16 SEPTEMBER 1995, Page 37

Slow to begin and never ending

Francis King

THE SIREN AND SELECI'hD WRITINGS by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Harvill, f14.99, pp. 185 N. doubt in part because its author was both Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa, L .P. Hartley, for whom a title always acted like musk on a deer in the rut- ting season, declared that The Leopard was `perhaps the greatest novel of the century'. But though one may demur that, despite its sales of over a million copies and its trans- lation into 23 languages, Lampedusa's novel can hardly be regarded as superior to, say, Ulysses, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu or The Magic Mountain, there can be no doubt that here is an indisputable masterpiece.

About the creation of this masterpiece, as David Gilmour recounts in his authorita- tive introduction, there is one extraordi- nary fact. Whereas most other writers sweat away for 30 or more years at the treadmill of fiction in the vain hope of pro- ducing at least one novel which will ensure them immortality, Lampedusa's whole life of writing, as distinct from preparation for writing, extended to precisely one book and to precisely 30 months, before his death in his late Fifties from lung cancer.

Why a born writer should have for so long deferred writing anything and why eventually he should have settled to a life of feverish literary activity when his health was clearly failing, are two questions which have received a variety of answers. To my mind, the best answer to the first question is that he was the sort of man who con- stantly devotes himself to minor tasks in order to postpone having to put his hand to a major one; to the second, that he was at last goaded into action by rivalry with his cousin Lucio Piccolo, who had in late middle-age had success with publication of a book of poems. 'Being mathematically certain', Gilmour quotes Lampedusa as saying to a friend, 'that I was no more of a fool than Lucio, I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel.'

In his last 30 months, endured in increas- ing pain and fragility, Lampedusa produced not merely his masterpiece but also some sections of an autobiography, its style inspired by Stendhal's La Vie de Henri Brulard, two stories and the first chapter of a novel. It is these which make up the major part of this volume. The chunks of autobiography comprise a wonderful turn- of-the-century evocation of both the Lampedusa palace in Palermo, destroyed by the Allies in the second world war, and the vast, labyrinthine mansion, home of his mother's family, at Santa Margherita, 12 hours' journey from Palermo by train and carriage. As one reads of the combination of luxury and primitive discomfort which characterised life at Santa Margherita, one at once recognises the prototype of the great dusty, dilapidated palace at Donnafu- gata, so brilliantly realised in The Leopard. Typical of this life is the long rail journey there, accompanied by many servants, through the arid countryside in summer, in a carriage which lacks any corridor. A chamber-pot is carried for the young boy — to be flung, with its contents, out of the window just before the final destination is reached.

It is not surprising that E. M. Forster so much admired the short story 'The Siren', since in the irony, now gentle and now ruthless, of its tone and in its adroit combi- nation of fantasy and realism, it has so much in common with many of his own short stories. Lampedusa records what is, in effect, a relationship between his youthful self, represented by the impover- ished scion of an ancient Sicilian family working in the editorial offices of a Turin newspaper, and his older self, represented by an imperious and cantankerous classical scholar of world renown, who loathes the modern world in general and his native Sicily in particular. In his youth the scholar has briefly made love with a Siren, inhabi- tant of the lost world of antiquity to which he has devoted his life; and his eventual death at sea, as the supposed result of hav- ing accidentally fallen overboard, reunites him with her.

The other story, 'Joy and the Law', starts out well in its description of a harassed, indigent clerk attempting to keep his family in some sort of respectable comfort in post- war Palermo, but its climax comes too soon and is handled too perfunctorily.

The first chapter of the novel, which was never to progress any further, is sadly brief. The tone is far more derisive than that of The Leopard, suggesting that, if completed, this study of a peasant family making its way up in the world through cunning, ruth- lessness and dishonesty, would have been an extremely acrid, albeit powerful, work.

The volume concludes with extracts from a series of lectures on English and French literature delivered by Lampedusa, three times a week, to an audience of, for the most part, only two young men. There are occasional felicities of observation or expression which lodge themselves in the memory; but there are too many such sen- tences as 'All Stendhal's works are of top quality and considerable interest' or 'Like Mauriac, Greene has been overwhelmed by moral preoccupations.' I used to deliver myself of similar banalities when I lectured on English literature at universities abroad. I should hate to see them now reproduced in print; and I suspect that, were he still alive, Lampedusa would feel the same about his own banalities.

Of the three translators — Archibald Colquhoun, responsible for masterly ver- sions not merely of The Leopard but also of Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, has the lion's share of the work and is far and away the best.