Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Lampedusa's The Leopard:

Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, the dominant force in the Sicilian aristocracy of Palermo in 1860, made the floor shake by the “sudden movement of his huge frame,” and “a glint of pride flashed in his light blue eyes at this fleeting confirmation of his lordship over both human beings and their works.” There is a reason the Prince is known everywhere as The Leopard. Or so we would believe if we read in translation the marvelous novel by Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa and did not know that the Italian title, ‘Gattopardo,’ is not ‘Leopard’ but the African ‘Serval,’ a wildcat hunted to extinction in Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century, the same fate that was to meet the Sicilian aristocracy at nearly the same time.

Lampedusa, the 11th Prince of Lampedusa, Duke of Palma, was born in 1896 and died in l957. The Leopard, the only novel he wrote, was published the year after his death. It had been rejected by the two publishers to whom he submitted it during his life, and, such is the occasional idiocy of publishers, one of them continued to defend its decision even after the novel had gone through fifty-two editions in less than six months, which, if it is not a record, must be close to it. Lampedusa spent several years writing The Leopard, but, it could be argued, spent most of his life in preparation. A voracious reader who owned eleven hundred books on French history alone, he read — and more than read, studied and made notes on — everything of importance in English literature, notes which were later published as a thousand page critical analysis beginning with the religious reflections of the Venerable Bede to the secular mysteries of Graham Greene. The original plan for The Leopard was to follow what James Joyce had done in Ulysses and tell the story as the events of a single day. He told it instead over eight days, or rather eight months, each a subject of a separate chapter, the first four in l860, the fifth and sixth in the following two years, the seventh a quarter century later in July of l898, and the final chapter twenty-three years after that, in May of 1910, nearly half a century after the central episode.

The Leopard is a novel about a place, Sicily, the “secret island” where “a known evil” is always preferred to “an untried good,” and where the memory of the past has destroyed any hope for the future. Fabrizio, considered an “eccentric” because of an interest in mathematics that was considered “almost a sinful perversion,” was still respected because he was Prince of Salina, “an excellent horseman, indefatigable shot, and tireless skirt chaser.” He watches with something close to indifference when Garibaldi lands with his red-shirted army to unite Sicily to Italy as part of the bourgeois revolution. Nothing will change. His nephew, Tancredi, an “aristocratic liberal,” wounded at the battle of Palermo, will marry his daughter, Concetta, who is madly in love with him. Tancredi will continue the line. There will always be Salinas, and the Salinas, whatever the form of government, will always rule.

The great novelty of the year 1860, as much as what Garibaldi was doing, is the rapid rise to fortune and importance of Calogeri Sedara whose income would soon equal, and perhaps eventually surpass, that of the Prince. When Sedara entered a room, his “quick eyes were…insensible to the charms, intent on its monetary value.” When he and his daughter are invited to dinner, the Prince begins to understand that things may begin to change after all. He sees in Don Calogero, climbing the stairs in his ill-fitting tail coat, everything that is wrong with the bourgeoisie revolution; he sees in the extraordinary beauty of his daughter, Angelica, the inevitable destruction of his daughter Concetta’s only hope for happiness. He knows from his own reaction what his nephew, Tancredi, will do; he knows by a sure instinct that Tanceredi will fall in love, and not just because of how the girl looks. Tancredi is “drawn along by the physical stimulation that a beautiful woman was to his fiery youth, and also by the (as it were) measurable excitement by a rich girl in the mind of a man both ambitious and poor.”

Tancredi’s choice is not difficult. Marry Concetta and eventually inherit a worthless title and the diminishing fortunes of a family that would soon be without power; marry Angelica and be assured of “an ephemeral carnal satisfaction and a perennial financial peace.” He makes his decision without hesitation or regret, or any sense of the injury to his cousin Concetta’s feelings. The Prince’s wife insists that, by his decision, Tancredi has proven himself a traitor: “Like all liberals of his kind, first he betrays his King, now he betrays us!” The Prince’s attitude toward Tancredi’s marriage to Angelica was, “as is proper to every man not yet decrepit, that of carnal jealousy.”

Tancredi wants to marry Angelica and Angelica wants to marry him. She is in love with him, but that does not mean she loves him, a distinction Lampedusa understands far better than most writers. Angelica, he explains, though capable of passion, was incapable of love because, “she had too much pride and too much ambition to be capable of that annihilation, however temporary, of one’s own personality, without which there is no love.” In Tancredi, she saw her chance of gaining a “fine position in the noble world of Sicily, a world which to her was full of marvels very different from those which it contained in reality; she also wanted him as a lively partner in bed.”

While they are engaged, Tancredit likes nothing so much as to take Angelica on long tours of the Prince’s palace, a palace that is as endless as the history of Sicily itself. With a short facade — just seven windows on the square — it “gave no hint of its vast size, which extended three hundred yards back.” The seven windows are what is seen from the outside; what is not seen takes time to discover. What is not seen goes back so far that there were places, “not even Don Fabrizio had ever set foot.” He used to say that “a place of which one knows every room wasn’t worth living in.” The palace is like the mystery of Sicily, the vast obscurity of the past that has made Sicily what it is.

The days meandering through the almost limitless building were the best days of their lives, the days “when desire was always present because it was always overcome…when the sexual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were in preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success; a preparation which, however, was in a way sufficient in itself, exquisite and brief; like those melodies which outlive the forgotten world they belong to and hint in their delicate and veiled gaiety themes which later in the finished work were to be developed without skill and fail.”

And then one suddenly remembers that Lampedusa had mentioned Nicias. A mention, that is all, a single word, a name that, forgotten everywhere except among those fortunate enough to have read Thucydides and his history of the Peloponnesian War, but a name still present in the mind of any Sicilian who had gone beyond the sixth grade in school. Nicias, the Athenian commander when the Athenian army was destroyed; Nicias, who had opposed the Sicilian Expedition but could not stop the Athenians from their dreams of conquest and empire. Everyone wanted Sicily and, after Nicias, after the Athenians, everyone who wanted her had her, for a while.

“We are old,” Fabrizo explains, “very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own…for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.”

Everywhere a Sicilian looks he sees the past, monuments, like the Greek ruins in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento on the southern Sicilian coast, the oldest Greek ruins in the world, “magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their own expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well….” All this history, an endless chronicle of slavery and defeat, thousands of years the victim of “foreign domination and ill-assorted rapes,” has given Sicilians the very opposite of what we might expect, an exalted sense of pride. “We think we are gods,” insists Fabrizio, “having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples,” Sicilians “consider they have an imperial past which gives them the right to a grand funeral.”

The seventh chapter of The Leopard jumps twenty-six years ahead to July of 1898 when Fabrizio is dying. Summing up his life, he comes to the conclusion that out of his seventy-three years he has lived at most two or three. In a brief catalogue of happiness, he remembers the two weeks before his marriage, a half hour when his son was born, and a few hours of talks with his son before his son moved to another country. His only real, that is to say lasting, happiness had been the many hours he had spent in his observatory, “absorbed in abstract calculations and the pursuit of the unreachable.” His only happiness, in other words, had been when he was engaged in what, because Sicily is an ancient place, the ancients understood as the highest calling of a human being, the timeless contemplation of timeless things.

Fabrizio, the Prince, had always believed that his family would endure, that there would always be Salinas, but he was the last. Twenty-three years after his death, in May of 1910, his daughter, Concetta, who had lived a life of anguished disappointment after her cousin, Tancredi, abandoned her for the beautiful and rich Angelica, a woman who later became “one of the most venomous string pullers” in Italian politics, passed away. A nephew had often called her in private Catherine the Great, “an unsuitable name made innocent by the complete purity of Concetta’s life and her nephew’s total ignorance of Russian history.” Her furniture, which she had thought “antiquated and in very bad taste,” was sold at auction and “is today the pride of a rich shipping agent when his wife gives cocktails to envious friends.” The palace, that labyrinth of rooms as difficult to discover as the real truth about Sicily was partly, though not entirely, destroyed by an allied bombing raid in l943.

The Prince of Salina, The Leopard, who thought himself part of an “unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new,” had the good fortune to know the difference. The 11th Prince of Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, had the good fortune to write a novel that explains, better than any history book ever could, what being a Sicilian really means. It was, my father told me, the only book he ever read that made him begin to understand what his own Sicilian father had really been.