russian Orthodox ceremony...
...Unfortunately, Licy refused to leave her Latvian castle at Stomersee...
...His beloved nephew marries a rich, beautiful woman whose father is a money-grubbing vulgarian, and whosegrandfather was an unlettered, probably criminal, peasant...
...It comes as no surprise to find out that Lampedusa was rereading War and Peace as he started his own work...
...n Italy, whenever a southern aristocrat nately close to his mother, and remained so of a certain era dies, the obituaries all his life...
...Other portions of Lampedusa's life have been lost entirely, despite Gilmour's preening about the caches of documents he found in Giuseppe's adopted son's house...
...The Leopard is set against the background of the Risorgimento, when Italy was united under Piedmontese control...
...Yet, unlike most writers about whom this could be said, Lampedusa was steeped in the traditions of European literature...
...Gauche by nature and by no The Lampedusas were an ancient fami- means fluent in English, he was something ly, possibly descended from Tiberius, but a of a social success in London, which nineteenth-century patriarch had died intes- Gilmour attributes to his being mistaken for tate, and a legal imbroglio worthy of Bleak the Duke of "Parma" by ambitious hostessHouse ensued...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 2
