Classics

Thomas J. Ferraro (Duke University)

That there exists any such thing as "Italian American literature" has long been a surprise to most Americans, including Italian Americans themselves—the kind of news that Mediterranean people greet with a shrug of the shoulders: so what? What has that to do with me?

In the academy, we have been treated over the last several decades to complex and evolving answers to the "so what?" question, at once sociological and aesthetic, with increasingly comparative foci often driven by diasporic, multilingual scholars. But the lack of concerted interest among readers at large may well reflect a bone-deep disdain for what in the late twentieth century came to be recognized as "identity politics": wasn't our time for special pleading finished before it had ever really begun? Despite key Italian identifications, including widespread pride in Don DeLillo's majestic achievement and certain knowledge of other writers in disparate genres, literary separatism as such feels both belated and inflated. (After all, Italian Americans have always been the last and least successful at organizing formally, but also, and not unrelatedly, the first to take umbrage at charity, relaxed standards, and tokenism.) The lack of interest may reflect, furthermore, aesthetic tendencies that lean away from the strictly verbal toward the performative, that forego the rigorously monastic for the social and collaborative, and that are premised on the conviction that life is too short for anything second-rate. And it most certainly reflects the fact that the best-known work of fiction by an Italian American about Italian Americans—The Godfather (1969)—was not intended by its author, Mario Puzo, to be "literary" at all but rather a lucrative pop-exploitation of Sicilian stereotypes: family, crime, and sexual primitivism. So why bother to have an Open Syllabus entry on the literary "classics" of Italian America?

A simple answer is that there exists a coterie of novels written by the offspring of Italian immigrants during the heyday of working-class struggle, from the 1920s through the 1960s, that are as good as such novels ever are—and, in several cases, just plain better. These classic immigrant novels take us back into forgotten social histories; they deepen our understanding of the cultural and psychological conflicts integral to dislocation, modernization, and upward mobility; and they identify and often embrace forms of cultural persistence and evolutionary transformation that continue to put Puritan America to the test, the making (not just tracing) of an Italian American religio-aesthetic ethos.

The majority of Italians who emigrated to the United States—as many as five million of them—were contadini (peasants) from south and east of Naples, rarely skilled and less often literate. They arrived as transient wage laborers, for years shuttled money and themselves back and forth to Italy, and only decided to settle permanently after an extended sojourn, with the wartime suffering of Europe often the deciding factor. Notoriously suspicious of business, government, and the Church, they held their people emotionally and culturally close, making "the family" and immediate community, first defined by dialect and region, the principal means and so the logical ends of their existence. Only rarely schooled in Northern Italian art and culture, they approached change with maximum caution, saying to themselves: "Chi lascia la via vecchia per la nuova, sa quel che perde e non sa quel che trova" ("Whoever forsakes the old way for the new knows what he is losing but not what he will find"). They cultivated street savvy and respected technical expertise but distrusted American forms of self-determination, including liberal education, exogamy, and even (after those ocean voyages!) geographic mobility. During the years of actual immigration, from the late 1870s through 1911, to become a writer "out of the ghetto" in North America was not only economically and socially improbable—it was, given the immigrants' world-view, quite literally unimaginable.

By the 1920s, however, American Italians began producing memoirs and autobiographical fiction for the mainstream American press. Established literary circles first registered the publication of a series of "from alien to citizen" autobiographies—most notably those by the sociologist Constantine Panunzio (The Soul of an Immigrant, 1921) and the pick-and-shovel-poet Pascal (né Pasquale) D'Angelo (Pascal D'Angelo, Son of Italy, 1924), both published by Macmillan. Honorable mention went also to Louis Forgione's Men of Silence (1928), a novelization of the famous Cuocolo murders. The novel documents the investigation and prosecution of the Camorra (organized crime) back in Naples by New York City's Joseph Petrosino—a great police detective of Neapolitan descent who was brought onto the Cuocolo case at the behest of the Italian government. Men of Silence confirmed crime as an Italian problem (in the wake of the resurgence of anti-Italian sentiment surrounding the trial of anarcho-syndicalists Sacco and Vanzetti), yet figured Italian Americans as its solution; it was also a harbinger of the hard-boiled detective genre, which Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929) launched a year later.

The first work of Italian American literature to reach a national readership was a short story by Pietro Di Donato called "Christ in Concrete," which appeared in Esquire in 1937. In the story, a bricklayer supervising his small work crew is buried alive on Good Friday when a wall, which he had not been allowed to build to code specifications, collapses. In "Christ in Concrete," Di Donato fashions a lyrical vernacular to give the impression, in English, of the dialect sensibility of pre-literate skilled laborers, earthy yet articulate in ungenteel ways. He foregrounds a man of fierce husbandly and paternal dedication, Geremio, who is fixated on buying a modest house after twenty years of hard labor but on Good Friday is trapped (literally) under capitalism's contradictions. Di Donato laces the story not only with a Christian protest idiom—his hero is sacrificed at the altar of capitalist greed—but also with a "pagan Catholic" sense of sacramental materiality, especially toward food and connubial sexuality. So positive was the popular and critical reception to the short story that Di Donato continued the narrative, and in 1939, the Book of the Month Club chose Christ in Concrete to be its main selection, at the expense of first alternate, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath! Ten years later, blacklisted director Edward Dmytyck filmed the novel secretly in England and released it under the title Give Us This Day. The film is a bit off in its rendering of la famiglia di Geremio (Sam Wanamaker stars!) and its immigrant patois, but devastatingly persuasive in its black-and-white "reconstruction" of the building collapse and the work of bricklaying itself. In the meantime, over the course of his lifetime, DiDonato continued to write fiction and non-fiction, including a history in 1961 of Mother Cabrini, the first American Saint, as well as a bit of pornographic indulgence for Bob Guccione's Penthouse magazine.

It is remarkable in itself that the National Coordinating Editor of the Federal Writer's Project, and its major historian (The Dream and the Deal, 1972), Jerre Mangione, was the scion of a Sicilian family of bricklayers. Born and raised in Rochester, educated at Syracuse University, and employed as a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Mangione was also the uncle of the accomplished jazz trumpeter, Chuck Mangione. Repackaged at the publisher's insistence into "a fictional memoir," Jerre Mangione's set of autobiographical sketches, Mount Allegro (1943), focused on the conviviality of his extended family, with considerable attention to the mystique of the dinner table, including the skill of its regulars at storytelling, as well as to the tension between the official Catholicism of the Irish-American Church and the heathenish pleasures of the Evil Eye, of cannoli worshipped for their quality, and of strong sensual women. As Werner Sollors has observed, Mount Allegro provides an anthropological folklore corrective (featuring a strong comic component) to the despairing sociological portrait of Christ in Concrete. This difference in approach was sponsored, in part, by the economic conditions distinguishing metropolitan New York at the height of the depression from the smaller industrial cities upstate during Mangione's youth in the 1920s. Over the course of a long career, Mangione wrote books on a wide range of topics: A Passion for Sicilians (1968) on famed Sicilian socialist and social worker Danilo Dolci, An Ethnic at Large (1978) on his own experiences as the honorary Italian among the New York Intellectuals, and La Storia (with Ben Morreale, 1992) on five hundred years of Italian American history—as well as several novels.

Of more concentrated ambition as a novelist was John Fante, who was raised in Colorado and sporadically educated at the University of Colorado and Long Beach Junior College. Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Fante's best-known novel, attempts psychological realism within a second-generation setting. It details a son's effort to deal with the tension between his mother's devout Catholicism and his father's philandering ways, against the backdrop of labor, poverty, and prejudice in the stone-cutting industry in the Colorado Rockies. Fante turned Wait Until Spring, Bandini into the first book of a tetralogy, The Saga of Arturo Bandini. A half-century later, after Black Sparrow Press's republication of Fante's corpus, an Italian-French-Belgian production company produced a quite faithful film adaptation of Wait Until Spring, Bandini with Joe Mantegna playing Arturo's father.

Of all the immigrant novels that have disappeared, the most remarkable is Garibaldi M. Lapolla's The Grand Gennaro (1935), an epic in miniature of turn-of-the-century East Harlem that more than any other source, sociological or literary, gives us a sense of what life was like in the tougher industrial precincts during the obscure years of Italian immigration. In a witty literalization of the rags-to-riches metaphor, the title character, one Gennaro Accusi, is a rag-picker who pulls himself up by the bootstraps to become a big local entrepreneur, the Rag King of Harlem. Accuci's success in "making America" (the term in broken Italo-English expressed both wonder and disdain for class-defying economic success) combines product, personnel, and market savvy with callous intimidation and brutal deception. Although the title is a deliciously sardonic echo of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), and the central issues of ethnic exploitation and masculine overdrive almost a direct response to Abraham Cahan's 1917 The Rise of David Levinsky (first serialized as "The Autobiography of a Jewish Businessman"), the rigorous sociological detail, the tapestry of interrelated lives followed through time, and the objective third-person narration is reminiscent neither of Fitzgerald nor even of Cahan but of the great nineteenth-century European realists; there's even a Balzac-like empathy for the incorrigible title character, Gennaro Accuci, who knew himself well enough to keep calling himself, despite his success, a cafone (a country "clodhopper," brutishly straightforward and socially clueless).

There are two other novels from the classic period that are especially worth remembering, in part because they are conceived from a woman's perspective. Michael De Capite's Maria (1943), narrated in sparse prose of near Dreiserian insight, recounts the story of a poor woman in Cleveland married at the bidding of her family, then abandoned (the husband can not face the shame of his financial stupidity), yet who learns to fight against the Depression with inarticulate intensity to support her children, bouncing between factory lines and relief lines, ultimately finding the courage and means (married again to an improvident man) to abort an untimely pregnancy. Mari Tomasi's second novel and the first major work of Italian American fiction by a woman, Like Lesser Gods (1949), is told over the shoulder of an immigrant schoolteacher with a resolutely Franciscan sensibility. It analyzes the pleasures and dangers of the Vermont Granite industry, where cutters from Italy's Piedmont make art of stone. At risk of death from a lung disease specific to granite and unknown in Italy, the Vermont granite-cutters put their wives in the untenable position of having to mediate between a vocation of sacred force (stone cutters being "like lesser gods") and its threat to life, love, and security.

The Italian American realist genre continued at the onset of the 1960s with a triptych of notable novels. In 1960, Raymond DeCapite (Michael's brother) published The Coming of Fabrizze, the protagonist of which is, as Rose Basile Green writes, "a folk-hero of the Italian American zest for life." Two years later, Rocco Fumento published the often-anthologized Tree of Dark Reflection; its lyrical yet ominous title invoked the psychological dynamics of second-generation cultural re-formation, including sexual ambivalence and self-doubt, during the Second World War. In-between, Octavia Waldo gave us A Cup of the Sun (1961), a "homefront" novel that has never been reprinted and is almost totally forgotten now; set in South Philly, it focuses on a female adolescent who must come to terms with the discrepancy between an emergent sensuality of real aesthetic power and the jeopardy to which it exposures her in the neighborhood and even within her family.

For all of the forthrightness of A Cup of the Sun and Christ in Concrete, the best works at mid-century dealing with Italian-descent sexual taboo, not coincidentally within the struggling working and under classes, were written by non-Italians, yet deserve strong consideration for inclusion in Italian American syllabi: Knock on Any Door (1947), by African-American Willard Motley, another utterly underrated and neglected novel, whose protagonist begins as a reform-school victim of male-on-male sadism and ends as a rent boy on the streets of Chicago (the 1947 film version is limited to a mid-novel trial, dispensing with all homosexual representation and even innuendo); and Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (first staged, 1955), which treats a longshoreman's love for his niece, with a parochial pungency of universal proportions, and which, in its recurrent stagings over its seven decades, has been lauded well more often than not, by non-Italian and Italian-descent audiences alike. Another special recommendation of classic sexual import goes to a dialect family memoir, George Panetta's We Ride a White Donkey (1944), a black-humored self-critique that includes a riotous exposé of Italian male obsessive-compulsiveness and fear of cuckoldry.

In 1964, just when US immigration restriction laws were stripped finally of their pro-Northern European bias, a New York writer of serious bent and ambition by the name of Mario Puzo published his second autobiographical novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, treating the experience of his female-centered family in the Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan during the twenties and thirties. The Fortunate Pilgrim is at once the most specifically Southern Italian and the most generically ethnic achievement in American immigrant fiction, a tour de force at both levels. Puzo's Southern Italian matriarch, named Lucia Santa (after the popular saint who holds her eyeballs aloft in a dish), operates at the center of Italian American life in symbolically heightened actuality, as one husband is killed in a longshoreman's accident and the second is lost to insanity. It is the immigrant mother who first calls for loyalty to la via vecchia (the old ways) only to then instigate, under the cover of her rhetoric, the supposedly rebellious transformation of her children—who mistakenly presume that they alone are responsible for abandoning the old ways, and hence for rejecting the parent who articulates and symbolizes them.

It may sound like a peculiarly Italian version of American Oedipal complaint to blame Americanization on mom, but granting foresight, courage, and self-acceptance to the immigrant mother are crucial steps in healing the break between the generations—an imaginative act of forgiveness and reconciliation that The Fortunate Pilgrim effects, surprisingly, on mamma's own terms. In 1988, in a 4.5-hour television version of the novel, Lucia Santa was brought to the screen by none other than the cinematic patron saint of Naples, Sophia Loren. Filial honor enough, you would think, but not the half of it: for Mario Puzo had already based the character of Vito Corleone, the Godfather of us all and the most mythic patriarch in 20th-century anglophone literature, not on a man, mobster or otherwise, but on the actual fortunate pilgrim, one Maria Le Conti Puzo—his mother.

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