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Lampedusa, Prince of twilight

hildren, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa lived in a kind of earthly paradise: a person refused nothing to the king of the house, and throughout his life, he looked involuntarily and all his forces to fall into that blissful state where there was neither work nor responsible adult. He soon was a taciturn and solitary child, who lived among the things more readily than humans, and was lost in the halls of the immense family homes. This experience of loneliness - and sometimes anguished, sometimes happy - never left him. But his loneliness was not entirely: for all beings, all things hovered the shadow of his mother, which prevented him from growing, to conduct his own life, and treated him until his death as a boy - or rather a much loved little girl.

Then came the years of great trips and lectures. He went to France, England, Germany and the Baltics. He had a cousin, Lucio Piccolo, excellent poet, author of Baroque songs

: between 1925 and 1930, Lampedusa wrote from Paris and London, many letters to Piccolo and his brothers, now published by Seuil. Lucio Piccolo told that when he left Italy, Lampedusa seemed another. It was not the end race Sicilian prince, bold, shy son loved his mother too, but a bright young man who caught the flight from London buses, floating on his overcoat around him. He loved England discretion, eccentricity, trade with the spirits of the air, madness - and France, the wealth of sensations, lucidity, the supreme intellectual courage. He began reading passionately history books and literature, especially English and French, and English Literature , essays in French literature, which reveal in labyrinths, often unknown to specialists, he ventured, and how many texts, including minors and small, he had in mind. He read for pleasure, out of curiosity and entertainment with great candor, searching through books this wealth of experiences and adventures that life had not given. If we leaf through the letters of those years, we feel that Giuseppe Tomasi of Lampedusa no: perhaps he was also one of those ghosts that his melancholy English were so fond. Life for him was an empty, or, as he said, quoting Shakespeare,

"a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and meaningless"

, and he plunged into the noise and this rage, had not the strength to live. He met Alexandra Wolff Stomersee: we keep a few letters he wrote in spring 1932, there was never a single line in these letters, which creates an echo of a sentiment. The terms are a pale imitation of the terms Tomasi imagined that we would find a love match. During the summer of that year he married Alexandra: perhaps he feared his wife as he had feared, and was always afraid, her mother. SOFT GIRON Palermitano

When this same mother impressed the young couple to live with it, Lampedusa left his wife back in the beautiful castle Stomersee Baltic, where she took care of psychoanalysis, and remained in the soft bosom of Palermo. Thus, thirteen years, her marriage was made very long absences and visits to Stomersee summer, Christmas in Rome and Palermo. After a few years, he claimed that his love

"increased with distance and with the absence asserted" . He could build his pen is a love of freedom and imagination in love like that, twenty years before, had united and separated Kafka and Felice.

But his letters speak only of dogs, meals, tenants, heat and cold. Nothing ever is daydreaming or obsessive love - even if this singular marriage gave rise over time, if not love, at least at a deep psychological complicity between him and his wife. He began to live as a person when he sold the house in Santa Margherita Belice and, in April 1943, bombing destroyed the Palazzo Lampedusa to Palermo: two homes on his heart and his imagination. The injury was terrible after the destruction, he said nothing for three days, but this disaster freed him feelings that remained objectified in things.
Therefore, he began to exist in memory. As he loved his childhood, when he had not been expelled from Paradise: the voices, noises, shadows, lights, sometimes filtered through the curtains of silk, sometimes heightened by gilding, or populated by myriads of grains of dust! He could not extend the child around him: he could not continue sleeping in the room where he was born, and if the light of remembrance aggression, he was shocked by its violent beauty.
He traveled through the imagination the vast remains of Santa Margherita Belice, with its three hundred rooms, three courtyards, four terraces, garden, his grand staircases, a theater and a church, its vestibules and corridors: he had crossed, child, like an enchanted forest, and he now revisited the places and objects. He did not need to wrap sense: it was enough to name them because the soul was still lurking in all objects stored in its memory.

Thanks to the memory of Francesco Orlando and Gioacchino Lanza, we have a vivid portrait of the old Lampedusa. It was also not so old. When these friends knew him, he was 56 years old, but he was plagued early and weighed down by life that he had not lived. He lived now at 28, via Butera, among the sediment and the relics of the past ; With his wife, finally. He left his home early in the morning, as if to free himself from any confinement. Big, fat, pale, like a general at rest or a huge cat, he crossed the center of Palermo, with a bag laden with books. He always carried with him a volume of Shakespeare and

The Pickwick Papers

. He spent a lot of books in its meager resources, and lied to his wife by claiming to have bought these books used. He cultivated the discretion, irony and good manners. He was happy when his wife told him: "I love you like Stomersee."

If we were to describe it, we might mention one of its pages on Montaigne and Shakespeare:

"We find the same in both a-religiosity mixed with the same emotion to the religious feelings of others, even non universal compassion without a slight tinge of contempt, the same determination to dismantle the machinery of the human psyche, the same serene skepticism, which welcomes all opinions with an "if" ironically condescending. "

At times it looked like a French moralist of the Grand Siècle, or a romantic disenchantment, or a worshiper of frenzied passions and revolutionary dilettante or a great historian. Soon, his young friends realized that behind his smiling face, the old prince was hiding intense anguish. In 1957, he wrote in his diary:

"At home in the evening, clear feeling of being exhausted. This will once again perhaps. But one time or another, this does not happen more. "

he courted death, as Tancred said Fabrizio Salina in The Leopard

? Or death for him it was an experience that had

"pierced the bone marrow"

: a grief that was growing daily in his body and he could not to stay away?

(Translated from Italian by Brigitte Pérol.)

By calling themselves "the Monster" , young Lampedusa provides a key to understanding caustic reading his letters to his cousins Piccolo. This correspondence, long kept by recipients as a secret hard to publish, because of its tone very "happy few", and excesses of a coded humor reveals key aspects of the author of Cheetah

: observations Ironically, its Anglo-Saxon, its debt to Proust. Lampedusa was not the author as late previously thought. Writing during his travels in England, Paris, Switzerland, Germany, he describes a world still attached to an aristocratic tradition, parodying the style of English travelers of the eighteenth century and e announcing major political and cultural.

TRAVEL IN EUROPE Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Salvatore Silvano Nigro preface. Translated from Italian by Nathalie Castagne, Threshold, "Reflections", 224 p., 19 €.