Notes on the tales of Leonardo Sciascia (1921–89)
Many years ago, my friend and editor Roger Kimball said something about Walter Bagehot that made immediate sense to me. Bagehot’s reputation, he said, was held back by the inability of people to pronounce his name. We see it but don’t know how to say it. Therefore, we don’t talk about him, or recommend him, or ask for him in bookstores.
Here it is: “Badge-it.”
Walter Bagehot was a British journalist, living from 1826 to 1877. In 1855, he co-founded a magazine called “National Review.” That was exactly a hundred years before William F. Buckley Jr. founded a magazine of that same name. Unlike WFB’s, the 19th-century National Review was short-lived: nine years.
In 1872, Bagehot published a book called “Physics and Politics.” Outstanding book, says Roger Kimball, but saddled with a confusing title. (Some combination of Einstein and Oakeshott?)
I always thought that Leonardo Sciascia was held back, in the English-speaking world, by the inability of people to pronounce his name. It is (more or less) “Shah-shah” — rhyming with “ha ha” or “rah rah.” Beautiful name, actually: “Leonardo Sciascia.”
Writes Albert Mobilio, “Leonardo Sciascia, despite the catchy melody of his name and his several translated books, remains largely unknown in America.”
Mr. Mobilio is an American poet, novelist, critic, etc., who teaches at the New School in New York. I have quoted from his introduction to a Sciascia collection of short stories, The Wine-Dark Sea.
Sciascia was an Italian writer of novels, plays, and other things, in addition to short stories. He lived from 1921 to 1989. Brilliant fellow. I encountered him in college and recently got reacquainted with him through The Wine-Dark Sea.
I have called Sciascia “Italian,” and that he was, but he was also Sicilian, mining his island for material. Actually, you don’t need to mine in Sicily. The material falls into your lap. It is all around you, whether you like it or not.
People have often said that the American South is the same way.
Many prominent writers have come from Sicily. Here is a little pantheon: Verga, Pirandello, Lampedusa, and Quasimodo (along with Sciascia). You could include Natalia Ginzburg, too. Of the writers I have mentioned, two won the Nobel prize: Pirandello and Quasimodo.
Sunny island though it may be, Sicily is often a dark place, from the pen of Leonardo Sciascia. A place of distrust, a place of lies, a place of tricks. Justice is elusive, even a farce. Violence is everywhere. People are engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival.
There are streaks of beauty and delight, too, of course.
The short stories that constitute The Wine-Dark Sea were written from 1959 to 1972. In 2000, The New York Review of Books published an edition, using a translation by Avril Bardoni. (The introduction is by Mobilio.) The collection takes its title from one of the stories, “The Wine-Dark Sea” (in Italian, “Il mare colore del vino”).
And you remember where the phrase comes from: Homer. “Wine-dark sea” is the old and common English translation of a phrase that Homer uses recurringly.
I propose to jot a few notes on the collection — nothing formal, nothing comprehensive, just a few notes that may interest you, and give you a diversion from the day-to-day.
• Here is a snippet from a conversation that takes place in one of the stories:
“There are still a lot of people in Sicily who have a certain attitude towards life; they’re suspicious.”
“What about?”
“They don’t trust people in general, or themselves. And they’re not entirely wrong.”
• In his introduction, Albert Mobilio says that Sciascia’s stories delve into a “contentious world where church, state, and family make war on each other to ensure that no one comes out ahead.” He then quotes something that Sciascia wrote in an essay: “Privilege, to the Sicilian, is not so much the liberty of enjoying certain things as the pleasure of forbidding them to others.”
• Something else that Mobilio writes:
The Sicilian language is the only one in Europe that has no future tense. The island’s bitter legacy of conquest and revolt seems to have stunted its inhabitants’ ability to conceive of a time outside this recurrent cycle.
• In one of his stories, Sciascia has a Swiss businessman visit Sicily to recruit workers. The story ends with the businessman muttering, “Primitive place.”
• Another story takes place up north, in Lombardy. Sciascia touches on something very Italian — a regional divide:
The first suspect was a builder from Suisio, one Abramo Esposito, who was arrested. The name suggests one of Southern Italian origin. Was that the reason he was arrested, because he came from the South?
• Listen to this:
As on the first occasion, an immediate arrest was sought. The choice fell upon Luigi Comerio, a villager from Suisio . . .
“The choice fell upon” — superb language. Saying so much about the administration, or maladministration, of justice. Just get somebody.
• One story — “A Matter of Conscience” — is about cuckoldry. Brilliant, deft, unsparing story. Some wife has cheated on her husband. Who can he be? Who is the unfortunate fellow? We learn at the end. And great shame and horror falls upon him. Shame, horror, and mockery.
Some years ago, I gave a speech — longish — on the topic of shame. Let me quote a pertinent portion:
I’ll tell you a word you hear often in Italy — jocularly, yes, but seriously, too: “Vergogna!” “Shame!” And you know what this is, don’t you?
“This”? Yes, giving my speech, I made a certain sign, with my hand. With two fingers, in particular.
I am not supporting the University of Texas Longhorns. I’m making the horns — Sto facendo le corna — accusing you of being a cuckold. If you’re looking for a quick way of getting killed in Sicily, just flash that sign.
Silvio Berlusconi, that lovable scamp, made the sign behind the back of the Spanish foreign minister, Josep Piqué, at an official picture-taking of the European Union in 2002. He later said he was just kidding.
When I was quite young, I didn’t get this whole “corna” and shame business. It seemed to me that the shame rested with the adulterer, not the one cheated on. It was she, or he, who was sinning, not the faithful partner. I obviously had a lot to learn.
• In one of his stories, Sciascia treats an actual historical case, that of Aleister Crowley, an Englishman who lived in Cefalù in the 1920s. He ran a cult there — maybe “commune” is a nicer word. He and his followers lived in a villa, hidden from public view. You can imagine the curiosity. What’s going on in there? (Lots of sex, for one thing.)
Sciascia imagines a correspondence between the boss in Rome, Mussolini, and local authorities. Mussolini demands an investigation. A police report comes back to him.
The report speaks of the right to privacy, “a right accorded to every citizen and which the English, in particular, hold dear.”
That brought a smile to my face. (Sciascia knows his cultures.)
Winding up, the police report says,
Crowley’s way of life is indubitably different from that of most people, but it is mysterious rather than scandalous; and it is this mystery which makes Crowley’s presence in Cefalù a cause of local unease.
Wonderful passage.
• “The Long Crossing” deals with America — trying to get there. In his introduction to the collection, Albert Mobilio tells us that “between 1890 and 1920 one-quarter of Sicily’s population left the island.” In his story, Sciascia writes the following, about his characters:
To get to America was certainly the important thing; how and when were minor details. If the letters they sent to their relatives arrived, despite the ink-blotched, misspelled addresses scrawled so laboriously on the envelopes, then they would arrive, too.
These put-upon, hopeful people would travel over “that great dark ocean to the land of the stori (stores) and the farme (farms), to the loving brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, to the opulent, warm, spacious houses, to the motor cars as big as houses, to America.”
Listen to some more:
Their dreams of America were awash with dollars. They would no longer keep their money in battered wallets or hidden under their shirts; it would be casually stuffed into trouser pockets to be drawn out in fistfuls as they had seen their relatives do; relatives who had left home as pitiable, half-starved creatures, shriveled by the sun, to return after twenty or thirty years — for a brief holiday — with round, rosy faces that contrasted handsomely with their white hair.
A fair amount of history, and life, is packed into those few words.
• Maybe I could address something lighter. Young people may marvel at the thought, but, in the days before smartphones, we had to have reading material on us, especially when we traveled. To be caught without reading material — well, that was a terrible fate.
I suppose we have the equivalent today: when our battery runs out and we can’t recharge.
In one of Sciascia’s stories, a man who regularly travels long distance by train must have reading material. Especially when it gets dark outside and he can’t even see out the window. Heaven forbid we should be alone with our own thoughts, right? (Right.)
A couple of lines from Sciascia’s story:
So, as soon as he realized that the train was running behind schedule, Vaccagnino would search the train, almost empty by now, for papers discarded by other travelers. When he had managed to collect a few, no matter whether they were Fascist pamphlets, women’s magazines, or books of comic strips, he felt safe again.
Once, I was with Bill Buckley, on a trip, and he noticed he was without reading material. That was fine for now. But what about later? He was rattled. “Never be without reading material,” he said. It was a rule of life. Might as well have been chiseled into stone on Sinai.
• In another Sciascia story, a man tells a woman that her husband, in his opinion, is a self-made man. She begs to differ — eloquently and bluntly:
Your idea about self-made men comes straight out of romantic fiction or American manuals on “How to Succeed.” But I can assure you, from my knowledge not only of my husband but of a fairly large number of “self-made men,” that they have all without exception been “made” by other people, who in their turn have been “made” by a set of circumstances, coincidences, and sordid little deals that, even if the result seems a story-book success, remains fortuitous and meretricious.
In the last war my husband fought with the Fascists alongside Sabatelli, who became Minister for Public Works; they were both volunteers. And that’s the long and the short of it. And you cannot imagine how stupid Sabatelli is. In a well-ordered and honest society, where no papers were forged and men had to depend upon their own merits and abilities, the most favorable of circumstances would have carried them both to the threshold of public office — as door-keepers; the most unfavorable would have carried them over the threshold — of a prison.
I find Leonardo Sciascia an uncomfortable writer, most of the time. I don’t mean that he himself is uncomfortable. He himself is not experiencing discomfort. No, he is making you and me uncomfortable!
Is he cynical? Maybe. Is he realistic? No doubt.
• Sciascia is swimming in his material, his Sicilian inheritance: Mafia, Church, politics. The politics of the Mafia, the politics of the Church. “Politics politics.” We have a saying in my home state of Michigan — indeed, it is our state motto: “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.” If you seek a story in Sicily, look out the window. Or cock an ear on the street.
In a story called “Demotion,” Sciascia has a man mock his wife and her friends for protesting the removal of a statue from their church: a statue of Saint Filomena. Saint Filomena never existed, the authorities had concluded. This made the women very upset. The husband regards them as a bunch of superstitious hens. In fact, he says, “arguing with a woman is like washing a donkey’s face.” He himself is a rational Communist.
Later on, he sits down with his newspaper, L’Unità, and reads something that infuriates him. He tosses the paper “violently towards the ceiling.” The item he has read? The latest Soviet party congress voted to remove Stalin’s body from the Mausoleum.
The man’s wife, startled and anxious, asks, “What’s the matter?” “Nothing,” he replies. “Nothing at all.”
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