Leonardo Sciascia, the joy of reason

«A conversation in Palermo with Leonardo Sciascia». This writing by Ian Thomson (translated and edited by Adele Maria Troisi) is the first of «I notebook di Regalpetra», a new valuable series published by Rubbettino. Unmissable appointment for those who love Sciascia. For those who feel close, brotherly in reason. The volume gives an account of the meeting, following an exchange of letters, between him and the journalist of the “London Magazine” Ian Thomson. A long conversation, which began at 14:00 on a winter day at the end of 1985. The place is the writer’s house in Palermo. For the guest, the impact is fulminating: «The door of the Sciascia house is already open when I get off the lift. He is standing, a curious cross between Albert Camus and Humphrey Bogart, next to an umbrella stand that contains a large collection of silver-headed walking sticks. He wears a tailored gray serge suit with a bright red tie.’ In the studio, Victorian and Art Nouveau objects. A chaise longue. The pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes. Coffee is offered.

The dialogue begins under a sky of written pages, ignited by the values ​​and ideals dearest to Sciascia, those “typically Voltairean”: Freedom, Reason, Justice. Allegorical gods contemplating a world in trouble. In a country where the negative is “so widespread that no one notices it”, there is an obligation to lift the veil, in the wake of that “brutal realism” of the best Sicilian narrative tradition. The island has always been a bond: «I was born here, in Sicily, and as a result I am condemned to love this island, even if sometimes I have a mad desire not to die there: as if to compensate, if you like, the fact of born there”. The pride of having included Pirandello in the detective novel emerges, in those prodigious mixtures that hold the reader in their grip: “a combination of doubt, ambiguity-relativity if we want to follow Einstein’s theories”. Conversation is the occasion for a firework of ideas. From each gem the next. Sciascia admires Poe’s “lucid and visionary intelligence” and declares that Diderot and Voltaire, which he read as a very young man, were for him “like a breath of fresh air in the fetid world of sulfur”. To eighteenth-century France he recognizes «sensitivity», «liveliness», «brightness». He argues that reason, “the most effective weapon we have to remedy the ills of this world”, must be tempered “by a healthy dose of skepticism. Doubt is the origin of wisdom.” In “The Betrothed” he reads a “really desperate tale about the complicity of power”. He shrewdly observes: «probably the whole of Lombardy today would suffer from the same problems as Sicily, if in Manzoni’s time it had remained under Spanish rule, instead of passing under the Austrians». And he comments, sulphurous: «History works in strange and mysterious ways».

In the analysis of Italy’s unresolved problems, Sciascia sees an inescapable crux: «I find priests so interesting because it is precisely through them, from the Counter-Reformation onwards, that so many evils from which Italy suffers today have come down to us. The Italian Catholic Church, for example, has always told ordinary citizens to “appear” at any cost: be seen at midday mass, at confession, and after that do whatever you want. Even murder.” And he concludes: “If you want to find the reason for the defects of contemporary Italian society, you have to face the oppressive specter of Italian Catholicism”. Back in England, Thomson resumed the correspondence with Sciascia. On 24 March 1987, mindful of the predilection expressed by the writer, he sent him a volume illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Sciascia’s reply is dated 19 May: «That you remembered my love for Rackham’s things I consider a sign of particular attention and friendship […] if you come to Sicily, I will be pleased to see you again»