The Viceroys (2 page)

I vicerè
is about the Risorgimento betrayed. Until recent years the aims and results of that movement have been blurred by official rhetoric and a process of falsification which began in the north of Italy and was at first due to the role of Piedmont and its dynasty. The piazzas of Italy are still cluttered with some of the less harmful results, those bewhiskered and gesticulating statues of the first King of United Italy, Victor Emmanuel of Savoy. Amid the confusion of motives, nationalism, dynastic aggrandisement, social aspiration, it was the south that came off worst. Seen from there the posturing and rhetoric looked suspiciously like cover for failed promises; in time this even became linked with Mussolini's rodomontades about ‘eight million bayonets'. The age-old distrust of rulers throughout the south spread next to ‘those in Rome'. Subsequent waves of immigration from the depressed areas of Sicily and Calabria brought with them the Mafia and Camorra, to spread all over the Americas; and, less obvious but more damaging, the diffusion from Soho throughout the world of that most inadequate and adhesive of national images, the Italian organ-grinder with a monkey on a stick.

A preoccupation of Manzoni when writing the first Italian novel
I Promessi Sposi
(‘The Betrothed') had been ‘the millions whom history ignores'. In the pages of Verga we glimpse for the first time the southern worker, sober, toiling, undemonstrative, bitter sometimes at hopes deferred. Manzoni's Lombard peasants of fifty years before had been irradiated by Providence; the Furies dog Verga's fisherfolk at Acitrezza and peasant proprietors in the hinterland. All the Catanian so-called
Veristi
(‘
Verismo, verismo, verità, io dico!
', exclaimed Verga) were haunted by this bitter aftermath of a Risorgimento that in Sicily during the decades after 1860 looked almost a mockery. This spirit pervades
I vicerè
, though its protagonists were nobles and its plot the end of Sicilian feudalism (or, according to a modern historian, ‘the feudalising of the Sicilian Risorgimento'). Its pages almost vibrate at times with an indignation about cant that must have affected most sensitive inhabitants of the island then, and has left traces today. They show in that very different book with a similar plot,
Il Gattopardo
(‘The Leopard'); but De Roberto was nearer to the facts and less involved than the Prince of Lampedusa, not watching the ruin of his own class on its way later but noting in detail the moves used by the old order to preserve itself at the time. On a deeper level the oriental fatalism prevalent in western Sicily scarcely touched these writers of the east, who with all their disillusion (a modern critic has even accused Verga of ‘narcissism of defeat'), kept alive something of the dynamism of the Risorgimento.

One result of the sweeping away of ancient state barriers was a sudden awareness of local cultural roots. In Sicily, with its unimaginable riches of untapped image and legend, there was no danger of artificial ‘folklore', and a dialect breakaway was avoided by Verga's insistence on using an Italian modified by local speech rhythms; ‘By listening, listening, one learns to write', he would say. Another major influence was literary theory from France, then prevalent in northern Europe. The French realists' advocacy of close ‘objective' study of physical and psychological detail, in effect usually turned into fixation on the drabber aspects of middle-class life around them. Since Attic days, Sicily has been a forcing-house for ideas from outside and the Catanian
Veristi
, working directly on the Sicilian themes they found around them, brought off a grafting process which made them more vital, and eventually more influential, than their French teachers.

Verga was born at Vizzini, one of those remote places in the interior whose roofs lie like leaves around a church, and whose male inhabitants appear to spend their days in the streets, cloaked and silent, staring into space. Capuana's birth-place, Mineo, is a primeval hill-town behind Catania. But De Roberto was only half-Sicilian by blood, and born in Naples, in 1861, over twenty years after either of his masters. His father was a Neapolitan who, on service in Catania as a regular
officer in the Bourbon army during the last years of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, married the daughter of a local family, the Asmundo. Colonel De Roberto, according to family tradition, was the officer who personally consigned Naples to Garibaldi on the latter's historic entry in September, 1860. On the colonel's death his only son, aged ten, was sent for education down to his mother's family at Catania. There Federico De Roberto made his home, never to return to Naples except for an occasional visit to such family property as was there.

The Asmundo were a vast involuted tribe, of Spanish origin as the name implies (so was Verga), ruled by an aged and autocratic grandparent, chief charity commissioner for the city. Systems of life centuries behind the times have a way of being preserved in Sicily; the Asmundo were more patriarchal than feudal, and memories of the family set-up must have been at the back of De Roberto's mind when he started
I vicerè
. Not that the Asmundo, though of ancient Spanish stock, were grandees on any such scale as the book's Uzeda. One catches a glimpse, in De Roberto's background, of something far rarer, particularly in the south; the old professional upper middle-cum-minor-landowning class whose standards have helped to give fibre to the south since the Renaissance; the class to which, in Naples, belonged many of the promoters of the Parthenopean Republic and later the opposition to King ‘Bomba', and in more recent days De Sanctis, founder of Italian literary criticism, and the late Benedetto Croce. Rare on Sicily's east coast, it is almost non-existent in the west; at Palermo, even today, such standards as there are (outside the Church, the Communists, and the followers of Danilo Dolci) have devolved, for the arts at least, on to sprigs of the nobility, who take a serious part in the Regional Government's various ‘Assessorates' for the encouragement of opera, music, even tourism. Catanians have always prided themselves on energy and thrust, and life there, however provincial and enclosed, has less social rigidity. Verga, for instance, in spite of his radical views, spent most of the last twenty afternoons of his life dozing away beneath the springing arches of Palazzo Càrcaci, the Nobles' Club in Via Etnea. For De Roberto this place was merely a waste of his maestro's time. He himself had an early ‘salon period' (there is an agreeable
glimpse in an early story of a duchess on her
venitiènne
in a remote darkened boudoir toying with a tortoiseshell paper-cutter over the pages of Bourget); but he kept away from most Catania society, which was far more flourishing at the time than it is now. No volumes of his inscribed to local great ladies survive, as they do of Verga, Capuana, and even of the ‘anarchist' poet Rapisardi. Detachment from his characters' lives gives an oddly transposable air to
I vicerè
, as if it might be in another medium, music or even dance, heard or seen through a door. Perhaps it was this quality that made the Prince of Lampedusa consider
I vicerè
as a ‘picture of the Sicilian aristocracy seen from the servants' hall'. The introspective poetry of
Il Gattopardo
which gives that book its effulgence was a sign of its author's lingering involvement, while De Roberto changes key and presses on almost obsessively.

Whatever De Roberto's preferences in the way of company, he was anything but a recluse most of his life, and must have taken an active part in literary life in Florence and then in Milan, where he was established by the late ‘eighties. For he followed a pattern common to Sicilians of all classes, who long to escape from their island, sometimes do and always yearn to return. In northern Italy De Roberto had no difficulty in finding his feet as critic and literary journalist; Milan had been an intellectual centre since the first Italian Encyclopedists and the ‘Società del Café' at the end of the eighteenth century. In the ferment of those years after the Unification, it was the liveliest place in the peninsula, with writers and aspirants from all over Italy, Giacosa, the two Boitos, young D'Annunzio, young Fogazzaro, congregating in the cafés around the Scala. There De Roberto first met his fellow-townsman Verga, already an established writer and just plunging into the great creative period of his life. Capuana joined them, and it is pleasant to think that the meeting of these three Sicilians amid the Lombard mists helped to bring about a renovation of Italian letters.

Cosmopolitan though Milanese literary life may have seemed then, with its pervading influences from Zola, Flaubert and Bourget, most Italian writers of the time were as provincial in their habits and interests as they are today. De Roberto cast one of the widest nets among literati of his time; he translated
Baudelaire, wrote essays on Tolstoy, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, and through the pages of the new
Corriere della Sera
of Milan, (while Capuana did the same through
La Nazione
of Florence), became a major diffuser of French, English, German and Russian literature in the peninsula. Through forty years and in thirty volumes he ranged from psychological stories, tales of peasant life (early efforts, in imitation of Verga, though one may have been the original plot of
Cavalleria Rusticana
), realist studies, the earliest psychological thriller in the language, to works on art and antiquities, and a series of volumes on a hybrid science, very popular at the time and fitting somewhere between Lombroso and Havelock Ellis, ‘the psychology of love'. At times he had hardly finished a book in one style before he was busy on something totally different, and the very breadth of his interests has tended to defy docketing and to confuse his reputation. Restless, searching, diffusing throughout his life a kind of intimate disquiet, he was an example of that strange island ill which Sicilians are apt to illude themselves preoccupies us all,
la tensione siciliana
.

He began writing early, first published some scientific papers at the age of nineteen, and in spite of the tacking of his talent remained a dedicated writer all his life. A cool eye for the vagaries of human conduct and of daily reality combined with technical control to avoid literary attitudes. According to Brancati and Pirandello he was already at his best in his very first book of stories of Catania life,
Processi Verbali
. Soon, in his first novel,
Ermanno Raeli
(1889), came influences from France, particularly of Bourget; this is an uneven book about a young Sicilian of half-German extraction and his troubles in integrating a double nature into Sicilian life. ‘Happiness is a chimera' is the opening line, and one might dismiss this book as full of woozy adolescent self-pity were there not glimpses of an adult and original mind, some good talk on a local baroque painter who is still too little known, Pietro Novelli il Monrealese, and well-observed details of a Palermo winter season in the ‘eighties, when for the locals ‘all foreigners were English'. Tension and disquiet show again, more clearly, in his second novel,
L'Illusione
(1891), whose theme was a bold one for the period, a woman's search for true love from one affair to another. Poor
Donna Teresa may have some affiliations with that other self-destroying charmer, La Pisana of Nievo's
Confessions
; but she is more obviously a victim; her provenance is from Flaubert and she is a Sicilian Bovary.
L'Illusione
also turns out to be a crablike approach to
I vicerè
, for the heroine is an Uzeda, daughter of two main characters in the later novel, the selfish charmer Don Raimondo and his hapless first wife. De Roberto's correspondence has not yet been properly sifted and we do not know if he already had the vast novel in view when he wrote
L'Illusione
. Or did an attempt to explain Donna Teresa in terms of heredity draw him into an ever-spreading family chronicle, hoping to find somewhere an answer to the nag of his life, the meaning of love?

I vicerè
, published in 1894, seems to have been written very fast, though it may have been partly in his head already, for its structure suggests careful planning. The manuscript, unlike the tortured pages of Manzoni's
I Promessi Sposi
, shows few erasions for a first draft. The idea of the book must have been with him ever since the time when, a youth just out of school, he had spent a period as librarian in the new civic reading-rooms, once the great library of the monastery of San Nicolò l'Arena in Catania. No-one could work there now without being affected by past splendours, for the monastery, according to De Roberto's own later computation, was the biggest in Europe except for Mafra; it now houses not only the huge municipal library, but four day-schools, an art-school, a gymnasium, a barracks and an observatory, the whole with its orchards and outhouses covering in its day a district of the town. In this improbable building were set some of the most fascinating scenes in the book. The vast luxurious monastery becomes a twin pivot, with the palace of the Uzeda in the town below, for pride, corruption and greed. The facts may be coloured, but there is no doubt about their accuracy. At the time of the sequestration in 1862, when church property was sold off at what turned out to have been mainly rigged auctions, the monastery drew an income from fifty-two estates, for the benefit of some fifty choir-monks and their dependants, of about the modern equivalent of £100,000, or $280,000, a year (untaxed). The Sicilian Church, until 1860, had become progressively more prosperous ever since the allocation to
it by the Norman Kings of a third of the island's land and many privileges. Both at San Nicolò and at their other great house, Monreale outside Palermo, the Benedictines in Sicily had become powerful and lax. Though their Order's ancient tradition of distinction in science and letters was still very important to island life, and their vast rentals were so extensively used for the relief of the needy that no-one has yet filled the gap (facts never mentioned by De Roberto), yet their discipline was loose; power and riches had brought pride, and there was an insistence on noble blood which is certainly not to be found anywhere in the Rule of St Benedict.
^*
Annals show how tense their relations often were with the local archdiocese, and even with the Papacy itself, while their public contribution to the religious life of Catania was limited to one sumptuous procession on Corpus Christi Day. Like most Italian writers during the last hundred years, De Roberto was anti-clerical. The local combination of paternalism, outward splendour, squalor, insistence on the letter to the detriment of the spirit, must have driven hard such faith as he had. San Nicolò, to him, represented the worst side of religion in Sicily, and his prejudices were apt to run away with him, although he was generally scrupulous about his documentation. The weak Abbot who makes an occasional semi-imbecile appearance in
I vicerè
can only be based on a very different figure, who tried to reform both Monreale and then San Nicolò at this time: the saintly and shrewd Cardinal Dusmet, revered in Catania as ‘friend of the poor' and now under process for sanctification. But the relations of love-hate, attraction and repulsion between modern Sicilian writers and their Church would make a fascinating, though rather macabre, study in itself.