AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN, after the murder of his aunt, Giuseppe went to school for a term in Rome. Following the family’s return to Sicily at the end of 1911, he was transferred to the Liceo-Ginnasio ‘Garibaldi’ in Palermo, where he stayed for nearly three years. The school report for his final year there gave him high marks for those subjects he most enjoyed – history, philosophy and written Italian – and low ones for those in which he was given oral tests: Latin, Greek and spoken Italian.77
When he was seventeen, Giuseppe left school and decided to go to university. He intended to study literature, but his father could see no point in this and suggested he should prepare for a diplomatic career like his uncle Pietro. Considering that the only successful career pursued by any member of the family for several generations had been diplomacy, this was not necessarily bad advice. Yet for someone so handicapped by shyness and without any real concern for world affairs, diplomatic life was plainly unsuitable. In addition, Don Giulio wanted his son to study law, a subject equally unsuited to someone of Giuseppe’s temperament and interests. Like many southern Italian fathers, however, Don Giulio regarded law as the ideal education for a student, and on this issue his son was forced to capitulate.
Giuseppe’s university career contains certain mysteries. He managed to give the impression later that he went to Turin University and took a degree, but there is no evidence for this. For the year 1914–15 he enrolled at the Law Faculty at Genoa University, yet it is not certain that he ever studied there.78 We know, however, that he soon left for Rome because a document from the Law Faculty in the capital certifies that he had attended a course of lectures for at least a part of the year.79 Whatever the reasons for all this, Giuseppe’s student life was brief because in May 1915 Italy entered the Great War and the following November he was called up for military service.
There are even more mysteries about Lampedusa’s military career, whose length and distinction were exaggerated many years later by his widow. An ‘Attestation of Good Conduct’ of February 1916 declares that he could be admitted into the army as an officer because he was upright and honest and neither a brawler nor addicted to wine and indolence.80 Giuseppe then joined an artillery unit stationed at Messina and in May he was promoted to corporal.81 It is not known why he joined the artillery, but there may have been a family connection: the following year Don Giulio was made a reserve captain of artillery and was later promoted to the rank of major.82
Giuseppe’s military service was an alarming prospect for his mother. Beatrice bombarded him with letters full of advice and visited him at Messina, when he was ill, and later at Augusta. Her letters, in Italian with French phrases for emphasis, have a rather frenzied tone. They contain a certain amount of gossip about the ‘Palermitan beau monde’ and gratitude for Giuseppe’s presents (‘I adore them! The violet water est exquise!’), but their main concerns were his health and his activities. How was his cold? Had he stayed in bed? What was the journey like? Then there are complaints about the infrequency of his letters. She had received only two recently: why did he not write to her every day?83
Beatrice was particularly agitated by a decision to transfer Giuseppe to the infantry which she regarded as the most dangerous branch of the service. It ‘has absolutely shattered me’, she wrote, urging him to have the decision reversed by a combination of intrigue and determination. If he became friendly with his superiors and told them he planned to become a regular officer, he should be able to choose the branch in which he wished to serve. ‘Investigate and find out all possible ways of twisting the rules,’ she advised, and then make a determined move: ‘de l’audace, encore de l’audace’. Whether this manoeuvre was successful, or whether some other consideration was involved, is not clear; at all events, Giuseppe remained in the artillery.
Beatrice Lampedusa’s letters once again reveal the closeness of their relationship and give the impression that she was still treating her son as a small boy. Many people use embarrassing nicknames and perhaps not too much should be made of her terms of endearment: ‘my good and dear Pony’ (in the feminine), ‘my lovely one’ (also in the feminine), ‘my sweet little Pony’ and so on. But the worries about his health, the endless concern that he might catch a cold in the bad weather, read curiously in letters to a young soldier. And so do some of the sentiments: Giuseppe’s barracks at Messina are described as ‘the place where all my life is!’ Certainly Beatrice was often thinking of earlier times, when Giuseppe was a child and her sisters were still alive. ‘The fifth of May! I remember when you were painting pictures in which you tried to give an impression of that fatal day at St Helena.* O blessed and happy times! Where have you gone? Was there really such sunshine?’84
Photographs of this period suggest that Giuseppe was not so unsuited to the army as might have been expected: there is a certain self-confidence in his expression, and in his cape and boots he even looks moderately dashing. In May 1917 he was sent to Turin for an officers’ training course, and the following September, nearly two years after being called up, he arrived at the front. His first duties were to go out each night and repair the telephone lines brought down by Austrian bombardments. Subsequently he was stationed at an observation post near Asiago in a sector held by Alpine troops of the Edolo battalion. Facing them, to the excitement of the battalion’s chaplain, were Bosnian units: the prospect of shooting ‘Muslim infidels’, Giuseppe later recalled, so aroused the chaplain that he grabbed a rifle and fired madly at them.85
Shortly after Giuseppe’s arrival at the front, the Italian army was routed at Caporetto, where it suffered 40,000 casualties and lost 300,000 prisoners, and was driven back seventy miles to the line of the Piave. His unit, some way to the west, took no part in the main battle, but in November it was attacked during an Austrian offensive from the Trentino. In his memoirs Giuseppe admitted ‘killing a Bosnian with a pistol and who knows how many Christians by shellfire’, but this passage may have been an untypical piece of bravado: in recounting the incident many years later to one of his nephews, he gave the impression that he had wounded but not killed the soldier. In any case the Bosnians forced the Alpine troops to retreat and in the assault Giuseppe was wounded, knocked unconscious and captured. For several weeks nothing was heard of him and it was suspected that he had been killed: his friend and fellow-soldier, the poet Enrico Cardile, even dedicated his poem Alba Triste (‘Sad Dawn’) ‘to the dear memory of my corporal, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa,† lost near Asiago’.86 It was not until around Christmas that a telegram arrived in Palermo announcing his imprisonment.
The day after his capture Giuseppe was interrogated by an Austrian officer dressed in a white uniform which seemed to date from the time of the Risorgimento. Subsequently taken outside with other prisoners, he believed he was going to be shot in reprisal for the killing of some Bosnian prisoners by the Edolo battalion. But in fact he received good treatment from the Austrians, a fact he later ascribed to the ducal coronet which they discovered sewn on to his shirt. On his way to a prisoner-of-war camp, he was allowed to do a tour of Vienna on condition he made no attempt to escape, and later claimed that his German was so good that nobody he met recognised him as an Italian. Life in the Szombathely camp in Hungary turned out to be reasonably comfortable and he was able to receive news and parcels from his relations in Sicily; they even sent him tennis balls and racquets.87
At one moment during his imprisonment, Giuseppe and a friend managed to bribe a guard to procure two Austrian uniforms and train tickets for the Swiss frontier. They then set off and had nearly reached safety when they stumbled into barbed wire connected with an alarm system. A group of guards recaptured them and, believing they were deserters, started to kick them. But as soon as it was realised that they were escaped prisoners, they were once again well treated: reimbursing the Austrians for the train tickets was the sole penalty exacted from them.88 Giuseppe was then taken back to the camp where he remained for a few months before escaping again. The war was by now virtually over and there were few guards left at the camp. He escaped without difficulty and, a year after his capture, reached the Italian-occupied city of Trieste.
After his return Giuseppe remained in the army for a further year and was demobilised with the rank of lieutenant in February 1920. The postwar years were for him a period of disillusionment and physical illness. He spent several months in bed, suffering from nervous exhaustion and from a combination of nightmares and insomnia that plagued him for the rest of his life. During his final year in the army he had resumed his student career to the extent of taking an exam at Rome University. But neither there nor at Genoa did he settle down to study. Much to the annoyance of his father and his great-aunts, who were still hoping he would become a diplomat, Giuseppe abandoned his law studies without taking a degree. It seems that even at this early stage he had decided neither to follow any formal profession nor to make any attempt to earn himself a living.
His disillusionment extended beyond his own life to Sicily and Italian politics. It has sometimes been said that Giuseppe di Lampedusa was a convinced anti-fascist who resigned from the army after Mussolini came to power and refused to accept an official post under his government. In fact he was essentially apolitical and, although he had democratic leanings, he was not a real opponent of Mussolini, least of all at the beginning. Indeed, he was less of an anti-fascist than several of his relations: his maternal uncle Alessandro was a socialist politician; his paternal uncle Pietro was foreign minister in the penultimate liberal government; and his father Don Giulio, like some of his peers, was an antifascist who viewed the regime with aristocratic contempt.‡ Surprisingly, the fascists in Giuseppe’s family were his mother Beatrice and her sharp-tongued sister, Teresa Piccolo.
Throughout his life Lampedusa remained too sceptical and disillusioned to be a genuine democrat or a liberal, at least as far as his own country and his own island were concerned. The man who acquired such admiration for British parliamentarians had little but disdain for Italian liberals, especially in the south. One character in The Leopard is described as possessing ‘the deluded and rapacious soul of a liberal’. For Lampedusa, liberalism applied to Sicily was a ridiculous notion, an attempt at veneering a rough and brutal society that was obviously unready for it. The sixty years since the Risorgimento had brought little benefit to the south. Whatever political liberalism may have achieved in certain areas in the north, it had scarcely been practised in the southern provinces. Successive governments in Rome, which needed the support of deputies from the south, found that their easiest course was simply to make pacts with local landlords allowing them to retain political power. From Cavour onwards, liberal politicians in the north had found Sicily impossible to understand and consequently thought it easier to ignore the place rather than antagonise different factions with various plans of reform. For decades there had thus been almost no worthwhile measures of social or economic reform, few agricultural improvements and little in the way of public investment. Communications were still very bad: the Lampedusas took four hours to travel the twenty-two miles from Partanna to Santa Margherita in a landau; more remote districts could be reached only by donkey.
Lampedusa’s view of the Italian liberals as corrupt and ineffectual was shared by other southern intellectuals: for many years the limitations of the Risorgimento and its failures in the south had been attacked by writers and political figures such as Fortunato, Salvemini, Verga and De Roberto. In their eyes southern liberalism had been merely a euphemism for heavy-handed political control. In addition, the liberal leaders now seemed too weak and hesitant to deal with Italy’s post-war crisis, in particular the alleged threat of Bolshevism. In 1919 many opponents of the liberals applauded the flamboyant D’Annunzio who invaded the free state of Fiume and demanded its annexation; Lampedusa, who admired D’Annunzio’s writing, later admitted that he had been among them.90 Yet they needed something more stable and serious than the exotic nationalism of an exhibitionist poet, and most of them found it in Mussolini’s movement. The literary desert of much of the fascist period and the intellectual incoherence of the regime’s doctrines have perhaps obscured fascism’s great attraction to intellectuals in its first years. Three of Italy’s finest musicians, Puccini, Mascagni and Toscanini, were early supporters of the party;§ among writers, the most famous and enthusiastic adherent was Pirandello, who joined the fascists just after they had murdered the socialist deputy Matteotti.91
Giuseppe Palma’s early feelings towards fascism, like that of many junior officers, stemmed from fear of revolution and resentment at the liberals’ failures. He recognised that the fascists were not blameless, yet ‘with all their excesses and defects’ at least they wanted to improve the country while the liberals remained in complacent and corrupt inertia.92 Besides, he believed that fascism could ‘tame Bolshevism’, removing the communist threat by imposing much-needed reforms. These views were sometimes expounded in the house of his Piccolo cousins who admired Giuseppe’s political intuition. Many years later they were recalled by someone who argued with him there one afternoon in the winter of 1922–3. According to this witness, however, Giuseppe never lost control of himself and, although dogmatic, he did not argue like a ‘fervent fascist’. Much of his attitude seemed determined by a ‘bitter grudge’ against the liberal middle classes.93
Some of the greatest figures of Italian liberalism, such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Giolitti, did not oppose fascism until the end of 1924 or 1925. Giuseppe Palma had lost his enthusiasm for the regime before then, although he did not think that Mussolini was always wrong and later applauded his intervention in Spain.94 He admitted that the fascists might be necessary in Italy for a certain period, but he became increasingly disdainful of them. Demagoguery, military parades and all the other paraphernalia of fascism were quite alien to his temperament, and he found them boring and rather ridiculous.
Giuseppe had also lost his enthusiasm for living in Sicily. Between the wars the island retreated from the Belle Epoque into a dull provincialism which Mussolini’s bureaucracy did little to make more interesting. Furthermore, Giuseppe had personal reasons for disliking his home region. The quarrels between his father and his uncles made the atmosphere of the Lampedusa home disagreeable, and the old palace lost much of its charm for him when a large part of it was let to the municipal gas board. There was still an aristocratic society of sorts but, apart from visits to the Bellini Club where he saw friends and cousins, Giuseppe participated in it with reluctance; years later people remembered him drifting about at dances by himself, vaguely looking for his mother.95 But if he was disenchanted by Palermo, his feelings for Santa Margherita were even sadder. During a visit in 1921 he was conscious that the place was changing – strolling actors no longer visited and the theatre had been turned into a cinema – but he had no idea that it would soon be lost to him for ever. Three years later, however, his uncle sold the house without warning. Alessandro Tasca had sacrificed his wealth to finance Sicilian socialism and his debts were by now massive.
His illness, his weariness of Sicily and his disinclination to work persuaded Giuseppe to spend part of the post-war years in northern Italy. He had made some intellectual friends during the war and stayed for long periods with them in Genoa, Turin and their home villages. The writer and critic, Bruno Revel, had been a fellow prisoner, and Giuseppe wrote letters and visited him for many years afterwards. Another friend was Guido Lajolo, who emigrated to Brazil in 1930; a quarter of a century later Lampedusa renewed their correspondence to tell him of the novel he was writing. Occasionally Giuseppe was accompanied on his travels by his mother. During the twenties the two of them stayed in Tuscany and Bologna and made at least one journey to Munich.
In the early twenties Giuseppe acquired a camera and took quantities of photographs of the places he visited. His surviving albums reveal an assiduous tourist but an indifferent photographer: the pictures contain few people, have no artistic pretension and are designed simply to record the architecture of the buildings he looked at.96 In November 1925 he was in Pistoia, where he photographed the cathedral and various palaces, and then in Florence, where again he visited the most famous sights: the Uffizi, the baptistry, the Ponte Vecchio, the Piazza della Signoria. There is a single picture of Beatrice at San Miniato in December and then several photographs of Rome (the Forum, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi fountain), where they spent a few days before returning to Sicily. By 12 December they were staying with Beatrice’s sister Teresa, and Giuseppe was taking photographs of the Piccolo estate at Capo d’Orlando.
A photograph taken during this visit shows Giuseppe wearing a bow-tie, a suit and waistcoat, and spats. He has a small clipped moustache and his black hair is brushed straight back without a parting. Like his father and uncles, his eyes are large, round and slightly protruding. Sitting on a sofa with one of his cousins, a cigarette in his left hand, a large book open on his lap, he has the appearance of a well-fed dilettante.
Yet his reading was more serious than that of a dilettante. He did not dabble in different subjects so that he could shine at dinner parties and largely ignored religion, music, economics and contemporary politics. The subjects he concentrated on were literature, history and, to a lesser extent, art and architecture.¶ By his early twenties his knowledge of literature and history was so impressive that his Piccolo cousins dubbed him il mostro, the monster. Nearly all his reading, except for Russian novels, was done in the original language. As a child he had learnt to read Italian, French and German, a language favoured in Palermitan ‘kindergarten’ by aristocrats loyal to Italy’s Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany. As an adult he acquired English, partly because the War had made him pro-British and anti-German, but he never spoke it as fluently as his childhood languages; for him it was a sort of dead language, to be learnt in order to enjoy its literature. By the time he visited England in 1925 he had read all of Shakespeare and must have been one of the first Italians to penetrate Joyce. He later compared literature to a forest where it was important to investigate everything, not just the large trees in isolation but the undergrowth and wild flowers as well. They were all part of the great body of literature and contributed to each other’s growth.98 Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, for instance, was in itself ‘not worth a cigarette end’, but it was an important and influential book because it opened the way to novels by Scott and Thackeray, to the supernatural writing of Poe and to certain works of Henry James.99
This consuming interest in literature led Giuseppe to the exploration of minor writers from every era. He pursued them through innumerable biographies and acquired an enormous stock of literary anecdotes. With his knowledge of authors and their books, he liked to construct theories and establish unusual connections between different periods and branches of literature. Towards the end of his life he wrote an essay on ‘thrillers’ or ‘romanzi di terrore’ which traced their origins to Shakespeare’s lesser tragedies and other Elizabethan drama before sketching their development down to modern times.100 Elsewhere he argued that history could not be understood properly without a knowledge of literature, especially minor literature. To find out what shopkeepers and railway workers were thinking in the 1920s, he remarked, there was no point in reading the works of Giovanni Gentile. One had to read the books of second-rate novelists to have an authentic picture of an epoch, and although this might require patience, a strong stomach and a dose of bad taste, it was worth it. ‘Ungrammatical, illogical, hysterical, ignorant, fatuous, “snobbish”, in short pitiful as they are, they give us the true portrait of Demos, our lord and master. One has to read them.’101
Three articles which Giuseppe published in 1926–7 give some indication of his literary tastes as a young man. There are favourable references to Yeats, Joyce, Shaw, Swift and Keats; among the French, to Baudelaire and Anatole France but not Hugo; and among Italians, high marks to Petrarch, D’Annunzio and Leopardi but not Tasso.102 Many of his judgements did not change (Keats remained his ‘archangel’;|| Leopardi was always his favourite Italian lyric poet), but some did. Over the years Hugo was partially rehabilitated, Lampedusa admitting that after all Les Misérables was ‘not bad’.104 He also changed his view of The Comedy of Errors: for most of his life he regarded it as a ‘comedy of horrors’ and did not recognise until 1954 that it had one or two good characters and a few exquisite lines.105 Lawrence Sterne went through three stages of popularity. A Sentimental Journey was one of the first books he had read in English as a child; he liked it, reread it and liked it even more. He then read Tristram Shandy, first in Italian and then in English, and thought it a masterpiece. After the First World War he read them both again: ‘Complete disappointment! I was already reading Proust and Gide, and Sterne seemed to me to be rosewater.’ Thirty years later he read both novels once more and reversed his opinion. Sterne was ‘much more subtle and penetrating than the inattentive reader could ever imagine’.106
There was a change too in his attitude to what should be explained in a book and how much should be left for the reader to deduce. On rereading Stendhal’s autobiography in 1955, he said he ‘had not read it since long ago in 1922, when I must have still been obsessed by “explicit beauty” and “subjective interest”, for I remember not liking the book. Now I cannot disagree with anyone who judges it to be Stendhal’s masterpiece.’107 This increasing preference for the implicit over the explicit extended to other areas as well and was doubtless a cause of his distaste for Italian opera.108
Another valuable source for Giuseppe’s tastes and interests is a surviving volume of his commonplace book.109 It is undated but the handwriting, the interests and the absence of modern writers suggest that it was compiled in the twenties. A majority of the quotations are from French sources, but there are a good number of Italian writers and the English range from Shakespeare and Pepys to Ruskin and Charlie Chaplin. As people usually use commonplace books to record opinions they agree with, this collection probably gives a good indication of Giuseppe’s ideas and prejudices at that time. It contains a derogatory comment about philosophy, which no longer interested him after he left school, and another on the incompetence of democratic government. Bismarck’s remark that Italy was made with ‘three Ss: Solferino, Sadowa, Sedan’ – battles principally between the French, the Prussians and the Austrians – is quoted presumably because it supported Giuseppe’s view that the Risorgimento was much less nationalist and heroic than Italian historians liked to pretend. And there are several quotations which record what he liked about the English: their common sense, their stiff upper lip (Charles I on the day of his execution), their taste for paradox (even when exaggerated by Chesterton and Oscar Wilde), and various other qualities he believed they possessed. (Sir Herbert Tree: ‘A gentleman is one who does not care a bit whether he is or not.’)
Before he visited England in the mid-twenties, Giuseppe bought his English books from the Treves brothers in Milan who published works of British and American authors at five lire each; his earliest purchases included Gulliver’s Travels and the poems of Edgar Allan Poe.110 Unlike some of his aristocratic contemporaries, Giuseppe never had a British nanny or governess, and his English was therefore learned from books. When he wrote it, which was seldom, the grammar was usually correct but the choice of phrases suggests that they had been picked up from his reading. Among his papers there is a curious document, partly in Italian and partly in English, which illustrates this. ‘From its very beginning,’ he started in English,
English literature shows itself as a solid block, without those crevices, those abeyances of talent which are so painful to behold in German and Italian letters. But, of course, there are more or less brilliant periods; by universal recognition the two brightest phases are the Elizabethan and Victorian ages. Both exhibiting the most varied talents in prose and in verse; though the theatre of the former and the novel of the latter are set down as their most glorious achievements.
On the next page there is an odd dialogue about someone strolling along Piccadilly, followed by two sentences in Italian stating that Keats had greater spirituality or inner feeling than Shelley. There is then an interesting but less well-written passage in English comparing Shakespeare to Dickens.
The English author who is most like Shakespeare seems to me to be Dickens; he is, in fact, a Shakespeare to whom tragical poetry had been taken away but whose jokes had been amplified and often bettered. Besides he owns Shakespeare’s zest for life and unremitting comprehension towards his own characters.
The document ends with a few paragraphs in Italian denying that Milton was an ‘English Dante’. Although the characters of the two poets had much in common (‘austere, rigid and sometimes hard’), Milton lacked both Dante’s concision and his latent sympathy for the damned. ‘In any case, how can one compare Dante to Milton when the latter was not in a position, morally or theologically, to imagine Purgatory?’111
During his thirtieth year Giuseppe decided to exhibit some of his learning in Le Opere e i Giorni, an obscure Genoese journal vaguely connected with D’Annunzio and Pirandello.112 His three published articles are all very different and highly idiosyncratic, full of incidental subjective judgements on writers unrelated to the subject matter of the essays. They also reveal the breadth of his reading, demonstrating a literary knowledge of French, English, German and Italian.
The first article, a commentary on the early works of Paul Morand, praises the author’s view of the period immediately after the Great War and admires the irony with which he describes the ‘sad caricature’ of post-war Europe. It also contains some of Giuseppe’s pessimism about the future, including an accurate prediction that the diplomacy of recent years had ‘laid firm foundations for future conflicts’. The second article, which he entitled ‘W. B. Yeats e il Risorgimento irlandese’, celebrated the ‘spiritual beauty’ of Yeats’s poetry. Stressing Ireland’s Celtic inheritance and the effect of the country’s climate and landscape on Yeats and his symbolism, Giuseppe also had time to view the whole sweep of Irish literature and to discuss the caustic satire of writers from Swift to Joyce. With a rather grandiose flourish, the article concluded that ‘under the distinguished guidance of W. B. Yeats … the literature and arts of the new Ireland are assuming a position worthy of the traditions of a people which in all the tragic hours of its history has always found a poet to point out its destiny’.
The third article, a long review of a German biography of Julius Caesar, reveals Giuseppe’s fondness for historical heroes. His enthusiasm for Caesar’s greatness was even more lavish than his praise for Yeats’s poetry, and was presented in even more sonorous prose: ‘Caesar, for twenty centuries absent in the flesh, for twenty centuries present in the spirit; without doubt the most alive of all the immortals’. This high-flown, rather ornate style is one of the characteristics of these essays. Another is the quantity of personal opinions, such as his remarks on the importance of reading literature in its original language. And a third is the surprising degree of self-confidence for someone so reserved and inexperienced. The judgement on Victor Hugo is grandiloquently self-assured: Hugo’s ‘untidy palace’, which was ‘partly a Gothic cathedral decorated only with monsters and angels, without God and without human effigies’, already had, in spite of its recent construction, ‘more than one broken pane and more than one piece of peeling plasterwork’.
These articles were not polished pieces of literary criticism but they had a certain originality and made some interesting points. Forty years later Paul Morand read the review of his work and found it excellent.113 After the publication of the essay on Caesar, a journalist wrote to tell Giuseppe that his admiration for the piece was such that he had been inspired to write a short story on the same subject which had been published in the Corriere della Sera.114 Yet the appearance of his articles, which apparently encouraged his parents to think he was about to become a literary figure, did not inspire Giuseppe to write anything more, except for an essay on G. K. Chesterton which was not published and may not have been completed. So far as we know, he wrote nothing else with a view to publication for nearly thirty years.
* The death of Napoleon, 5 May 1821.
† He was not in fact Prince of Lampedusa at this stage. Until his father’s death in 1934, he was usually known as the Duke of Palma.
‡ On seeing Mussolini for the first time, one Sicilian prince shook his head and muttered, ‘Too many spats, too many spats!’89
§ Toscanini, however, had already become disillusioned by the time of Mussolini’s march on Rome and afterwards refused to conduct the fascist anthem ‘Giovinezza’. Puccini died in 1924 shortly after he had been appointed a senator by Mussolini. Mascagni remained a zealous fascist and a member of the Italian Academy.
¶ Giuseppe had catholic tastes in buildings, encompassing Gothic cathedrals and English country houses as well as the Baroque churches of Sicily. About paintings he talked little, though sometimes he liked to compare works of literature to the style of a great artist. One of Shakespeare’s sonnets he described later as ‘coloured and sumptuous like a Rubens’, while Antony and Cleopatra ‘reflected its epoch with the clarity and colour of a fresco by Tiepolo’.97 One of his favourite pictures was Reynolds’s portrait of Dr Johnson in the National Portrait Gallery.
|| Lampedusa enjoyed placing writers in categories. One group contained ‘creators of worlds’ such as Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Balzac, Tolstoy and Dickens. Another was reserved for the ‘angels’:
‘To be included among the angels it is necessary to die very young or to cease all artistic activity at an early age. One condition, it goes without saying, is that their work is of supreme value, while another is that their presence is short and brilliant, so that they leave us grey mortals with the sensation that they are superhuman visitors who watched us for an instant and then returned to the heavens, bequeathing us gifts of divine quality and also a bitter regret at the fleetingness of the apparition. Among the “angels” I place Raphael and Masaccio, Mozart and Hölderlin, Rimbaud and Maurice de Guérin, Shelley, Marlowe and Keats … Rupert Brooke and Novalis have just missed promotion to this group, together with Giorgione and Van Gogh. In this list, shining with joy and for us tears, the supreme place goes to John Keats. Of all of them, he alone is absolutely pure … angel and archangel of the highest degree.’103