Between Eternities: And Other Writings Page 14

  (2005)

  For Me Alone to Read

  A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how certain lines from books and films and certain pieces of music which we once thought wonderful can sometimes become so hackneyed that we can barely stand to hear them any more. This is the case, above all, with books, but something similar and even more mysterious happens with films and music. Every fan of these arts has experienced, at least in youth, the feeling of ‘appropriating’ whatever he or she reads, sees and listens to. The sense that these works were made for you alone. That the author’s voice or the director’s images or the composer’s notes were intended solely for us (that is, ‘for me’), and that we were the only people who knew them, or at least the ones who best or most truly understood them. Needless to say, you gradually come to realize that many other readers, viewers or listeners are familiar with these works and have perhaps felt the same, and then you cannot help but see these others as ‘usurpers’ or ‘copycats’. When devotees of a particular writer, director or composer find that the latter have grown too successful or have too many admirers, it’s not unusual for them to desert them, if I can put it like that, or else join the ranks of the disaffected or even of their detractors. It’s as if we thought: ‘Well, if all those other people like them, I’m off.’ This isn’t simply an elitist position – although it is that too – or because it’s impossible to belong to the ‘initiated few’ when there are legions of initiates, it’s that we feel somehow ‘dispossessed’ (‘This no longer belongs only to me’) or that our favourites have become contaminated.

  It’s even worse when we discover that we share passions with people we don’t like, or whom we detest or despise, or who strike us as arrant fools. Obviously this happens with the classics. Two years ago, we all had ‘our own’ Don Quixote and probably each of us felt that most of the many others were spouting nonsense whenever they talked about the book, even though we all shared the same enthusiasm. We perhaps had a private belief that our reading was the ‘right’ one and rather crazily continued to believe that Cervantes had written it almost exclusively for us. It’s even harder to see people we consider to be utter idiots suddenly discovering one of our favourite authors and starting to quote from him and to comment on him, in short, to ‘appropriate’ him, and in doing so they often almost ruin him for us. For example, if a columnist in the habit of pawing everything he touches, and usually spoiling it in the process, should suddenly be dazzled by G. K. Chesterton and proceed to write about him constantly, transforming him into some awful, over-pious fellow, we cannot help but feel that our jovial Chesterton has been ‘soiled’ in some way or that, as far as we are concerned, he has been rendered useless. And if we hear someone for whom we have little respect declaring that his favourite films are the same as ours, let’s say: The Searchers, Two Rode Together and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we experience a feeling of profanation. They will, of course, feel exactly the same when they hear us praising Chesterton (although not, of course, for being pious) or John Ford’s three crowning achievements. Obviously, none of us is right, and that’s why I speak of feelings rather than judgements.

  The extraordinary thing about literature (and perhaps to a lesser degree films and music, because in these other arts there is no voice telling and persuading and whispering, and it is the narrative voice that most captivates) is that once you know that nothing is yours alone and that you might share enthusiasms with those you most despise, the puerile feeling nevertheless prevails that no one has read such-and-such an author or such-and-such a work in the same way as you have. Our personal experience survives and, despite all our ‘disillusionments’, we nevertheless go on believing that the writer was writing only for us. After the recent centenary celebrations for Hergé, the creator of Tintin, it has been impossible not to recognize, if we hadn’t already, that Tintin and Haddock belong to the whole of humanity. And yet nothing can erase the excitement I felt as a child when I first read the comic books, just as nothing will erase the excitement felt by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, to mention just one Tintinophile, who even, in part, imitated him by choosing to follow a career as a reporter.fn1 Both of us – and millions more – will continue to think: ‘Those stories were written for me alone to look at and read.’ That’s the wonderful thing: even though men have been reading the Iliad for centuries and we are not discovering anything new when we cast our eyes over it, that act of reading is ours alone and the work in question is then as new as if Homer had just composed it. No one can take that away from us. I remember reading Madame Bovary while staying, alone and frightened, in a country house in Gerona, with dogs barking in the distance. For me that is the only Madame Bovary that exists, however many learned studies and wise interpretations may have been written about it. It’s fortunate really that we are not all granted the wish expressed by the Woody Allen character in Annie Hall, who, standing in line at a cinema, listening to some guy pontificating foolishly and pedantically about McLuhan, wishes that McLuhan himself would appear and say to the idiot behind him: ‘You know nothing of my work.’ Who knows, it might be us and not the others who Cervantes or Homer, Flaubert, John Ford or Chesterton decided to take down a peg or two.

  (2007)

  Hating The Leopard

  There is no such thing as the indispensable book or author, and the world would be exactly the same if Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Mann, Nabokov and Borges had never existed. It might not be quite the same if none of them had existed, but the non-existence of just one of them would certainly not have affected the whole. That is why it is so tempting – an easy temptation if you like – to think that the representative twentieth-century novel must be the one that very nearly didn’t exist, the one that nobody would have missed (Kafka, after all, did not leave just the one work, and as soon as it was known that there were others, as well as Metamorphosis, any reader was then at liberty to desire or even yearn to read them), the one novel that, in its day, was seen by many almost as an excrescence or an intrusion, as antiquated and completely out of step with the predominant ‘trends’, both in its country of origin, Italy, and in the rest of the world. A superfluous work, anachronistic, one that neither ‘added to’ nor ‘moved things on’, as if the history of literature were something that progressed and was, in that respect, akin to science, whose discoveries are left behind or eliminated as they are overtaken or revealed to be incomplete, inadequate or inexact. But literature functions in quite the opposite way: nothing that one adds to it erases or cancels out what came before; rather, it sits alongside those earlier books and coexists with them. Old and new texts breathe in unison, so much so that one wonders sometimes if everything that has ever been written is not simply the same drop of water falling on the same stone, and if, perhaps, the only thing that really changes is the language of each age. The older work still has to ‘breathe’ despite the time that has elapsed since its creation or appearance: and some works – the majority – are erased or cancelled out, but this happens of its own accord, not because something else comes along to take their place or to supplant or eject them; rather, they languish and die because of their own lack of spirit or – more precisely – because they aspired to being ‘modern’ or ‘original’, an aspiration that leads inevitably to an early senescence, or, as others might say, they become ‘dated’. ‘It’s very much of its time,’ we tell ourselves when we read these books in a different, later age, because, given the unstoppable and ever-accelerating speed with which the world moves, ‘in a different age’ can sometimes mean a mere decade later. This is the case even with stories written by some of the great modern authors, such as Kafka, Faulkner, Borges on occasions and Joyce almost always. They can sometimes seem slightly old-fashioned or, if you prefer, dated, precisely because they were so innovative, bold, confident, original and ambitious.

  The same cannot be said of Isak Dinesen or of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. The latter is not in any way an old-fashioned nineteenth-century novel as some critics said at th
e time, misled perhaps by the century in which the action takes place. It is, without a doubt, a contemporary novel of the kind written by the authors mentioned above, and its author was fully aware of the new techniques and ‘advances’ in the genre, if you can call them that, and was even modest enough to abandon one possibility – that of describing a single day in the life of Prince Fabrizio di Salina – saying: ‘I don’t know how to do a Ulysses.’ But he did know, for example, how to make masterly use of ellipsis, telling a story in fragmentary fashion, unemphatically, even withholding information and leaving unexplained what the reader need only glimpse or intuit, setting up illuminating connections between disparate and apparently secondary or merely anecdotal elements, adroitly bringing together what the characters say and do with what they think (all of which is much more common in the twentieth-century novel than in the novel of the nineteenth century), and, above all, he observes, reflects, suggests and qualifies.

  As we know, The Leopard was very nearly never published at all, and its author did not live to see it in printed form; indeed, only a few days before his death on 23 July 1957, he received another rejection letter from one of the best Italian publishing houses, which thus added its short-sighted ‘critical perceptions’ to those of another no less prestigious house. More than that, though, The Leopard might never have been written at all. Lampedusa was not a writer, and proved to be one only after his death; and he began writing his novel in the last years of his life for, it seems, entirely trivial reasons: the relative late success of his cousin the poet Lucio Piccolo, which led Lampedusa to make the following comment in a letter: ‘Being absolutely certain that I was no more of a fool than he, I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel’; another reason was his wife, Licy, who encouraged him to write – to write anything, with no pretentions to greatness – simply as a possible way of neutralizing his deep-seated nostalgia; a third reason might have been his solitude: ‘I am a person,’ he wrote, ‘who is very often alone. Of the sixteen hours of daily wakefulness, at least ten are spent in solitude. And being unable, after all, to read the whole time, I amuse myself by constructing literary theories …’ He did, in fact, spend most of his life reading and, when he went for his daily stroll around the city of Palermo, he always carried a briefcase with him, stuffed with far more books than he could possibly need. He even read (and he read in five or six languages) mediocre, second-rate authors, whom he considered to be as necessary as the literary greats: ‘One has to learn how to be bored,’ he said. So there was very little drive and scant ambition behind The Leopard. Indeed, as I say, it might never have existed, for Lampedusa himself had doubts about its timeliness and its value. On one occasion, he said to his pupil Francesco Orlando: ‘It is, I fear, complete rubbish,’ and he said this, apparently, without false modesty and in good faith. At the same time, though, he believed that it deserved to be published (which is not so very remarkable given how many books – good, mediocre and bad – were published in the twentieth century, not to mention all those that have already been published in the twenty-first century). In ‘Last wishes of a private person’, he wrote: ‘I would like every effort to be made to publish The Leopard … this does not mean, of course, that it should be published at the expense of my heirs; I would consider that to be a great humiliation.’ So while there was little drive and scant ambition when it came to beginning the task, at least there was a certain pride in finishing it.

  Lampedusa had good reason to feel proud. The Leopard is fresh and bold and free of any of the inhibitions that afflict novelists who feel an undue sense of responsibility towards themselves and their career thus far; it is entirely free of intellectual airs and vanities and of any desire to be original; it has no intention of dazzling or scandalizing or of ‘opening up new paths’; on re-reading The Leopard more than fifty years after it was first published and in another century, it seems to me to be a solitary masterpiece four times over: first, because it is the author’s only complete novel; second, because it appeared when he was already dead, and thus stepped out into the world, so to speak, alone; third, because it was the work of an islander cut off from ‘public’ literature until his death; and fourth, because although it never aspired to originality, it is, nonetheless, extraordinarily original. Much has been written about this novel since, and it would be presumptuous of me to attempt to add anything more. We can all agree that it is the pre-eminent novel about Sicily and about the unification of Italy; that it gives us a portrait of the end of an era and the death of a whole world, as well as a picture of opportunism as embodied in that famous and oft-quoted line: ‘For everything to remain the same, everything must change’ – repeated ad nauseam by those who have never read The Leopard – although those words are, in fact, just another fortunate phrase in the book as a whole and incidental to the plot. For me, it is, above all, a novel about death, about one man’s preparation for and acceptance of death, even a certain impatience for it to come. Death stalks the book not in any insistent way, but tenuously, respectfully, modestly, almost as part of life and not necessarily the most important part either. Perhaps two of the most moving passages in the book are the Prince of Salina’s contemplation of the brief death agony of a hare he has shot during a hunting party, and the final paragraph, in which, almost thirty years after Don Fabrizio himself has died, his daughter Concetta decides to relegate to the rubbish heap the stuffed carcass of a dog that belonged to her father and of whom he was particularly fond, Bendicó.

  Of the hare, Lampedusa writes: ‘Don Fabrizio found himself being stared at by big black eyes soon overlaid by a glaucous veil; they were looking at him with no reproval, but full of tortured amazement at the whole ordering of things; the velvety ears were already cold, the vigorous paws contracting in rhythm, still-living symbol of useless flight; the animal had died tortured by anxious hopes of salvation, imagining it could still escape when it was already caught …’ And of the dog he writes: ‘As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things discarded in the hope of final riddance,’ and this leads the reader to remember another line, much earlier, in which he speaks of the world of Donnafugata as being ‘deprived thus of that charge of energy which everything in the past continues to possess’.

  Lampedusa knows that all things take a long time to disappear, that everything takes its time; even something that is already past lingers and resists leaving, even the stuffed carcass of a dog that departed this world decades before. And one can only oppose this slow, inevitable disappearance with a humble, but never rancorous reproach to the order of things. Anyone who knows or senses the existence of this order gradually becomes used to the idea and to the prospect of disappearing, even thinking of it as a ‘salvation’. For example: ‘he had achieved the portion of death that one can safely introduce into one’s existence without renouncing life’; and, elsewhere: ‘Where there’s death there’s hope …’ This doesn’t apply solely to places and animals, who do not understand (still less the eyes that are not even eyes, but the glass imitations used by the taxidermist when creating the stuffed version of Bendicó). It applies to people too, most of whom are still unaware and full of life, still convinced that death is something that happens to other people, and yet who are still worthy of compassion. In the famous ball scene, he writes: ‘The two young people drew away, other couples passed, less handsome, just as moving, each submerged in their passing blindness. Don Fabrizio felt his heart thaw; his disgust gave way to compassion for all these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms. How could one inveigh against those sure to die? … Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.’

  As he says at the end of the sixth chapter: fifty or more years are a mere instant ‘in the region of perennial certitude’. Perhaps it is long enough, though, for all of us still living, still ephemeral novelists – blind, touching figures caught between two shades – to start earning the right to hate
The Leopard.

  (2011)

  Writing a Little More

  After a more or less obligatory first reading of the great masters of the past, usually in our youth, many of us writers feel somewhat uneasy about revisiting them. It tends to be a rather discouraging, not to say frustrating experience. The novelist or poet picks up a copy of Shakespeare or Cervantes, Montaigne or Hölderlin, Keats or Conrad or Proust, and, after re-reading a few pages, thinks: ‘What on earth am I doing here at my typewriter or computer? What is the point of me adding a single line to what they have already said?’ Re-reading the classics can be an invitation to silence.

  I experience this feeling myself with quite a few writers, although not with Shakespeare, who should perhaps be the one author guaranteed to have the most depressing, paralysing effect. Instead, I always find revisiting his work stimulating and enriching. It doesn’t invite me to silence at all, but urges me on to write ‘a little more’. How can that be? It would be absurd for anyone to compare himself with Shakespeare, to compete or even slavishly imitate him. One takes his undoubted superiority for granted. Yet far from discouraging me, his work encourages and fills me with a desire to write, and the reason for this is that his texts are so mysterious, even when they appear not to be and seem easy to understand … at least initially. There are so many ideas that he merely noted in passing, but left unexplored; as you travel through his plays, you notice so many side streets going off to the left and right that you feel tempted to go down them, to venture off along paths he merely signalled, but did not take, those, so to speak, that he discarded or abandoned.

  Seven of my books have titles that quote from or paraphrase Shakespeare: the novels A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, Dark Back of Time, Your Face Tomorrow and Thus Bad Begins, the volume of stories When I was Mortal and the collection of essays Seré amado cuando falte (I Shall be Lov’d When I am Lack’d). If we look at the lines from Macbeth from which the first title comes: ‘My hands are of your colour; but I shame to wear a heart so white’, the meaning of the word ‘white’ is by no means unambiguous. Does it mean ‘pale’ or ‘cowardly’ or ‘innocent’ or ‘without stain’? If we look at the line from Hamlet that I’ve used as the title for my most recent novel: ‘Thus bad begins and worse remains behind’, the Spanish characters who quote these words take them to mean ‘and worse is left behind’, and yet many Shakespearean exegetes and translators interpret it as meaning ‘and worse lurks or waits behind’ or ‘worse is yet to come’. Shakespeare’s ambiguity is there even in some of his most famous and often-repeated lines. We are all familiar with Othello’s soliloquy spoken just before he kills Desdemona, which begins thus: ‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.’ Almost no one bats an eyelid or pauses when they read or hear this and what follows, and yet it isn’t at all clear what Othello is referring to, because he doesn’t say ‘This is the cause’ nor, of course, ‘She is the cause.’ And what exactly does ‘In the dark backward and abysm of time’ mean, when the word ‘backward’ doesn’t even appear to be a noun, strictly speaking? And are Prince Hal’s words to his pal Poins any clearer: ‘What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name! Or to know thy face tomorrow!’ (I, of course, gave this a contradictory twist in my novel Your Face Tomorrow.)