The Safety Exit

I just read The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957).  Originally published in Italian in 1958, it was promptly made into a prestigious epic motion picture by Luchino Visconti, with Burt Lancaster as the lead.  I decided to read the book before I watched the film, but now I wonder if I should follow through on the latter.  For one thing, I generally dislike dubbing, and the original version had Lancaster dubbed into Italian; a shorter version made for US release apparently has Lancaster's own voice speaking English, but I presume everyone else is dubbed.  For another thing, I suspect Lancaster was miscast physically: his character, Prince Fabrizio Corbero di Salina, has a "vast expanse of" belly under "his waistcoat" (7),* which doesn't sound like Burt.

Not that he was fat; just very large and very strong; in houses inhabited by common mortals his head would touch the lowest rosette on the chandeliers; his fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper; and there was constant coming and going between Villa Salina and a silversmith's for the mending of forks and spoons which, in some fit of controlled rage at table, he had coiled into a hoop. But those fingers could also stroke and handle with the most exquisite delicacy, as his wife Maria Stella knew only too well; and up in his private observatory at the top of the house the gleaming screws, caps, and studs of the telescopes, lenses, and "comet finders" would answer to his slightest touch [7-8].

I find myself picturing someone more like John Goodman, if the actor must be American.  I don't quite believe any Hollywood actor, especially of that era, could play such a character convincingly, especially amid a mostly Italian cast.

But the main reason I'm now reluctant to watch the movie is that Lampedusa's prose (as translated, quite beautifully, by Archibald Colquhoun) carries the book.  It hasn't much of a plot, though I can understand why the vivid descriptions of people (aside from the Prince, his future daughter-in-law is described so sensuously that even I wanted to caress her), food, buildings, and Sicilian landscapes would have tempted Visconti.  Everyone who writes about the film mentions the forty-minute-long ball scene, based on the one in the book, which I'm sure will be visually gorgeous, but I doubt it can convey Lampedusa's voice and tone.  That's always a problem with omniscient narrators, which is why every film or TV adaptation of Jane Austen I've seen falls flat.

Austen's on my mind right now because, inspired by a book group discussing Pride and Prejudice on the bicentennial of her death, I'm rereading all her work.  Film and video can give you the costumes, the landscapes, the architecture and the decor, which, along with Colin Firth in a wet shirt, are what most people take to be what these stories are about; it's much harder for them to convey the author's attitude to his or her story.

Like Austen, Lampedusa was an observer, often acidly satirical, of his social world.  (Lampedusa was himself a prince, and The Leopard is based on his grandfather.  It's said that he began writing the novel -- the only one he wrote -- after the family palace was destroyed by bombing during World War II. He died of cancer shortly before it was published.)  So, for example, we are told of a Sicilian peasant:

In fact with his low forehead, ornamental tufts of hair on the temples, lurching walk, and perpetual swelling of the right trouser pocket where he kept a knife, it was obvious at once that Vincenzino was a "man of honor," one of those violent cretins capable of any havoc [202].

I think it was the word "ornamental," so carefully and meaningfully placed, that first made me think of Jane Austen in connection with The Leopard: it's the kind of touch she often employed.  Though she would never have written as Lampedusa did, of the young ladies at the ball:

The more of them he saw the more he felt put out; his mind, conditioned by long periods of solitude and abstract thought, eventually, as he was passing through a long gallery where a populous colony of these creatures had gathered on the central pouf, produced a kind of hallucination; he felt like a keeper in a zoo set to looking after a hundred female monkeys; he expected at any minute to see them clamber up the chandeliers and hang there by their tails, swinging to and fro, showing off their behinds and loosing a stream of nuts, shrieks, and grins at pacific visitors below.

Curiously enough, it was religion that drew him from this zoologic vision, far from the group of crinolined monkeys there rose a monotonous, continuous sacred invocation.  "Maria! Maria!" the poor girls were perpetually exclaiming.  "Maria, what a lovely house!"  "Maria, what a handsome man Colonel Pallavicino is!"  "Maria, how my feet are hurting."  "Maria, I'm so hungry, when does the supper room open?"  The name of the Virgin, invoked by that virginal choir, filled the gallery and changed the monkeys back into women, since the wistiti of the Brazilian forests had not yet, so far as he knew, been converted to Catholicism.

Slightly nauseated, the Prince passed into the next room, where were encamped the rival and hostile tribe of men ... Among these men Don Fabrizio was considered an "eccentric"; his interest in mathematics was judged almost a sinful perversion, and had he not been actually Prince of Salina and known as an excellent horseman, indefatiguable shot, and tireless skirt chaser, his parallaxes and telescopes might have exposed him to the risk of being outlawed.  But he was not talked to much, for his cold blue eyes, glimpsed under their heavy lids, put questioners off, and he often found himself isolated, not, as he thought, from respect, but from fear [222-3].

Lampedusa wrote about his era in retrospect rather than from within it, as Austen wrote about hers.  The social worlds of balls, crinolines, hunting, palaces, are very similar, though fifty years after Austen, the Prince knows that the order he represents is in decline. If she had lived a century later, and felt free to write about sexuality and politics (most of The Leopard is set in the mid-1800s, during Italy's transition to a unified "modern" state, and several of its characters play significant roles in that transition), and if she had lived long enough to write about old age from experience, Austen might have produced something like The Leopard.  But Lampedusa did produce it, and I'm very glad to have gotten around to reading it at last.

*Quoted from the 2007 edition published by Pantheon Books.

Swallowed Up by the Skirt

You know that unpleasant feeling when you feel a sneeze coming on, but you just hover there on the cusp, waiting for it to get done with, but it won't?  Well, I've felt like that for most of this week.  I'm not sure I remember a cold quite like this before.  I began to notice the onset of a cold on Monday, with congestion and a muzzy inability to concentrate, and by Tuesday noticed at my (part-time) job that several of our student workers were in even worse shape than I was.  So I kept waiting for it to crest, so that I could begin recovering, but it got worse each day.  Today I napped for a few hours, which seems to have helped a bit; I'll probably do that for the rest of the weekend.  It's frustrating -- I had several topics to write about, and was ready to get to work on them, but this week I couldn't get motivated.  In the end one simply has to sit down and get on with it.

I've been reading a book I found at the public library sale, Speaking of Jane Austen (Harper & Brothers, 1944) by Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887-1956) and G[ladys] B[ronwyn] Stern (1890-1973).  It's a fond discussion of Austen's works by writers who like her a lot, though they distinguish themselves from hard-core "Janeites."  (There's always somebody more extreme than you are, no matter where you stand.)   It's fun to read, not a work of academic criticism but still historically informed, and both authors grew up in an England very different from the one they died in, probably closer in culture to Austen's than to the England of the late twentieth century.

Among much else, I was intrigued by Sheila Kaye-Smith's digression on women's underwear:

Miss Bingley's remarks on Elizabeth Bennett's petticoats -- "six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain, and the gown which had been let down to hide it not doing its office" -- inspires the reflection that most articles of feminine underwear started on the outside.  Elizabeth's petticoat was meant to be visible, a part of the scheme of her dress, with the gown above it looped up to show either a contrasting or a blending colour and a different material.  Sometimes the gown was slit down the front to display that petticoat beneath, and half a century earlier had been hunched high over it in panniers.  It was not until Victorian times that the petticoat disappeared under the skirt.  Stays, too, by Elizabeth's time invisible, started as outside wear, much in the style that still survives among certain European peasants, with the chemise visible above them.  Drawers were later than her day, but they also began as a visible article of dress, reaching the ankles and to be seen for several inches below the skirt, which finally dropped to the ground and swallowed them up as it had swallowed up the petticoat.  The Victorian women, then, wore no less than four unmentionable undergarments which had in their day not only been mentionable but plainly visible.  By the time that her crinoline and bustle had shrunk away into modern streamlines and what was beneath might be expected to be revealed, it was found that these had shrunk too, contracting all four of them into a single scantie.  [243]

It happened that I read this progress (if that's the word) of outerwear to underwear as more controversy raged over Muslim women's headscarves.  It's worth remembering that in England and Europe, respectable Christian women covered their bodies below the neck, as well as above.  (Male visitors from the Muslim world still found them "immodest," of course.)  The remarkable thing to me in this case was how each new covering apparently had to be covered up in turn.  Where does it come from, this obsessive need to package women's bodies in layer after layer of wrapping, like a fast-food hamburger covered in tissue and paper and a cardboard box, then put in a paper bag?  We seem to have left the tendency behind in the West for the most part, though I expect a reaction to come eventually; the best hope I see is that women here do have a lot of room for personal choice, whether for long skirts or short shorts.  The problem isn't the degree of covering so much as making a specific degree of covering or uncovering mandatory.

Gals Go Wilde

"... Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself."

If I had encountered that line out of its context, I'd have guessed it was one of Oscar Wilde's aphorisms. But Jane Austen wrote it, for her character Elizabeth Bennet in chapter 59 of Pride and Prejudice.*

Nor does it stand alone. There's also this one from chapter 60:

Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother, on his approaching marriage, were all that was affectionate and insincere.

And then in chapter 61, the narrator informs us that after her marriage, Elizabeth's father "delighted in going to Pemberley, especially when he was least expected."

This line from chapter 20 isn't Wildean, but it jumped out at me as oddly "modern" the first time I read P&P:

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."

I've always thought of Wilde's humor as unique to him, maybe even invented by him, but I'm coming to suspect that I thought so only because I hadn't read enough 19th-century English literature. That suspicion was reinforced when I read Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1880 novel A Fair Barbarian, about a wild young gal of the American West who descends upon her father's sleepy English hometown of Slowbridge. Nineteen-year-old Octavia Bassett appears without warning (but with six trunks full of her wardrobe) at the door of her timid maiden Aunt Belinda. Her father, Martin, is a speculator in silver-mines of great but inconsistent fortune, and just as he was about to visit his sister Belinda for the first time in thirty years, his fortune went South, as we Yanks say, and he had to hurry back to America to build it back up again. (Do fortunes go North when they recover themselves?)

Slowbridge is ruled over, socially speaking, by the gorgon-like arbiter (arbitress?) Lady Theobald, a forerunner of Wilde's Lady Bracknell but lacking Lady Bracknell's greater wealth, station, and London address.

In Slowbridge, America was not approved of -- in fact, was almost entirely ignored, as a country where, to quote Lady Theobald, "the laws were loose, and the prevailing sentiments revolutionary." It was not considered good taste to know Americans, -- which was not unfortunate, as there were none to know; and Miss Belinda Bassett had always felt a delicacy in mentioning her only brother, who had emigrated to the United States in his youth, having first disgraced himself by the utterance of the blasphemous remark that "he wanted to get to a place where a fellow could stretch himself, and not be bullied by a lot of old tabbies" [8-9]

Martin Bassett must not have been the only Slowbridge gentleman who lit out for the territories, because there are hardly any left in town by the time Miss Octavia comes to visit. There is, of course, a working-class fellow who brings her trunks from the railroad station; Mr. John Burmistone, the mill-owner, a recent immigrant in small-town terms, of whom Lady Theobald doesn't approve any more than she does of Americans; and the mild-mannered (not to say milquetoaste) curate, the Rev. Arthur Poppleton. Since none of these are gentlemen, a love interest has to be imported, in the person of Lady Theobald's nephew, Capt. Francis Barold, who drops in to visit Slowbridge and becomes fascinated by the fair barbarian.

The first confrontation between Miss Octavia of Bloody Gulch, Nevada, and Lady Theobald of Slowbridge:

"You don't look like an English girl," remarked her ladyship.

Octavia smiled again. ... "I suppose I ought to be sorry for that," she observed. "I dare say I shall be in time -- when I have been longer away from Nevada."

"I must confess," admitted her ladyship, and evidently without the least regret or embarrassment, "I must confess that I don't know where Nevada is."

"It isn't in Europe," replied Octavia, with a soft, light laugh. "You know that, don't you?" [35]

Later, Lady Theobald takes note of the abundance of jewelry Miss Octavia wears:

"You are a very fortunate girl to own such jewels," she said, glancing critically at the diamonds in her ears; "but if you take my advice, my dear, you will put them away, and leave them until you are a married woman. It is not customary, on this side of the water, for young girls to wear such things -- particularly on ordinary occasions. People will think you are odd."

"It is not exactly customary in America," replied Octavia, with her undisturbed smile. "There are not many girls who have such things. Perhaps they would wear them if they had them. I don't care a very great deal about them, but I mean to wear them."

Lady Theobald departed in a dudgeon [39].

Miss Belinda remonstrates mildly with her niece.

But Octavia did not appear overwhelmed by the existence of the standards in question. She turned to the window again.

"Well, anyway," she said, "I think it was pretty cool in her to order me to take off my diamonds, and save them until I was married. How does she know whether I mean to be married, or not? I don't know that I care about it" [40-41].

Octavia is more of a Huck Finn than a Gwendolyn or a Cecily, but Lady Theobald is very much a Lady Bracknell-wannabe. Burnett, though born in England, moved with her family to the US at the age of 16, and spent most of the rest of her life there, with only occasional residence in England. She has a nice touch with the clashing provincialisms of America and Britain, and though A Fair Barbarian drags a bit towards the end -- Burnett seems bored with the story -- she wraps it up neatly enough, with some small surprises.

This was the first book I've read by Burnett with an adult protagonist, and it's a hoot. She's best-known now for her "children's" books Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden, which in their day were read and loved by adults as much as children. I think A Fair Barbarian would make a great film. There's a 1917 silent version, but someone today with the right feeling for a comedy of manners could make something very entertaining out of it. It's quite different in its tone and attitudes than I expected from 19th-century fiction, just as Jane Austen's novels shook me out of my preconceptions about what an English spinster would write about 70 years earlier.

Which brings me to something that kept occurring to me as I read Pride and Prejudice last night. The writing drips irony, and some fairly intense sarcasm. Do most Austen fans notice it? After re-watching Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's very fine and successful Sense and Sensibility a month ago, which missed or left out the irony too, I'm inclined to doubt it. As Jane Eyre is often mistaken for a proto-Gothic romance novel ("Always to be a governess and always in love," Virginia Woolf sneered in the 1920s), so Austen's novels seem to be thought of as simple proto-Harlequin romances.

For example, though Austen accepted her society's ideas about class and breeding, she knew very well that a title and thousands of pounds did not automatically make a good person. The Bennet parents in Pride and Prejudice are human failures in their different ways, but there is also the affectionate but insincere Miss Bingley, and even more there is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who despite her august station is not really different from the empty-headed Mrs. Bennet. I've been wondering what Miss Austen would have thought of the great working-class critic Raymond Williams's impression of his class 'superiors' at Cambridge:

The class which has dominated Cambridge is given to describing itself as well-mannered, polite, sensitive. It continually contrasts itself favourably with the rougher and coarser others. When it turns to the arts, it congratulates itself, overtly, on its taste and its sensibility; speaks of its poise and tone. If I then say that what I found was an extraordinarily coarse, pushing, name-ridden group, I shall be told that I am showing class-feeling, class-envy, class-resentment. That I showed class-feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunately enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people.

*I'm referring to chapters in P&P rather than page numbers because there are so many editions of Austen's novels, and besides, the chapters are short enough to make it fairly easy to find a passage. I quote A Fair Barbarian from a 1995 facsimile reprint, by the University of Idaho Press, of the 1880 original, but it can also be found online.