Thursday, December 17, 2020

Anti-intellectualism in American Life

             I’ve had it in mind to read Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) for some time, now, but lighter entertainments have been more tempting during the current plague. Not that there is anything inherently difficult about Hofstadter’s book; his style is clear and his arguments methodical. But the book is dense and full of particulars in the way it sets out the historical background of the give and take between intellectualism and its denigrators. I have spent a few weeks, pleasanter than I expected them to be, slowly reading through his chapters, and I am ready to vouch for the book’s readability and its continued relevance at our historical moment.

            Anti-intellectualism is “older than our national history and “subject to cyclical fluctuations, writes Hofstadter. He defines it at “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind…and a disposition…to minimize the value of that life.” As used here, it involves social attitudes and political behavior. He begins with some examples. Ike didn’t like “eggheads.” America has a disdain for “pure science.” The far-right wing has characteristically expressed resentment of the educated, established classes, and McCarthy was the most notorious standard-bearer for them. The right wing also has a tendency to call universities Communist breeding grounds, to reflect the old Jacksonian dislike of specialists and experts, as well as a generalized anti-culturalism. Evangelicals have tended to see intellectuals as relativists and moral bankrupts, and to see education as primarily indoctrination. Another part of the population thinks educational standards of any sort, as well as any required curriculum, wrong. Anti-intellectualism is “a broadly diffused quality” in America, Hofstadter concludes his introduction by saying, which “first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion,” later “became associated with our passion for equality,” and became “formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian.”

            Considering what intellect is, Hofstadter in the second part of his introduction looks at popular usage and attitudes about it. Intelligence is distinguished from intellect in the public mind: intelligence is practical, while intellect is abstract. Most professional work—that of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and often even writers and professors—is not intellectual. The intellectual, he argues, has an attitude toward ideas that includes what he calls piety and playfulness. The dedication to the life of the mind is “like a religious commitment,” and takes as its essence Socrates’s assertion that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The intellectual is engaged, committed, and feels that the intellectual life has moral significance. All this he calls its piety. As for playfulness, he may live for ideas, but is not obsessive about one idea. Harold Rosenberg says an intellectual is “one who turns answers into questions.” And since the “element of play seems to be rooted in the ethos of the leisured class,” and piety “is reminiscent of the priestly inheritance of the intellectuals,” it is not at all surprising that the intellectual’s position is uncertain in a country that is “the home of the democrat and the antinomian.”

            Hofstadter argues that American ideas about the impracticality of intellectualism have changed now that intellectuals find their way, through brain trusts, councils of advisors, and quasi-governmental agencies, into policy management and real power. Now the intellectual is resented because he is the expert calling the shots. And experts don’t always get it right or avoid partisan decisions or venality, furnishing more ammunition for resentment. We have a populist tradition of government by the common man that means the elites and the experts are always under suspicion. Historically, the intellectuals found themselves in opposition to the right wing in politics. The allegiance of many intellectuals to Communism in the 1930s gave the right wing a perpetual talking point equating the one with the other. Moreover, the American heartland, often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and deeply conservative in values, resents the intellectual as being the harbinger of change and the modern, global in perspective, and skeptical in nature. A mythology has developed among its enemies about intellectualism: that it is opposed to feeling, values mind over character, and is anti-democratic.

            The main body of the book develops ideas about evangelism as being anti-intellectual, about populism in politics leading to scorn of anyone with special expertise, about the fluctuating fortunes of reform movements led by intellectual critiques of economic or political wrongs, and the way the expert advisor to power has sometimes been valued but is frequently the object of popular suspicion. Business, which Hofstadter calls “the most powerful and pervasive interest in American life,” tends to devalue the past—which means effectively a disdain for culture—and to set its practicality and modernity against the intellectual’s respect for the lessons of history and tendency toward abstraction. The American “self-help” strain is inimical to intellectualism. Hofstadter looks at “a popular culture that has been proudly convinced of its ability to get along…without the benefits of formal knowledge,” and points to some examples: farmers’ resistance to agricultural education and innovation, and the labor movement, which, though it began with an intellectual critique of capitalism, became effective only when pragmatic and non-intellectual leaders took over.

            Education and the American dream of its being available to everyone would seem to be the natural allies of intellectualism, but Hofstadter shows that it has not been so in the past, nor is likely to be so in the future. Horace Mann’s mid-nineteenth-century criticism detailing inadequate classroom buildings, insufficient funds, the abandonment of public schools by the rich, and the lack of competent teachers might have been written yesterday. Even if an adequately educated and respected class of teachers had been available, it would have faced the conviction that public school education was never intellectual in purpose, but had social, economic, and political indoctrination for its aim and always emphasized character over brains. Additionally, American public school education has been crippled by movements such as the “ill-fated life-adjustment movement of the 1940s and 1950s,” that insisted that school subjects had to be practical preparation for life and that reduced the college preparatory subjects taught to a fraction of the curriculum.

            Hofstadter concludes with a chapter called “The Intellectual: Alienation and Conformity.” He points out that in colonial America and the early republic two groups of intellectuals held the power: the Puritan clergy and the Founding Fathers. “The Puritan clergy founded the tradition of New England intellectualism.” The Founding Fathers’ intellectualism was important until the expansion to the West diluted its power and the Jacksonian egalitarian ethos superseded it. But later developments such as progressivism, reform, and New Deal economic reconstruction have brought intellectuals back to the fore. An innate problem of the intellectual in America, though, has been the country’s anti-elite sentiments, grounded in democratic government. The intellectuals are, whether economically privileged or not, an elite class. Another problem is that intellectuals “are troubled…when power disregards the counsels of intellect,” but “when power comes to intellect for counsel” they are even more troubled by the possibility of their corruption by power. It is clear from Hofstadter’s discussion that the union of power and intellect depends for its success on the right politician asking for the help of the intellectual, and the right intellectual supplying it.

            In a 2014 Columbia Journalism Review article, Nicholas Lemann argued for the continued relevance of this book fifty years after its publication. I think the present contrast between an outgoing President of the United States who thought, à la Andrew Jackson, that any one of his friends and loyalists was capable of filling any government job, and an incoming President who is picking people with experience and expertise for those jobs—this contrast illustrates well the back-and-forth movement Hofstadter has described in American history, and the contrast also argues that Lemann is right about Hofstadter’s enduring relevance.

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

The Amazing Patrick Leigh Fermor

 

            “My life story could be entitled ‘The Case of the Overshot Deadline’,” Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) wrote accurately about himself in one of his letters. In fact, his life story is told in A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and the posthumously published The Broken Road (2015), three books he wrote decades after his 1933-35 trip on foot when he was eighteen from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul; in his friend and battle-mate Billy Moss’s book Ill Met by Moonlight (1950) which tells of the kidnaping of a German general on occupied Crete in 1943 by Moss, Leigh Fermor, several other British comrades who like them were managing to get by on Crete disguised as partisans, and a band of real partisan Cretans; and in a collection of letters, Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters (2016), selected and edited by Adam Sisman, who fills in the gaps, identifying the correspondents and the hundreds of people referred to in the letters recording Leigh Fermor’s very social life. But only in biographies is the whole story told of Leigh Fermor’s falling in love with the Rumanian Princess Marie-Blanche Cantacuzène, called “Balasha,” whom he met in Athens in 1935 and lived with, in Greece and Rumania, with travels to England and around the Balkans, until war broke out in 1939, when he immediately left to join the war effort in England. He wrote to her after the war was over, and he visited her when it became possible to do so, which was not until 1965. They remained correspondents until her death, but Leigh Fermor in 1946 was already in love with Joan Rayner, whom he married in 1968.

            He had many other affairs, some of which Rayner may have been aware of. The one with Lyndall Birch in the late fifties is an example, I think, of how Leigh Fermor sometimes trades unthinkingly on his charm and expects it to open doors and arms. He had a fling with her in Rome in October, 1958, wrote one letter to her in November from London, and then went back in May expecting to pick up where they’d left off. That didn’t work out. He does not make the same mistake with his next lover, Enrica “Rickie” Huston, fourth wife of John Huston, whom he chats up in frequent letters, the funniest being the one where he is trying to figure out whether she got crabs from him. “Could it be me?” he asks. He thinks at first it might have been because of that one-night stand in Paris with “an old pal,” but then he says, no, he has no sign of them, directs her to an Italian powder for sale in Paris called MOM, and discusses the departure of her little friends in an allusive paragraph (“their revels now are ended…where are all their quips and quiddities? The pattering of tiny feet will be stilled. Bare, ruin’d choirs”) ending with “Don’t tell anyone…Mom’s the word, gentle reader.”

            Another funny letter is one to “Debo”—Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, youngest of the Mitford sisters, whose correspondence with Leigh Fermor over fifty years has been separately published as In Tearing Haste (2008). He writes about Anne Fleming’s getting him an invitation to stay with Somerset Maugham at his house in France and about his being thrown out after one day because he drank too much (he says in another letter that his favorite noise is “the soft hiss of the soda syphon”) and told a story about a stuttering friend that rightly offended Maugham the stutterer.

            One gets the idea that the good looks and the charm allowed him to get away with a lot of unanswered letters, missed deadlines, and carelessness. An egregious example: he took back to England all of Diana Cooper’s answers to condolence letters after her husband Duff died—and then lost them. To Balasha he makes the claim that because he wants to write long, detailed letters, he doesn’t get around to it for much longer than he would for a short one. Then, two pages later in the same letter we discover that he and Joan Rayner have just married, and his dilatoriness in writing takes on a different light.

He complains to his publisher Jock Murray that his house builders in Kardamyli are doing a Leigh Fermor on him. But the house is finished in 1969. What shall we call it, he asks—“Doubting Castle? Blandings? Gatherum? Headlong Hall? No. 2, The Pines?”

            Once one actually received a Leigh Fermor letter, however, it was worth the wait. He has a lyrical gift for describing landscape, as evident in the letters as in A Time of Gifts and other books. He sets down the mundane events as well as the outré ones and, as Sisman perceived, does the biographer’s work for him.

 

            Leigh Fermor decided when he was eighteen to walk to Constantinople. He set off in December in a little steamer from Tower Bridge to the Hook of Holland, walked up the Noorwede, the Waal and the Maas until the last turned into the Rhine (in Holland, the Rijn).He follows the Rhine into a Germany taken over by the Nazis only a year before. Though somewhat apprehensive, he finds the Germans he deals with, aside from an occasional drunk and belligerent type, are friendly and as unlikely to want to discuss politics as he is. Up the Rhine from Düsseldorf to Cologne, on a barge to Coblenz, walking again to Stolzenfels, Bingen, Rüdeseim, Mainz, Worms, Mannheim, and then along the Neckar to Heidelberg, where he spends New Year’s. At each town he buys a stocknagel, a little town badge with a nail to drive into your walking stick, and before he loses the stick at Munich he has twenty-seven of these. He is taken in by various kindly innkeepers, spends several days with two Stuttgart girls his age whose parents are out of town, and finally, when his rucksack with passport and money is stolen in Munich, he makes use of a letter of introduction he has to Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff, who not only extends his own hospitality, but writes to Schloss-owning friends of his on Leigh Fermor’s route, who also take him in. The first part of this story is told in A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977). Writing almost 45 years after the events he is describing, Leigh Fermor shows a young man striding through an old and toppling world, shortly to be ravaged by a war that will change many of the borders he crosses. His letters of introduction give him entrée to the elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that will no longer exist in ten years, and he is entertained in castles whose residents are soon to be ousted and in some cases their names erased. His account of all this is travel writing as elegy.

            His policy is to walk unless he can’t because of terrain or fatigue, and to accept rides “for no further than a day’s march would cover.” He joins the Danube at Ulm and continues east, leaving Germany and entering Austria near Salzburg. He spends three weeks in Vienna, beginning his stay there without any money, knocking on doors and offering to do sketches of people for a couple of schillings. He is remarkably successful, but eventually his allowance arrives. He comments on the city’s museums and goes to the Spanish Riding School, which prompts a discussion of the Spanish-Austrian Hapsburg connection. Looking at artifacts, he speculates what would have happened if the Ottoman Turks had taken Vienna. Architecture is one of Leigh Fermor’s interests, as is obvious from the detail of the descriptions, and in Vienna he visits works of von Erlach, including the Karlskirche, and of Hildebrandt, such as the upper Belvedere.

            From the beginning of his journey, Leigh Fermor was in the habit of making sketches; when they were of people he would often give the sketches to the sitters, many of whom had been hospitable to him. Clearly the sketching habit helped with his memory of people and places. Although he says recalling the details of his journey forty-plus years later is “like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones,” clearly he has a prodigious memory; during one long dull stretch of walking he recites all the literature he knows by heart, and the catalogue takes two pages. Catalogues are a feature of his style, and he ekes out the account of his own doings with historical asides, incidents from his own past or occasionally his future, and other sorts of long views: as he passes the point where the Moselle joins the Rhine, he writes:

A seagull, flying upstream, would look down for scores of miles on tiered and winding vineyards, and swoop, if he chose, through the great black Roman gates of Trier and then over the amphitheatre and across the frontier into Lorraine. Skimming through the weather-vanes of the old Merovingian city of Metz, he would settle among the rocks of the Vosges where the stream begins.

This sort of description, along with mentioning places he saw on later trips, is a way of describing the road not taken and expanding his narrative. His style also includes quotations from various standard authors and Latin tags. He is not above stealing an idea, for example in this passage, which borrows from W. H. Auden’s use of it in “Musée des Beaux Arts”:

In Holland the landscape is the protagonist, and merely human events—even one so extraordinary as Icarus falling head first into the sea because the wax in his artificial wings has melted—are secondary details: next to Brueghel’s ploughed field and trees and sailing ship and ploughman, the falling aeronaut is insignificant.

            Also notable are passages giving a devastating critique of German painting, noting the changes in accent he encounters in spoken German as he moves south and east, or describing fat Germans in the dining hall of Munich’s Hofbräuhaus. Leigh Fermor often compares what he sees to art and admits how painting has affected the way he views things. A farm woman sitting by a fire, for example, is compared to a Supper at Emmaus or Bethany.

            Leigh Fermor begins this book with an “Introductory Letter to Xan Fielding,” whom he met undercover, like himself, in the hills of German-occupied Crete in 1942. This enables him to give an autobiographical sketch up to the time he left England on his journey to Constantinople, telling of his parents away in India for much of his childhood, and schools where the young Leigh Fermor did not necessarily fit in. “English schools,” he writes at one point, “the moment they depart from the conventional track, are oases of strangeness and comedy,” but it is likely that he did not see the comedy until later.

            East of Vienna, at the point where the March/Morava River empties into the Danube, Leigh Fermor crosses over into the East: “Östlich von Wien,” wrote Metternich, “fängt der Orient an.” The Slovakian part of Czechoslovakia is on the north side of the river, and Hungary on the south. In Bratislava, just across the border in Czechoslovakia, he visits two nearby bars, one full of Magyars and the other of Slavs, and delineates the differences in person, dress, and drink—although they’re all drinking fruit brandy of one sort or another. He also visits the Jewish quarter and a Gypsy encampment. He is staying with a friend in the city, a banker whom he met in Vienna—the man’s home town—and his friend convinces him to take a side trip, by train, to Prague. Prague is “a baroque city loaded with the spoils of the Austrian Caesars,” and a lot of its architectural details run together in Leigh Fermor’s memory, late Gothic and baroque vaults and traceries detached from their context in particular buildings, though he finds the Charles Bridge over the Moldau/Vltara “one of the great medieval bridges of Europe.”

            Friends of his banker friend invite him to yet another nobleman’s castle, this one 50 miles east of Bratislava, so he remains in Slovakia longer than he’d intended. And now he has a diary recovered years after he’d left it in Rumania. The entries begin as he leaves Bratislava and finds his way with difficulty to the Baron Schey’s house. Here his genteel host entertains him, urges him to read Proust, and tells him stories that evoke a whole lost turn-of-the-century world in the capitals of Western Europe. Then the Baron sends Leigh Fermor off with a tin of tobacco, a leather case full of cigars, and a whole roast chicken. He makes a loop through Slovakia before returning to the Danube/Donau/Duna. He crosses into Hungary and enters Esztergom on the evening of Holy Saturday.

            Leigh Fermor has a peculiar sensibility, no doubt useful later when he was behind enemy lines in the war, but that he questions late in this book:

The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.

He has this thought on the first night that the temperature allows him to spend the night outside, and only a few miles from his entry into Hungary.      

           

I have not read Between the Woods and the Water or The Broken Road, about the rest of his journey, which takes him not only to Constantinople but back into the Balkans, ending just before the beginning of his grand romance with his Rumanian princess. The other book I have read of his is one published earlier than any of these, entitled A Time to Keep Silence (1957).

            Above the road along which Emma Bovary hurried from Yvetot to her lover in Rouen is the Abbey of St. Wandrille, where Patrick Leigh Fermor spent some weeks in the early 1950s. His purpose in secluding himself in a visitor’s cell of the oldest Benedictine abbey in France was to finish a book, but he also wrote letters to Joan Rayner, the photographer/correspondent whom he would eventually marry, and these letters became the basis for A Time to Keep Silence.

            Wandrille founded the monastery on the banks of the Fontanelle in 649, and over the years it produced many candidates for sainthood. The abbey grew in size, lands, and royal favor, was ruined in the ninth-century Norman invasion, suffered a fire in the thirteenth, survived Commendation—appropriation by lay courtiers as royal favors—in the sixteenth, and was abandoned from the time of the French Revolution until the middle of the nineteenth century. Then the monks spent the time from the 1901 anti-monastic regime until 1930 in Belgium. Some damage was done to the abbey in WWII.

            Leigh Fermor went from an initial period of depression and sleeping badly to falling in with the abbey’s hours. Then he no longer felt tired and was able to work and explore the abbey, especially the library he was given the freedom of. He makes an apology for the life of the monks, a life that would make no sense without the basis first of Christian belief and second the “belief in the necessity and efficacy of prayer” (though Karen Armstrong, in her introduction to the NYRB edition, disputes this, and says the practice can come first and bring about the belief). Barring these, he says, they “lead a good life, make (for they support themselves) no economic demands on the community, harm no one and respect their neighbours.” But if you accept the two beliefs, “their power for good is incalculable.” Of their commitment to constant prayer, their scholarship, their building, their conservation of learning during many centuries he concludes, “I, not the monks, was the escapist.”

            He also spends two weeks in the Priory of St. Peter of Solesme on the Sarthe. But the middle of the book is devoted to La Grande Trappe and the severe, austere part of the Benedictines known as the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, named from the 12th-century Abbey of Cîteax. Here St. Bernard reformed the backsliding Benedictines and started the Cistercians, who, at least at La Grande Trappe, spend their lives in silence (they are allowed to speak to the animals they tend and, of course, to confess and confer with the Abbot), sleeping on straw-covered boards in an unheated, common dormitory, eating no meat, eggs, or fish, working in the fields when not at prayer. While “prayer for the redemption of mankind is the basis of Benedictine monasticism…in the Cistercian branch…the principle of prayer has been supplemented by the idea of vicarious penance.” Their way of life is designed for expiation and atonement for sin. Leigh Fermor muses about what psychologists might make of the effects of all this “repression,” but he observes at the monastery only that this life of “acute outward suffering” seems to be really “one of peace and joy.” He cannot imagine himself a Trappist, however, even if “endowed with an abundant gift of faith and with the monastic temperament.”

            His last monastic episode is a visit to the ruined monastic community of Urgüb, in Cappadocia in modern Turkey, churches and habitations carved out of volcanic cones and built to defend against Roman and later Seljuk invaders. A postscript Leigh Fermor writes from a Benedictine priory in Hampshire, while musing about the monastic communities that once were scattered all over England and now, he writes, are coming back in small numbers. He ends by quoting a letter from St. Basil, who eventually moved from his native Cappadocia to a monastery built within sight of the Black Sea.

            A man who could have written Casanovan memoirs about sleeping with many of the prominent women of Europe over several generations, or could have written about feats of derring-do performed while undercover in occupied territory during wartime, chose instead to write about travel, and in my opinion may justly be acclaimed as the best travel writer of the second half of the twentieth century.

 

 

 

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

The Prince of Minor Writers

 

Max [Sir Henry Maximilian] Beerbohm was an essayist, a comic verse writer, and an author of literary parodies; he also drew caricatures for Punch and other magazines. He was part of a circle of literary and artistic dandies that included Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Unlike Wilde, he was never an object of scandal, though he might have been homosexual; the doubt indicates his discretion. And unlike Beardsley, he was never associated with end-of-century decadence. In fact, he was widely popular. Shaw named him “the incomparable Max” and Virginia Woolf, who praised him in her reviews, called him “the prince of minor writers.” And he was knighted in 1939, an honor that everyone thought had been delayed because Beerbohm hadn’t spared the royal family in his satiric verse.

            He wrote one novel, Zuleika Dobson in 1911. Zuleika is a not-very-talented magician but a literal mankiller for whom the Duke of Dorset and all the undergraduates of Oxford kill themselves. Zuleika can only love someone who does not love her, and since all the men fall in love with her on sight, she has never been in love, and in this book is only so for a few hours and by mistake. “Death cancels all engagements” is one memorable quote. Beerbohm makes fun of Oxford dons, who barely notice that all the undergraduates have disappeared, of student societies, of Rhodes Scholars, and of various styles—including his own: Zuleika says she talks the way she does because of an evening spent in the company of a writer named Beerbohm.

            Philip Lopate published a collection of Beerbohm’s writings in 2015 under the title The Prince of Minor Writers. Lopate collects most of the essays from And Even Now, which he considers Beerbohm’s best collection, and some pieces from seven others in “the only collection of Max Beerbohm’s writings to feature his essays alone.” Lopate’s introduction is splendid.

            In “Dandies and Dandies” (1896), Beerbohm writes about Beau Brummel, the Regency dandy, asserts that “English society is always ruled by a dandy,” and shows his essential sympathy with dandyism. In “Laughter” (1920), he makes fun of Bergson’s famous essay on the subject, and remarks that he finds himself laughing less as he ages. Beerbohm is hard on lady crime writers (“The Crime,” 1920), the British penchant for Russian writers (“Kolniyatch,” 1913), and the public’s idea of what’s funny (“The Humour of the Public”), but he writes straightforward appreciations of his brother Herbert Beerbohm Tree and of Aubrey Beardsley.

            Beerbohm’s art can be self-conscious (“If I were writing in the past tense I might pause here to consider whether this emotion were a genuine one”), self-deprecating, and apt to surprise with his take on a subject. Lopate points out that he liked to portray himself as a lover of the past—even as far past as the Regency and Beau Brummel—but in “The Naming of Streets” (1923) he drops nostalgia for a no-nonsense assertion that “For a street one name is as good as another” and new names for new streets will do as well as the old. A similar turn may be seen in his homage to the old Swinburne in “No. 2, The Pines” (1920) followed by his sendup of the young admirer’s visit to the old lion, literary or otherwise, in “A Point to Be Remembered by Very Eminent Men,” (1923). Accepting a knighthood himself, he made fun of the idea in “Arise, Sir – –!”(1899).

            In “How Shall I Word It?”(1910) he satirizes model books of letters by making up a few of his own outrageous model letters. Beerbohm wants to set up a museum of unfinished works of art and house it in Michelangelo’s Baptistery of San Lorenzo (“Quia Imperfectum,” 1918); he spends a lot of time in this essay on Goethe and Tischbein’s unfinished portrait of him.

            Lopate includes a few examples of Beerbohm’s theater criticism and one funny review of Sarah Bernhardt’s memoirs. There are also selections from the radio talks Beerbohm did for the BBC.

            Aside from Zuleika Dobson, I don’t think there was much of Beerbohm still in print before the Lopate book. In the past, when he was mentioned in my reading, I assumed that he was one of those people who was famous for being famous, without much there there. But he’s very entertaining, and although his subjects often make him seem dated, he can surprise, and frequently reveals a more than usually interesting mind.

 

 

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

A Trip to Sicily

            A couple of weeks I spent in Sicily in 2007 with three colleagues was a huge revelation to me. I have spent many months in European countries, but never have I had such an experience of a land that’s like a palimpsest, with the layering of every Mediterranean civilization on it, with Phoenicians supplanted by Greeks, Greeks by Carthaginians, Carthaginians by Romans, Christians from Rome and from Byzantium, Saracens, Normans—all leaving some mark. In Syracuse, a fifth century B. C. Doric Temple of Athena still forms the main structure of the city cathedral; the temple was turned into a Byzantine church twelve centuries after its construction, and the cathedral’s façade is a beautiful late Baroque addition of the eighteenth-century. In the district of Casale there’s a Roman villa from the second or third century that has dozens of rooms with mosaic floors depicting family life, scenes from the Odyssey, and mythological subjects, all preserved in better shape than the villas of Pompei. A huge Greek amphitheatre, also at Syracuse, has seen the opening of plays by Aeschylus in the fifth century B. C., and audiences can still see productions of his plays there.

            While we were there we passed back and forth copies of books by Sicilians: Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and a mystery by Andrea Camilleri set in the Agrigento area. Not until recently did I know about the books of Leonardo Sciascia. All of these books in their different ways evoke the Sicily of the past and present. Reading them is like taking a return trip to Sicily.

Sciascia’s The Wine-Dark Sea (1973) contains a baker’s dozen of stories set in Sicily, evoking small time gossip and rivalries, the quiet ubiquity of the mafia and the church, folk tales and sensational historical incidents, the consciousness of the Sicilians’ disdain of Italians from the north, political tensions, and a kind of anomie that is certainly more widespread than Sicily but is given a peculiar flavor by the Sicilians.

            Leonardo Sciascia was born in the Sicilian town of Racalmuto, near Agrigento, and in the first story in The Wine-Dark Sea he tells of the rivalry between his home town and the nearby village of Grotte, before recounting the story of Concettina, a girl from Racalmuto who, at her father’s urging, gives herself to an old judge who demands this price, “The Ransom,” for saving her brother, who has kicked a peasant to death. The old judge dies within six months, and Concettina returns to her father’s house, now rich. Then six months after that, she elopes with a young man from Grotte. Albert Mobilio, who introduces the New York Review of Books edition, points out “the economies” of this story: everyone—judge, daughter, and father—gets rewards, then punishments, or the other way around. “Giufà” is a folk tale about the wise fool of that name, and how he kills a cardinal and gets away with it. The clever girl in a village that a visiting Swiss recruiter calls a “primitive place” knows better than her mother or her lover what she needs to do, and she passes “The Test” the recruiter gives to prospective workers in the Swiss factory he represents.

            In the title story, the longest one here, an engineer coming from northern Italy to work in Sicily finds out a lot about the country and its people by taking a long train/ferry trip from Rome and sharing a compartment with a family with several children and with a young girl who may become a romantic interest.

            In “The Long Crossing,” Sicilian villagers are tricked by an Italian version of a “coyote,” who keeps them aboard a steamer for eleven days and then lands them, not in New Jersey as they were promised, but on the other side of the island. “Philology” is a one-sided discussion about the etymology of the word mafia by an educated mafioso who’s trying to instruct another man, one who relies on “his wallet and his double-barreled shotgun,” about how to act when he’s in front of “the Commission.”

            The most intriguing story in every sense is “End-Game,” where a woman figures out that her husband plans to have a young man come to her house and murder her. She manages to turn him, so that he goes off to kill her husband instead. Then she calls the police.

            “A Matter of Conscience” starts with a letter written to a magazine’s priest columnist by a woman from Maddà, confessing a secret infidelity, and it continues with the uproar the letter causes in the little Sicilian town from which it was posted.

            One of the pieces here purports to be correspondence between Mussolini and Sicilian officials at the time of the expulsion of the Englishman Aleister Crowley from Italy about 1924.

            In “Mafia Western,” a war is on between two factions of the Mafia in a city between Palermo and Trapani. The capi get together and discover that two thirds of the casualties have not been caused by either side. Eventually the interloper is discovered and killed, but not before he has shaken up the most powerful mafiosi in Sicily.

            Sciascia tells the story of a Jack the Ripper precursor, Vincenzo Verzeni of Bottanuco, in “Trial by Violence.” Verzeni’s crimes, at the beginning of the 1870s, took place in Lombardy; this is the only story not about Sicily or Sicilians.

            The last story, “Euphrosyne,” details a galaxy of crimes with an innocent Syracusan beauty at their center. Euphrosyne is married to a vacuous young nobleman and seduced by a Sicilian viceroy, who then has her father-in-law jailed and killed when he tries to intervene. The viceroy also has the husband killed. He has to swindle the Inquisitor to get at the father-in-law, and then the viceroy is himself killed, either by the Inquisitor’s arrangement, or, Sciascia suggests, by the man who later married Euphrosyne, and may have been in love with her all along. This man was opposed in his marriage to her by his two sons, presumably because so much scandal attached to her name, and soon after the marriage, the sons show up at their father’s house and kill Euphrosyne, an act for which they are tried and beheaded.

            Sciascia also wrote mysteries, and his first is called The Day of the Owl (1961). In it, Captain Bellodi of the carabinieri, the military national police force of Italy, is from Parma, and thus a Northerner, a “polenta eater” stationed in Sicily. He is polite, which surprises the Sicilians, who are used to being pushed around by the cops. Bellodi investigates the murder of a contractor in a small Sicilian town, a man who conducted his business honestly and ignored the local mafia.

            Bellodi, with a careful, oblique style of questioning that makes even his sergeant impatient for him to get on with it, gets the name of the capo of the local cosca (the individual, semiautonomous groups of mafia call themselves cosche, meaning the tightly wound leaves of the artichoke). He also discovers the name of the subordinate who ordered the murder and ultimately the murderer whom they put to the job. The murderer confesses and implicates the subordinate, but Bellodi cannot move the capo except to acknowledge the captain as a man, a respect that Bellodi reciprocates, thinking of the capo as ”beyond the pale of morality and law, incapable of pity, an unredeemed mass of human energy and of loneliness, of instinctive, tragic will,” who can only picture the normal world in which people abide by laws and are bound by affection as a blind man pictures the world of light and color. 

            The distrust of the Northerner by the Sicilians, and their unblushing denial that there is even such a thing as the mafia, are features of Sicilian life in this book as in the stories of Sciascia’s The Wine-Dark Sea (1973). The narrative of Bellodi’s investigations is interrupted by conversations where unnamed local or national officials deplore his activities, deny the existence of the mafia to each other, and suggest how his investigation will end. An alibi with many corroborative witnesses is found for the murderer—though he has signed the confession that Bellodi winkled out of him—and he is released along with the local capo and his subordinate. Bellodi, on leave in Parma, muses how very civilized and unSicilian his native city is, and at the same time he realizes he loves Sicily and will return.

            A Sicilian mystery writer still producing mysteries is Andrea Camilleri. I read his second mystery, The Terra-Cotta Dog, published in 1996. Camilleri’s main character is Salvo Montalbano, a Sicilian police inspector in a town called Vigàta. Vigàta is a wholly fictional town, but after the phenomenal success of Camilleri’s mysteries, his home town in Sicily, Port Empedocles near Agrigento, added Vigàta to its official name. 

Montalbano is a very literate police inspector, and throughout the book there are references to his reading. He likes the Spanish mystery writer Vazquez Montalbán, whose name is the Spanish version of his own and whose mysteries, like Camilleri’s, also have many references to food and its preparation. But Montalbano also reads Faulkner and quotes Shakespeare as well as other dramatists, perhaps because Camilleri taught for many years at a school of drama.

            Montalbano, though he is companionable enough in other respects, likes to eat alone. His housekeeper leaves him dishes in the fridge or in the oven: poached baby octopus, the casserole called pasta ‘ncasciata, anchovies baked in lemon juice, spaghetti with sardines, and other Sicilian treats.

            Montalbano and his associates are always worried about moles in their organization—mafia spies—and in fact there is a kind of cold war between the police and the mafiosi. The struggle is not only in Camilleri’s fiction: its factual basis becomes apparent before one has even deplaned at the airport outside Palermo, which has been renamed Falcone-Borsellino Airport after the two judges murdered in 1992 for their anti-mafia activities. Mostly the violence happens within the mafia in Camilleri, and there is a chilling indifference born of use with which the police regard the killings of one mafioso by another.

            The plot is complex and begins with a well-known mafioso giving himself up to Montalbano. He wants the police inspector to stage the surrender as a surprise arrest. The man’s associates are not fooled and they kill him, but before he dies, the mafioso gives Montalbano information about a large gun-smuggling operation. Montalbano finds the cache of weapons, but nearby discovers a young couple, murdered fifty years earlier, just before the Americans entered Italy in 1943. The fifty-year-old crime begins to consume Montalbano’s thoughts; he becomes obsessed with it in the way Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s inspector is obsessed with the murder of a little girl in The Pledge, a book that Montalbano thinks of in connection with his own obsession. Unlike Dürrenmatt’s character though, Montalbano solves this one. I think you might like it, but you might have to go to Sicily to get the full effect.

            The most famous Sicilian author is Guiseppe di Lampedusa, whose best book, The Leopard, was published posthumously in 1958, a year after his death. It is set during the Risorgimento, the long and bloody process of Italian unification that took up many decades of the nineteenth century.

            Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, has a wife who bores him, a foppish son Paolo, a nephew Tancredi, involved in the struggles at the beginning of the Risorgimento. He has royal audiences with King Ferdinand, who has papers to sign (at his own desk, Fabrizio thinks about how they both imagine themselves to be influencing the course of fate “that was actually flowing on its own in another valley.” Fabrizio takes the Jesuit family priest along on his dalliances and drops him at the Gesú in Palermo for two hours. The next day, in Fabrizio’s observatory, he and the priest, Father Pirrone, make up over their calculations and they discuss politics from the differing points of view of the Church, which has been promised an eternal existence (as Fabrizio points out), and the aristocracy, which has no such assurances of longevity and has to make deals and compromises to survive.

            Early in the book the action moves from Palermo to Donnafugata, where the Corbera estate is located. The fictional place name of Donnafugata, the “run-away wife,” is now the name of a winery whose Antilhia, made from the most widespread of Sicilian grapes, Cattaratto, was a very pleasant discovery of ours in our travels. Fabrizio holds a large official dinner the first night, surprising everyone by serving a locally traditional pasta course rather than the more cosmopolitan soup course everyone fears. Tancredi imagines, as he savors his food, what Angelica would taste like. I can’t tell you about Angelica, but the local pasta dishes throughout Sicily, one of them dressed with a sauce made of pistachio nuts, are savory indeed.

            Tancredi is loved by Concetta, Fabrizio’s daughter, but he falls for Angelica, the daughter of the coming man, Don Calogero Sedàra. Her grandfather was called Peppe ‘Mmerda, but Fabrizio has to “swallow the toad” and sue for her hand on behalf of his nephew.

Angelica and Tancredi wander the unused rooms of the palace, but fairly innocently.

 Fabrizio realizes how things have changed when Don Ciccio the organist, with whom he hunts, says of the “unanimous” plebiscite to join the revolutionary alliance that he voted “no.” A Piedmontese named Chevalley comes to ask him to be a Senator at Turin, but Fabrizio refuses.

There is an odd interruption as we follow Father Pirrone to his home village, where he arranges a Sicilian country marriage. Concluding chapters describe a ball, the death of Fabrizio, and the “relics”—that is, not only the worthless objects held to be sacred by Fabrizio’s daughters Carolina and Caterina, but the women themselves, as well as Concetta and her ancient rival Angelica.

The sense of an old and crumbling aristocracy that one gets in Lampedusa is a kind of palpable presence on the streets of Palermo, but with the age and the crumbling now an aspect of buildings and infrastructure, bureaucracy and the church and other institutions, and there is an answering strain of fatalism in the people. Still, it’s a place of beauty and fascinating history, delectable food and wines, friendliness, and a rich literature.