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.

 

 

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.