The Viceroys Read Online Free
Author: Federico De Roberto
elaborately treated crisis of conscience by a woman during her marriage service. Fascination with the Church, horror of unctuousness, terror of love ‘
soif de l’absolu
’ perhaps unacknowledged … no wonder his fiction and his ‘scientific’ and even his historical studies, emanate a tense, sometimes brusque disquiet; even at the Feast of the Assumption at Randazzo the decorated float reminded him of the chariot of Vishnu or Moloch.
Neither Verga nor De Roberto ever married, both having theories about a writer being wedded to his work. This did notprevent Verga from keeping secret mistresses with whom he would vanish for long jaunts in northern Europe, unknown to all till after his death. De Roberto stayed at home with his mother, locked in one of those relationships which are inexplicably both closer and less neurotic in the south. Love betrayed recurs so often in his writing that he must have set up some embittering pattern of his own, driven perhaps too by that sexual rhetoric of Catania for which Brancati found a new word, based on the image of a strutting cock,
gallismo.
With all De Roberto’s clarity and energy his writing is full of the strange Sicilian character, its subdued fervour and sadness, its solitude beyond the smiles. Is its only cause, as some historians insist, a social structure too ill-balanced to release local energies? Or is there some deeper anguish in Pirandello’s comment ‘Intelligence is a terrible thing because it destroys the beauty of life’, or in the title of his last ‘Notes on my involuntary sojourn on earth’? A remark which De Roberto put into the mouth of Mme de Maintenon, ‘Nothing is more able than irreproachable conduct’, calls up one of those silently screaming cardinals by Francis Bacon. Sicily now is one of the few places where Stendhal would still find his ‘
sombre Italie
’.
De Roberto’s last years were spent either tending at his mother’s bedside or looking after Verga’s literary interests, and at his death in 1927 he left behind a mass of unfinished manuscripts; a history of Malta, a biography of Verga, the complete first part of a novel,
L’Imperio
, which continued the story of the last Uzeda, Prince Consalvo, in Rome. Such fame as he had outside Sicily dated back to the ‘nineties, his writing was not the kind to appeal to Fascism, his books were allowed to fall out of print while in public demand, and within a few years he was almost forgotten except by specialists; though it is pleasant to record that Edith Wharton was an enthusiast about
I vicerè
, and, through her, Bernard Berenson. Now Italians are probably closer to his spirit than ever before. There is a growing realisation of the odd and important place that Sicily occupies in their modern literature, of, for instance, De Roberto’s influence on the narrative style of Moravia, of the
Veristi’s
direct perception as part of that chain in Italian art which links Giotto to realist films. De Roberto’s work is likely to be reassessed againsta wider background. ‘God concedes to every artist one hour that is truly great’, he once told an admirer, but never said which he thought to be his.
We catch a glimpse of him through contemporary eyes, out on his stroll at
l’ora del gelato
(‘ice-cream-time’) in Via Etnea; Cavaliere Roberto, he was known as, one of the city’s major personalities; a spry figure, with a quizzical look behind his eye-glass and above a high stiff collar and white waistcoat. He passes among the parading carriages, the jostling carts, the barrel-organs playing
Casta Diva
, under the all-seeing eye of Etna. If it were the Feast of St Agata there would be tall constructions of gilt and baroque quivering down Via Etnea among squibs and shouts and fervour, as they do every year. Even now, feudalism has its trappings and some descendants of the old Spanish viceroys flourish, for during the feast the image is still greeted by a flow of splendid liveries in the palace
soif de l’absolu
’ perhaps unacknowledged … no wonder his fiction and his ‘scientific’ and even his historical studies, emanate a tense, sometimes brusque disquiet; even at the Feast of the Assumption at Randazzo the decorated float reminded him of the chariot of Vishnu or Moloch.
Neither Verga nor De Roberto ever married, both having theories about a writer being wedded to his work. This did notprevent Verga from keeping secret mistresses with whom he would vanish for long jaunts in northern Europe, unknown to all till after his death. De Roberto stayed at home with his mother, locked in one of those relationships which are inexplicably both closer and less neurotic in the south. Love betrayed recurs so often in his writing that he must have set up some embittering pattern of his own, driven perhaps too by that sexual rhetoric of Catania for which Brancati found a new word, based on the image of a strutting cock,
gallismo.
With all De Roberto’s clarity and energy his writing is full of the strange Sicilian character, its subdued fervour and sadness, its solitude beyond the smiles. Is its only cause, as some historians insist, a social structure too ill-balanced to release local energies? Or is there some deeper anguish in Pirandello’s comment ‘Intelligence is a terrible thing because it destroys the beauty of life’, or in the title of his last ‘Notes on my involuntary sojourn on earth’? A remark which De Roberto put into the mouth of Mme de Maintenon, ‘Nothing is more able than irreproachable conduct’, calls up one of those silently screaming cardinals by Francis Bacon. Sicily now is one of the few places where Stendhal would still find his ‘
sombre Italie
’.
De Roberto’s last years were spent either tending at his mother’s bedside or looking after Verga’s literary interests, and at his death in 1927 he left behind a mass of unfinished manuscripts; a history of Malta, a biography of Verga, the complete first part of a novel,
L’Imperio
, which continued the story of the last Uzeda, Prince Consalvo, in Rome. Such fame as he had outside Sicily dated back to the ‘nineties, his writing was not the kind to appeal to Fascism, his books were allowed to fall out of print while in public demand, and within a few years he was almost forgotten except by specialists; though it is pleasant to record that Edith Wharton was an enthusiast about
I vicerè
, and, through her, Bernard Berenson. Now Italians are probably closer to his spirit than ever before. There is a growing realisation of the odd and important place that Sicily occupies in their modern literature, of, for instance, De Roberto’s influence on the narrative style of Moravia, of the
Veristi’s
direct perception as part of that chain in Italian art which links Giotto to realist films. De Roberto’s work is likely to be reassessed againsta wider background. ‘God concedes to every artist one hour that is truly great’, he once told an admirer, but never said which he thought to be his.
We catch a glimpse of him through contemporary eyes, out on his stroll at
l’ora del gelato
(‘ice-cream-time’) in Via Etnea; Cavaliere Roberto, he was known as, one of the city’s major personalities; a spry figure, with a quizzical look behind his eye-glass and above a high stiff collar and white waistcoat. He passes among the parading carriages, the jostling carts, the barrel-organs playing
Casta Diva
, under the all-seeing eye of Etna. If it were the Feast of St Agata there would be tall constructions of gilt and baroque quivering down Via Etnea among squibs and shouts and fervour, as they do every year. Even now, feudalism has its trappings and some descendants of the old Spanish viceroys flourish, for during the feast the image is still greeted by a flow of splendid liveries in the palace
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