Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America 9780814728635

Citation preview

Feeling Italian

nation of newcomers Immigrant History as American History Matthew Frye Jacobson and Werner Sollors general editors

Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America Ji-Yeon Yuh Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America Thomas J. Ferraro

thomas j. ferraro

Feeling Italian The Art of Ethnicity in America

a new york unive rsity pre s s New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2005 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ferraro, Thomas J. Feeling Italian : the art of ethnicity in America / Thomas J. Ferraro. p. cm. — (Nation of newcomers) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8147-2730-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-8147-2747-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Italian Americans—Ethnic identity. 2. Ethnicity—United States. 3. Italian Americans—Social conditions—20th century. 4. United States—Civilization—Italian influences. 5. United States—Ethnic relations. 6. Italian Americans—Intellectual life. 7. American literature—Italian American authors. I. Title. II. Series. E184.I8F29 2005 305.85'1073—dc22 2004026813 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Manufactured in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Tony, who has the Voice; and Dani, the Attitude

Seriousness and joy; that’s how I approach my work; that’s what I learned from my mother. —Bruce Springsteen

contents Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Feeling Italian

1

1. Honor: Friday Bloody Friday

9

2. City: New York Delirious

28

3. Job: Close to the Flesh and Smell and Joy of Them

51

4. Mother: The Madonnas of Tenth Avenue

72

5. Song: A Punch in Everyman’s Kisser

90

6. Crime: La Cosa Nostra Americana

107

7. Romance: Only a Paper Moon?

128

8. Diva: Our Lady the Dominatrix of Pop

143

9. Skin: Giancarlo and the Border Patrol

162

10. Table: Cine Cucina

181

Conclusion: The Art of Ethnicity in America

198

Notes

209

Narrative Bibliography

235

Index

249

About the Author

256 ix

acknowledgments The ideas in Feeling Italian are unorthodox, even heretical; its materials, often controversial; its modes of expression and address, experimental. Although written in a white heat, this book took more than a decade to germinate. Along the way, I have learned a great deal from those who have not shared my enthusiasm for Italian stuff, a great deal from those who have shared my enthusiasms for other kinds of stuff, and a great deal from those who have shared with me their enthusiasms for all kinds of other stuff. Also, Italians have long memories. Which makes writing acknowledgments an impossible task. So let me dispense with my continuing education and call the roll of those who have engaged me on matters expressly Italian. At Amherst College, Eric Siebert put Sinatra records on our turntable, George Birdsong came over to listen. The American Studies faculty taught Urban Villagers. Allen Guttman quietly cautioned me about antiCatholicism in the old-line academy; several others—Jack Cameron, Barry O’Connell, and Mary Gordon—modeled ways of finessing it; many others—especially David Wills, Dale Peterson, Robert Gross, and Laura Wexler—helped me find my way. In graduate school at Yale University, Jean-Christophe Agnew told me I’d like Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim; Alan Trachtenberg supervised my forays into immigrant history and ethnicity theory; Richard H. Brodhead coached a dissertation in a subfield—immigrant and multicultural literature—that didn’t yet exist. One hot summer, John McLucas and Antonella di Napoli taught me intensive Italian; Matt Munich, fourteen-year-old opera buff, shared the intensity. Gary Garibaldi, head of Local 34 and a New Haven visionary, sat me at his family table for Sunday dinners. Werner Sollors talked shop along Mary Antin’s route through East Boston, encouraging and soon publishing my first Godfather essay. Bill Boelhower relayed good work and kind words from Italy; Jules Chametzky and Donald Weber did too, from those Pioneer Valley schools I adored. Reva Siegel and Raoul Ibarguen taped Madonna videos and turned Springsteen concerts into pilgrimages; Tara Fitzpatrick schooled me in Long Island Catholicisms. Joe Skerrett Jr. hosted my first MLA panel, Robert Viscusi attended. xi

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Werner Sollors unpacked di Donato’s sociology, Mangione’s anthropology; John Lowe went after the humor. In Geneva (where “Euro culture” was already taking shaping unbeknownst to itself, in Switzerland of all places), André Kaenel and Jay Blair asked me, more times than they probably care to remember, why? Corinne Boccard, with a greengrocer for a father and a jazz-loving Italian for a boyfriend, didn’t have to. Shortly after I returned to the States, Emory Elliott asked me for an overview of early immigrant literature; Frank Lentricchia, a comrade in close reading and movie screening, invited me to write on White Noise. Alan Thomas wanted cover art for my first book, Ethnic Passages: I found “Telegraph Pole” in an obscure corner of the Stella archive; Randy Petillos secured permission from the Potamkins to use it; Richard Rodriguez sent me a congratulatory note, saying “What a beautiful cover.” Art Casciato, writing on di Donato, wanted to hear more about Puzo. Maurice Wallace, then a graduate student, connected Do the Right Thing to Puzo’s political economy. Vincent Peterson shared his Brooklyn borderlands and kept me posted on the arts of crossing over. James T. Fisher, Paul Giles, Mary Gordon, and Robert Orsi drafted original essays for Catholic Lives, Contemporary America that would prove ethnically relevant; Camille Paglia talked about Catholic tendencies, letting me write it all down; Paula Kane, Sandra Mize, Paul Crowley, and Scott Appleby debated the results. John Paul Russo at Italian-Americana coaxed reviews from me. Pellegrino D’Acierno invited an encyclopedia essay for The Italian American Heritage and a performance piece on “urbanity at the end of the millennium” (the latter got me thinking about Spike Lee again). Anthony Tamburri slipped me copies of his anti-hyphenation polemic and a Madonna video compilation. The NEH awarded a summer grant to work on Joseph Stella, enabling me to work with curators and plot with old friends at Yale, the Whitney, the Met, and the Newark Museum. At Mario Mignone’s invitation, I visited SUNY/Stony Brook to discuss the future of Italian American Studies. Paula Marantz Cohen masterminded Sinatra’s first appearance at the MLA, and Hofstra University sponsored an entire conference, both of which were splendiferous. Stanislao Pugliese shepherded the Hofstra papers into print. Alane Salierno Mason and Helen Barolini sent me their good books. John Gennari proved to be a man after my own African Italian heart, and he got

acknowledgments

me together with that other city slicker, Carlo Rotella. When Tina Klein revealed Nancy Kwan in Flower Drum Song, images of Madonna danced in my head. Frank Lentricchia shared an Italian American fiction anthology he assembled in the 1970s, when all the publishers would say was no. Peter W. Williams asked me to conjure up another encyclopedia essay; Jay Parini did, too. Rafael Pérez-Torres’s idea for a volume on post-ethnic America recalled Big Night to consciousness; Michael Gorra then quizzed me, isn’t passing for Italian in the movies “just acting”? Susan Mizruchi prompted my first extended venture into Italianizing Catholic Studies. Laura Wexler, Stanley Hauerwas, and Lucy Maddox liked “Lorenzo’s Chrism” enough to show it around; Frank Lentricchia, enough to publish it in a special issue of SAQ; Grant Farred, enough to chew me out for not producing more. Fred Gardaphé and Mary Jo Bona arranged another performance panel, “Stereotypes, Schmereotypes,” before which Gardaphé chuckled, “Just be yourself.” Sante Matteo invited me to an Italian American Studies Symposium, where Rebecca West and Ben Lawton discussed Italian film, Art Casciato and Paul Giordano spoke to identity myopia, and Sante shared his students with us. Of special note is the opportunity Gordon Hutner provided to give three of my boys—Stella, Sinatra, and Puzo—a public hearing, at an ALH symposium, where Ann DuCille laughed in just the right way at my experimental diction (which meant more to me than she could possibly know), and where Mitch Breitwieser, José David Saldivar, and Jonathan Freedman told me, “You’ve just got to see The Sopranos.” Back in Durham, Jim Applewhite averred, “It’s art, man; it’s really art.” In the meantime, Werner Sollors was getting ideas: how would I like to write a book on “Italian Americans in the Age of Cultural Studies”? My home institution, the English and related departments of Duke University, made answering Sollors’s call possible, encouraging risk while demanding rigor. Barbara Herrnstein Smith plucked my letter of application (with all its talk of Puzo and Yezierska) out of a stack of late arrivals. Melissa Malouf shared with me her short stories on Italian America; Marianna Torgovnick, Crossing Ocean Parkway; Frank Lentricchia, The Edge of Night and the ensuing novels. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick got me thinking queer and Catholic together. Cathy Davidson gave me detailed feedback when I first started thinking about Sinatra; Houston Baker, when I starting writing again on film; Michael Moses,

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Sarah Beckwith, Ian Baucom, and Thomas Pfau, when I first started thinking about Stella. Roberto Dainotto proposed bringing Italian American Studies to Duke with me. Priscilla Wald applauded an early draft of chapter 10, “Cine Cucina”—the cornerstone, as destiny would have it, for what lay ahead—when others did not. Two classrooms full of undergraduates entertained my first efforts to constellate the Italian American arts; Jeremy Rossman, whose grandmother once met Springsteen and didn’t even know it, got the picture; so did Phil Tinari. Jinan Joudeh insisted I put the word out, and her father, who came to Italian cooking the hard way, showed why. I’ve excused graduate students from having to grant me formal indulgences for my Italian thing, but many of them recently—Suzanne Schneider, Caleb Smith, Alex Feerst, Nihad Farooq, Jené Lee Schoenfeld, Vin Nardizzi, Adam Haile, Melinda DiStefano, and Kinohi Nishikawa—have been solicitous, anyway. John Hilgart and Lisa Naomi Mulman, among others, remember when. Dean Karla Holloway granted me smiles of real encouragement—and a research budget. Marianna Torgovnick gave the finished manuscript a warm nod of Brooklynite self-recognition; Janice Radway and Joseph A. Porter took it under wing, too. My chair, Maureen Quilligan, kept committee assignments at bay and shared, on a daily basis, the joy of learning from students. Catherine Beaver and her staff expedited as needed, taking my ethnic excitability in stride. My colleagues—every single one of you!—have made the workaday world an education and a pleasure. Intellectual life depends on associated community, and you are my home association. Werner Sollors, my once and future padrino, gave the entire draft a very timely once over, spotting both linguistic miscues and opportunities to cross-reference, urging that I make the architecture more apparent (“You’ve given us one archetype per chapter”), and challenging me to make the last remaining chapter pertinent to the book’s religious issues. Matthew Jacobson, master historian and kindred spirit, kept me chronologically focused and factually honest, with the academic landscape (“What does Cultural Studies have to do with it?”) in front of me. Together, they cottoned on to the vision and pushed for clarity. Casey Jarrin, who once brought Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to a graduate class, was my first sounding board for the artwork. Vamshi Reddy did leg work

acknowledgments

for one cover idea. Then a photograph from A. Kenneth Ciongoli and Jay Parini’s Passage to Liberty caught my eye, and the book’s spirit. From the beginning, Eric Zinner, my editor at New York University Press, thought that many short chapters just might work, but knew to warn against both repetition and discontinuity. At the end, he held me to standards of public communication, inspiring several eleventh-hour chapter revisions and a more expansive conclusion; it was a pleasure to be taught so cogently and efficiently, often by only a few phrases. His assistant, Emily Park, guided both the manuscript and me through the NYU paces, exchanging pointers on the cover. Despina Papazolgou Gimbel saw the manuscript through production in style, marshalling me with uncanny grace. Nicholas Taylor copyedited unobtrusively, taking me at my word. NIAF awarded Feeling Italian a Culture and Heritage Grant, in support of promotion beyond standard academic venues. Beth Eastlick, ideal combination of enthusiast and skeptic, read every word I wrote, and let me keep some of them. Tony Ferraro and Dani Ferraro bugged me to get off the computer. My parents afforded the family periodic escapes to the beach. Many moons ago, the late great R. W. B. Lewis told me: “If you had any balls, you’d write the whole damn thing on Puzo.” Here it is, Mr. Lewis, the next best thing: a whole book—a whole book!—on the artistry of Italian America. A modest portion of chapter 5 has been published in two different forms: Thomas J. Ferraro, “‘My Way’ in ‘Our America’: Art, Ethnicity, Profession,” ALH 12 (Fall 2000), 506–11; and Thomas J. Ferraro, “Urbane Villager,” in Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture, ed. Stanislao Pugliese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 135–46.

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Introduction Feeling Italian Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in. —Michael Corleone, 1990

One would think, on the face of it, that the Italian Americans whose ancestors came to the United States en masse a full century ago must be coming to the end of their social and cultural distinctiveness. Blue-collar foundations that were once taken for granted have finally waned; the fourth and fifth generations are dispersing into the suburbs and across the country; and long-cultivated bloodlines are being diluted by intermarriage and alternative arrangements, with lovely results. We also know that the cultural baton and ethical highground have been passed to immigrants of color, that the Internet enables the incessant reinvention of personal and group identity on a surreal scale, and that the good ol’ melting pot has made a hearty comeback in the form of mestiza hybridity, fusion cuisine, and global sampling. Surely the social historians are right, then: Italian Americans must be at the twilight of their ethnicity. So how come HBO’s The Sopranos has caught everyone by the throat? Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America is not an attempt to turn the clock back, to think of white ethnicity in 1970s terms, as an issue of “us” versus “them.” It is not about the Italian American community frozen in time but rather about the century-long, often wondrous, at times discordant, Italianate remaking of the United States. Feeling Italian is written after the shift from industrial manufacturing to the postindustrial service economy and the concomitant flight from the inner city to the suburbs have undercut classic blue-collar values and pressures; 1

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after the barriers to the power professions have come tumbling down, with people of Italian descent in positions of authority everywhere and biased access no longer an excuse for lowered expectations; and, of course, after the discourse of multiculturalism has taken the great leap forward, from an activist counterculture and “we are minorities, too” attitude to the new—diversity-obsessed, yet strangely abstract—orthodoxy. With change has come obligation and opportunity. I have chosen to foreground artifacts—books, movies, paintings, recordings, video—in part because they hold attention and insert themselves in memory more easily than historical data and sociological precepts. But I have foregrounded artifacts also because it is my belief that aesthetic media, especially quality media, have been integral to the persistence and dissemination, transformation and recovery, of Italianate sensibilities beyond their regional class base and family confines, and at no time more so than in our own: postindustrial, postmodern, and, in some ways, post-ethnic. It is through art and, increasingly, in the wake of the fourth generation, only through art that we come to know and to deal with what it means to feel Italian still in America. Who are Italian Americans today, in the age of political correctness and virtual reality, after the so-called twilight of ethnicity? How did they get this way? What patterns or structures of feeling are demonstrably Italian? Which ones become recognized as such, and which do not? Where does the idea of “feeling Italian,” as itself a structure of feeling, come from? How has Italian-derived culture impacted, even permeated, the U.S. mainstream? What remains recognizably different about Italian forms of Americanness, different in truth as well as in perception? And what is it about the Italian American difference that makes it so appealing to non-Italians? Why, in short, does American Italianness matter in a post-ethnic, gender-liberated, transnational, racially utopian United States? The purpose of this book is to answer these questions by proposition and, more importantly, by example: to examine the evolution and persistence of Italian Americanness; how it developed from Southern Italian dislocation and increasing intergroup contact/mobility; how it has influenced the nation at large even when we don’t quite sanction its influence, understand its operation, or recognize its origins; and why as a subculture, real and imagined, real because imagined, it continues to exercise

introduction

such an appeal both to those who immediately identify with it and to those who think of themselves as strictly outsiders to it.1 My title is evocative and multivalent. The pun in Feeling Italian harbors a double meaning: to “feel like an Italian” means, first, to feel the way Italians feel, to have Italian or Italianate types of feelings, whether recognized or not; and, second, to feel that one’s identity is Italian or Italian-like, no matter the ancestry. The phrase invokes cultural continuity over distance and across time, including the mystique of such continuity, without relying on credentials of blood: so formulated, “feeling Italian” opens up the ranks (you don’t have to be one to feel like one) and beats back both the authenticity police and the determined de-essentializers —this feeling of Italianness was made in America from cultural formations that arose in Italy. But this structure of “feeling Italian” does not surrender the claim to distinctiveness. I know there’s a loose-jointedness to the concept; that’s the idea. It’s an aesthetic, really: the play of ambiguity across the identity line, done well, is the art of feeling Italian in America. The peasants who migrated to the United States from south and east of Naples, first as transient labor, then as proletarianized settlers, knew themselves not as Italians but as members of a particular family, perhaps a town, at most (after arrival) a dialect-defined region, but nothing more. Italia, the newly emergent nation-state of Italy, its government, its declared cultural capital of Florence and its Church operations in Rome, its rallying cries for unification and economic incorporation, they distrusted, even despised. It was not until they had dealt with nativist suspicion and wonder in the United States, so new (ethnically hostile priests, health crusaders, cartoonists drawing them as monkeys) yet so familiar (Sicilians were called Africans in Italy), did they think of themselves as a unit, and it was not until they had committed to stay and acclimated to the urban working classes did they feel they were, in truth, Italians—Italians of an American stripe, Italian Americans. But of course that identity, however emergent, wasn’t merely relational: it reflected and reinflected folkways and folk desires shared across Southern Italy, whatever their differences (Calabrians more stubborn than Neapolitans? go figure), then brought to bear upon life in the United States, the medium of social aggregation and cultural convergence. Italian-like feelings were turned into the feeling of being an Italian: this is a historical dialectic of

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representation and self-representation, yes, but it was lived in the blood, the flesh, the soul. From the beginning, the media mattered as a site of American projection and guarded Italian response. But it was not until after World War II, at the very moment when European-descent ethnicity was supposed to have disappeared into the convenient mists of whiteness, that the first offspring of the Italians entered the national limelight in notable numbers, reanimating the Italian mystique. And it was not until the 1970s and 1980s, in the wake of the rise of the new ethnicity, the diversity mania of multicultural chic, that Italian Americans by the score claimed the center stage of American culture as their own, especially the movie screen, where they vied with each other and with the national iconography machines. Reciprocal reinvention was at work, with paradoxical results: even as those of Italian descent took the national discourse more and more into their own creative hands, remaking America, so too those of Italian descent knew themselves more and more through how the paesans acted in the public eye and how they were portrayed in the media, the popular arts especially. Italian American self-understanding and the portrayal of Italians in American culture at large, then, moved closer together, to the point where the feelings Italian Americans have for themselves, the feelings non-Italians have for Italian Americans, and the feelings they both have for the role of Italianness in America intertwine and interpenetrate: almost—but not quite!—one. What is peculiar about this convergence, the faultlines notwithstanding, is how little it has worried individual Italian Americans, especially outside the sphere of organized professionals. They have experienced very little angst, fretting neither about their own authenticity nor the province of others in trying to define what is really Italian nor the claim of others to actually embody it. When need be, they simply ignore the cheap counterfeits (the accordion-dialect cafone songs, the pizza and pasta chains, those really bad mafia flicks); more often than not, they are charmed, even enlightened; and, sometimes, exalted. There are reasons for this, this feeling of being okay and even more-than-okay with massmediated Italianness, and these reasons go back to the beginning, to the culture of Southern Italy and its transatlantic relocation, to that cluster of feelings we have no choice but to label as Italian. I want to trace that

introduction

origin, these evolutions, to be a good historian, to look backward so as to look forward; but most of all, I want to visit the charm, the illumination, the exultation. This book has issues, but even more than that, it has mysteries. Who was the seamstress Maria Barbella? What did she do to become the most famous—nay, the most notorious—immigrant in the United States of 1895, and why have we forgotten her? How did Giuseppe “Beppino” Stella, an émigré from the backcountry hills of Basilicata, become America’s premier painter of the industrial cityscape, and what was it about the utter medievalness of the rural Mediterranean that proved to be so far-sighted? What was happening meanwhile behind the scenes, at the jobsite, where peasant laborers were building—literally—the new urban world: a bloody sacrifice on the cross of capitalist exploitation; this we know, but what else? And who were the immigrant matriarchs of so much lore, everyone’s Donna Rosa, who lorded it over their broods at home in the tenements then, and who somehow still command our sense of female possibility, even in the professional ranks? The ghost of the immigrant matriarch in the newly Italianized boardroom may be a bit uncanny, taking one to know one, but some puzzles from the past continue to weigh more obviously upon us. What in the 1950s made Francis Albert Sinatra (whose early handlers wanted to rechristen him “Frankie Satin”) Sinatra, and why does that attitude still matter? How did The Godfather get under our skin, circa 1970; and why can’t we—thirty-plus years later, in the era of the Russian and Columbian mobs, anti-Arab profiling, and Internet paranoia—let our Sicilian bloodbrothers go? Haven’t the guineas finally gotten white, at times in the worst possible ways; and don’t we—thanks to Spike Lee—know it? Sure, Madonna never stops talking about her background—“Italians Do It Better”—just like Sinatra, but what could “Italianness” mean in Madonna’s case, when her Girlie Show is never the same thing twice, so gleefully rebellious, so inventively chameleon-like, with any ethnicity (yo, any culture or history) fair game for her costume dramas, her artistic poaching? Is there, moreover, anything to be learned from today’s mass-mediated Italian American Lite—the films of romantic comedy central like Moonstruck and My Cousin Vinny, even Prizzi’s Honor or Big Night—beyond the fact that stock ethnic schlock will fool most of

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the people most of the time? And what in the world do the prejudice police have to complain about, if what Italian Americans invent when left to their own devices—in this case, an entire crew of producers, actors, and writers, heavily Italian or veritable converts, working on spec out of the network spotlight—is a comic opera of sublime intelligence, The Sopranos? These are the questions I pursue, a taste of what is to come. My ambition for this book is not coverage, but something else: ten case studies at the intersection of culture, idiom, and artifact, which, taken together, present a history (not the entire history by any means, but a formidable pathway through it) of Italian America: Italian America in its own terms, as it has made and found itself to be. Each chapter offers a sustained, concentrated meditation on a single Italian American image, each subject vexèd, each text magical. The determination here is to analyze ethnicityin-transition, warts and all, but also to mediate it, to play it up and run with it. Underneath the scholar’s imperative you will feel, therefore, a pulse of affirmation and affection, with special confidence in art’s darker truths, including ethnic self-damnation. Throughout I look from past to present to see how we’ve gotten here from there; that’s my primary responsibility, but I can’t help insinuating, as arranger Quincy Jones did for Sinatra on the brink: “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Italian American cultural production is one of the intellectual community’s better-kept secrets. One book can only do so much to put the word out, and there are major figures, major texts, and major constellations not considered here: I don’t discuss the 1891 New Orleans lynching or the Sacco-Vanzetti affair; the politicians like LaGuardia, Cuomo, or Ferraro; the original Rockys, Joey D. or Yogi or Roy Campanella (the great Brooklyn Dodgers catcher who helped Jackie Robinson to break in, and whom we tend to forget was half Italian), Coach Lombardi or Franco Harris (half Italian, too). I don’t discuss early Italian theater and vaudeville, the graphic artists, animators, and architects (like Robert Venturi); grand opera, both nationally and regionally (Italians passing for Spanish in the Southwest); the vast number of instrumentalists, in jazz especially (composers, too); or the “assimilated” filmmakers of the golden age of Hollywood, Frank Capra and Vincente Minnelli; plus all those actors and actresses, beginning with Valentino. There’s more liter-

introduction

ature, too: the return-to-Italy tales, women’s writing (what ever happened to Octavia Waldo?), poetry; and the postmoderns—including guerilla critics Camille Paglia and Frank Lentricchia, from whose fierce autonomy I have taken heart. So much great stuff, and so much of it barely touched!2 This book is, then, an introduction to Italian ways of feeling and ways of feeling Italian in the United States, both historical and contemporary, that arise from the usual suspects—family values, prejudice both without and within, and stepped economic mobility, which the new social history and ethnic sociology can help us to read—only to carry us into ongoing issues of habit and mind that, however stereotypical (as criminal, urbanite, lover, gourmand, aesthete, neo-racist, or prima donna), continue to escape scholarly notice, intellectual understanding, and theoretical incorporation. I am especially interested in pursuing the interplay between ethos (lived values) and ethnos (sense of belonging) in our age of transnationalism. On the one side of the dialectic is a highly particular version of Catholicism (paganish, domesticated, sensualized), in which it is first the extended family and later the intersections among food, sex, and art that make for shadow faith. On the other side are certain globalizing presentations of that sensibility, in which feeling Italian is not by birthright so much as it is by choice, a map for educating desire and (re)conceiving relatedness. The two sides of the dialectic —the secularizing of Catholicism among the Italians versus the Italian Catholicizing of secular America—come together not as a righteous xenophobia, the guido-style parochialism of which we have had more than enough, but as a demanding, even consequential mode of culturebased cohesion: acting Italian, finally, as an art for America. This book offers a dramatic account of an earthy, sensuous, sardonic people: those people, the Italians of both distant history and recent vintage in the United States, but also the rest of us, readers and watchers and thinkers at large, who so identify when and how we can, most often through the media arts. This book is for each and every one of us, the democratic way, who has always wanted to be the hero of every story we care about (especially if the heroine is an underdog!), and who therefore already has a sense of what it feels like to be a paesan in America. In this kind of cultural studies, reconstructive rather than deconstructive,

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harnessing thought to people rather than people to thought, I begin at the beginning, assuming what must be assumed, with the incontrovertible facts of lived history and marginal folkways. But in the affect I identify, in the artifice I examine, and in the effect I wish to stimulate, I pursue the other side of the ethnicity dialectic: the allure of storied difference. Feeling Italian, then. If only in your dreams.

chapter

1

Honor Friday Bloody Friday A woman knows the cost of a life better than a man does. —Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1895

The southern Italian peasants who came to the United States during the Great Migration (1880–1917), first as sojourners, later as settlers, to help build and run the industrial cities, were the proudest of peoples. Having suffered for centuries at the hands of the landowners and the governmental authorities and the Church, the weather and the gods, they had long before established distinctive ways of making do and of making sense: the mother-centered order of the family for all practical intents and purposes, the Virgin for the expression of hope and the renewal of courage, the cult of Honor for communal intrigue and masculine self-esteem. They were ferocious realists who understood where power lay and why it was wielded, but they would have hated—hated—to be considered anyone’s victim. I begin, then, with a story about a common laborer from the darkest era in Italian American history—the first era, that of arrival. Yet it is, in their spirit, a story not of backbreaking work and studied isolation unto death, a commonplace narrative, but of a curious victory or rather, to be more precise, a series of victories, in their earliest dealings with official America: victories so improbable—paradoxical in how they occurred, contrary in their implications, yet wondrous for all of that—that they feel like acts of grace. At the end of the nineteenth century, America was actively seeking cheap labor—expandable, expendable labor—for its booming industries and burgeoning cities. Italian peasants, some with skills in the 9

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construction or extraction or hand trades, most just farm workers with strong backs and tough constitutions, answered the call, upwards to three hundred thousand a year.1 The vast majority came from the notoriously backward regions of rugged Italy, especially the Mezzogiorno, the area south and east of Naples, where—as classic rumor has it—the hill-town people are so suspicious of outsiders and so tight with one another they refuse to give a stranger directions. What these emigrants wanted was the opportunity for the first time ever to escape hunger and degradation; their American Dream was the (not so) simple transformation of penny wages into saved dollars. A significant proportion, at least the majority, settled in the industrial Northeast, where they worked and lived together in conspicuous concentrations in the toughest city neighborhoods, including Hell’s Kitchen, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side of New York.2 Feeling Italian in America began, I believe, as a function of the original urban ghetto, especially its breakdown. The Italian colony, as it was first termed, was built in accordance with ancient habits (la via vecchia, including fierce familialism, low expectations, and distrust of authority) and new necessities (including chain migration, language barriers, and restricted housing). Its insularity caused as much alarm among the majority of established Americans who disdained contact with others as among the small minority who welcomed it. And, most importantly for our purposes, cracks appeared in those symbolic ghetto walls almost the instant they were raised. Feeling Italian in America began, then, in the contact zone of mutual Italian/American (re)construction, as a founding interplay between how the immigrants understood their new country and what the citizens at large thought of them, when the hermetic seal of Southern Italian culture cracked itself open to external inspection. Why did the Italians come all the way to the United States only to cling so fanatically to themselves? How, nonetheless, did their private lives and communal doings become the focus of widespread curiosity and national concern? When such affairs spilled into the public sphere, what happened? Was it the case, as latter-day defensive thinking would have it, that these aliens, these foreigners, these racialized others were screwed from the very start? Or were there ways and means—once recognized only to themselves—to take advantage of America’s special conditions, even when (perhaps especially when) their backs were to the wall? And, if so, how can we possibly now know?

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On July 17, 1895, an illiterate seamstress in Lower Manhattan by the name of Maria Barbella became the first woman in the world to be sentenced to die in the electric chair. At the time the basic circumstances of the case suggested she had been used, abused, and hung out to dry several times over. But the case did not turn out as anyone could have reasonably predicted, and sixteen months later, after an extended sojourn in Sing Sing Prison and an O. J. Simpson–style retrial, Barbella was, amazingly, set free. Until a decade ago, no one in the United States, not even the professional historians of immigration and the female proletariat, had ever heard of Barbella, but we now know most of what transpired, thanks to painstaking research by Idanna Pucci, an anthropological filmmaker and author from Italy. Pucci’s The Trials of Maria Barbella is a sobering reminder of anti-Italian prejudice, of course, but it is much more than that.3 Pucci researched for ten years like a woman possessed. She not only had the tenacity to persist against all odds, turning up court transcripts, the trial appeal, all kinds of letters from various interlocutors, Il Progresso Italo-Americano for 1896, and of course the voluminous Englishlanguage newspaper and magazine archive, but she also had the patience, skill, and sensibility to shape the myriad pieces of the public record into what is, in effect, a documentary novel. In its overall architecture, The Trials of Maria Barbella preserves the ambiguity of the archive, as Pucci lets the materials speak in their contrary complexity, and she invites the reader to share in the intrigue of deciphering the historical record, with subtle pointers to Pucci’s own investigative suspense. In what follows, I attend to what Pucci seems to be saying sotto voce, and I do so with increasing urgency because what I hear there, under Pucci’s breath, reminds us that the good stuff is never neat, never nice. Ultimately at issue in The Trials of Maria Barbella is, I believe, a mystery dance between political correctness and lived history—that is, between the contemporary intellectual mandate to unearth how Southern Italians were once racially denigrated and systematically mistreated, which is true, and the transatlantic Italian appetite for ascertaining illicit sexuality, exacting just revenge, and crediting divine intercession, which is even more true.4

At 9:45 a.m. on Friday, April 26, 1895, Maria Barbella came out of the Tavolacci Bar at 428 East Thirteenth Street with her body wholly

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unscathed, her heart and mind under great duress but not permanently destroyed, and the better part of her dignity reinstated. Left dying on the bar floor behind her was the bootblack, Domenico Cataldo, whom Maria, a long-sheltered naif, understood to be her fiancé, the love of her life, but who was in fact by all accounts (including his own) an unconscionable exploiter of vulnerable women—the sort of man the immigrants used to call a Lothario, the kind we would call a stalker, a dealer in false pretenses, and a serial date rapist. Maria said, “Me take his blood so he no take mine. Say me pig marry.” Only pigs marry! is what Maria actually heard, in regional Italian dialect. It was romantic misadventure turned dramatically violent, and as such a scenario more familiar from village legend than from fact. The scene of the crime was New York’s infamous Little Italy, the Five Points district of Lower Manhattan, which housed a dense concentration of unskilled and semi-skilled Italian laborers, the majority of them adult males living under penurious contract in stable-like conditions. The protagonists came from neighboring hill towns in the very worst part of Southern Italy, the mountainous anklebone called Lucania or Basilicata, a place ravaged forever by climate and outsiders and history itself. Banished to Basilicata in 1935, Carlo Levi found a world of exploitation and alienation older than communal memory and harsher than humane measure: “No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding.”5 It was a land of the most stubborn poverty (la miseria) where either you suffered terribly all life long (many died young) or took leave of your history, most often to go to America.6 Idanna Pucci reports that when the Barbellas came to rent a standardissue airless railroad apartment at 136 Mott Street, they might as well have still been in Basilicata. Well, yes and no. On the one hand, the immigrants of lower Mott Street, all from the region, speaking variants of the same dialect, had transplanted the most intense elements of their long-evolved culture. Christ was on the altar but Mary was worshiped; women made the ultimate decisions because they did the hardest work; and people owned nothing to speak of but what they could speak of, that is, communal lore and individual fantasy.7 The worship of Mary was a strange exultation of Virginity-cum-Fertility, which translated, in practice, to a woman’s chastity-before-marriage and motherhood afterward being a matter of Honor for all the family, especially the men—who had

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so much time on their hands, unemployed, unemployable, without political franchise, with so little to be proud of, so little to contest. The immigrants brought their Honor cult with them, but circumstances had changed. In Basilicata, there was no place without prying eyes, and an unmarried woman, especially a young unmarried woman, would never be left alone. In Basilicata, to claim sexual conquest was a ubiquitous form of male braggadocio, offering solace while resisting proof. In New York City, Domenico Cataldo took advantage of the jam-packed Lower East Side—young women walking unescorted and beyond familiar eyes a fair distance to and from work, ubiquitous barcafés admitting women where drinks could be doctored, and very cheap apartments available at a moment’s notice—to make good on what in Italy was, for logistical reasons, mostly just talk. Maria Barbella was a chaste dutiful daughter of the old school who had never had a suitor and who worked ten hours a day, six days a week, for minuscule wages, taking piecework home at night and bringing her check to her parents, unopened. In November 1893, when the two first talked on the street, Cataldo was nearing thirty years of age and had been in New York long enough to have put almost a thousand dollars in the bank, to the immigrants a prodigious sum; Maria admitted to having just turned twenty and to having arrived only eleven months before— during which time she had done nothing but work, seen nothing but the sweatshop, nor conversed with anyone beyond their tenement stoop. Heartlessly and stealthily Cataldo pursued Maria, while refusing to meet her family as custom prescribed and the Barbellas demanded. To elude Cataldo, Maria changed walking routes, then switched sweatshops, but he found her again months later, and eventually his charm melted away some of her traditional resolve. It is unclear how exactly they came to lie down together, but when she awoke that first morning in Cataldo’s apartment, Maria knew that her father would not let her step across the threshold into the family’s fifth-floor walk-up until and unless she were properly married. Maria had dishonored herself and thus the family, which were, to people from the south of Italy, the same thing. It took truly dreadful immediate circumstances—a sudden forty degree rise in heat late on the afternoon of April 25 to an unprecedented ninety degrees, ten hours of handling rough wool in a suffocating sweatshop, sexual brutality following Cataldo’s middle-of-the-night return

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home, and his morning declaration that he was returning to Italy—to bring the relation to a fever pitch of violence; but Cataldo had, as the local Italians understood it, given Maria no choice. For over a month, he had resolutely refused to marry her, and a young Italian woman scomunicata 8 from her family was nowhere and nothing. There was only one way to get her honor back. The neighbors on Mott Street mourned with the family when Maria was taken to jail, though most assumed Maria was responsible and the killing justified. To the Italian vice-consul, it was surprising only that a member of Maria’s family hadn’t already done the deed. There was no proof, however, that Maria had actually intended to kill Cataldo, whom she seemed genuinely to have loved and, in her posttraumatic daze, often spoke of in the present tense. She only wanted, as she put it, to draw blood—which would bring the pair before the American authorities, whom Maria seemed to think would hold Cataldo to his promise of marriage. So not only was it part human tragedy, part minor miracle that the diminutive Maria had, in fact, killed Cataldo, who was much stockier and stronger, but there was something providential in the truly mysterious manner of the death, which allowed Maria to walk a precarious ethical and psychological line. Maria had satisfied the oldworld criterion of the vendetta. At the same time she could tell herself that she had only intended to enforce Cataldo’s promise of marriage— which satisfied the new-world ideal of a love match. Maria seemed as well truly not to remember exactly what happened in the bar, which was, as we shall see, a boon in itself. Cataldo’s throat had been cut. The weapon, which Maria had taken from their makeshift bureau, was an old-fashioned straight-edged razor, altogether too evocative of the long thin knife called a stiletto that had already entered English parlance as a sensationalistic stand-in for the immigrants themselves. I don’t think we can underestimate the symbolism of that straight-edge, anymore that we can underestimate the prejudices triggered by the combination of occupations (bootblack and seamstress), extramarital domestic discord, a seedy bar, card playing, emotion-driven violence, and—of course—the psychosocial overinvestment in the idea of Honor itself. In the America of 1895, the Southern Italians were a despised and feared people, despised especially for doing the work they were brought to do, and feared (characterized as dark-skinned dagos and

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African-blooded guineas) because they were known to work at half wages (pay rates in the North advertised below that of “coloured labor”) seemingly without complaint, clinging to each other and their established ways of doing things. Only four years earlier in New Orleans, eleven Sicilians who had just been exonerated in one way or another of the murder of a corrupt police captain were lynched—a couple of them literally, the rest massacred by bullets—by a huge mob organized by the KKK-like White Defense League; and rightly so, according to such distinguished arbiters of national public opinion as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the editors of the New York Times.9 “Maria the murdering seamstress,” with the hot temper and the deadly straight-edge, was made for the tabloids even if she hadn’t been a foreigner; that she was Southern Italian was—for the purposes of a national psyche alarmed about newcomers, factory workers, “Roman” Catholics, and darker-skinned peoples—too good to be true. The very sight of the average Southern Italian was frightening to most Americans of older stock: markedly short and thick of trunk, often misshapen from malnutrition and lack of medical care, dark of skin and hair, in clothing that bespoke their origins, their poverty, and their occupations. In the illustrated papers just coming into being in the 1890s, they were drawn, all too often, with the simian features of the very creatures—performing monkeys—that helped the first arrivals survive. In The Dangerous Classes of New York, Charles Loring Brace pursued the Italian organ grinders of Five Points into their homes, reporting “a bedlam of sounds, and a combination of odors from garlic, monkeys, and the most dirty human persons.”10 The immigrants were loud—speaking dialects much harsher than Tuscan Italian—and they smelled, from lack of washing but also from their wretched surroundings and unfamiliar cuisine. Even their foodstuffs set them uncomfortably apart: “fish that never swam in American waters . . . Big, awkward sausages, anything but appetizing,” noted Jacob Riis.11 Riis, a former police photographer turned housing reformer and no fool, swore that in 1890 almost none of the parasitical criminality of the Five Points—be it opportunistic or organized—was of Italian origin. But the Southern Italian’s vaunted tendency to sudden excessive emotion, according to Riis, could and did cause trouble between friends— competing in cards or love or whatever the local coinage of esteem—

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that occasionally resulted in violence, which was, more importantly, “settled,” if at all possible, without the involvement of the police: The wounded man can seldom be persuaded to betray [his attacker]. He wards off all inquiries with a wicked “I fix him myself,” and there the matter rests until he either dies or recovers. If the latter, the community hears after a while of another Italian affray, a man stabbed in a quarrel, dead or dying, and the police know that “he” has been fixed, and the account squared.12

This method of communal self-reliance—closemouthed problem solving —may not have yet gained a prominent place in the national imagination, but word of its existence was already getting around (the omerta), to the anger of the civic authorities and the anxiety of the general public. Maria’s initial treatment by the police and penal system, especially her incarceration in the Tombs, was rough to the point of brutality. The media was gleefully vicious, rechristening her “Barberi” to echo the sound of “barbarism,” thereby invoking the reigning view of Italians as dirty, stupid primitives prone to the violent outbreak of emotions. The first trial before the New York Superior Court less than three months later was almost comically corrupt, featuring a defendant being tried for firstdegree murder who didn’t understand the concept of premeditation, an incompetent translator whom the judge often prevented from doing his job, and an obscure public defender who met with his terrified client for less than an hour several weeks before the trial and who owed his appointment to political support he had thrown to the judge. Nasty biases and procedural irregularities were to be expected, but they only served to exacerbate the cultural standoff that was the primary lesson of Maria’s first trial, regarding alternative constructions of female self-determination, righteous conduct, and just punishment. The Lower East Siders understood that, whatever exactly had happened in the bar, Maria had in the larger sense of things defended herself. “I take his blood so he no take mine” is what she, under duress, with only the present tense of English available to her, had said: American-style self-defense, perhaps; Italian-style justice, beyond a shadow

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of a doubt. Domenico was a rogue—seducing women right and left, including one long-term lover of such dubious character she seems to have taunted Maria, at Cataldo’s request, with their ongoing affair— but the ugly depths of his character only underscored the principles in play. Having fought to obtain the imprimatur of marriage for weeks, she had done the only thing left to do, given his utter refusal to respond to her mother’s pleas, and with his absolute intransigence before her in the form of imminent flight—which was to try force. Under the code of Honor, the desecrated female was not only ruined for marriage but dead to her world—symbolically dead, which sounds truly barbaric if it weren’t for the fact that she was also eligible for symbolic resurrection, through the vaunted vendetta. Everyone in the neighborhood was surprised, in fact, that Maria’s father or older brother hadn’t already killed Cataldo. When Maria stormed into the bar, with a razor up her sleeve, she was making a last-ditch effort to get her beloved back, but even if that effort failed, she was practically guaranteed that she would regain her respect—even if, in the worst case scenario, it cost her life. This even the public defender, Amos Evans, otherwise out to lunch, understood. Improvising, he decided to play the culture card—to present Maria’s predicament in her own, Southern Italian terms, in an attempt to evoke sympathy and seek leniency from the jury, which was necessarily all-male and, of course, included not a single Italian, Italian speaker, or even anyone of southern European descent. But the presiding judge, John W. Goff, of Anglo-Irish background and severe formality, prompted the prosecuting attorney to object to Evans’s defense strategy on the grounds that such evidence was prima facie motive for premeditation and thus self-incriminating, so he could then rule that the defense’s evidence regarding the circumstances leading up to the tragedy, including Cataldo’s predatory character and Maria’s crisis of Honor, was inadmissible. In an American court there was literally no defense for what Maria seemed to have done. In his final charge to the jury, Judge Goff prohibited from consideration any and all mitigating circumstances, instructing the jury to decide only on the basis of how they construed intent: “The killing did not take place in retaliation against betrayal. When Maria Barbella took the razor from the chest, she had a plan in mind. It is up to you to decide what it

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was” (79). To everyone in the courtroom, the verdict seem dictated: “A jury does not concern itself with mercy. The law does not distinguish between the sexes.” Three-quarters of an hour later, the jury had carried out its charge. “The American code has triumphed over the Italian” (81) was the straightforward, victorious declaration of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. A poor Italian girl’s last-gasp stand on her own behalf in the old way —with the knife—was ipso facto her legal death warrant in the New World. The electric chair had been in usage in New York State for six years. Three days later, Judge Goff sentenced Maria Barbella to be the first woman on earth so to die.

On the face of the public record—as Idanna Pucci has been able to reconstruct it, based on newspaper accounts, letters, one memoir, trial transcripts, a copy of the appeal—the first part of Maria Barbella’s history, up to and including her sentence, reads like a series of spiraling victimizations; the second part, beginning with the series of interventions, like a victory for social justice engineered by activist sentiment within the public sphere. It appears to be, for lack of a better term, a righteous story of a poor immigrant girl done wrong—dealing in the terms of domestic containment, sexual exploitation, and ethnic scapegoating. She is saved from the grotesque compounding of injustices— from the legal system’s logic of blaming the victim—by liberal (then called “progressivist”) activism, including the sentimental wing of the feminist establishment and the enlightened element within the scientific/phrenological community, whose cast of characters can be forgiven their tendency to patronize, given the enormity of what was at stake: a woman’s life, and a people’s reputation. Feminist intellectuals, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore, and Susan B. Anthony, protested against what they saw as a characteristic instance of the law blaming the victim (Anthony argued that a false promise of marriage be criminalized), but neither their sociological empathy for Maria nor the legal analyses they offered could be heard against the fever-pitched anticipation of the electrocution to come. Dominating the press, especially in New York City, were phrenological and physiognomic portraits of Barbella, whose personality was supposed

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to be legible in the shape of her skull and body. Maria, a seamstress, took great care with her appearance even under these most dire of circumstances; she was no Mediterranean beauty but pleasantly enough featured. Wielding calipers, however, the pseudo-scientists attested to a predominance in her of simian features—“grossly asymmetrical cranium,” “enormous” lips, and “jutting cheekbones”—that, they claimed, not only indicated the arrested evolutionary development characteristic of the Southern Italian peasant in general but were just exactly indicative of a passionate, impulsive, dangerously reactive personality (154). Life-sized figurines of Barbella, dubbed “Maria the Murderess,” popped up at the amusement park on Coney Island, midtown in Macy’s department store’s curiosity shop, even downtown along the Bowery. Enter onto the scene, in the immediate aftermath of the conviction, a type with no precedent in the south of Italy except in the imaginative pantheon of patron saints. From the very north of Italy came Cora Slocomb di Brazzà, a New Orleans debutante and heiress turned Northern Italian aristocrat by marriage and women’s labor entrepreneur by fierce dedication (she organized a lace-making cooperative in Udine). Cora Slocomb had followed Maria’s trial from the other side of the ocean (“Another poor Italian immigrant at the mercy of the American courts”). Making the transatlantic crossing to see for herself, she found not a few like-minded progressives already in action (including Rebecca Salomé Foster, the otherwise anonymous “Tombs Angel”). Slocomb befriended Maria and her family, rallied public figures and intellectuals and even a couple of members of the press, organized a massive petition for clemency to the governor of New York State (who kept his mouth shut and bided his time), and, most importantly, she secured a first-rate defense team headed by Frederic House and featuring Emanuel Friend, who together would prove to be the Johnnie Cochran/Alan Dershowitz duo of their era. That a wealthy, educated, and titled person would take up a poor peasant’s cause was a true shock to the Barbella family and to their Italian community. Such skilled and concerted intervention was in its own way a major miracle on the Lower East Side, but the best—tactical judgment and legal inventiveness in the face of anti-Italian prejudice, the great good luck of the properly prepared (including a key witness), and certain instincts about Maria and her fellow immigrants—was yet to come.

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In September 1895, with the long appeals process underway and Maria better housed (in a strictly physical sense) and better fed (the Barbellas could afford macaroni only on Sundays, otherwise it was bread and milk) and better schooled (the warden’s wife decided to teach her English) at Sing Sing than at any other time in her life, Cora di Brazzà felt able to return with her husband to Italy. In mid-October, Cora undertook the truly arduous journey south into the mountains of Basilicata, to Maria’s native town of Ferrandina, so remote she was lucky to find it on a map. In Ferrandina, she witnessed firsthand the social forces underlying the extreme deprivation called la miseria, which stepped her empathy up another notch. Cora also found evidence of periodic, short-term mental instability—almost certainly epilepsy—afflicting both sides of Maria’s family. Here, then, were grounds for burying the culture card and substituting for it an up-to-date variation on the classic temporary insanity defense, seductively scientific with a disarming (to the racists) counterpunch. “Maria was no longer the victim of an indigent class or of an inferior condition due to her sex. She was no longer a woman forced to kill because of a barbarous southern Italian custom, nor a murderess for money. She was an epileptic” (210–11). House, who took the case for expenses only, went immediately to work fashioning an effective appeal, featuring overlooked and/or suppressed evidence, including Cataldo’s own twelve-inch knife found on his body, but his strongest leverage came from failures of due process. In April 1896, the Court of Appeals in Albany granted a retrial, holding Judge Goff accountable for systematic elimination of testimony and for outright bias. Six months later, House and his partners mounted only the second epilepsy defense ever in the United States—a twenty-four-day (and often night-session) ordeal in which a small legion of forensic anthropologists and alienists (as psychologists were called) debated whether the medical histories and physiognomies of the Barbella family indicated the kind of “degeneracy” that would have made Maria susceptible to fits in which she did not know, quite literally, “who she was, where she was, and what she was doing.” According to their claims, epilepsy was a barbaric, indeed, barbarism-inducing condition because it deprived the sufferer not only of memory after the fact but of agency during it. House and his team had found a way to turn the racial primitivism hounding Maria to her advantage—at least theoretically. But

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the amount of volition that was seemingly necessary to kill Cataldo—a hidden razor pulled from a dress sleeve, opened, then slashed across a throat—left Maria’s actual state of mind in doubt. If to a historian of prejudice there is something gratifying about the turnabout in fair play that the epilepsy defense entailed, to an unreconstructed partisan of folk culture there was something delicious about what was, in retrospect, the decisive moment of theatricality during the retrial. House strove to establish that Maria was prone to episodic fits that had never been diagnosed but which everyone in the neighborhood knew about—and to do so he had, of course, to rely on poor, illiterate, malnourished if not misshapen, egregiously out-of-place laborers who did not speak a word of English. On cross-examination, the lead prosecuting attorney, John F. McIntyre, generally rock solid throughout both trials, badgered one of these witnesses, Angelo Piscopo (a hallmate from the sad tenement where Cataldo had installed Maria), to the point where Piscopo admitted through the translator that it was, alas, difficult for him to describe the screaming fit that Maria had undergone just ten days before Cataldo’s death. Reaching for a coup de grace, prosecutor McIntyre asked Piscopo, in the classic condescending rhythms of pointedly facetious cross-examination, if “by any chance” the man could “imitate” what he had heard. It was, as Pucci reports, an enormous mistake: “Yes, sir,” Angelo answered excitedly. The tall thin man stood up and gave the awful, gasping cry of the epileptic. It was an unmistakable scream. Angelo threw his head back and lifted his arms, rotating his hands upwards and then stopping them in midair. He stayed there, rigid, and yet trembling from head to foot. “Sit down!” thundered McIntyre, but the damage was done. (254)

What poetic justice! The prosecutor had intuited so little about the most melodramatic and gesticulative of peoples that he asked Piscopo, heretofore restrained by the terrifying solemnity of the nineteenth-century Anglo-American courtroom, if “by any chance” he—a Southern Italian peasant!—could act something out. The fact of a full-bore black-out interlude making Maria both superhuman and less-than-human might explain the lack of clarity everywhere in her testimony, both on the witness stand and behind the scenes.

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It would account for the physical power and strength of purpose with which she must have wielded the razor. And it would account for the success with which she rebounded, the psychological health and ethical self-possession that she displayed at the second trial. The opportunity to assign Maria’s mysterious behavior—“A woman does not kill lightly, it’s not in her nature” was Cora’s original operating assumption—to a temporary bout of mental illness seems heaven-sent given the legal jeopardy in which she found herself, but, with 20/20 hindsight, we can also see how well the fit served Maria both before (how does a poor Italian girl solve a problem like Cataldo?) and after (how does a good Catholic girl live with a solution like Maria’s?) the trial. More than once, in ironies of almost surreal proportion, Maria’s epilepsy got her into a double bind only to set her free.

The time-honored Italian Catholic peasant cult of Honor is—apparently —what got Maria Barbella into so much trouble. The progressive American culture of personal self-transformation, political intervention, and genetic neurology is—apparently—what got her out. But there was a dialectic at play between the two, tradition as modernity, the Italian as American, that requires our final attention. To the delight of her family and community, America proved its boast of justice when Maria was saved as if by miracle by forces that would seem to have been and to a large extent must have been very much outside her control: ambitious activists, legal technicalities, forensic medicine. But the information that Idanna Pucci was able to gather is not yet all before us, and there is another trajectory to the story—Maria’s gumption, her resourcefulness —yielding a spicier dimension to the narrative. If as a victim several times over—worked to the bone, exploited in love, demonized by the press, objectified by social workers, and railroaded by the judicial system—Maria Barbella illustrates what the immigrants faced upon arrival, then as the ultimate victor—set free from Cataldo, exonerated before the law, liberated from public spectacle, both her life and dignity restored— Maria illustrates how it all began: the century-long transfusion of Italian blood rites into American possibility. No Italian, perhaps no immigrant, was more on the public stage at the height of the Great Migration than Maria Barbella. However much

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against her will and intent, Maria Barbella was a celebrity with a stage name and iconic tag—Maria Barberi, the murdering seamstress—done up in wax, midtown at Macy’s, downtown on the corner at Five Points. While she could not have known in advance what she was getting herself into, she was not without agency; and in the exercise of that agency —including its snowballing significance and profound reversals—lies one more dimension of Maria’s story. Progressivist patronage, judicial review, and the sciences of the mind opened up the possibility for winning her legal freedom—which to a Southern Italian felt like an act of divine intervention—but it was Barbella herself who stepped onto the stage and allowed the heavens to work on her behalf, whether she understood it that way or not. Maria had to some degree offered herself up to Cataldo, dreaming of a better life; she had to some degree worked up the strength that sacrificed his life in order to resurrect her own in the wake of broken dreams; and she had done what had to be done, to put herself in the position to receive the fates’—the Blessed Mother working through the Patron Saints of the Transatlantic—forgiveness. It was the American promise of romance that tempted Maria to risk Cataldo’s proximity, however we figure the role of a sedative in the consummating hour. It was her anger at the embarrassment, at the brutal assumption and social betrayal of her love that gave her the physical strength to fight, including the strength of will to summon that convenient lapse of consciousness. And it was the ability to dream another ending for herself that allowed her to heal for sixteen months in Sing Sing, to learn enough English to present herself as a love-struck good girl done wrong by a heartless predator and then betrayed a second time by the bad blood of an inherited neurological disease. If these were the first steps toward assimilation, it was assimilation, Italian style. Maria Barbella could have had no inkling that she was about to be put on parade as the first Italian in America available for mass forms of identification and disdain, empathy and projection; but it was not a coincidence, the grace with which she responded to the hazards and opportunities that came her way, slowly at first, then spiraling into the triumph of the second trial. Fighting Cataldo brought her into a social theater in which she successfully “seduced” and “deployed” a whole coterie of others—Rebecca Foster and Cora Slocomb di Brazzà, of course, but also the warden’s wife and the inmates at Sing Sing, Frederic House

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and the defense team, producer-playwright Moishe Ha-Levi Ish Hurwitz Jewish (who dramatized her story for the Yiddish stage), and such eloquent commentators as Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son), who wrote for the New York Journal—ultimately bringing certain of the educated elite and many of the newcomers in the street around to see it more or less her way. It was the colorfulness of Cataldo’s death coupled with the unique severity of her sentence (they had yet to work the kinks out of this brutal form of public execution) that caught the interest of Maria’s interlocutors, but it wasn’t just righteous curiosity that sustained commitment and focused concentration during the grueling year of research, preparation, and trial. It was—it had to be—Maria. The progressivists working on Maria’s behalf may have first been drawn to the case on principle, but they kept at it, I think, because they saw something in Maria tougher and more complex than the tag of condescension—“this childish, ignorant, hot-blooded Italian girl”—used by casual sympathizers. As Pulitzer’s New York World put it, “Simple epilepsy will not save Maria from the electric chair” (210). Crucial to the victorious acquittal was Maria’s remarkable poise on the witness stand, including six hours of first-class cross-examination, during which she consistently maintained, in the English she had learned at Sing Sing, that she loved Cataldo still, that all she wanted to do was to get him to marry her, and that she did not remember what transpired in the bar—“The blood on my hands. I thought I was cut” (237). Maria let herself believe, so others could believe, that she was merely and only a confused, conscientious, love-besotted girl overwhelmed—tragically lost, even to herself —by a devastating fit at the fatal hour. But was it so? The very first fact about Maria that Pucci enters into the narrative record concerns the obscure night when Cataldo first took the girl’s honor. The one thing Maria knew for sure about how it happened was that her clothing—a long wide skirt, several underskirts, corsets, tailored blouses, and stockings—had not been torn. “When a man wanted a woman, he had to make his way through layers and layers of material —unless, obviously, she desired him enough to take her clothes off” (3). Pucci’s “unless” dangles, in a teasing flash, an ambiguous inflection, baiting us with the idea of something closer to informed consent, which would mean that Maria had been flirting, however momentarily, with the

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explicit transgression of Southern Italian sexual norms. Given that peasant mores and obligations were at stake, even a small element of rebellious self-determination puts a more difficult ethical spin on the affair than drug-induced violation alone, which was, more or less, what everyone thought at the time, even the many non-Italians who proclaimed she should fry. Pucci seems to have taken the nineteenth-century equivalent of date rape for her own operating hypothesis through most of the research and writing of The Trials of Maria Barbella. The book begins, “This is how I saw the events leading up to the death of Domenico Cataldo” (p. 3, emphasis mine)—until, in the name of thoroughness (the Ellis Island records had been destroyed) and happily perverse curiosity, she finally made the tough pilgrimage to Maria’s village of Ferrandina, where the trains still do not go. There are two parishes in this medieval township, a forbidding place where the townsfolk no longer remember anyone by the surname Barbella. And yet, in the second of the church’s records, Pucci discovers that there was indeed born to Michele and Filomena Barbella a girl child, christened Maria, at 6 a.m. on October 24, 1868. In 1868!, which means that in April 1895, when Domenico Cataldo lost his life to the razor, Maria Barbella was not twenty-two years old, as was taken for granted in every single instance of the public record, but nearly five years older. For once, Pucci speculates out loud: “When Cataldo rejected her, she may well have lost hope of ever getting married. In her mind, it may have been her last chance. In 1895, an unmarried woman in her late twenties was already doomed to a life as a spinster” (289)—which, I might add, involved full-time service first to her younger siblings and then to her aging parents, untouched by companionate love or physical intimacy her whole life long. The knowledge of Maria’s real age suggests a reassessment of Maria’s attitude toward the affair itself, casting it in a more consensual light despite Cataldo’s practiced subterfuge. Pucci doesn’t quite say it, but could Maria have been tempted, originally, by the idea of receiving the love that she felt was long overdue, while at the same time setting a last-ditch marriage trap? (Wouldn’t Domenico have to keep his promise?) Such thinking on the part of Maria, even if and perhaps especially if it were accompanied by the contrary fear that in Little Italy the code of obligation pursuant to taking a maiden’s virginity wasn’t going to be the

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iron bond it was in Basilicata, ratchets up the frustration Maria must have experienced at Cataldo’s refusal to marry her. Hell hath no desperation . . . , we might put it. Readers are likely to find themselves thinking throughout most of The Trials of Maria Barbella that Maria was simply victimized at each stage and that the acquittal is legally just and morally righteous in contemporary terms, and yet by the book’s end Pucci leaves us with the disconcerting probability that, epilepsy or no epilepsy, Maria Barbella took Domenico Cataldo’s life. It is unclear whether the Italians, who figured the act justified but never raised the question of sexual consent, simply couldn’t imagine a good girl like Maria saying yes, or if they believed that by accepting her virginity Domenico had, in fact, contracted marriage. From our contemporary perspective the acquittal looks less like a legal confirmation of Maria’s innocence and more like a bestowal of mercy: an act of divine intervention, if you like, or the unwitting grace of her interlocutors’ empathy and effort. The full shock value of Pucci’s revelation of Maria’s age devolves not only upon the immigrants, whose huddling together in secret is an ancient art of culture that supposedly ran in their blood, but also upon the one outsider who must have discovered Maria’s actual age and who therefore must have elected to enter voluntarily into the Southern Italian cult of secrecy, namely, the American-born Unitarian, Cora Slocomb di Brazzà. You may, if you take pleasure or courage in the figurative excess of Catholic iconography, think of Cora as an angel of mercy, not only because she masterminded the defense that brought the jury to its acquittal, but because she also withheld the hidden fact that would have condemned Maria. Or you may think of Cora less extravagantly as an abettor to a successful stroke of intercontinental feminist intervention in getting a poor, abused woman off the nastiest of hooks. But there can be no doubt of Idanna Pucci’s own role—as tenacious researcher and inspired narrator—in all this. What takes my breath away about Pucci’s reconstruction is that, as a story, despite or rather because it is sequenced, nuanced, and understated with historical rigor, it feels so Italian. The Trials of Maria Barbella does great justice to the public record it establishes, slowly inviting a social and ethical triumphalism, in order to let us in on the full power of the darker realism of an Italian women’s omerta: the exquisite little secret that Domenico Cataldo’s death

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just may have been a calculated act of vengeance, and Maria Barbella’s freedom a gift of blessed Fate.13 From start to finish, Maria Barbella threatened the American public because she was the bearer of an alternative culture with different traditions of conflict resolution, self-assertion, and guilt attribution (part fact, part legend), which were put to risky use across the Atlantic and almost earned her a truly barbaric American death. The tribulations of Maria Barbella in the United States occurred only because of changed circumstances—Cataldo’s assumption of cost-free exploitation, a sensationalist media fanning the flames of an already-prejudicial courtroom, a legal system focused on the genderless appraisal of utterly gendered circumstances and behavior, a death sentence designed to be a lesson to the hot-blooded multitudes; and the subsequent process of exoneration— the progressivist intervention, a fancy temporary-insanity defense, and a jury forced to think in black and white—that was American, too. Taken together, the moral of the story would appear to be that, from the very beginning, to survive in America you have to play by its rules— that is, to assimilate. But crediting Maria with agency (romantic, vindictive, performative, and “blessed”) suggests that, despite or rather because of cultures in conflict and in transition, her particular strategies for self-determination—embracing physical romance, striking out for personal and familial vengeance, acting the good girl born under an unlucky neurological star, and keeping secret from first to last the devastating fact of her imminent spinsterhood—were less cleanly assimilationist and more, well, Mediterranean than meets the eye. Once apprised of the full record, we are in a position to feel what, secretly, Maria Barbella and those closest to her must have felt, what Cora Slocomb di Brazzà must have eventually intuited, and what author Idanna Pucci has crafted her documentary novel to provoke in us. Barbella’s is the story not only of male predatory opportunism but of female sexual transgression; not only of physiological accident but of poorly calibrated vengeance; not only of U.S. penal-code justice but of Italianstyle common-law mercy. Whatever the import of Barbella’s epileptic fit on her momentary volition, a year and some months later Maria Barbella stood before an all-American jury and got away—in cultural as well as literal terms—with murder.

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2

City New York Delirious The truth: These country women from the mountain farms of Italy . . . loved the clashing steel and stone of the great city, the thunder of trains in the railroad yards across the street, the lights above the Palisades far across the river. —Mario Puzo, 1964

“Milan is just like New York, only there aren’t so many Italians.” The assumption underlying this common quip is that New York is one of the most Italian places on earth, yet it was built and settled not by the urban peoples of Italy’s advanced north but by contadini—the rural peasants from the impoverished, essentially medieval hill towns south and east of Naples. What happened? How did Italian peasants, conservative by their own tradition, come to so love the American city—Greater Metropolitan New York and its industrial satellites most of all—that they remain to this day hugely identified with it? The story begins with the initial encounter of Mediterranean hill towners with the techno-industrial cityscape, a sensory shock of profound import that no one understood better than the painter Joseph Stella, who emigrated at eighteen from Basilicata to New York’s Lower East Side and emerged fifteen years later as America’s “first and greatest futurist.” Stella’s colossal renditions of America’s urban infrastructure— of Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge, the port and skyline of New York —captured the primal scene of industrial sublimity, the newcomer’s 28

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fierce engagement with what Stella called, with an energetic, compacted Italinglish eloquence, “the polychromatic riot of a new polyphony.” What Stella meant—what, indeed, he pictured—was the sudden, instantaneous exposure to tunnels and bridges that knew no bounds, buildings that leaped massively to the sky, and electric lights that cut through and carnivalized the night sky—which in combination felt to him like nothing short of “a new divinity.” Throughout the period of the Great Migration and well into the 1920s, after the gates of admission had been effectively shut to the southern and eastern Europeans, there were many efforts—most of them led by oldfamily social workers with evangelical Protestant leanings—to move the Italian immigrants from the cities, especially from the tough ghettoes of the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, and East Harlem, onto farms in places like south Jersey, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The idea was that the city (crowded, filthy, and filled with crime) was inherently corrupting, and that the Italians, unusually susceptible to corruption, needed to get out if they were to be saved and safely absorbed into American society. The back-to-the-farm movements failed miserably, however, as only a very, very few immigrants ventured forth and even fewer did not immediately return to the Little Italies. The established explanations for this resistance are good ones: industrial wage labor, no matter how exploitative, still brought cash that could be saved, no matter in how miniscule the units, which is what brought most of the immigrants in the United States in the first place (many of whom figured they would send money and then go back to Italy); the romance of the land had no appeal to the peasants from south and east of Naples, most of whose families had suffered under its caprice since time immemorial, nature no friend; and that peculiarly American arrangement wherein individual families lived on farms isolated from one another made no sense at all to ferociously social people who huddled together in hill towns, finding in the conviviality of street stoops, piazzas, and neighboring relatives the only respite from the terrible and terribly alienating work on the land they farmed, often miles away. These are persuasive accounts of why the immigrants rejected farming from the get-go. But I think there developed, with surprising speed, a less practical, less ideological, less domestic reason for keeping close to the city, which has to do with the Italian feeling for what sociologists call the built environment:

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how the immigrants responded to and made sense of the remarkable physicality of New York. I can’t prove, of course, what the illiterate and undocumented felt, but in interpreting what is in the sociological record beyond dispute— the stubborn urban-ness that the Italian immigrants demonstrated from the start and that has characterized each and every ensuing generation—we have the privilege of a very special kind of hindsight, which is that of artistic legacy.1 It is not a coincidence that those descended from a highly gestural people whose semi-pagan mode of Christianity is outlandishly iconographic rather than word-focused, and spectacleextravagant rather than spectacle-wary, related day to day to their new environments visually (taking in through the eye) and theatrically (dramatically presenting oneself to the eye); and it is not a coincidence, then, that over time they came to achieve so well, as a group, not so much in the written as in the visual and performative arts. But we need not focus on the big picture—yet. Of the various tendencies within the arts of Italian America, which of course go off in diverse, even contrary, directions, what is unmistakable, from the very beginning, is an involvement in the emergent industrial city so intense and impassioned that there is no other word for it than metaphysical; and it is a mystery to be happily reckoned with that the original mapping of that involvement— the cityscapes of Joseph Stella—continue, somehow, to speak to many of us today who are trying still to look the human impact of phenomenal technological advancement in the eye. In early 1896, at the very moment that Maria Barbella, the East Side seamstress, was at Sing Sing on death row, Giuseppe Michele Stella left Mura Lucano, another medieval township on the slopes of the southern Apennines in Basilicata, and crossed the Atlantic from Naples by steamship to the United States to join his older brother, Antonio, in New York’s Italian East Side, just blocks from where the Barbella family had settled (closer, still, to where a couple generations later Martin Scorsese would be raised). America was a shock—a blinding cacophonous assault of light and machinery, skyscraper and mill, tunnel and bridge—which obsessed young Giuseppe from the start and intensified year after year (he saw the coal mines, the steel towns, and the refineries, too), but which he would not come to understand, if understand was the right

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word, until he could portray/represent/visualize it, sixteen years later, as the painter Joseph Stella: Steel and electricity had created a new world. A new drama had surged from the unmerciful violation of darkness at night, by the violent blaze of electricity and a new polyphony was ringing all around with the scintillating, highly colored lights. The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes and expanded to vast latitudes with the skyscrapers and with bridges made for the conjunction of worlds. A new architecture was created, a new perspective.2

Twenty and forty and sixty years later, Stella was still talking about his initial encounter with America in this way, in an idiom of extravagant, highly impacted metaphors that strike the ear (you might even say, hit the eye) with the ultra-quick, superbright sensory overload that epitomized his first contact: “I could define New York as a monstrous steely bar erected by modern cyclops to defy the Gods with the dazzling of a thunderbolt.”3 How typical of the Italians was talk like this? Like the great majority of the immigrants, Stella came from an impoverished mountain village where the train did not go, electricity was scarcely a rumor, and, the ancient Roman aqueducts notwithstanding, women still lugged water by donkey and on their heads. The son of a governmental functionary (the only kind of middle class there was in such a town), Stella received a boarding-school education where he was taught Whitman and Poe as well as the European classics and where he felt the early stirrings, or so he later claimed, of artistic temperament—impulses that seem to have been directly linked as well to the melodramatic (manic-depressive) hypersensitivity for which Southern Italians are renowned even today, in the United States especially. The Stella family was not immune to poverty, but he was no contadino—that’s for sure. On the other hand, the peasants who arrived in the United States had, most of them, spent no more time in Naples (or in Palermo, or in any other city for that matter) than it took to find the loading dock, whereas Stella had lived in Naples for several years of high school, which means that the contrast between the hill towns they came from and what they saw from the decks and

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then along the streets when they arrived was, if anything, greater for the contadini than that which Stella experienced. Stella had some big words, but they were not originally in English; he did not use them the way American intellectuals did; and even then it was not the words that would finally matter but the pictures. Stella’s reaction to the advanced metropolis was not so much typical as it was, in varying ways, hypertypical—of the Italian country folk, of Mediterranean Catholics and their fellow immigrants more generally, and of all those who encountered the modern city all at once, without warning, and beyond earshot of formal sociological analysis. The principal response of each and every one must have been mindbending, body-wracking shock, of being utterly overwhelmed not only by the arduousness of the journey and the rough uncertainties ahead, but also by changes of movement and sound, dimensions of time and space that did not, by any known measure, compute. But what, then, was distinctly Italian about that? Stella’s reaction had a particular shape to it, even a recurring and renewed and exponentially increasing shape, a shape much more complex and wonder filled and even desirous than the doom-filled repugnance, nostalgic to the core, that has come down to us from the metaphysics of New England transcendentalism, which was itself (as scholars have come to recognize) a reaction formation from the rural periphery of Boston (America’s first mercantile capital) to the market and manufacturing taking hold within.4 In March of 1835 or ’36, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then a disgruntled young Unitarian minister, took a walk in a quotidian daze across the cow pasture called Boston Common, without any occurrence of special good fortune, and enjoyed what he called “a perfect exhilaration,” in which he became “a transparent eyeball”: the moment, as it were, of a nineteenthcentury, post-Puritan (universalistic) American sublime. Imagine then that a man had a mystical Romantic poetic frame of mind like Emerson, but unlike Emerson he came from a medieval town barely touched by capitalism and not at all touched by the technologies of modernity (no locomotive, no electricity, no running water), and unlike Emerson peopled environments and occasioned festivity and visual spectacle ran in his blood,5 and unlike Emerson he encountered urban modernity not through the fits and starts of colonial Boston and of excursions therefrom but all at once—crossing the seas to America. Like Emerson before him,

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Stella felt part and parcel of something beyond the individual self, supernature, but Stella’s stimulus to the sublime was urban, not rural; machine driven, not nature borne; and people entailed, not isolated. Out in the park woods all by himself, back turned upon the city, Emerson had, on a singular occasion, been “glad to the brink of fear,” giddy with the inferred benignity of God, whereas the techno-industrial cityscape panicked Stella to the wellspring of ecstasy; he felt the deliciousness of terror recurrently, yet as if for the very first time; and what, metaphysically, the techno-industrial environment felt like to him was the pulsing together of deity and demon through the mind-body membrane into the soul. What did this feeling mean? How could he find out? And how could he express it? In the fall 1896, his first year in the United States, Stella started medical school according to his brother’s wishes, but only lasted a year. In the spring of 1897, he started the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York, but only lasted a semester, instead hanging out at the Art Students League. From 1898 to 1901, he studied at the New York School of Art under its esteemed director, William Merritt Chase, who against the tide of change taught the skills of Rembrandt and Van Eyck, and who saw in Stella such promise that he granted him the most unusual boon of a scholarship. For the next decade Stella, already a brilliant draftsman, thought to follow directly in Chase’s footsteps, struggling to execute classical subjects in traditional media while eking out a living as a documentary illustrator. From 1909 to 1910, he studied the Renaissance masters in Italy, then traveled to Paris, where he met the modernist avantgarde and experienced a revelation, that his “fate” (such a Mediterranean Catholic way of thinking about these things!) was to “put [my] vision into the future instead of walking back to the past.” At thirtyfive years of age, then, Stella realized his exact calling as an artist, which was to declaim in visual form that “steely orchestra of modern constructions” that had long haunted him—to render techno-industrial America’s reordering of human experience, and thus, through painting, a move at once self-incorporating and self-alienating, to claim and to disclaim the city. As Stella understood it, the United States demanded forms of acceptance and resistance, translation/interpretation and the registering of mystery, worship and something of an exorcism—an art “myriad-minded” in respect of “an oceanic poliphony (never heard

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before)” inhering in “the new civilization of america” (his terms, his spelling, his capitalization). In an idiosyncratic masterpiece, Delirious New York (1978), Rem Koolhaas (whom Time magazine dubbed the architect of the first decade of the new millennium in the issue that was released just a couple of days before the 9/11 attacks) nominated the spectacular prewar recreation complexes at Coney Island as the harbinger of the twentieth-century city to come. But Stella got there first—in taking architecture as an animate being and in nominating Coney Island as the symbolic register of the techno-industrial revolution. Stella’s first famous painting, the sensation-causing Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913–1914), was a gigantic canvas, described at the time as a “phantasmagoria,” representing one of the Coney Island amusement complexes, Luna Park, at night (during the festivities it marketed as “Mardi Gras”). Battle of Lights depicts the psychosocial dislocation of the not-yet-naturalized spectator, half in and half out, seen from afar but as if in the center of centrifuge, through a funhouse mirror hallucinogenically; it refuses to discipline the paint either to programmatic theory or modern decor, incorporating Luna Park—its figured tower as the cyclops—while testifying to its effect on the participant-observer. The formal leap in representational modality rehearses the shift in built reality; the rush of felt power in Stella as an artist rehearses the fear and wonder not only of the leap in art technologies that he learned in Paris but the leap in lived techno-industry that he reexperienced in returning to the States and that he recognized in the prismatic microcosm of Coney Island. At Coney Island, you did not so much escape from urban modernity as tumble headlong into its logical culmination, a frenzy of machined light and movement, a playful yet gut-wrenching escalation of the very forces impacting the psyche day to day. In his breakthrough Coney Island series, Stella set out to capture—at a moment when electric light was still awe inspiring (Luna Park alone had a quarter of a million light bulbs) and transportation technology an as-yet untapped amusement resource and cultural mores emerging at last from the nineteenth century (the rides flung bodies, warm from the beach, shockingly together)—the force of the park upon the individual who had just arrived in the several senses of that word, arrival. I don’t think it is a coincidence, in contrast, that it was an American-

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Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras, 1913–1914. Oil on canvas, 76 × 85 in. Yale University Art Gallery.

izing Italian who took the American neo-carnival seriously—who focused not on the artificiality of its amusements and hence the presumed gullibility of their consumers, but celebrated instead the park as a “modern kermesse” (kermesse being an old Dutch word for an outdoor fair, with, of course, a fearful ambivalence of mystical affect but not a trace, not a single trace, of moral or aesthetic condescension).6 Consider for instance where in the old world the magic came from, what magic there was in the hill towns they had left behind: the townspeople would break out from the worst kind of daily routine for festas of the Virgin and the patron saints, which embraced color and light and sound and movement. These elaborate, relatively crowded processions, with colorful icons held aloft, surrounded by tables of luxurious food and drink, topped off

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(if at all possible) by fireworks!—even the verticality of the hill towns, crowned by cathedrals towering over the hills towering over the valleys —suggested an eerie predilection for the New York sensorial cacophony, enough of a predilection to suggest that there was a reason more complex than changing an old home for a new one or being people of the body rather than the mind to explain how the shock of the industrial city entailed, for the immigrants at least, some kind of affirmation and, over time, became addictive in itself: the urban-ness, as it were, of the urbanite.7 Stella’s Battle of Lights was the most famous and controversial painting in the famous and controversial Montross Gallery Show of 1914; it was a shocker, but it almost instantly received the “futurist” label. The term “Italian futurist” has come to imply that Stella was a sophisticated player in the new transatlantic arts, but to call his work futurist is, alas, all too neat and convenient—even for work as directly influenced by Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini as the Coney Island paintings. Although Stella was of course himself an Italian and he had, in fact, met several of the leading lights of the concerted movement—Boccioni, Severini, and Carrà—that did indeed call itself futurism, Stella insisted, not without cause, and not inaccurately, that he worked from inspiration, not from an intellectualized artistic program. Stella was excited by the potential of the new art to render the world in transformation, but he, like Emerson, had little time for groupthink: for Stella, a challenge to tradition that starts or turns doctrinaire will defeat its own purpose, which is to see beyond what has already been established. Stella’s inspiration was to deploy a scandalously innovative art not for art’s sake, not for innovation’s sake, and not just to outrage an onlooker whose tastes were still Victorian, but rather to convey a concentrated reenactment of the actual experience of arriving that first time at Coney Island, to induce that particular jolt, including its thrills, in the first-time viewer of the painting, and to keep it alive viewing after viewing. For all its affinities with the manifestoes of Carrà and Martinetti, Battle of Lights is less thesis driven than phenomenological. If in fact we compare Battle of Lights to its most immediate formal models, several things emerge: it was not sufficiently clean, not sufficiently decorative, for the Museum of Modern Art. At one point Stella called Battle of Lights a kaleidoscope, but Battle of Lights is actually less geometrically neat—

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less like the actual view through a kaleidoscope—than the famous Boccioni and Severini paintings that he must have seen in Paris and that eventually were installed at MoMA. Stella insists on the duality of participant and spectator—that is, on the doubleness of being, simultaneously, an individual at the center of the park’s whirl and the individual taking in the whole thing. Most importantly, in comparison to the European models, Battle of Lights is an earthier, more naturalistic representation of the modern amusements—you can trace and name the individual rides, including The Tickler and Razzle Dazzle—inviting the viewer to laugh with the artist himself having fun with perspectives on the park; and it is a headier, indeed more spiritual, summing-up of the import of those amusements, in which the cyclopean tower personifies (we might even say incarnates) the new technological order. We must call it fated instinct that landed Stella, when he was growing confident as an artist in the wake of the Coney Island successes but nonetheless still struggling financially, in a Williamsburg apartment blocks from the harbor, while his studio remained in Lower Manhattan. What he saw looking across the harbor from his apartment in the industrial port was what he took in again psychophysically each time he made the walk across the Brooklyn Bridge—the pedestrian walkway recapitulating transatlantic migration recapitulating global capitalist modernization. Ernest Goldstein, writing for young people with clarity and intelligence, observes with succinct binaries: It took Stella twenty years from the first time he saw the bridge to paint it. During that time, he completed two educations: one as an artist, the other as an immigrant in New York City. From one he learned how to paint. From the other he learned what to see in the land of opportunity. He needed both educations to paint his bridge.8

Stella “interpreted” (the word is finally his, of course) the voices of the city in order to paint them, but he also painted the city’s voices in order to understand them—his two educations were intertwined, mutually constitutive, and they came to a crescendo with the bridge. Completed in 1883, just as the Great Migration from eastern and southern Europe was beginning, the Brooklyn Bridge continued to dominate the East Side view by sheer mass and unique aspect well into

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the twentieth century, until the downtown skyscrapers would block it increasingly from, say, Bowery sight. It was an unprecedented, in many ways still unrivaled, masterpiece that drew Brooklyn toward Manhattan —benefiting real estate investment, workforce movement, and vertical integration. It took countless lives in its making, including that of its designer-prophet, John Roebling (also paralyzing his son, Washington, who oversaw its completion). And it entered into the national imagination, where novelist Henry James, painter John Marin, poet Hart Crane, and others depicted it, and where, if film is any sign (from On the Town to Prizzi’s Honor, Moonstruck, Once Upon a Time in America, and now Sex and the City), it still resides. Integral to the bridge was its hybridity—of material and use, form and function—the coordination of masonry and steel, sculptured Gothic arches and wire cross-hatching, thundering steel trolley tracks with grated roadway and the thump-thump of leather and rubber soles echoing off planking from the wooden walkway suspended above. The hybridity belonged to the bridge, but few envisioned its meaning for the multitudes as Stella would. Of those who had come before, the great novelist Henry James, who traveled to New York in 1904–1905 (after a twenty-year expatriation dating exactly to the opening of the bridge), had felt the bridge’s power (concentrated in the steel stays, to James a spider web of mechanical energy) as emblematically American, endemically dynamistic: “Some colossal set of clockworks, some steel-souled machine room of brandished arms and hammering fists . . . the horizontal sheaths of pistons working at high pressure, day and night.”9 A Londoner by adoption, James could only see in the bridge a monstrous organism, a harbinger of anti-civilization; Stella’s response was recurrent, complex, contradictory, but at the heart of it, the shocking heart of it, was what Henry’s brother William would call a “variety of religious experience.” Stella says it himself: Seen for the first time, as a metallic weird Apparition under a metallic sky, out of proportion with the winged lightness of its arch, traced for the conjunction of worlds, supported by the massive dark towers dominating the surrounding tumult of the surging skyscrapers with their gothic majesty sealed in the purity of their arches, the cables, like divine messages from above, transmitted to the vibrating coils, cutting and dividing into innumerable musical spaces the nude immensity

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of the sky, it impressed me as the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of america—the eloquent meeting of all forces arising in a superb assertion of their powers, in apotheosis.10

Visiting Coney Island was a one-time revelation for Stella, whereas the Brooklyn Bridge entailed recurrent epiphanies. The bridge occasioned and was very much the focal point of the wildest flights of the imagination he experienced in the United States, giving not only rein but a startlingly different direction to sensitivities cultivated and shaped in the mountain towns above Naples and on the Bay of Naples itself, within whose sight the original night-splitter, Mount Vesuvius, lies. It was the architect Roebling who had had the inspiration to construct a pedestrian walkway suspended above the trolley tracks and carriage road—which he called a “promenade,” referring not only to a public place for walking but to the walk itself, often leisurely, as if the bridge were not only a way to get to and from work (excess labor movement, in both directions, notwithstanding) so much as a destination in itself: the American equivalent of the evening passeggiata through the Italian piazza under Gothic arches.11 Yet no church bell rang the hours or quarter hours; whatever quietude attended the bridge after rush hours was still broken by fearsome forms of light and sound;12 and the persona the walk was legitimately to scope was of course the bridge herself, patron saint to the city at large (to whom Stella once wrote a prayer):13 Many nights I stood on the bridge—and in the middle alone—lost— a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness—crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers—here and there lights resembling the suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites—shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion, like the blood in the arteries—at times, ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill sulphurous voice of the trolley wires—now and then strange moanings of appeal from tug boats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below— I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new divinity.14

What did it mean? How could it be explained?

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Of the many Stella compositions that I first encountered in reproduction and only later saw then with my own eyes, Stella’s first rendition in oil, the Brooklyn Bridge of 1919–1920 at the Yale Art Museum, was the big shocker. The canvas is colossal, magnetic, stunning: its brilliant replaying of Stella’s vertigo on the bridge has to be seen in proportion and detail to be experienced. Stella heightened and reworked Roebling’s Gothic vocabulary—rather than the bridge’s two arches, he gave us three, stacked like a wedding cake in the inevitable central and upper vertical, yet also receding into the front plane of the canvas. Tunnels and underground passageways, somewhat more to the foreground, dominate the bottom half of the painting and corral the eye. It is a nighttime view —hugely abstract, but not beyond a certain mimetic realism—from the Brooklyn side, as box-style skyscrapers, placed deeper into space in partial shadow, nonetheless frame Gothic bridge towers occupying the central upper vertical. Framing the towers into an A, as in altarpiece (like the somewhat distant Virgin in Ralph Fasanella’s Fiesta), are two diagonal beams of light, which seem also to echo the cables—distinct indications of the two large bridge cables fronting the Gothic arches. (There’s also a ghostly evocation of a side view of the bridge to the top right, showing off Roebling’s perfect catenary curves.)15 Accentuating the sense of spiritual dislocation/relocation, Stella gave to the paint a remarkable translucence achieved by the preparation of fine-grained canvas with a gesso ground (an out-of-date Renaissance method that Stella taught himself) in conjunction with the drybrush technique of scumbling. It yields an effect somewhere between fresco (variegated shadings between primary and pastel colors, evidently Stella’s intent) and stained glass (black outlining around intensely colored wash), both methods formally underscoring the thematic religious resonance. Stella’s vocabulary of sublimity, including the two-places-at-once effect (technically cubist, but Romantic in philosophical origin and, more importantly, in application), works in intimate relation to older religious binaries—heaven/hell, good/evil—as if the painting had been produced by an Emerson working in visuals and jettisoned to the twentieth century, an Emerson who came to acknowledge the experience of Fate only to find himself spinning into a Blakean turn.16 Along the central vertical but below the middle horizontal, a red diamond-shaped figure surmounting a disk, which Alan Trachtenberg reads as a hypnotic

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Brooklyn Bridge, 1919–1920. Oil on canvas, 84 × 76 in. Yale University Art Gallery.

prism, is especially enigmatic, sharply drawn yet of uncertain import, hence threatening.17 Ernest Goldstein identifies the outline of a skull, which Stella need not have explicitly intended for us to feel its dark significance: the hellish consequences not only of building this particular bridge—bodies buried literally in its base—but of the general industrial onslaught that the bridge expedited and symbolized. Barbara Haskell, Stella’s most important curator, calls the lower half of the painting “a metaphor of modern suffering in the urban world.” It is a persisting, still

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pertinent reminder of the way technological velocity taxes the limits of human endurance and, given the adrenaline rush of the painting as a whole, an intimation of the concomitant paradox of graced human renewal—if not through technology itself, as so often advertised, then through its abiding spectacle.18 Shockingly, even the industrial wasteland had such compensations, T. S. Eliot’s prissy disavowal (which was exactly contemporaneous) to the contrary. Stella knew where the steel came from for the bridge, where the coal came to make the steel, and—to complete the circle—how the trains were built to bring one to the other to the third. In Monongah, West Virginia, after the mining explosion of 1907 (half the town’s breadwinners were buried alive), he had drawn the faces of those who survived. In Pittsburgh the following year, he drew the face of steel labor—backs and torsos, arms and hips at monstrous deadly work—“The spasm and the pathos of those workers condemned to a very strenuous life, exposed to the constant menace of death.” He returned one winter and drew the cityscape, the chimneys of Pittsburgh’s factories emerging from snowsofted coal clouds alongside and exactly as if they were steeples. From the first visits he thought in terms of Poe—“Misterious ancient macabre rites and sacrifices performed in homage to monstrous divinities”—and of Dante: Often shrouded by fog and smoke, her black mysterious mass—cut in the middle by the fantastic, tortuous Allegheny River and like a battlefield, ever pulsating, throbbing with the unnumerable explosions of its steel mills—was like the stunning realization of some of the most stirring infernal regions sung by Dante. In the thunderous voice of the wind, that at times with the most genial fury was lashing and there fog and smoke to change the scenario for new, unexpected spectacles, I could hear the bitter, pungent Dantesque terzina.19

It was these mills he could not get out of his mind but which he did not actually tackle until his trip to Bethlehem, where he figured out how to pay homage to what he first saw in them back in 1906—“A new divinity, more monstrous and cruel than the old one.” Bituminous Coal Storage Piles, The By-Products Storage Tanks, The Crusher and Mixer Building, The Traveling Pusher, all are exemplars, 1918–1924, in black ink and

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The Quencher (Night Fires), c. 1918–1924. Pastel on paper, 22 × 29 in. Milwaukee Art Museum.

charcoal; and, in the best of them—The Quencher (Night Fires), the volcanic grey and pitlike blackness is cut by red-orange flashes of pastel, Vesuvius in capitalism-driven, man-built idiom: achingly beautiful in their deadliness, taken individually they seem like pagan altars to the industrial sacrifice; together they constitute stations of the industrial cross, wholly depopulated yet somehow humanly ghosted, radiant with the effect of the sacrifices within.20 Stella was fond of saying that rendering the Brooklyn Bridge gave him courage to take on the challenge of representing, of re-present-ing the (idea) of the city entire, but I think he also had to come to terms with Manhattan’s inferno-like support system—the mills and refineries and wastelands we now see from the Jersey Turnpike, or in the opening credit sequence of The Sopranos—before he could envision the city’s exhilarating, luminescent, and prophetic public face, as if a beautiful terror were the cost of modernity’s terrible beauty, which indeed it is.

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New York Interpreted (Voice of the City), 1920–1922. Oil and tempera on canvas, 5 panels. The Newark Museum; Purchase 1937 Felix Fuld Bequest Fund.

Stella’s most ambitious work—New York Interpreted (The Voice of the City), 1920–1922, alternatively labeled The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted—was a gargantuan five-panel rendition of the city, futurist in style yet modeled as an early modern polyptych altar. It consisted of five discrete vertical canvases, the middle panel slightly larger than the other four, each containing a stylized view of Manhattan and its waters with a patterned runner (the Renaissance predella) of related images —“Searchlights, theater lights, hallways, subway corridors, and cable casings”—along the bottom. Whereas the European impressionists did church interiors to capture the play of light on color (for example, Roberto Delauney’s Cathedral Saint-Severin) and the cubists tackled the Eiffel Tower to illustrate the steely fracturing of consciousness (again, Delauney’s La Tour Rouge), what Stella captured was the cathedral-esque aspect of the city herself. Not only did Stella assume from the first that the spiritual dimensions of urban industrial experience inhered in its visual materiality and thus could be rendered, or better, embodied, in the visual materials of painting, but he recast classic Christian icons into modern form and recomposed contemporary cityscapes into sacred tableaux.21 As he explained, I had witnessed the growth and expansion of New York proceeding parallel to the development of my own life, and therefore I was feeling entitled to interpret the titanic efforts, the conquests already obtained by the imperial city in order to become what now She is, the center of

Panel 3: The Skyscrapers (The Prow), 1920–1922. Oil and tempera on canvas, 99¾ × 54 in. 45

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the world. Continually I was wandering through the immense metropolis, especially at night, in search of the most salient spectacles to derive from the essentials truly representative of her physiognomy.22

Daily and then again nightly, Stella looked on and across and down upon the harbor, which fed the city its materials and fuels and bodies, so he painted it—the city’s gateway as Voice’s first panel. He lived the superstimulus of Broadway and Times Square at night; he painted them twice over, structuring their more variegated and multicolored illuminations into “the stained glass fulgency of a cathedral” (his phrase) while reconjuring the electric effect of Coney Island (which had a White Way, too). Brooklyn’s bridge was transport, purview, and (to the immigrant, the Long Islander, the classical artist) portal, which he metamorphosed from the 1918 Bridge, and from which he took his overarching metaphor. Then he tackled the most important piece of all, that skyline, which in 1919 was still emerging. Picking and choosing throughout the city, he plundered and idealized the most forward-looking buildings, giving construction airy flight, seeing almost literally into the architectural future. The Skyscrapers, rather than featuring the blocky concrete push-ups of his own day, conjures up streamlined glassy suspensions of a material order still to come, majestic monoliths pressed yearningly together to form the hull of an ocean-liner whose guardian angel is a hieratic version of the sleekest monument of his own time, the Flatiron Building, haloed in the painting by the beams of searchlights. Stella’s anticipation of 2001’s missing skyscrapers, represented in absentia by two arrays of searchlights, is too spooky for words. Stella’s prose-poetry, once again: Steel and electricity had created a new world. A new drama had surged from the unmerciful violation of darkness at night, by the violent blaze of electricity and a new polyphony was ringing all around with the scintillating, highly-colored lights. The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes and expanded to vast latitudes with the skyscrapers and with bridges made for the conjunction of worlds. A new architecture was created, a new perspective. . . . I could define New York as a monstrous steely bar erected by modern cyclops to defy the Gods with the dazzling of a thunderbolt.

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What Stella saw for the first time and then again as if for the first time is something like a strobic juxtaposition of all those September 11– aftermath photos, especially the nighttime scenes, with an inverted yet related poignancy—the poignancy of witnessing the erection of a skydefying, darkness-defying architectonic hubris rather than of watching it being obliterated as fantastically, as consequentially, and as divinely/ demonically away. When we think of the place of Italy in the American imagination, what leaps to mind are tourist dreams of summer days in Tuscan vineyards, when what I’ve been arguing, starting from the immigrants’ perspective, is that the first great gift the Italians gave to the American imagination was an appreciation of America’s own urban revolution, its revolutionary form of technologically orchestrated urban-ness. If we take the long view on Stella’s career, it is telling that the nostalgic works of the 1920s—Blessed Virgins and mythic herons in Neapolitan decorative style—hold almost no claim upon us, despite the Italian American propensity to turn any available inch of soil into a vegetable garden (often overseen by a “Virgin of the bathtub”), whereas the delineations in charcoal and pastel of the industrial complex that Stella did for The Pittsburgh Survey constitute a record of the factory-and-refinery world that still packs a mighty, and, if truth be told, a mightily mystical punch despite the fact that manufacturing and processing are largely behind us now. As to the major canvases that I have been discussing, which were classified by art critics in their own time as futurist while understood in common parlance as futuristic, these masterworks have proven, in addition to their certifiable period significance, to have astonishing legs, which is to say, an astonishingly prophetic reach. In 1993, Jay Clayton used Battle of Lights for the cover of his book The Pleasures of Babel, which focuses on literary and philosophical postmodernism; in 1995, H. Bruce Franklin similarly used the Voice’s 1922 Bridge for the nineteenth-century science fiction retrospective, Future Perfect; and in 1995, the great Samuel R. Delany took White Way I, also from the polyptych, for a trilogy of his science fiction novellas, Atlantis. At the millennium’s end, then, just as a global economy of the Internet, satellite linkups, and ubiquitous small jetports were about to emerge, the century-old Italian encounter with techno-industrial America continued to work its magic, suggesting that the feeling of massive postindustrial

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technological reorientation that grips so many of us now, day to day, is not without (a structural) precedent, and that the peculiarly Italian love of that peculiarly New York intensity—loudest, brightest, boldest, highest, fastest, and thus the most mind-bending—is with us still.

Although his paintings are prescient as a pictorialization of urban modernity’s future, Stella can take us only so far in this story of the Italian experience of America, particularly of the feeling of being Italian in America and ultimately of the American need to feel more in the manner of Italians. Stella’s own impulse as he aged was to a pastoral nostalgia, gently Marian or unblinkingly neo-pagan; in particular, he rehabilitated a Neapolitan decorative style and put it to work on a variety of mythoreligious subjects—The Birth of Venus (1925), The Virgin (1926), The Crèche (1929–1930)—almost all of them, including the goddesses of fertility, rendered with a St. Francis–like sweetness in a sun-drenched sea palette of blue, green, and white. As a Mediterranean Third Worlder, the late Stella is, of course, self-reconstructed, which distinguishes him from many of his cohorts in New York and Paris. But by the mid-1920s, the modernist primitivism is so pronounced in him that he seems to have crossed a generational threshold or two, from the adult immigrant who personally experienced the shock of the urban new, to the child of immigrants who has the city feeling, as it were, in his or her blood, so can’t imagine anything else, to the grandchild with the restless soul who is inured to the charms of the city—and who rediscovers the Old World, struggling within to reclaim its cosmology and faith. The explicitly Catholic paintings of the late Stella have long put art historians and curators on edge—The Brooklyn Museum has The Virgin in storage, for instance—in part, I suspect, because of its seemingly explicit embrace of naivete, which is to be expected in an anonymous eleventh-century altar piece but to be suspected of a well-educated and self-conscious modern like Stella. The unabashed will to believe of these later paintings distills, but also thins out, the darker, fiercer religious pulse in Stella’s urban sublime, yet it calls attention once more, looking backward, to Stella’s class liminality. There is an old question that intellectuals, especially those from working-class families, ask of intellectuals who portray the working classes: how do you know? In Stella’s case, the

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The Virgin, 1926. Oil on canvas, 39½ × 38¾. The Brooklyn Museum.

issue is more a matter of perspective than it is of authority, since—with the exception of a few early sketches at Pittsburgh and Ellis Island— Stella never claimed to be representing his fellow immigrants in either sense of the word “represent.” Still, the questions arise: Is Stella’s aesthetic of the city something afforded by those, like Stella, in a position to look? Was it something different for those on the ground, building the buildings, trying to make family lives out of such work? How did the outrageous scale of light and height, material and color, relate to the other dimensions of workers’ lives? The later amateur paintings of a New York City gas station attendant and sometime union activist—Ralph Fasanella—point the way to the

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perspective I mean, in oils. But if we really want to get into the hearts and minds of the workers who made the city, we must turn to a bricklayer turned novelist, Pietro di Donato. It is di Donato who can take us into the lived interiority of the Italian American building class, for it is di Donato whose writerly career began, literally, when, unemployed during the Depression, he sought to give a sense of what it meant to be sacrificed to American urban capitalist expansion: a sacrifice that turns out to have more than a little in common with what happened to those in the late nineteenth century who died at work, inside the stone and mortar pylons of the Brooklyn Bridge.

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3

Job Close to the Flesh and Smell and Joy of Them My soul scene is a maelstrom of bricks, mortar, goading foremen, leering suckers, whore-faced bosses, shouts, sweat, madness and mute death on Job. —Pietro di Donato, 1937

Once upon a time in America, the swarms of hard-hatted, bronzed men in cheap clothing with dark unruly hair carrying lunch-buckets, comfortably convivial with one another while fiercely devoted—from all signs—to family, too earthy and hardbitten it would seem for belief in God, never mind organized religion, yet sporting unmistakable crucifixes, garrulous even in public in a language more liquid than English but rougher than school-taught Romance tongues, doing all the construction work, skilled and unskilled, were not South Mexican, not Central American as they are now, but Southern Italian and Sicilian: guineas, wops, and dagos. This is their story. By “their” story I mean to offer, in fact, the story of a story, that is, the actual history of a particular tale about Southern Italian laborers in America, Pietro di Donato’s “Christ in Concrete.” I’ve known about “Christ in Concrete” for the better part of my professional life: it’s a 1937 first publication by an unemployed bricklayer set among bricklayers in the 1920s. “Christ in Concrete” then reappeared in 1939 as the first chapter of a coming-of-age novel (a bildungsroman) of the same name, the form in which I long knew it. It’s only been recently that I’ve taken 51

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the tiny trouble to find the original story in its original setting, which turns out to be both fascinating in itself and a lesson in editorial contingencies—the original is not quite the “original,” after all—which suggests yet more of some simple but larger story of ethnic occlusion. What was it to feel like an Italian laborer, a laborer who spoke and in some sense still lived in Italian dialect but worked for the American construction industry, literally building capitalism’s infrastructure (including the towering financial district of Lower Manhattan), a laborer of Italian descent among immigrant Italians raising the great city during the industrial boom of the 1920s? Just as the Italians were phenomenally adept at bricklaying, so the idiom that di Donato developed to tender their lives—a raw experimental poetry of translated dialect and protean narrative—gives us privileged insight into the felt experience that this kind of skilled yet exploitatively driven city labor required, permitted, and (paradoxically enough) made possible. “Christ in Concrete” shocks with physicality: the story shows as strongly as it tells, and its mode of narrating is as olfactory and tactile and even gustatory—you’re supposed to smell and touch and taste the words—as it is visual and aural. In disconcerting ways, di Donato presents the vitality of inanimate objects and sociological forces, evil and fated; recreates the bone-crushing, nerve-numbing, ear-smashing intensity of manual labor, thus assaulting the reader; evokes the memory of super-dense living in railroad apartments and hallway-toilet tenements, that overripeness of what we romanticize as neighborhood, which, in fact, would turn most twenty-first-century stomachs; and celebrates in non-genteel ways the ferocity of the workers’ ritual interplay and repose —the stickiness of blood and honorific kin, the thrill as well as need of food, sensual commingling (often, though not always, connubial), the warmth of men intimate enough to tease each other about their relations with women and, through women, with their children. Physical duress is the lot of these immigrants, but it is also their pleasure, their cohesiveness, their art, and, explicitly in this tale, the felt intimation of their redemption. In March of 1937, an unemployed twenty-five-year-old bricklayer from Hudson County, New Jersey (across the river, where the New Jersey docks are), published his first short story—his first publication ever—in Esquire magazine, where high literary seriousness, high-end

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production values, and vaunted masculinity met. Esquire, which was the regular publishing outlet for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and such writers as the African American noir-existentialist Chester Himes, was formidable even in format—first-quality paper stock, almost 10 by 14 inches, with double entendre cartoons. “Christ in Concrete” opened across a two-page spread unencumbered with advertisements and was strikingly illustrated by a couple of two-tone line drawings. The editors installed a headnote between the title and the authorial byline, assuring the reader that, of the eighteen thousand unsolicited submissions that they had received in the previous three years (eighteen thousand!), none has “come our way with the performance and promise shown by Pietro di Donato.” “Christ in Concrete” is the story, loosely autobiographical, of a fatal construction accident. The foreman of a small bricklaying crew, a devoted and prolific father, is being extorted by his prejudiced site-manager to ignore building codes—and his own better judgment. He and several of his crew members die on the afternoon of Good Friday, when the wall they are raising collapses, taking the whole building with it. Di Donato treats us to the camaraderie among the men at lunchtime, the familial thoughts and actual home life of the main character, and the religious perspective and resonance of a contemporary human tragedy set during Holy Week. “Christ in Concrete” is, therefore, genre fiction; it combines two altogether familiar conventions, sociological exposé and local color, prompting a simple historical question about its enthusiastic reception: what was so surprising and innovative about that? Dialect fiction, immigrant realism, and protest naturalism had thrilled the publishing scene (and, for that matter, popular theater) since Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896). The Great Depression had been raging for the better part of a decade, which made the proletarian novel and anthologies of the country’s diversely forgotten people (with titles like In Search of America), whether sponsored by the WPA or not, a cottage industry. So what was the big deal with yet another immigrant worker’s story? The difference—in the largest sense—is that this story dealt not with tailors or peddlers, did not feature skilled musicians falling down in artless America or rediscovering themselves in jazz, did not reveal oncepromising rabbinical students now on the make in the garment trades or scholarship girls rebelling against their fathers and getting away (all of

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which had made Jews the representative figures in the wake of the Great Migration), but instead portrayed construction workers, in particular Southern Italian brickmasons, seemingly frozen in labor and time.1 When the great expatriate writer Henry James returned to tour the States in 1907—the very year that the largest number of Italians entered the United States, at a time when the public work crews of New York City were over 90 percent Italian—he espied the American future on the Lower East Side not only in the teeming sweatshops and tenements of the Jews, in passages well discussed by literary and cultural historians, but in the face of a Sicilian ditchdigger (rarely remembered by scholars) who, upon seeing the Anglicized, uppercrust James (in James’s ethnically and ethically convincing portrayal of the exchange), simply stares back, saying absolutely nothing. To paint this in the broadest strokes, the Sicilian ditchdigger had, at the point of first contact, nothing to say to AngloAmerica, or at least no way to say it. Thirty years later, in the depth of the Depression, it was not the Sicilian ditchdigger per se who most represented the urban foreigner so much as his more skilled peasant cousin from the Abruzzi (the mountains east of Rome), who had the previous decade helped literally to raise the housing of finance capitalism, that is, Wall Street; and the American people, evidently, were still anxious, like James, to hear what the Southern Italian laborer, who had experienced the crash before the Crash, had to say.

Geremio, father of seven (with number eight on the way), is looking forward to signing the mortgage papers on a very modest home, the fruit of twenty years of labor. He is foreman of a small crew of bricklayers who are raising walls on the frame of an older structure, and who are doing so in violation of New York City building codes. Geremio’s boss, an oldline American by the name of Murdin, is so determined to cheat, in fact, that he rejects Geremio’s urgent counsel—“Padrone—padrone, the underpinning gotta be make safe”—and threatens to fire him—“Lissenyawopbastard! if you don’t like it, you know what you can do?”—if he dares to open his mouth again. Geremio, who is feeling the pressure of the imminent birth, the even more imminent mortgage, and the immediate cost of the weekend’s Easter feast—not to mention his background

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more generally (in Southern Italy the word of the padrone is the real law) —backs down. The story actually begins in lockstep with the work day—a chilling Holy Thursday—itself: “March whistled stinging snow against the brick walls and up the gaunt girders. Geremio, the foreman, swung his arms about, and gaffed the men on.”2 The issue in “Christ in Concrete,” from the get-go, is physical: late winter weather is still nasty weather, such that it is experienced by the construction crew as an animate force, the curse of nature upon men at work. The girders are “gaunt”—language usually reserved for people, not construction materials, suggesting that the steel beams, exposed and cold to the touch, look skinny, an illusion of fragility, in relation to the heft of weight-bearing brick. “Gaffed the men on”: a verb most of us are probably not familiar with (to gaff is to hook), chosen to underscore the tools of a trade not our own. When reading the opening of the story, are we supposed to think like this, as if we were all English professors intent on analyzing grammar and word choice? Not exactly, or rather, the point is that we, as readers, don’t need to behave like English teachers if we are willing and capable of understanding viscerally, intuitively, as the characters themselves do. It’s not just that the weight of the chosen diction and the accompanying syntax of narration falls on sensory perception rather than on psychological portrayal but that the physicality represented is itself knowing and informative, pressing us to be sensuous in our reading, too. Di Donato wants us to feel—with them, about them, and ultimately for them. To begin the story, he puts our face directly into it—into the chilling winds of March and the siren call of work. What di Donato has ultimately in store for us is the all-consuming intensity of construction, but first he puts us nose to nose with the intimate camaraderie (the cheerful blowhardedness, even horny catcalls) of these men who work, of these men who work desperately hard and close together. With no other preamble except that first paragraph, giving us wind and gaff, we meet the men: Old Nick, the “Lean,” stood up from over a dust-flying brick pile, and tapped the side of his nose. “Master Geremio, the Devil himself could not break his tail any harder than we here.”

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Burly Vincenzo of the walrus mustache and known as the “Snoutnose” let fall the chute door of the concrete hopper and sang over in the Lean’s direction: “Mari-Annina’s belly and the burning night will make of me once more a milk-mouthed stripling lad. . . .” The Lean loaded his wheelbarrow and spat furiously. “Sons of twolegged dogs . . . despised of even the devil himself! Work! Sure! For America beautiful will eat you and spit your bones into the earth’s hole! Work!” And with that his wiry frame pitched the barrow violently over the rough floor. Snoutnose waved his head to and fro and with mock pathos wailed, “Sing on, O guitar of mine. . . .” Short, cheery-faced Joe Chiappa, the scaffoldman, paused with hatchet in hand and tenpenny spike sticking out from small dicelike teeth to tell the Lean as he went by, in a voice that all could hear, “Ah, father of countless chicks, the old age is a carrion!” Geremio chuckled and called to him. “Hey, little Joe, who are you to talk? You and big-titted Cola can’t even hatch an egg, whereas the Lean has just to turn the doorknob of his bedroom and old Philomena becomes a balloon!” Mike the “Barrel-mouth” pretended he was talking to himself and yelled out in his best English . . . he was always speaking English while the rest carried on in their native Italian. “I don’t know myself, but somebodys whose gotta bigga buncha keeds and he alla times talka from somebodys elsa!” Geremio knew it was meant for him and he laughed. “On the tomb of Saint Pimple-legs, this little boy my wife is giving me next week shall be the last! Eight hungry little Christians to feed is enough for any man.” Joe Chiappa nodded to the rest. “Sure, Master Geremio had a telephone call from the next bambino. Yes, it told him it had a little bell between instead of a rose bush. . . . It even told him its name.” “Laugh, laugh all of you,” returned Geremio, “but I tell you that all my kids must be boys so that they someday will be big American builders. And then I’ll help them to put the gold away in the basements for safe keeping!” A great din of riveting shattered the talk among the fast-moving men. (40)

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While rich in voluble curses adopted as catharsis against the new land, they also proclaim, nay, sing, to each other of their manliness—literally ribbing each other about both success and failure. You get the sense they’ve done this before, often. It is a special, maybe peculiar form of male camaraderie, of male bonding and sociability, what scholars now call homosociality. Yes, they brag and compete and undercut; they nickname each other—the Lean, little Joe, Curly-Headed Sandino, Barrelmouth (a handle that invokes literally the language-making apparatus of this particular man’s body), Ashes-Ass—as well as the women (bigtitted Cola) on the basis of physique, which is colorful and seems simple enough, a kind of raw, almost cloddish, masculinity. So: a Southern Italian form of linguistic gamesmanship, of the serious play at rivalry that the black South calls doing the dozens. But is it that simple? The question of virility comes up the next day after lunch, as the men ponder an early three o’clock whistle and the event—the feast of Easter —to come: “Oh, but first we stop at Mulberry Street, to buy their biggest eels, and the other finger-licking stuffs.” Geremio was looking far off, and for a moment happiness came to his heart without words, a warm hand steeling over. Stoutnose’s words sang to him pleasantly, and he nodded. “And Master Geremio, we ought really to buy the seafruits with the shells . . . for the much needed steam they put into the—”. (194)

The above ellipsis belongs to Snoutnose, who also refrains from completing his sentence—he even blushes—but we don’t need another evocation of “eels and other finger-licking stuffs” to get the saltily salacious point: seafood is sexy, and that idea is food for thought and talk among men. Remember it is 1937, the days of Catholic-led censorship in Hollywood. These men are analyzing, selecting, and for all we know shopping together, but the real dirty little secret being shared between the men is a bit of Southern Italian folklore, invoked but for obvious reasons not made explicit: clams and oysters (oysters are fresh in months with the letter “r”) look and touch and smell and taste like female genitalia, particularly genitalia that has reached a pitch of excitation—first stimulated, to complete the circle, not simply by the attention of her

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man but by the aphrodisiacal cuisine they have shared and the bonhomie it generates. “It is true, I know it—especially the juicy clams . . . uhmn, my mouth waters like a pump.” Geremio drew on his unlit pipe and smiled acquiescence. (194)

What makes these working men such men, finally, is the physical worship of women, a kind of heterosexual gourmandise. I’ve lingered over this passage to give you a sense of the bold rawness of the text—bolder still, though less surprising, if you catch the innuendo. So no wonder it made it into Esquire, you may be thinking. But what is at issue in the frank representation of an equally frank sexual worship, is not just virility, which seems everywhere to go without saying despite Snoutnose’s concern for the steam in his pipes, but— and here I use the female-centric word deliberately—fertility. The teasing by the men about their manhood throughout the story is warmly and multiply appreciative, not violent; it practically reeks of the Italian hill towns yet is adapted here to hard-driven wage labor and the urban industrial conquest over nature. In truth these men are almost as intimate with each other as they are with their wives and families, and their intercourse constitutes an open homosociality—better, what we might call homosociability—that thrives on the remembrance and anticipation of (reproductive) heterosexuality. The hearth side of this fulsome erotic equation is complex, too. Di Donato’s language is poetic and earthy: sentimental in part, but really more urgent than that. It speaks to the sacred but terrifying animality of human bodies, to the joys and terrors of the life cycle (making babies, raising sons, facing deterioration) epitomized in that other “labor”: the bloody business of delivering offspring and the unending terror of having to feed them that determines immigrant women’s essential existence while capturing the imagination of the men who work for them (both on their behalf and in order to “have” them); apropos then of a world in which the Blessed Mother competes with, maybe even rivals Christ (Jesus seen not as a zealous God’s right-hand man but as a compassionate mother’s sacrificial son), and where the people are wise enough not to

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have to see her as a virgin (which was and to some measure remains the Church’s strange and outrageous attempt to split the sacramental Godmaking force of female fertility from heterosexual femininity). In Esquire the story is surrounded by the invocations of vanity and boredom and consumption in the WASP upper-middle classes, but what’s at stake in di Donato is directly antithetical to the dream of unfettered bankrolled bachelordom that Playboy would promote unabashedly in the 1950s and that Esquire wistfully anticipates. The women who are invoked in the playful innuendo of the men are wives, wives who are or should be, again and again, pregnant! The drive is to seek comfort in women’s arms, pleasure in the children they produce, and the seeming immortality of (male-genealogical) continuance. “‘Laugh, laugh all of you,’ returned Geremio, ‘but I tell you that all my kids must be boys so that they someday will be big American builders.’” In the opening segment of “Christ in Concrete,” di Donato represents the ferocity of each day (we don’t catch them actually at work—yet) as something for each man to get through and recover from, in expectation of another day’s accomplishment and the opportunity for their bodies to relax, heal, and indulge. “And he swelled in human ecstasy at the anticipation of food, drink, and the hairy flesh-tingling warmth of wife, and then, extravagant rest” (194). Di Donato reports: “That day, like all days, came to an end. Calloused and bruised bodies sighed, and numb legs shuffled towards shabby railroad flats” (40). What’s at stake at the end of the day, each day, is here concentrated in Geremio, who is particularly family-oriented, ritualistically prayerful, and sweetly sensuous, and who that very night is to sign the mortgage on his first, modest (very, very modest) piece of America. Ah, bella casa mio. Where my little freshets of blood, and my good woman await me. Home where my broken back will not ache so. Home where midst the monkey chatter of my piccolinos I will float off to blessed slumber with my feet on the chair and the head on the wife’s soft full breast. (40)

The risk that di Donato takes here is of condescending to Geremio— he himself calls the workers “these great child-hearted ones”—but there

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is something profound and primal, not just simpleminded and oldfashioned and goody-two-shoes, in this man’s home love and parental pride. Di Donato creates that effect by supermasculinizing Geremio’s rough-hewn speech, here by rendering the catchphrase “ah, bella casa mio” with a faulty pronoun agreement (it should be bella casa mia) so that what we hear with our English ears is the paternal heartiness of “my” house, a putatively masculine possessiveness. Geremio claims his place on the ledger sheet of service to humankind: “Blessings to Thee, oh Jesus. I have fought winds and cold. Hand to hand I have locked dumb stones in place and the great building rises. I have earned a bit of bread for me and mine” (40). Di Donato takes over as narrator, switching to a present tense that intuitively signifies the recurrent need for and the intense pleasure of physical renewal: “The mad day’s brutal conflict is forgiven, and strained limbs prostrate themselves so that swollen veins can send the yearning blood coursing and pulsating delicious as though the body mountained leaping streams” (40). Here is relief so sublime it is practically spiritual, the daily resurrection of the worker’s body as a sacramental influx of grace and an intimation of the Incarnation—in Geremio’s giddy case, especially delicious, given how twenty years of pennies earned by the dint of his back are about to initiate a mortgage: “What mattered that it was no more than a wooden shack? It was his own!” (40). So emphatic is Geremio’s humbly luxurious, replenishing domesticity that when, the next day, we get to the suggestion of bestowing good luck upon a home by taking there a woman not one’s wife, it seems truly scandalous—transgression as the actual violation of domestic space; and it remains so, even after we realize that what we are hearing is not an actual custom (how in the world would anyone, especially in a tiny hill town in Italy, get away with such a thing? why would they even try?) but a popular folk myth reflective of masculine dreamwork. Di Donato takes us home to share with Geremio and Annunziata, his wife, the deliriousness of their children at the prospect of a home of their own, but we also see the sophistication of their intimacy, including Annunziata’s wise premonition, when she asks Geremio why he hasn’t said a word about the current work site: “And I have felt that I am walking into a dream. Is the work dangerous? Why don’t you answer . . . ?” (41). Her question is left hanging. ♦

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We’ve met the men, the man; now to see what they’re going through, in which wage labor, even skilled wage labor in a vaunted Southern Italian tradition, feels like an animate force, called in their idiom simply, without any article, not even the definite article, “Job.” “Job loomed up damp, shivery gray. Its giant members waiting.” Writing in phrase torrents, less stream of consciousness than stream of action and observation, di Donato wants us to feel the malevolence of working under the gun: Trowel rang through brick and slashed mortar rivets were machinegunned fast with angry grind Patsy number one check Patsy number two check the Lean three check Vincenzo four steel bellowed back at hammer donkey engines coughed purple Ashes-ass Pietro fifteen chisel point intoned stone thin steel whirred and wailed through wood liquid stone flowed with dull rasp through iron veins and hoist screamed through space Carmine the Fat twenty-four and Giacomo Sangini check. (41)

Elided sentences with squeezed-out articles—the heft of brick mortared frenetically upon brick, the elbow-cracking wails of first-generation power riveters—enact the bodily loss of individual personhood, one man crushed unto the other like the sentences themselves, to the point where “liquid stone” seems to flow through the very veins of each man. The men say nothing, as befits the machine cogs of construction they have become, while screaming inwardly their shared fate. Job, in short—a “symphony of struggle” binding men in counterpoint to home and play. In such ferocity there is, nevertheless, a kind of poetry, neither pretty nor nice, instead sublime and even demonic, which di Donato records and simulates, getting the dark poetry before us and giving us a taste; but he avoids sentimentality, neither discounting the pain nor mistaking the cost. So he personifies workers’ destruction in the body of the crew’s elder, the Lean, and their alienation in relation between body and mind: The Lean as he fought his burden on looked forward to only one goal, the end. The barrow he pushed, he did not love. The stones that brutalized his palms, he did not love. The great God Job, he did not love. He felt a searing bitterness and a fathomless consternation at the queer consciousness that inflected the ever mounting weight of structures

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that he had to! had to! raise above his shoulders! When, when and where would the last stone be? Never . . . did he bear his toil with the rhythm of song! Never . . . did his gasping heart knead the heavy mortar with lilting melody! A voice within him spoke in wordless language. The language of worn oppression and the despair of realizing that his life had been left on brick piles. And always, there had been hunger and her bastard, the fear of hunger. (41)

Nick (the Lean, no last name) is alas no statesmen of the building crafts, adjusting with dignity to change, but in fact a broken man who finds none of what the others still can and intermittently (given better weather, a more generous contract) still do: the hymn of proud and beloved building making. It is against Nick’s underscoring of push and despair that we learn of the escalation of danger—the site manager asking Geremio to fire the Lean in exchange for “a young wop,” cursing the crew for not doubling their efforts in light of Good Friday’s early whistle (at 3 p.m., echoing the legendary moment of Christ’s crucifixion), refusing Geremio’s pleas to redress the building’s underpinnings, and threatening to dismiss Geremio himself. The other men have heard the talk, intuited the danger. Geremio considers for a moment just walking away (“Annunziata speaks of scouring the ashcans for the children’s bread in case I didn’t want to work on a job where . . .”), but he can’t bring himself to do it: “Am I not a man, to feed my own with these hands?” We have an inkling now of what is to come, but di Donato deliberately holds off. At lunch there is bragging on Geremio’s part about his eldest son, then some lightly prurient conversation over lighter work, more commentary on the Lean having broken down—and “an uneasy sensation” when the floor vibrates ominously. Geremio renews his resolve to stand up to Murdin, who is too drunk and callous to answer Geremio’s request to double-check the underpinning. And so the story climaxes, for several excruciating pages, with first the major retaining wall and then the entire frame coming down and burying Geremio alive, and, presumably, several of the others. It is difficult, really impossible, to extract passages and do justice to the unrelenting nightmare of this section of the story. Again, di Donato means us to feel what happens, which is torturous and horrific beyond words.

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The men poised stricken. Their throats wanted to cry out and scream but didn’t dare. For a moment they were a petrified and straining pageant. Then the bottom of their world gave way. The building shuddered violently, her supports burst with the crackling slap of wooden gunfire. The floor vomited upward. Geremio clutched at the air and shrieked agonizingly. “Brothers, what have we done? Ahhh-h, children of ours!” With the speed of light, balance went sickeningly awry and frozen men went flying explosively. Job tore down upon them madly. Walls, floors, beams became whirling, solid, splintering waves crashing with detonations that ground man and material in bonds of death. The strongly shaped body that slept with Annunziata nights and was perfect in all the limitless physical quantities thudded as a worthless sack amongst the giant debris that crushed fragile flesh and bone with centrifugal intensity. Darkness blotted out his terror and the resistless form twisted, catapulted insanely in its directionless flight, and shot down neatly and deliberately between the empty wooden forms of a foundation wall pilaster in upright position, his blue swollen face pressed against the form and his arms outstretched, caught securely through the meat by the thin round bars of reinforcing steel. (194–95)

Melodramatic though it may be, the tragic tableau di Donato conjures up is both highly particular and implicitly representative: particular to this Good Friday, to a foreman whose demands at home seemingly outweigh the risk of his job, and, in particular, to a Southern Italian with the long, hard legacy of knowing that authority can not be challenged without generating more and immediate miseria. But Geremio’s crucifixion in concrete is also representative, symbolic of the way that capitalism puts working men of craft and conscience and commitment—what we might regard as real “men of honor”—between a rock and a hard place, that is, literally between several tons of brick with a dubious underpinning. The rescue men cleaved grimly with pick and ax. Geremio came to with a start. . . . far from their efforts. His brain told him instantly what had happened and where he was. He shouted wildly. “Save me! Save me! I’m being buried alive!”

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He paused exhausted. His genitals convulsed. The cold steel rod upon which they were impaled froze his spine. He shouted louder and louder. “Save me! I am hurt badly! I can be saved I can—save me before it’s too late!” But the cries went no farther than his own ears. (195)

The four-page conclusion of “Christ in Concrete,” an extended stream of terrorized consciousness that is more surreal than anything from the American naturalist novels, is outscaled enough, simply as an effort to render what it would feel like to die under a collapsing building, to struggle first for life and then to know you’re finished; surreal, in the way that the collapsing of the Twin Towers looked like bad 1950s Godzilla animation. The pathos is compounded by Geremio’s despair for leaving his family and by his guilt in not having succeeded in defying his boss or deserting the work site. He must do his utmost to break out of this dream! He’s swimming under water, not able to raise his head and get to the air. He must get back to consciousness to save his children! . . . His fingers slithered about grisly sharp bones and in a gluey, stringy, hollow mass, yielding as wet macaroni. Gray light brought sight, and hysteria punctured his heart. . . . The heavy concrete was settling immutably and its rich cement-laden grout ran into his pierced face. His lungs would not expand and were crushing in tighter and tighter under the settling concrete. (195–96)

In his last gasp, a cry of the body as much as the mind, voiced whether or not it is aloud, Geremio petitions Christ the Intercessor for a miracle, a gesture that one might take as helplessly, hopelessly naive. “Show yourself now, Jesu! Now is the time! Save me! Why don’t you come! Are you there! I cannot stand it—ohhh, why do you let it happen—where are you? Hurry hurry hurry!” His bones cracked mutely and his sanity went sailing distorted in the limbo of the subconscious. With the throbbing tones of an organ in the hollow background, the fighting brain disintegrated and the memories of a baffled lifetime sought outlet.

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He moaned the simple songs of barefoot childhood, scenes flashed desperately on and off, and words and parts of words came pitifully high and low from his inaudible lips. Paul’s crystal-set earphones pressed the sides of his head tighter and tighter, the organ boomed the mad dance of the Tarantella, and the hysterical mind sang cringingly and breathlessly, “Jesu, my Lord my God my all Jesu my Lord my God my all Jesu my Lord my God my all Jesu my Lord my God my all.” (196)

What we hear rings semi-blasphemous changes on Christ’s “My Father, why have you forsaken me?”: an improvised last rite, it is at once a baneful expression of anger for having been so painfully, callously, and tragically abandoned and still a material sacramentalist’s channeling of agony, terror, and despair into the expressive physicality of what one calls, here a bit misleadingly, prayer—“Jesu, my Lord my God my all Jesu my Lord my God my all Jesu my Lord my God my all Jesu my Lord my God my all.” The final imagery is of course as iconic as one could ask—the accompanying line drawing shows Geremio on his knees atop the collapsed bricks, his hands folded and extended upwards in desperate solicitation. But the image’s hold upon the reader’s imagination draws for its power from the accumulated psychosocial portraiture of the story as a whole, a scarcely mediated anthropological immersion at once forthright and subtle. Familiar enough from tabloid stereotypes yet, if you are watching and listening and smelling closely, also idiomatic to the nth degree. “Christ in Concrete” foregrounds a sentient physicality—at the intersection of masculine camaraderie, fertile virility, virtuoso labor, heightened suffering, and material faith—that challenges us to this day.

It is a curious fact how resistant, even in the age of multiculturalism, the English anthology has been to Italian American literature: several of the recent anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of American Literature, though each numbers upwards to four thousand pages, contain not a single word by or even about Americans of Italian ancestry; most of the rest have a few poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a San Franciscan whose

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Italian heritage has recently been questioned. In 1990, when publisher D. C. Heath came forward with its pathbreaking collection, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, with almost two hundred writers and hundreds of selections in volume 2 alone, they included one prose selection from an Italian American, one, announced as “Christ in Concrete”; yet the selection that Heath actually included (though by an aged di Donato) begins with its main character returning from Vietnam.3 The inadvertent impression is, who cares? no one’s really going to read this selection anyway. Of course editing any anthology is nightmare labor, never mind one as innovative and inclusive as the D. C. Heath; and calling attention to this error (since corrected, of course!) is like biting off the hand that feeds you, since, to my knowledge, there is no prose at all by an Italian American in any of D. C. Heath’s competitors and because, of course, I’m guilty of much the same thing, as an immigrant literature specialist having previously given relatively little attention to di Donato. So I’m not exactly protesting here. I am reading this phenomenon of turning away even or rather especially on the part of those, like myself, who would have it otherwise. There is something eerily Freudian about our inability to find a place for this story. That “Christ in Concrete” is absent in our literary histories even when announced otherwise is, I think, the most curious telltale of them all, ferociously so, in light of the dramatic reception and early history of the story. Any good literary historian knows the basic outline. The general middlebrow public as well as the highbrow critics loved the story when it first appeared. “Christ in Concrete” was included in Best Short Stories of 1938, edited by Edward J. O’Brien, who dedicated the volume to the novice author. Di Donato was badgered on all sides into doing what he wanted to do anyway, which was to write a fictional account of his childhood; that in 1939, the well-established firm of Bobbs-Merrill published the resulting novel, eponymously entitled Christ in Concrete. The Book of the Month Club selected Christ in Concrete over what its editors and other contemporary reviewers judged to be a more formulaic narrative, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. We even know that di Donato, taking the podium in June 1939 to address the Third American Writers’ Conference of the Communist Party’s Cultural Front (with Richard Wright, Dashiell Hammett, Christina Stead, and others), refused to be

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pigeonholed as a “politically correct” novelist.4 All of this is common or common enough (at least among ethnic-lit specialists) knowledge. But I have never heard this history recounted with sufficient attention to the meaning and impact of di Donato’s original story. This part of the larger story begins with a virtually unknown fact. The original “Christ in Concrete” was published by the Esquire magazine company separately, available directly from the publisher, as a book. In offering the book version, the editors at Esquire admitted that they had done a little censorship: In a general magazine of over six hundred thousand circulation there are some words and expressions that you simply can’t print, legitimate though those words and expression may be (and in this case are) as a means of attaining complete verisimilitude in projecting the setting, the scene and the atmosphere, of a piece of literature. (32)

In fact there were several substitutions of phrase in the myriad curses the men exchange (“tail” for “ass,” “sons of two-legged dogs” for “sons of three-legged whores,” “this to you and all your kind” for “screw you and all your kind!” and, most effective of them all, “Lissenyawopbastard” for “ah, shit!”), which to my ears lighten the load of vulgarity while preserving the hearty embattledness—sometimes even strengthening the oral rhythms of playful repartee or anticapitalist irreverence.5 These substitutions would have surprised no one. But there were also several larger sections excised as well, which underline by repetition or make explicit through commentary di Donato’s founding intuitions and intentions. The censoring of one clause, at the end of the second sentence of the story, says it all. The Esquire version reads: “Old Nick, the ‘Lean,’ stood up from over a dust-flying brick pile, and tapped the side of his nose.” But the book begins: “Old Nick, the ‘Lean,’ stood up from over a dustflying brick pile, tapped the side of his nose and sent an oyster directly to the ground” (13). The preferred second sentence lands quite literally on a gob of snot—definitely a shock to the genteel system!—suggesting the raw impact of cold, the rough publicness of bodily fluids, and vernacular language that is at once frank and evocative (that “oyster”), a brief but eloquent distillation of the physical issues and idiom to come.

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The longest excision was a second riff on the men at work Good Friday morning, this one so accelerated that the clauses are even shorter, more impacted, fanatically insistent: Furor hard driving forms bumped stumbled ripped hammered objects took life few planks on Sandino’s head nail stabbed ankle plunk tobacco juice on it goodbye lips tight wide panting Mike’s trowel flashed bricks jumped from scaffold slid into unfolded mortar he disgorged armpits flowed over solid exuding surface scalps pricked itchy head scratchless toil’s tears down curved backs stiff backsides limp between legs thighs bulged soak toes fought thin legs full legs shoe leather into debris floor action number Giacomo thirteen Patsy foreman seven Pietro husbands fathers uncles who but how why. . . . (23)

What we are asked to see and hear and even touch here are supercharged men breaking down in fierce effort into superanimated interacting body parts, brilliantly but demonically driven tools taking on lives of their own, yet through it all sense perceptions at once pinpricked and overflowing residually, resurgently indicative of the humanity within. The passage continues directly from the ellipsis (which is, once again, di Donato’s): “If that whistle hadn’t blown? I would have done it in my pants.” “You coulda used my pocket. Do you still wipe yourself with cement bags?” “Perhaps you think you’re the stage clown, Farfaiello . . . . But from the way you worked upstairs . . . A mad-house!” “You shoulda seen yourself!” “I!” “You!” “Not only me, everybody! Do you think there will be a lay-off?” Mike and another mason rebundled themselves, left the makeshift latrine, and joined the other men gathered around the blazing fire in the cellar. (23–24)

The risk and fear of defecating in one’s pants among one’s fellows is the final measure, then, of Job’s tyranny: to admit as much, to invite and

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graciously accept teasing of same, to make light and make good (the men are complimenting each other on their insane productivity) of the forced intimacy (they are in the outhouse together! but what is that compared to being on this kind of job together?) they suffer, is the sign not of their barbarism or brutalization but of a resistant or counter-civility: selfironizing, resourceful, and humane. I am not saying that the book version of “Christ in Concrete” is better than the magazine edit, necessarily. Several of the magazine cuts generate a more “modernist” structure—a bit more fragmented, an even greater degree of implictness than the original manuscript—that may very well serve di Donato’s effort not just to report but to reenact the alienated rhythmic beauty of frenzied work punctuated by bright fellowship. In fact, di Donato preserved most of these phrase substitutions and paragraph excisions in the text he later prepared as the first chapter of the novel. We can assume that part of that decision is circulation exigency—you do want the novel to reach a general audience, don’t you?—and part of it is an aesthetic judgment call that the edited story by and large accomplishes di Donato’s original vision, which is to render the full bodily and sensorial texture of these lives no matter the offense to middle-class sensibilities. My general point here is not just that of an old-fashioned literary or biographical historian ascertaining authorial intent. It is that the editors themselves understood, or, to be metaphorically consistent, “felt” di Donato’s aesthetic intuitions. They accomplished such an effective edit of the original story because they had “gotten it”—not everything of course (in subsequent republishing di Donato would reinstate that “oyster”) and not exactly in the terms I’ve used, but fair enough to di Donato’s basic ambition and ultimate spirit. There is even evidence to that effect in the way the editors introduce di Donato in an extended bibliographical note (included as a prologue to the bound volume), where they authenticated his bricklaying experience (dry statistics making plain the precociousness of his expertise) while playing up his social passion and writerly intuitiveness and overall sensual intensity (by interpolating phrases and sentences of di Donato’s own in which he “talks” like his characters).6 But the real evidence of significant simpatico lies, I believe, in the physical entity of the bound volume itself, which they offered to readers at cost for twenty-five cents.

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Front and back covers of special bound edition of Pietro di Donato, “Christ in Concrete” (Esquire, 1937); Arnold W. Ryan, designer. Special Collections, Perkins Library, Duke University.

The unprecedented decision by Esquire to publish a discrete version of the story may have been partly a long-term marketing ploy, generating a buzz around their discovery of a great and slightly salacious writer, but the self-interestedness of Esquire pales before the existence of the slim book itself. Approximately 5½ by 7 inches, the book lays “Christ in Concrete” over 27 pages (plus several of the introduction), with a fair degree of breathing room but not pompously or pretentiously, as well as in a forthright yet friendly typeface. What is truly affecting, however, is the several-toned cloth cover featuring a latticework of line drawings, a stylized presentation of construction work in all its iconic variety; and, interior to the volume, several intermittent variations on the theme of the pick and shovel (a socialist invocation of the worker) encircled first by a crown of thorns and then by a halo of radiance (a decidedly nonsocialist turn) that are so forceful that Bobbs-Merrill would later decide to emboss the best of them in gold on the black cloth cover and spine of the novel.7 The book version of “Christ in Concrete” is, in short, a lovely, unpretentious, solid work of printers’ art, and I can’t imagine that di

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Donato himself wasn’t taken with it. There is, inherently, a class differentiation between the art of building a building and the art of making a book, but part of di Donato’s anger at the U.S. building trades was over the way that capitalist speed pressure gnawed away at craftsmanship, so I can’t help but think that di Donato felt something like an artisan’s pleasure/pride in the quiet beauty and relative heft of this small book, an objective correlative of the artistry that went into its representative story. Indeed, the one copy I have seen is signed by di Donato—directly under his name on the first of the two title pages. It’s just a signature— there is no note indicating a personal relation to its purchaser—leading me to wonder when the signing occurred and whether di Donato went to the offices of Esquire in Chicago to do it, in effect, for himself. I admit to feeling a little melancholy at the idea that the book version of “Christ in Concrete” is locked away in a few special collections scattered across the country, unheld and unseen and practically unknown, but its loss to readers’ common experience is, in the final analysis, no big deal. We have the original story, reproducible for a modest fee; and we have the novel, back again in mass paperback, which uses and expands upon it. The real danger is that we not read the text at all: that we forget, on the one hand, what the story and the book and the novel have to tell us regarding the ferocity-cum-ferocious beauty of working men’s lives, and that we miss the point, on the other hand, of what the story and the book and the novel signify, through their very existence. In the depth of the Depression, a man very much like the son of Geremio, a bricklayer who was expected to fill his late father’s shoes all his days, nonetheless willed himself into becoming a writer, a man of the word (not bricks) in the public eye. It was then, and only then, as a writer, that di Donato was able to reveal “the flesh and smell and joy of them” who were, as he put it, his “own people,” and who had since their arrival lived beneath the radar of middle-class sentiment, so close to the bone.8

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Mother The Madonnas of Tenth Avenue She is to her children, as the Madonna is to the believing Catholic of her society, all-forgiving, all-protecting. —Ann Cornelisen, 1976

Pietro di Donato’s short story “Christ in Concrete” has proven valuable on several accounts: its aesthetic strength as a linguistic and narrative experiment, the fascinating contradictory history of its reception, but above all because it provides special insight into the working men of the first generation, what di Donato himself characterized as an untold story that would have gone, he felt, unheard, if he hadn’t brought himself to tell it. In this chapter I turn to what is, in effect, the central story of settlement and transformation, the other side of the gender coin, a compulsively retold story, a story told in the homes about the home but, fortunately, not only there. This is the paradigmatic story of the hard-won understanding, far-sighted intuition, and tough love of those immigrant matriarchs, who without education or seemingly relevant urban experience provided not only warmth and protection for their children but compelled them, as brutally as necessary, to become Americans. I am a Neapolitan-Calabrian-Sicilian American of the fourth generation, more or less; biologically a Southern Italian pure bred or an interregional miscegenated mess, depending on how old-fashioned the perspective, but with no direct household connection to Italy, to immigration, or even to immigrants. Although born in Manhattan, I was raised in a cozy city in New Hampshire, the son of a nurse and a surgeon, 72

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where I lucked into the neighboring prep school, then Amherst College, and later Yale University.1 Demographically speaking, I therefore grew up very far in time, in space, and in class terms from the crucible of immigrant experience, those Little Italies of poverty and isolation and rage that served the building of industrial America. Yet of all the texts and artifacts I present in this book none is more viscerally familiar to me than Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim, an autobiographical novel of immigration and settlement set in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s. With no other work is my comprehension less dependent on what I have learned in school or at the library, and none is more emotionally immediate or relevant. How could this be? I know Lucia Santa: not Puzo’s actual mother of course, but her uncanny double, my father’s maternal grandmother, Rosa Marguerita Granito-Zito, who was not just any one of my original immigrant progenitors but the one that all the stories are told about. At most 4 feet 11 inches, at least 215 pounds, dressed always in black, she lost one husband in a construction accident, a second in ways no one talks about; she was illiterate, without marketable skills, a contadina who transported herself through marriage from a Neapolitan hill town to Bayonne, New Jersey. Savvy and fierce and indomitable, she raised four children practically on her own, each of them into the middle and uppermiddle classes, where they won security and respect in ways that were literally unimaginable in the old country. All praise be to Donna Rosa. Who, then, were these immigrant women? What did they do so that their families might survive and prosper, and how is it that we remain fascinated by their stories? What do we already know, and what, if anything, are the storytellers at home, the historians at large, not telling us? Three-quarters of the way through The Fortunate Pilgrim, when the Angeluzzi-Corbo family has weathered crisis after crisis, Puzo gives us a snapshot of its matriarch against the backdrop of the imminent dissolution of their New York City neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen (now the outer edges of Chelsea): In a few years the western wall of the city would disappear and the people who inhabited it would be scattered like ashes—they whose fathers in Italy had lived in the same village street for a thousand

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years, whose grandfathers had died in the same rooms in which they were born. Lucia Santa stood guard against more immediate dangers, dangers she had conquered over the last five years: death, marriage, puberty, poverty, and that lack of a sense of duty which flourishes in children brought up in America. She did not know she defended against an eternal attack and must grow weaker, since she stood against fate itself. But she had made a world, she had been its monolith. Her children, wavering sleepily from warm beds, found her toasting bread by early morning light, their school clothes hanging over chairs by the kerosene stove. Home from school, they found her ironing, sewing, tending great brown pots on the kitchen stove. She moved in clouds of steam like a humble god, disappearing and reappearing, with smells of warm cotton, garlic, tomato sauce, and stewing meats and greens. . . . And at night Lucia Santa waited until her house was quiet and at rest before she sought her own sleep. Her children had never seen her eyes closed and defenseless against the world. (200–201)2

We all recognize the type, which is why we must listen carefully to the stories: both because the received stereotype of the peasant Italian mother is true, making it an archetype; and because an archetype is prone to mythologization, screening actual women from ready view.3 We need, then, to probe the truth behind the truth of the immigrant madonna. At the very least, our stories recollect the constant vigilance and work-never-ending of the traditional Southern Italian way of impoverished motherhood.4 The better of the novels—Michael deCapite’s Maria, Helen Barolini’s Umbertina, Canadian Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints —place the mother figure in historical context, pointedly highlighting (not erasing, not obscuring) the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience. The Fortunate Pilgrim is especially effective at analyzing what it took—in terms of vision and intelligence and just plain will—to effect the radical transformation of peasant family life, to escape the legacy of profound, unremitting poverty (la miseria), but also to oversee the concomitant breakup of those traditional values (la via vecchia) that went with it.5 The mother’s point of view is at issue on every page of The Fortunate Pilgrim, and her tactics remain an object lesson—rallying the

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young by doing what has to be done, defying limits of class and gender by knowing when to stop, exercising control of the future by finally letting go—that persists in relevance three-quarters of a century later. I am especially interested in how the history of an undoing of tradition becomes the afterlife of the tradition itself—especially for women of any extraction who see themselves in peasant/proletarian precursors and including any number of men, like myself, who are not only able but somehow driven to identify across time and gender.

It is summer, 1928; and in Hell’s Kitchen, a Little Italy in New York City that was a bit less dense and a lot less picturesque than the Lower East Side, the street court of the immigrant matriarchs is in session. In the first chapter of The Fortunate Pilgrim, Puzo introduces us to the de facto domestic “madonnas” of Tenth Avenue, between thirtieth and thirtyfirst, who gather to mock and curse and expel from their hearts their American-born young: Each tenement was a village square; each had its group of women, all in black, sitting on stools and boxes and doing more than gossip. They recalled ancient history, argued morals and social law, always taking their precedents from the mountain village in southern Italy they had escaped, fled from many years ago. And with what relish their favorite imaginings! Now: What if their stern fathers were transported by some miracle to face the problems they faced every day? Or their mothers of the quick and heavy hands? What shrieks if they as daughters had dared as these American children dared? If they had presumed. . . . Each in turn told a story of insolence and defiance, themselves heroic, long-suffering, the children spitting Lucifers saved by an application of Italian discipline—the razor strop or the Tackeril. And at the end of each story each woman recited her requiem. Mannaggia America!—Damn America. But in the hot summer night their voices were filled with hope, with a vigor never sounded in their homeland. Here now was money in the bank, children who could read and write, grandchildren who would be professors if all went well. They spoke with guilty loyalty of customs they had themselves trampled into dust. (6–7)

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The customs in question are of course la via vecchia—the mothercentered and arguably mother-dominated ethos of fierce familialism and withering fatalism that underwrote a refusal of all forms of authority outside the extended kinship system, whether government, church, or education. “In their tenacious will to survive,” Richard Gambino reminds us, “the contadini paradoxically valued la via vecchia more than their very lives.”6 Yet what Puzo allows us to see is how the women themselves understood what was happening already—and why. The key issue for the women is the structure of individual selfdiscipline, filial obedience, and punitive parental authority upon which the exercise and reproduction of the system as a whole, including its ideological persuasiveness, rests, which the women declare is crumbling before their very eyes. And yet the examples with which the women illustrate the transatlantic breakdown between the generations seem like routines from cable television’s Comedy Central: the daughter who won’t abandon her bridal bed to attend her grandmother’s sickbed, the father who should murder the son impatient to get married, with outraged elder family members screeching “puttana” and “figlio disgraziato” and “mannaggia America!” through it all. Indeed, taken out of context, from a distance, these scenarios of tyrannical motherhood and fatherhood might as well be from Moonstruck or The Sopranos, which is to say they would be taken as tongue-in-cheek self-parody if the day-to-day conflicts, which they are meant to epitomize, weren’t still, at that time, so serious. What gives the pull and tug of mutual alienation between parents and children its particular tension is that the women know at some level who is responsible. The women aren’t saying it aloud, not within hearing of their children, and certainly not to the children; some of them aren’t even saying it to themselves—yet. What we have here is the nastily sublime dance of intergenerational projection, as much prospective vision as it is retrospective falsification. The women conduct a ritual excommunication of the young, whom they claim to be already alienated from them anyway. They revel in an emergently American form of guilty pride (“We have done this, tolerated that, for you”), while insisting in front of their children on a residually Mediterranean kind of deceptive disavowal (“It is you who are doing this to me and to those who have gone before”).

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How did the women get here from there? Southern Italians, mainly unskilled and illiterate, arrived in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as Mexicans often do today, as part of a surplus labor flow—young and sometimes not so young men, shuttling money and themselves back and forth across the Atlantic. Over time, the men, settling in, reluctant to return home, sent for wives and children or, more frequently, for a young village woman with whom to start a family. The men, who have depended on these women of the shadows (their mothers —and their sisters) to do almost everything except to work in the open marketplace, knew how invaluable the women were; they knew enough, even, to intuit how invaluable they would be. What social historians call chain migration was going on here, but so too, I think, was the subtle power dynamic of the Marian Catholic peasantry, in which outside the home the man is granted official stature, but it is the woman who more than likely solves the problems, makes the truly tough decisions, and commands the allegiance of all, especially her sons. “Men work and talk about politics,” reports one of Ann Cornelisen’s women of the shadows, “We do the rest. If we have to decide, that’s fair too. Why should we do all the work and not decide?”7 The men contracted themselves out as wage labor in the United States, sometimes with cartoon visions of gold-paved streets. More than a few were prodigal, most of the others scrimped and saved, but the women were in effect the visionaries, hardnosed visionaries: they made the decision to immigrate, to resettle so that there would be a chance, for the first time in history, for their progeny to escape poverty—even at the cost of those children becoming strangers (i.e., Americans). Rebellion, it seems, is the secret tradition of Italian immigrant women, whose wounds are as disguised as they are raw. As Puzo maintains, The truth: These country women from the mountain farms of Italy, whose fathers and grandfathers had died in the same rooms in which they were born, these women loved the clashing steel and stone of the great city, the thunder of trains in the railroad yards across the street, the lights above the Palisades far across the Hudson. As children they had lived in solitude, on land so poor that people scattered themselves singly along the mountain slopes to search out a living.

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Audacity had liberated them. They were pioneers, though they never walked an American plain and never felt real soil beneath their feet. They moved in a sadder wilderness, where the language was strange, where their children became members of a different race. It was a price that must be paid. (7–8)

Lucia Santa arrived at Ellis Island in 1908, at the very height of the Italian emigration, and she came in the classic fashion: as a bride married by proxy to a man from her village with whom she had played as a child and whose face she couldn’t even recall. She accepted the proposal because it entailed feasible escape. The boyhood friend writing from the United States went correctly through both fathers, which allowed Lucia Santa to feign obedience. But the truth was that her family was so poor that she would be given no bridal linen, which was a prospect too shameful for a woman of character to bear. From the vantage point of twenty years of struggle, Lucia Santa, as smart as the women come, recognizes her own culpability—she assented to leave, and she has fought for poverty’s end, and she accepts that her children are to become Americans—but as a Christian peasant, which she remains despite never going to church, she seeks forgiveness for what could only be seen as the hubris of her will to self-determination (her audacity), that challenge to Fate she herself made when she “traveled the three thousand miles of dark ocean to a strange country and a strange people” (8). You would think from the elegiac tone with which Puzo opens, in these quoted passages, that the torturous social history and intergenerational melodrama have become, by the late 1920s, a thing of the past; and in the time-honored way of superstitious misdirection, each of the women are hoping, praying (by insisting on how the battles are still being fought), that the real struggles are behind them, none more confidently than the matriarch of the Angeluzzi-Corbo clan. Now, after twenty years of struggle and a fair share of suffering, Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo stood on that little knoll of prosperity that the poor reach, reach with such effort that they believe the struggle is won and that with ordinary care their lives are safe. She had already lived a lifetime; the story was over. (11)

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And yet, of course, the story of Lucia Santa and the Angeluzzi-Corbo family has only just begun. A simple litany provides scale if not detail. Still to come are the disappearance, seeming evangelization, and ultimate fall into insanity of Lucia Santa’s second husband, Frank Corbo, whose departure is compounded, both economically and psychologically, by the almost immediate departure of the oldest boy, Larry. Larry (only his mother calls him Lorenzo) is an old-style charmer who gets serious only after he is cornered and it is too late; he becomes a petty gangster, lost more to himself, even, than he is to his family. The oldest girl, Octavia, is the only reliable breadwinner, yet complications from pleurisy relegate her to an extended-care facility for the better part of a year. The third Angeluzzi child, Vincenzo, born under the unlucky star of his father’s accidental death and despondent by nature, leaves school early to support the family, chaining himself to the railroad accounting desk only to die on the tracks in the railroad yards—apparently, against all Italian norms and precedent, by suicide. Governing the spiral of troubles is, of course, the Great Depression, which forces even an Italian like Lucia Santa —“the poorest Italian is the proudest of people”—to go on relief, for which, alas, she has in the ugly old-country fashion to tender kickbacks to the welfare agent. At the center of the narrative of The Fortunate Pilgrim, the very stuff of which my family’s “Donna Rosa” stories are made, is Lucia Santa’s improvisational handling of these myriad crises, acting at first from timehonored fears and old-time counsel yet learning from her mistakes. Some of her actions are overtly maternal but others seem callous, even brutal, in order to effect the very changes she supposedly doesn’t approve of and, at least officially, refuses to acknowledge. “America, America, what different bones and flesh and blood grow in your name? My children do not understand me when I speak, and I do not understand them when they weep” (225). “On every day in every year people must condemn and betray their loved ones. Lucia Santa did not think in terms of sentiment. But love and pity had value, a certain weight in life” (115). A hard-nosed pragmatism informs Lucia Santa’s seemingly inarticulate vision; she justifies her decisions by rituals of doomsaying that reflect and recall millennia of

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poverty, but the actual decision making, even at its most negative, is fueled by a secret optimism, an optimism both confirmed by assessing new-world shifts in possibility and chastened by hard lessons from this side of the Atlantic, thus a cautious optimism. Lucia Santa says she doesn’t understand the notion of happiness her kids keep crying for, but she is committed to feeding, housing, and nursing her brood beyond their meager means. In her speech and in her thinking she was pessimistic about life. Yet she lived like a true believer in good fortune. She rose in the morning with gladness, she bit into bread knowing it would be sweet. Her hope was a physical energy, replenished by her love for her children and the necessity to do battle for them. (159)

Lucia Santa’s life, then, is a pattern of “do as I do and not as I say” that slowly, surreptitiously, but inexorably draws the figure of happiness into the family equation.

Written during the late 1950s and early 1960s, The Fortunate Pilgrim is something of a precursor text to the feminist literary movement— “In search of our mothers’ gardens,” as Alice Walker phrased it—of the 1970s and 1980s. But in its attention to such matters as competitive intimacy, heterosexual entanglement, and the indirect exercise of power, The Fortunate Pilgrim reads less like the angry young women’s texts of utopian feminism—Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Walker’s The Color Purple—and more like the nuanced recoveries of Joan Chase’s During the Reign of the Queen of Persia or, more recently, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent. From the start, Puzo attends to the way mothers and daughters do the things women do: Lucia Santa felt Octavia sitting beside her on the backless chair; their hips and thighs touched. This always irritated the mother, but her daughter would be offended if she moved, so she accepted it. Seeing her daughter so oddly handsome, dressed in the American style, she gave the old crony Zia Louche a smile that showed both her pride and

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a hint of derisive irony. Octavia, dutifully silent and attentive, saw that smile and understood it, yet she was bewildered once again by her mother’s nature. As if her mother could understand that Octavia wanted to be everything these women were not? With the foolish and transparent cleverness of the young, she wore a powder-blue suit that hid her bust and squared the roundness of her hips. She wore white gloves, as her high school teacher had done. Her eyebrows were heavy and black, honestly unplucked. Hopelessly she compressed the full red lips to an imaginary sternness, here yes quietly grave—and all to hide the drowning sensuality that had been the undoing of the women around her. For Octavia reasoned that satisfying the terrible dark need stilled all other needs and she felt a frightened pity for these women enchanted into dreamless slavery by children and the unknown pleasures of a marriage bed. This would not be her fate. She sat with bowed head, listening, Judas-like; pretending to be one of the faithful, she planned treason and escape. Now with only women around her, Octavia took off her jacket. . . . Lucia Santa took the jacket and folded it over her arm, an act of love that was maternal, that meant possession and dominance. But above all an act of reconciliation, for earlier that evening mother and daughter had quarreled. Octavia wanted to go to night school, study to become a teacher. Lucia Santa refused permission. No; she would become ill working and going to school. “Why? Why?” the mother asked. “You, such a beautiful dressmaker, you earn good money.” The mother objected out of superstition. This course was known. Life was unlucky, you followed a new path at your peril. You put yourself at the mercy of fate. Her daughter was too young to understand. Unexpectedly, shamefacedly, Octavia has said, “I want to be happy,” and the older woman became a raging fury, contemptuous— the mother, who has always defended her daughter’s toity ways, her reading of books, her tailored suits that were as affected as a lorgnette. The mother had mimicked Octavia in the perfect English of a shallow girl, “You want to be happy.” And then in Italian, with deadly seriousness, “Thank God you are alive.”

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In the cool evening air Octavia accepted her mother’s act of peace, sat gracefully, hands folded in her lap. Remembering the quarrel, she mused on the mystery of her mother’s speaking perfect English when mimicking her children. (11–13)

Octavia is plotting to slip out of the cycle of reproduction that she holds responsible for the poverty and constriction of the lives around her. She credits the oppressive cycle of these women’s lives, simply and strictly, to sexual desire. The Italian-born cronies, modest in conduct but earthy in speech (“With a husband I thought your mouth would get cleaner as the other got dirtier”) and in mind (“If little Lena grew up like this [lipsticked and rouged hussy] . . . little Lena would be a young American lady whose strapped ass matched the colors on her face”), condescend to Octavia, partly because they think, correctly, that she underestimates sexual attraction and, more importantly, erotic communion. The novel has already established the paradigm of loyalty versus betrayal, but the mutual accusation being played out here is complex. Lucia Santa is already harboring supportive inclinations, and she sometimes defends her daughter’s quest for self-determination to her cronies, but she certainly isn’t ready to tell Octavia that, because she needs Octavia’s unopened paycheck to be as large as possible. So their confrontations have been fierce. In the future, with her younger children, the idiom of accusation will become adaptable to a form of provocation—to push them over the edge. But Octavia is the eldest girl child, and for all of them to survive, she must be made to do things her mother’s way. What is happiness? This is an idea the mother can’t get her mind around. The not-understanding is itself part of a dialectic: she can’t afford to be taken to understand or even, secretly, to allow herself to understand yet, that much she does intuit. She senses the consequences of ambition: that her children will become increasingly alienated from Southern Italian culture and, indeed, from its symbolic center and traditional watch guard, the mother—that is, from her very self. Lucia Santa realizes fairly early on that she has initiated a shift in mores and emotion as inconceivable among the peasantry in Italy as the escape from poverty itself, and this is “the price to be paid.” In the most demographically typical manner, Lucia Santa rejects English for herself.8 For the family’s sake, Octavia must be recruited to her mother’s purpose, to her mother’s

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way of thinking and feeling, so Octavia becomes the first child to be let in on her mother’s secret. Lucia Santa is willing to give certain signs of her contrariness, seemingly in objection but actually in mediation and conciliation. Their sophisticated interplay—layered and contrary and multiply pronged—has elements of the theatrical and the coded, but it is not a sham. At stake is the fate of their family. At the heart of the tension between mother and daughter is Octavia’s own harsh judgment that her mother’s life is a waste. As she sees it, her mother’s physical yen for Frank Corbo prompted her to tolerate his weakness, his conspicuous spoiling of Gino, and his absentminded cruelty to Vinnie. The only way to escape her mother’s trap is for Octavia to refuse men, sexuality, and babymaking altogether. And yet she is not the total rebel her attitude suggests, given how she concedes to the very sacrifices that her mother is at this moment insisting upon. Instead of night school, where she might follow her dream to become a teacher, Octavia must use her evenings to protect her health, to earn overtime when necessary, and to help wrangle the four younger children, especially through their still-important schooling. In this begrudging compromise, in which she curtails her own dreams in order to secure the futures of her siblings, Octavia is more her mother’s daughter than she would admit. We learn fairly quickly how much sacrifice her mother demands. At work Octavia experiments with having it all when she is offered the opportunity to teach how to use sewing machines to prospective consumers in the neighborhood. Octavia figures that running clinics in English and Italian for the Melody Sewing Machine Company will allow her not only to escape the sweatshop floor but also to exercise her gift for teaching. In short order, however, she runs into the exploitive logic of consumer capitalism, when she learns that the real purpose of such clinics is bait and switch: offering the genuine utility of the entry-level model in order to trick customers into buying the overpriced deluxe models, and to pull off that substitution, moreover, by manipulating personal warmth and the promise of friendship. Octavia balks at what is being asked of her and gets fired in just two weeks. In the ensuing face-off with her mother, the peasant stubbornness of Lucia Santa and the opportunity-fueled idealism of Octavia meet each other more than halfway: there is something of American idealism in the mother’s admission that she wouldn’t make nice to people even for money, and something of Italian fatalism in the

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daughter’s insistence, contra her teachers, that real life exists only in the extremes—either sell yourself to get ahead or get left behind with your integrity. And so it goes with Octavia, a strategic give-and-take-and-give-again, until she makes her final stand, seven or so years later, at the ripe old spinsterhood age of twenty-five, when she breaks her personal vow and allows herself to fall in love. The aging Italian cronies turn out to be right about the spell of desire, but Octavia has held out longer than anyone could have imagined, especially given her natural voluptuousness. The man she proposes to marry, Norman Bergeron, is, of all things, a Jewish poet who writes in Yiddish, whom she meets at the only place a good Italian girl from a neighborhood whose denizens are all Catholics could meet such a foreigner, at work. For Octavia, who has had to restrain her appetite for knowledge and experience, Bergeron the Yiddish poet is the embodiment of a wider world; in addition, Bergeron doesn’t want children, allowing Octavia to escape the reproductive cycle without sacrificing companionate heterosexuality. It is, I think, a brilliant compromise. Even Lucia Santa, by this time, almost a decade after the opening of the novel, is cottoning on. She acknowledges, at least to herself, the marital logic of avoiding “those guinea tyrants” who locked their wives at home . . . ; who made an uproar fit for wild goats if spaghetti was not steaming on the table at the precise moment their baronial boots crossed the doorsill; who never raised a finger to help their pregnant wives, and sat calmly smoking stinking De Nobili cigars while their big-bellied women stood on the windowsills, so topheavy as they washed dirty glass that they were in danger of tumbling like balloons to the pavement of Tenth Avenue. (207)

More importantly, she gives the union, in a paradox of cultural transformation that is ultimately progressive, an Italian-style family blessing. With the help of her cronies, Lucia Santa throws a big old-fashioned guinea wedding, inviting the whole neighborhood and even the rich cousins from New Jersey and Long Island (though not without cunning design, as Gino is coming handsomely of age). She agrees with all and sundry that it is strange that her daughter has not chosen an Italian, and that is it is stranger still that her daughter has found the one Jew who

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can’t seem to make money, but that there is wisdom—or so the women concur—in Octavia’s decision not to have deal with one of them, those Italian men, the despotic greenhorns of Tenth Avenue.

Focusing on Octavia’s relation to her mother highlights the constructive dynamic of change and continuity down the female line, but it skips over the emotional faultlines a bit too readily. Because the women do the real work of supporting and demanding the Americanization of the young, the young, the boys especially, are at risk for feeling “defathered” twice over—cut off from the ways of the Italians and too much beholden to the women now functioning in their stead. (As Robert Orsi suggests, “the rebels invariably turned against their mothers, who expressed and symbolized the power of the domus.”)9 That Vinnie Angeluzzi, the melancholic middle child, lost his biological father to typical male carelessness is the harsh judgment of Lucia Santa and her like-minded cronies, but it is history’s lesson as well: the vast majority of the women worked in the home or at least “out of” the home, where they were sheltered from the worst of nativist and capitalist abuses, concrete and foreign tongues not withstanding, whereas men raised on agricultural rhythms were drawn into the psychophysical vortex of relentless industrial labor. Drawing upon common immigrant tragedy a second time, Puzo makes the mother something more than an innocent bystander-victim to masculine failure and paternal desertion. Puzo pushes Frank Corbo over the edge and in so doing corners Lucia Santa into committing him to an asylum, with Oedipal repercussions ever after. Frank Corbo, that gentle unreconstructed peasant who needed alas to work the farm and breathe mountain air, undergoes a rapid deterioration in sanity that is truly terrifying—especially to the uneducated, medicalknowledgeless, social science–less Lucia Santa, who is put in a no-win situation. Banishing a member of the family, any member of the family, never mind a woman’s one adult love and the father of her children, to the care of outsiders—which is just exactly how the Southern Italians understood any such institutionalization—is historical anathema. When Lucia Santa commits Frank Corbo to the state mental institution, she does a terrible American thing, closing family ranks against him rather than around him—and she knows it. Although Lucia Santa is “just” a

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peasant, no small degree of ethical distinction has gone into a decision that, from contemporary middle-class standards, looks like pure common sense, but actually entails what Puzo in the opening pages calls “argu[ing] morals and social law,” not as expiatory ritual of self-denial and self-recognition, but as means of judging her obligations to Corbo under ancient codes of conduct amidst new American realities (husbands go crazy, states have public mental hospitals, American law gives even women the right to institutionalize crazy husbands) and new American experiences (money in the bank and children who can read and write, but also bedding and marrying a man “for love”). Such institutionalization is banishment from the family and de facto excommunication, justifiable only in instances of intentional betrayal. Period. And that’s the tricky discernment: Lucia Santa regards Frank Corbo not as a betrayer of his commitment to her, her children, their children—a commitment he made courageously, against local wisdom and demographic odds—but simply as someone who couldn’t fulfill on the promise he made. Corbo’s promise to the Angeluzzis is not governed by contemporary contract theory but by an older ethos of commitment, meaning that Lucia Santa believes that Frank Corbo is still owed familial care and protection. It is only because Corbo’s mental condition poses such an outsized threat that she betrays him (her word, her formulation), doing what absolutely must be done. Lucia Santa’s memory of their passion, which consummated the engagement and characterized the early days of their marriage, compounds her felt transgression. Lucia Santa understands her relationship with Corbo to be special in a modern American kind of way: sacramentally consecrated by a sexual magic, classically discounted and unfelt, that she herself (against all gender conditioning) first put into play and that culminated in the conception of their firstborn son, a boy child “conceived in true love.”10 That boy child is of course Gino, whose future is ultimately secured by his father’s commitment despite the fact, paradoxically because of the fact, that he resents it bitterly. The only member of the family who regrets Frank Corbo’s departure more than Gino is Lucia Santa, but the only member of the family who holds Lucia Santa more responsible for the loss of Corbo than Lucia Santa does herself is Gino; in the decade-long play of mutual recrimination and projected misunderstandings that ensues, Gino acts out against Lucia Santa and everything—here comes the

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symbolic regime of la via vecchia once again—he assumes she represents. In refusing to acknowledge or even recognize the betrayed love and felt rejection beneath Gino’s inarticulate rebellion, Lucia Santa pushes Gino out of the nest and beyond her sphere of cultural influence—he will have the strength, when the time comes, to act on his rebellious convictions—while she looks the emotional consequences directly in the face, responding to his increasing hatred of her by learning to hate in return. At the opening of the novel, the women were asking sotto voce, through their displacement narratives, for the forgiveness of Fate for what they themselves had done to their parents and their parents’ ways. At the close, Lucia Santa asks Fate to forgive her for what her emigrant adventure has done to her children, especially her beloved boy: America, america, blasphemous dream. Giving so much, why could it not give everything? Lucia Santa wept for the inevitable crimes she had committed against those she loved. In her world, as a child, the wildest dream had been to escape the fear of hunger, sickness, and the force of nature. The dream was to stay alive. No one dreamed further. But in America wilder dreams were possible, and she had never known of their existence. Bread and shelter were not enough. . . . With terrible clarity she knew Gino would never come home after the war. That he hated her as she had hated her father. That he would become a pilgrim and search for strange Americas in his dreams. And now for the first time Lucia Santa begged for mercy. Let me hear his footsteps at the door and I will live those forty years again. I will make my father weep and become a pilgrim to sail the fearful ocean. I will let my husband die . . . and then I will weep beside his coffin. And then I will do it once again. (281–82, Puzo’s emphasis)

It is a devastating formulation, with only a trace of self-pity, since what Lucia Santa prays for is not freedom from the suffering that has gone before and from all yet to come but only for mercy, and not a general mercy at that, but a quite particular one. Lucia Santa grants herself one dream and one dream only, for a sign of forgiveness, a step across the threshold that is if not a move in fact to reconciliation at least to the peace of a mother’s knowledge that there is peace in her child’s heart. What then is Lucia Santa dreaming of?

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The answer, in the most fundamental way, is The Fortunate Pilgrim, which is the mythically imagined yet very real homecoming of one Gino Corbo, aka the author Mario Puzo. In 1955, Puzo, a struggling writer with one novel behind him, set out to produce a self-portrait, but by 1964 he had rendered his immigrant mother as the pragmatic visionary, the beset-upon conjure woman of his own—ultimately remarkable— future: When I came to my “autobiographical novel,” the one every writer does about himself, I planned to make myself the sensitive, misunderstood hero, much put upon by his mother and family. To my astonishment my mother took over the book and instead of my revenge I got another comeuppance. But it is, I think, my best book. And those old-style grim conservative Italians whom I hated, then pitied so patronizingly, they also turned out to be heroes. Through no desire of mine, I was surprised. The thing that amazed me was their courage. . . . How did they ever have the balls to get married, have kids, go out to earn a living in a strange land, with no skills, not even knowing the language? They made it without tranquilizers, without sleeping pills, without psychiatrists, without even a dream. Heroes. Heroes all around me.11

Admittedly, Puzo seems to have been a bit slow—forty-plus years old, an Italian American son in a storytelling tradition such as this one, and he still hadn’t figured out the double-sidedness of his mother. But when —after laboring for nine long years, without benefit of either feminist instruction or multicultural chic—he finally comprehended, it was with an empathy so luminous, a self-recrimination so trenchant, that it felt to him like his authorial vision had come directly from the (maternal) source.12 As Puzo puts it, in the common parlance of Hell’s Kitchen, he finally got his comeuppance, and his mother, once again, got her way. What then distinguishes The Fortunate Pilgrim, which is after all a novel, from the myriad Donna Rosa stories that, I suspect, every family descended from one form or another of Catholic peasantry tells itself? Of the oft-told tales in my family, perhaps the favorite, certainly the most repeated, concerns that quintessential early moment of crisis, when Rosa’s first husband died and her brothers—how many brothers? who

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knows, the story is semi-apocryphal anyway—came all the way from Italy to cart her back “to where she belonged.” Penniless, illiterate, skill-less, with two small children, and with no means of support, Rosa Granito proclaimed: “My children were born here, in America. They are Americans. I will not go!” The ostensible point of the story is Rosa’s stubbornness, her courage, and her farsightedness; the implicit point, which no one in my family would linger on but which no one would miss either, was that she did the near impossible, the theoretically unprecedented, the culturally imaginable: she said, “No!” to a unified band of (her) Italian men. What I’ve never heard addressed in all the family lore is what such defiance, breaking codes and hearts, meant for her. Compare, then, The Fortunate Pilgrim: Puzo has said that he fears that in writing the novel, he yielded to something he calls “retrospective falsification,” making the crusty old immigrants more attractive than ever he knew them to be. But Puzo is behaving in classic Southern Italian fashion here, that is, with too much humility, fending off the evil eye by refusing to tell the truth of his achievement, leaving it for us to do so— after his death, in his stead. It is my understanding, book tutored but bone deep, that Lucia Santa is the way it was: Puzo’s portrait in words gives that once-plasterized and now-plasticated icon of Italian American history, “the immigrant mother,” uncanny voice, so that she may speak to us, with pride (“Yes, now they were on Long Island”) but without selfdelusion (“I wanted this without guilt, without sorrow, without fear of death and the terror of a judgment day”), of the great and costly victory over caste destiny that she won at the last for her progeny.

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5

Song A Punch in Everyman’s Kisser if Frank Sinatra could Do so much for the man who was the horror of horrors, To sing such that he could make it through a day Just think what such listening can do for me. —Gerald Early, 1989

The “long” American 1950s—the postwar period running from Harry S Truman’s dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945 to John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and the subsequent passage of civil rights and immigration-reform legislation in 1964—was the first great watershed for Italians in the United States, when they finally achieved their American dreams of no more hunger and much more dignity. In 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took Italians off the “suspect aliens” list and shut down the relocation operations.1 Conspicuous in numbers and valor during World War II, the Italian Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief, wrapping themselves in their hard-won reputation as solid, upright, God-fearing citizens who practiced family values. Postwar prosperity and the GI Bill brought economic security, making the second and in most cases third generations solidly blue-collar, not entirely immune to prejudice, particularly class prejudice, but able to operate without fear for body or basic livelihood. No one would have advertised her own foreignness, but it 90

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was no longer an embarrassment to admit grandparents or parents had been Italians. Despite the gaudy Italian presence in organized crime, the vast majority of Americans understood that ordinary Italian Americans subscribed to “the American way of life,” and no everyday Italian American was going to go out of her way to undermine the safeguards of that common impression. “We [Americans] are all third generation,” as anthropologist Margaret Mead put it.2 Poverty had been vanquished from their midst; the taint of unassimilable backwardness had slipped off their shoulder; and (im)migrant workers from the Caribbean and the Pacific Rim—“Hispanics,” “Orientals,” and “West Indians,” as the polite terminology then went—were, increasingly, the new kids in town. The guineas, it seems, had gotten white. Or had they? In the 1950s ethnicity was something you were supposed to leave behind, if not entirely then at least when you went out in public, which makes the Italians of the postwar period a special instance, because in certain key arenas they were—for the first time outside of organized crime—very much out in public. It was at mid-century that Italians, in significant numbers, made their first great breach into legitimate America—into ward and city politics (Fiorello LaGuardia and Vito Marcantonio), into sports (baseball especially, but also Vince Lombardi and others in football), and, most importantly, into arts and entertainment—as character actors, classical musicians, big band instrumentalists, graphic artists, theater and film production folk of all sorts (including directors Frank Capra and Vincente Minnelli), but, especially, as makers of popular music. By the mid-1950s—at the height of postwar consensus and complacency, when Joe McCarthy was finally censured by Eisenhower for his anti-Semitic anti-Communism, and the only official problem left that everyone knew about was the monstrosity of Jim Crow (the immigrationrestriction laws and Southwestern border patrols being dirty little halfsecrets)—there was hardly a popular singer in sight, at least not a white male singer before Elvis, who wasn’t an Italian American, whether his name ended with a vowel (Mario Lanza, Julius La Rosa, Jimmy Durante, Al Martino, Louis Prima, Perry Como) or had been anglicized in fact or pronunciation (Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Vic Damone, Jerry Vale, and Connie Francis). And all of this happened at a time—what we would call, retrospectively, the conformist

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1950s—when, ethnically speaking, no one was even supposed to notice, and the children and grandchildren of the Italian immigrants, solidly blue-collar without being threateningly upwardly mobile, were supposed to be settling in nicely. In some ways what we see here is a classic pattern of ethnic advancement: from the factories (immigrant generation) to the entertainment industries (second and, in the Italian case, third generation) to the corporate and professional boardrooms (breached, finally, in the 1970s). But that Italians are apt to be found singing is the oldest of ethnic archetypes, transcending period (organ grinders and East Side divas at century’s end, Enrico Caruso and crooners like Columbo between the wars, Mitch Ryder and Frankie Valli and the Philadelphia doo-wopers like the Rascals by the end of the 1950s, John Pizzarelli and Dominic Chianese today) and lending credence to the age-old claim that singing means more to those from Italy than finding a better way, generation after generation, to make a living in America. We are left, that is, with the sneaky suspicion that there is something particularly Italian-like about pop singing, a presumption which shouldn’t disconcert us anymore than the connection of African Americans with the blues, jazz, and R & B, but a linkage—given the roots of American pop in the Tin Pan Alley and musical comedy production companies of Jewish, WASP, and black music makers dating to the 1930s and 1920s—much more difficult to put one’s finger on. Or is it? If the Italian American presence within the musical arts is a telltale for ethnic persistence in the Wonder bread 1950s, a story of group self-transformation that we need to figure out how to read, then we are blessed with a test case within the test case: the mystery of the Italian Americanness of one particularly great singer’s particular greatness. Let me speak bluntly here. No one has ever been more important to Italian America’s sense of itself—outside the family—than Frank Sinatra. No one has ever been more important to pop vocalization and performative masculinity in the United States—that is, to the way American men sing—than Frank Sinatra. From these two propositions, hyperbolic in their claims yet astonishingly close to the truth, I wish to derive a third: that no one of Italian ancestry has been more important to America’s love affair with difference than Frank Sinatra, a singer, actor, and cultural impresario who made ethnic self-dramatization—defiantly seductive, seductively defiant—into an art.

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This chapter’s puzzle, “What made Sinatra Sinatra?” is really three questions in one: Where did Sinatra come from? Why has America fallen in love with the man and his music time after time? And what difference does listening to Sinatra make to the way Americans live their lives? I don’t have the space here to tell the whole story, but I do want to examine the Italian American dimension of his aesthetic performance, wherein lies, I believe, the mystery of his transformative power: not only the key to Sinatra’s personal hold over the postwar imagination but act one, as well, of why, in an age that alternates between a comically individualized multiculturalism and a tragically racial resegregation, feeling Italian still matters. From quite humble origins in the mixed immigrant ghetto of the dock town of Hoboken, New Jersey, with nary a private music lesson and only forty-seven days of high school, and despite there having been “no evidence” of “any talent at all,” Sinatra became, among other things, the most respected and influential pop vocalist in world history, teaching himself to perform on stage and in the studio as if on stage, in ways that aficionados, both amateur and professional, love to analyze and debate.3 Music scholars in particular have given a persuasive, practically consensual account of the technical accomplishment of Sinatra’s recorded voice: how in terms of prolonged breath control tightly attuned to lyrics, a light and therefore accessible baritone vibrato, a sensitively masculine recasting of lyrics originally written for women, and an early mastery of the conversational effect of the microphone, he did what he did, does what he does. Of that much we are sure. Reading the musical scholarship is fascinating, and I heartily recommend it, but Sinatra’s technique in the narrow sense is not my focus here. I want to consider instead the much more controversial issue of the larger persona that his technique served: where it originated, how it has been perceived, what it actually does, and why the answers to these related questions—answers that are thickly and wondrously entangled in Italian America—count, for everybody. A few years back, Paula Marantz Cohen, an expert in nineteenthcentury British and American women’s literature, argued that the United States had to wait an even hundred years for the great Poet—not a mere versifier but one who would “express” the American soul—for whom Ralph Waldo Emerson, early New England’s philosopher-king, first called in 1842.4 Whitman was not it, nor Emily Dickinson, nor Robert

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Frost, nor Langston Hughes, but rather a popular singer who penned scarcely a word of his own, yet in giving voice to lyricists and composers gave voice to the nation at large, across spectrums of class and faith, region and color, sex and gender. It was an outrageous thing for Professor Cohen to claim, especially before a major academic conference, but in its populism and passion and irreverence for establishment propriety, deliciously Sinatra-esque, inspiring me to ask in Cohen’s honor: what then does ethnicity have to do with it? When in the midst of Sinatra, I hear only Sinatra. But if given a chance to reflect, I find that a form of musical memory akin to, because constituted by, erotic memory, kicks in: Dion DiMucci, singing “The Wanderer”; Bobby Darin, singing “Beyond the Sea”; the Four Seasons, singing “December, 1963 (Oh What a Night).” I wonder, then, if it is a coincidence, the affinities that Sinatra in his bravado seems to have for those other Italian American pop songsters, from Russ Colombo to John Pizzarelli—a genealogy so large and seemingly comprehensive that if litanized (guess how many changed their names?) it would put you back on your heels. John Rockwell of the New York Times puts the convergence down to received high tradition. Rockwell says Sinatra’s “‘hitting on’ bel canto was not just a clever choice; it was an instinctive response to the cultural heritage he had absorbed from his family and his ancestors.”5 In reaching back, then, to something like a bel canto form—its conversational subtlety, but also its Mediterranean operatic and masculine emotive openness, the Italian American singers gave an established national popular form a specifically ethnic twist, an evolution, the crucial paradox, that renewed and enhanced, rather than limited, its transethnic appeal.

In 1958 and 1959, sociologist Herbert J. Gans sojourned in the West End of Boston, on the eve of its destruction by urban renewal, subsequently producing his 1962 classic, The Urban Villagers. The West Enders were second-generation Americans of Italian descent and their offspring: urban villagers who hung together—non-Italians would have said clung together—in resistance to what they understood as “the outside world,” meaning mainstream, middle-class America. Yet ethnic identity was a peculiar matter among them. West Enders were not, Gans insists, prone

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to praise individuals, including public figures, just because they were Italian Americans—in fact, they were more apt to ridicule that form of easy identification.6 But there was no one in the world they admired and wished to identify with more than Francis Albert Sinatra. On the one hand, Sinatra’s appeal in the West End had something to do with his public persona. The West Enders embraced not only his refusal to be embarrassed by his background, but also his willingness to countenance offending the genteel sensibilities of an Anglo-American cultural elite that otherwise was taken, for good reason, with the classiness of his singing. Behavior that came across as crass if not exploitative on Beacon Hill and at the Boston Globe—Sinatra’s romantic exploits, fist fights, mafia friends, incorrect ethnic jokes—was taken, in the West End, as vital attitude. In other words, to fare brutta figura on Park Avenue, at least according to the New Yorker and the New York Times, was to win points on Arthur Avenue, Canal Street, and in industrial Jersey, where Sinatra was celebrated for demonstrating that you could leave the corner without leaving its values behind. “This was the Sinatra who did not have to say he was ‘bad’ because we all knew he was.”7 However instinctive Sinatra’s public behavior was, he understood what was at stake in it for Italian Americans. Calling himself the “Top Wop,” he identified his appetites and emotions with the south of Italy— that famous Sicilian temper—and, more importantly, he identified his disdain of social niceties with the Italian American urban street corner, what Gans calls “the peer group society.” At the Lido nightclub in Paris in 1962, Sinatra followed up a quietly majestic rendition of “Ol’ Man River” by commenting, “That song was about Sammy Davis’s people— and dis song is about mah people.” That song about his people was Rodger and Hart’s “The Lady Is a Tramp.” When the Italians step out, he seemed to be saying, they can adopt good taste, put on forms of elegance (the lady likes the theater), while refusing the policing mechanisms of high society and highbrow culture (she likes the theater so much she refuses to arrive late).8 Sinatra’s version of post-ghetto ethnicity, then, is measured not in expressed pride for an Italian American boyhood (Hoboken was too tough a place for waxing nostalgic) but by the persistence and exemplification of particular boyhood values—a circular definition of what it means to be a wop.9 When is an Italian American not a wop? One boozy evening at their

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infamous hang-out Jilly’s (the bar in The Manchurian Candidate), one of the fellas asked, “Who is the worst living American?” The clear choice was the boxer Jake La Motta, an Italian American whom they considered not only an ugly bruiser in the ring but a gross bastard outside of it— quite literally a figlio disgraziato who, rumor had it, sold out his old man. (“‘He dumped the fight to Billy Fox, and never told his father, who bet his life savings on Jake,’ Sinatra said. ‘Lower than whale shit.’”)10 On the other hand, when Sinatra and his gang came across that special combination of grace-cum-impropriety that they recalled from the best of their corner days, they hailed the man to their part of town. Their favorite boxer, for instance, was Sugar Ray Robinson, an African American esteemed for his consummate gracefulness as a fighter and for an uptown bejeweled flashiness: it was Sinatra, above all, who made sure that Robinson and his lavender Cadillac were always welcome at Jilly’s.11 So where’s the rub? According to the majority of the biographers who anticipated and commentators who responded to Sinatra’s death, what made Sinatra great was his transcendence of the street corner as a singer; otherwise, in his life and personhood, he was said to be arrested in “a kind of permanent adolescence.” Insisting that “Sinatra was a musician, not a life style,” critics have averred time and again that, in his music, thank God, Sinatra was able to exchange his Sicilian temper for poetic passion, his vulgar street talk for worldly wit, and his “virility, flash, a hint of gangsterism” for “gravity, understatement, and a precise calibration of emotion.”12 I have encountered this dichotomy so often, I’m forced to wonder, was Ol’ Blue Eyes just a boy who wouldn’t grow up, after all? Of course, nothing would be more Italian American than to shrug my shoulders: who the f—— cares? In fact, I’ve been in the explanation business too long—I do care. And like Frank, I want to throw a punch. When Gans took up residence among the Italians of Boston’s West End, he was astonished—truly astonished—by how they related to one another. The West Enders were obsessively communal in a manner that spotlighted individuals in an elegant social chemistry that Gans barely had language for: he likened it to “display” and “performance” within a “group setting,” often the family, but more often the peer group.13 I believe that Sinatra, initiated in such rituals at home and as a youth, reproduced them as a singer for a national marketplace—in his relation

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to the material, to the audience, and to the occasion. In the final analysis it was not only his exhilaration in misbehavin’ that identified Sinatra as Italian American but his exaltedly brilliant way of putting misbehavior, that is, belligerent autonomy, into the vocalization itself—during which he teases and rallies, steps out and supports, incorporates and distinguishes. There can be no question of Sinatra’s extraordinariness. He was one of those uncommon locals driven to get out. And yet the desire to make it as a singer—to sing live and soon on recordings, and, later, as a radio and television personality, as an actor, and so on—was assiduously cultivated in Northeastern working-class Italian neighborhoods, and more was at stake in it than the desire to do something artistic that wouldn’t be labeled as sissy: Group members—be they adult or adolescent—display themselves to the group, to show their peers that they are as good if not slightly better than the rest, but then they yield the floor to the next person and allow him to do likewise. The purpose of this is to create mild envy among the rest of the group. . . . And the most talented of both sexes try to become entertainers. Thus, although an interest in art is considered effeminate, there is nothing wrong if boys want to become singers of popular music, for this is an opportunity for self-display. In fact, most of the successful white singers today are Italians, and it is no accident that they are as much creators of a distinctive personal image as they are purveyors of songs. Italians have done well in contemporary popular music because it emphasizes the development of an individual image and style more than technical musical skill. (82–83)

One can argue with Gans for overemphasizing the distinction between technique and style, but he was onto something I think, and something not only about what drove Sinatra onto the stage and into the studio and onto the screen but also what he did when he got there—with the music, with the other musicians, and with his audience. The peer group principle has even more important consequences for personality organization. Indeed, the role of the group in the life of the individual is such that he exists primarily in the group. School

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officials, for example, pointed out that teenagers were rough and active when they were with their peers, but quiet and remarkably mild and passive when alone. Their mildness is due to the fact that they exist only partially when they are outside the group. In effect, the individual personality functions best and most completely among his or her peers—a fact that has some implications for independence and dependence, conformity and individualism among the West Enders. (40)

The problem is that the sociological mode of analysis Gans was trained in —distinguishing individual from group—is already too individualistic. The challenge is to characterize the experience of Sinatra in performance: how he sings, his relation to each song and to the composite songbook, his relation to the supporting musicians and vice versa; and how that singing is received by the listener, each song heard individually but also in relation to each other, each listener listening individually but also in relation to each other and to the evolving persona. Even in this conceptualization, though, I risk tripping over the inherent logic of long-established individualistic formulae and habits of mind. The jazz and cultural historian John Gennari has suggested there is something askew in the way the New York and Hollywood cognoscenti blame what they regard as Sinatra’s emotional neediness and social maladroitness on his mother, Dolly Sinatra, a ward healer, occasional abortionist, and all around toughie whose work outside the home made Sinatra, an only child, into a latchkey kid.14 Dolly Sinatra’s supposed emotional austerity—reminiscent of the tough love that Lucia Santa administered at home—must have had something to do with the force of personality her son needed in order to get out of town, across the river. But to reduce Sinatra’s joy in the spotlight to maternal neglect is too easy, way too easy—especially in light of what transpired down on the corner, out on the street.15 In his ambition, “smitten with singing,” Sinatra was not so much exceptional as hyper-typical; the pathology, if that’s what it was, as much cultural as personal, indeed an exaggerated personal drive because it was an internalized cultural appetite. John Lahr characterizes Sinatra’s drive to entertain, increasingly familiar to gossip-hungry Hollywood, as a personal weakness, implying that Sinatra’s generosity was desperate, compensatory, and utterly selfserving. “Offstage, Sinatra was dubbed the Innkeeper by his friends,

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because of the largesse of his hospitality; onstage, he operated more or less the same way. He fed others to insure that he got what he needed.”16 Sinatra’s friends in Los Angeles, not Italians, called him the “Innkeeper” because the only language they had for his extroverted form of engagement was one of hospitality—a concept that does not have an equivalent in the Italian language.17 For an Italian, to do well in food and friendship and clothing is to put on a good face (bella figura) for and in front of your friends—it is part fear, part love—and it generates what Italians mean by rispetto, respect: all the more necessary once you’ve made it, and who from the neighborhood (any neighborhood) ever made it bigger than Frankie? Biographer after biographer has noted how Sinatra was less smooth, less knowing, less comfortable without the microphone, as if his awkwardness should come as a regrettable surprise—a character flaw tinged, alas, with ethnicity. But as I see it, Sinatra came into his own—was more relaxed, was “more himself” even—in the act of singing because to be in action in public is where Italian men, at least West End–style Italian American men, find themselves; I wish less to credit him either with the achievement of gentility or self-identity—that’s for the Anglos and the therapists—than to credit the performances that earned him respect, even among the upper-crust, but by no means only among the uppercrust, with the persistence and redeployment of a certain psychosocial logic difficult to describe because our explanatory terms, pitting the isolated individual against the conformist group, have not and still do not come from the urban street corner, whose crowd wouldn’t care to explain itself. Especially if asked. When critics analyze Sinatra’s mastery of the standard pop repertoire, they tend to emphasize class dynamics, of which there is, of course, an abundance: “Sinatra’s appropriations of the standards was also the acquisition of the manners of another class. ‘It’s like stealing a Cadillac —except he’s stealing George Gershwin,’ the biographer Pete Hamill says.”18 But I’m not sure in the final analysis that it is right to say that Sinatra stole the songs, exactly—even if Cole Porter and other songwriters occasionally felt that way—anymore than it is right to imply that when singing he was able momentarily to assimilate. What Sinatra actually did was to give renewed life to an established, indeed waning Tin Pan Alley musical tradition, reviving the freestanding songs of the

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pre–golden era musical comedies of the 1920s and 1930s. With the help of Ella Fitzgerald, especially, he gave the back catalog such updated panache he turned them into standards—while at the same time inspiring writers like Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen to work freshly in this revitalized tradition for him. Wherever his material came from, he did not simply do it in his style—as, say, Louis Prima jazzed songs up, or the post-Trio Nat King Cole eased them down; rather, in so much of his work, Sinatra fit song and style together, as if they were meant for each other. There is much talk about Sinatra’s uniqueness, but there was actually a sophisticated, ultimately alchemic give-and-take between singer and song that came across as a natural convergence of generic form with personal voice. “With other singers—Vic Damone, for instance, and Tony Bennett— you admired the technique; with Sinatra you admired the rendition. He presented the song like a landscape he’d restored, painting himself into the picture so masterfully that it was impossible to imagine it without him” (Lahr 83). Sinatra’s rendition gave a song to the audience by giving it back to itself, or at least seeming to; not radical separatism but a communalizing form of interpretive individuation. And he did not do it alone. Whatever his periodic troubles with Mitch Miller or Nelson Riddle, overall Sinatra was enormously generous to the professionals serving him because he liked to work—to play—with them. They wanted, desperately, like the boys on the corner, to please each other—not just because he was The Man, for it was in his desire for their pleasure, their desire to please, that being the top wop was constituted. In effect, everything was always live: he brought friends, family, and prospects into the studio with him. Will Friedwald tells the story of a famous big band singer for whose radio show Sinatra once subbed: Sinatra was instantly annoyed because the band, conditioned not to upstage the famous singer, wouldn’t play loud enough. While never doubting he was kingpin, Sinatra nonetheless wanted the band to swing, hard and loud, confidently and happily, with him—in concert and for his enjoyment, too.19 When Gans visited the West End, he found that showmanship and spectatorship, competition and camaraderie, worked differently there than elsewhere: “The West Enders do not seek to outdo all others, and

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thus be the best or numerically the greatest in these displays. Rather, they want to show themselves off, without questioning the right and ability of everyone else to do much the same” (83). Performance follows performance: others get to step out next, mildly anxious but anxious to please. I could argue that the relevance to Sinatra is that he adored the best of his peers—Crosby and Holiday, Mercer and Bennett—but that’s not the most important point. His listeners feel close to him, determined to emulate, inspired to do their best—not put out by his top-ness but energized by it. The affect of individuation from the crowd returns to energize those in the crowd to (their own) individuation. It’s not exactly what occurs in the closed circle of the West End men’s club, but there’s a continuity between them with an affirming effect that has so far escaped description and understanding. Not only did Sinatra find his individualism in song, if that’s the same word, but he also created a cultural corpus christi—which would not surprise the ethnic (lapsed Catholic) habitués of the Hudson County bars of New Jersey.20 By corpus christi I mean a community of wonder produced out of disparate conditions and temperaments and walks of life, in mystical relation to one another and the body social. In James T. Fisher’s slice of Jersey, there’s an embrace of failure and perhaps too much homogeneity—the thrill of Sinatra is how he produced a new kind of community out of the simultaneous invitation to the ladies to stop being so prissy and to the corner boys to get off their duffs. In his youth, Frankie Sinatra was an urban villager; as a professional singer, Frank Sinatra showed the world what it meant to be the urbane villager. The wordplay on urban/urbane may sound too clever by half, but the dialectic I am identifying—a worldly wise dare to the corner to come out and join him, a corner-like warning to the world at large to keep out of the way—was actually intuited down in the West End: As a singer, the inflection [Sinatra] gives to the tune and the lyrics is interpreted as arousing his audience to action. As a West Ender said, “He gives you a little dig in his songs.” At the same time, his singing style has a teasing quality which suggests to West Enders that he is making fun both of the song and of the outside world. To them, he seems to be putting something over on the outside world. (193)

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West Enders heard in Sinatra’s singing a double-edged sword—a dig at respectability, but also a dig at the corner boys, who were made to see that their cult of action can and should operate in the greater America, an America made more encompassing and more knowing because of their presence.

Italians in general like to show, not tell (never to explain). Sinatra did not give lectures on difference. But the moment he stepped up to the microphone, the corner boy in him came alive with a combination of eagerness and insouciance, a fierce desire to win over coupled, contrarily, dialectically, mysteriously, with a stubborn refusal to placate, that became his hallmark—the essence of Sinatra’s notorious attitude. Not only did Sinatra bring corner boy values into the national spotlight, he used corner boy values to set his own terms for occupying that spotlight, and in living up to those terms (“I did it my way”) he modeled an Italian American approach to the tangle of cultural exposure, engagement, and incorporation—an approach that was, commensurate with the corner boy double valence, both infectious and provocative. When the public went crazy over Sinatra, which they did time and time again, they were doing more than embracing an idol or appreciating vocal subtlety, though Lord knows there was plenty of both; they were learning and affirming how to be in the American world with an Italian inflection. Sinatra’s combination of defiant seduction and seductive defiance was not just an ethnic attitude, one among many, a particular current among those of working-class Italian descent; Sinatra’s attitude was born on the corner, it thrived in the postwar media during his heyday, and it has survived after his death, not just as a feature of his music but as an attitude toward ethnicity itself, toward both the presentation and the reception of cultural difference. In the final analysis, the Sinatra persona is a grown-up corner boy’s way of dramatizing and/or adopting the posture of delicious dissent, which the singer made available and attractive and dangerous to all. In the 1940s and then again in the mid-1950s, millions of Americans, especially women, and especially young women, had a thing for Frank Sinatra that was bigger—way bigger—than any such thing ever before: and it started before Hollywood, before Sinatra was a matinee idol and

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way before he was a Rat Pack Vegas staple. The year was 1944 to be exact, on Columbus Day of all days, when the thirty-six hundred women who had gotten into the first show at New York’s Paramount Theater refused to give up their seats (even to go to the bathroom) for the duration (five separate shows!), and the ten thousand others in line outside the theater, plus another twenty thousand watching and hoping, rioted. In the wedding scene of The Godfather, Francis Coppola takes a quick dig at these girl women, showing the hysteria on a half-dozen baby-fat faces when Johnny Fontane opens his mouth, but the janitorial staff at the Paramount who had to clean up could testify that, given the conservatism of America’s wartime mores (Hollywood censorship was in full throttle), what was going on between Frankie and the girls was no laughing matter. Martha Weinman Lear recalls how it felt listening to Sinatra among the bobby soxers: The voice had that trick, you know, that funny little sliding, skimming slur that it would do coming off the end of a note. It drove us bonkers. My friend Harold Schonberg, the Times’s music critic, says that it must have been what is called portamento, although he can’t swear to it, he says, because he’s never heard Sinatra sing. Elitist. Anyway, whatever it’s called, it was an invitation to hysteria. He’d give us that little slur —“All . . . or nothing at aalll . . .”—and we’d start swooning all over the place, in the aisles, on each other’s shoulders, in the arms of cops, poor bewildered men in blue. It was like pressing a button. It was pressing a button. . . . Croon, swoon, moon, spoon, June, Nancy with the Smiling Face, all those sweeteners notwithstanding, the thing we had going with Frankie was sexy. It was exciting. It was terrific.21

Weinman Lear is hitting on all cylinders here, not only for what she says (the young Sinatra really affected us) but for how she says it (“It was like pressing a button. It was pressing a button.”), which is, like the Sinatra for whom she is testifying, a winningly naughty thing for her to say. In the 1940s, Sinatra, the skinny soloist in front of the big microphone, the orchestra in shadow, wasn’t so obviously hanging out with the boys, but the boy hanging out strutting his stuff and serenading the girls was absolutely integral to the persona, which—the witnesses like

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Weinman Lear swear it—you could hear. If there is any doubt at how the Italian street urchin came across as he was singing, you need only look at the pictures; and if there is any doubt about what he was up to with that rhythmic delay (his slur) that was his earliest stylistic signature, well, you’ve never hung out on the corner. Overnight, it seemed, Sinatra had inflected pop romanticism with an Italian sexuality that was at once exhilarating and dangerous, exhilarating because dangerous, and dangerous because exhilarating: each girl burst forth from the constraints of American conservatism, coming into her own because provoked by Sinatra, and constituting together, if not yet a “movement” still a communal force of the female and the feminine that would only grow in momentum (“Girls just want to have fun,” as pop songstress Cyndi Lauper would later put it), down to the present day. Sinatra’s solo career began with an almost exclusively female audience; then, in the mid-1950s, he won over men in droves, not just Italians or Northeasterners but all the guys, including African Americans by the score, while continuing to command the attention of women. He did so by increasing, paradoxically, both the assurance and the doubt, the reassurance and the threat, the nonchalance and the desire in his voice. “Stubborn, defiant, proud, cocky, willful and winsome and wholly engaging, buffeted and boisterous and boyishly bashful, he did it his way then—and we loved him for it.”22 The Sinatra that essayist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison is talking about here is the Sinatra of the 1950s —when he turned forty years of age, somehow a rebel still, in that peculiar come-hither-but-watch-out kind of way.23 Back in Jersey they know where a double attitude like that comes from. Adele Zirilli’s only boy—Bruce Springsteen, from in and around Freehold—reports: My first recollection of Frank’s voice was coming out of a jukebox in a dark bar on a Sunday afternoon, when my mother and I went searching for my father. And I remember she said, “Listen to that, that’s Frank Sinatra. He’s from New Jersey.” It was a voice filled with bad attitude, life, beauty, excitement, a nasty sense of freedom, sex, and a sad knowledge of the ways of the world. Every song seemed to have as its postscript, “And if you don’t like it, here’s a punch in the kisser.” (Lahr 94)

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This passage is remarkable, first of all, for the representative scenario it so efficiently sketches: in it a woman of Martha Weinman Lear’s generation, an Italian American of the second generation, stops—pauses in the midst of the soul-wrenching business of once again chasing down her hard-drinking husband—in order to introduce her young son to Sinatra’s singing. She takes solace—viscerally from the sound, indirectly from the affirmation of place and from the insinuation (look what a Jersey boy can do!) that Springsteen’s father’s fate need not be her boy’s own. For his own part, young Bruce hears Sinatra’s voice before he sees the man or otherwise knows of his reputation, and what he hears is a rebel with a cause, a combination of the bravura he invokes above and a hardbitten wariness that takes its pull from the corner but is, by no means, childishly self-indulgent: But it was the deep blueness of Frank’s voice that affected me the most, and, while his music became synonymous with black tie, good life, the best booze, women, sophistication, his blues voice was always the sound of hard luck and men late at night with the last ten dollars in their pockets trying to figure a way. On behalf of all New Jersey, Frank, I want to say, “Hail, brother, you sang out our soul.” (Lahr 94)

Springsteen sketches Sinatra’s bluesy voice and ballsy swagger as if they were distinct entities, which in terms of the overall feel of individual songs and even albums is accurate. But the complementary modalities were always in hearing distance of one another—in the mind’s ear of the individual listener who invariably knew them both, yet also in the way Sinatra performed each side of the repertoire. On the one hand, in the Jersey-boy blues you can hear not only the male bonding that the confession of feeling cast aside paradoxically promotes (the character in the songs is not that alone, and Sinatra knows that he is singing to us and for us) but also the renewal of the fight (the self-pity is cathartic and preparatory). On the other hand, in the mid-tempo swingers and even in the up-tempo anthems, the exhilaration in his voice—“Oh, look at me now!”—has an ironic underpull, the insinuation of his Jersey accent in the midst of that wondrously uptown pronunciation, reflecting both the memory of how tough it was and the fear that at the next roll of the dice

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you’re gonna be back in the gutter: unreasonable perhaps, given his fame and his fortune and his talent, but go tell that to an Italian. Frank Sinatra was not just a great singer who acted: he was the medium for implicit initiation into a public style of working-class Italianness that was a mode of interpersonal and intergroup relations bringing solicitation and resistance together: a romantic form of autonomy in interplay with a predatory form of sensitivity. For their part, Italian Americans (like Springsteen’s mother) took courage from Sinatra’s witchcraft, his ability to hold the American masses spellbound without becoming whitewashed. They found themselves charismatically incorporated into the national imagination, but they also took Sinatra’s own communal individuation personally, as a secular (very secular) saint’s life, challenging each of them to go forth and do likewise. In the meantime, Americans at large, whether they identified themselves with Hoboken or not, absorbed the Italianate double logic, whether or not they recognized its type from other cultural sources, and they did so in that supremely Italianate way, intuitively. Like Weinman Lear, they learned how to love and fear simultaneously—first, the man; second, the Italian American presence of the second and third generations for which he stood; and third, the arts of ethnicity in general, which can and often do operate (and here I definitely do not mean only among the Italians!) with corner boy élan. Let our favorite Jersey shore rat remind us once again: “It was a voice filled with bad attitude, life, beauty, excitement, a nasty sense of freedom, sex, and a sad knowledge of the ways of the world. Every song seemed to have as its postscript, ‘And if you don’t like it, here’s a punch in the kisser.’” Now as well as then, among those who got off the corner, among those who never left, and among those who never came close to experiencing it, what is commonly acknowledged and embraced, from their different vantage points, is Sinatra’s sweet threat—the punch in everyman’s kisser.

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6

Crime La Cosa Nostra Americana This country . . . it’s a blend of family and entrepreneurship. —Roberto Cavalli, Columbus Day 2003

In the late 1960s, as disenchantment with U.S. involvement in Vietnam was escalating and domestic protest from various sectors was turning increasingly violent, when white ethnics were thought of as thick-necked hardhats and militarized cops who beat up scraggly or braless college kids, a long-suffering serious writer of fiction published his first mass-market novel, and the country’s understanding of itself and the role of ethnic difference within it hasn’t been the same since. That writer was, of course, Mario Puzo; the novel —a mob-thriller-as-family-romance, narrated in an insider’s voice—was The Godfather. Puzo’s calculated act of intuitive genius became, in very short order, the bestselling and, indeed, most widely read work of fiction in history. It served as the narrative basis and framing style for the young Francis Ford Coppola’s movie version (The Godfather, 1972), which, along with its immediate sequel (The Godfather Part II, 1974), constitute one of Hollywood’s transcendent achievements. And they gave rise, in turn, to seemingly endless literary and especially cinematic creativity, as dozens, now hundreds of filmmakers talk back to Puzo and Coppola. By century’s end, “The Godfather” referred less to a book or film than to a modern secular mythology of Romanesque proportions and ancestry. All over the United States, but especially in and around New York, from the inner city to the suburbs, ordinary people of all stripes 107

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and colors, but especially those of Italian descent, continue to identify themselves, somehow, with the assumptions, actions, and aura of invented criminals without, of course, going criminal themselves. How did such a thing happen? What does it mean? As late as the 1960s, even after the stirrings of the new ethnic consciousness, Italian Americans were still thought to epitomize the first fundamental theory of upward mobility, exemplified in all our classic immigrant literature, that the success of a group is actually a function of its members breaking away from the group. No one doubted that the Southern Italians, relatively slow to climb the class ladder and thus “retarded” in their economic development and social “adjustment,” were victims of their own values, above all of their notorious clannishness.1 Individual opportunity was held in check among them by domestic needs and domestic focus, including domestic pleasures (the conviviality of the dinner table, the kitchen, the bridge table), a “culture of poverty.”2 The Southern Italians were marked as well by a defensive reluctance to entrust themselves to mainstream institutions, to participate in mainstream doings, and to curry the mainstream’s favor; an ancient fatalism that, however softened by the great breakthroughs into economic security and basic human dignity, still lingered in the form of relatively low expectations and a penchant for guarding the young too closely. As a result, the many instances of Italian Americans succeeding in sports and entertainment after the war were taken as just that, individual success stories proving the rule, none more so than in the case of that lonely only child, Frank Sinatra. Even among thinkers less prone to anti-Italian prejudice or socialist romanticism, the lesson of the working classes during the prosperous 1950s, when it was assumed what everyone wanted was the suburbs, seemed obvious. The Italians may have won blue-collar status by committing themselves to a cautious, stepwise, partial Americanization, but they would never really make it— that leap into the professional middle classes and the power elite, which the offspring of Jews seemed to have done in a single (generational) bound—until something was done about the family. It was Mario Puzo who did what had to be done, practically singlehandedly. I don’t mean Puzo changed a single fact, at least not at first, but he reinvented how the American dream of upward mobility was envisioned—the sociological, political, and ethical contours of the immigrant

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success narrative—and in so doing he transfigured the role of Italian Americans in the national imagination.3 The Godfather replaced the Western with an updated version of the gangster film, less Horatio Alger than the Magnificent Ambersons. The Godfather transformed the scenario of the uncivilized frontier, where men were at conflict with one another in the establishment of both law and profit, into the corrupt, urban jungle land of advanced capitalism, entailing “a whole new code of living” that displaced the seemingly eternal ethos of rugged individualism with a counterculture version of collectively benevolent corruption.4 Puzo’s new vision of the mob incorporated “a rags-to-riches immigrant story,” but what really hit the nation’s central nervous system was the way he transformed the rags-to-riches story to conform to the mafia’s familial specifications. The offer that the American public could not refuse was a diabolical mixture of family and business, filial devotion and fraternal betrayal, warm male domesticity and ruthless capitalist competition. Before Puzo, organized crime was simply a mob—outlaw rabble-rousers; after Puzo, it was the mafia, la cosa nostra, the Gambino or Colombo “crime family”: a consortium of illegal enterprises, each organized by means of a patriarchal kinship system into a military-style corporate hierarchy dedicated to its own propagation and aggrandizement.5 Not only did Puzo produce Sicilian family values as the secret to truly effective organized crime, but he revealed a monomaniacal capitalist conspiracy as Southern Italy’s dream destiny. Sicilians were, all of a sudden, not part of an embarrassing blue-collar morass, an industrial underbelly losing its significance, but instead the capitalist nation’s underground brain trust, and a potential mirror upon American corporate capitalism’s requisite brutality. In the mainline of Puzo’s narrative, which Coppola deftly extracted and beautifully cast for the film, the old gangster prototype was transformed from orphaned loner to devoted patriarch, and the last-ditch clever clannishness of poor dago immigrants was metamorphosed into the damnably sacred empire-building of illegitimate yet charismatic business visionaries. Italians in America had turned to crime not only because they didn’t yet have the forms of knowledge and cultural capital —the right accents, the collegiate and country club connections, a better product or service or idea—to wrestle wealth legitimately, but also because there is a special synergy between their kind of kinship and

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those ways of doing business: because illegitimate capitalism requires the omerta sensibility of Sicily; and because underground entrepreneurship, not only big-time money but outlaw status, is particularly effective at keeping families together. The family is what makes the Corleones such good illegitimate capitalists, putting the organization into organized crime; crime is what makes them such good family men, keeping the boys in line and the women secure, providing incentive, self-discipline, ideological justification, and emotional payback. This is the dualism that the central narrative of The Godfather explains, enacts, criticizes, and ultimately extrapolates from, hinting at its structural vulnerabilities while claiming a pervasive corruptness—implicating the government, the courts, the cops, and the corporations—that was not the mob’s alone.6 What Puzo and Coppola did, then, is change the national story, reimagining the place of Italians in America, and America as a different kind of place. They injected Italian American values, idiom, imaginative reach, and even experience into the national narrative, not only making Italian America the center of conversation but remaking that conversation—its storytelling conventions and figurative repertoire, the questions it asks and the answers it seeks—in the Italian American image. By 1983, when Stephen S. Hall announced (in a justly famous New York Times Magazine cover story) the first coming of Italian Americans into the power professions—business, law, medicine, upper levels of government, education administration, and the media elite—Americans at large had for a decade been getting used to the idea that those of Southern Italian descent might be forces to reckon with, that their families and transplanted values were somehow going to matter even in their professional walks of life, and that a criminal elite could be found any- and everywhere there is systemic power, but especially here, one nation, under Capitalism.7

As almost everyone now knows, Vito Corleone is CEO of an underground conglomerate or holding company specializing in gambling and union corruption, which is facing management issues during a time period when an emergent market—drugs, heroin specifically—is pressuring established modes; capital flow, political and legal influence, and corporate standing are ultimately at stake. Don Vito doesn’t quite understand

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how great the demand, how much money there is in that white powder, sufficient to corrupt the better part of the police and judiciary systems, whatever their previous squeamishness about drugs. Failing to act on the emergent market exposes Genco Pura Olive Oil (aka the Corleone Syndicate) to a literal hostile takeover bid—since one operates here with guns and the garrote rather than stock market shares—from the BarziniTataglia consortium, who are backing Sollozzo, the man with the heroin and the guns and the guts to risk it all on a point of honor. Vito Corleone is also the patriarch of a successful Sicilian American family blessed with three (four, counting Tom Hagen) sons in their twenties and early thirties, but only one of whom has his father’s talent and strength of character, Michael. And yet Michael has turned himself into a black sheep, basically scomunicato: against his father’s expressed desires and secret arrangements, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps to fight in World War II, where he risked his life “for strangers”; he now wants to be a math professor and marry Kay Adams from New Hampshire, a “washed-out rag of an American girl” who impresses no one in the clan even though she is pointedly named after the original presidential dynasty, the Adamses. Michael’s independence, outright defiance, and callous disregard for the needs and wishes of his father threatens the integrity of the family at every turn, compounding the difficulties caused by the compromised talents of his otherwise loyal siblings. This is double jeopardy to the nth degree: a crisis in the business of managerial succession, a family tragedy in the flight of the prodigal son. Puzo’s genius lies in the mathematical elegance of where that puts us: two problems, one solution. Step by engaging step, the novel narrates the successful re-ethnicization of Michael, in effect as a series of dark sacraments: being slapped by the cop McCluskey as a wake-up call or baptism; “making his bones” in the killing of Sollozzo and McCluskey as confirmation; a period of apprenticeship in Sicily where he learns mafia history and gets rechristened a Sicilian male by “the thunderbolt” of sexual infatuation, alternatively a period of reflection upon his new family role and vocation, culminating in a long tutelage at his father’s side; standing godfather to Connie and Carlo’s eldest son, in effect his final vow, which allows him, symbolically, to play God as he orchestrates the murders to reestablish the family in the wake of the death of his father, who has, after all, not

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only devised the masterplot but made it politically feasible, making common cause with the drug chieftains and publicly foreswearing his own personal vengeance, which turns out to be nothing less than playing possum with a jackal up his sleeve: Michael Corleone. Michael is destined like Oedipus to take the place of the father-king, but Michael’s rise to crime lord and family kingpin turns out not to threaten the father but rather to fulfill the father, as the elevation of Michael is revealed to have been Don Vito’s design all along. The Oedipal dynamics of father-son love here, combining filial election and paternal embrace, may be exquisitely sweet (“Tell my father I wish to be his son”), but Michael will have to pay for the seemingly utopian satisfactions. Michael’s primary job, after all, is to clean up his father’s mess: to right the mutual interferences between family and business that began not only with the decision after Connie’s wedding to reject Sollozzo’s proposition but also entailed in the wedding itself, the decision to allow Connie to marry the man of her choice, Carlo Rizzi. This is a big mistake, from the point of view of both love and money: Carlo Rizzi is an American of Northern Italian ancestry (“not a Sicilian,” as the text incants it) who knows he has married into a royal crime family and so expects to be given work in the inner circle—employment for which he is so ill suited that the Don, great hearted though he may be, has but one choice, to shuttle his new son-in-law aside, Carlo’s resulting resentment leading in turn to his pivotal act of fratricidal vengeance. The unspoken issue hanging over the novel is that Carlo set Sonny up for the kill, a gangland slaughter. Michael is bequeathed the responsibility, then, of doing what his father cannot do and cannot even suggest must be done, which is to send Carlo to swim with the fishes. Conceived and executed by Michael, the murder of Carlo Rizzi protects the father’s aura of paternal benevolence while legitimating the son as a successor truly to be respected, that is, feared, because he is willing to do whatever needs to be done. It’s another sweet cleanup, except of course that it costs Don Michael the life of his new brother, the love of his sister, and his personal claim to domestic peace. Those of us who tend to dwell on these things are surely struck by the wondrous convenience of it all —how by refusing to pursue the identity of Sonny’s betrayer Don Vito spares himself from thinking about Michael’s future while bequeathing to him the double-edged privilege of settling the business debt closest

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to home and acclimatizing family members to the new regime, in one fell swoop. It is here, at the end, that the complexity of Puzo’s irony reaches full concentration. In the final scene of the film, difficult for any of us to forget, Kay stares along a hallway into Michael’s study, where she sees the caporegimes kiss Michael’s hand (intoning “Don Corleone”) for the first time, only to have the door swung shut in her face, a chilling gesture of consummate exclusion. In the very final cut, the camera asks us to identify with Kay, whose face has just told us that she knows that Michael outright lied to her, that he really did have Carlo and all those other men killed, and that his criminal henchman have just closed ranks around him, leaving her (and thus us) desperately out in the cold. It is a liberal Protestant critical perspective, proto-feminist as well as female identified, with a kind of marginalization that is both legible and familiar, but it is not the way the novel ends. In the book, Puzo weaves the loose thread of Kay’s alienation and apparent powerless back into the mysterious knot of family business. In the final chapter of the novel, Michael’s American Protestant wife, Kay Adams, converts to Roman Catholicism, against his expressed wishes but under his mother’s enthusiastic tutelage. Reconsolidating this first family of underground capitalism on an old-world basis, Kay signs an implicit contract in which her man of criminal ambition works for the corporate good while she, the good woman, is held in the moral protective custody of day-to-day innocence, from which she is to execute her part of the domestic deal: to produce sons for the family, of course, but also to procure divine mercy. From the innermost recess of the church the bell tolled for repentance. As she had been taught to do, Kay struck her breast lightly with her clenched hand, the stroke of repentance. The bell tolled again and there was the shuffling of feet as the communicants left their seats to go to the altar rail. Kay rose to join them. She knelt at the altar and from the depths of the church the bell tolled again. With her closed hand she struck her heart once more. The priest was before here. She tilted back her head and opened her mouth to receive the papery thin wafer. This was the most terrible moment of all. Until it melted away and she could swallow and she could do what she came to do.

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Washed clean of sin, a favored supplicant, she bowed her head and folded her hands over the altar rail. She shifted her body to make her weight less punishing to her knees. She emptied her mind of all thought of herself, of her children, of all anger, of all rebellion, of all questions. Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone.

Ending the novel with Kay at the altar rail after communion, saying “the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone,” Puzo leaves us suspended between the temptation to complicity and the need for resistance. Puzo leaves us suspended between the specter of intercessory prayer as yet one more string in the mafia don’s masterfully self-serving repertoire and the possibility of intercessory prayer as a daily expression of frightened yet fierce internal dissent. We are suspended, that is, between an idea of Kay as a formerly liberated woman who has for all practical purposes swallowed the whole goddamn mafia thing (“This was the most terrible moment of all”) in exchange for the wafer-thin prospect of saving her husband from eternal damnation, however unpalatable an outcome that may be to the rest of us, and an idea of Kay as a self-aware rebel who masochistically invites the ritual of ethnic conversion to be routinely shoved down her throat (“until it melted away and she could swallow”), in order to experience in herself and for herself that sublime feeling of final cosmic rejection, the vengeance of the Lord: “Don Michael, be damned.”8 In Puzo’s America, you are allowed to have your cake and eat it too but only because you can stomach your loss of freedom and ethics, the business of family entailing the carnage of kin in the underworld marketplace. The reader coming to accept these realities feels, through Kay, a delicious yet spooky vicarious Italianness; seduced by the characters, by the plot, by the ethos, the reader finds himself cheering for the Corleones to grow stronger than ever under Michael; the reader is allowed to emerge victorious in his championing of vengeance and domination, but he is not permitted to remain morally and political deluded unless, turning his back on the story as Puzo tells it, he wills himself into delib-

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erate blindness, which—as the rest of the world knows all too well— Americans are wont to do. The sociological lesson here—that ethnicity is a tool of capitalism, capitalism is a tool of ethnicity—works at an implicit yet mythic level, suggesting that the forms of ethnicity which really count in America, our platitudes and earnest correctives to the contrary, are the ones that secure power, especially economic power: New York (and Hollywood, even Vegas, but not Washington) being the center of us all. We know, after The Godfather, why to love and fear, honor and envy, emulate and escape the Korean grocery store, the Pakistani-run newsstand, the Spanish-speaking construction crew—or Yale Law School. In such recognition The Godfather radiates an Italian American feeling about it all, transfiguring the national sensibility at the level of tone and expectation and value, to the point where we pay our most knowing homage to those icons among us who are both successful and bloodied. Puzo implies throughout that the mob works in a gnostic fashion, either you “get it” or not, exemplified by how you are supposed to talk with and, especially, about it. Claiming something is “business not personal” is the best way, the Machiavellian way, we learn, to actually take business personally. That goes, mysteriously, for the way the novel makes friends with us, its way of asking us to keep faith with it, as a whole, Italian American insider-hood as it is invited by the text. Insisting on the distinction between the secret illegitimacy of mainstream culture (epitomized in the novel by a mother’s selling of her ten-year-old daughter to the movie producer Jack Woltz) and the seductive integrity of the underground Sicilian culture (the contention that the Godfather runs “his” America more judiciously, generously, and compassionately than does the legitimate power elite) is an ideal way of producing in the audience, at the time we read it but also in the way we talk about it afterwards, an identification with the mob. At some level we know or are supposed to feel that the mob, who provide us, in our identification, with such an astonishing rush, is really the alter ego of official America, not its opposite or its undoing but its inner being, its truest realization, but you can’t, as an initiate into the culture, say anything like that out loud because it would spoil the delicious effect of an open secret. In our heart of hearts we recognize that the Corleones are the first family of American

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capitalism, and that being Italian, at least this kind of Italian, is just the better way to be(com)ing an American. That’s the ultimate inside joke, the omerta that is the experience of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.

With twenty years experience teaching The Godfather in myriad classroom settings—different folks, different places, different intellectual contexts—I know all too well that the novel leaves more than a little wiggle room for aesthetic uncertainty, for differences of opinion regarding the novel as a work of art, somehow considered in isolation, beyond its entertainment value, its reflection of late 1960s anxieties, and its mythologization of ethnicity, capital, and nation-state. There is enough excess baggage that you have to have either an appetite for roman à clef (faux) revelation or a fondness for nineteenth-century narrative structure or a darkly comedic Gender Studies eye (yes, these three converge, Puzo having done all the work for us) to appreciate it. It uses an idiom of appreciatively irreverent insinuation you very well may have to have a New Jersey Italianate ear to catch, which means not everyone, including many smart and distinguished thinkers, thought the novel was “great” in the same way high literature, especially modernist literature, is great. Pauline Kael, the film critic who for four decades routinely and brilliantly introduced the elite readership of the New Yorker to popular standards, detested The Godfather so much she likened it (“a trash novel”) to the grotesquely bad speeches of then–Vice President Spiro Agnew— a comparison that leads me to believe that even intelligence may be culturally relative. Nonetheless, the film united everyone in affirmation, Kael included: “If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, The Godfather is it.”9 In making a case for itself, the first Godfather movie proved beyond a shadow of anyone’s doubt that popular appeal and artistic distinction could thrive together under the sign of ethnicity, which in the wake of Sinatra may sound like an Italian American mantra. The original idea at Paramount studio was to make a gangster cheapie. No Sicilian mob movie had ever done well at the box office, and a good one, Paramount’s own The Brotherhood (released in January 1969), had just bombed. But production chief Robert Evans felt goaded by the pressure of every other studio to get Paramount to sell the rights, and so, still

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thinking small, he hired a TV producer, Al Ruddy, who fortunately had other ideas. It was Ruddy who liked Puzo so much when he met him— Puzo threw down his copy of the novel, saying, “I never have to read that book again! I can do the screenplay.”—that Ruddy broke a cardinal production rule, hiring the book’s author to do the screenplay. Although he was at first horrified when the name of Francis Ford Coppola was put forward—“A terrible track record at the box office, not to mention the reputation of being a brilliant but eccentric director”—Evans took the questions of authenticity (no Italian American had ever made or starred in a mafia flick) and timeliness (to get the film made while the book was still on everyone’s mind) so seriously that he took a gamble on the one director of Italian American extraction with big-screen experience who was available: a thirty-one-year-old son of Italian immigrants with a BA from Hofstra University and an MFA in theater arts from UCLA who had directed a couple of creative yet quirky flicks and whose primary claim to recognition was as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Patton.10 Coppola was at first skeptical—an artiste raised in a financially struggling but very cultured immigrant family (his father was a Juilliardtrained flutist and composer), he had put down the book down on page twenty-eight, when Puzo discusses Lucy Mancini’s soft pelvic floor— but his vision caught fire when he finally read the novel, taking copious notes and recognizing who the Corleones were, “a noble family” caught in a quintessentially American tragedy. Coppola understood how movies were structured, but he had a reputation for being better with words than images, and he gives credit to Puzo for having the more acute visual sense, which he drew upon and put directly to work: “I also did a lot of things in that movie that people thought were in the book that weren’t. The act of adaptation is when you can lie or when you can do something that wasn’t in the original but is so much like the original that it should have been.”11 The novel contains multitudes; the film is tight. It was Puzo, executing the first draft of the screenplay, who cut out much of the novel’s material about the sordid goings-on in Hollywood and Las Vegas—parts that at the time looked as if they were there just to sell books—to focus on the issues of family and power, which put him on the same page as co-writer Coppola, who cut out even more, leaving almost nothing, for instance, of the Sinatra-like singer, Johnny Fontane. I happen to think,

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along with most of my students, that the book holds its own against its cinematic realization; the novel may be less overpowering than the film because less concentrated, but it has a dark, knowing subtlety to it— especially on the interplay between masculine self-discipline and female desire—of which even Puzo, who worked from instinct and never looked back, seemed unaware. The point here is not to defend the novel or even to see it on its own terms (that’s another kind of essay for another kind of day) but to underscore what was at stake in the making of the movie: to recognize its wildly public, prodigiously successful production as integral to the Italianization of America, especially as Italian Americans themselves—intuitively—understood it. It is a legacy of the intrigue surrounding the production of the film, which was extensively covered at the time in the weeklies, that we know to what degree Coppola had to fight for his casting, and it is with 20/20 hindsight that we know how utterly effective it was—James Caan as Sonny, Robert Duvall as Hagen, Coppola’s own sister Talia Shire as Connie, and a host of utterly remarkable character actors, including Richard Costellano, Abe Vigoda, John Cazale, Lenny Montana as Luca Brasi (who makes his eyes pop out of his skull as he is strangled, just like in the book), and Al Lettieri as Sollozzo the Turk. It is, of course, nearly impossible for us to distinguish, retrospectively, what Coppola and his brilliantly chosen creative staff—especially cinematographer Gordon Willis—show us on screen from what any of us first “pictured” from the novel. But it has to have mattered, the degree to which everyone involved had been schooled by the book, which was put into the hands of every one of the principals who hadn’t already learned it by heart. Coppola recognized immediately that the young Robert De Niro was too forceful a presence to play Sonny, and he went to the wall with the studio executives—who were so intent on getting Robert Redford for Michael that they asked Puzo to script an opening love scene!—to cast the erstwhile stage hound Al Pacino (approaching thirty, but looking more like a dissolute twenty-two), instead. The casting of Pacino is in fact, a useful case in point, indicating that Coppola understood from the start what Puzo’s story was going to require. Whoever played Michael was going to have to convince an audience of his metamorphosis from self-reliant straight arrow to criminal mastermind with delusions of grandeur in under three hours. One look at the screen test and you’ll see

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the significance of Coppola’s faith: Pacino looks, sounds, and acts like a laid-back, flighty punk—neither Michael the boy wonder nor Michael the triumphant—but Coppola knew, having seen his Tony-winning turn as a psychotic killer in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? that Pacino could do it.12 When the Hollywood trade paper, Variety, quoted the producer to the effect that they were going to cast unknowns, several hundred applications came in from regular folk with no acting experience whatsoever who were dying to participate (“from pizza makers, Italian waiters, and just about everyone who had ever eaten spaghetti”) and who followed the production with the fierce devotion of daytime soap opera: Hollywood had seen nothing like it since the making of Gone With the Wind.13 For every individual who put himself forward, there were hundreds of thousands who simply worried about what Paramount was going to do with “their” book, including—we have FBI wiretaps to thank for this! —members of the New York mob, whose first choice for Don Vito was Ernest Borgnine. The person most worried about the very real threat of truly disastrous casting was Mario Puzo, who “long before the book became a movie project . . . had only one man in mind to play the Don on the screen,” so when he heard the rumors — TV actors Vince Edwards and David Janssen, not to mention lawyer Melvin Belli, were clamoring for the job! —Puzo suppressed his natural shyness and petitioned the imposing Marlon Brando directly, sending him a copy of the book with a letter asking if he was interested.14 The rest, as they say, is history: many Americans don’t know that Marlon Brando is not an Italian American, they don’t know how unsure he was whether he could do it, they don’t remember how youthful a forty-seven-year-old he was when he did it, they don’t know to what lengths Paramount went to keep his performance under wraps, they don’t know how much Coppola fought to get him the part, they don’t know how he wanted to do it so much he actually took a screen test and accepted a modest salary, they don’t know how scared everyone was of him but how warm and funny he was on the set. They just know he is the Godfather.15 A funny thing happened on the way to the New York–based film shooting. Before production began, Paramount had to deal with the Italian American Civil Rights League, an organization supposedly modeled

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after American Jewish Anti-Defamation League and founded for the purpose of counteracting the denigration of Italian Americans by mass media. The Italian American Civil Rights League protested the filming of The Godfather, which its leadership judged to be successfully concluded when Ruddy agreed to strike the words “mafia” and “La Cosa Nostra” from the screenplay (three occurrences total) and to run a disclaimer— “The film you are about to see is fiction, no special connection with any group or subgroup is intended or should be inferred.” To this end, the Civil Rights League held a couple of rallies, fund-raising parties really, including one on Columbus Day 1971, which was to celebrate, in part, the victory at Paramount. As it so happened, the event was broken up less than an hour before it was supposed to start, when the rally leader, Joseph Colombo Sr., setting up, was shot in the head and critically wounded. Joseph Colombo Sr., president of the Italian American Civil Rights League—whose large war chest had been gathered, after all, to protest invidious stereotypes—was at the time the head of the Colombo crime family, and the Gallo-Gambinos weren’t going to let an opportunity like that—a guaranteed public appearance by a rival chieftain!— slip by. The real-life dark comedy here is worthy of Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor, which no one appreciated more, I think, than ordinary Italian Americans, whose real concern was not the fall out from the mafia equation (though its lingering presence would later haunt Geraldine Ferraro and, arguably, Mario Cuomo) but whether or not the movie was going to do the book justice.16 There may be a risk of waxing too nostalgic about the tough decisions that, in retrospect, came out so well in the making of the film, but there is no way to overestimate the impact of the film itself, especially for those prickly readers who had never gotten past the graphic sex, but for whom watching the film was a transcendent, in some cases life-transforming (how many contemporary actors trace their careers to seeing The Godfather as youths?) experience. Picture who Americans were in 1970, what they cared about and felt their world was up against, and how they carried themselves in public; then consider Coppola’s cinematic picturing of the Corleones. It is nothing short of amazing to examine the photographs of the movie shoot and see the discrepancy between what the crowds, crew, and cast looked like off camera—scruffy clothing, unkempt hair, and that air of accomplished anti-authoritarianism in their very posture

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(Coppola, the scruffiest of them all, had himself directed skin flicks)— versus what was being portrayed on camera, a darkly compelling collectivity in which everyone knew his place and worked hard, with newworld precision and old-time rationale, to keep others in theirs. Realizing Puzo’s portrayal of postwar-costumed, Italian-mannered kinship in crime, Coppola produced a monster of an alternative vision of American society—part revelation, part phantasm—that took hold of the national imagination and never let go.

In the process of making the first Godfather film, a job that he got only because the studio was desperate beyond measure, Coppola wrested increasing creative control and a budget large enough to realize his ambition (its limits forcing productive creativity), but he could never breathe freely. The astounding success of The Godfather changed all the rules: it made more money than anyone deemed possible, and the artfulness of its mythic realism blew everyone away. So Paramount offered Coppola, whose points in the first film had gotten his fledging Zoetrope Studio out of financial trouble, a deal he wasn’t going to reject: “nearcomplete creative control and an almost unlimited budget,” with the promise of no interference with the hiring, a half million in salary, and 13 percent of the adjusted gross. For The Godfather Part II, Coppola was hired as director, screenwriter, and coproducer. With money to burn and the nearest thing to carte blanche, he recruited the screenwriting help of Puzo; almost every one of the original design personnel, including Gordon Willis and most of his own family; and an equally astounding cast including Robert De Niro, method-acting guru Lee Strasberg, and all the previous principals he needed except for the man who played Clemenza, Richard Costellano. The era of the studio auteur had begun, with the fate of the Corleones—and America’s massive fascination with them—hanging in the balance. Michael’s blistering triumph at the end of The Godfather may have been just business, but some folks in the movie branch of the Italian American representation industry were taking that triumph quite personally, not least among them Coppola. Coppola accepted the assignment to make the sequel for the cash and the clout, of course, but also because he was possessed by an aesthetic vision and moral mission: he wanted to

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remove every last tincture of romance from his portrayal of the mob. He wanted, in particular, “to punish Michael” by destroying the family “from the inside”—which is to say, from an Italian perspective, in the most profound way possible, entailing a direct assault on the mythos of ethnicity in the original narrative.17 To be sure, Coppola thought he had gotten Michael dead to rights already, at the very end of The Godfather, when Michael, cold-blooded and demonically possessed, lies to Kay, his study door swinging shut in our face. But in the wake of all the adulation that greeted not just the film but, seemingly, the Corleones themselves (the pundits rushed to charge Coppola with glorifying the mob, the very danger Puzo warned about when he insisted that Coppola retain the violence), Coppola believed he had to make Michael’s ultimate defeat—and damnation—perfectly clear. A personal vendetta, then, as well as history’s ultimate lesson: it was, after all, 1973, when the consecrated mighty, such as the American involvement in Vietnam, the U.S. economy, and Richard Nixon, were tumbling all around him. The structural conceit of The Godfather Part II is to shadow The Godfather, scene by scene of pointed difference. The first communion celebration of Michael’s son, Anthony Corleone, at the new estate on Lake Tahoe, which opens The Godfather Part II, is a mere echo, grandiose but pathetic, of the marvelous garden wedding that opens The Godfather: the “hors d’oeuvres” are “crappy” (where’s the antipasto?), the band can’t play a tarantella, and the dissolute Fredo has married a oncevoluptuous actress who is falling all over the other men. On the business side, the Senator from Nevada deliberately mispronounces Corleone as a coded sign of disrespect and then tries to force a kickback on liquor licensing (big mistake), Tom Hagen is cut out from the most important negotiations regarding expansion into Havana, Pantangele is being undermined back on the old turf in New York, and an assassination attempt is made that night on Michael—and Kay!—in their bedroom (although women, children, and civilians have long been off-limits). Ethnicity’s going to hell in a handbasket: what, in capitalism’s name, is going on here? In the struggle not just to grow with Hyman Roth but to absorb Roth’s rackets into his own, Michael Corleone outfoxes the greatest Jewish gangster of them all, a man of his father’s generation modeled on Meyer Lansky, but he runs up against Castro’s Cuban Revolution, which sets

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one geographic limit to capitalist expansion, and he detonates every trace of his own familial relations, both blood and honorary. There are few more chilling scenes in all of world cinema than the final tableau of The Godfather Part II, at dawn on the lake, when Fredo, saying his Hail Mary to catch his fish, is killed, the camera at a distance but the sound echoing across the lake—unless it is the scene immediately preceding, at their mother’s wake, when Fredo hugs Michael for granting him permission to join the others, and the camera catches a glimpse of hatchet man Al Neri at attention behind him. Neri remains stone-cold still, but there is a flicker in his eyes telling us that Neri knows what Michael, under this show of godfatherly mercy and fraternal reconciliation, has determined to do, now that Mama Corleone is no longer able to feel the consequences. A brilliant man, obsessed by ambition, battling another, no holds barred, for control of interlocking conglomerates—we know, in America, how to respect that, up to and including the inevitability of ethnic succession in the corporate ranks; but a man who kills his brother in the process has lost his soul: the invocation of divine judgment at the end of the second Godfather film is as clear as a bell. Michael is held most responsible for a failure of mercy, having never forgiven Fredo for betraying the family. “Betraying the family” has been reduced to a ghost of its former self, since all Fredo actually did was pass along a bit of household information unguardedly. Cuddling up to Roth’s errand boy (Johnny Ola) was absolutely, totally stupid—it almost got Michael and Kay killed— but, unlike the conspiratorial betrayals of both Paulie Gatto and Carlo Rizzi, it did not constitute a knowing collaboration in the ensuing assassination attempt, which makes it something else again: forgivable. In Michael’s world, then, money and power corrupt absolutely, just as Americans have always wanted to believe. Capitalist drive, in the traditional American scenario, which The Godfather Part II embraces with a vengeance, is what vanquishes, drains, undoes ethnicity: the sanctity of home and kin, the solidarity of neighborhood and symbolic kinship, the integrity of la via vecchia and the rituals constituting the populist devotions of home and street—Michael rends these totally asunder. If the novel and first film encouraged us to dream with the Italians of having their success and their families, too, messy though that combination may be, The Godfather Part II dismantles every corner of that dream,

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punishing Michael for megalomania and thereby reinstating at the level of national mythology the classic moral of the up-from-the-ghetto genre: once again, it is lonely—damnably lonely—at the top. And if for the Corleones there is no way to go back, once started on this American version of Italian-destroying destino, then are we not, ideologically and mythically speaking, back to the beginning? The Godfather Part II presents the consequences of the Italian version of the American dream run amuck, hoisted by the petard of violent self-contradiction—“Francis felt that he had to knock this family off,” as Coppola’s sister Talia Shire put it—but the second film could not wipe out the impress from the mind of the original Godfather specter, either its claim for a bygone era or its power as an education in future desire. It seems, in fact, that the film was not even supposed to dislodge the Vito myth. The Godfather Part II juxtaposes Michael’s brutally pyrrhic victory, his fall from grace in consequence of his grasp for absolute power, with the tragic youth and beguiling rise of young Vito Corleone, an interpolated “back” narrative taken almost directly from the retrospective chapter in the novel. In the book and on film, Vito’s rise is understood less as a direct continuation of what went on in Sicily (where his father and mother were murdered for being on the wrong side of the local mafia) than a spontaneous regeneration ten years later on the Lower East Side, when Vito’s reacquaintance with a strictly parasitic form of gangsterdom wreaking havoc on the neighborhood, his personal alarm at the threat to his family, and the outlaw camaraderie he comes to share with other resourceful men, pushes him across the line first to burglary and then to murder (protecting the fruits of that burglary). He figures out how extortion might help legitimate efforts in the wholesale business, and Mama Corleone orchestrates an object lesson in putting an intimidating reputation to benevolent use, securing in turn the neighborhood omerta. Coppola’s version of Vito’s coming into power is, if anything, more insistently nostalgic than its depiction in the novel. Photographed through a sepia-tinged lens, The Godfather Part II’s staging suggests that, once upon a time in America, on the way up, Sicilian godfathers were Robin Hood–style banditti who not only led a tightly knit band of convivial men against the darker forces of nativist capitalist manipulation but also honored their wives, took care of poor lonely widows and their dogs,

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went out of their way to revenge the deaths of their mothers, and looked farsightedly after their children’s future. Michael is judged by direct comparison to his father, who is, given De Niro’s stunningly persuasive anticipation of Brando, more real to us than ever. The Godfather Part II got to people principally because Michael, in squandering that legacy, broke their hearts—hearts that belonged ever more to Vito, and, by extension, to The Godfather, where the Corleones were ethnically successful and ethnically bloodied.18 With The Godfather Part II, Coppola killed off the claim for a specifically Italianate success, success by means of and on behalf of the tradition-observant but upwardly mobile family, giving us a godfather in name only, Michael Corleone, who is as much a blood-thirsty killer at home as he is a coldhearted bastard at work. Ironically, the film only contributed to The Godfather narrative’s seeming immortal flight, including the aura of ethnicity that has accompanied its success ever since. Making American popular film aesthetically powerful by means of an Italian inflection, holding American imagination captive to the Italian obsession with the interplay of family and freedom, and teaching the pezzonovante at the studios the combination of lucre and acclaim they can expect when they let the Italians take charge, these dimensions of the Coppola/Puzo mafia “thing” had only, in 1974, just begun. The point here is not simply celebratory. On the one hand, I am suggesting that there is a shadowy but definite parallel between what was happening in the lives of Italian Americans, excited and troubled as they faced breakthrough into the upper-middle classes, and what was happening in the fictions they generated and cleaved to, which teased with possibility but warned of the moral and social and political pitfalls: in other words, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II constitute an implicit debate about the entwined fates of ethnic tradition and social enfranchisement (what Time magazine, finally getting it in 1990, punned as “mob-ility”). Even as the terms of admission to the power professions —corporate finance, government, and the law—were being negotiated by the mobsters in the films, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, the making and reception of the films themselves constituted a larger-than-life, yet very real and very publicly legible, first strike. In the final analysis, Puzo got Coppola got Brando, Pacino, Duvall, and De Niro

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to do it their way, and it is that configuration, not exclusively but largely Italian American in fact and method and sensibility, that has made all the difference. On the other hand, I am also suggesting that Italian Americans, far from being annoyed at criminal stereotyping, took enormous pleasure, including if not especially those who were not economically, culturally, or even geographically very mobile and therefore still somewhat vulnerable to class prejudice, in the gargantuan cinematic conversation that has ensued: Italians on Italian criminals (Scorsese’s mafia trilogy, the many films of Abel Ferrara), non-Italians on Italian criminals (Andrew Bergman’s The Freshman, John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor, Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob), Italians and others on noncriminal Italians (Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints, De Niro’s A Bronx Tale, Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck, Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s Big Night), Italians on non-Italian criminals (Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction) and non-Italians on non-Italian criminals (the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing among the Irish, Menace II Society among African Americans), all of which leads to The Sopranos, the first year of which is surely the second greatest mafia narrative of them all, and about as strong in true wisdom as dark comedy gets. Although there are grounds for impatience with the mafia stereotype, it seems to me an intellectual act of self-denial to reject the national obsession with mob ethnicity out of hand, to turn your back on the brilliant creativity of the new-style gangster film that The Godfather brought into being, or to discount the way in which storytellers both within and outside the group keep reevaluating what is at stake in the Italianness of mob life. John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor, for instance, offered a wickedly funny critique, pitting masculine loyalty against romance, the familial organization of crime against individual entrepreneurship; Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas set out to defeat Coppola by deglamourizing the mob once and for all; and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III reimagined the Corleone family as Park Avenue aristocracy, legitimacy as a problem in common with the world’s most conflicted multinational (the Vatican Bank), and the problem of corporate succession as an issue of the family’s past crimes (especially those against nature) visited upon the innocent, the female, and the young. Taken as a whole, the Godfather narratives let the Italian Americans, on the verge of the upper-middle

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classes but not yet there, feel a part of the greater, more formidable America, a special part, at once dissenting and exemplary of the larger American myth narrative, and in a way—the Italian way—in which most of them would partially identify (I know people like that, I want to be like people like that) yet also formidably hold their distance (too much crime, or that’s why I’ve got to get out from under my family’s patriarchal reach). Italian Americans, in short, saw their histories, their hopes, their foibles, their worries, their strengths, their beauty, and their ugliness reflected on the national screen—yes, but not just that. They had always marched largely to their own drummer, not needing cultural or social affirmation from what they saw as the outside world. But here, with the Corleones, they were able to take the solace of an intelligence bordering upon true wisdom in the national discovery of Italian criminality as a mirror into America’s heart of darkness, and they were soon granted the special joy of seeing key forms of Italian American noncriminality— Brooklyn femininity in Moonstruck, power feminism in Madonna, gustatory sacramentality in Big Night, working-class masculinity in Springsteen—taken up as antidotes to what ails that heart. Multe grazie, Mario Puzo.

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7

Romance Only a Paper Moon? Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight. —Richard Rodriguez, 2002

By the late 1980s, the third and fourth generations of Italian America were coming into their own, with precious little memory of either Italy or immigration. Despite the pull of multicultural chic, individuals of Italian ancestry were taking spouses and life partners from outside the heritage, residing increasingly wherever the postindustrial service sector took them, venturing well beyond even the outer circles of the original industrial settlement in order to secure their places, at last, in the professional-managerial class. Observers both inside and outside the academy, both the many convinced that the old European ethnicities were on the wane and the few struck by the unseemly tenacity of Italian American self-identification, were beginning to wonder, with much sociological and even more political justification: Have we reached the point when Italian Americans know themselves as such only through the images that Hollywood and Madison Avenue produce? And, if so, does that mean Italian Americanness is at best a minor affectation—like Madonna wearing an “Italians Do It Better” T-shirt—and at worst an invidious consumer delusion? In 1987, I spent an afternoon in Geneva, Switzerland, with the great novelist Ishmael Reed, who good-naturedly kept badgering me, aren’t you enraged at Moonstruck? Reed was angry at the film’s Jewish director, its Irish American writer, and its cast full of non-Italian actors, including Cher; he faulted the movie for being totally artificial in its production 128

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values—blue-collar stereotypes bordering upon caricature, Toronto locales substituting for the essential Brooklyn, and a Dean Martin exercise in Neapolitan kitsch commanding the soundtrack; and we agreed that the true-love plot had been hatched, more or less, from TV’s romanticcomedy central. Sufficiently embarrassed, I couldn’t defend my intuitive fondness for the film that day. But since that time I’ve noticed a marked discrepancy between the occasional Italian American intellectual who is, as Reed was, offended by the presumed condescension and inauthenticity of mass-market Italian American lite (including such films as Prizzi’s Honor, Married to the Mob, My Cousin Vinny, and Analyze This) and the vast majority of everyday Italian Americans, who tolerate, often enjoy, and in key instances even identify with such blatant versions of consumer ethnicity. Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck is an instance in which Italian Americans, especially the various middle classes, were by and large delighted with the portrayal, which they took as amusing, instructive, and flattering—and were hence tickled by its national appeal. Why? The film is theatrical—a movie written for the screen by an accomplished playwright and shot with the stylized colorfulness of a stage set. Think of the Twin Towers, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the cemetery under that hanging moon: together they look more like one of the set panels for La Bohème (untrucked at the Met as the opening credits roll) than an actual site in Williamsburg or Fort Greene, though that’s what it is. In contrast, the basement ovens at the Cammareri bakery or the overstuffed shelves at Cappomaggis’ deli—fast becoming things of the past in 1989—are hyperrealistic, terrifically familiar yet already a nod toward nostalgia. The movie alternates between not-quite-enough texture (the moonstruck skyline, the Toronto streets, the restaurant) and over-thetop realism (the deli, the bakery), as if the production designer’s tongue were shifting from cheek to cheek. Both forms of texture hint at camp from, as it were, opposite directions (stylized at one moment, minutely detailed at another), but separately and, especially, taken together, they refuse to reduce to camp. Not just place but thought, speech, and action are all exposed as ritualistic, thus ironized, but the irony is neither embarrassed nor disabling. Moonstruck is happily suspended somewhere between mockery and sincerity, mimicry and mimesis. Its staginess—an uncanny because untroubled interplay of the real and the fake—turns out to be much more prole (the buffed-up E Street Band triumphantly

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clowning around in Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” music video) than alienated modern (Samuel Becket’s prisonhouse of social conventions) or arch-postmodern (Spike Jonze’s funhouse of media sophistication). The wry, even loving self-acknowledgment internal to the film portrays an established strain of Italian American sensibility, while the wry, even loving reception of the film exemplifies an increasingly contemporary relationship between the movies and ethnicity, between latter-day comic opera and lived comédie humaine. Moonstruck makes a virtue out of the category collisions/collusions, those border crossings, that Reed warned against—theatricality courting caricature, cheerful self-irony turned unwitting self-parody, antinativist alienation become iconic incorporation. Debating detail may be part of the postmodernist reception game, but being stereotypically larger-than-life is the primary form that ethnic identification takes in the film, which makes authenticity a chicken-and-egg question and the popularity of cartoonlike inauthenticity a surprising point of honor. “How do you know, Chinese America, what is Chinese tradition, and what is the movies?” Maxine Hong Kingston asked, now famously, in 1976. Moonstruck treats the Kingston question as a nonstarter that doesn’t have to be answered, and it is such an attitude of dismissive disregard— shoulder shrug, fugedaboutit—that feels, well, Italian American. I must admit, I am kind of attracted to this formal nonchalance and, by extension, to what might be made of it. It tells us something significant about the comfort level between the portrayed and their portrayers, more easy than edgy, unflummoxed by pop-movie simulation. It invites us nonetheless to join in—to play the game of identifying what’s real and what’s not, for the sheer fun of it. (The Grand Ticino ristorante, invoking Switzerland, is way too Euro for Neapolitan America; the cookies look good—crunchy and light and not too sweet—but the bread looks like bad French baguettes; and how in blazes did Ferrara’s Grand Street pastry shop get to Brooklyn? By the way, that’s Danny Aiello during the opening credits, with his back to us, swapping out the glass-encased billboard in front of the Metropolitan Opera.) And it opens the door to considering meta-critically (à la Marxist theorists Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, who work on the big picture) whether generic selfcontradiction (the dialectic of form) is a precondition for social change and political awareness. But I’m not sure a strictly formal analysis or

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grandly postmodern theory would cut it down at the corner garage, where Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei, the Click and Clack of pop filmdom, used to work.1 Moonstruck is Italian lite, more a Friday night supper than a Sunday dinner, and expects to be taken with a grain or two of salt. But its play between parody and participation—the mutual admiration between Hollywood romanticism and lower-middle-class Brooklyn—has an anthropology, an ethics, and an aesthetics more knowing than the imitation of an imitation. What makes Moonstruck, despite its self-teasing, indeed because of its self-irony, feel Italian, or rather, to be more precise, feel late-twentiethcentury Italian American? If, in watching Moonstruck, we are laughing with and not just at Italian Americans, what is it, exactly, that is so funny, and why is the humor ultimately rallying rather than either denigrating (like the ethnic jokes others tell on you) or liberatory (like the ethnic jokes you tell on yourself)? Is the clowning around simply at the expense of Italian America or is there something there that the greater audience is attracted to, forms of affirmative knowing and effectual doing that address who we are these days, especially women?

Moonstruck is an updated chapter in the evolution of the Italian American extended family. Traditionally, families sought extra hands (including kids) around the farm or shop; they bonded together to secure mobility or consolidate class standing. Moonstruck features instead a cluster of (heterosexual) couples—Shanley must have been tempted by, then resisted the older conceit of having brothers marry sisters—in which each couple in the extended family is held in the honored embrace of every other, interlocked like the Olympic rings by the mutual pursuit of happiness and gossip. Around the table in this movie you don’t talk about money, status, or even food (at least not very much); you talk, instead, about love. Affairs of the heart are everybody’s business: intimacy between individuals orchestrates intimacy within the whole, and vice versa—a daisy chain of love magic and love trouble. From the get-go, the world of the private is orchestrated in public. Consider the byplay of the first big scene, the marriage proposal in the restaurant. Loretta (played by Cher) demands of her suitor Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello) all the trappings of old-time Hollywood romance

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even though she understands herself to have abandoned the quest for true love. Loretta may be just a pragmatist now, as her mother advises, but even a pragmatist depends on luck (Brooklynites remain superstitious), and luck is a residual of ritual performance, so Johnny must make a show of it—“Where’s the ring? (whaddy’a mean, you don’t have a ring?)”—no matter what. Getting others to bear witness, making a public commitment so as to secure the consecration of the group, is the first order of business in the movie-long conversation about luck. Loretta not only makes Johnny kneel to propose, but does so with an entire neighborhood of witnesses—the manager of the restaurant, BoBo, who knows what’s coming, the tweedy English professor who is hitting on yet another coed, the Italian patriarch who butts in, the big-eyed young woman in the background, and, from the other side, a triad of peopled tables. And so it goes throughout the movie: If you forget the bank deposit you’ll be challenged in front of the family; when you miss Saturday night dinner, your whereabouts will be the topic of discussion; if you step out on your lover even for a second, you’re gonna run into someone in the neighborhood, maybe even family. If you go to confession because you’ve slept with your fiancé’s brother, the priest is going to recognize you (despite the supposed screen of anonymity) and call you by name (refusing to honor even the semblance); though he doesn’t berate you, he’s going to urge upon you a whole mess of rosaries (not to mention sincere reflection), which is going to attract notice (what’s she been up to?); and your mother, who is waiting outside the confessional (with problems enough of her own—she’s seeking strength to deal with your father’s philandering), has the privilege of the first pointed inquiry, what took you so long? The interplay of the personal and the social in female well-being is at the center of a certain understated self-confidence in the film, epitomized in its (literally) quietest scene. Is there a more female-appreciative, female-identified moment in film history than when Loretta returns from her hair makeover and shopping spree and sits in the bedroom with packages spread around her (fire lit, wine glass in hand), then slips off her work clothes, down to a camisole to model for herself in the mirror? The scene is not a wry commentary on self-objectification any more than it is a critique of rampant consumerism. It’s about afterglow—and antic-

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ipation. Loretta is simply radiant, and it’s not an issue, in any simple way, of self-love. She is not an aging airhead deluded by the therapeutic narcissism of Cosmopolitan magazine’s values, but a grown woman doing a dance of certain danger (her fiancé’s brother) and infinite hope (her fiancé’s brother?) with a man (her fiancé’s brother!) who, in tuxedoed finery, is doing something of the same for her. And where are we, tickled pink, in this? Are we intruders upon Loretta’s privacy, or doing something else? Consider the previous scene, the morning after the supposed one-night stand with Ronny. When Loretta decides to gussy up for Ronny’s opera invitation (her first), she is greeted at the beauty parlor—which calls itself “Cinderella” (a corny self-reflexivity that does not discount the truth of the game being played)—with a flourish of the hand and a delirious “finalemente,” which speaks, lusciously, to the preestablished klatch of Loretta-watchers, who have long since believed they know what’s best for her: let’s address her physical aspect to give play to her soul; so the better things, long overdue, will surely come. I’ve heard sophisticated female academics go gleeful in admiration of this succession of sublimely feminine moments—from beauty parlor to boutique to boudoir, identifying with the liminality of self-witness between indulgence and preparation, congratulation and expectation, withdrawal and advance; and I’ve joined them, only a little belatedly, wishing I had brought up the scene myself. In doing so, we not only pay testament to Jewison for getting this wickedly familiar experience just exactly right but, as a community of filmgoers, we take renewed pleasure in remembering the scene together, thereby restoring it (through the spontaneous “gossip” of poolside intellectuals) to communal view, which is, after all, where Loretta—in the eye of extended family and neighborhood, already is. The film invites us, then, to an active form of spectatorship—to join the circle not only in laughter and the forgetting of human foibles, but in tears of joy from the making and remembering of minor miracles. In intellectual circles there is almost universal hostility to what is called the “male gaze”— the camera framing women for the objectifying purview of a male audience (confused between visual stimuli and tactile delight), the stand before the mirror of women as a template for the internalization, by women, of their objectification under a sexually abusive patriarchy. The part of the woman who looks at herself, we are

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told, is male, exploitative, oppressive. But the mirrors in Moonstruck (themselves a template for the frame of the film writ large) work differently than that, and the sweet eroticism they put into play has none of the prurience of either the voyeuristic or the predatory. Mirrors in Moonstruck reflect, literally, the quest for and ultimate securing of a personal vitality in which outward aspect, “the look,” is in symbiotic relation to inward state, an inner being that is itself a matter of public recognition, of loving and of being loved, of recognizing oneself as a lover and of being recognized as a lover. At the outset we are clued in to what Loretta, gray of clothing and hair and profession (she’s a bookkeeper!), is capable of when she is making her accounting rounds: in the florist scene, when she glows at the gift of the rose; we catch a three-quarter head shot, from a modest distance, in the back-wall mirror, reflecting with all due respect Loretta’s susceptibility to the sensual beauty of the rose (which she flutters across her lips and lifts to her nose!) and to the spontaneous affectionate appreciation of the florist (“Thank you, Carmine”). Where’s the moon talk in all of this? Loretta’s paternal grandfather— aka “Old Man”—joins his cronies, reduced by age to dog walkers, in the cemetery, where they can at least have the satisfaction of disobeying the no-trespass (actually, no-dogs) sign. It is Old Man who casts the first light on the film’s leitmotif: “La luna, la bella luna: the moon brings the woman to the man, capisce?” Quoted out of context the proverb conjures up the harvest moon as an ally to masculine seduction—the primal howling of grandpop’s dogs—but there is just enough edginess to suggest the dangers of domestication that Sinatra called the tender trap, the domestication of the figure of the moon itself into poetic romanticism, here given blood not only by the hint of the periodic renewal of sexual infatuation (Sinatra putting gonads back into the romantic conventions of the Tin Pan Alley standards) but also by the seductive pleasure with which the aphorism is told. The ideal of companionate romance belongs to so many of us, but the picturesque figuration of it—Dino-esque schlocky (movie as entertainment) with a serious Sinatra-ized undercurrent—is Italian American.2 The lunar idiom conjures up a synergy of classic incompatibles—the thunderbolt of sexual infatuation underwriting (the renewal of) both the poetics of sentiment and the pragmatics of familiarity—a model of the lusty companionate couple which we might argue is particularly

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compelling to the United States at the moment when the effect of career choices, of two parents working just to keep up (with the lower-middle class mimicking the professional class), and of sexual crisis throwing the abandonment of the previous two decades into partial relief. What does Italian America, that partly blue, partly pink collar of Brooklyn, as imagined in the film, and as it has come to know itself through the film, have to offer but this vision? The truly female-oriented conceit of the film is that men are the bigger romantics and—how shall we say it?—passionists. It is not a coincidence that we’ve already been treated to a bustling close-up of the florist, craggy of face and voice, himself heartily appreciating the roses, which, figuratively speaking, have been shorn of the thorns of gynophobia without being stripped entirely of sexual charge (from the male point of view, female sexuality in the film is delicious but not deadly, socially compromising but not demonic). It is Uncle Raymond, ’fessing up at the dinner table, telling on his brother-in-law in front of the clan, who names the specter—Cosmo’s moon—of divine intercession, transfigurative love, that hangs over the movie as a whole, whose title includes interlocking O’s meant to signify the dyad that the moon sponsors. (Uncle Raymond recalls the courtship of Rose by Cosmo, who squirms because he is feeling guilty now for steppin’ out with another woman, Mona, whom we haven’t yet seen.) And it is Old Man who first introduces the conceit of the moon with a key point of Italianate irony. When he repeats the proverb in Italian dialect, he waves his hand dismissively at his cronies, a very ambiguous gesture: it may be that what they don’t understand is how playing up to female desire—the erotics of their romanticism, the romanticism of their sexual drive—serves male interest, not only because youth will always be served when the moon is full but the aged of both sexes can use a boost (as the subsequent scene in Rita and Raymond’s bedroom, and the playfulness in the deli the next day, would suggest): “You Make Me Feel So Young.” Just as it is a gruff-voiced, craggily handsome man who celebrates the roses and bequeaths one on Loretta, so the principal articulators of the discourse of being moonstruck are men. Don’t misunderstand me: the film is fully, if not quite relentlessly female focalized; the issue at stake is that of true love, wisely understood as a synergy among eros, companionship, and divine blessing, the problem of the late 1980s career girl

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cunningly relocated within a pink- and blue-collar matrix, where it is said to be a matter of luck, not choice. But the film proposes, develops an ethics from, and enacts the idea that it is men who are the true romantics, that it is that romanticism that paradoxically masculinizes them, that to be a man is to have the strength of one’s romantic convictions, which is in turn the source of their appeal, the means by which women can claim them, and—completing the circle—the idiom through which they may, if the men accept women’s reading, value their achievement. The beauty parlor door invokes Cinderella, but the film reverses the salvific order of Pretty Woman: It is Loretta who rescues Ronny (Nicolas Cage) from his rut of self-pity, and Ronny who saves her “right back.” At issue, underneath the seeming dialectic between luck and selfdetermination, is the way women handle people (especially men), in particular male wolfishness—and what men can learn in return. Johnny wants to reconcile with Ronny, who holds him responsible for the mutilation of his hand, which led in turn to Ronny’s fiancée, his one true love, abandoning him. Ronny is outraged that his brother not only wants to kiss and make up, but that he would ask him to join in the witnessing and benediction of the very thing his brother has supposedly denied him. Loretta doesn’t buy the self-pity, however; for all the luck talk earlier, she doesn’t accept Ronny’s assumption of bad karma, and she certainly won’t accept the scapegoating of Johnny. According to Loretta, Ronny sensed the tender trap—he was not ready, she’s not the right girl —so he did what he had to do (just as he is now about to sweep Loretta off her feet “to the bed”). There is an ethos of self-determination that honors Ronny in his subconscious decision to sever his engagement but scolds him for seven years of self-denial and self-delusion; yet of course it is the fervor with which he suffers and vents that is part of Ronny’s appeal. Compare his brother: Johnny has to be cajoled, in public, into the semblance of passion, serving Loretta’s need to secure luck and to luck into domestic security, while Ronny’s heart is simply bursting in anger at his brother for causing him to be jilted. We understand from the first that Johnny is a mama’s boy—the play with his fierce Sicilian mother is as predictable as it is funny. Ronny is the reverse: his feminine passions masculinize him, and what this means in ethical terms is the core of the first conversation. To be a wolf isn’t to be a sexual predator so much as it

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is to be a passionate romantic in action, not just thought: to have the strength of character to cut off one’s hand to escape the wrong kind of domestication. And it is Loretta’s telling him this story, so that he sees how forward she can be, that emboldens him to grab Loretta—a bit comically, I might add—and take her to the bed. If male suffering is a turn-on for women, then being challenged to get over it must be something of the same for men. The women are bossy, seemingly presumptuous but with a certain loving tolerance—that the men, in turn, emulate with their own degree of wryness. Women treat men by giving them in their sexual wanderlust a certain amount of rope only to show them when and how they’ll hang themselves and asking them whether that is what they really want— creating the situation in which, in the long run, the guy in question will do the right thing, to the point, even, of saving the woman right back. “If I’m a wolf,” Ronny says, “then you’re the kind of woman who runs to wolves.” We can see the velvet glove of feminine tolerance and mercy at work with how the film, in emulation of the ethos it is representing, handles Loretta’s father, Cosmo. Cosmo is extended a certain amount of slack by the very casting of Anita Gillette as his mistress-hussy, Mona (whose name comes down to us, in a bit of Shanley’s cheek, from Henry Miller). For all Cosmo’s bumbly fumblings (the cheesy charm bracelet), Gillette has the smoldering voluptuousness—red hair, red dress, Springsteen’s redheaded woman—that representationally speaking gives Cosmo a little breathing room. After all, Olympia Dukakis plays Rose, his wife and Loretta’s mother, too defeated and too gray and almost melancholic. While Mona is a piece of work, well, that cuts two ways: there’s little shaking these days from Rose’s direction. Cosmo’s moon descends upon the Cappomaggios’ bedroom, but it’s the Castorinis who are in need of its revitalizing influence. While Cosmo, that greedy manipulative plumber, may have selfish motives for refusing to pay for Loretta’s wedding, the fact remains that for most of the movie it’s Johnny whom Loretta intends to marry—and Cosmo couldn’t be more right: Johnny is a big baby. The film is very talky, but still the most important exchanges in the film are nonverbal, gestural, and facial, which is to say, in the Italian idiom, in-your-face theatrical. Mirrors, reaction shots, close-ups: the genre of the film is expanded sitcom, and it plays quite well on the small

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screen, even in pan and scan (the only form of DVD currently available). There is an ontology, an epistemology, and a sociology at work in these formal cinematic devices involving camera and composition. The film assumes—is this something a movie can assume? I think yes!—that the body is vessel to the spirit, that mirrors reflect the soul, that gestures of face and body are superior forms of bearing witness and making commentary, and that participatory spectatorship is a primary mechanism for developing extended (familial, extrafamilial) intimacy. I know this is a mouthful of abstraction, so let’s check out a few examples. The initial reaction of Chrissy, the salesgirl at the bakery who takes Loretta down to the ovens for her first meeting with Ronny, who appraises Loretta as a rival for Ronny’s affections but nonetheless does the right thing, is priceless, and so is the interplay with the other female employee and the other male baker. For all the chicken and egg, this expressiveness is what the actors have to get right and the camera has to highlight, it seems to me. For instance, the actor (Louis Guss) and actress (Julie Bovasso) who play Loretta’s uncle and aunt are right on target. The uncle—surely a Jewish American of Russian-Polish extraction—may not get every facial turn exactly Neapolitan/Sicilian American, but he’s very expressive and gesticulative in a sweetly open way, convincing enough to get my amen. It’s a measure of Olympia Dukakis’s relative failure in the film that she is given great lines, but by and large her gestural interpretation fails her—she plays it too defeated until the final scene, and even then her face shows little emotion. Cher is another matter, and it’s a credit to Julie Bovasso—a form, indeed, of women’s credit, contained in gossip—that she taught Cher the accent (and, to add to the telephone game, I hope the gestures, as well, which are, even more than the accent, near on perfect).3 What’s so funny about the comedy between Loretta and her father is that Cosmo, con artist and skinflint and philanderer though he is, speaks her moonstruck language from his first words (mouthing along with Vicky Carr, under his breath), the very first gestures he makes (dropping a small sugar cube into each champagne flute) as he says, “Te amo.” In the extended opening byplay between them, when Loretta announces her engagement, she scores when she attributes her marital bad luck to his refusal to give her away; but, in the scene taken as a whole, he gets the better lines (“But, Loretta, you already tried that once [getting

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married]”), the better gestures (the evil-eye stab of the outturned pinky and forefinger), and the winning intuition (when Cher tells him that Johnny got down on his knees in the restaurant, omitting to say that it was her idea, Cosmo screws up his face, “He did?!? That don’t sound like Johnny”). We sympathize with Loretta of course, but we also empathize with Cosmo, not just out of wary, weary acknowledgment of the male panic at waning powers and expectations hanging over the scene (“I can’t sleep anymore, it’s too much like death”), which of course feminizes him, but because of his woman-tutored, you-make-your-own-destiny aggressive wit, which if anything must have sharpened as he has aged, and here, I am happy to argue, masculinizes him. Gesture; the eruption of the private into the public realm in concert with the public orchestration of the private; and the female-identified tangle between transgressive grace and redemptive accountability: the various strands of the movie, epitomizing the ethical comedy I have been analyzing, come together in the most exquisitely funny moment of the film—which belongs (this should surprise us?) to father and daughter: the scene at the coatroom in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera. Cosmo gestures to Ronny to step back—so that he might speak to Loretta in private, in exercise of a little paternal authority, in preparation for summoning his own strength. He and Loretta parlay inquiries into the propriety of their respective trysts: “What are you doing here?” is a doublebarreled question, literally about being at the Met (Loretta we know has never seen an opera before), but also about their apparent lovers (“You’re married” countered by “You’re engaged”)—and then, a bit baffled and clearly cornered, Cosmo offers his part of a deal (“I didn’t see you here tonight”) and then, with a stunning combination of admission and deflation, of resignation and supplication, Cosmo tips his hat: an established ritual of respect and an improvised plea for mercy he uses to seal the deal unilaterally and signal the end of the encounter. Simply put, Vince Gardenia should have gotten the Academy Award, not Olympia Dukakis. The most sustained achievement of the movie is its final stretch, set appropriately enough at the table, but at breakfast on a weekday morn. The chairs keep filling, the table expanding, with guests who are expected without having ever been invited. The theater of confrontation meets the populist Catholic logic of getting right (mob talk for the cycle

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of contrition, confession, and reconciliation) with the family. Hanging over the denouement is the return of Johnny Cammareri from Sicily, who bumbled his way over to the house from Kennedy Airport the previous evening only to find a rueful, hurting Rose, who sent him home after a brief interrogation on why men chase women (“Because they are afraid to die”). He returns the next morning, but not before the family—and the audience—is put through a Marx Brothers routine of knock knock, guess what? I’m not whom you expected. As she cooks, Rose warns Loretta, who is the first to waltz in, of Johnny’s imminent appearance. Rose is panicked at the visible sign of Loretta’s as-yet-unidentified lover (“You’ve got love bites on your neck,” “Put on some makeup for God’s sake”) that turns out to be a setup for Ronny’s arrival in which, for a second, Rose almost pops out of her sadsack posture. Rose has never met Ronny of course, doesn’t even know the man Loretta has disappeared with the previous two nights is Johnny’s brother, but learns all of this in a half second at his arrival, in part because of her own—admirable—maternal aggressiveness. Answering the door while Loretta is sequestered in a closet (where she is changing out of her evening gown), Rose not only interrogates Ronny with a stare, but reaches underneath his coat to pull up his shirt collar in order to look at his neck—“You’ve got a love bite, too”—and then, on the way back to the kitchen, Loretta having tumbled out of the closet, she gives Loretta’s shoulder a twisting pinch of chastisement, which is too good for words. When Cosmo comes down, he responds appropriately enough to Ronny’s pretence that they’ve never met, but when Rose glosses him as Johnny’ brother, Cosmo’s look of scandalized wonder is again worth the price of admission. “Don’t look at me like that, Pop,” which is a daughter’s traditional lament, a counter parlay, and her version of the Mediterranean shrug. The delicious comic turn on love bites is more than just a typologization that these characters have a ready familiarity and easy physicality: that a mother would presume to notice and forthrightly address the meaning and consequences of her thirty-plus daughter’s hickey. There is a convergence here between the anthropology of neighborhood and the ontology of love: the real mark of Loretta’s transfigurative involvement with Ronny is the dance in her step, a sliding skip down the street that ends on an elaborate spin into the kitchen, which Rose catches: “Loretta,

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what’s gotten into you? Your hair is different.” “Ma, everything is different.” The love bite, patently obvious, is a confirmation of the afterglow that is the real signpost to social consequence, given the nature, as these characters believe, of romantic trysting: a consummated moondance can’t be hidden, especially from one’s family. “Just tell him, Loretta,” Cosmo will advise in a matter of moments, “’cause they find out anyway.” And that means what the film teasingly reveals and sweetly, idealistically resolves—though first we have to wait for the arrival of Aunt Rita and Uncle Raymond: Rose makes Cosmo swear off his mistress; Johnny nervously pronounces that he can’t go through with the engagement (and of course Loretta rages at his infidelity—a promise is a promise!—even though her heart and hopes now lie with Ronny); and Ronny proposes before the assembled masses, catching his brother unawares, and getting the acceptance he seeks. (“Do you love him, Loretta?” “Ma, I love him something terrible.” “Oh, that’s too bad.”) By film’s end, then, Loretta has provoked Ronny into recognizing his own fears and desires while triggering the return challenge, which saves her from being stuck lifelong with an overgrown mama’s boy; her mother has spoken up, her father has sworn off his mistress, and the brothers Cammareri are reconciled. In and beyond Hollywood, the Brooklyn Italians have finally crossed over, despite or rather, paradoxically, because of certain lower-middle-class retentions. They now live on the other side of the great cultural divide that Puzo once defined as the will to happiness, where they invite us to think about the sacramental interplay among romance, sex, and family, suggesting how, in particular, the pop romanticism of “la bella luna,” “one true love,” and (this is Puzo again) “the thunderbolt” comprehend sexual infatuation as both a vehicle for and a challenge to companionate intimacy. The film is not interested in tracing cultural transformation; instead, it simply assumes that the Castorinis, Cammareris, and Cappomaggis have something to teach us in the wake of the feminist embrace of workplace professionalism, its downplaying of the domestic heterosexual imagination. For all the cartoonish upbeat contrivance of Moonstruck, the repartee and interaction are smart enough—indeed, sexy enough—that we can believe, in the end, that romantic coupling is both supported and fueled by a larger (but, and this is crucial, not huge—this is no big fat Italian wedding) familial setting, which is itself mainly an interlocking set of couples and offspring. At the

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center of the public opera of Italian American domesticity is not only what women want but how they go about getting it, especially in the face of men’s fear of emasculation, obsolescence, and death—which, I might suggest, will only intensify with the upward mobility (of the men, but also, finally, of the women!) still to come. In an era, then, when the pain of migration and the growing pains of cultural dislocation are strictly hearsay, Italian American identity may have become for the majority of middle Americans, including those of Italian descent, only a paper moon under a cardboard sky—but the fact of mass production doesn’t make the ethnic persona any less real, less useful, or less seductive. What in fact we learn from Moonstruck is how successfully sentiment and self-parody can converge: that the fourth generation now lives comfortably with or even in pop imagery suggests a strikingly postmodern mode of reciprocal construction, of mutual assimilation. Hollywood’s romance with Italian America and Italian America’s romance with Hollywood know each other, and it is good. Now that’s amore.

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8

Diva Our Lady the Dominatrix of Pop Ya gotta have faith. —George Michael, 1987

By 1985, the sex-gender nexus, never far from the American mind, had become a hot-button issue. To most U.S. women, already taking civil rights advocacy for granted, feminist utopian thought had begun to feel like a choice between nutty-crunchy lesbian separatism or outgunning the preppie boys at Morgan Stanley, which put them between a rock (antiporn crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon) and a hard place (Anita Bryant and give-meback-the-TV-1950s Right). The long-standing expression of commonplace wonder—don’t you feminists like men?—was turning into, don’t you even like yourselves? In 1986, as the news broke on the disease targeting homosexual men and their fellow players, unsuspected succor was given to sexual conservatism in general and homophobia in particular, with god-awful potential for scapegoating the survivors.1 From within the gay community, post-Stonewall euphoria gave way to fear, activism, and death watches, even as it was discovered from without —awkwardly—that that guy who had had so much unsafe sex lived next door or just down the street: the banker, the star athlete, the longhaul trucker. So too, with race never far behind where sex is involved, popular music had become a medium of controversy, with the pundits (talking heads) acting as if the decade-long rift between the seemingly sexless culture of FM radio bubblegum pop (“white”) and the putatively oversexed culture of long-play dance/funk (“black”) was no longer 143

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bridgeable, except perhaps by the acquired taste of art pop (the Talking Heads). And then along came Mary.

By “Mary” I mean, of course, the girl from the Motor City; the singing, dancing, drama queen christened at birth, in honor but also I suspect in aspiration, after the mother-savior-lover of us all: Madonna. In this chapter, I take the liberty of assuming Ms. Ciccone’s staggering achievement: First, as a song-and-dance woman for the new technological era of the mid- to late 1980s, who crafted digitally mastered albums that are among the most infectious in history, who produced music videos that functioned like reflexive short stories building serially into a Romantic pilgrimage novel, and who staged shows in Vegas high style for one- and two-night stands in massive stadiums—an aesthetic array that feels as fresh, witty, and exhilarating today as it did then.2 In so doing, Madonna became the harbinger of the second wave’s second act, that of power feminism, teaching women they could be ambitious and sexy, material and romantic, in the market and on the market. Her Immaculate Collection (1990) was for at least a decade the soundtrack for dressing to kill on Saturday night. Visualizing across lines of gender and modes of sex, she put into play an erotic economy beyond the zero-sum game of the identity police: a zone of reciprocal act and expression where good girls could vogue like naughty boys or dykes in drag, where gay men could imagine themselves—in heroic playfulness —as high-maintenance women, and where straight guys could just lie back or join the show, depending. That Madonna has proven to be the single most successful white artist ever to scale America’s black music charts only confirms her uncanny ability—natural-born, self-involved troublemaker though she be—to push the buttons and pull the joysticks of our common humanity. Madonna didn’t do it alone, of course: there were huge forces at work in the country at large in the early 1980s, up to and including an exhaustion with the bad fashion taste of the preceding decades.3 In music proper, Michael Jackson got there first, in the shadow of (Little) Stevie Wonder, and he ran with Madonna for a while before imploding

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in fantasy. Prince simply vaulted both race and gender. But no one was more important to the culture as a whole than Madonna: miracle worker and wonder woman, she was the faith healer of Ronald Reagan’s divideand-conquer America, for its youth especially. How did she do it? Every step along the way, Madonna has insisted that she is an Italian American and proud of it. What could this mean for the sometime champion of the Weimar-era sexual underground, eighteenth-century French decadence, and Eva Perón’s Argentina? What could this mean given that Italian women’s values have revolved forever around family, domesticity, and neighborhood? That Italian American women were notoriously underrepresented in every one of the power professions, through the 1980s and beyond?4 That the few women with major careers had launched those careers only after enormous fights at home and school (unless, like Connie Francis, they had stage fathers, who pushed them there)? In short, how in the world can Madonna call herself an Italian if to be ben educati (well educated) has always meant, first and foremost, being a good (Catholic) girl? In the second half of the 1980s, Madonna transformed herself from a roundly discounted Cyndi Lauper “wannabe,” whose primary achievement seemed to be galvanizing young teens into a cotton-candy-sexy fashion frenzy, to the most watched and arguably most watchable woman in the world (never a dull moment, and, at times, downright mesmerizing), whose music-and-video persona pumped female knowing into feminist determination, mined gay style to kick up heterosexual affect, and got black folks and white folks back on the floor, dirty dancin’ together again. That gargantuan leap entailed three top-of-the-charts albums, almost monthly hit singles and/or video releases, several astonishing stage-show tours, one Mamet play on Broadway, and a couple of fetching film performances, with only the occasional bad move (Who’s That Girl? Shanghai Surprise, some Sondheim songs a bit out of her range, and—oh yes—marriage to the otherwise incomparable Sean Penn). In her drive to domination, Madonna drew upon her third-generation Italian background—a large close-knit middle-class family (“I’m the oldest girl”; “I was pretty rambunctious”; “I was my father’s favorite,” she reported in 1985, as if we couldn’t guess) plus a gentler, less defensive, less repressive parochial school education post–Vatican II (“Nuns are sexy,” she

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quipped, with surprising illumination)—in unprecedentedly American ways, drew America to her in unprecedentedly Italian ways, and in so doing redrew America. My mission in this chapter is to track the Italian origins and, more importantly, Italianizing impact of the body-mediatrix’s body of work from 1985 to 1991, a six-year run that deserves—despite all the hype then, the ennui of scarcely raised eyebrows now, and the academic flurry in-between—to be called, simply, the Age of Madonna. I take my inspiration and something of my interpretive lead from a couple of agents provocateurs, Camille Paglia and Richard Rodriguez, who are out there not only as the queer swarthy offspring of Roman Catholicism but also as wickedly perceptive observers of that religion’s uncharted, unsuspected, and untoward cultural effects. I also work from instincts tutored by all the women I have known and adored, especially those outside the academy, and especially my four sisters. In the end, I want not just to give credit where credit is due—the Italian roots thing—but to account for, so as to value, a Great Woman theory of history: Madonna, Our Lady the Dominatrix of Pop.

Second-wave feminism, as we came to experience it in the 1970s, emerged from the domestic and professional resentments of intellectuals, who had fought to get out of the house, including its good-daughter psychology, and into the upscale workplace, where they ran into the blue-blooded male hierarchy—if not, in many cases, the ethnic equivalents of their fathers. The look-after-the-kids and redo-the-kitchen suburban mom— Donna Reed—was the enemy, of course, but so was the Playboy bunny and the cult of highly sexed womanhood (Helen Gurley Brown and the women’s magazines). Romance was a trap to be avoided, the world of fashion and consumer-oriented sexuality were anathema, the body in general was a challenge to the supreme value of individual freedom, and tradition (whatever tradition, but especially religious tradition) was a downer if not worse. By the early 1980s, then, feminism had argued itself into a corner, by rejecting both the power and the pleasure of what most women understood as “classic femininity.” What could feminism look like if it came, instead, from a culture where mothers ruled, as everyone knew, behind the scenes, where what the women valued

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was what everyone valued despite or rather because of the long-standing division of (sexual) labor? What might female self-making look like, in short, if it were to put femininity back into feminism? As Fosca D’Acierno reminds us, “Essere donna e madonna” is an everyday Italian expression meaning to be absolute mistress of all one surveys, an expression that couldn’t be either more gendered or more definitive, eerily predicting its American namesake’s special destiny.5 But it’s not simply conquest that matters here, it’s the mediation Madonna’s conquest achieves: a cross-class, poly-ethnic, transgendered—and, for that matter, transnational—communion. I am not just being cute with my title’s evocation of the Blessed Virgin, who is for Catholics the official Queen of Heaven, yes, but also, especially for the laity, the great intercessor or, in Church Latin, the mediatrix. I wish not only to see Madonna’s divadom as a more powerful, less self-riven response to male chauvinism than snarky feminist disdain, which I believe is beyond a shadow of a doubt, but also to determine why her theatrical reinvention of Italian Catholic womanhood has proven so seductive to so many outside the fold— sorority women in old-line colleges, black and Latino disco-cruisers, politically hip academics, good ol’ rhythm-and-blues aficionados, and the better part of the pop-music listening, watching world. We knew, from the very first, that Madonna was not so much a rocker —she came of age at the tail end of disco—as a song-and-dance woman whose influences included the girl-group appeal of Motown and the production craft of Las Vegas (which came through loud and clear the very first time I laid eyes on her, in one of those twenty-five-artist stadium fund-raisers for the fight against AIDS) to the elaborate, free-standing numbers in the old MGM-style musicals. We knew also, from the beginning, that she was obsessed with fashion (underclothes on top, lace and dangly belts and glitter!) and with making herself the fashion, making up to herself in the mirror (recall the fabulous scene at the bus terminal in Desperately Seeking Susan) while at the same time playing eye candy, especially for a young female’s wishful, emulating eye. Through the first two albums and the resultant Virgin tour of 1985, the professional videowatchers and concertgoers couldn’t get past Madonna’s dress and occasional lack thereof—“a kind of Neo-psychedelic costume,” “her scanty see-through blouse,” “funky costumes,” “a sweaty pinup girl come to life.”6 Men, especially, had no idea where the fashion razzle-dazzle was

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coming from and why it could possibly matter, even when the writing was on the wall—“Who would have thought the devilishly simple concept of Boy Toy would capture the imagination of so many female teenagers?”—the story already in those music vignettes constantly in rotation on their TV sets.7 Even at the start, she was not just fulfilling her ambition or exercising her ego. She was reviving and remaking a glorious old genre, the musical dance number, and with it, the feminine art of celebrity. By Live Aid and the Virgin tour (1985), Madonna was beholden less to mainline rock than to Donna Summer doing her nightclub routine and to Diana Ross when she was with the Supremes, to Tim Curry in Rocky Horror and Mick Jagger in his campier moments, to Lena Horne on stage in Vegas, Nina Simone in Paris, and to all the screen stars later litanized in “Vogue.” In Madonna’s breakthrough hit, “Like a Virgin,” the rhythmic hook for the title chorus is meant to get under your skin, but when it first received radio play—before I had ever seen Madonna (MTV was in limited cable distribution, often with a special fee)—I resisted, thinking like everyone else that she was a Cyndi Lauper clone. Then I saw the video, directed by Mary Lambert, a Brit, released in late 1984. It was funny (very funny), funky, and bright, in ways I hadn’t heard about. Against the backdrop of Venice, two Madonnas: one in a palazzo on her wedding night; the other singing and playing to us, a gondola troubadour gone Gothic, seducing her audience. The interior Madonna, newly wedded and just about to be bedded is, of course, the virgin as whore, baby-fat curvaceous, surprisingly fine in that white dress; the lip-syncing frame Madonna—been there, done that—is the whore as virgin, a girl singing for her supper yet with such verve and élan that we feel, ourselves, renewed. From the start, “Like a Virgin” is gloriously tongue-in-cheek. The lion wandering the streets of Venice symbolizes salacious animal masculinity (it is a male lion, isn’t it?) at least at first, but the real animal of prey proves to be the Madonna bride, who takes him—and thus us— on her own (self-stimulating) terms. The proof is in the frame. Madonna the dance troubadour looks directly into the camera’s eye more convincingly than any 1960s pinup girl, implying her own agency and indeed pleasure. Remarkably, she is able to hold the stare of the viewer even when she slithers down or pivots about on that skinny little Italian riverboat. Even at the level of the

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generic come hither—giving us a little hip, a hint of belly, the upper- or lower-curve of a breast—it’s not half bad. And yet, for all the body exposure, the reviewers were wrong when they insisted that the Madonna of this music, their videos, and those early concerts was just about sex. The “3000 screaming teenyboppers” pressed to the stage at each stop during the Virgin tour were fighting battles each day with their parents —desperate to get to the mall to buy, or wear (having raided the antique clothing stores), their Madonna outfits. They knew that power was at stake from the get-go. Intuitively, they sensed Madonna reinventing the female pop star; they wanted to join her; they wanted to make it happen. Madonna wasn’t what most women in pop music were in 1983, either the pretty face of the day or a three-chord acid screamer or an earnest 1960s-style folkie; she wasn’t even a legitimate rock-pop innovator like Deborah Harry, Rickie Lee Jones, Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics, or Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders; but she was something else, even then. Madonna had a much more powerful way about her, psychosexually and aesthetically, upping the stakes of (self-)ownership. Springsteen accepted the title of Boss with an endearing sheepishness; Sinatra strode nonchalantly into the Boardroom, knowing there he was Chairman; but Madonna was grooming herself to be nothing less than Queen of the Universe.8 That ambition was palpable and it communicated—not to everyone yet, but to many who were listening and watching and waiting. By May of 1985, six months after its initial release, Like a Virgin had tripled the sales of the first album, its videos had given the struggling MTV a major boost forward, ticket sales for shows like the Radio City Music Hall series had gone faster than any in history (pre-Internet), her supporting role in Desperately Seeking Susan had stolen the thunder of its stars, and her “tasty trashy wardrobe”—“junk jewels and boxer shorts, curvy skirts and corsets, leg leggings and lame blazers,” “the crop top, the bare midriff [in 1984!], a hip-hugger skirt or pants and lingerie straps showing under your top”—style had just become commercially available (the Boy Toy Collection) from the Madonna-authorized Entertainers Merchandise Management Corporation.9 For all of her success, the Madonna of Like a Virgin still had the reputation “for girls only,” but if the media at large had actually listened to what the fans were saying—as critic John Skow did in 1985,

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interviewing a gaggle of seventeen-year-olds—they would have seen the phenomena of “Madonna wannabes” in a more generous, and farsighted, light: “I like the way she handles herself, sort of take it or leave it.” “She’s sexy but she doesn’t need men, really. She’s kind of there by herself.” “She gives us ideas. It’s really women’s lib, not being afraid of what guys think.” Madonna’s self-confidence in acting sexy, owning her sexuality on its own terms, was itself a confidence builder—and a new generation’s turn-on. By the end of the decade, Camille Paglia was tallying up the lessons that young female America had in the past half dozen years taken from Madonna—“Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives”; “She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny—all at the same time”—for readers of serious bent who, presumably, still didn’t get it. But the implications of Madonna’s divadom had been there from the very beginning—not the least in the performances themselves.10 In “Material Girl” (dir., Mary Lambert, 1985) we are given, once again, a frame Madonna, this time an actress, who has made a video; and an interior Madonna, the character in the video within the video, who does a 1950s Marilyn Monroe dance number. Most viewers know she’s invoking Monroe, at least physically (though she’s surprisingly diminutive in comparison); some viewers know the routine comes from Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). But Madonna’s number is neither nostalgic restoration nor signifyin’ gamesmanship—in fact the viewer need not have any idea that the routine comes from anything at all to get it.11 For all the reflexive sophistication, the “material girl” that is Madonna the institution—Madonna the icon, Madonna Inc.—is much more like the “material girl” that Madonna the actress plays on the stage set in the interior video than may at first appear. She is able, all at once, to tease the routine, tease our lust for it, tease her own economic and psychological dependence on it, and still give herself fully to it— restoring, reanimating, transforming. The frame narrative of “Material Girl” operates as if it were a reinstatement of romantic sincerity, in counterpoint to staged performance, but the counterpoint is so self-ironic that it compromises not only the video producer (played by Keith Carradine, who plans to seduce her with lavish presents until he overhears her saying that money is not what

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she’s about) but also Madonna the video actress (who comes across with a kiss only after Carradine pretends to hey-shucks innocence and lack of means). But the moral of the story does not derive directly from the morality play: it comes from the doubleness already in the wicked fun of the song itself, emerging in the dramatization because Madonna, acting on the musical stage, is simply radiant, in just the way the singer Madonna projects. That Madonna, Madonna in performance, the only real Madonna that matters, possibly the only real Madonna there is, is at once her “self” and her persona, a lucky star there for extravagant ambition and already feeling the love. Part of what I’m saying here you’ve read before. Madonna, like Sinatra throughout his career and like the guys in Boston’s West End, is more at home, more herself, on stage than off. (If she seems happier off the stage than Sinatra ever did it’s probably because she’s a child of the 1970s, not the 1930s: she is constantly aware of the media’s eye and takes great care—I don’t mean she always succeeds, witness Truth or Dare— to present her “private” life rather than swing her fists at the paparazzi.) The reason why you can’t escape or get beyond the flip-flop between the antimaterialist Madonna of the frame narrative and the materialist Madonna in the interior dance routine, even though they are presented as “the genuine” versus “the staged,” is that the two moments operate yin to yang in a different metaphysics—Sinatra’s metaphysics—of the real. You can’t resolve the two but then again you don’t have to; surely she doesn’t want you to. Madonna makes the past present, totally alive, temporally incarnate; she gives old material fresh materiality, makes it wholly there, physically redeemed.12 Madonna, holding us fully in her allure, fully held by us in the camera gaze, is truly a material girl, in the spiritual sense of immanent presence. The reviews at the time didn’t understand this, but her audience felt it: the charismatic incorporation, a somewhat pagan version of embrace and empowerment not seen since, well, Sinatra. By the mid-1980s, the feminist movement had spread the notion and indeed, in places like Minneapolis, instituted the claim, that the visual appreciation of the female form, especially when undraped and especially when framed by the camera (“the gaze”), was by its very nature exploitative and harmful to women. Their mandate was for women to stop posing, formally and informally, which is an utterly ridiculous notion to

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those raised in cultures where one worships with the eye, communicates with the body, finds one’s “self” in “public” performance, and understands love—even that of the family, never mind eros—to be a bilateral form of aggression. In the emerging feminist consensus, consumer culture was once again bad, a mutual pathologization game in which the woman on display, be it on paper or stage, is reduced to an object of titillation, dehumanized, spiritually if not literally raped (no matter her role in the production or the size of her pay check). Meanwhile, the male onlooker is suckered by his own projections, at best on erotic autopilot, at worst a de facto abuser. Suffering most of all in this stock scenario is the appreciative female viewer, who “internalizes the gaze” and is thereby brainwashed into self-defeating emulation. Always on parade, with scarcely a self-conflicted bone in her body, Madonna exhibited another way. She strutted wantonly, courted the desiring eye, tutored the young into wanting display, but the magic of Madonna’s show-and-see was not at anyone’s expense (beyond the cost of tickets and trinkets), not at ours and not at hers; it worked in a different economy of erotic value because it exemplified a different form of spiritual practice. An Italian pagan Catholic understanding of power had come to America in fits and starts—Stella, di Donato, early Puzo, Springsteen, most of all Sinatra—throughout the last century, but in the second half of the 1980s Madonna gave it a long-awaited and muchneeded female valence: the mystery (in her, but also emanating from her) of the sacred in the profane.

By the early 1990s Madonna’s impact posed an expressly religious puzzle. Why hadn’t America, the most God-besotted first-world nation on earth—which got so bent out of shape when another pop diva, Sinéad O’Connor, tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on national television (Saturday Night Live, 1992)—raised holy hell at Madonna?13 Among Madonna’s performances in the late 1980s were images and conceits so seemingly pagan and disrespectful—rocking her pubes on the altar of Abraham, so to speak—that fundamental religious discourses and the Baltimore Catechism seemed to have been thrown out the window or, worse still, burned in effigy, in a deliberate challenge to official dogma. “Altogether undermining the sources of her [religious] inspiration”

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was how the scholars understood her achievement: Madonna “deconstruct[ed]” — demystified, disempowered, destroyed — the oppressive ideologies of her oppressively Catholic upbringing, turning faith inside out, leaving it in tatters.14 But if this was true, why was there so little public fuss? From the Vatican for a little while, yes, but not from the hundreds of thousands in the concert seats or the hundreds of millions at home watching MTV, where even Catholics with traditional values, not to mention U.S. puritan tendencies, took Madonna’s blasphemies in stride. What were they seeing—feeling—that the pezzonovanti of the Church and the academy were not? I believe, and I’m not alone in this (thank you, Camille, Fosca, Carla), that Madonna is Italian Catholic from the top of her coif to the tip of her Soho dancing shoes.15 Madonna is all about radiance, and that’s got to have come from somewhere and amount to something beyond female self-determination. Italian Catholicism informs just about everything Madonna does, most often in ways that are not officially sanctioned and that we are unaccustomed to speaking of or even recognizing, no matter how alert our postmodern suspicions.16 Madonna may not have the language to explain her Christian invocations, but she’s got the music, the movement, the visuals—the aesthetics and the affirming, confirming reception. In the late 1980s, she put Catholic imagery on stage like a pagan Italian, for the world to test and contest; and she put Italian womanhood on stage like a pagan Catholic, in order to bear human witness and sacramental fruit. On the Blonde Ambition tour, which was conducted in and featured throughout the 1991 documentary Truth or Dare, several of the songs, mainly ballads that Madonna wrote herself, were performed on an oldfashioned kneeler framed by a stylized chancel with a rosette of Christ’s face, against the backdrop of columns evocative of a Gothic cathedral. In these ballads, Madonna adopts the pose of the supplicant, the confessor, and to some extent the domestically martyred, but even here the theatrics of humility are but half—arguably the less blasphemous half —of her stage dialectic, as she also plays goddess, doing so despite songs that token despair before the compounded patriarchy of father and Father. Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccone, designed this particular set, in which the lineage between church and arena, saint and rock star, liturgy and song couldn’t be more explicit, yet the assumption that

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one might make was that Madonna had simply added a couple of religious figures—the Contrite Girl evolving into the Salacious Nun—to her repertoire: made complex and relevant, perhaps, but of no more fundamental significance than any other of her masked paraders. Or was it? 17 Those familiar with the 1980s videos in The Immaculate Video Collection and with the tours, especially Blonde Ambition, know that Madonna has within her corpus easily recognizable Christian meditations on conscience and right action, on atonement and mercy, even on sacrifice and redemption, which, if anything, peaked in the late 1980s. “Papa Don’t Preach” (dir., James Foley, 1986) is anti-patriarchal in the literal sense, going against the counsel of one’s father, but it’s also a hymn to keeping one’s baby—ferociously disconcerting to the feminist Left in 1986—adoption (not abortion) the only alternative up for consideration. “Oh, Father” is an accusation of paternal abuse, psychological if not physical—yet daughter Madonna embraces rebellion and escape as the necessary preconditions for admitting partial culpability, making contrition, proffering an exchange of mercy, and securing reconciliation: a therapeutic revelation, perhaps, but the confessional rhythms of Catholic atonement, absolutely. Madonna is, if anything, more forthright in the religious underpinnings of her social vision. Although the Vatican protested the very idea that the Madonna character gave herself stigmata in “Like a Prayer,” despite the fact that it was done in a dream sequence (“Like a Prayer” is structured, explicitly, as a play within a play within a play), and although the idea of an Italian girl making love with a mulatto saint (a statue of St. Martin de Porres come to life) can still make the American Right queasy, and although mainstream academe acts as if the Southern black church had nothing to do with Roman Catholicism (as if the “parishes” of Louisiana and the Caribbean Rim never existed), still it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that “Like a Prayer” is a Catholic morality play with a vengeance: liberation theology, Madonna style. Is Madonna the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of pop Catholicism, surprisingly orthodox in her thematically religious work, in which she in effect represents her “real” self, but hopelessly blasphemous (sexed up and increasingly, bodaciously, even ostentatiously aberrant) in the work we think of as quintessential Madonna, the music videos in which she plays, of course, the diva? Only if we fail to see that each time Madonna gets on

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stage, she goes to work in surreptitiously, seductively religious ways, involving not so much a pop secularizing of Italian Catholic problems and motifs as something like the reverse, a retrieval and intensification of the Italian Catholic impulse that is, believe it or not, latent in pop secularity itself.18 We often call rock, like the blues before it, a substitute religion, and it is commonplace to label Madonna—herself so self-consciously iconic, her fans so reverent, and her fertility now so self-evident—a “goddess,” as one of her recent biographers puts it. But here I’m pursuing something more structural than thematic, more performative than conceptual, and more specific than the pagan goddess revisited. Catholicism in the pews is less a discourse of belief than a way of being and doing, at home and on the streets and out in the world. It is less a mode of testifying (Protestants ask, “Are you saved?”) than a form of devotional practice (Catholics ask, “Did you go to Mass?”). What matters in Madonna’s case are the aesthetic dimensions of the Church’s rituals and liturgies: its performative, sensory, and visual cultures, which are expert at channeling the impulse of the libido into spiritual directions, but in so doing take a risk of casting the spirit in untoward—at one time, closeted—directions.19 For Catholics, the crucifix is more than a cross, the Mass is astonishingly more bloody and sensual than its polite Protestant counterpart, and the devotional candles, the polychrome statues, the vibrant and complicated narrative iconography of stained glass and the stations of the cross give spiritual play if also discipline to the erotic imagination. You pray with the eyes during a Catholic service, especially traditionally; you appeal to Mary and the pantheon of saints, and your attention is allowed to drift, productively, even promiscuously: men in colorful dresses conduct a more-than-merely-symbolic cannibalistic feast, speaking in tongues, attended by boys swinging bells and incense, with starkly clothed women maintaining a respectful distance, an uncertain difference. On the side altar Christ of the Bleeding Heart oozes from breast or side (reproduced on one of Madonna’s T-shirts in Truth or Dare), St. Sebastian writhes from all those arrows, and St. Lucy holds her eyeballs aloft on a plate. In a post-1960s suburban church you may well be comforted by the blue-and-white robed Mary cradling her newborn (familiar worldwide from all those plaster copies), so homey and benign; but downtown, in the baroque cathedral, you’re likely to be confronted

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by the black-and-red-and-sepia Mary of the Pietà, no virgin she but a heartbroken Mother of a doomed Son, disturbingly, the devastated lover of the sacrificial man. The omerta of Catholic iconography in motion, especially its public afterlife in art, is now out—and has been at least since Madonna first made music. As Richard Rodriguez observed in 1981, When we were in eighth grade the priest told us how dangerous it was to look at our naked bodies, even while taking a bath—and I noticed that he made the remark directly under a near-naked figure of Christ on the cross. The Church, in fact, excited more sexual wonderment than it repressed. I regarded with awe the “wedding ring” on a nun’s finger, her black “wedding veil”—symbols of marriage to God. I would study pictures of martyrs—white-robed virgins fallen in death and the young, almost smiling, St. Sebastian, transfigured in pain. At Easter high mass I was dizzied by the mucous perfume of white flowers at the celebration of rebirth. At such moments, the Church touched alive some very private sexual excitement; it pronounced my sexuality important. . . . I am, for example, a materialist largely because I was brought up to believe in the central mystery of the Church—the redemptive Incarnation. (I carried the heavy gold crucifix in church ceremonies far too often to share the distrust of the material still prevalent in modern Puritan America.)20

In the doctrine of the Incarnation—God in the body of Man, man as the body of God—matter and spirit converge, with profound effects that you can’t help but feel. That’s Rodriguez’s point, and it rings bells of inquiry and recognition. How does such a legacy of doctrine, figuration, and practice—as far from puritan plain style as one can get—weigh on the mind; how does it make for a mind like Madonna’s? After the eleventh century, the Church adopted the fertility principle of its pagan cult rivals—elevating Mary as Mother of God—but tried to leave the sexuality at the door, embracing maternal incubation as a divine force while insisting in a profoundly self-defeating logic that reproduction be asexual. Yet the Church’s own developing iconography,

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especially after competition from the Reformation, courted the return of sexuality; the popular play of everyday Italians both practiced and policed the healing of the divide between the two Marys (Christ’s mother and Magdalene, an ex-prostitute and possibly his lover, at least as Jesus Christ Superstar—which was surely a formative text of Madonna’s youth —and now The Da Vinci Code, envision it); and Madonna brought the interplay between sacred and profane to fruition. “She has rejoined and healed the split halves of woman: Mary, the Blessed Virgin and holy mother, and Mary Magdalene, the harlot,” Paglia commented in 1992.21 Madonna resurrects the female goddess persona (an Apollonian form of discipline that dates to ancient Egypt) and puts her into musical (Dionysian) motion. Reclaiming the byplay between Hollywood dance routines and the voyeurism attendant upon Catholic statuary and ritual, she intensifies the Italianness of the iconography and re-paganizes the saints. Madonna’s version of pagan Catholicism benefits as well from an established pattern within Southern Italian daily life: extensions of religious sensibility into secular realms that flirt with paganish blasphemy but always in specifically Catholic ways that feel ultimately sacramental. Scholars are quite adept at interpreting Italian—and Italian American— domesticity as an extension and challenge to Catholicism, but home is never isolate among these most social of peoples (there isn’t even a word in Italian, Pellegrino D’Acierno tells us, for “privacy”), and the interplay of ritual and daily life takes place on the streets as well: there is just as intimate a relation, analogy really, between what happens in Church and what happens in the piazza. La bella figura is, as D’Acierno points out, the Italian term for upholding the honor of the family—Marian Catholicism is much more a shame than a guilt culture, so that the overall metaphor for right behavior is one of good looks!22 The passeggiata, then, not only brings the statues alive and puts the iconicity into quotidian motion, it casts the ordinary Italian in the resultant pageantry: the spectator becomes spectacle, the woman steps forth as the rival and commander, and the erotic play of the social takes on a ritual, hence spiritual, bent. For the late 1980s, Madonna slimmed down and toned up, and she played with various forms of S and M theater, with lipstick lesbianism, and with high fashion, but there was never anything anorexic or

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self-destructive, even when she was acting the role of masochist. And there was never anything of the unapproachable hauteur of fashion models either, even when she emulates them (in the videos, but also on runways built for the arena shows). For all the witty mirroring in her oeuvre, Madonna is most at home on stage, and on stage you don’t need a mirror, however self-reflective your performance. On stage you can, indeed you must, judge how you are doing in the eyes of a live audience, whom, like Sinatra and like Springsteen, she courts with assiduous love. Intuitively and ultimately self-consciously, Madonna operates in this vein. She self-consciously invokes and plays with modern images and figures, but the key to what she does with them is her immersion in the legacy that proceeds through Hollywood—the glamour photograph and the musical dance set piece—from the older Christian pageantry.

The late 1980s were a tragic time for homosexual men in this country, with the need to care for the dying and to solve the puzzle of the disease, to stop the onset of AIDS from HIV and develop a vaccine. But it was dispiriting in other ways too: there was a fear, for all the empathy, indeed running beneath the empathy, of backlash; and there was a sense of loss, in which the radical, heady experiment in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and especially San Francisco—where personal liberation ushered in utopian social communion—had crashed. A short fifteen years later, however, lesbian dominatrix chic is all the rage, there is scarcely a comedy on TV without the requisite gay male character (not to mention the ubiquitous Whose Line Is It Anyway?), and Massachusetts —an Irish and Puritan state if ever there was one—has declared that members of the same sex have the right of marriage. I’m not saying everyone understands what has happened, nor am I unaware that the specter of same-sex marriage may turn out to rally the Christian Right once again. But when the crowds at baseball games dance and mime to the disco chestnut “Y.M.C.A.” (which is, in fact, a paean to the liberating and redemptive power of anonymous sex sought by lonely country boys in the big bad city, at citadels of Christian physical self-discipline!) we are already practicing a domesticated, defanged version of what Madonna, speaking out of warehouse-district experience, the Greenwich

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Village party scene, and European traditions of decadence, urged upon us lo those fifteen years ago. You don’t need to have highly developed gaydar to pierce the representational strategies of “Vogue.” Filmed in the black and white of classical glamour photography by David Fincher, transferring its aethetic values from stills to screen, Madonna in “Vogue” (1990) plays the Hollywood diva more literally than ever before—her hair gone platinum, her costumes ranging from the extravagantly voluptuous to the femme formale—alternating between looking Harlow looking Dietrich looking Davis, against the backdrop of statues, paintings, elegantly feminine men, happy clichés (French maid service, a Chinese house boy), and women dressed up, circa 1933, like men and like men in drag. Statues come to life and dance at Madonna’s beck and call; or rather, in sync with her dancing—as if she were the queen inspiring young boys’ genderliberation dreams. The relation between gay and straight is neither pathological nor a zero-sum game—it is queer, bringing heterosexuals to terms with heroic gay figures, rallying gay folk (male and female) around the figure of the female poseur, giving vent to the crossgender wanderlust of heterosexuals through men impersonating women, and rallying just about everybody around Madonna herself. Everyone wins—at least in their imagination—which turns out to be neither a final collapsing of identity nor a benign form of social tolerance but something darker, more challenging, more visionary, and more vital. “Justify My Love” (dir. Jean Baptiste Mondino, 1990), refused by MTV and left out of the video version of Collection, is the rubbery fleshed underbelly of “Vogue.” Set in the Royal Monceau Hotel in Paris and photographed in the black-and-white noir of Weimar, Germany, “Justify My Love” is replete with sleekly male women and luxuriously sinuous men, dominating and dominated: sexual androgynes who are, for the most part, ethnically indeterminate as well, flip-flopping roles (leather, chain, and lace) in a rapture of ego immolation and personhood convergence. In the end, macho “normal” has been called out as a selfmystified resignation; the look into the perverse within, as a stroke of masculine courage. Although the tone is sardonic, the style that of holding one’s breath, the only real cruelty here is what is required for a regular guy to cross the psychological threshold of latent desire:

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Madonna the dominatrix is at work not as an actual sadist but as the estrogen-fuelled maternal intercessor, orchestrating testosterone’s curious drive to the wonderland of submission, under the sign (literally) of the crucified Christ. On the back wall of the room in which most of the action takes place there is a mammoth crucified Christ—a modern Christ, in crucifix position but without the cross, in full ecstatic shock at his yet-to-be justified torture and death by execution. The relation of God and man are unresolvable, but, I think, overdetermined here: it is unclear whether the expectant lover is to suffer, in the realization of what he wants, a desire redeemable only in the bedroom; or whether it’s the prone Madonna who suffers in the realization that she gets to take heterosexual flight only if she is willing first to take command, thereby sacrificing womankind’s traditional and all-too-convenient illusion (“It was his idea, not mine”). However you read it, though, the point is not the antithetical juxtaposition of murder and Catholic creed that Coppola enacts at the end of The Godfather, but Madonna’s intuitive sublime gone salvific, transgressive sexuality and redemptive power working imaginatively and materially together, a faith in the sacramental power of the inward yet shared: ex-stasis, spiritually self-extinguishing because carnally self-revealing. What I sense in most of Madonna but especially here is an altogether Catholic undercurrent of universal fallenness turned infinite hope, enacting both the privileged insight of gay folks’ special election and their common prayer of sensual salvation. From a heterosexual point of view, “Justify My Love” is, at the very least, a call to look within, the embrace of what elsewhere is already “out”—it’s not tolerance, a division of sexual labor, but something more frightening and more inspiring, self-recognition, the interpenetration and cross-fertilization between hetero and not.23 Madonna’s queer magnetism, including her command over the actual imaginations of gay men, has more in common with Mae West’s piercing humor or Cher’s technicolor majesty, than it does, say, with the imperious cry of Barbara Streisand or the sulky defiance of James Dean (in Madonna there’s a touch of the outlaw, even the tragic, but thank God no self-pity).24 The wink of Madonna’s eye invokes the knowing wit of an older generation’s embrace of musical comedy, cross-casting themselves in the theater of furtive life, while the increasing confidence with which Madonna in fact

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pulls off the fantasy effect—a bravado of ambisexual cross-identification —reflects, in turn, a newer generation’s will to believe in full-scale social and physical transformation (the gorgeous freedoms of San Francisco, the miracles of modern surgery). Johnny Depp may credit his recent triumph as the debonair prancer in Pirates of the Caribbean to Jack Haley’s Tin Man (in the most heartrending panic narrative of them all, The Wizard of Oz) and to rocker Keith Richards (whose own legacy goes back to Little Richard), but with black eyeliner and shadowed skin Depp owes at least as much to Prince, and even more—given the double glint of confession and come-on—to Madonna. It is a commonplace to wonder at the successive reincarnations of Madonna, which like Sinatra’s comebacks (and Dylan’s versatility, and Nina Simone’s eclecticism), is a variation of American Romantic musical pilgrimage. But Madonna’s form of reinvention has its own special continuing logic to it, one driven less by sheer musicality than by production values—and by a particular tradition of perfected stagecraft: dance, costume, pose, vignette, and strut. Madonna’s reanimation of the pop diva takes advantage of, operates within, and variously re-inflects a regime of representation that is older than concert rock and roll and MTV, much much older—the magisterially erotic female taking center stage that Paglia suggestively calls “Sexual Personae.” Paglia traces the female trajectory within this tradition, especially its appropriation of the hard masculinized line, all the way back to Egyptian statuary, then forward through the great post-Reformation European fine arts project (think Botticelli’s siren-like Venus versus Michelangelo’s muscled and bullnecked mothers), forward into what she regards as the high paganist revival of Hollywood’s golden era—in order to get at its beguiling gender bend.25 I believe, with Paglia, that the Madonna of the late 1980s, however much she is expressing herself, is rediscovering, reanimating, and popularizing the Personae trajectory in pop musical form; but I also believe that the key intervening mediation of this fulsome and varied legacy is that of Roman Catholic iconography, at least as that legacy is envisioned and embodied by the architectonic persona of our time.26 Or, as Richard Rodriguez confesses, “I’d rather be Madonna. Really, I would.”27

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9

Skin Giancarlo and the Border Patrol To be white and sound that black, you’ve got to be Italian. —Steve Van Zandt, 1997

To their corporate shame, Italian Americans figured prominently in two of the New York City hate crimes of the 1980s, crimes so closely tied to the patrolling of informal community borders that the fatal incidents are now known simply by the names of the respective neighborhoods: Howard Beach and Bensonhurst. On the night of December 20, 1986, a posse of young toughs in their late teens—the boy wielding the bat was Jon Lester, but eight of the other eleven had conspicuously Italian surnames—chased down four black men, beat them with fists and bashed them with the baseball bat and a tree limb, for the “crime” of needing to make a telephone call in a pizzeria after their car broke down on the outskirts of Howard Beach, an isolated section of Queens near Kennedy Airport also known as the home of gangster John Gotti. Trying to escape, with the bloodthirsty mob in pursuit, one of the four men, Michael Griffith, twenty-three, was struck and killed by a car, whose driver thought he had hit a deer. On August 23, 1989, a warm summer night, Yusuf Hawkins, sixteen, and three of his buddies were on their way to keep an appointment to inspect a used car, advertised for sale in Bensonhurst (at that time, the Little Italy of Brooklyn), when they were accosted by a pack of thirty to forty white youths armed with handguns, knives, and baseball bats. Four shots rang out: Hawkins was shot dead, another of the boys was 162

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grazed. Eight young men—all of them from Bensonhurst, seven with conspicuously Italian names—were arraigned for some combination of civil rights violations, criminal possession of a weapon, first-degree or aggravated assault, first-degree riot, manslaughter, and murder in the second or first degree.1 The youth who actually pulled the trigger, Joey Fama, may have been “not right in the head,” but the extenuating circumstances otherwise spoke volumes. The boys had been whipped into fantasies of proprietary masculinity and preemptive sexual vengeance by one Gina Feliciano, of Afro-Caribbean and Italian heritage, who had boasted that her black and Latino friends were coming to kick the local boys’ “pussy white asses.” “Italian Americans in Bensonhurst are notable for their cohesiveness and provinciality; the slightest pressure turns those qualities into prejudice and racism,” Marianna De Marco Torgovnick reports: “I detested the racial killing; but I also understood it.” Maria Laurino, another offspring of Bensonhurst who crossed Ocean Parkway, passes judgment: “Yes, [the residents of Bensonhurst] were right to assert that it was a mentally impaired young man who pulled the trigger that killed Hawkins, but they refused to accept blame for an entrenched bigotry that created the setting for this racial tragedy.” Truth be told, Italian American xenophobia had struck African Americans in the Brooklyn-Queens corridor once again.2 Of course it hadn’t always been this way. At the turn of the century, during the height of immigration, Southern Italians were “swarthy,” and therefore not exactly white: dagoes, wops, and guineas. In the North, the Italians took the dirtiest jobs—digging ditches, picking rags, shoveling manure off the streets—at the lowest pay, on a scale that went from “white” to “black” to “Italian” (with “Irish” and “Hebrew” pegged variously in between); in the Jim Crow South, in Alabama and in Mississippi and especially in Louisiana, Sicilians worked side by side with African Americans in the cotton and sugar fields, upon occasion bunking with them, and upon occasion getting lynched, too. Everywhere they went, the Italians were tagged as dumb, dangerous, and apelike; and the police profiled them, with familiar results. By 1924, the nativist forces in the U.S. House and Senate had passed laws grossly favoring immigrants from Anglo-Saxon Protestant Europe, especially the British Isles, reducing the influx from Italy and its Mediterranean neighbors to a trickle.3 The Sacco and Vanzetti affair, which

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mixed the sorts of prejudices that greeted African Americans with the ones that greeted Jews (prejudices in play whether Sacco and Vanzetti did it or not) spanned the better part of the 1920s. Roosevelt’s decision in 1942 to take the Italians off the suspect aliens list and close down the Montana internment camps was a huge, if to this day hush-hush, victory (Italians preferring not to remember), but that was not the end of more subtle exercises in prejudice—class distinction, but also, quietly lingering, ever reemergent, the racial connection. The 1942 live-action film version of The Jungle Book featured Italian Americans almost exclusively —Joseph Calleia, Frank Puglia, Rosemary DeCamp—in its cast of African animals; and as late as 1967, when it came to the animated version, Disney Studios (an arbiter of whiteness if ever there was one!) did something with Louis Prima (a singer with much Cab Calloway in his persona) they would no longer have dared to do with an African American: they cast him as the orangutan. By the 1970s Italian Americans in the outer belts of the inner cities were starting to feel abandoned—by the economy heading south, by race-based legislation, and by the ambitious among them becoming educated and leaving blue-collar enclaves behind. Some if not most in the old Italian neighborhoods, feeling desperate, latched onto the combination of territorial pride and white righteousness at work in certain strands of the new ethnic consciousness. Fifteen years later, the youths responsible for the fatalities in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach, who were neighborhood punks, high school and voc-tech outcasts going nowhere fast, had been raised on the emergent racist mentality of their parents (all that melanzana talk), who had themselves gone nowhere and were now itching to do unto others as they felt done unto. It was into this ugly mix of frustrated longing and compensatory belonging that Michael Griffith, Yusuf Hawkins, and their friends in the mid- to late 1980s walked. Perhaps no artist or thinker in history not born of it has taken this aspect of Italian America more seriously than the contemporary filmmaker Spike Lee, a die-hard Brooklynite of African American ancestry and identification, who has made in effect a guido trilogy, with intriguing combinations of genuine simpatico, righteous anger, cross-projection, cross-identification, and mutual critique.4 The first installment, Do the Right Thing (1989), is probably the most important African American

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statement about New York’s contemporary white-black borderlands extant, a direct response to the Howard Beach disaster, telling it like it is from the black perspective. The film pivots on the residual presence in Bedford-Stuyvesant—black centered and diversely colored—of a pizzeria owned by Italian Americans from Bensonhurst, who in the course of the film partially instigate and yet also suffer from a sociologically complex turning of the tables of racial rage, at the center of which is the tragic beating death by the police of a young black man. If you want to talk anger at racially inflected economic disenfranchisement, Lee is saying, then let’s take a swing through my neighborhood. I mean to meet controversy with controversy here, engaging the turf wars from the admittedly safe distance of the moviegoer and culturewatcher. I agree with the Italian American protestors who sense that despite the strong familiarity of type, attitude, and interactive behavior (Lee knows his neighbors and is personally tight with Danny Aiello), the film is not in the final analysis quite fair to Sal and Sons, whose pizzeria is first tossed then torched in the wake of a Radio Raheem’s beating death. But I disagree about the nature and import of Lee’s artistry, which harbors within it something more lasting, I hope, than either a black revenge fantasy or white guilt-trip. Lee may or may not be fully persuasive in balancing the various sociological explanations and parsing out the guilt for the tragedy that he has, in its nuances, only imagined—I leave that call to you. But I do believe that the film seduces the attentive viewer—I would like further to believe, even the Italian American viewer—out of Sal’s pizzeria, where the Howard Beach baseball bat defends waning economic privilege if not racial hierarchy, and onto the black-identified yet multicolored Stuyvesant Avenue, which as the true common ground is not just iconically Brooklyn but symbolically Mediterranean in ways that Lee’s filmmaking identifies with, illustrates, and enacts.

In the interest of efficiency, let me declare my loyalties Brooklyn-style. By the end of Do the Right Thing, I’ve taken on a wary affection for Radio Raheem, and Buggin’ Out is my man, his project my project. I’m not saying I’m “down”—that’s not my decision to make, it’s not even my language (exactly). What I am saying is that as a spaghetti-makin’,

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medallion-totin’, Sinatra-smitten American EYEtallion, my assumed point of identification is Sal and Sons Famous, and in short order Lee has gotten me out from behind the counter, across the threshold of the pizzeria, and along the weave of Stuyvesant Avenue. Taken in by a film that’s all about turf in the not quite multicultural city, I’ve been deterritorialized, sent for a hike, not away from my people but to where “my people, my people” (DJ Jackson’s radio call) really are.5 For what makes Do the Right Thing work as transit through the interracial contact zone is its intuitively brilliant deployment of interethnic common ground: if not quite a universal catholicity still a dyed-in-the-wool Brooklyn urbanity, ItaloAfrican American at the least and perhaps more. In the aftermath of the film’s initial reception, Lee was dismayed that white folk were more upset about the destruction of Sal’s property than by the death of neighborhood impresario Radio Raheem. To this I say sure enough they are white. From where I sit—among the South Brooklyn diaspora, one generation removed on mother’s side from Bay Ridge and Coney Island’s Seagate— those who don’t see what Buggin’ Out sees haven’t, to put a signifying spin on the patrollin’ idiom, “stayed Italian.” Cornel West has testified, and bell hooks has averred, that “Spike’s great talent, almost near genius, is his keen sense of Play and the comic” —a gift for documenting African American vernacular and, indeed, composing by its muse, that is supremely realized during the first half of Do the Right Thing.6 In Lee’s romantic yet fiercely involving version of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn calls to us. On the strip along Stuyvesant between Quincy and Lexington lies a habitus of stoops and windows, street mingle, store flow, and music float, constituting leisure-day sociability: less a mean street than the boulevard of what Herbert Gans once called an “urban village,” its open hydrant the fountain of an elongated piazza —and what we see there is its syncopated congress, the opera of the streets, where the individual is constituted not so much outside of group interaction as through it, and where the ethical imperative that emerges is a formidable combination of love and irony, respect and suspicion, absorption and wariness. Now the pizzeria at the Stuyvesant/Lex corner is another matter. What makes the interior of Sal’s Famous so claustrophobic is of course the racist vitriol that foments beneath its pleasant aspect, but not just that. What happens inside the pizzeria is a familiar mixture of defensive

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humanism and Calvinist realism: it’s a double whammy that on the ideological face of it ought to legitimate the Franzione family but in my viewing undercuts them.7 If you remember how marvelously the charged confrontations out on the street devolve, especially those involving the ubiquitous Radio Raheem—with Ella’s three henchmen who pronounce him “large” (and themselves “just visiting”), with Mookie to whom he soliloquizes on Love and Hate, with the Puerto Rican stoop leader who shuts down the salsa with a wry “You’ve got it,” or (my favorite) with the Korean shopkeeper, whose feisty meeting of curse-with-curse prompts Radio to break out a smile—then you’ll own how readily interactions in the pizzeria turn ugly, and why. Lee uses lower-middle-class Bensonhurst xenophobia to strong, manipulative effect here: except for the single instance of teasing Mookie for having a guilty conscience, Sal never hits a high note to my ears, not even in his small-time local charity; and his sons, the clinical primitivist (Pino, in racial panic/homosocial denial) and his flaccid reverse-wannabe of a brother (Vito), well forget it. In the key scene, in which Buggin’ Out gets all the lines, the Brooklyn urbanity I would like to assume Sal enjoys and can reproduce—he’s supposed to be a Neapolitan type, for Christ’s sake—utterly fails him, and Lee wants us to feel that failure. In the crucial prelude to the defining confrontation of the film, what Buggin’ Out and the rest of us see—and I don’t think I can make too large a point of this—is one mediocre piece of pizza pie. Buggin’ Out wants more mozzarella, and who can blame him? Filmed at a distance, this slice is parsimonious by New York or anywhere else’s standards: it’s not vivid, has no oozing milky cheese or tomato red sauce, and above all no bubbles in the crust (a sure sign that Italians have given up the standards). What is ingenious or insidious about Lee’s direction is that he never lets us see the wonder of great pizza. We get paeans to the hard work that goes into it as well as to its happy affect among certain customers, but we are made privilege to neither the anticipatory sensuality of its production (no dough is tossed) nor to the realized sensuality of its consumption. Recall the scene in which the Puerto Rican IccyMann scrapes snowcones from a magnificent block of ice, then loads them with Caribbean syrups, for big-eyed kids—and you’ve got the point. Sal’s pride in feeding the community later articulated comes across as self-congratulation, as self-justifying rhetoric along the border between races that Sal in fact

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never crosses except with a buck or a bat in hand. Mookie knows, at least, why Southern Italians have curls. When the camera catches Sal staring down Buggin’ Out, who’s staring at a slice on the counter, I have to admit I’m with Buggin’ Out: first, because of that sorry lookin’ slice of pizza; and second, because Sal has no way to acknowledge his shortcoming except by condescending to Buggin’ Out (“What are you, some retard?”) and worse yet by throwing the cash nexus in his face (“Extra cheese is two dollars”). What Buggin’ Out and the rest of us hear at strategic moments throughout the film, from Sal almost exclusively, is a lot of past history—”These kids have grown up on my food and I’m proud of that,” “I built this pizzeria with my own hands,” “Jade, you used to come in here all the time”: formulations of craftsmanship, intimacy, and nurturance that reflect the dinnertable sacramentalism of Mediterranean Catholics (Lee gets that right) yet in Sal’s mouth they sound strangely, disconcertingly hollow, because Lee viciously undercuts Sal’s claims as a cook-host by deflating the quality of his product and by indicting it for economic exploitation (the cash flows out of Bedford-Stuyvesant into Bensonhurst). Only Sal’s refusal to relocate the pizzeria from Bed-Stuy to Bensonhurst—“Pop, we gotta leave!” Pino insists; “When are you pulling out?” the cops echo—has prophetic force to it; otherwise I hear only self-justification. Buggin’ Out nonetheless tries to meet the man halfway—“Sal, how come you ain’t got no brothers on the wall?”—a question that lands full square on the shared idiom of ethnic iconicity. In response Sal lampoons neighborhood/nationalist solidarity while invoking proprietary privilege: “Get your own place, you do what you wanna do. You can put up your brothers and uncles, nephews and nieces, stepfathers and stepmothers, what you want. But this is my pizzeria: American Italians only on the wall.” Sal fails here. His comeback becomes racially insulting rather than just personally disrespectful: a declaration that the game is fixed in advance because his ownership fixes it (Buggin’ Out has an elegant reply to that)—and the presence of the baseball bat speaks chillingly for Howard Beach. As I see it, Sal’s gallery of Italian Americans operates not as aesthetic testimonial but as pure border control, because Sal refuses to, perhaps cannot, testify on behalf of those whose photographs he has placed on the wall: a failure symbolized iconically by the black-and-white blandness of the surprisingly weak publicity shots

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(where is Sinatra the waif in a forties zoot suit? or the Pacino who mounts to his father’s throne in The Godfather?)—shots that pale in comparison to that flame red wall, the gaily colored brownstones, the playful clothing, and above all the gorgeous faces in the streets. Whatever force it has in playing the interracial dozens at all costs, Sal’s brutal retort is lousy self-articulation. Even Vito knows that if he’s going to elect Roger Clemens over Dwight Gooden, he’s gotta make a case. Yet Sal provides no sense whatsoever that among Italian Americans performative virtuosity, of body and voice especially, is fiercely admired—these guys are on the wall because they made really great song, could catch the ball with elegance, and so forth—admired especially for achieving wide honor without assimilating: performances imbued with ethnic tonality, personae bespeaking group loyalty. Of course Italian Americans are not alone in that respect: that’s Lee’s inspiration. What this understanding of Lee’s film contributes to our model of the multicultural city—call it our shared romance with Brooklyn urbanity—is its embrace of competitive virtuosity: not celebrity as itself an achievement, but rather achievement plus celebrity, a joyous if also burdensome celebrity in consequence of vital, sometimes peerless achievement. I know cross-ethnic comparisons are dangerous whether emphasizing similarity or difference because they risk compound stereotyping and bidirectional projection. Yet if what we’re talking about is performative virtuosity—be it musical or athletic or theatrical, of the voice or of the body or better still of both—I think we’re on solid ground, that is, common ground, if we want to cross-reference Italian and African America, not exclusively, of course, but majorly. Here I would recall the uproarious scene at the foot of the yuppie newcomer’s brownstone, where Buggin’ Out, as the aggrieved owner of a pair of brand-new prime sneakers, speaks out against the invasive power of gentrification, including (in a deft comic spin) disloyalty to the neighborhood gods. The eloquence here is as much physical as it is vocal: the gang featuring the young Martin Lawrence reprise their masterful histrionics facing the showy 1960s convertible at the fire hydrant, and Lee the auteur-director steps up to the challenge of his best actor, who again takes center stage. You’ll recall the set up: Mookie, the pizza deliveryman who runs interference for Sal’s Famous with the block, and Vito, the earnestly simpatico son, have just been joined by Buggin’ Out, who asks

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Mookie what gives with the white boy. Just then a flash of shamrock green—Boston Celtic green, a jersey unmistakably emblazoned with Larry Bird’s 33—whizzes into Buggin’ Out, and lays a patch of street grime across his sparkling white Air Jordans. Buggin’ Out looks down in horror, then sprints after the bicyclist, identified in the credits as Clifton, whom he hails down at the top of his brownstone stoop. Egged on by the Greek chorus of the youthful streeters, who are themselves led by the B-girl Ella (whom I increasingly fancy) and her main buds, Buggin’ Out queries the dollar-makes-right logic of gentrifying dispossession, speaking against Clifton’s gross confusion (“This is a free country”) between the colonizing power of legislated and subsidized ownership and the ethics of belonging. To catch the vignette’s final joke, you have to have been schooled in professional basketball turfdom, circa 1988. During the late 1980s in multicolored Brooklyn, wearing the jersey of Larry Bird—the sport’s last great white hope, a frontcourt master—is tantamount, in a predominantly black neighborhood no less, to flipping the bird, unless you’re a fast talker, which Clifton (like Sal, like Vito, like Pino) most assuredly is not. Yet for all his escalating anger at Clifton, Buggin’ Out is willing to put this form of disrespect down to the shared code of regional loyalty, wherein race is at least partially enfolded into space—“Whyn’t you move back to Massachusetts!”—only to have Clifton reveal, in a final, egregious taunt, that he is no refugee from the pale lands to the north but, in fact, a Brooklynite born and bred. In electric antipathy, the crowd instantly repositions Clifton from block invader to borough traitor, as it throws up its hands in Mediterranean-like disdain: whatever.8 Buggin’ Out gets the last word, a gesture beyond language that renders a verdict without appeal. In the final analysis, Clifton, that honky, is also a Tom; he’s what they call in Long Beach, hissing through their teeth, “’scommunicato.” The man whose publicity photo hangs on my wall, then, is the actor who plays Buggin’ Out, one Giancarlo Esposito, a man with not only a name—Giancarlo Alessandro Giuseppe Esposito—but a biography that for the express purposes of border defiance is just too good to be true. Who better to signify Brooklyn urbanity in the context of Lee’s Bed-Stuy than an Italian African American/African Italian American? Calling the block a piazza, invoking the opera of its streets may be an interpretive

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convenience, but damn, Giancarlo Esposito is the son of an Italian stage technician (from Naples) and a black American diva (from Alabama). Born in Copenhagen, he lived as a small child in Southern Italy and was later raised in Greater New York, where he attended Elizabeth Seton College in the Bronx/Westchester Italian/black border town of Yonkers.9 Talent backed by genealogy, genealogy underwriting talent, to invoke Esposito is to erect a special icon: that of bicultural virtuoso, one who is not stranded between cultures (certainly Vito, and arguably Mookie, run that risk) but has, rather, the capacity to embody either culture, to inhabit their common ground with especial aplomb, and to articulate emergent as well as persisting power dynamics. Tellingly, Esposito himself not only claims the Italian half of his heritage, which he has preserved and upheld in spite of the trouble it has caused him on both sides of Ocean Parkway, but he conspicuously refused to act in Jungle Fever despite Lee’s now-magisterial bidding—in protest against the script’s reduction of the thickness of love to sexual racism.10 But the proof was in the pudding, which turned out to have a sweetly redemptive current after all. In filming Jungle Fever, Lee (who grew up across the line from Bensonhurst in then-Italian Cobble Hill, and who, according to Esposito, often “had a better feel for the Italian stuff . . . than the African American stuff”) came around to Esposito’s vision of the transcendent possibilities of interracial passion: not in the central coupling of the film, which was conceived in racial projection (penile endowment versus forbidden fruit, all over again) and thus stillborn from the start (even the actors have no chemistry), but in the byplay between the cuckolded candy-story Italian American boyfriend (John Turturro) and a classy African American patron (Tyra Farrell), who encourages the Turturro character to go to college and for whom he experiences the thunderbolt. “It was beyond anything you can label,” Esposito the moviegoer recalls: “It doesn’t matter how different people are. Did you ever meet people who don’t speak the same language, yet they are in love. It’s magnificent. That kind of love is the language of the world” (245).11 Amen, brother G’. Yes indeedy, that’s sounds sweet, but aren’t I, the Neapolitan-Sicilian boy with not quite enough curl, forgetting something? In the late 1990s, when I first spotted Esposito as the key to Do the Right Thing, I wondered whether the United States, even at the millennium’s end, and even at its

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most sophisticated urban and polyglot reaches, was yet ready for the bronze-toned actor to break out of the typecasting—“a [black] rebel with just causes”—he’d been saddled with. I wondered in particular, when he would get to play an American Italian. As it turned out—surprise, surprise—I wasn’t the only one who was wondering such a thing. In 2000, John Gennari—an expert, not coincidentally, in the racial politics of jazz—approached Esposito for an interview about his Italian American background and came away with a brilliant interpretive report speaking directly to Esposito’s experiences with the identity police. The first person to cast Giancarlo Esposito as an Italian American was—wouldn’t you know?—Giancarlo Esposito. In 1995, the Wayne Wang/Paul Auster team invited him to participate in their episodic little indie Blue in the Face (follow-up to Smoke), and Esposito improvised the character of Tommy Finelli, one of the cigar shop regulars. Esposito named his character “Finelli” in honor of the man who sold him his first house, which had one of those modest yet lovingly tended backyards that, in Gennari’s words, sing out “to the neighborhood like a beautiful melody.” The point here is not only one of respected legacy—“You see, the Italians, they love working with their hands. They’re about the earth, about nature, and sustaining themselves, by themselves. It’s one of the things I’ve always loved the Italians for, one of the many things” (247)— but of proactive participation. The purpose of owning the house was to live fully in its aura, to perpetuate that aura by dint of his own earthy labor, and to embrace thereby its quietly radiant embrace of the neighborhood. A house has been bought in a particularly Italian part of town, yes, but ethnicity here is something you do, not just something that you claim or inherit or obtain. Listening keenly but also watching, Gennari finds himself caught up in the culturally convergent gestures with which Esposito evokes his feeling for Italians, and that convergence demands its own form of bravura articulation: “As he talks, Esposito mimics the hand movements of a man working the soil, and the effect is just as expressive as when he demonstrates Thelonious Monk’s handspread on the keyboard and Charlie Parker’s fingering of the alto sax. For Esposito, arboriculture meets jazz craft in the laying on of hands” (247). As Esposito feels, so Esposito does—laying his hands on both traditions, laying his hands on in the shared fashion of both traditions—but the character he created for Wang and Auster, Tommy Finelli, must fight

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border patrols on all sides. When a black interlocutor charges him with a failed attempt at self-whitening: “You ain’t no mulatto, you as black as me. Y’all wanna be white, that’s the problem” (246)—Finelli meets the challenge with one of the most powerful formulations in the American idiom, not only by claiming double roots (“My father’s Italian, my mother’s black”), but by invoking the long sad history of racial conscription and invidious ethnic distinction. Defending his love for things Italian to an African American manning the gates, Esposito-qua-Finelli speaks not in Sicilian American gesticulative dialect—which would be that shrug of the shoulders with which Esposito-qua-Buggin’ Out once disowned the bicycle man—but rather in the oracular repartee of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Where once Invisible Man famously declared “I yam what I am,” Tommy Finelli (aka Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito), the black man who is also an Italian boy, gets in the face of Brooklyn’s border patrol, acting directly in Ellison’s profound and profoundly enabling shadow, to protest in thunder, “How do you know who I am?” Finelli’s question was of course rhetorical, a resonant movie moment, but out there somewhere a writer/producer by the name of Tom Fontana, who grew up in a Sicilian family making its living in the racially mixed bar business of Buffalo, New York, and who would go on to do HBO’s searing prison drama Oz, nonetheless had the right idea. In developing television’s Homicide with Baltimorean Barry Levinson in the mid-1990s, Fontana committed himself to getting the ethno-racial admixture of Baltimore right, and that began—hallelujah!—with the creation of captain Al Giardello, an Afro-Sicilian who is “more old world than old school,” as Gennari punchily puts it: “He delivers aphorisms in the original Italian, stares people down with the malocchio (evil eye), and condemns the nouvelle pseudo-Mediterranean cuisines on Baltimore’s trendy waterfront as an accursed yuppie affectation. A deeply passionate man, he’s given to alternating bouts of fiery rage and weepy sentimentality” (247– 48). The actor playing Al Giardelli was one Yaphet Kotto, not exactly Sicilian born or bred, who nonetheless loved playing the Italian side of Giardelli’s heritage so much he kept it up when kibitzing offscreen, while also—and even more to the point—petitioning the show’s writers for more Italian lines. On Homicide, acting Sicilian became seriously infectious: Jon Seda, of Puerto Rican descent, agreed to join the show only if

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he too was allowed to play an Italian—he outright rejected the Latino role that was originally proposed, wary of ethnic typecasting but also catching the groove of the crossover gestalt. By the 1998–1999 season, the show was ready for the moment its chief writer had been waiting for —Fontana had known Esposito for twenty years; he created the part of Al Giardelli’s son expressly for him—but NBC cancelled Homicide before Esposito had the chance to make that role, his first as a prime-time Italian American, his own. Baltimore in fiction is not yet Queens in fact; and the Queens of fact still lords it over the Baltimore of fiction. Gennari asks the question raised by all of this, Buggin’ Out–style: What would it take for Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito, son of Giovanni Esposito of Naples, to pass as an Italian in America? Will his picture ever appear on a Brooklyn pizzeria wall alongside Sinatra, De Niro, and Pacino? Would it matter that his picture also graces the walls of Harlem barbershops, where he’s the son of opera diva Elizabeth Foster Esposito? (249)

As Homicide demonstrates, Gennari’s question is not just wishful thinking—the black and Latino actors on Homicide, and its Italian and Jewish and other writers, understood what is at stake in the crossover dream (as Esposito says of Fontana’s writing, “it doesn’t matter what color the person is who serves as my alter ego or voice,” [248]), but even they— working on network television—were forced to hedge their bets. Seda the olive-skinned Latino got to play a wop, unqualified, but the Giardellis were characterized as part African American, a happy sign on the one hand of progressive, cross-ethnic pollination (the Giardellis as transracial procreativity in the flesh), but also, at the same time, a sop to the national audience’s insistence on preserving the color codes. Esposito the man has no more interest in disowning the black Southern half of his heritage than he does the Neapolitan half—he is, like Fontana, like Kotto, invested in living, not just ventriloquizing, polyethnicity—but what remains at issue in the casting is the racialist gaze of the mass media itself. The color of Esposito’s skin (a couple of degrees darker than generic Sicilian olive) determines whom he is allowed to portray, and does so despite Esposito’s “race-defying DNA,” despite his

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Italian boyhood, despite his developed expertise, despite his professed ambitions—and, above all, despite his manifest virtuosity. I, for one, like Gennari, adore Esposito’s palette of socially edgy, culturally hybridized characters—they are, as Homicide knows, America in the making—but I, too, again like Gennari, feel an irritation with the American public (Bensonhurst and Bed-Stuy and everyone else in “the People’s Republic of Brooklyn”) akin to the anger of Buggin’ Out toward Sal and his retrograde Italian boys. Isn’t it about time that Il Signore Mistah G’carlo Esposito gets to play a son of Italy—which would be, in the light of Italian America’s darkening history, race-blind casting all the way?

It is a curious fact that the Italian Americans who have over the years been held most dear by black America, and the Italian Americans who have been most engaged in civil rights and other race-identified causes (Fiorello LaGuardia and Mario Cuomo, notwithstanding), have been entertainers—the actors and the athletes, but especially the musicians. The story begins, I suspect, behind the scenes during the Depression, in the worlds of Tin Pan Alley and especially of jazz, in the encounters in the clubs where interracial mingling was possible and in the combos where working together was already standard practice, not conspicuously but conspicuously enough. It begins, that is, with Sinatra once again. Amidst all the qualifiers that surrounded the mainstream press’s obituaries of Sinatra—a monumental singer and part-time actor, yes, “but he was a bully and a thug,” “but he was a bully and a womanizer,” “but he was a bully and a mamma’s boy”—it is quite striking to read the coverage of his death in the African American press, especially in Jet, that barometer of everyday African American opinion. Like most of the other postmortems, Jet’s national report attended more to the man than to his music, but the biographical details the magazine put forth departed dramatically from what appeared in the general-interest media: “Blacks Mourn Death of the Frank Sinatra That Nobody Knew.” In the live recordings and TV shots from the 1950s, we might hear from Sinatra’s mouth an ethnic joke or two that falls sourly on our contemporary ears, but Jet recalls indulgently his Tom-foolery with Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop while insisting there was more to remember: Sinatra was both outspoken and generous on the civil rights front—

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sticking his neck out publicly when the occasion called for it (alienating his mafia friends) but, more importantly, behind the scenes, “quietly and with dignity,” when a different kind of occasion called for that. Jet credits him with the Oscar-winning wartime short The House I Live In, penned by Lewis Allan; with funding the work of Martin Luther King Jr.; with traveling down South with Sammy Davis and Harry Belafonte; with boycotting Jim Crow venues and making a stink whenever he encountered segregation on the road or at the clubs (most famously, with Lena Horne on his arm). He “risked his career to help Black causes” at the height of the McCarthyite hysteria (when he was labeled a communist); he “opened up doors of opportunity” to a small host of black entertainers; he spearheaded various black-related fundraisers; and he took on sole financial support, in utmost secrecy, of several retired African American musicians and athletes, including the boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, as well as Louis Armstrong, whose medical bills and funeral Sinatra covered.12 There may be some populist exaggeration and a bit of looking the other way (say, over the aging Sinatra’s friendship with the Reagan White House) in this, but the gist is on the historical record. Jet claims nobody knew this side of Sinatra, but the piece was not the result of deep investigate journalism—so obviously at least some folks knew, and just as obviously most of those folks were black, cross-class-identified, and political. The point being that it was the white-controlled media who “whited out” Sinatra, and that it was the black-owned media that stuck its collective neck out—post–Howard Beach, post-Bensonhurst—to recall a different form of Italian American interaction, making common cause against the press establishment. I say interaction because Sinatra’s commitment to black rights and black lives was the by-product of the rich mutual cross-identification that was his musical life. The respect for Sinatra among the most accomplished of jazz, R& B, and now hip-hop artists, especially the men—Lester Young, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, and Tupac Shakur—is a point of pride among Sinatraphiles, and it is not hard to see where their appreciation comes from, given both his technical skill and his persona as a streetwise, establishment-suspicious survivor.13 The anti-Italian prejudice which Sinatra knew from Hoboken and experienced in one form or another all his life made him acutely sensitive to the facts and hidden injuries of racism. But Sinatra also knew

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that black individuals were no more defined simply by the discrimination issue, no matter how fierce, persistent, and insidious it was, than were Italians or members of any other group. This he understood because he worked almost everyday of his recording and concert life cheek by jowl with African Americans, who contributed both directly and indirectly to the music he made.14 My point is simple. Sinatra crossed over as an activist, mentor, and private safety net not only because he knew prejudice firsthand but because he made his life among friends within the contact zone of pop music: on stage, in the studios, at the clubs—and in the aesthetic/imaginative realm of the great Afro-European musical form itself.15 No white pop star ever owes more to black male production teams, to black-style dance and stage presentation, including Reggie Lucas, Nile Rogers, and Steve Bray, than Madonna in the 1980s and 1990s. No diva has spent more time on camera and off with men of color, professionally and romantically involved, directly challenging the most invidious of all the border patrols. There are trace elements of condescension, of appropriation, of slumming—those risks are always there, and she trips over herself in commentary like Sinatra—but the truth lies in the performance. No other white performer in history has spent more time on the variously African-American (soul, R&B, dance) Billboard charts. There are historical reasons for this, of course: she fell in love with music and dance in the capital of the black North, Motown; and her years of performance gestation were split between Greenwich Village and the black-Latin gay discos several blocks to the west, where she found her first audience. By March of 1989, Madonna was already one of the most accomplished white-to-black artists, certainly the most accomplished Italian-to-black crossover artist, in history when, at the height of the border troubles, less than three years after Howard Beach and mere months from Bensonhurst, she released a video of the song “Like a Prayer,” directed by Mary Lambert: a liberation theology morality play that went directly to the issues of white-on-black violence and its legacy of unjust incarceration. To review the archive of Madonna criticism is to discover that a good number of folks did not get “Like a Prayer” when the video was first released—Pepsi infamously pulled a commercial with Madonna using the tune for fear of consumer backlash from religious groups, not without

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reason (“I will not drink Pepsi,” Donald Wildmon opined on the op-ed page of USA Today).16 But the Italian Americans and African Americans who chose to speak out embraced together the cross-identifications, including their romantic and erotic elements, and they affirmed, in a singular call-and-response, the importance of the religious mandate to humane empathy and utopian racial vision. The crosses that back Madonna’s dancing remind us of the abuse of Christian symbolism by white supremacy groups, connecting Sicilian New Orleans to black Georgia; and the church setting, angels, choir, dream stigmata, and martyred saint are invoked as continued inspiration to racial justice, with the Italians and blacks vying—comically but sweetly—for whether the Italian Catholicism or the black Southern church is to be credited with the saving grace.17 Feeling Italian, then, as feeling Black, not always and in every way and to the fullest extent of course, but where performative stepping out, political stepping up, and spiritual reaching out rapturously meet. Madonna, never doing anything half way, is the most famous of contemporary Italian American entertainers whose commitment to black music and black musicians has brought them, as Madonna herself would put it, “over the borderline.” But she’s by no means the only one. Consider, for instance, how rocker Steve Van Zandt (Little Steven) got a shot at television acting on HBO’s The Sopranos. During the series’ development, creator-producer David Chase (né Cesare) was idly watching the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction show when Van Zandt took the stage to testify to doo-wop pioneers The Rascals. “To be white and sound that black,” Van Zandt quipped, “you’ve got to be Italian.” As a commentator on vocalization in the 1950s and 1960s, as he was coming of age, when aspiring musicians everywhere but especially second- and thirdgeneration kids growing up in the greater Philly area, cross-identified, with vocal chords and a masculine stage presence that made record producers salivate, Van Zandt is speaking to a phenomenon seldom noted: to have been that “white” and to have achieved a sound that “black,” you may in fact have to be that Italian. Van Zandt may have been quipping here for the sheer pleasure of it with a kind of biological/historical mystique—the Moors got to Sicily, therefore we Southern Italians are African—but the real point is that there is a tradition of Italian musicians crossing the line for the pleasure of the music itself. And that’s not even the central point of Chase’s anecdote. According

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to Chase, it was Van Zandt’s leap of black-Italian identification that inspired Chase to hunt him down and offer to write a part for him in the show. Chase knew the force of what Van Zandt was saying; he knew of Van Zandt’s political activism; and he knew how to find the man. Van Zandt, in the 1970s, as a writer and record producer, built a Jersey bar band (Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes) around the rhythm and soul of Solomon Burke, Lee Dorsey, and Stax records, and in the mid1980s, together with dance remix genius Arthur Baker, masterminded the industry’s greatest anti-Apartheid project, the Sun City video. Just as Madonna won her first audience in the black and Latino gay discos, employed their dancers, fused Motown with Las Vegas, aligned herself romantically with black men and Latino men, and upset racial political conventions in her video, so Van Zandt, a Jersey Italian (never mind the name) who wrote and performed songs like “Princess of Little Italy,” nonetheless also worked both retrospectively and adventurously in African American idioms, moved in ethnic creative circles wider than Springsteen’s E Street Band, and pursued racially enlightened social activism. Chase knew Van Zandt’s history because he reached him through his political organization. The moral of the story is this: an Italian-descent entertainer cast another Italian-descent entertainer in an iconically Italian American TV production because of the latter’s investments in African American aesthetic forms and because of his contributions to the politics of the black Atlantic, making cross-racialism a dissenting mode of feeling Italian in the age of post-ethnicity. It is a mode involving not only the intuitive recognition that Van Zandt and Chase had for each other but also the choice “we” make in embracing their recognition of each other—in choosing to read their mutual recognition not as ethnic self-rejection or racial wish projection but as genuine interethnic race work, including, necessarily, the remaking of Italian America. If Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s defense of the NYPD in the Amadou Diallo shooting, February 4, 2001, continues to rankle in the memory of its citizens of color even in the aftermath of the mayor’s leadership after 9/11, it should also be noted that rocker Bruce Springsteen, who has little enough following among African Americans (though he toured in the early 1990s with a predominantly African American band), wrote and performed in the summer of 2001 a brilliant testimonial to the brutality

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of the Diallo incident, “American Skin (41 Shots).”18 It matters that Springsteen, an Italian-Irish kid from Jersey, sees racial responsibility in national terms—and that in doing so he had Van Zandt and the whole E Street band back on board. Clarence Clemons was there, too, of course —the famous stunning portraiture of Born to Run is credited to a photographer with an Italian surname—but the Italian contribution to the epic white-black male bonding, backward to Frank and Sammy, forward to Vince and Jules in Pulp Fiction, is a subject for another day. The New York City cops boycotted their assignments for the E Street Band’s Madison Square Garden concert that summer, taking the mother’s warning in the song—“If an officer stops you / Promise me you’ll always be polite”—altogether too personally. Yet it was not the police department per se that the song holds culpable, but rather America writ large, the racialized scapegoating in all of us that recurrently takes such violent ritualistic turns. In Springsteen’s words, 41 shots . . . and we’ll take that ride ’Cross this bloody river To the other side 41 shots . . . got my boots caked in this mud We’re baptized in these waters and in each other’s blood

Bloodied by guilt is each and every American who has dragged his heels on the way to national self-recognition and concerted action. Although the song’s terms are ethnically nonspecific, quite deliberately so, those fans at the Garden—from in and around Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, and their equivalents all over the Bronx, Staten Island, and North Jersey —felt that Springsteen and the E Streeters were talking especially to them, and maybe they had reason. At that concert, the most devout fans of the most revered figure in contemporary rock and roll, booed their hero for the old, old trespass of “stepping out over the line.” It was an absolutely unprecedented moment in the relation of the Boss to his followers, almost all of whom know every word to every song. Maybe the audience at the Garden didn’t get it for once, but I think their reaction was a transparent gesture of self-denial. For who knew better than they what went down in their hometowns? “It ain’t no secret / No secret my friend / You can get killed just for living / In your American skin.”

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10

Table Cine Cucina Music and cooking are so much alike . . . Taste, like rhythm, may be described, but it does not exist until it is experienced. —Marcella Hazan, 1978

At the turn of the century, even the progressivists closed their eyes and held their noses when approaching the food shops in Little Italy, and my grandmother, born in 1901, used to recall endless childhood taunting, where antipathies of one order or another would invariably turn into food insults: “Go eat worms!” they told her, meaning spaghetti. Into the early 1980s my favorite provisions store in New Haven, Connecticut (barrels of dried beans, oodles of different kinds of small pasta for soup, and extra-dry ginger ale) was so embedded in the old Oak Street neighborhood it went without a sign! But now, a century after my grandmother’s birth and a couple of decades after that provisions store’s demise, Italian food has become the cuisine most beloved by Americans—which would seem, at first glance, to be a mixed blessing, given its adulteration in the frozen food section of the supermarket or in the latest big-box restaurant at the mall. My grandmother would have made an immediate about-face at the smell of half cooked garlic wafting from the Olive Garden door, chuckling in pleasure—the prejudice is over!—but shrugging her shoulders in sadness at the gross popularity of such bad food. But my grandmother, who was simply and truly a fabulous cook, has passed away. So does all this authenticity talk still matter? In Milan, and then again in Rome, I have warned members of my 181

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family not to ask for grated parmesan with the seafood dishes (vongole, calamari, fra diavolo) they love. I have seen them bite their tongues in deference to family peace only to give into temptation, reaching for parmesan on the table for other dishes; and I have seen, each time, a waiter, a professional man of the table in waiting, justly suspicious, swoop down to prevent the disgrazia. In Italy, the customer is not always right; the guest/host relation of hospitality is not exactly what transpires when a stranger comes to dine; and there are things too precious to be left to an advantageous exchange rate, international goodwill, or nouvelle caprice. What is to happen, then, to Italian food culture in the capricious, imperious United States—where even Italian Americans sometimes prefer not to get it? Who remembers how, who is going to do all the work, and will anyone care?1 Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s restaurant flick Big Night (1996) invites us to consider what is at stake, socially and spiritually, literally but also figuratively, in the Italian cultura of food—la buona cucina— when it operates, as it often has and now must, in the face of capitalist forces, the imperative of cross-cultural toleration, and the cult of anything-goes hybridity. Big Night is set vaguely on the Jersey Shore in the late 1950s—the transitional moment of an in-between people on the verge of realizing a momentous transatlantic relocation, literally and figuratively: the Greater New York area Big Night evokes was then the demographic center of Italian America and remains still the habitus of the Italian American imaginary—its place, so to pun, in the national imagination. I was first drawn to Big Night because the paternal side of my family hails from Bergen and Hudson counties, because Italian food is the discipline of tough love in both my ancestral houses (the cheese issue notwithstanding!), and because we, too, would be loath to let either Isabella Rossellini or Minnie Driver slip away. I want now to bring the sensorium—as knowledge, delight, and obligation—to the table of cultural inquiry and to demonstrate, as explicitly as possible, what a difference a metaphysics of viscerality makes to our construction of the contact zone and our feeling for Italianness in America. Big Night is the story, apparently, of the defeat of Italian gastronomy under the boom conditions of the American postwar marketplace: the brilliant cook Primo holds sacred the production and consumption of great food, to which he sacrifices body and home, yet he can’t make a go

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of his authentically Italian trattoria in 1950s New Jersey. The foreseeable future belongs to rival entrepreneur Pascal, another Italian émigré, whose wildly successful spaghetti-and-meatball joint (which Primo calls “the rape of cuisine”) panders to the philistine vulgarity of the American middle classes—whom Primo’s brother and business partner, Secondo, devoted though he is to his brother, and as haunted as he is by his brother’s traditionalist vision, is desperately eager to join. If read with too flat an identification with Primo, Big Night can be seen to inflect the Puritan jeremiad with the Mediterranean curse—I spit on thee who have betrayed la via vecchia. But if Primo’s gastronomy is a figure for the fate of artistry in the United States, as Tucci and Scott picture it, then we are confronted with a remarkable and telling paradox, for Big Night taken as a whole—in its production and reception, its referentiality and its resonance—gives the lie to that curse, and how. I’ve been obsessed with Big Night for the better part of a decade now and I talk it up all the time, especially to strangers. I have never met anyone who has seen it who does not react with glee when the film is mentioned, whether a casual eater or a devoted foodie, Jerseyite or outsider, a true believer in italianità or an “enough already!” doubting Thomas. The singular exception so far has been an Ivy League Film Studies professor, not an Italian, who dismissed the film for trading in stereotypes, a complaint that is simply comical (and why shouldn’t it be? Big Night is a comedy!) to Italians of any generation. Although it was marketed and distributed and received as an art house film, people across the board love the movie, and that’s telling us something. Émigrés from Italy confess that they cry every time they see the film—the lighting of the wrappers at the end of the banquet is too reminiscent of home—while Saleh Joudeh, the former owner-chef of Seattle’s most distinguished trattoria, whose Palestinian origins and Arabic name defy border police, proclaimed to me, utterly unprompted save for our being in the kitchen together: “You know that movie, Big Night? That’s me. I am Big Night!” Now, pray tell, what could Chef Joudeh mean, identifying himself not only with the central character but with the entire movie? Big Night is a story about cooking and eating Italian that is told and acted and shot and proffered in the Italian spirit of cooking and eating. On screen Big Night portrays the rhythms of preparation, ex-stasis, and rehabilitation that constitute la buona cucina—an ethos, really a gestalt;

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the actors and production crew go about the official business of making cinematic illusion with the pleasurable anticipation of delivering, in fact, the real thing; and we the moviegoers feel we’ve been given that genuine cucina feeling, if only for the movie moment. Primo and Secondo’s ambition to make Italian regional cooking chic may not have had a prayer in 1950s Jersey, but Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s late 1990s artistic analog—to make a film good enough to eat, to have a fabulous festa-like time doing it, and to welcome us all into their delicious “food movie” fold2 —is not only the intuitive agenda underlying Big Night: it is, I believe, its spiritual effect.

There is a long-standing, somewhat condescending commonplace that Italians, especially Southern Italians, have a deep appreciation for the sacredness of experience, even when anticlerical and nonchurchgoing. In The Madonna of 115th Street, Robert A. Orsi puts teeth into the truism, identifying how the real religion of the Southern Italians and their offspring in the United States was the family, a not quite catechetical version of Catholicism, and how East Harlem’s devotion to the Virgin was a means for the second and third generations to deal with the guilt and fear attendant to the changes they were pursuing. Food played an important role in the Little Italies of the American past, but only to the extent that it was part and parcel of la famiglia, the emotional core and pragmatic center of everyday life: “Eating was the sacrament of the home, and the Sunday meal was more important to the immigrants than regular attendance at mass. Eating expressed the ideal unity of the home and defined the real hierarchy of authority within the domus—the meal became a drama of authority and resistance, the context of reconciliation and the affirmation of tradition.”3 Mediating between our time and the 1950s, between this side of the Atlantic and that, between uncodified folkways and the federated logic of Italian cuisine, lies the lifework of the great Marcella Hazan, who explains why even the missionary outreach of la cucina begins—just as Orsi would have it—at home. “There is no such thing as Italian haute cuisine because there are no high or low roads in Italian cooking. La cucina casereccia—home cooking . . . is the only good cooking—la buona cucina. . . . The family table, worshipfully called il sacro desco, was an

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inviolable place, the one still spot in a turning world to which parents, children, and kin could safely cling.”4 Il sacro desco translates as “the sacred (dinner) table,” a perfect phrase for what I have long experienced as the Marian Catholic domestication of the Eucharist: in the classic Italian home, the preparation of food is a sacred obligation undertaken daily on behalf of one’s self, one’s family, and one’s intimates; the consumption of especially good food entails God’s grace, a partaking of food in common that brings us closer to each other through Him (“Church”); and the sacred privilege of the table, blessing though it may be, is also part sanction and part commission: a divine renewal of moral strength and social resolve demanding ethical action—“rejoining,” the Italians say—both within and beyond its providence. In sum, the traditional ethos of good cooking is a communion of excellent ingestion to be pursued by and for all, a daily feast-rite in which the soul is graced through the body (“Give us, this day, our daily bread”) and the body politic—which, in the Southern Italian tautology, is la famiglia—is reaffirmed through the intercourse of well-fed souls (“and lead us not into temptation”). Despite its small, local scale, Big Night has a less parochial story to tell, a less cloistered vision to explore, than the classic immigrant saga of family values and family crisis. Primo and Secondo may be brothers, but Big Night puts the biological unit on the back burner—no mothers, no sisters, no wives, no children for the two brothers—in order to foreground extra-familial outreach, the late-twentieth-century mission to bring Italian cooking and eating to the greater non-Italian world—in Big Night’s case, to the polyglot Jersey seaboard of the postwar boom economy. The ideals of virtuosity and sanctity, masculine expertise and female nurture, pedagogy and protection are collapsed into the figure of the male chef, who believes la cucina is a matter of life and death: “If I sacrifice my work, it dies. Better to die myself.” Big Night looks back to the 1950s, when the tight family circle reigned ethnically supreme in America, to ask the forward-looking question of the late 1990s: under what conditions is food the greater—more seductive, more dangerous, more prophetic—imperative?5 When Primo (who is identified with the only devotional object in the film, a crucifix, which flashes out of his shirt—once) finally works up the courage to bring Ann the florist into the kitchen, he’s sautéing a quick primavera, which he explains and philosophizes about, raising the

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skillet for a taste. Recall that Ann (Allison Janney of The West Wing) is so WASPy that she wears khakis to work and so Daughter-of-the-AmericanRevolution that she reads Cooper—not “bang bang” but “families on the trail”—in her leisure time. So when Ann hesitates, Primo spontaneously offers his own dipped finger. Sucking off the sauce, Ann issues a quiet version, rated PG, of the female dionysian guttural: “Oh, my God.” Unnerved by the instant intimacy, Primo breaks the spell: “So now you know . . . to eat good food is to be closer to God.”6 In the Roman Catholic mass, a yeastless wafer of bread (reminiscent of matzo) suffices, Christ made present through priest-orchestrated communal witness, but at the tables of the Italian home the presence of grace, traditionally felt if not articulated, is a function in part of the sensual stimulation of the food itself.7 Italians have no monopoly on making a cult of good food; but the Italians become piqued these days, in our rush to one-world gastronomic hodgepodge (pineapple on pizza, cilantro instead of basil for pesto), because of the degree to which they believe in regional genius/the genie of regions.8 Contrary to what goes on, say, in LA or at the Culinary Institute of America, Italians honor the natural interaction of food stuffs, preparatory techniques, and consuming rites—climatically determined, historically perfected—including, of course, their own, which is to some extent portable and subject to persisting evolution (witness the fusion genius of New Orleans), but only to the extent that the newer matings taste divinely predetermined. Primo may come across as provincial, with his Calabrian dialect, his stay-at-home shyness, and his orthodox morality, but his uncle the chef has made it to Rome (not Palermo, not even Naples, but Rome), and Primo himself has made it gastronomically to Bologna and to Milan (it is Milanese style risotto, the Venetian form being runnier, under scrutiny in the first eating scene). So even as the U.S. contact zone is being negotiated, so “Italy” is being reimagined not as unification of industry or the homogenization of language but as regional variations within a common, increasingly articulated gestalt, a federation of cultura within a federated understanding of cucina.9 Core values go something like this: the Italian way of cooking and eating insists on the just-right matching of just-the-right ingredients brought together by water, oil, salt, and heat into just the right relation, entailing the first fundamental principle of gustatory sensuality that

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texture contributes as much to taste as flavor (for any given sauce, the right dough and shape and size of the macaroni). There are, as well, second and third and fourth orders of elegance: the order in which dishes are presented and consumed, which is ritualized not for a purely ritual sake but to the end of orchestrating gastronomic titillation and digestion to mutual ends—in just the way that pasta is at once the most satisfying and yet also the best for you (as a slow-burning carbohydrate tied to modest amounts of protein, vegetable, salt), the most highbrow and lowbrow, the most quintessentially Italian and the most immediately accessible to outsiders. There is the cult of conversation that surrounds: anticipation (planning ahead despite having to reconceive each course based on what the market actually has to offer), critique (including what to do differently next time), and renewal. There is as well a cult of work —the right tools as well as right methods for what is habitually done, which does not mean the most expensive or best looking (save the futurist espresso machine); for those who cook together the business of the right division of labor, including exchanges of talk that are ritualistic, more gestural than informational; and for those who partake, especially as “consumers,” the attendant obligations of pitching in to clean up, which is ultimately figurative only because it is first and foremost literal. Seen in its totality, the rhythm of preparation, consumption, and cleanup is eucharistic, contextualized within a contritional/reconciliatory undertow that is a major context of the Mass, which begins with inwardly and congregationally organized confession, climaxes in communion, and ends with outwardly bound renewal. For Southern Italians settled abroad, this rhythm is intensified, becoming more social and evangelical, less closed and conservative: unlike the family structure which is its own vehicle, the culture of cucina is put at risk by the breakdown of ethnic parochialism and thus increasingly reliant on outreach and alliance for its survival—a complex interplay of Catholicizing expansion and catholic adaptability. A Pakistani family now operates what has long been and still is the best Italian bakery in Waterbury, Connecticut, Corvo’s: better than ever, the old guard like to say. Under the guise of a backward glance and defeated vision, Big Night maps, hails, and facilitates these kinds of transitions. I refer not only to the cultic elevation of the chef—nurturer, priest, and virtuoso all rolled into one —but also to the missionary agenda of the movie: educating the palette

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of the philistines, upgrading the family meal into a neighborhood festa, and taking the occasion to get one’s act together, the prodigal included. The Pillagi brothers have named their restaurant, in an Old Testament irony more prophetic than nostalgic, Paradise. In Native Informant (1991), Leo Braudy, a Los Angeles film scholar, points to a special affinity between contemporary moviemaking and Italian Catholic America, whose directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma) treat cinematic conventions as forms of pop iconography and pop ritual. Braudy boldly goes where no critic has gone before—to the reemergent force of the sacred in putatively secular forms—calling their movies “sacraments of genre.” In Big Night, Tucci and Scott insist that it is sensuality of detail that gives otherwise generic filmmaking back its sanctifying power, and they suggest that the ultimate sacrament of this particular genre—not another movie about comically earnest immigrants running aground against an American vulgarity they increasingly know and love?—lies in the rhythms of its uncommonly spirited production (“Hey, Campbell, old buddy, wanna make a movie about my old neighborhood?” “Tony, that twinge of selfsatisfaction is a reflex after my own heart!”) and the rhythms of its uncommonly spirited reception (“Madonna mia, does Tucci get it right!” “[crying] My mother was such a terrible cook!”) which are, at this late (aesthetic) stage of mass-mediated ethnicity, anything but nostalgic, easy protests to the contrary. They are, I believe, the sacred rites of postmodern identity formation itself.10

The best effort in Big Night to render actual cooking is the sequence in which we watch several of the main stages—the sauce, the meatballs, the boiled eggs—in the production of timpano, but by and large Tucci eschews trying to show us how to cook. Nonetheless, the cooking details are delightfully accurate and telling, down to the fact that in rolling the penne (tubular macaroni) Primo has what looks to be a commercial wooden roller designed expressly for this purpose but Secondo has taken recourse to an ordinary pencil; that in apparent argument over some dish or another Primo waves an oil-stained recipe card at Secondo, suggesting even the master-chef wants to be proven right about proven ingredients (more likely, their proportion or timing) which he nonetheless has had to

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write down and recurrently consults; and that when Secondo misplaces a utensil over the stove he thinks to himself (“Now, what did I do with . . . ?”) by means of a rapid air tapping of both hands, confronting an impasse in his own thinking by means of a reflexive gesture that is sublimely Italian. But what I have in mind is more, of course, than the portrayal of men at work in the kitchen. The filmic equivalent, realization, analogization of a gustatory aesthetic is there from the start, I would like to suggest, in the astonishing physical accuracy-cumpsychological persuasiveness of the brothers, particularly Primo, and the milieu they inhabit. It is through sight, through gesture, through the sound these gestures make, through music or its marked absence, through the non-signifying dimensions of language (Secondo’s refusal in the opening scene to use or even acknowledge Italian, Primo’s formality and impatient clumsiness in English, repetition itself) that we meet these men, which to my instinct “feels right”—in the overdetermined sense in which what feels Italian is that we feel, as an audience, our way towards who these men are and what they may be feeling, through the sensorium—and this despite or rather mandated because of the marked, markedly ironizing intelligence of the screenplay, the wit of its dialogue, the quiet wisdom of its extradomestic melodrama and romance. But I don’t think that the risk of tautology undercuts the fact that the sensorium is not just contributory here, it is the thing itself, necessary and, arguably, sufficient. One male (Secondo), facing us but distanced, in a waist-high apron over formal pants and a white shirt with tie slung back over his shoulder, is doing a quick sauté, while another male (Primo), mustached, in full chef gear, angled but mainly with his back to the viewer, is chopping. The interior island has a bank of burners (and ovens, which we can’t see) on the far side; a well-worn wooden block on the near side. The mustached chef asks the near cook, apparently a sous-chef, in a steady and mundane tone of voice, in Calabrian dialect, if he thinks what he is cooking needs salt, holding out the frying pan. The near cook goes “Huh?” and the mustached chef says in exasperated English, “More salt?” The near cook puts finger in the pan to taste: “No!” So the far cook then salts the dish anyway, conspicuously, and a pattern bespeaking ritual is established for us. They’ve done it before, they’ll do it again (seconds later, in fact); the two, Primo and Secondo, are locked in a quiet

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struggle, frustration percolating below, of which narrative melodrama must be made. We continue to creep toward the men: no closeups yet, but by the end of the opening sequence we’ve seen the whole layout of the kitchen with the exception of the walled corner in which the camera stands. The first moment of electric immediacy in the film is Primo’s look of expectant outrage, which is also, and not coincidentally, our first view of his face, when Secondo asks him to make a side order of spaghetti: “Who is it for? I want to know for who it is for. [sic]” “For the lady with the risotto.” “Bitch!” At the simplest level, the contemporary objective correlative to Primo’s gastronomic art-craft (earnest, rooted, embodied) is the gently bravura performance of the actor portraying Primo. For the performer who brings Primo the Italian exemplar to life—to the full presence of, say, that astonishing voiceless exchange when Secondo and Cristiano return to the kitchen with the soup plates in hand, heads nodding in confirmed success, and Primo’s mustache triggers a wiggle of delicious satisfaction through the shoulder down to unseen toes—is no Italian but, wonderfully, an American of Lebanese extraction, Tony Shalhoub. Perhaps Shalhoub’s particularly effective crossover is not wholly a matter of method-acting accomplishment. Once upon a fragile time, Beirut was the competing capital of Mediterranean cuisine, after all, and Frank Lentricchia writes that he groups occasional Poles and Lebanese with the Italians in his Utica, New York, demographics.11 Yet Shalhoub’s hilarious, again full-bodied turn in Men in Black as the jeweler–guns dealer with the exploding head reminds us that this man can play aliens of multiple galaxy estates.12 What I am saying here is that Shalhoub manages a full-bore im-person-ation of the character that Tucci and cowriter Joseph Tropiano, his cousin, have imagined. There is nothing ghosted about Shalhoub’s performance. What persists in its aftermath is not an ironic disavowal of insiderly authenticity (we’ll get to the question of cultural mourning later), however apropos that regression may be, but the knowledge that performative immediacy and procreative ethnicity are mutually constitutive; that for the duration of the movie a Lebanese American, not a professional cook, not an adult émigré of the 1950s, has given himself over to the cause not so much of contemporary Italian American self-knowing as of a visionary material sacramentality figured

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gastronomically but realized, to the applause of critics and a certain critical mass of ticket buyers, on 35mm film, that is, through a medium more textured than meets the theoretical Visual Studies eye.13 I can see my reader raising a skeptical eyebrow: aren’t you just saying that Shalhoub is a good actor, that he’s been well coached by a knowledgeable director or two? Yes, of course, that’s part of it; but also No, the illusion and allure of authenticity over the borderline of identity is the name of the game here, both on-screen and off. My enthusiasm for the film might only be an ethnicity hound’s guilty pleasure, like Moonstruck, but it feels like something more, especially given the number of folks— foodies and accomplished restaurateurs on the one hand, recent émigrés from the Mediterranean and umpteenth generation Italians on the other —who take this film (as they say in The Godfather) personally. Moonstruck is filmed with the stock cartoonishness of a stage set—its tonguein-cheek inauthenticity is part of its appeal, with intermittent flashes of accuracy contributing to a game of name that realistic detail—whereas the mimetic effect of Big Night, including Shalhoub’s wondrous impersonation, is meant, like The Sopranos, to hit home, be the thing itself but with no mobsters in sight. Among the surprises of The Sopranos’ first year was the local talent, Italian American in descent and Mid-Atlantic postindustrial in background, including writers, who spun national myth from ethnic self-critique. But the special, especially instructive thrill of Big Night consists in its Italianate vision of ethnic inclusiveness that not only characterizes the transnational production crew working behind the scenes but resonates palpably from the screen itself across cinema’s figurative fourth wall—where a mostly non-Italian and indeed non-American cast participates with such apparent great good humor that they disappear into a happy convergence of real, imagined, liminal, and adopted Italian Americanness. Tucci plays Secondo; Isabella Rossellini, who is an Italian national with Hollywood experience (Blue Velvet), plays Gabriella; the film was scored (and partially performed) by Gary DiMichele, a jazz drummer and keyboardist. But that’s it for the Italian-descended; otherwise, as one critic put it, the cast and crew were “assembled from the four corners of show business”—in ethnic terms, most of all. The codirector and coproducer, who steals his scenes as the Cadillac salesman, has a name so WASPy, Campbell Scott, it’s reversible, so that the only way I can get it

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straight is to recall that he is George C. Scott’s son. The actor who plays Pascal with Duddy Kravitz–style exuberance (“Bite your teeth into the ass of life!”), even if (alone in this) his accent occasionally slips, is English, Sir Ian Holm; and Minnie Driver, playing a Jersey girl who would have done both Bruce Springsteen and Kevin Smith proud, is the real Anglo thing, too. If film critic Richard Schickel is right that the actors are “clearly delighted” in what they are doing (my sentiments exactly), then what is at stake in their performance is not just professional acting, a bought-and-scripted illusion, but the enacted, hence representative pleasure of feeling Italian that the actors themselves are experiencing —an Emersonian uptake into full presence that master chef Joudeh confirms, in reciprocity, when he says “I am Big Night!”

In Big Night’s big blowout, elements of the expansionist 1950s cocktail party—the jazzy pop, martinis and other mixed drinks, off-the-shoulder satin gowns, and the Cadillac—kick the European dinner affair up an energy notch, but I’ve been to dozens of non-Italian weddings, and I always come away thinking, a marriage is a mating ritual, for heaven’s sake, don’t they know how to participate? I’m not talking strict traditionalism here: the party at the Paradise augments the ritual eating of the festive Italian meal by giving it fresh work to do. The party is good public relations for the Italians, and it ideally expands the market for the importation of high-end goods. But it’s also an exercise in expanding the sacred table beyond family bounds, il sacro desco for intimates and acquaintances and passersby, those tight with one another and those on the outs and those in ambivalent deceptive relation, Italian Americans and those they attract and those that are attractive to them. The camera skips around the long elegant table catching glimpses of this rainbow coalition of folks doing the things that one does—that, I swear, Italian Americans do—at such moments: feeding each other by hand, accepting or blocking the pouring of wine, pursing one’s hands to kissing lips, and so forth. A couple of guests are throwing up their hands, and it seems that one of them, Pascal the plotting rival, is teaching another, Ann the flower lady, what is to be done: palms down and flat, up over one’s shoulders; then flipped up to the vertical, almost but not quite open. Ann wants to learn the gesture because she needs to

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learn it, and she needs to learn it because she has been placed in a position (of delighted vanquishment by material artistry working the senses to heaven’s ends) where nothing one would say exactly would suffice: where resorting to speech would itself be a gesticulation of sublime resignation—as she put it earlier, taking a taste off Primo’s fingers, “Oh, my God.” For the brothers, the party’s success is a Pyrrhic vindication of their culinary vision, that even Americans on the Jersey Shore in the 1950s, primed to see a celebrity who never shows, could nonetheless be made to acknowledge the wonder of their food, what it makes possible, what it requires. The meal is over-the-top, and to that extent “fantastic,” but its texture, its rhythms, its chemistry is real enough, persuasively hyperbolic yet familiar. Like the party more generally, the gesture models a scene of ethnically implicated aesthetic design, execution, and reception in which the text—that is, the meal—produces the very effect that its makers intend.14 The film seduces its audience to throw up its hands in double delight; first, spontaneously, joyously, at the vital immediacy of the fantasy lying before it; and, in a melancholic aftereffect of recognition I hope to stimulate and put to work, in the realization of who was involved and how they did it and what it all means. Nothing epitomizes the Italian American sense of sublimity more than a festa where the food rocks and the people percolate. Big Night’s dinner sequence is utopian, in that its nostalgia educates contemporary desire, yet it does so realistically rather than preposterously—not only in the conceit of a misguided publicity stunt doomed to economic self-defeat, which imagines extraordinary possibilities while acknowledging the constraints of 1950s restaurant trade, but also because of the spectacularly persuasive three-dimensionality of the meal itself. Cinematographic composition and design (including the silent film–style titles), the assemblage of acting, imagery, and sound, are like the menu and melodrama they serve, completely over-the-top. Yet they work in concert with the menu and melodrama so that you feel like you’ve been there, at the party; done that, crossed the line—from outsider to insider, from the alienated to the reclaimed, and from the untraveled to the experienced. Do you come away hungry! The movement of peoples from outside the charmed circle of ethnicity to within it does not involve what we are used to in terms of

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masking, mimicry, or ventriloquizing.15 The guests around the table are not entering a forum of mere pretense or strategic simulation—even when, I would argue, they dance Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano” and the heavyset Basil Man does a drag, in lip-synch, on an Irish American woman’s vocalizing of Italian-Cuban pastiche—but rather one of dressing up and taking in and letting go and facing up. They are adopting a form of art and divinity and social congress in which to move and have their being, however liminally and with whatever utopian dispensation: a gustatorily literal realization of Catholicism’s cannibalistic rite, where the body is vessel to the spirit, and the lamb is going to come out sanguinante. The guests are reaffirming, relearning, or learning for the first time certain Italian structures of feeling that—given who they are (of disparate origins, assimilationist, regionally identified, clueless) and where they are (the U.S.-based contact zone)—are simultaneous to that more nebulous experience of feeling Italian. Such a feeling is often delusive and almost always dangerous to denominate, I have to admit, but here— it’s an aesthetic judgment call, that’s my point —it is just exactly right. Primo and Secondo’s big night is more than a de facto going away party for their original naively purist version of the American dream; it does seriously redeeming prospective work—socially and ethically if not spiritually—by occasioning, enabling, provoking the readjustments of relation (accusation, admission, contrition, dismissal, mercy) among the protagonists, at the center of whom is Secondo. The overall architecture of the film is not exactly epic, but there is undeniable power in these scenes—they burn into consciousness, like late-night espresso immigrant-style, and the emotions they conjure linger with the viewer, well into subsequent days. The final scene is, by all accounts, a keeper: “On its slender scale, it’s perhaps the most exquisitely touching ending in recent film history,” as film critic Peter Matthews attests.16 I refer not only to that single take with a still camera for eight and a half minutes, during which an actor makes a frittata from scratch for three to eat, and for all the rest of us to believe in, but also to the dynamic of silent reaffirmation, the melancholy of fraternity, the idiom of social-difficultycum-human-flaw-cum-divine-mercy that the scene establishes, which is “pensive and rueful” but less “unresolved” (Primo is an idealist, but

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nobody’s fool) than any of the reviewers have taken it. Secondo here cooks in service to the others, making the first gesture of reconciliation, holding in reserve a third of the frittata for Primo with no assurance he’s even going to show, communicating then that he’s at least as much in the wrong, given what can be expected of a Continental perfectionist after all; for his part, Primo accepts the request for mercy, in touch, as Italian Americans do (including the men, who are wont to hold your hands across a table). Here is resolution as it should ethically and must pragmatically be—“tenuous solidarity in the teeth of disillusion and defeat,” as Matthews puts it: a form of utopian realism with an Italian gestural inflection that is at once peasant-like and sophisticated, apropos of the tragicomedy of migration. As Big Night serves up its final gesture, so it is this business of making gestures—procreatively yet convincingly, figuratively yet also literally—that makes for Big Night. In the final analysis the film is committed, its seems to me, to the post-ethnic cultural work of what we might call, provocatively, “aesthetically correct ethnicity.” Although the gesture of throwing up one hands, like Primo’s craft and ethos, is marked as old-world authentic, the cinematic art form that represents it and that it is meant in turn to signify is new-world imaginative, its production collaborative, and its social action incorporating—which is at the epicenter of what has me so excited at this late moment in Italian American history. Primo’s expectations as a would-be 1950s Jersey restaurateur are simply naive, but his brother Secondo’s felt desire to have it both ways—the art and the commerce, European sophistication and raw American power, the aura of particularity and the claim upon the transnational—that more expansive dream is something else again. It’s a model, it seems to me, to conjure culture with: that good stuff—by no means only Italian stuff—for which we all should make time. The case for the ultimate achievement of Secondo’s fictional dream by real-life others—including Tucci and Scott, at least in that final scene— is prima facie, if by that dream I mean to Italian American artistry on the order of Coppola, Scorsese, and De Palma. Louis Prima, jazz bandleader and Cab Calloway–styled showman, whose appearance is supposed to secure celebrity status for the restaurant, never shows up. In point of fact, he was never invited. But in terms of the symbolic action of the film,

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Louis Prima was never needed, given that no single publicity stunt would have solved the fact that the restaurant was ahead its time and that the festa does its larger sacramental work wondrously without him; Louis Prima was there all the time, given that he epitomizes the Italian way of aesthetic outreach, cultural hybridity, and cross-racial solidarity; and he was only a stand-in anyway—for Sinatra, literally (what indie could pay the fees for several of his recordings?), and for ethnic artistry of American sensibility and global force, that is, in the figurative terms of Secondo’s (read Tucci’s) wider ambition. But even so the fact remains that Big Night has more going for its underlying utopian vision than either 20/20 hindsight or ethnic triumphalism. Consider—as my final example—one of the film’s better inside jokes, which centers on the kitchen grunt, Cristiano. In hunched service from beginning to end, Cristiano stands for the immigrant everyman, the workman of regular station, and as such he is a special figure for successive American dreams—if only you know how to read the signs. The name, “Cristiano,” is the term the Italians use for “human being.” Christ never got to Eboli, meaning the mountainous parts of Southern Italy are so brutal its peasants feel inhuman; immigrants like Cristiano leave in search of their dignity, their humanity, but mere arrival doesn’t mean the battle is over. At the restaurant, Cristiano is treated decently (a couple of slaps on the back) or speaks up for himself at a few strategic moments (“‘Please, Cristiano, take out the garbage’ would be nice”), but the truest moments of humanizing grace—his smoldering silence, the cooking smock he lends to the soaked Phyllis, and an insidious series of quick set pieces in which we catch him dancing rather than working—bespeak a running joke on Cristiano’s impersonator. For the man playing Cristiano, to perfection, is none other than Marc Anthony, the New York dance-and-song man of Puerto Rican extraction and Island disposition, who in 1997 was still little known outside of Latino circles but whose imminent destino as a latinizer of the American public was already written on the wall, at least on the wall of the Paradise restaurant in Tucci and Scott’s prophetic casting. Given the often sad history of disdainful succession, the treatment of Puerto Rican arrivals by Italian East Harlemites especially, Tucci’s casting of Anthony as his everyman immigrant and Anthony’s skill in paesan-ification is a blessedly corrective form of interethnic congress, but what they have

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achieved together, in making the film, pales in comparison—I am happy to say—to what it sneakily augurs: that is, the day, near at hand, when it’s not a condiment for corn chips that we all think of when someone says “let’s salsa.”17 All of us except, perhaps, of course, the Italians.

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Conclusion The Art of Ethnicity in America “But please, Mr. Armstrong, just what is ‘jazz’?” “Oh, my dear lady, if I have to explain it, you’re never going to get it.” —apocryphal

Italian immigration to the United States peaked in 1907. Almost a century later, a band of Northeasterners led by David Chase (né Cesare) took the American imagination by storm with a black comedy about the Jersey mob entitled The Sopranos. The trailers made the TV show sound like the same old formula—gangsters once again—but when the episodes actually hit, genre benders with ferocious self-knowing and sardonic grace, they put everything out there (from TV and the movies to serious fiction and literary theory) to shame. The first year of The Sopranos played less like a television series than a serial novel that the nineteenth-century Londoner Charles Dickens might have written had he grown up guido in New Jersey. The story it told, satirizing upscale suburban domesticity by revealing its entanglement in the enterprise zones of postindustrial crime, places Italian Americans in the suburbs for the first time, living cheek by jowl with dentists and CEOs, while portraying their crises of confidence as fundamentally American. All over the United States, friends gathered religiously to watch episode after episode, with their VCRs running, only to pass those tapes around in compulsive delight, electing one by one to become intimates of this television family. Since then, we’ve been treated to four more 198

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seasons and counting, the rumor increasingly afloat that the latest will be the last, only to be undone by a renewed corporate will to continue, by more Emmys and more kudos, even from the New Yorker and the New York Times. In the meantime, producing companion volumes to the series—naked marketing ploys, sure, but also fan-driven flights of creativity and smart, passionate commentary from various sectors of the academy—has become a cottage industry. Dozens of people have had homes built on the model of Tony and Carmella’s place. What’s been going on here? On the listserv for the American Italian Historical Association and elsewhere, irritation at the media’s ongoing obsession with the criminal stereotype struck a resonant chord among many intellectuals, who took the class associations personally: our image finally makes it into the suburbs, and we don’t even get to be white-collar criminals—the lawyers, doctors, politicians, businesswomen, and private-school administrators ripped from the headlines to people Law & Order; we may live in New Providence or Short Hills, but we’re still seen as gutter thugs, exploiting women, extorting kickbacks, and hijacking trucks! What other group is subjected to this? What other group would sit by and tolerate it? The facts are, Northern Jersey is something like a backwater in the fierce progression of ethnic succession in organized crime (the Russians are the wave of the future in the Northeast, along with the Vietnamese and the Jamaicans), while professionals of Italian ancestry can now be found conspicuously in every single form of classy endeavor: no question, that. But the politics of identity, of sameness versus difference, are complex, not only in The Sopranos portrayals on screen but also in how folks have responded to them. The paradoxes of Italian/American cross-recognition are nowhere more apparent than in how those who wear their Italianness on their sleeve—including those who have built a reputation from being most vigilant against the persisting realities of organized crime and those who have been most hurt by the lingering prejudices of mafia fear—have received the TV show. In the spring of the second season, Rudolph Giuliani, the once-controversial mayor of New York who rose to prominence as the chief prosecutor of megamobster John Gotti, and Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York who curtailed his own candidacy for the presidency—and, as importantly, the Supreme Court—

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amid the very same kind of rumors (mob connections?) that embarrassed Geraldine Ferraro (a brother, an uncle?), shared the stage to fete series star and resident genie James Gandolfini: truth be told, they confessed in public, we adore The Sopranos. That James Gandolfini, a balding potbellied barely employed actor out of Rutgers, was transformed almost overnight into a national sex symbol without having to change his accent or skip a temperamental beat (other than delivering the theatrics of violence) tells you something about what sexual charisma really is. Of course Gandolfini’s characterization is unimaginable without the women with whom he exorcises his demons, an interdependence that tells us, in turn, where the bewitching dangerousness of Italian American masculinity comes from and to whom it must report—as if we didn’t already know. (My mother, she knows.) When Tony Soprano’s midlife performance anxiety is referenced to a trinity of very formidable, very Italian American women (Nancy Marchand playing Tony’s mother, Edie Falco his wife, Lorraine Bracco his psychiatrist —not to mention, as the series continues, his daughter, his mistresses, and the prodigal sister), something new and wondrous has taken place in the national imagination. The icon of the mafia family, which under Puzo and Coppola’s regime played out as strictly male, has been corrected for gender bias, not in generic feminist fashion, but in a way that holds our understanding of the sexual dynamics of masculine achievement under capitalism accountable to a hundred years of Italian American social history, to that very history now better known through the prism of the book in your hands. In The Godfather, Mario Puzo pushed the women into the shadows, making the Italian American family male centered as well as male dominated, and turning the question of its future into a matter of filial loyalty, masculine discipline, economic power, and the ruthless assertion of individual will. The original novel not only romanticized but also exposed mafia masculinity as a product of sex-and-gender panic, in ways that are as outrageously over-the-top as they are sardonically subtle. David Chase & Co. turn up the volume on Puzo’s tacit critique, taking male-female relations out of the Italian American closet, going upscale suburban with them, and getting explicit. Everywhere one turns, but especially in such key episodes as Tony’s boyhood trauma, his daughter Meadow’s college trip to Maine, and Uncle Junior’s unseemly girlfriend trouble, The

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Sopranos makes the love and terror with which Italian American men and women engage each other its explicit subject. The Sopranos not only updates such psychosocial formations as mammissimo, the Virgin-Whore complex, and the time-honored fear of being cuckolded by the village priest to account for Italian Jersey’s nouveau riche, but it also makes such materials—intimately familiar to all the actors and most of the writers, yet rendered with fearless self-exaggeration—speak to Americans generally, via recurrent shocks of audience self-recognition. The average viewer, it’s fair to say, is both charmed and terrified by these Jersey suburbs. Soprano family values are at once unbelievably strange (the mother goads her brother-in-law into ordering a hit on her son!) and hypertypical (haven’t we all had to place someone we love in an assisted care facility for their own good?). The revelation in The Godfather was anthropological; The Sopranos is strictly confessional. Americans see in The Sopranos a peculiarly intimate if exaggerated version of themselves—extraordinarily colorful and fierce in ways they would disavow, of course, yet somehow, in their deepest logic, familiar. We’ve gone from the epic, big screen scope of The Godfather to the small screen domestic serial novel.1 What is so particular here—that your mother is out to get you, that your daughter knows you well enough to leverage her freedom and your nephew is so anxious for promotion he’s pushing your buttons, that corporate loyalty has costs you don’t ever want to pay but you must exact, that men must listen to women who say “don’t do it” even when it’s on behalf of the women for whom they seek revenge— these are the fractures of love and fear attending work and family, male and female, young and old in the professional middle classes during the first decade of the new millennium: only more so, intensified, gone exotic perhaps but made palpable, too. If Coppola’s capstone to the Corleone saga, The Godfather Part III, may be understood as an attempt to claim Euro-American aristocracy for U.S.-born Italians—a fitting endeavor on the part of a Napa Valley wine lord and patriarch of a family filmmaking dynasty—The Sopranos has in contrast pursued something closer to the average American heart. The Sopranos lays claim to the suburban middle classes through a darkly comic realism that is at once breathtakingly specific to the Jersey mob and, paradoxically, reflective of ordinary (non-Italian) lives in the Prozac/Viagra new millennium. That’s the fundamental donné of the

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series. Whereas the original Godfather seductively exposed the Italian crime family as the nation’s secret capitalist underbelly, The Sopranos sweetly shocks the greater American public into recognizing contemporary crime-family crisis as its true inner self. The mafia stereotype may be all too familiar, but in terms of the cultural self-mapping of the national psyche, the Italians ain’t what they used to be. As HBO insinuates: they are now us. The results, it seems, are in. Italian forms of solidarity and cultural retention and ethnic reinvention have become the most attractive of all such forms to most Americans, and thereby the most revealing of American fantasies; their forms of Americanization are the most reflective of fundamental (if unrecognized or unspoken) majority realities, and thus the most revealing of the diasporic Italian process of self-transformation. Americans now look to Italian-identified figures for a mirror unto themselves, to judge what they once were and what they have never been, to figure out what they have become and what they would still like to be. And the Italian Americans, so dispersed and intermingled and assimilated as to be almost (but not quite) sociologically indistinguishable, look to the cultural market as a whole—from trash mafia paperbacks to the rise of full-scale Italian American Studies, but especially to the continuing major Italian presence in film, popular music, sports, and the fine arts —for practically the same thing: to compare who “their people” once were against who their families are now, and to figure out why the hell Italianness could possibly still matter. At the mall the Italian restaurants keep getting bigger and, alas, more vulgar—if Primo only knew!—even as the conscientious cooking magazines, the Internet-based specialty supply operations, and the never-ending travel reports from Tuscany become more refined and demanding. Once upon a time, feeling Italian was the unlooked-for fallout of social history: Barbella’s murder was an Italian act in an American setting, produced by American conditions, and resulting in a new-worldstyle vindication with an old-world secret. Joseph Stella went from the hill towns to the New World and stood agape at a brutal majesty that his feudally raised, Catholically trained eye was able to capture better than anything else, even the camera. Deserted and illiterate, with many mouths and no prospects, Lucia Santa masterminded the family’s slow and costly climb into the middle classes, sacrificing the very means—la

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via vecchia—by which she secured it. Frank Sinatra revolutionized pop vocalization by animating the American standard songbook with cornerboy wisdom—he’d been up and down and he’d known, well, just about everything. At mid-century feeling Italian became increasingly a lesson in attitude: attitude like Sinatra’s that emerged from experiences like his, yes, but also the attitude that emerged from our experiences of the artwork of ethnic personification such as Sinatra’s—Stella’s paintings, “Christ in Concrete,” The Fortunate Pilgrim, certainly Songs for Swingin’ Lovers and The Godfather, and everything thereafter. Agency is whatever is left when fate has done its damnedest; the purpose of family is to withstand its own undoing; charisma is the irony that cuts in both directions. You name it, the lessons are there, sotto voce, several per artist of Italian extraction, per chapter of Italian American history, with Italianate sense and sensibility—diverse and allied, contrary and cumulative—taking shape in the spaces between. As a self-conscious regime, acknowledging the lessons of experience and adopting the attitudes of art, feeling Italian is now a chosen identity —in part more than whole, or as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. I for one need more Lucia Santa in me, not only at home but at work, in administration, where negative capability, farsightedness, and a willingness to take your lumps are at a premium. I admire ferociously entrepreneurial values where I find them, among the Korean immigrants and the Indian transplants of course, but also the South Mexican sojourners and the Iranian refugees, who remind me of whom the Italians once were, including the parental thumb and the discipline to suffer it. Lifelong student of Emerson and Hurston though I am, I also teach with as much Puzo and Springsteen in me as can be mustered—enough so that students catch their analytic edge and philosophical value even if they don’t always know whence it comes. And I have chosen to live in a postindustrial city, where I encounter the interplay of class and color and accent every day, where I’m blessed with beautifully resurrected and still-fallen reminders of bygone industry almost everywhere I go, and where upscale distribution of my beloved Italian food products and lowend distribution of the Mexican and Honduran, South Indian and South Chinese and South Vietnamese food stuffs I increasingly fancy, are only a couple of miles apart.

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“Feeling Italian” is my name for the patterns of intelligent emotion and articulate gesture played out in Italian America (ah, those Sicilian tempers!) and for the sensuous, provocative, demanding leap of identity across genealogical lines: that long romance in and of America for its Italians. In large measure, what I’ve traced here is the Italian American version of the dialectic of ethnicity: a century-long interplay between ethos and ethnos, between, on the one hand, the effect of the Italian way on the individual, no less authentic when unacknowledged or unrecognized and, on the other hand, the production of community through affinities of personal election, no less real for being prompted and ritualistic.2 Such interplay is tricky business, of course, not the least because it is a matter of history and faith, of knowledge and style. This book, Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America, is the overarching story of getting from there—the original culture gap of distrust, ignorance, isolation, and alienation—to here, where what we experience is mutual mythmaking of the most intimate order. One hundred years of cultural reciprocity is a simple idea, really: as the Italians have gotten more American, so the Americans have gotten more Italian. The process is complex of course—so, these many pages—but the basic idea of it runs counter to the classic idea of wholesale assimilation and the quest for racial privilege. The vanguard of the Anglophone academy now asks, anxiously, have the Italians become “white”? and this book responds, provocatively, no, that’s not it. The Americans get (to feel) Italian. A couple of comrades of mine, Carlo Rotella and Arthur Casciato, keep needling me that real Sicilians don’t talk about their “Sicilian”-ness (“Even ‘Italian American’ is an abstraction I can’t get behind”), they just go about their business, attending to whatever deserves attention.3 So what in blazes have I been doing, making a book-length fuss over Italian identity? In truth, it’s not just the Sicilians who are tired of the selfdefeating contradictions and narcissism of identity politics; even our schoolchildren—raised on spineless feel-good nonconfrontational multiculturalism—have become pretty cynical about the whole thing. Yet we as a nation of everyday people are somehow inexhaustibly taken with ethnic self-representation in general and Italian American self-representation in particular. Given how late it is in the oppression-versus-assimilation game for the offspring of Italians, given how global flows and Internet exchanges break down all manner of boundaries, and given how

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much we both admire and fear the non-European peoples in our midst, this is a strange and curious thing. So, one final time, why? I started this book thinking I would try to do for the history of Italian American artistic self-representation what Albert Murray did for African American music and dance culture in his book Stomping the Blues: that is, explore an ethnically rooted cultural form of the first order with which most of us are, by now, at least passingly familiar if not involved, but which has been underappreciated or misunderstood. In a recent talk, Murray himself philosophized about the significance of the good stuff like the blues: Art provides mankind with definitions of itself, its circumstance, its situation, its condition, and also its possibilities. That is what I think stories and poems are about. It is what paintings and sculptural forms are about. It is what music is about—which after all is nothing if not a soundtrack to which we choreograph our daily activities. So let’s be sure it’s good music.4

The insistence that we assemble a soundtrack for daily existence— “equipment for living” in one philosopher’s phrase, “art for life’s sake” in another’s—is a motif that occurs everywhere in the archive of Italian American artists, critics, and fellow travelers.5 Of course the Italians neither originated such an idea nor monopolize its practice. But the extent to which art as equipment for living is an Italian American attitude —the attitude Italian Americans bring to art, the attitude non-Italians take away from Italian American art, and the attitude that makes Italian identity itself an art—can still take us by surprise. It certainly has taken me by surprise, even when I should have been most expecting it. In the final thralls of writing Feeling Italian, I stumbled upon a brandnew book happily shelved right next to Madonna in a music library: Bruce Springsteen’s America (2003) by Robert Coles, the distinguished child psychiatrist and writer. Luck may be the residual of design—look, a new Bruce book!—but I had no idea how fortuna could smile on spirited enterprise until I opened Coles’s book and started reading. In the prologue Coles sets out to explain Springsteen’s importance in the broadest sense—so broadly in fact that the prologue is not directly or explicitly about Springsteen at all. It is instead the recollection of an afternoon

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spent with another distinguished writer-physician, the modernist poet and essayist William Carlos Williams, who at seventy-one years of age had been by then a lifelong observer and, indeed, contributor to the myth of America. One afternoon in October of 1954 Williams took the young Coles aside to talk about why and how art matters, especially in the difference-haunted, difference-absorbing, difference-enhancing, differenceachieving land of theirs. It was the height of the McCarthy era, fear and loathing everywhere; and Williams the poet-healer of Paterson, New Jersey, found himself listening compulsively—surprise, surprise—to Frank Sinatra: Look, whether we’re young, or we’re all grown up and just starting out, or we’re older and getting so old there’s not much time left, we’re human beings—we’re looking for company, and we’re looking for understanding: someone who reminds us that we’re not alone, and someone who wonders out loud about things that happen in this life, the way we do when we’re walking or sitting or driving, and thinking things over. I mention this guy, Sinatra, because he’s very much present in the homes, in the lives, of my patients. He’s “a New Jersey boy,” they’ll tell me (as if I don’t know!) “and now he’s gone national,” one dad told me, contemplating the pictures of Frankie-boy all over his daughter’s room . . . Afterwards, doing my thinking as I often do, while driving home, I kept hearing Sinatra sing—in my head and, in a way, through that girl’s head . . . A good singer does that—gets our mind going: makes us look at life with an intensity that comes from her or his head, heart, taking hold of our own.6

In the tradition of Williams, and hence of Coles, the kind of art that has mattered and continues to matter in America is the kind that counsels and consoles, challenges and enriches people day-to-day. From Sinatra to Springsteen comes a particular legacy of artistic vocation, accomplishment, and use value: a continuity of fierce and knowing engagement with the hearts and minds of common folk yielding song as successful in helping individuals “choreograph [their] daily lives” as it is deliberate in seeking to do so.

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Such convergence—the legacy of a certain kind of music from Sinatra to Springsteen and the legacy of a certain understanding of why that music matters from Williams to Coles—is no damn coincidence. Springsteen is, after all, a Jersey boy whose own mother—“the Italian,” as he invokes her—first insisted that he listen to Ol’ Blue Eyes.7 For over half a century now we have recognized that particular artists seem to be particularly adept at insinuating themselves into ordinary lives. James T. Fisher has identified the tendency of cradle Catholics (the barflies and track habitués of the postindustrial Northeast who know every line of The Pope of Greenwich Village) to make of pop culture sacred texts— neither condescension nor blasphemy are intended by Fisher’s formulation—drawing wisdom out of them, making community of each other through them, and taking solace from them.8 What Coles and Williams gesture toward is the mode in which Sinatra and Springsteen invite their audiences to engage the world (of their music, through their music) like cradle Catholics. Nothing is more breathtaking for someone like me— who came of age after Sinatra, during the reign of Springsteen, and in plenty of time to catch Madonna’s opening acts—to encounter a twentyyear-old who can lip-synch every line of the songs, evoke every gesture of the performances. And the music fans pale in their daily devotions to the mafia flick aficionados, who really do know every line of The Godfather, the sequels, Goodfellas, Scarface, and now, of course, The Sopranos—or, if “the environment” hits a bit too close to home (mum’s the word, remember, in the old neighborhoods), then Moonstruck. The kinds of art I have examined here have exactly this effect—these songs and stories and pictures and movies get under our skins—which brings us back to where this all began: what does Italianness have to do with it? everything, is my flippant answer, but what I really mean to say is that from the beginning, the painters and writers and musicians and filmmakers examined herein were working in American contexts in significantly Italian ways, using Italian or Italian American materials to create an Italianate sensibility in the United States. Over time the nation at large has absorbed the overall effect—its feeling for Italianness—to conceptualize and symbolize and deploy and where necessary keep at bay many, perhaps most, of the archetypically Italian experiences and qualities: Honor, Job, Mother, Crime, Table, you now know the litany.

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Naked like that, the archetypes look like mere stereotypes, but they are in truth blueprints for thought and action developed by Italians and the offspring of Italians to deal with the United States they found themselves in—a United States to which they, increasingly, wanted to belong, a United States which they discovered could be remolded, handsomely, in their own image. From ethnicity comes art comes the art of ethnicity—a treacherous yet magical dance of identity, self-skeptical yet self-generative, that is as useful as it is artful, useful indeed because it is artful. The art of ethnicity in America is imagination for everyday life, and feeling Italian is one of its great achievements.

notes note s to the introduction 1. Sociologist Mary C. Waters reports that, given a choice, more Americans would opt to be Italian than any other ethnicity. Choosy Americans choose Italianness? The reasons offered by the interviewees are warm and fuzzy, suggesting either that the nation at large is gullible enough to believe the Italian American public relations racket or they’ve become Italian enough to know how to keep the omerta. Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 142. 2. In the chapters to come, I’ve kept the notes light. The narrative bibliography at the end is for those interested in matters of Italian American history, art, and literature beyond the scope of this book.

note s to chapte r 1 1. When the U.S. Congress called a halt to open immigration in 1924, with a series of immigration-restriction laws highly prejudicial to Southern and Eastern Europe (Asian immigration had been eliminated entirely), several million Italians were settled in the United States for good. Four to five million is the accepted estimate: the problem in reaching a precise figure is balancing the number of Italians who returned home, often after several crossings, to stay (the returnees tended to call attention to themselves but left scarce records) against those who entered the United States illegally and thus slipped into the general population unrecorded (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language traces the slur “wop” to the dialectic phrase for thug, guappo, but popular legend hears “wop” as an English acronym for “WithOut Papers”). 2. There were, of course, other trajectories of departure and settlement. For instance, emigrants from the north of Italy—seeking religious freedom or political asylum, fleeing military service, or looking to put skills to greater economic use—began trickling into the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century; the Gold Rush brought them West, and the truck farms, vineyards, retail food industry, and fishing boats of California (where, not coincidentally, the largest concentrations of Italian American Protestants are to be found) became their fallbacks. Commensurate with the beginning of the Great Migration, contract labor brought gangs of men onto the Louisiana cotton, sugar, and beet plantations, where they worked side by side with the descendants of slaves, but 209

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New Orleans with its docks and food industries was the long-term post-contract attraction. See Micaela di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among Californian Italian-Americans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984); and Vincenza Scarpaci, “Walking the Color Line: Italian Immigrants in Rural Louisiana, 1880–1910,” Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 60–78. 3. From a century’s distance, it is arguable that there is nothing so surprising about Maria’s case than the very fact that we know anything at all about it. This is not just a gentle reminder that the vicissitudes of academic interest serve Italian American history none too well, but something vaguer and more portentous, that the gods of fortune ultimately looking after Maria seem to have set fire to her historical trail only to light the imagination of Idanna Pucci, author of The Trials of Maria Barbella, an Italian with a distantly American genealogy and much New York experience, who was prone to take such fires as a sign of special election to a special challenge. If I had the space to do justice to Pucci’s detail (read the book!), you would see how unbelievably ripe Maria’s history is for all kinds of contemporary investigation: in her case the penal-industrial complex, transcontinental surplus labor circulation, the science and psychiatry of racial categorization, and women’s-status law all meet. 4. Pucci is my documentary source throughout. For the occasional direct quotations, I’ve supplied page numbers in parentheses from the standard English edition: Idanna Pucci, The Trials of Maria Barbella, trans. Stefania Fumo (New York: Vintage, 1997). 5. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, trans. Frances Franaye (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963), 4. Levi, a painter and a doctor of Jewish extraction, was an Italian opponent of fascism whom Mussolini banished in 1935 to Basilicata, then called by its Roman name, Lucania (as if it were Italy’s Siberia, which, in fact, it was). 6. Actually, to one of the Americas, with New York City superceding Buenos Aires as the cheaper destination from Naples in the 1870s. 7. Ann Cornelisen, Women of the Shadows: A Study of the Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), esp. 24–29, 218–28. 8. “Excommunicated,” the Italians say, speaking of familial estrangement as a form of religious ostracism. 9. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), 56– 61; Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 107–8, 118–19.

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10. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, & Twenty Years’ Work among Them (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872), 194. 11. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Dover, 1971), 44; text originally published by Charles Scribner’s, 1890. 12. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 46. 13. Pucci is an experienced documentary filmmaker with anthropological expertise, a native Italian-speaker with a command of English. She is also, on her mother’s side, the great granddaughter of the Countess Cora Slocomb di Brazzà. There is something exquisitely Italian about the ancestral urge that struck Pucci in the early 1980s, when she happened across a strangely circumspect testimonial written by her great grandfather, Cora’s husband, the inventor Detalmo di Brazzà, and the fact flashed upon her that her family had been all too reticent about Cora. But it was the specter of Maria, the girl seamstress whose lover died at her hands, that drew Pucci inexorably in, as if empathetic imagination passed down the female line through the Slocomb family blood; and it was a eerie coincidence of actual fires—an estate fire that destroyed Cora’s capacious diaries, the Ellis Island fire of 1892 that destroyed all record of Maria’s arrival, a newspaper fire that destroyed the files of Il Progresso Italo-Americano for the crucial year of 1895—which Pucci perceived as Maria trying to tell her something, as if the signs of fated erasure could be read with a reverse spin.

note s to chapte r 2 1. Stella is at the beginning of the long if seldom recognized legacy of what Pellegrino D’Acierno has called “Italian American visual culture.” Italian American visual culture is a legacy of achievement in pictorial form—painting and graphics, architectural draftsmanship, film and stage and video design, and what we might call literary and lyrical imaging—but that achievement is itself a reflection of and the lens through which nonprofessional folk, especially but by no means exclusively those descended from Italians, see the world. Pellegrino D’Acierno, The Italian-American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts (New York: Garland, 1999), 499–562. 2. Joseph Stella, “Discovery of America: Autobiographical Notes,” Art News 59 (November 1960), 64–65; originally written to accompany a 1946 retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 3. Stella, “Discovery of America,” 65. 4. Stella himself proclaimed an affinity, dating to high school, for the school of literary and philosophical writing we call American Romanticism, but the

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Romantics he felt kinship with were not Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville, but rather Walt Whitman, that “Brooklyn boy,” and Edgar Allan Poe, a transplant to Manhattan from Baltimore. Whitman and Poe as precursors to Stella: as we shall see, Stella’s literary inspirations make perfect sense given the Romantic encounter with the city, the ecstatic expectation with which Whitman responded to the diversity of New York Harbor (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) and the disconcerting compulsiveness with which Poe dramatized the anonymity of big-city streets (“The Man of the Crowd”). 5. Emerson was horrified by the materiality and crowds of an Easter Pageant in Rome. 6. When the Russian socialist Maxim Gorky visited Coney Island in 1907, the year that the greatest number of Italians came to the United States, he expressed in brilliantly economic but religiously hostile terms what would become in effect the intellectual party line, from both the humanist Right and the radical Left, that the park was an unmitigated moral and social disaster: “Life is made for the people to work six days in the week, sin on the seventh, and pay for their sins, confess their sins, and pay for the confession.” Maxim Gorky, “Boredom,” Independent 63 (July–December 1907), 314. 7. In 1907, again that year in which Italian immigration peaked, Henry Adams (the grandson of one president, and the great-grandson of another) damned America for sacrificing God-given, God-seeking natural reason to the machine-made, machine-making rationality of progress, a cosmic shift in the operating principles of society that Adams characterized as the shift from “the Virgin” to “the Dynamo.” In light of Adams’s famous dichotomy, long used by teachers and scholars as a frame of reference, it is stunning to see what Stella, working from intuition, did in another one of his Coney Island treatments, Coney Island Madonna, where he took a daytime, pastoral, and very abstract view of the park, replacing the cyclopic tower with a pastoral Virgin and blending the park grounds into what looks to be, surely, a Basilicatan hillscape. I like to think of this painting as the (Emersonian) meditative center of (the Poe-like) maelstrom of Battle of Lights, but at any event the principal point would be that, in contradistinction to Adams’s dichotomy, Stella painted the Dynamo as the Virgin. 8. Ernest Goldstein and Robert J. Saunders, Joseph Stella, the Brooklyn Bridge (Champaign, IL: Garrard, 1984), 19. 9. Henry James, The American Scene, ed. Leon Edel (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), 75. 10. Joseph Stella, “The Brooklyn Bridge (A Page of My Life),” transition 16– 17 (June 1929), 87–88. 11. In his glossary of Italian-American terms, d’Acierno defines the passeggiata:

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the evening stroll in which all the residents of a small town (it occurs in a modified version in larger cities) put on their best clothing to parade through the town in order to be seen and to look at others. Its main locus is the piazza where Italians enact their rituals of self-display and culturally-sanctioned voyeurism and often conduct their courtships as well.

D’Acierno, The Italian-American Heritage, 745–46. 12. What had happened to the passeggiata, for Stella, is this: He heard the wind hum through the cables and the sound of the traffic below. He saw moving headlights flashing through the structure and plankings. The quiet space and distant stars seen from the promenade were far different from the view on the lower level. That was a ferocious, frantic world of rushing traffic and the deafening whine of tires on steel gratings. The noise filled the air around the bridge like a dense cloud. What the eye did not see, the ear could hear from that position on the promenade.

Goldstein and Saunders, Joseph Stella, 7. 13. Upon a scrap of paper, undated but still with us, Stella wrote a prayer in Italian to the city of New York, here beautifully translated, by Moyra Byrne: New York . . . Gigantic jaw of irregular teeth, shiny black like a bulldozer, funereal gray, white and brilliant like a minaret in the sunlight, dull, cavernous black, like Wall Street after dark. Clamorous with lights, strident with sounds— that’s Broadway, the White Way—at night, blazing and mad with pleasure-seeking. Imperial metropolis, childish Babel—sometimes flimsy, derisory, ephemeral, insignificant as a child’s tracing in the sands, sometimes grotesque and common, bulky with middle-class heaviness, the skyscrapers like bandages covering the sky, stifling our breath, life shabby and mean, provincial, sometimes shadowy and hostile like an immense prison where the ambitions of Europe sicken and languish, sinister port where the energies drawn from all over the world become flabby and spent, enemy of every effort, ferocious with its enormous blacks of buildings, barring one’s way like the Great Wall of China, with its dreadful, closed windows, barren of flowers.

Printed in Italian under the title “New York,” in Irma B. Jaffe, Joseph Stella (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970); printed in English translation by Moyra Byrne, also under the title “New York,” in Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 219. 14. Stella, “The Brooklyn Bridge (A Page of My Life),” 88. 15. To a layperson the two catenary cables appear to be holding up the bridge, though the lattice hatching is what actually does the bulk of the work. 16. Goldstein and Saunders, 42. 17. One of the Yale curators suggests that the prism is a huge plumb bob, which works very well thematically but doesn’t quite explain the disc.

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18. Haskell, Joseph Stella, 97. 19. Stella, “Discovery of America,” 41–42. “The initial step in a steel mill is taken with a crescendo of awe, terror, towering black steel structures menacingly surge all around and the sudden explosions here and there of the incandescent fires of the ovens seem the insidious lightnings of that perpetual black storm governing those infernal recesses.” Paul Kellogg Papers, folder 194, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis; printed as “Pittsburgh Notes” in Haskell, Joseph Stella, 204. 20. And hence more powerful than the liberalizations of the Christic metaphor—by Pietro di Donato and Ralph Fasanella, among others. Fasanella, on the other hand—offspring of Italian Greenwich Village, gas station attendant, labor activist, and amateur painter “discovered” by John Berger and others in a brief flurry in the early 1970s—did in fact produce his own gas tank paintings and evocations of tenement streets that literalize the mystic impulse in these cases, and arguably only in these cases, to strong effect. 21. Art historians nominate Stella’s most celebrated works—monumental in size, subject of focus, and formal ambition—as his most successful renderings of the industrial metropolitan sublime, and they do so, in large part, by shadowing Stella’s biographical footsteps and by taking his occasional autobiographical notations at face value. There is certain eye-opening merit to this procedure. We know, for instance, that he attended both the April 1911 Salon des Independants exhibit and the October “Section d’Or” exhibition, both of which showcased Roberto Delauney. By 1911, Delauney had completed his postimpressionist interiors of the cathedral Saint-Severin, executed to capture the play of light and color yet without any trace of deliberate religious investment on his own part, as if the cathedral had lost its force to sanctify or damn; he was also well along in producing a largish series that fragmented the Eiffel Tower in various settings, capturing the steely fracturing of consciousness. 22. Stella, “Discovery of America,” 65.

note s to chapte r 3 1. Although the Italian sections of the Lower East Side always attracted notice in the slumming narratives of the late Gilded Age (Charles Loring Brace’s The Dangerous Classes of New York or Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives) and although a couple of autobiographies were published by successful Italian immigrants in the 1920s (Constantine Panunzio, Pascal D’Angelo), there is almost nothing by way of fiction proper in English between a short story, “Peppino,” which Luigi Ventura translated from his own French in 1886, and the first accomplished novel, Garibaldi M. Lapolla’s The Grand Gennaro (1934), both of

notes to chapter 3

which are entirely forgotten except by a handful of Italian American literature specialists. Ghetto literature in its myriad incarnations, at least from the 1890s through the 1930s, was primarily and therefore iconically about Russian-Polish Jews: Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1911), the novels that Henry Harland published under the name “Sydney Luska,” including Yoke of the Thorah (1887), Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), Ernest Poole’s Voice of the Street (1906, with illustrations by Joseph Stella!), Anzia Yezierska’s novels and short stories, including Bread Givers (1925), Michael Gold’s Jews without Money (1930), Charles Reznikoff’s By the Waters of Manhattan (1930), Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), Meyer Levin’s The Old Bunch (1937), and Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), as well as such fabulously successful plays as Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1925) and Anne Nichols’s Abie’s Irish Rose (originally produced 1923). 2. Pietro di Donato, “Christ in Concrete,” Esquire 7 (March 1937), 40. 3. The reprinted story was Pietro di Donato’s “The House” (1977). 4. Arthur D. Casciato, “The Bricklayer as Bricoleur: Pietro Di Donato and the Cultural Politics of the Popular Front,” VIA 2 (Fall 1991), 67–78. 5. Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete (Chicago: Esquire Inc., 1937). Subsequent parenthetical page references are to this edition. When I first found mention of this book version of “Christ in Concrete,” in the biographical notes accompanying the magazine publication, I thought I was in store for a visit to the New York Public Library only to find—a different kind of elation—that the Special Collections of Perkins Library at Duke University, my own institution, owned a copy, which it had preserved as part of a bequest from a retiring faculty member, Weston La Barre (a Yale University Ph.D. in anthropology who wrote books on snake handling in Appalachia, the Ghost Dances of the Paiute and the Sioux, and sexuality among the Stone Age Muelos). 6. The editors reported being overwhelmed by the felt authenticity of the story but given pause by di Donato’s own letter of introduction—“it seemed to us to have a slightly phony ring, a note of arty self-dramatization that had not sounded once in the story itself. We were skeptical, too, of all this prodigious bricklaying.” They were savvy enough to assume that the writing was not hatched on the job but not sure of what to make of the fact that di Donato talked like the guys in his story. Yet what the editors did themselves was relay almost word for word the report that the distinguished writer Meyer Levin (who was at the time working on his own immigrant opus, The Old Bunch) filed from New York after visiting di Donato on Long Island, a report that not only emphasizes his working-class authenticity (he really was an expert craftsman at fifteen, foreman on the construction of the Hotel Lexington at seventeen, and a master mason by the age—eighteen—most others first qualify for an apprentice card)

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but more importantly his passion and intuitiveness, his corporeality and sensuality): a good boxer and an expert back stroke and free style swimmer . . . Is crazy about music and when he writes claims that he sees colors and forms and hears notes. He writes only in passion and “cannot think or put two and two together while writing. I use a word by all my senses. . . . I think he is completely emotionalized and that future work is utterly unpredictable.”

Not exactly the aesthetic persona of the artist-as-bricklayer, but surely close enough. “Notes on Authors,” Esquire 7 (March 1937), 2. 7. The typeface, by J. M. Bundscho Inc., is appropriate to the drama at hand, neither too stodgily classical nor too avant-garde nor too commercially populist; the cover design, by Arnold W. Ryan, features mortar-gray background, cream filler, and brick-red lines/shadowing/highlighting. 8. The phrase, which I’ve used to title this chapter, is from the novel: Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939), 256.

note s to chapte r 4 1. My paternal grandmother could speak Italian “beautifully,” and my father lived for a year in Siena when he was ten, but my mother has only the proverbs and indispensable phrases, and no Italian was spoken in our home except as a rhetorical flourish. 2. Parenthetical page references are to the latest edition: Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (New York: Random House, 1997). 3. My title pays homage to the title of a wonderful study, The Madonna of 115th Street, by the historian Robert Orsi. The special focus of Orsi’s expertise is a shrine to the Blessed Virgin on 115th Street in New York, an organized devotion to the Madonna popular between the wars, that he reads not as a nostalgic or cultic holdover from Southern Italy but as a reflection of and response to U.S. opportunity, a multilayered form of crisis management, in which “the immigrant mother” is the fountainhead of a revered culture that everyone is working, surreptitiously and guiltily and hypocritically, to dismantle. I am with Orsi almost all the way, though I do wonder if, in his demystification of the maternal icon and in his compassion for the many real-life women, he doesn’t underestimate the latter—at least, the more thick-skinned and farsighted, who (as Puzo suggests) may have orchestrated their own undoing, in part by intuitively adopting the role of conservative scapegoat (the mater dolorosa of cultural mobility). Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), esp. 135, 217. 4. I would think it simply anachronistic to rely on Ann Cornelisen’s Women

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of the Shadows, a report from the hill towns of Basilicata (where time supposedly stands still) based on a quarter century of living almost exclusively among them, if what Cornelisen has to say about the women left behind didn’t resonate so powerfully with what we as professional and familial historians know about those who emigrated—who had, if anything, even more gumption. Cornelisen, Women of the Shadows: A Study of the Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy (New York: Vintage, 1977), 26–27. 5. American sociologists have been debating the familial culture of the Italian South since the 1920s and 1930s (the essays of Jane Addams and Leonard Covello, Phyllis H. Williams’s 1938 South Italian Folkways in Europe and America), often with condescension and disdain (Harvard sociologist Edward Banfield’s 1958 The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Yale psychiatrist Irving Child’s 1942 Italian or American?), and the first revisionist account of the Italian emigration (Rudolph Vecoli’s punchy “Contadini in Chicago”) appeared as early as 1964— the year Puzo finally published The Fortunate Pilgrim. But it was not until the early 1970s, inspired at least in part by Puzo’s very own Godfather, that several popular works—especially Richard Gambino’s engaging, readily familiar, and at points quite subtle Blood of My Blood (1974)—codified “la via vecchia” for a general readership, explaining the tradition’s origins and detailing its lingering effects. In the wake of ethnic populism came the highly professional “new social history,” statistical and archival local case studies with finely drawn arguments, including monographs by Humbert Nelli, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Thomas Kessner, John Bodnar, John Briggs, and a small host of others, with subsequent updating and/or dissent by Micaela di Leonardo, Mary Waters, Donna Gabaccia, Richard Alba, and Jonathan Reider. Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1974). 6. Gambino, Blood of My Blood, 10. 7. Cornelisen, Women of the Shadows, 227. 8. Unlike the many Yiddish-speakers who studied English even into old age, the Italians refused to learn it, but they insisted, as sternly as any group of immigrants ever, on English for their children, exactly what Lucia Santa does here. 9. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, 210. 10. Peasant women seldom see physical encounters as pleasant. As something necessary, as duty, as trial but not passion, which is a word associated with rage rather than love or sexual intercourse . . . When they are alone, talking, a wife who boasts of her husband’s sexual charms always says the same thing with wan pride: “He’s valente, valente!” He’s very, very quick!

Puzo is right: Lucia Santa has made a radical break from the Southern Italian norm. Cornelisen, Women of the Shadows, 20.

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11. Puzo, “Choosing a Dream: Italians in Hell’s Kitchen,” The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1973), 26–27. 12. Puzo composed The Fortunate Pilgrim when there were scarcely a handful of American writers and intellectuals with Italian backgrounds, before the widespread celebration of European ethnicity (in the wake of the black-is-beautiful movement) and before the voluminous new scholarship debating ethnic persistence and mystification (the first widely recognized harbinger of that academic revolution, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot, was published in 1964, the same year as The Fortunate Pilgrim). Puzo was in effect too late for the immigrant moment (which lasted, in effect, through the Depression) but ahead of the multicultural recovery game, which spared him, as he was happy to remind interlocutors (how could he work without a network of peers? without an established discourse? without a niche market?), from censorious scrutiny by the ethnic thought police.

note s to chapte r 5 1. In early 1942, the U.S. government quietly but hurriedly registered as suspect aliens 600,000 Italians not yet naturalized; relocated more than 10,000 Italian American citizens, mainly fisherfolk from the California coast (whose livelihoods were destroyed, including Joe DiMaggio’s parents), subjecting 42,000 others to nightly curfews and search and seizure; and drafted plans for internment facilities in Montana, actually interning a hundred people or more before FDR rescinded the orders. Lawrence DiStasi, Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II (Berkeley: Heyday, 2001), xviii. 2. Margaret Mead, “We Are All Third Generation,” And Keep Your Powder Dry (New York: Morrow, 1942), 27–53. 3. Donald Clarke, All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (New York: Fromm, 1997), 17. 4. Paula Marantz Cohen was the organizer of the first Modern Language Association panel on Sinatra (December 1997), a milestone in Italian American Studies and the occasion of her courageous linking of Sinatra to Emerson. 5. John Rockwell, Sinatra: An American Classic (New York: Random House, 1984), 62. 6. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of ItalianAmericans (New York: The Free Press, 1962), 34. Gans would later term “costfree” identification “symbolic ethnicity”: Herbert J. Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America,” Theories of Ethnicity: A

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Classical Reader, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1996), 425–59. 7. T. H. Adamowski, “Love in the Western World: Sinatra, Celebrity, and the Conflict of Generations,” Sinatra panel, MLA Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 1997. 8. There’s doubleness and irony by the score here. For the kid from Hoboken is at the Lido in Paris making jazz with a sextet, reanimating in immaculate upper-class accent and intonation a Rodgers and Hart standard, after Elvis and at the moment the Beatles are in Hamburg—he has indeed not only stepped out but in mobility terms stepped up. Yet in the midst of a resplendent rendition he interrupts the song to do a “dirty rat” Bogey imitation, laying down a deliberate reminder of the corner but ruining the live recording. 9. The West Enders produced their own instinctive version of the equation “trampiness is Italian”: Sinatra is liked first because he is an Italian who is proud of his lowly origin, not so much because of his ethnic background per se—although it is not disparaged —but because he is willing to admit and defend it. . . . He has become rich and famous, but he has not deserted the peer group that gave him his start. Nor has he adopted the ways of the outside world. Still a rebellious individual, he does not hesitate to use either his tongue or his fists. . . . Also, he shows his scorn for those aspects of the outside world that do not please him, and does not try to maintain appearances required by middle-class notions of respectability.

Gans, Urban Villagers, 192. 10. The men gathered that night were not alone in this judgment: among others elsewhere who had already come to the same conclusion was a studious youngster from the Italian corner of Greenwich Village with priestly aspirations, “Marty” Scorsese, who fumed long enough about La Motta that he eventually made the story into his critically revered film Raging Bull (1980). For a more congenial evocation of La Motta, in the course of teaching us what we should really be looking for from boxing, see Carlo Rotella, Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 84. 11. Even Sinatra’s cronies didn’t know, as late as 1970, that he privately arranged to support Robinson in his later years. Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 18–20. 12. The portrait I have rendered here is a composite drawn from an eloquent and largely trenchant coterie of New Yorker commentators: Alex Ross (qtd. in Franklin, 49), John Lahr (83), and Adam Gopnik (qtd. in Franklin, 48), respectively. Judicious biographer Donald Clarke shares the disdain for Sinatra’s extramusical life (151), but he underscores his stage and studio professionalism

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(61); whereas Lahr remarks that “inside the lyric” Sinatra had “no hint of the Hoboken streets in his pronunciation” (83), Clarke notes how Sinatra in fact worked in “the touch of a New Jersey accent” even in the standards, where he evinced a “counterpoint of toughness” (134). Donald Clarke, All or Nothing at All; Nancy Franklin et al., “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker (May 25, 1998), 47– 49; John Lahr, “Sinatra’s Song,” New Yorker (November 3, 1997), 77–95. 13. Raised in Cologne, Germany, Gans knew that something different was going on in the West End than in, say, Indiana’s Middletown—or, more precisely and proximately, given Gans’s next focus, Long Island’s planned suburbia, Levittown. As Gans saw it, the West End ethos of “performance” had at least three unfamiliar, almost indescribable, mechanisms: West End sociability produced “individuality” out of group interaction, not apart from it; the success of an individual provoked quality imitation, not sullen resentment; and the aesthetic pleasures of competitive, individuating display strengthened the group, rather than dividing it against itself. 14. John Gennari, “Mammissimo: Dolly and Frankie Sinatra and the ItalianAmerican Mother/Son Thing,” Italian Americana 19 (Winter 2001), 6–10. 15. Sinatra reports: “In my particular neighborhood in New Jersey, when I was a kid, boys became boxers or they worked in factories; and then the remaining group that I went around with were smitten by singing. We had a ukulele player, and we stood on the corners and sang songs.” Quoted in Lahr, “Sinatra’s Song,” 97–98 16. Ibid., 79. 17. As Gans observed, “The goods which contribute to the enjoyment of the group and the display of the individual ought to be the best that can be obtained; but the quantity and quality of food, drink, and clothing that are purchased leave little else for other expenditures or savings.” Gans, Urban Villagers, 187. 18. Quoted in Lahr, “Sinatra’s Song,” 83. 19. Will Friedwald, Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer’s Art (New York: Scribner’s, 1995), 25. 20. James T. Fisher, “Clearing the Streets of the Catholic Lost Generation,” Catholic Lives, Contemporary America, ed. Thomas J. Ferraro (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), 98–100. 21. Martha Weinman Lear, “The Bobby Sox Have Wilted, but the Memory Remains Fresh,” The Frank Sinatra Reader, ed. Steven Petkov and Leonard Mustazza (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 48. 22. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Oh, How We Worshiped The Gods of the Fifties!” Off Center: Essays (New York: The Dial Press, 1980), 48–49. 23. Picture the piano player in the film Young at Heart, after his popularity

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plummeted and Columbia Records dropped him, after he ditched his boyhood sweetheart, Nancy, and was ditched by the gorgeous and wonderfully wanton Ava Gardner, after his voice mysteriously thickened, and upstart Capitol Records paired him with arranger Nelson Riddle.

note s to chapte r 6 1. Leonard Covello, “The Influence of Southern Italian Family Mores upon the School Situation in America,” The Italians: Social Backgrounds of an American Group, ed. Francesco Cordasco and Eugene Bucchioni (Clifton, NJ: Kelley, 1974), 516; first published in 1944. 2. A sociologist at Harvard summed up the culture of Southern Italy with notorious bluntness, as “a society of amoral familists.” Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958), 83. 3. All we need call to mind is the best-known literary figure of the American twentieth century, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, to remember that the great American tragedy is that of a self-willed orphan turned self-made gangster, the doomed pretender to the upper-class throne. The orphaned fighter and rebel, no longer bound by apron strings or any domestic ambition of a familiar sort, disowned by his birth family if ever he had one and disinterested in lording over a new one, is the quintessential figure of the American imagination, a figure that was nowhere more powerfully at work than in the genre of the gangster film as we knew it before Puzo. Whatever their personal ethnic markings, the gangsters of the 1930s and 1940s—Irishman James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson of Jewish stock, the omni-cultural Paul Muni—epitomized the central U.S. myth of competitive individualism. They were the poor, frustrated, ultimately defeated first cousins of the individuals who actually made it: loners even more lonely than Howard Hughes. 4. Robert J. Thompson, “Introduction” to Mario Puzo, The Godfather (New York: NAL, 2002), 3. 5. By 1969, Americans had heard bits and pieces of these ideas and this rhetoric—the Italian family typologies were made available by films like Lovers and Other Strangers, the connection between organized crime and familial sensibility from Joseph Valachi’s testimony and Peter Maas’s subsequent book, The Valachi Papers (1968)—but Puzo put in all together in a narrative that seduces us to our tippy toes. 6. The hyperbole in Puzo’s portrayal of the Corleones is clear enough— he combined and exaggerated the histories of Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, and several others—but how realistic is Puzo’s basic premise, that success can and should be kinship dependent? Research into the workings of the postwar

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American mafia suggest that the Italian crime syndicates were in fact under familial control, organized along patriarchal lines, and justified by rhetorics of marital/paternal/fraternal protection (“mafia” originally meant “refuge”) and of clan loyalty, which also meant that nepotism would indeed become a problem as those syndicates grew and managerial succession would indeed become the issue when the more able of the young took their talents elsewhere. Francis A. J. Ianni with Elizabeth Reuss-Ianni, A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime (New York: Russell Sage, 1972). Historian Humbert S. Nelli concedes the “group unity” and “cooperative effort” of Italian American mobs, but he stresses the individualism and “American way of life” of the gang leaders. See Nelli, The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), 255–57. 7. Stephen S. Hall, “Italian-Americans: Coming Into Their Own,” New York Times Magazine (May 15, 1983), 28–34, 36, 38, 42, 44, 49–50, 52, 54, 56, 58. 8. In the final shooting script, Puzo and Coppola imagined one final scene with Kay, post-conversion, lighting candles at a kneeler in church—a scene that Coppola in fact shot (it’s available as one of the extras on DVD) but decided not to use. Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, Screenplay of The Godfather, Third Draft (March 29, 1971), publ. by Script City. 9. Pauline Kael, “Alchemy,” New Yorker 48 (March 18, 1972), 132. 10. Michael Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life (New York: Crown, 1999), 94. 11. Coppola is not just being congenial in testifying to Puzo’s visual sense. A congenitally deaf woman (about thirty years of age) once told me, her eyes tearing with wonder, that The Fortunate Pilgrim was the first novel she had ever been able to read all the way through—because “I could see it all.” Puzo would later script the films Superman and Superman II. Coppola, as quoted in Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola, 96; also Harlan Lebo, The Godfather Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 23, 30. 12. The very first screen test of Pacino is included in the widescreen VHS edition of The Godfather (1997), tape one; bits and pieces of that test and several subsequent ones are interwoven in “The Godfather: A Look Inside,” The Godfather DVD Collection (2001), Bonus Materials disc. 13. Lebo, The Godfather Legacy, 46. 14. Ibid., 47. 15. When it came to casting The Godfather, Puzo and Coppola one-upped even the Italians. “If Brando plays the Don,” renowned producer/director Dino De Laurentiis warned Charles Bludorn, “forget opening the film in Italy. They’ll laugh him off the screen.” The picture was in fact a sensation in Italy. Screened at prices 25 to 30 percent above the norm, the theaters in Italy and Sicily

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were packed, and Brando was beloved—especially by the men of respect! Ibid., 209. 16. The Italian American Civil Rights League was reviled, especially in the New York press, and especially at the Times, for being a transparently obvious public relations ploy on the part of organized crime, which seems to have made a laughing stock of itself on the way to trying to make a laughing stock of everyone else. Panic and paranoia reigned at the studio—the Italian American Civil Rights League had amassed a small fortune, and mob control of the unions was no laughing matter—but in retrospect the fiasco was off-the-scale funny, especially given what the mobsters were really after. The Times hurled invective at Al Ruddy for making a deal with the mob; cornered, the studio itself denounced Ruddy’s deal to the reporters, thereby doing more to exacerbate than to deflate the rumor going round that the mob was now “in” on the production. And so they were: the wise guys all loved the damn book, more than anybody, and they wanted to watch what was going to happen to it, and they (like everyone else, including the cops) wanted in their own small way to help—which in the end is just exactly what they did: securing permissions, running errands, keeping order, and taking bit parts. Lebo, The Godfather Legacy, 93– 99. 17. This time, I really set out to destroy the family. Yet I wanted to destroy it in the way that I think is most profound—from the inside. And I wanted to punish Michael, but not in the obvious ways. At the end he’s prematurely old, almost syphilitic, like Dorian Gray. I don’t think anyone in the theater can envy him.

Coppola, as quoted in Lebo, The Godfather Legacy, 215. 18. This is as true outside the country and along its borders, by the way, as inside of it. No nation-state other than the United States worships The Godfather, not even Italy, more than Japan, which is after all the apotheosis of patriarchal capitalism as well as the discourse of heroic male vengeance. And no immigrant population in the United States, not even the Italian Americans, worships The Godfather more than the Cuban diaspora centered in Miami, where every word is memorized in an embrace that actually predates the Cuban thematics of The Godfather Part II, predates Pacino’s insane turn as a Cubanized Scarface, and predates the casting of Cuban American Andy Garcia as the heir apparent in The Godfather Part III.

note s to chapte r 7 1. In Jonathan Lynn’s My Cousin Vinny (1992), Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei play Brooklynites stumbling, with precious little success, out of the working classes—Pesci has failed his bar exam, like, six times. But there is cross-class

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wisdom afoot, as they not only put their car knowledge to work in proving Pesci’s cousin’s innocence but also in reestablishing corner boy/girl interaction in the upper-middle-class settings of domestic partnership and legal aid; Click and Clack are, of course, the Car Talk boys, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, MIT engineers who turned the national airwaves (NPR, of all things!) into the hilarious and informative outpost of the local, family-owned garage. 2. The nastiest jab Dean Martin ever took at the Leader of the Pack—his good buddy, Frank Sinatra—was to say he couldn’t stand people who took singing that seriously. 3. Vito Corleone, born and raised until ten in Sicily, has a notoriously undecipherable countenance, but that’s then (he’s something of a traditional “mustache pete”) and this is now; Italian Americans I know may be quiet and introspective (the Tony LaRussa type) or gregarious and outgoing (the Dick Vitale/Tommy Lasorda type), but they are almost always emotionally legible, the need for and insistence on inscrutability a thing of the embattled past, when everything and everyone outside the immediate circle of the belltower was suspicious.

note s to chapte r 8 1. The news went like this: HIV is carried in the blood and comes in through the cracks; it began with monkey love and it is passed from mothers to their young; it looks like leprosy and kills like the plague. 2. Of course there were a few missteps along the way—some bad tunes when her voice was weak, a couple of forgettable movies, the overbaked porn project Sex, much of the documentary material in Truth or Dare—but this is carping. Not all of her best cuts from the 1980s even made it onto the Immaculate Collection album, and the video collection unfolds as a wondrous serial, a novel really, in visual form—with only one entry, Herb Ritts’s New Age-y “Cherish,” that personally leaves me cold. 3. The 1960s could think social revolution and personal liberation but couldn’t dress; the 1970s could write fiction and make movies—boy, could they make movies!—but they couldn’t dress either. 4. Rosemary C. Salomone, “The Ties That Bind: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Gender, Ethnicity, and the Practice of Law,” Virginia Journal of Social Policy & The Law 3 (Fall 1995), 177–215. 5. Fosca D’Acierno, “Madonna: The Postmodern Diva as Maculate Conception,” The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts, ed. Pellegrino D’Acierno (New York: Garland, 1999), 492. 6. Michael Goldberg, “Performance Review: Madonna Seduces Seattle,”

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Madonna: The Rolling Stones Files, ed. The Editors of Rolling Stone (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 49–50. 7. Fred Schruers, “Like a Virgin Year-End Album Review,” Madonna: The Rolling Stone Files, 55. 8. “I remember Nancy Sinatra singing, ‘These Boots are Made for Walkin’’ and that made one hell of an impression on me. And when she said, ‘Are you ready, boots, start walkin’,’ it was like, yeah, give me some of those go-go-boots. I want to walk on a few people.” Madonna as quoted in Denise Worrell, “Madonna!” The Madonna Companion: Two Decades of Commentary, ed. Carol Benson and Allan Metz (New York: Schirmer, 1999), 41. 9. Mary Rourke, “A Mad, Mad World of ‘Madonnas,’” The Madonna Companion: Two Decades of Commentary, 116. 10. Camille Paglia, “Madonna I: Animality and Artifice,” Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1992), 4; originally published on the op-ed page of the New York Times (December 14, 1990). 11. The triumphant wit Madonna displays in “Material Girl” descends not from the Monroe character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but from Jane Russell, whose archetype Madonna explicitly invokes in the lip-syncing sections of “Papa Don’t Preach.” 12. Transcendence is the pulse of divinity functioning despite the material, the corporeal, the social; immanence is the sensed experience of divinity within: the flesh, one’s material goods, even the body politic as vessels of the holy. 13. This is the same United States of popular and high opinion which had just made such a stink over Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts controversy; and was just about to kick up a fuss over Chris Olifi’s The Holy Virgin Mary in 1996, Rudolph Giuliani’s crusade against the Brooklyn Museum of Art. 14. Karlene Faith, Madonna, Bawdy & Soul (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), 98. 15. “With an instinct for world domination gained from Italian Catholicism,” Paglia wrote in a British journal in 1991, Madonna “has rolled like a juggernaut over the multitude of her carping critics . . . she has introduced ravishing visual beauty and a lush Mediterranean sensuality into parched, pinched, word-drunk Anglo-Saxon feminism.” As D’Acierno asked, “So many critics seem to love to discuss Madonna’s obsession with religion: Is it possible that so many of them —except perhaps Camille Paglia—have missed the whole point?” In 1992, Carla Freccero made a point of challenging Paglia—“Madonna is not, after all, a revolutionary feminist (pace Camille Paglia); she’s a female multimillionaire”— but Freccero’s sustained analysis of “Like a Prayer,” in which the Madonna character is seen as “both mother and child, both divine interpreter and earthly

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supplicant” puts, if anything, a more traditionally Catholic and Marian spin on Madonna’s overtly religious imagination. Camille Paglia, “Madonna II: Venus of the Radio Waves,” Sex, Art, and American Culture, 13; Fosca D’Acierno, “Madonna,” 495; Carla Freccero, “Our Lady of MTV: Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer,’” boundary 2 19:2 (Summer 1992), 163–83. 16. Our received language includes therapeutic distinctions between interior self and exterior show, sociological constructions of class, race, and religion underscoring sectarian divisions, and Enlightenment contrasts between the sanctuary of the holy and secular society—all of these oppositions productive, but all of them also, alas, a puritan way of thinking about everything, including the impress of non-puritan phenomenon. 17. At the time Raoul Ibarguen helped me to formulate the Sinéad O’Connor comparison, but in doing research for this essay, I was delighted to discover that we weren’t the first to have asked the question it raises. See Matthew Gilbert, “Playing the Shock Market,” The Madonna Companion: Two Decades of Commentary, 139. 18. The Catholic Church, at least in the Mediterranean and in its Caribbean and Latin American manifestations (but not only there), is a strange force: it is in many ways, as we all know, still officially frightened of modern sexuality (with tragic results among its clergy, as the recent disclosures make plain). Yet those countries where the Church still holds sway have produced and continue to produce among the most charismatic, sexiest public figures on earth, at least in global Christendom, especially in those places where its moral dogmas and institutional imperiousness are taken with a grain of salt: Valentino, Satchmo, Sophia Loren, Jennifer Lopez, Antonio Carlos Jobim. Madonna makes the connections explicit. 19. Madonna has immigrant Catholic roots on both sides of her family, but she was raised among the middle classes, in the shadow of her mother’s Jansenist French Catholicism (a Protestant-leaning form of Catholic practice) and under the direct aegis of her father, a devout Italian Catholic, and his extended family. She attended Catholic schools, which meant a lot of theology and many masses, in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II, as the traditional Mass was overhauled (elimination of Latin, altar turned toward the congregation, a renewed emphasis on the Testaments, folk music and sacred dancing and the prayer of peace), and the teaching nuns weathered the storm of change, which challenged the beloved illusion of a never-changing Faith but produced thereby an opening to ask the hard questions regarding woman’s place in the world and in the Church in particular. 20. Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Boston: Godine, 1981), 84, 102.

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21. Paglia, “Madonna II,” 11. 22. Pellegrino D’Acierno, entry for “La Bella Figura” in “Cultural Lexicon,” The Italian American Heritage, 707–8. The difference between a culture of guilt and a culture of shame is, once again, the difference between the emphasis on dogma and the emphasis on practice, or between the European North and the Mediterranean South. 23. As Karlene Faith reminds us, “The video, and the very danceable song, had become a queer anthem in gay clubs before the mainstream could see it.” Of course fault lines don’t completely disappear—social justice is not the name of the game here, and the questions of AIDS’ corporeal agony and extracorporeal meaning (special election, survivor guilt, the fear of a death wish) are left unanswered—like the uncanny gloat of the Madonna figure escaping the hotel in laughter. Karlene Faith, Madonna, Bawdy & Soul, 113. 24. Madonna’s queer magnetism certainly can’t be explained by her behavior with the dancers of color in Truth or Dare, an overt “mothering” which these surprisingly young guys will soon outgrow. It must have to do, I believe, once again, with her pop Catholic idiom, that fashion-fed, fashion-feeding dancing and prancing inclusiveness—“Express yourself!”—on stage. 25. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1990). 26. The Catholic influence is invoked by Paglia in its moment of breaking forth (of the Italian Renaissance), addressed in interviews and sidebar articles, but curiously absent—no sexed Virgin, no Pietà, no writhing Christ—from the otherwise exhaustive Sexual Personae. And what this means is that the cover of Sex, Art, and Material Culture, where Paglia vamps in Madonna costume, tells only half the story: it’s not just that Paglia can help us figure out what Madonna is up to, if only we’d listen with an open heart, but that Madonna can help us figure out what Paglia’s been getting at all along, the spirit (not just the logic) of her art epic. I like to imagine how Paglia must have felt watching the string of late videos—first, “Open Your Heart,” then “Express Yourself,” culminating in the two versions of “Vogue” and “Justify My Love”—and thinking, Holy Mary Mother of God, the girl’s got it! 27. Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002), 39–40.

note s to chapte r 9 1. Hawkins’s death was actually the second such incident in Bensonhurst: in 1982, a gang of some twenty Italian American teens beat Willie Turks, an African American transit worker, to death when they found him having a snack at

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the Avenue X Bagel Shop, where he had gone because—Howard Beach, here we come—his car had broken down. 2. Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, Crossing Ocean Parkway (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 6; Maria Laurino, Were You Always an Italian? Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America (New York: Norton, 2000), 123, 126. See also Alphonso Pinkney, Lest We Forget . . . White Hate Crimes: Howard Beach and Other Racial Atrocities (Chicago: Third World Press, 1994); Charles J. Hynes and Bob Drury, Incident at Howard Beach: The Case for Murder (New York: Putnam, 1990). 3. As Matthew Frye Jacobson, David Roediger, and Jonathan Rieder have shown us, Americanization has meant for many a baptism into prejudice, race baiting, and eventually a certain self-righteousness (“We did it without extra help, why can’t they?”)—individual friendships, working relations, and even cross-racial hero worship notwithstanding. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985). 4. Lee’s third installment, Summer of Sam, deserves a full-length treatment for its interest in Italian American male homosexuality alone, which turns to be a recurrent subject of African American literature. 5. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” Black American Cinema, ed. M. Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 215. 6. bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston: South End, 1991), 78–79. 7. Michael Eric Dyson, “Film Noir,” Tikkun 4 (1989), 75; Wahneema Lubiano, “But Compared to What? Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse,” Black American Literature Forum 25 (Summer 1991), 271. 8. What all assembled know is that the closest approach the borough ever makes toward achieving a corporate identity, an identity that would necessarily be trans-ethnic (or maybe, better still, pan-ethnic), is through its sports teams, their stars and leaders especially. Held in common esteem—Vito’s pathetic protests to the contrary—are such compelling figures of African descent as Willis Reed and Patrick Ewing of the New York Knicks, or, to invoke the timepresent of the film, such baseball players as Dwight Gooden, Mookie Wilson, and, to expand the colorizing spectrum, Keith Hernandez—all of whom were then playing for the New York (read Brooklyn-Queens) Mets. In Brooklyn, what-

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ever foul happens in management or even at the gate, on the streets the people worship—at least they are supPOSED to worship—sports together. 9. Ida Peters, “Giancarlo Esposito . . . Journalist in ‘Bob Roberts,’” Baltimore Afro-American 101 (October 17, 1992), B7. 10. Tonya Pendleton, “Giancarlo Esposito: Life after Spike Lee,” The Philadelphia Tribute 109 (October 9, 1992), 5–E. 11. John Gennari and I are trading interpretive riffs here, but I lean on Gennari’s interview and analysis sufficiently to warrant several parenthetical citations: John Gennari, “Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito: Life in the Borderlands,” Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 234–49. Originally published under the same title in CommonQuest 4 (Winter 2000), 8–17. 12. “Blacks Mourn Death of the Frank Sinatra That Nobody Knew,” Jet 94 (June 1, 1998), 4–14. 13. For a seminal overview and analysis of black identifications with Italian America, including Sinatra, see John Gennari, “Passing for Italian,” transition 72 (1996), 36–48. 14. Everyone knows that Sinatra made his pull from big-band (jazz) instrumentalists, that he depended on African American musicians, including Henry “Sweets” Edison and on arrangers Sy Oliver and Quincy Jones, and that he made albums with Duke Ellington (who made his own recordings with Sinatra’s record company, Reprise) and Count Basie (twice, and Basie’s band backed him in concerts). These were collaborations in NY and LA recording studios, obviously, but Sinatra was also known to frequent the late-night scene in black clubs both at home and on the road; he was especially fond of seeking out the female vocalists, not only Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald (his friend and professional rival), and Lena Horne (whose career he boosted and with whom he had an affair), but also such lesser-known blues and jazz stylists as the English transplant Mabel Mercer, to whom he felt especially indebted. I think there is also an untold story of experiment and influence during the transition “down” years, in which he worked not only with the jazz-saturated George Siravo but also recorded straight-up blues (“Lonesome Blues,” an honorable attempt), Broadway blues (“Necessity”—pretty good), and extra-verbal recordings (not bad scatting, but the whistling is even better) for such scuttled projects as an animated version of Finian’s Rainbow. 15. There is in this history of course a sad story of appropriation and exploitation. I don’t know how fair Sinatra’s own company, Reprise, was to the black artists and technical staff it employed, but the larger history is tackled by an episode of The Sopranos (First season, episode 10: “A Hit Is a Hit”), scripted by Joe Bosso and Frank Renzulli, in which Hesh, Tony’s long-standing business

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partner and wise Jewish uncle, is pressed for financial reparations by the descendents of an African American composer whose song royalties Hesh had— “in those days”—stolen (registering his name as cowriter!). 16. Donald Wildmon, “This Video Is Offensive to Believers,” The Madonna Companion: Two Decades of Commentary, ed. Carol Benson and Allan Metz (New York: Schirmer, 1999). 17. Ronald B. Scott, “Images of Race & Religion in Madonna’s Video Like a Prayer: Prayer & Praise,” ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg, The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), 57–77; Carla Freccero, “Our Lady of MTV: Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer,’” boundary 2 19:2 (Summer 1992), 163–83. 18. Springsteen tends to adopt titles from other media for his songs, so it’s a special pleasure to speculate that the title phrase “American Skin” came from Dom De Grazia’s Italian American heartland noir American Skin (New York: Scribner’s, 1998).

note s to chapte r 10 1. In North Beach, San Francisco, the old downtown Italian neighborhood, a butcher shop featuring Chinese meat products, manned entirely by Chinese faces, still calls itself—at least in its English signage—“Italian meat market,” and what could be more glorious than that? I am tempted to say that the writing is on the wall, but I’m also willing to bet that some of the better chefs working with Italian foodstuffs in California are of Chinese ancestry. 2. Ask amazon.com for Big Night, and it’ll deliver this litany of food-andfesta suggestions: Babette’s Feast, Soul Food, Chocolat, Like Water for Chocolate, Eat Drink Man Woman, Mostly Martha, even The Scent of Green Papaya. 3. Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 4, 172– 73, 183. 4. Marcella Hazan’s emphasis on the familial basis of Italian regional cooking allows us to take the measure not only of the brothers’ experiment—to invite America into the Italian “home” via Primo’s exemplary expertise—but also, in an exact and exacting parallel, of Hazan’s own missionary project, begun in the wake of widespread disillusion throughout Euro-America with all things traditional (her original and still-best cookbook was released in 1973) and on the cusp of the U.S. retreat from social responsibility into “the cultural of narcissism”: to teach Americans how to stop, smell the basil, and when it’s at its peak, make the pesto. Marcella Hazan, More Classic Italian Cooking (New York: Knopf, 1978), 3. 5. Food among Italians now is neither vestigial nor, in a Marxist sense, merely

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structural. It is not merely a retreat from the public sphere, though ironically its traditional purpose has been something closer (“the one still spot in a turning world”) to that; it is not primarily a question of patterned style patrolling boundaries of privilege, as illustrated in The Preppy Handbook for the Anglophilic Northeast, and it is emphatically not what Herbert Gans would call “symbolic,” a cost-free commodification of nostalgia among the assimilated middle classes, an empty signifier disguising, as Stephen Steinberg suspected in the 1970s, class or racial hegemony. Of the classic essays gathered by Werner Sollors, those litanized here—by Gans, Barth, and Cohen—have in the past made the deepest impact, after the work of Sollors himself, on my thinking, because they were, like Sollors’s Beyond Ethnicity, blazingly anti-nostalgic, more structuralist and comparative than positivistic, and highly sensitive to power dynamics: Werner Sollors, ed., Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1996). 6. Reading the periodical literature only after drafting this essay, I found the movie critics charmingly caught up in art-as-food talk (Richard Schickel and Jonathan Coe comment wittily on how food metaphors keep insinuating themselves into their prose), but all the reviews I have seen hold the spiritual overtones of Primo’s cooking at a safe distance—either by taking no note of it (the majority) or by characterizing it as either too religious (especially the leftleaning English) or not religious enough (especially the right-leaning Americans, who seem to look for the sacred primarily in official forms of self-discipline and proclamation). Jonathan Coe, “Review of Big Night,” New Statesman 126 (May 30, 1997), 46; Joseph Cunneen, “Review of Big Night,” National Catholic Reporter 33 (November 8, 1996), 13; Peter Matthews, “Review of Big Night,” Sight and Sound 7 (June 1997), 47–48; Richard Schickel, “A Movie to Dine For,” Time 148 (September 23, 1996), 72; John Simon, “Review of Big Night,” National Review 48 (December 9, 1996), 65. 7. Helen Barolini, Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 1. 8. Hazan puts it bluntly: “I am not interested in fusion or cross-cultural culinary hybrids, in rootless, inconsequential cooking that does not communicate a clear sense of identity, of place.” Marcella Hazan, Marcella Cucina (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 5. 9. Risotto is the touchstone that Tucci and Tropiano choose for the broad opening comedy of mis-manners, but the treat that epitomizes what Primo has to give to the grand festa—ultimately more celebratory and memorializing than it is pragmatic or evangelical—is timpano, a secret recipe from his hometown in Calabria, emblematically Italy’s own Deep South. Marcella Hazan, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (New York: Knopf, 1993), 3–5.

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10. It’s been apparent, for at least a decade now, that the heavy Italian American presences in sports and pop music and food distribution, which used to be the most obvious signs of Italianness in the culture industries, have been superceded by film, not only acting and tech support but direction and production, which allows for an even greater ethnic imprint, not only explicitly (as has been my subject here) but implicitly, which is what Braudy meant to suggest. The Italians are not of course alone in bringing the sensual to icon and type, but that emphasis does show up in work that would otherwise appear beyond the pale of Italian Americanness. Quentin Tarantino may well be a junk dealer in stale movie images, as David Denby and others have recently suggested, but it mattered hugely to the iconic pulse of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 that he filmed it not with computer graphics but in the old Hong Kong way; in China with accomplished martial arts people in body harnesses on rails for the trickier stunts (he had to go to China, if he wanted to spend eight days shooting a single scene!); and it matters even more to the community of Hong Kong movie and martial arts aficionados that Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu—unlike Jet Li and Bruce Lee— are, alas, not adept in martial-arts cinema verité. 11. Frank Lentricchia, The Edge of Night: A Confession (New York: Random House, 1994), 102. 12. Shalhoub, lately of Monk, is also credited for a superb performance at the American Repertory Theater in David Mamet’s The Disappearance of the Jews —“a duet for two middle-aged male Jews”—opposite Vincent Guastaferro, of Homicide; Markland Taylor, “Review of Three One-Act Plays by David Mamet,” Variety 367 (June 23, 1997), 105. 13. By “material sacramentality” I mean the peasant sense of immanence, that good material things—food especially—are a form of God’s blessing, divine grace for what human hands hath made with love from nature, and now, in my extension (cine cucina), from culture. 14. What David Ansen observes about the film’s reception at Sundance— “embraced with equal fervor by critics, industry folks and civilians”—is borne out by the reaction I always get when I say I’m writing about Big Night: “Oh, my God, I love that movie—remember that scene where . . . ?” David Ansen, “Way Beyond Spaghetti and Meatballs: Stanley Tucci’s Big Night Was Big at Sundance,” Newsweek 127 (February 12, 1996), 81. 15. As Hazan notes, and I’ve already cited, in Italy to be asked to dinner was a very rare event; as Richard Gambino once interpreted it, and Pellegrino D’Acierno has recently reemphasized, it was a charged rite of passage in which the invitee went from straniero to amico, the latter not to be undertaken lightly. Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 20–21; Pellegrino D’Acierno, “Cultural Lex-

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icon,” The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and the Arts, ed. Pellegrino D’Acierno (New York: Garland, 1999), 706–7. 16. Peter Matthews, “Review of Big Night,” Sight and Sound, 48. 17. And, I mean, lastly, that the Italian American example of an alternative form of cultural work—ethnically productive in an ethnically specific way, in this case sacramentally incorporative—is a template not only for critical inquiry into the previous century, when the migratory proletariat from what was then the other Europe “made America” (its own expression), together in fair reciprocity and mutual emulation, but also for critical inquiry into this next century just started, when no eth(n)os is to be more important in reshaping American popular culture and thus the U.S. soul than that which comes out of the Caribbean Rim, through its Spanish speakers especially.

note s to the conclusion 1. The Godfather film trilogy is a cursed-house narrative on the order of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and Gabriel García-Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; The Sopranos is, as commentators keep noting, surprisingly Dickensian, given both its black-humored realism and its serial structure. 2. What I’ve done here is refashion the distinction between “consent” and “descent” with which Werner Sollors and the ethnic comparativists moved away from sociological positivism: Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986). See also William Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (Venice: Edizioni Helvetia, 1984). 3. Before meeting Rotella, Casciato reviewed his work, speaking to the spirit of industrious research-cum-storyteller’s kneading: “he believes you have to go there to know . . . in order to mean, [information] must be handled.” Arthus Casciato, “The Gent in Specs,” Review 25 (2003), 205–9. 4. Albert Murray, “The Function of the Heroic Image,” The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), 570. 5. Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1941), 293–304; Frank Lentricchia, The Edge of Night: A Confession (New York: Random House, 1994), 89. 6. Robert Coles, Bruce Springsteen’s America (New York: Random House, 2003), 4–5. 7. Williams does not evoke Italian when talking about Sinatra because he

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didn’t have to—in 1954 it couldn’t have been missed; Coles does not say “Italian” because Springsteen, his friend, wouldn’t want him to—no invidious distinctions please, especially the kind that could be misread. What’s the relation, then, of genealogy to practice? 8. James T. Fisher, “Clearing the Streets of the Catholic Lost Generation,” Catholic Lives, Contemporary America, ed. Thomas J. Ferraro (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), 76–103.

narrative bibliography I was once asked by an undergraduate enrolled in an Italian cooking class with me, what was the best Italian restaurant in town? Without hesitation, I answered, “China One” (a local Chinese restaurant). The student asking the question thought I was being facetious, but I wasn’t kidding: the Italians I know would seek out the best available food regardless of national origins and order off the home-cooked part of the menu (Taiwanese: clay pot stews with taro root). As luck would have it, another student in the class, of Chinese extraction, gave me the public high five: “Yeah, man, even my folks from San Francisco love that restaurant.” Anticipating the question, then, “Where should a reader of Feeling Italian go next?” I’m tempted to say, to Leslie Fiedler’s The Jew in the American Novel (New York: Herzl Press, 1959) or Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976) or Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation (New York: Viking, 1992), which are books that reach out from the academy to the public at large, speaking with style and grace, righteousness and chutzpah, of Jewish America, African America, and Mexican America, respectively. To which my mother would respond, “Thomas, you’re not being very helpful.” In fact, there is a treasure trove of materials, most of it smart and approachable, regarding the more proximate contents and contexts of this book: Southern Italian and U.S. immigrant social history, which is its background; the national scene of Italian American arts and letters, which is its primary subject; and the mass-mediated interplay of ethnicities, which is its greater import. I’ve been excited by Italian American participation in American books and movies since I was twelve years old, when a call from my Great Uncle Tony in Long Beach, New York, prompted my father, a frugal child of the Depression, to buy his first and only hardcover copy of a novel: The Godfather. I am not alone in this. Pellegrino D’Acierno has blessed us with a single-volume encyclopedia of great energy and range, The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts (New York: Garland, 1999), which is what its subtitle says—an introductory accompaniment —and more. The handy and beautifully produced D’Acierno volume 235

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combines a timeline of the Italian experience in America (compiled by Stanislao Pugliese), overviews by many of the founders of Italian American literary studies (Robert Viscusi, Fred L. Gardaphé, Helen Barolini, Stephen Sartarelli, Mary Jo Bona), and several intriguing cultural meditations (Richard Gambino, Frank Lentricchia, Camille Paglia, the anthropological team of Malpezzi and Clements) with seminal scholarship that D’Acierno researched and wrote himself: a wonderful cultural lexicon, a suggestive theoretical introduction, and powerful essays on film, music, and the visual arts (including color plates)—all of which are illuminating in ways that, quite frankly, you can find nowhere else. Where to go next is in part a function of what you are seeking, but let me first recommend several gateway texts. Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974) is a purposively friendly cultural overview—set in history but leaning toward sociology and social psychology—of the first three generations of Italian America, especially in the Northeastern industrial sector. The previous generation’s intellectual handbook to Italian America, Blood of My Blood has aged surprisingly well, especially as a barometer of the new ethnic consciousness, when Italian Americans felt caught between a rock (the felt critique of black nationalism, the antiwar movement, and women’s liberation) and a hard place (on the verge of the great breakthrough into the upper-middle classes but not there yet). Humbert S. Nelli’s entry on “Italians” in Stephan Thernstrom’s Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980) is an efficient historical overview, with a minimalist but useful bibliography. Rudolph J. Vecoli’s “The Coming of Age of the Italian Americans: 1945–1974,” Ethnicity 5 (1978), 119–47, from the dean of Italian American historians, provides vital periodization with demographic rigor. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) is a fulsome narrative history (with another capacious bibliography) in common tongue, by Jerre Mangione, the accomplished memoirist and editor of the Federal Writer’s project, and Ben Morreale, creative writer and man of letters; Gay Talese’s Unto the Sons (New York: Knopf, 1992), by one of gonzo journalism’s finest, is ambitious auto-ethnography, using Talese family history as a prism onto the Italian generations in America. If you want to return to the archetypal Italian South, I recommend the classics of transatlantic interpretation:

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Phyllis H. Williams’ South Italian Folkways in Europe and America (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1938), Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1947), Luigi Barzini’s The Italians (New York: Atheneum, 1964), Ann Cornelisen’s Women of the Shadows (New York: Random House, 1976), and Danilo Dolci’s Sicilian Lives (New York: Pantheon, 1981). Of academic monographs post-1970s, Robert A. Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1985) is the first place to go: an engaging interpretive history of East Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century—a terrific history of the problems of settlement as seen through the prism of religious devotion. It was written late enough in the new social history that its bibliography is very useful if what you want to do next is to read historical scholarship: seminal works by Rudolph Vecoli, Humbert Nelli, John W. Briggs, Virginia YansMcLaughlin, Thomas Kessner, Lydio and Silvano Tomasi, and Richard Alba, among others. Most of the distinguished immigrant historiography was produced before the early 1980s (the first great work, by Robert Foerster, dates to 1919!), making it into Orsi’s bibliography, although I also recommend the groundbreaking feminist work of labor historian Jean Ann Scarpaci (scattered in journals, alas) and the subsequent transnational work of Donna Gabaccia; various initiatives by John Bodnar, including the collectively produced (with Robert Simon and Michael P. Weber) comparative study of Pittsburgh, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1982); and the interpreters of the Italian presence in the Far West, including Micaela di Leonardo’s anti-typifying study of Northern Italian Protestant émigrés, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among Californian Italian-Americans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), and Andrew F. Rolle’s myth-sensitive account of emigrant adventure, Westward the Immigrants: Italian Adventurers and Colonists in an Expanding America (Niwot, CO: Univ. Press of Colorado, 1999). Herbert J. Gans’s Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1962) is the only academically sponsored encounter I made with Italian America prior to graduate school, and the book, despite its fondness for nominalization and categorization, still tells a potent story of what distinguished inner-city second-generation Italian America—“the working poor” and lower middle

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classes—during the great period of supposed assimilation. William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1943), another early account of sociological fieldwork, speaks directly to Sinatra’s latchkey upbringing. For all that, still the most vivid way to encounter the first and second generations is through literature and film. The first thing you should do is experience any and all of the works I treat first hand—Idanna Pucci’s The Trials of Maria Barbella, the novel version of Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim and The Godfather and—for the sheer fun of it—The Last Don (1996), almost the entire Sinatra and Madonna oeuvres (see below), all those mafia flicks both serious and parodic, Do the Right Thing and its rough sequels, plus the comedies Moonstruck and Big Night. Of course there is more where those came from. Allow me a small brief on behalf of the classic Italian immigrant fiction that has, in addition, remained in print. Jerre Mangione’s Mount Allegro (1943), for instance, is a great complement to Christ in Concrete, presenting the lighter side of a more economically and socially secure bricklaying family (in Rochester, New York), including their curious relations with God and the saints; Mari Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods (1949) and John Fante’s Wait until Spring, Bandini (1938) take you into cold rural climates—Vermont and Colorado respectively—with heavy Christian guilt and resurgent Marian hope. Mari Tomasi, the first significant Italian immigrant female novelist, never lets you forget the costs of masculine ambition, especially to the women closest at hand. But for novels by women fully focalized on women and, in addition, relatively easy to find, you have to leap several decades: Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (New York: Seview, 1979) and Tina de Rosa’s Paperfish (New York: Feminist Press, 1980), produced self-consciously in the wake of second-wave feminism. Of more recent vintage, factoring in the massive migration to Canada is the work of Canadian Nino Ricci, beginning with Lives of the Saints (Dunvegan, Ontario: Cormorant, 1990). Poet Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik (New York: Traveller’s Companion, 1969) anticipated Eric Jong’s “zipless f—k” (from Fear of Flying, 1973) by several years, examining the bohemian license of 1950s San Francisco with impressive vulgarity and prescient wisdom; in her recent memoir, Recollec-

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tions of My Life as a Woman (New York: Viking, 2001), di Prima looks back at her New York years in sober, expansive maturity. For more extended recommendations, leaning toward ethnographic fiction and film, see the essays I contributed to various reference works: “Catholic Ethnicity and Modern American Arts,” The Italian American Heritage, ed. Pellegrino D’Acierno (New York: Garland, 1999), 331–52; “Italian Americans,” Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner’s, 2001), v. 2, 363–74; “Italian American Literature,” Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 275–84. “Ethnicity and the Literary Marketplace,” Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), places the first generation of Italian American novelists in comparative (Scandinavian Lutherans, East European Jews, Irish Catholics) context. As I was writing this book, anthologies of Italian American literature, autobiography, and auto-ethnographic criticism were competing for shelf space in the mega-bookstores for the first time. Helen Barolini’s Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (New York: Schocken, 1985), Jane Capone and Denise Leto’s all-Italian issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Journal for the Lesbian Imagination in the Arts and Politics 41 (Summer/Fall 1990), and From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue Univ. Press, 1991; updated, 2000) edited by the Tamburri/Giordano/Gardaphé troika were harbingers of the breakthrough to come: A. Kenneth Ciongioli and Jay Parini’s Beyond the Godfather (Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 1997), Regina Barreca’s Don’t Tell Mama! (New York: Penguin, 2002), Bill Tonelli’s The Italian American Reader (New York: William Morrow, 2003), and Edvige Giunta’s proposed MLA Guide to Italian American Literature involve ambitious releases, major presses, and academic imprimaturs. The anthologies are a happy sign of hard work and growing interest, of certain utility: they provide appetizing introductions and welcome exposure, to contemporary writers, especially the younger women— Regina Barreca, Mary Capello, Rita Ciresi, Maria Laurino, and Alane Salierno Mason—who grace the anthologies, especially Beyond the Godfather, with gender- and sexual-sensitive voices. But even the best of the

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writers in each of these collections are allotted little space—such is the imperative of democratic inclusiveness that afflicts anthologies in general. In certain cases, there are entire books to turn to, the auto-ethnography of the accomplished professors from the mid-1990s especially: Frank Lentricchia’s The Edge of Night: A Confession (New York: Random House, 1994), Marianna Torgonick’s Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings of an Italian-American Daughter (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), and Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo (New York: Dutton, 1996). I can only hope, given the track record in publishing, that paperback reprints of sadly forgotten immigrant novels—including Garibaldi LaPolla’s The Grand Gennaro (New York: Vanguard, 1935), Michael DeCapite’s Maria (New York: John Day, 1943), Octavia Waldo’s A Cup of the Sun (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961), and the comic sketches of George Panetta, We Ride a White Donkey (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944)—are soon to follow. On the other hand, White Noise (New York: Vintage, 1985) by the current dean of literary postmodernism, Don DeLillo, is a warhorse of the contemporary literature curriculum (see the Vintage critical edition, 1998, edited by Mark Osteen). Lentricchia led the way to its critical appreciation and canonization, with Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1990) and New Essays on White Noise (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); Lentricchia’s own reflexive fiction—elegant, probing, conflicted, with an allusive complexity all its own—is in part a response to DeLillo but, if anything, more Italian–working class and more high modernist; start perhaps with Music of the Inferno (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1999). Italian American literature was first cataloged by Olga Peragallo, Italian-American Authors and Their Contribution to American Literature (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1949); a full generation later, Rose Basile Green updated that catalog for its dominant component, The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1974). William Boelhower (an American expatriate) wrote in English but for an Italian press the first scholarly monograph on Italian American writing, Immigrant Autobiography in the United States: Four Versions of the Italian American Self (Verona: Essedue Edizioni, 1982), doing so with unprecedented sophistication (see Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature [Venice: Edizioni Helvetica, 1984]). Fred L. Gardaphé’s Italian Signs, American

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Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1996) is the first attempt at a capacious theorized overview of the genre; his Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2004) explores the classic novelists, women’s autobiography, and identity concerns, providing a generous bibliography. Mary Jo Bona, Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1999), has a subtitle that speaks for itself. Anthony Julian Tamburri’s A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1988) is a full-length study by the Italianist and theoretician who coined the suggestive but ugly slash (“Anthony, you’ve have to answer for this, my friend”) in so much of contemporary Italian/American studies. There are, of course, elaborate conversations already established for the icons I take up. The Godfather narratives have been treated to their first (in this case, extensive) monograph, Christopher Messenger, The Godfather and American Culture (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2002). If the connection between family and business interests you especially (whether historical, sociological, or iconographic), see Ferraro, “Blood in the Marketplace,” The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 176–208. Puzo’s The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions (New York: Putnam, 1972) collects occasional pieces from just before and just after, in a style all his own, at once punchy and breezy. Peter Cowely, Coppola: A Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1994) and Michael Schumacher, Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life (New York: Random House, 1999) give requisite background to the movies, as does Harlan Lebo, The Godfather Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). For movies more generally, the gateway is—as I’ve said—the film section of D’Acierno’s The Italian American Heritage. Otherwise, the corpus of Martin Scorsese is the missing link: Mean Streets (1973), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990), all masterpieces, constituting his Italian-specific triptych. Lawrence S. Friedman, The Cinema of Martin Scorsese (New York: Continuum, 1997) is accomplished scholarship in a public idiom. Robert Casillo is his most Italian-interested—and tenacious—interpreter. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is, of course, only part I of his guido trilogy, with Jungle Fever (1991) and Summer of Sam (1999;

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cowritten with Michael Imperioli of The Sopranos) following. I am a fan as well of Italian American romantic comedy, both in its mafia dimension —John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor (1985), Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob (1988), Andrew Bergman’s The Freshman (1990)—and its “big fat Italian wedding” history, which goes back at least as far as Lovers and Other Strangers of 1969 (the first coming of Richard Costellano). Household Saints (1993; taken from Francine Prose’s novel of the same name, and directed by the Italian-Argentine American Nancy Savoca) is good and much valued, especially by scholars of Catholic women’s spirituality. For another film in the magical realist tradition that is truly magical, see Vittorio Duse’s Queen of Hearts (1989), concerning a South Italian couple running a diner not in New York but in London. Savoca’s True Love (1989) puts the claustrophobic gender realities back into the Bronx wedding equation. If you want to cut to the quick, you know where to find Madonna, Sinatra, and Springsteen—and the other singer-performers, generously and even super-generously represented on CD and DVD. There is a lot of writing on Sinatra, most of it written for the public sector and much of it quite good, especially when his music is the focus. John Lahr’s Sinatra: The Artist and the Man (New York: Bantam, 1997), Donald Clarke’s All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (New York: Fromm, 1997), and Pete Hamill’s Why Sinatra Matters (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998) are excellent introductions to the man. Clarke, a music critic, is terrific on the voice, though the largest labor of musical analysis is Will Friedwald’s indispensable Sinatra! The Song Is You (New York: Da Capo, 1997; originally published by Scribner’s in 1995). A book by the New York Times music critic John Rockwell, Sinatra: An American Classic (New York: Random House, 1984), was ahead of its time, musically attuned and inclusive enough to ponder the Italian American domination of popular music. Sinatra has been the labor of love for Leonard Mustazza, an English and American Studies scholar who has produced his own trilogy. Mustazza and Steven Petkov, eds., The Frank Sinatra Reader (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995) is the only collection we have of historical pieces, such as reviews and journalistic accounts; Mustazza, Ol’ Blue Eyes: A Frank Sinatra Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999) is a nearly exhaustive compendium regarding Sinatra’s recordings, films, and major performances; Mustazza, ed., Frank Sinatra and Popular Culture: Essays on an

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American Icon (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), with contributions by Philip Furia, Roger Gilbert, T. H. Adamowski, and others, kick-started genuine Sinatra scholarship. Other good volumes include Stanislao Pugliese, ed., Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Anthony D. Cavaluzzi et al. (meaning Gardaphé, Giordano, and Tamburri!), eds., The Life and Art of Frank Sinatra (West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1999). I even recommend the coffee-table books, especially by the insiders (such as Nancy Sinatra or Stan Britt or the staff at Life, who have access to the pictorial archive) because the pictures, including the often intrusive cameos, are just astounding: imagine if Sinatra had liked to be photographed! There is almost as much writing about Madonna as there is on Sinatra, most of it spirited yet also, very much unlike the Sinatra scholarship, quite academic in focus, language, and ideology; Madonna Studies was, after all, tantamount to Cultural Studies Central during the 1990s. I have found the collection by Cathy Schwichtenberg, The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993) useful and thought provoking though jargon heavy. Karlene Faith’s Madonna, Bawdy & Soul (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997) is a single-author work from slightly later, clearly written, politically committed and sexually radical, with a good academic bibliography. Beyond the hallowed halls of academe, Madonna: The Rolling Stone Files, ed. The Editors of Rolling Stone (New York: Hyperion, 1997) reveals that affinity was slow in coming, making Carol Benson and Alan Metz, eds., The Madonna Companion: Two Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer, 1999) the better resource for Madonna criticism. Although Camille Paglia and/or Richard Rodriguez might well find my chapter on Madonna a bit sweet, still they are the ones who got me going on the potential catholicity of her somewhat aberrant Catholicism: Sexual Personae (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1990) is Paglia’s epic, though Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1992) contains her short Madonna pieces, and Vamps & Tramps (New York: Vintage, 1994) her best introduction, “No Law in the Arena,” to the topicality of her thought. Rodriguez has a trilogy of his own. To chart Catholic matters, read “Credo” from Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Boston: Godine, 1981) and Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (New York: Viking, 1992); Madonna makes a

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brief but telling appearance in his Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York: Viking, 2002). The first half of Frank Lentricchia’s The Edge of Night, recollecting sojourns in Little Italy, Ireland, and a South Carolina monastery, constitutes a mediation on the relation between modernist aesthetics and unsuspected grace, in ways that dramatically challenge “the multicultural rag.” For the more general issue of the Catholic cultural difference, including how Catholic impulses can inform seemingly secular culture (there are interviews as well with both Paglia and Rodriguez), see Ferraro, ed., Catholic Lives, Contemporary America (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1997); Mary Gordon, Good Boys and Dead Girls and Other Essays (New York: Penguin, 1991); and Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992). Leo Braudy, “The Sacraments of Genre: Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese,” Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991) is a wonderful little essay on Italian Catholic visual imagination, ahead of the rest. For the relation of Catholicism, cultural transformation, and food, by far the most in-depth historical inquiry requires Italian: Simone Cinotto, Una Famiglia Che Mangia Insieme: Cibo Ed Ethnicità nella Comunità Italoamerican di New York, 1920–1940 (Turino: Otto, 2001) is at the cutting edge of the impressive turn in Italian scholarship to the Italian diasporas, including ours in America. Donna R. Gabaccia’a We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998) argues that the mass marketing of ethnic foodways can, for all the compromising with “authenticity,” preserve minority ways while ethnicizing majority taste—which is, I think, mighty brave (and Italianate!) of her even to suggest; academic ideology requires, instead, both romantic debunking and the romance of alienation. In “Lorenzo’s Chrism,” SAQ 103 (Winter 2004), 235–64, I look through the revelatory eyes of filmmaker George Miller at a real-life interplay among research medicine, parental empathy, and Catholic pragmatism, with the sacramental power of Mediterranean food rites ultimately—and surprisingly—at stake. Bruce Springsteen, who once inscribed an album “buon viaggio, mio fratello” (presumably to Steve Van Zandt, who at the time had taken leave from the E Street Band), is not quite invested enough in Italianness to warrant a full-scale treatment here. I think he is, nonetheless, the third

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figure in our great Italo-Catholic pop-singer trinity (The connections are tight: Springsteen backed the performance of Madonna’s ex, Sean Penn, with the title track for Dead Man Walking, while Michael Penn, Sean’s brother, masterminded the Nebraska cover album). Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files, ed. The Editors of Rolling Stone (New York: Hyperion, 1996) and June Skinner Sawyers, Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader (New York: Penguin, 2004) document Springsteen’s reception, often in ways that illuminate still. Robert Santelli—a product of the Jersey Shore, assistant curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a series editor for Wesleyan University Press, and the editor of Springsteen’s book of collected lyrics, Songs—is the author of the bio classic, Backstreets: Springsteen—The Man and His Music (New York: Harmony, 1989). Jim Cullen, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), puts Springsteen in the company of Emerson and Whitman, Duke Ellington and Chuck Berry, Michael Herr and Harvey Keitel—where he belongs. Robert Coles’s Bruce Springsteen’s America: The People Listening, A Poet Singing (2003) will make Springsteen fans do a double take. Charles J. Hynes and Bob Drury, Incident at Howard Beach: The Case for Murder (New York: Putnam, 1990) is thorough; Lest We Forget . . . White Hate Crimes: Howard Beach and Other Racial Atrocities (Chicago: Third World Press, 1994) is to the point. Maria Laurino, Were You Always an Italian? Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America (New York: Norton, 2000), and Marianna Torgovnick, Crossing Ocean Parkway, take you back to what plagues Bensonhurst. Robert Orsi, “The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People,” American Quarterly 44 (September 1992), got the Italian wing of Whiteness Studies going, with a micro-history of Italian responses to Puerto Rican and Haitian arrivals to East Harlem; John Gennari, “Passing for Italian,” transition 72 (1996), 36–48 raises the question of affirming cross-identification between black and Italian Americans, including the hip-hop’s veneration of Frank Sinatra, dubbed “the original gangsta” (by rapper Tupac Shakur, Vibe-r Bonze Malone, and others). Eugene D. Genovese’s revolutionary analysis of slavery, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974) is often regarded as the greatest work of Marxist historiography ever authored by an American, but let us not forget it was written (and, boy, is it well written!) by a Italian boy from Brooklyn, among the very first

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to make a real name for himself in the universities doing something other than auto-ethnography. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003), which republishes John Gennari’s important essay on Giancarlo Esposito, represents the arrival of Italian America to Whiteness Studies proper, with pointers galore to the archive of that industrious interdiscipline. The rise of the Archie Bunker attitude in blue-collar exurban New York, after the 1960s, has been treated at close range by Jonathan Reider, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985). To put Italian American racial in-between-ness in international perspective, where it now must go, see Sollors’s Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997). Anti-Italian nativism is at its most eloquent and self-conflicted in the Italian chapters of the classic texts of the late-nineteenth-century social reformers, who nonetheless become more accurate and empathetic over the decades: Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, & Twenty Years’ Work among Them (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872); Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Dover, 1974; orig. publ., 1890); and Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1910). John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1955) is our classic study of this period. For a more intensive look at the New Orleans lynching, see the HBO film Vendetta (1999), based loosely on a work by Richard Gambino of the same name (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), which works to sort out Italian self-divisiveness, the threat to the Irish, and fierce oldfamily retrenchment (all of it corrupt!). The interplay of prejudice on an international scale, industrial radicalism, and the American courts is at the heart of the Sacco and Vanzetti affair, for which I also recommend beginning, in Italian American fashion, not with scholarship (in this case, voluminous) but with Ben Shahn’s fascinating paintings of the infamous trial, reproduced with commentary in Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (Jersey City, NJ: Jersey City Museum Press, 2001). Joseph Stella’s paintings are dispersed (the Yale Museum of Art owns Battle of Lights and the 1919 Brooklyn Bridge, the Newark Museum owns Voice of the City and the revealing Crèche) but Barbara Haskell’s

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Joseph Stella (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), which accompanied his last major retrospective building upon Irma Jaffe’s founding contributions, is fairly comprehensive, biographically trustworthy, consistently illuminating, and offers great supplementary material (including most of Stella’s extant writing, translated by Jaffee). I just discovered Wanda M. Corn, “An Italian in New York,” The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), and I feel in Corn a kindred interpreter not only of Stella but of the visual transatlantic. For a wonderful but very rarely reproduced Stella painting, The Telegraph Pole, see the paper cover of Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in TwentiethCentury America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993); for an analysis of that painting, see Ferraro, “‘My Way’ in Our America,” ALH 12 (Fall 2000), 499–522. As I was completing this book, writing on The Sopranos had become a cottage industry, with many strictly populist texts capable nonetheless of holding interest, at least for fans. The series has also, not surprisingly, been of particular concern to the Italian-bent wing of Cultural Studies, attracting scholars like myself who are working to bridge the gap between the academy and serious readers: see, especially, Maurice Yacowar’s Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series (New York: Continuum, 2002), editor Regina Barreca’s A Sitdown with the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on Television (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and editor David Lavery’s This Thing of Ours: Investigating the Sopranos (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002). Finally, as it so happens—actually, Italians don’t believe in coincidences—the best places to start in order to locate Italians in the debate over race, ethnicity, and national identity is with the books of my series editors. Matthew Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998) includes a trenchant chapter on the arrival of the Italians and their fellow swarthy immigrants, a masterful overview of the complex issues attending their co-migrants from Eastern Europe (after the Holocaust, especially), and a rigorous accounting of the whole shebang, from the earliest days of the Great Migration forward; his Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples Both Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000) investigates U.S. xenophobia during the first age of industrial incorporation and

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imperial consumerism. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), throws down the gauntlet to the easy essentialist romances (then called “sociological positivism”) of first-generation ethnicity scholarship, charting (in striking tandem with expatriate Boelhower) the ethnic semiotics and narrative iconography of the U.S. imagination writ large, demonstrating how and to what effect ethnicization could be itself a form of Americanization; in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1996), Sollors brings together paradigmatic essays in ethnicity theory, all of which are useful as exemplars of changing thought and many of which (beware of fashionable changes in nomenclature) continue to inform and challenge. In Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002), Carlo Rotella pursues the fate of industrial workingclass values in postindustrial America, exemplifying what scholarship can do when it crosses media (boxers Liz McGonigal and Rocky Marciano, guitarist Buddy Guy, the cops of The French Connection) and makes its business plain; in Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003) he sticks to ringside, where he works out to his satisfaction, then passes along for our elucidation especially good equipment for living. Taken together, the essays in Robert G. O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998) portray a United States of vigorous polyethnic syncopation, in which African American virtuosos—with all due dissonance—jazzify the nation. And it is Mary C. Waters, in Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), who raises the open secret of this book (pages 142–43): why do contemporary Americans—of every hue and cry—like to think they’d rather be Italian? And when they left for the night, they occasionally came back for a surprise visit which they called a sirinata. —Jerre Mangione

index Abruzzi, Italy (ancestral region of Pietro di Donato), 54 Adamowski, T. H., 219n.7 Adams, Henry, 212n.7 “aesthetically correct ethnicity,” 194–95 (definition) Aiello, Danny, 130, 131, 165 “American Skin (41 Shots)” (song), 180 Anthony, Marc, 196 Anthony, Susan B., 18 Armstrong, Louis, 176, 198 Auster, Paul, 172 Baltimore, Maryland (interracial site of Homicide television series), 173–75 Banfield, Edward, 217n.5, 221n.2 Barbella, Maria, 5, 11–27, 30, 202 Barberi, Maria (media corruption of “Maria Barbella”), 16 Barolini, Helen, 74 Basilicata (Lucania), Italy, 28; and Lucia Santa, 217n.4; Maria Barbella’s region of origin, 12–13, 20, 25–26; banishment of Carlo Levi, 210n.5; Joseph Stella’s region of origin, 30; human dignity in, 196 Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (painting), 35–37, 47 Bedford-Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), New York, 165–70 bella figura, 99, 157, 220n.17, 227n.22 (definition) bella luna, la, 134 (definition) Bennett, Tony, 91, 100–101 Bensonhurst (Brooklyn), New York: as site of Yusuf Hawkins’s fatal shooting, 162–64, 177; as evoked in Do the Right Thing, 168, 170–72, 228n.8 Bergen County, New Jersey, 182; Patterson, 206 Berger, John, 214n.20 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 42

Beyond the Melting Pot (non-fiction), 218n. 12 Big Night (film), 5, 181–97 Blood of My Blood (non-fiction), 217n.5 Blue in the Face (film), 172 Boccioni, Umberto, 36–37 Boston, Massachusetts, 32–33; Spike Lee’s invocation of the Celtics, 170; social psychology of West End, 94–102, 219n.9 Bovasso, Julie, 138 Bracco, Lorraine, 200 Brace, Charles Loring, 15, 214n.1 Brando, Marlon, 119, 222n.15 Braudy, Leo, 188 Brooklyn Bridge of 1919–1920 (painting), 40–42 Brooklyn Bridge, The, 37–43, 50, 129 Brooklyn Museum of Art, 48, 225n.13 Brooklyn, New York: BedfordStuyvesant as depicted in Do the Right Thing, 165–70; Bensonhurst as evoked in Do the Right Thing, 168, 170–72, 228n.8; Bensonhurst and Yusuf Hawkins’s fatal shooting, 162–64; Cobble Hill (neighborhood of Spike Lee’s childhood), 171; Coney Island, 19, 34–37, 212n.6, 212n.7; typologically rendered in Moonstruck, 129; Williamsburg, 37 Bruce Springsteen’s America (non-fiction), 205–7 brutta figura, 95 (definition) Buenos Aires (alternative emigration destination), 210n.6 buona cucina, la, 184–88 (definition) Burke, Kenneth, 205 Cage, Nicolas, 136 Calabria (region), Italy (invoked in Big Night), 186, 231n.9 Carradine, Keith, 150

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Casciato, Arthur, 204, 233n.3 Cataldo, Domenico (Maria Barbella’s lover), 11–27 Cavalli, Roberto, 107 Chase, David, 178–79 Chase, William Merritt, 33 Cher, 138, 160 “Cherish” (music video), 224n.2 Christ in Concrete (novel), 66 “Christ in Concrete” (story), 51–71, 203; magazine version, 51–69; separately published hard-cover version, 67–71 Christ: crucifix in Big Night, 185; crucifixes in Madonna’s work, 155, 166; Pietro di Donato’s evocation of the crucifixion, 62–65; domestication and sensualization of the Eucharist, 184–87; icon of the Bleeding Heart, 155 Ciccone, Christopher, 153 Clarke, Donald, 218n.3, 219n.12 Clayton, Jay, 47 Click and Clack (Car Talk radio series), 224n.1 Clooney, Rosemary, 194 Coe, Jonathan, 231n.6 Cohen, Paula Marantz, 93–94, 218n.4 Coles, Robert, 205–7, 234n.8 Colombo, Joseph, Sr., 120 Coney Island Madonna (painting), 212n.7 Coney Island: as Joseph Stella’s focus, 34–37, 46, 212n.7; Maxim Gorky’s reaction to, 212n.6; wax figurine of Maria Barbella, 19 Connecticut: signless provisions in New Haven, 182; Corvo’s (bakery) in Waterbury, 187 contadini, 28 (definition) Coppola, Francis Ford, 103, 107–10, 117–26, 188; The Godfather (film), 116–21, 201–2, 207; The Godfather Part II (film), 121–26; The Godfather Part III (film), 126, 201; Screenplay of The Godfather, 222n.8 Cornelisen, Ann, 72, 77, 210n.7, 216–17n.4 corpus christi, 101 (definition)

cosa nostra, la, 109 (definition) cristiano, 196 (definition) cucina, la, 184–188 (definition) Cuomo, Mario, 120, 175, 199–200 D’Acierno, Fosca, 147, 225n.15 D’Acierno, Pellegrino, 211n.1, 232n.15 dago, 14 (definition) Dangerous Classes of New York (social treatise), 15, 214n.1 Dante Alighieri, 42 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 175–76 De Grazia, Dom, 230n.18 De Laurentiis, Dino, 222n.15 De Niro, Robert, 118 De Palma, Brian, 188 deCapite, Michael, 74 Delany, Samuel R., 47 Delauney, Roberto, 44, 214n.21 Depp, Johnny, 161 Desperately Seeking Susan (film), 147, 149 Detroit, Michigan, 177 di Donato, Pietro, 50, 51–71, 72, 152, 214n.20; “Christ in Concrete,” 50–71; Christ in Concrete, 66; “The House,” 215n.3 di Leonardo, Micaela, 210n.2 Diallo, Amadou, 179–80 Diawara, Manthia, 228n.5 DiStasi, Lawrence, 218n.1 Do the Right Thing (film), 164–70 Driver, Minnie, 182, 192 Dukakis, Olympia, 137, 138–39 Dyson, Michael Eric, 228n.7 East Harlem (Manhattan), New York, 184, 216n.3 Eliot, T. S., 42 Ellison, Ralph, 173 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 32–33, 40, 93–94, 212n.5 “equipment for living,” 205 (definition) Esposito, Giancarlo, 170–75 Esquire (magazine), 52, 58–9, 67, 70–71 “essere donna e madonna,” 147 (definition) Evans, Robert, 106–7

index

Faith, Karlene, 227n.23 Falco, Edie, 200 famiglia, la, 184 (definition) fare bella figura. See bella figura fare brutta figura. See brutta figura Fasanella, Ralph, 40, 49, 214n.20 “feeling Italian,” 3, 7–8, 203–5 (definitions) Ferrandina (Basilicata), Italy (Maria Barbella’s village of origin), 20, 25 Ferraro, Geraldine, 120, 200 Fiedwald, Will, 100 Fiesta (painting), 40 Fincher, David, 159 Fisher, James T., 101, 207 Fitzgerald, Ella, 100, 229n.14 Five Points (district of Lower Manhattan), 12, 15, 19 Flatiron Building, 46 Fontana, Tom, 173–74 Fortunate Pilgrim, The (novel), 73–89, 203–3, 222n.11 Foster, Rebecca Salomé (the “Tombs Angel”), 19 Francis, Connie, 91, 145 Franklin, H. Bruce, 47 Freccero, Carla, 225n.15 Friend, Emanuel (counsel for Maria Barbella), 19 fugedaboutit, 130 (definition) Gambino crime family, 109 Gambino, Richard, 210n.9, 217n.5, 232n.15 Gandolfini, James, 200 Gans, Herbert J., 94–102, 166, 220n.13, 231n.5 Garcia, Andy, 223n.18 Gardenia, Vince, 139 Gennari, John, 98, 172–75 Gentleman Prefer Blondes (film), 150, 225n.11 Gershwin, George, 99 Gilbert, Matthew, 226n.17 Gillette, Anita, 137 Giuliani, Rudolph, 179, 199–200, 225n.13

251

“Glory Days” (music video), 130 Godfather, The (novel), 5, 107–16, 200–203, 217n.5 Godfather, The (film), 5, 103, 116–21, 201–3, 207 Godfather Part II, The (film), 121–26 Godfather Part III, The (film), 126, 201–2 Goff, John W. (Barbella’s first presiding judge), 17–18, 20 Goldberg, Michael, 224n.6 Goldstein, Ernest, 37, 41 Goodfellas (film), 126, 207 Gopnik, Adam, 219n.12 Gorky, Maxim, 212n.6 Gotti, John, 162, 199 Grapes of Wrath, The (novel), 66 Great Gatsby, The (novel), 221n.3 Great Migration, 22, 29–32, 209n.1, 210n.6 Greenwich Village (Manhattan), New York, 30, 158–59, 177, 214n.20, 219n.10 Griffith, Michael, 162–64 Guglielmo, Jennifer, 210n.2 “guinea,” 15 (definition) Guss, Louis, 138 “gustatory sacramentality,” 168, 184–88 (definitions) Hall, Stephen S., 110 Hamill, Pete, 99, 219n.10 Haskell, Barbara, 41 Hawkins, Yuself, 162–64 Hawthorne, Julian (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son), 24 Hazan, Marcella, 181, 184–85, 230n.4, 231n.8, 232n.15 Heath Anthology of American Literature, The, 66 Hell’s Kitchen (Manhattan), New York, 10, 29, 73 “Hit Is a Hit, A” (Sopranos episode), 229n.15 Hoboken (Hudson County), New Jersey, 101, 176, 220n.12, 220n.15 Holm, Sir Ian, 192 Holy Virgin Mary, The (painting), 225n.13

index

252

Homicide (television series), 173–75 hooks, bell, 166 Horne, Lena, 148, 229n.14 House I Live In, The (film short), 176 House, Frederic (lead counsel for Maria Barbella), 19 How the Other Half Lives (non-fiction), 214n. 1 Howard Beach (Queens), New York, 162–64, 168, 177 Hudson County, New Jersey, 93, 104, 182; Hoboken, 52, 101, 176, 220n.12, 220n.15 Hurwitz, Moishe Ha-Levi Ish, 24 Ianni, Francis A.J., 222n.6 Ibarguen, Raoul, 226n.17 Il Progresso Italo-Americano (newspaper), 11, 211n.13 Immaculate Collection (music album), 144 Immaculate Video Collection (music video collection), 148–59 immanence (as opposed to transcendence), 151, 225n.12 (definitions) Incarnation, doctrine of (defined), 156 Italian American Civil Rights League, 119–20, 223n.10 Jackson, Michael, 144–45 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 210n.9, 228n.3 James, Henry, 38, 54 James, William, 38 Janey, Allison, 186 Jesus Christ Superstar (music album), 157 Jet (magazine), 175–76 Jewison, Norman, 129 Jones, Quincy, 6, 229n.14 Joudeh, Saleh, 183, 192 Jungle Book, The (1942 film), 164 Jungle Book, The (animated film), 164 Jungle Fever (film), 171 “Justify My Love” (music video), 159–161 Kael, Pauline, 116 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 130

Koolhaas, Rem, 34 Kotto, Yaphet, 173–74 La Motta, Jake, 96, 219n.10 “Lady Is a Tramp, The” (song), 95, 219n.8 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 175 Lahr, John, 98, 219n.12 Lambert, Mary, 148, 150 Las Vegas, Nevada, 147 Lauper, Cyndi, 104; Madonna as putative clone of, 145, 148 Laurino, Maria, 163 Lear, Martha Weinman, 103–6 Lebo, Harlan, 223n.16 Lee, Spike, 5, 164–71; Do the Right Thing (film), 164–70; Jungle Fever (film), 171; Summer of Sam (film), 228n.4 Lentricchia, Frank, 7, 190, 233n.5 Levi, Carlo, 12, 210n.5 Levin, Meyer, 215n.6 Levinson, Barry, 173 “Like a Prayer” (music video), 154, 177 Like a Virgin (music album), 149 “Like a Virgin” (music video), 148–49 “Like a Virgin” (song), 148 Livermore, Mary, 18 Lodge, Senator Henry Cabot, 15 Lovers and Other Strangers (film), 221n.5 Lower East Side (Manhattan), New York, 10, 29, 54; and Joseph Stella, 30, 37; and Madonna, 177; and Maria Barbella, 12–13, 19; and Martin Scorsese, 30, 219n.10 Lubiano, Wahneema, 228n.7 Lucania. See Basilicata (Lucania), Italy Maas, Peter, 221n.5 Macy’s department store, 19 Madonna of 115th Street, The (historical study), 184, 216n.3 Madonna (Veronica Louise Ciccone), 5, 128, 143–61, 177; “Cherish” (music video), 224n.2; Desperately Seeking Susan (film), 147, 149; Immaculate Collection (music album), 144; Immaculate Video Collection (music video collection), 148–59; “Justify My Love”

index

(music video), 159–61; “Like a Prayer” (music video), 154, 177; “Like a Virgin” (song), 148; “Like a Virgin” (music video), 148–49; Like a Virgin (music album), 149; “Material Girl” (music video), 150; “Oh, Father” (music video), 154; “Papa Don’t Preach” (music video), 154, 225n.11; Sex (book of photography), 224n.2; Truth or Dare (film documentary of Blonde Ambition Tour), 151, 153–54, 224n.2, 227n.24; Virgin tour, 148, 149; “Vogue” (music video), 159 Magdalene, Mary, 157 “Mambo Italiano” (song), 194 Mamet, David, 232n.12 mammissimo, 220n.14 (definition) Manhattan, New York: East Harlem, 10, 29, 216n. 3; Hell’s Kitchen, 10, 29; Five Points (Lower East Side), 10, 12–15, 19, 29–30, 37, 54; Greenwich Village, 30, 158–59, 177, 214n.20, 219n.10; New York Port and Harbor, 44–46, 212n.4; Joseph Stella’s prayer, 213n.13. See also Brooklyn Bridge, The; Flatiron Building; Twin Towers Marchand, Nancy, 200 Martin, Dean, 91, 224n.2 “Material Girl” (music video), 150 Matthews, Peter, 194 Mead, Margaret, 91 Mercer, Mabel, 101, 229n.14 Mezzogiorno, 10 (definition) Michael, George, 143 Magliozzi, Ray and Tom, 224n.1 miseria, la, 12 (definition) Mondino, Jean Baptiste, 159 Monongah, West Virginia, 42 Montana Internment Camps, 218n.1, 164 Montross Gallery Show, 36 Moonstruck (film), 5, 128–42, 207 Moral Basis of a Backward Society, The (sociological treatise), 217n.5, 221n.2 Motown Records, 147 Murray, Albert, 205 Museum of Modern Art, 36–37 My Cousin Vinny (film), 5, 129

253

Naples, 30, 171, 210n.6; Mount Vesuvius, 39, 43 Nelli, Humbert S., 222n.6 New Jersey: Bergen County (including Patterson) 182, 206; Hudson County (including Hoboken), 92–93, 101, 104, 220n.12, 220n.15; the Shore as evoked in Big Night, 182; and Bruce Springsteen (raised in Freehold), 104–6; view from Turnpike, 43 New Orleans lynching, 15, 178 New York City. See Brooklyn; Manhattan New York Interpreted (Voice of the City) (painting), 44–47 New York Port and Harbor, 44–47, 212n.4 New York School of Art, 36 New York Times (newspaper), 15, 110, 223n.16 New Yorker, The (magazine), 116, 219n.12 North Beach (San Francisco), California, 230n.1 Norton Anthology of American Literature, The, 65 O’Brien, Edward J., 66 O’Connor, Sinéad, 152, 226n.17 “Oh, Father” (music video), 154 omerta, 16 (definition) Orsi, Robert A., 85, 184, 216n.3 Pacino, Al, 118–19, 169, 222n.12 Paglia, Camille, 7; as interpreter of Madonna, 146, 150, 157, 161, 225n.15, 227n.26 “Papa Don’t Preach” (music video), 154, 225n.11 Paramount Pictures, 116–21 passeggiata, la, 157, 212–13n.11 (definition) Patterson, New Jersey, 206 Pesci, Joe, 129, 223n.1 piazza, la, 157, 166 (definitions) Piss Christ (painting), 225n.13 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 42, 47, 214n.19 Poe, Edgar Allan, 31, 42, 212n.4

index

254

Porter, Cole, 99 Pretty Woman (film), 136 Prima, Louis, 91, 100, 164, 195–96 Prince, 145, 161 Prizzi’s Honor (film), 5, 126, 129 Pucci, Idanna (author of The Trials of Maria Barbella), 11, 24–27, 210n.3, 210n.4, 211n.13 Pulp Fiction (film), 180 Puzo, Mario, 73–89, 107–27, 152, 218n.12; The Fortunate Pilgrim, 73–89, 222n. 11; The Godfather (novel), 5, 107–16, 200–203; The Godfather (film), 5, 116–21, 201–3, 207; The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions, 218n.11; The Godfather Part II (film), 121–26; The Godfather Part III (film), 126, 201–2; Screenplay of The Godfather, 222n.8 Quencher, The (Night Fires) (painting), 43 Raging Bull (film), 219n.10 Reed, Ishmael, 128–29 Ricci, Nino, 74 Rieder, Jonathan, 228n.3 Riis, Jacob, 15–16, 214n.1 rispetto, 99 (definition) Robinson, Sugar Ray, 96, 219n.10 Rockwell, John, 94 Rodriguez, Richard, 128, 146, 156, 161 Roebling, John, 38 Roediger, David, 228n.3 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 90 Ross, Alex, 219n.12 Rossellini, Isabel, 182 Rotella, Carlo, 204, 219n.10, 233n.3 Rourke, Mary, 225n.9 Ruddy, Al, 117 Russell, Jane, 225n.11 Ryan, Arnold W. (cover designer), 70, 216n.7 Sacco and Vanzetti affair, 163–64 sacro desco, il, 185 (definition) Saint Lucy, 156 Saint Sebastian, 155–56

Salerno, Salvatore, 210n.2 Scarface (film), 207, 223n.18 Scarpaci, Vincenza, 210n.2 Schickel, Richard, 192, 231n.6 Schruers, Fred, 225n.7 scomunicato, 210n.8 (definition) Scorsese, Martin, 30, 126, 188, 219n.10 Scott, Campbell (co-director of Big Night), 191–92 Scott, Ronald B., 230n.17 Seda, Jon, 173–74 Severini, Gino, 36 Sex (book of photography), 224n.2 Shalhoub, Tony, 190–91, 232n.12 Shanley, John Patrick (writer of Moonstruck), 128–29 Sicily: and Frank Sinatra’s temper, 95–96; contribution to the U.S. movie mafia, 109–10, 115–16; Tom Fontana’s Sicilian background and acting Sicilian in Homicide, 173–74; Sicilian Americans in Louisiana, 15, 163, 178 Sinatra, Dolly, 98 Sinatra, Frank, 5, 90–106, 202; and Madonna, 149, 151–52; “The Lady Is a Tramp” (song), 95, 219n.8; House I Live In, The (film short), 176; music as equipment for living, 206–7; on Spike Lee’s Wall of Fame in Do the Right Thing, 169; relationship with African America, 175–77, 229n.13, 229n.14; reputation as loner, 108; Songs for Swingin’ Lovers (music album), 203 Sinatra, Nancy, 225n.8 Sing Sing Prison, 20, 23–24 Skow, John, 149 Skyscrapers (The Prow ), The (painting), 45–47 Slocomb di Brazzà, Cora, 19, 26 Sollors, Werner, 231n.5, 233n.2 Sopranos, The (television series), 6, 43, 126, 178, 198–202; and local talent, 191 Springsteen, Bruce: “American Skin (41 Shots)” (song), 180; and pagan Catholic understanding of power, 149, 152; as commentator on Sinatra, 104–6;

index

campiness of “Glory Days” (music video), 130; invocation of “RedHeaded Woman” (song) 137; music as equipment for living, 206–7, 234n.8; racial politics of, 179–80 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 9, 18 Steinberg, Stephen, 231n.5 Stella, Joseph (né Giuseppe Michele Stella), 30–50, 202–3, 215n.1; Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras, 35–37, 47; Brooklyn Bridge of 1919–1920, 40–42; Coney Island Madonna, 212n.7; New York Interpreted (Voice of the City), 44–47; The Quencher (Night Fires), 43; The Skyscrapers (The Prow), 45–47; The Virgin, 48–49 Stomping the Blues (non-fiction), 205 Summer of Sam (film), 228n.4 Sun City (music video), 179 Tarantino, Quentin, 232n.10 “the gaze,” 133–34, 151–52 (definitions) Thompson, Robert J., 221n.4 Times Square (Manhattan), 46 Tomei, Marisa, 129, 223n.1 Torgovnick, Marianna De Marco, 163 Trachtenberg, Alan, 40 Trials of Maria Barbella, The (nonfiction), 11, 24–26, 210n.3, 210n.4, 211n.13 Tropiano, Joseph (co-writer of Big Night), 190 Truth or Dare (film documentary of Blonde Ambition Tour), 151, 153–54, 224n.2, 227n.24 Tucci, Stanley (co-director of Big Night), 181–97 Turks, Willie, 227n.1 Twin Towers, 46–47, 129

255

Urban Villagers, The (sociological study), 94–102, 166, 219n.9 Valachi Papers, The (non-fiction), 221n.5 Van Zandt, Steve, 162, 178–180 Vatican: response to Madonna, 153, 154; influence of Vatican II on Madonna, 226n.17 Vecoli, Rudolph, 217n.5 vendetta, la, 14, 16–17 (definition) Venice, Italy (as backdrop to “Like a Virgin” music video), 148 Vesuvius, Mount, 39, 43 via vecchia, la, 10, 74–76, 217n.5 (definitions) Virgin Mary: and Southern Italy, 9, 12; Holy Virgin Mary, The (painting), 225n.13; immigrant Madonna as, 73–74; Pietà and sexuality, 156–57; The Virgin (painting), 48–49; pop star Madonna’s relation to, 148–49, 225–26n.15 Virgin, The (painting), 48–49 “Vogue” (music video), 159 Wang, Wayne, 172 Waters, Mary C., 209n.1 West End (Boston), Massachusetts, 94–102, 219n.9 West, Cornel, 166 White Defense League, 15 Whitman, Walt, 31 Williams, Phyllis H., 217n.5 Williams, William Carlos, 206–7, 233n.8 Women of the Shadows, The (non-fiction), 216–17n.4, 217n.10 wop: debated origin of term, 209n.1; Frank Sinatra’s use of, 95–96 “Y.M.C.A.” (song), 158

about the author Thomas J. Ferraro, Associate Professor of English at Duke University, is an aficionado of the American Romantic tradition: Emily Dickinson, Edward Hopper, the Marx Brothers, and Nina Simone. He is the author of Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (1993) and editor of Catholic Lives, Contemporary America (1997).

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