A House in Sicily. By Daphne Phelps. Virago Press. 270pp, £17.50 in UK
In 1976 my wife and I spent three months or so as paying guests in a villa called Casa Cuseni above Taormina in Sicily. Mount Etna, with its coiled, beautiful menace, seemed but a stone's throw beyond the terraced gardens. We kept postponing our departure. As other guests arrived and departed and we stayed on we came to know and love the remarkable English woman, Daphne Phelps, who presided over this extraordinary establishment.
Now, about a year short of her 90th birthday, Daphne has written her story of Casa Cuseni. It is going to become a classic of its kind largely because, although she has spent 50 years in Sicily, Daphne has never lost one iota of her crystal-clear Englishness and it is this collision of cultures that gives the book its special piquancy and hilarity, its splendid common sense.
Then there are her guests. She never advertised. We found out about the place by accidentally hitting upon a kind of partially concealed network of people who knew about it. This network ensured that Daphne could pick and choose whoever she wanted at the villa at any particular time. Painters, writers, philosophers, scholars, sundry dreamers, botanists, archaeologists, friends of Daphne and friends of friends of Daphne, there really ought to be a reunion of the survivors at this stage, although it might take one of the larger Greek theatres in Sicily to accommodate everyone. Daphne would have absolutely no problem keeping everyone in place. Here is her description of the guests at Casa Cuseni:
"They have come from 26 countries all over the world, with friends introducing their friends. Around Brangwyn's round table I have mixed people who in normal life would be unlikely to meet, or if they did so would be unlikely to fraternise: highbrow and lowbrow, left and right, U and non-U, black and white, British and American (divided by a common language). I have even tried to persuade northern Italians to appreciate their, quite wrongly, despised fellow citizens from the south. Only once or twice has the magic not worked."
There is one story that she doesn't include in the book. Over a mantelpiece was the portrait of her late uncle Robert Hawthorn Kitson, the original owner of Casa Cuseni. He was clearly an exceptionally handsome man and (on evidence from the book) of excellent taste and judgment. But what was striking in the portrait was that he was dressed in full Bedouin regalia. Daphne still had the gear somewhere in the house in which Robert would dress for his frequent visits to North Africa.
Daphne asked us if we knew an Irish actor called MacLiammoir. We said we did. As a matter of fact, we told her, we had just rented Paddy Bedford's flat in Dublin during rehearsals of a play so we had some contact with Harcourt Terrace. Hilton and Michael had, apparently, been guests in her uncle's day at Casa Cuseni. Indeed, she would take us to meet one of MacLiammoir's local friends, if we so wished.
Next day we found ourselves, with Daphne, in the sacristy of one of Taormina's churches. A frail sacristan appeared. A flood of Sicilian was exchanged between himself and Daphne and we were clearly introduced as "friends" of the great Irish actor. The effect on the sacristan was, as they say, electrifying. Gone was the frailty and the man blazed with excitement, arms flying, words spilling, but all we could make out were the frequent, excited references to "Don Michele! Don Michele!"
How she inherited Casa Cuseni as a young, unmarried social worker after the second World War and how she tamed Sicilian machismo and misogyny, make up the opening of the book. The rest of it is organised around stories of individual people which, in the process, offer a complete picture of Sicilian life as it underwent complex change in the second half of the century.
There are familiar names in these stories, of course, like Bertrand Russell, Caitlin Thomas, Roald Dahl and Tennessee Williams, while Greta Garbo makes a suitably fleeting appearance, but off stage. Williams and Daphne shared their experiences of insomnia. They also shared a well-tested loyalty to the American painter Henry Faulkner, who came with a menagerie of dogs, cats, a billy goat and a drake. (We are told in the book that Sicilian males, oddly enough, are incapable of distinguishing between ducks and drakes, a very typical Daphne detail).
But it is the stories of the local Sicilians that will remain longest in the mind. Vincenzino, the suicidal waiter at Casa Cuseni who acted out elaborate one-man theatrical performances of Sicilian folk tales in between courses and ultimately did indeed commit suicide.. Or the amorous, tragic Beppe, Vincenzino's replacement, and the destruction of his marriage.. Both these stories, in particular, are written with a masterful sense of narrative timing that is worthy of Leonardo Sciascia or Alberto Moravia. There is the story of the housekeeper Concetta, still happily with Daphne today, and, another, which will delight many readers, the story of Daphne's own mafioso, Don Ciccio, a local godfather. Her relationship with this individual, perhaps, catches the essence of the whole book. It is a meeting of English rectitude (admittedly warmed by a delightful self-irony) and Sicilian corruption and violence, dressed in a white silk shirt and with one, mysteriously dropping eyelid. There is clearly an utter fascination of each with the other and, as time passes, a genuine affection.
This is one of those books which doesn't end - you just have a sense of a life going on and on. It does have an ending, however, with Daphne on the lip of the central crater of Etna being persuaded by her fellow climbers not to go forward to look into the abyss. Meanwhile, back in this house, we've started to book our tickets for a return trip to Taormina.