How a novelist took on the Sicilian Mafia – and lived to tell the tale

BIOGRAPHY
A Sicilian Man
Caroline Moorehead
Chatto & Windus, $36.99

In 1961 the Sicilian novelist, essayist and literary critic Leonardo Sciascia published his first bestselling giallo, or “detective story”, The Day of the Owl. Sciascia’s approach to the genre was to use it as something of a means to an end, seeing it as a way of disseminating his existentially unflinching understandings of the corruption of Sicilian society, or “non-society”, as he would have it.

The Day of the Owl concludes with a profound analogy. Sciascia writes: “Maybe the whole of Italy is becoming a sort of Sicily … Scientists say that the palm tree line, that is the climate suitable to the growth of the palm, is moving north … It’s rising like mercury in a thermometer, this palm tree line, this strong coffee line, this scandal line, rising up through Italy already past Rome”.

The implication here that political corruption and climate degradation might go hand-in-hand is just one example of Sciascia’s renowned prescience as a writer. Time and again, as Caroline Moorehead shows in A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, The Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul, his work seemed to prefigure the precise lineaments of corruption in both his island home and the nation that it became a part of 100 years before he made his palm tree line analogy.

Sciascia was a contemporary of Pasolini, and even though they were very different men, the two writers shared a similarly uncompromising view of Italian malfeasance. Pasolini was famously murdered in 1975, and after the president of the Christian Democrats and five-times prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the radical Brigate Rosse or “Red Brigades” in 1978, Sciascia recalled his friend on the first page of the book he published about Moro’s demise.

Reflecting on the correlation Pasolini had drawn not long before his death between the disappearance of fireflies from the Italian landscape and the rise of industrial consumerism, Sciascia opens his The Moro Affair with the story of how one night, walking near his home village in rural south-western Sicily, he had seen the distinctive emerald phosphorescence of a firefly for the first time in 40 years. The idea that perhaps this reappearance of the fireflies was a symbol that things weren’t perhaps quite as irredeemable as he and Pasolini thought is in reality supplanted by the fireflies becoming an emblem instead of the false hope offered during Moro’s weeks of captivity when Moro published, with the help of his captors, a series of live letters in the Italian newspapers.

Sciascia watched on as the leader of the Mafia-infested Christian Democratic government, in petitioning his country for his rescue, began to reground himself, and potentially the scheming obfuscations of the Italian state, with appraisals of his own and the government’s situation. Sciascia understood that the closer Moro’s letters came to the truth, the less likely he was to be rescued. After 54 days in captivity, Moro was indeed murdered, and thus any possible re-emergence of something resembling moral decency in public office, as symbolised by the fireflies, becomes a companion in Sciascia’s work to the palm tree line.

Moorehead’s A Sicilian Man is a masterly depiction of the writer who, as she says, tried at every turn, perhaps impossibly, “to extract simplicity from complication”. Born in the small sulphur-mining village of Racalmuto in 1921, the young Sciascia watched on as Mussolini rose to power after the First World War. Raised in a family house of great reticence and apprehension, the secretive yet grasping machinations of Sicilianismo, or local parochial power, were evident early to his young political intelligence, nourished as that intelligence was by his family and by one aunt in particular. As Moorehead writes, “Maria Concetta did something even better than warn Sciascia against the abuse of power: she taught him to read.”

As successive waves of Mafioso violence and extortion flourished in the postwar period, Sciascia kept a steady eye on it all. His exact, undecorative prose has, as his biographer and friend Matteo Collura observed, the intense flavour of something sun-dried, and it seems that he could sniff out the various unspeakable manifestations of Sicilianismo in the same way he could sniff out sulphur. That he took a literary approach to the ills of his island was important, affording him as it did the longue duree of history and the “big picture” of philosophical inquiry. In this respect, French Enlightenment writers such as Diderot and Voltaire were formative, but as Moorehead demonstrates, it was the enigmatic and particularly Trinacrian brand of satirical creativity he found in the work of Sicily’s own Luigi Pirandello that most absorbed him.

A Sicilian Man also shows how controversial Sciascia became in calling out the malevolent social codes of his culturally layered island. Beauty attracts both lovers and pornographers, and Sicily has had its share of both. Three thousand years of successive invasions, and the endemic power vacuums that result, make Sciascia’s very writerly mode of commitment to justice evident in all his work, but particularly in his short novels and historical inchieste, or investigations, both appropriate and compelling.

Despite describing her subject as a Christian without a church and a Socialist without a party, Moorehead concludes that there is a sense of piety in Sciascia’s unremitting gaze. Even as the courageous campaigns of the 1980s began finally to expose the Mafia stranglehold, he was at times, to the dismay of many, a critic of the anti-Mafia movement, which he knew could fester in its own nepotistic pathways like any other group of humans.

Thus, in his final years, Sciascia remained more than ever un uomo sole, a man alone. Yet, his commitment to portraying, and therefore alleviating, the injustices of the island was in the end all about the inexorable predicament of his belonging to a community and a place. That’s never just a walk in the park, least of all in a place called Sicily.

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