Thanks to H-ITAM

The following is an abridged version of an essay of Professor Fred Gardaphé.
I strongly urge the reading of the original.

It is a MUST read, and will make your heart well with pride and appreciation for our immigrant forbears and the sacrifices they made, and the suffering they endured for us to have the opportunities we have!!!
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IN SEARCH OF ITALIAN WRITERS
by Fred Gardaphé

Gay Talese raised the question, "Where are the Italian American Novelists?"
which he could not answer, since he had not read Italian-American writers.

I ask, why in spite of the fact that such prominent American critics as Frank Lentricchia locate the origins of Italian-American fiction in Luigi Ventura's 1886 collection of short stories Misfits and Remnants, did it take nearly one hundred years for a sense of a tradition to be realized?

One answer lies in the fact that until recently, Italian-American culture has not depended on a literary tradition for a sense of cultural survival.

In Little Italy, as long as a good memory was nearby, the past could always speak to the present. As long as that oral system operated, the need for reading and writing was limited. But as the years went on, the old neighborhood changed. Whole families moved away and with them went the stories.

Yet, it was a literary tradition which literally saved my life. If it were not for reading, I would have become a gangster. I grew up in the 1950s, when the only Italians you saw on television were either crooning love songs or singing like canaries in front of televised government investigations. In my neighborhood, we never played cowboys and Indians. Inspired by television programs like The Untouchables, we played cops and robbers, and none of us ever wanted to be the cops. While there might have been Italian-American cops in our town, there were none on television.

It is no wonder then that many of us young Italian-American boys became so infatuated with the attention given to the Italian American criminals that we found our own ways of gaining that notoriety and power.

Once, while I was being chased by the police for disturbing local merchants so my partners could shoplift, I ran into the public library. I found myself in the juvenile section and grabbed a book to hide my face. Safe from the streets, I spent the rest of the afternoon reading, believing that nobody would ever find me there. And I was right. So whenever I was being chased, I would head straight for the library, which became my asylum.

The Godfather was the first book with which I could completely identify, and it inspired my choice of the Mafia as a topic for the dreaded senior-year, semester-long thesis paper that my Irish-Catholic prep school required. One way or another I had been connected to the Mafia since I left my Italian neighborhood to attend high school, so I decided it was time to find out what this thing called Mafia was.

This was the first writing project to excite me. The more research I did, the more I learned about the men I thought I had known. Whenever I saw familiar names I would be amazed that they had done something so important that someone had taken the time to write about them.

When I completed that paper I was certain of an excellent grade. The grading committee decided that the essay, although well written, depended too much on Italian sources, and because I was of Italian descent, my writing never achieved the necessary objectivity that was essential to all serious scholarship. I read the "C" grade as punishment for my cultural transgression, and decided to stay away from anything but English and American literature in my future formal studies.

Ten years later, while I was doing research for my master's thesis on Walt Whitman,  I got detoured, and started reading Italian-American stories. With every novel I read grew my shame about my past.

When I suggested that I might do a dissertation on the subject, I was taken aside and told that the subject would note help my career. I fought it for a while, searching for professors to support my change of plans. But when I could find no help, I gave up, left academia, and decided to do the work on my own.

I kept wondering why it was that Italian-American literature had gained so little recognition and thus little respect in academia?

I learned that the first Italian-American writers were immigrants yet to be documented historically.The most significant work was done by labor activist Arturo Giovannitti. Through Giovannitti, I was able to hear the voices of hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants who worked their way into status as Americans.

Pascal D'Angelo, recorded his struggle to become an American poet in his autobiography, Son of Italy (1924). To Americans, as D'Angelo wrote, "I was a poor laborer -- a dago, a wop or some such creature."

Accounts of entering America and facing new challenges for survival became the primary subjects of other early autobiographies such as Constantine Panunzio's The Soul of An Immigrant (1921) and as-told-to autobiographies such as Rosa, the Story of an Immigrant (1970).

Through these works, I so understood my grandparents that, while they were dead, I felt I had to make up for the ignorance I had about their lives. I began interviewing surviving immigrants, most of whom lived in Villa Scalabrini, a local home for Italian aged. One woman was in tears after she read a story I did about her. She told me: "Grazie, sonny boy. Thank you for saving my life in these words. Now nobuddy is gonna forget me."

But it wasn't until I began to submit my own writing to publications that I realized that disseminating my work would demand political action. All the reading I had done told me that my story could not only be written, but that it had to be written. The reading I had done became the foundation upon which I would build my own career as a writer.

At the base of that foundation was Pietro di Donato, whose first novel, Christ in Concrete, became the main selection of the Book of the Month Club, chosen over John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Di Donato's novel has remained conspicuously absent in critical studies of American literature.

In John Fante I found the Italian-American Hemingway. He wanted to be a writer so badly that he sent stories, accompanied by long letters to H. L. Mencken, then one of the leading voices of American literature. Mencken rejected the stories and published the letters. :)

By 1940, Fante had already published half of his lifetime production of short stories in national magazines such as "The American Mercury, The Atlantic Monthly, " Harper's Bazaar and Scribner's Magazine, and had also published two novels and a collection of his stories (Dago Red, 1940, and a four-book saga of Arturo Bandini.
All of Fante's work spoke to me with a voice that drowned out all the American literature I had read in school.

Jerre Mangione, one of the most celebrated Italian-American writers (Mount Allegro  is the first of four non-fictional books) impressed me so that I connived to get him to critique my novel, and he graciously gave me the most solid criticism I had ever received. Years later, I became his literary executor.

Through Mari Tomasi's Deep Grow the Roots (1940) and Like Lesser Gods (1949),
Julia Savarese, The Weak and the Strong, (1952), Louise DeSalvo's Vertigo (1996), and Marion Benasutti No Steady Job for Papa (1966), I better understood my own family's struggle to survive immigration and the Great Depression.

All this reading inspired me to try my hand at writing. My first attempt was a novel that received mixed reactions from a number of editors. One suggested that I follow in Puzo's footsteps and heighten the Mafia material that he was certain was lurking under the surface of my story; another suggested that I change the characters' ethnicity because Italian Americans do not read and so could not be counted on to buy the book, and because Italian-American characters could even alienate those who did buy books, unless of course I was willing to tell more about the many murders that occurred in my family's past.

Not willing to follow any of these suggestions, I put aside my fiction thinking that before I could do anything with my novel, I had to change the mistaken notions of those editors. I believed that if I could prove there was Italian-American literature beyond Mafia stories, and that it did not depend on a distinctive Italian-American audience, then my own writing would have a tradition and a place in it.

What these writers did for me; they enlarged my view of existence as an American of Italian descent. "It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about. Whether we are 'minority' writers or 'majority.' It is simply in our power to do this."

Italian-American writers had saved my life by lifting my eyes to the horizons that lie beyond my neighborhood. They had given me a new respect for my culture, but more than anything, all this reading extended my sense of family.

In the poets, John Ciardi, Felix Stefanile, and Joseph Tusiani, I found artists who could have been my uncles. Helen Barolini's Umbertina (1979),The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985) helped me to understand the women in my family. The anthology, by winning an American Book Award, was proof that the rest of the world was beginning to take Italian-American literature seriously.

Joseph Papaleo's two novels, All the Comforts (1967) and Out of Place (1970) which both deal with the struggle of the second-generation of Italian American to find a respectable place in American society, helped me to understand the passionate life my father led. And when I found Ben Morreale's novels The Seventh Saracen (1958) and A Few Virtuous Men, (1973) I learned about Sicily and what it is like to live on the other side of the Mafia. In Monday Tuesday Never Come Sunday (1977) he recounts 1930s life in a New York Little Italy that defies cinematic stereotypes. And his latest novel, The Loss of the Miraculous (1997), spins a tale of love, art, and loss through an old Sicilian painter. Josephine Gattuso Hendin's The Right Thing to Do, (1986) which won an American Book Award, is a powerful account of the relationship between an old world father and a new world daughter.

At the poetic foundation of my own rebellion in the 1960s, were a number of Italian Americans, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Diane di Prima's autobiography Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) and her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman,Maria Mazziotti Gillan's (Where I Come From, 1995), and Daniela Gioseffi (Word Wounds and Water Flowers, 1995).

In college I learned that the way to tell if a literature is growing is the arrival of serious humor and parody. I found the most eloquent tragi-comical Italian-American fiction in Valentino and the Great Italians, According to Anthony Valerio. Anthony Valerio elevated Bensonhurst Joes and Josephines, as easily (and as wittily) as he leveled the stature of such household names as Enrico Caruso, Frank Sinatra, and Joe Dimaggio. His earlier fiction in The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn (1982) established him as a major voice of Italian-American culture, but his latest work, Conversation with Johnny will turn Italian America upside down.

What Mario Puzo romanticized in The Godfather(1969), what Gay Talese historicized in Honor Thy Father (1971), Giose Rimanelli parodied in Benedetta in Guysterland (1994). In my early days, Rimanelli had tended to me as though he was my literary Mentor, guiding me in new directions of reading.

Two writers who are have become like sister and brother to me are Tina DeRosa, Paper Fish (1980), and Tony Ardizzone, one of the best short story writers around, Larabi's Ox: Stories of Morocco, 1993, The Evening News, has been winning literary prizes for years, His latest story collection, Taking it Home: Stories from the Neighborhood (1996) features stories set in Chicago and filled with Italian-American and Catholic themes and characters.

Rose Romano, poet, editor, and publisher of Malafemmina Press, presents a more politicized persona through her publications and her own poetry. She has advocated the Italian-American position in the multi-cultural arena through her books: Vendetta (1992) and The Wop Factor (1994).

As my own career in academia grew, I gained strength through reading the criticism of Robert Viscusi whose imaginative memoir Astoria (1995), which can be read as part novel and part cultural criticism, won an American Book Award and established his reputation as one of Italian America's leading writers.

This power of literature to create identity and community has taken a long time for Italian Americans to realize. Louise De Salvo, has written: "It is as simple as this, reading and writing about what I have read have saved my life."

Those words could be mine, for not only has reading kept me from becoming a gangster, but it has made me a professor who realizes that if reading can save a life, then it must be true that literature can save a culture. If you are what you read, then you are not Italian American until you read Italian American writers.

To read the complete version:
http://www.italianstudies.org/iam/essay.htm