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1. The Novel of the Italian in America
- Fordham University Press
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22 1 The Novel of the Italian in America I forgot Italian and I didn’t learn English. —M. R., Philadelphia Narrative and Press: The Ventura “Case” Let’s listen to an authoritative prophet: Basically, I believe that the great, true book: novel, epic poem, or whatever it might be, of the Italian in America, if it has not been written up to now, never will be. And it couldn’t have been written, except in dialect: in one of those harsh, barbaric, unheard-of dialects that came into existence in our enormous, suffering communities on American soil. In a new language: just as the reality of which our immigrants were in part the creators and victims was new. Or to be more exact: this book, this poem has been written, but in letters of stone; it was carved into the rock of Manhattan, into the docks in the harbors and the railroad tracks. In the caverns and on the walls of the mine shafts, in the furrows of endless fields.1 Thus Emilio Cecchi wrote at the height of the most American period of the Italian twentieth century, introducing sympathetically, but cautiously and with a certain skepticism, two young Italian American novelists: John Fante and Pietro di Donato. Vittorini’s Americana (1941) had been published and then withdrawn and finally brought out again with Cecchi’s introduction (1942), and the first offerings in Italian of the literature of emigration were appearing in bookstores: Fante’s Il cammino nella polvere [Ask the Dust], in a Mondadori Medusa edition, translated by Vittorini (1941) and di Donato’s Cristo fra i muratori [Christ in Concrete], in a boldly vernacular version by Eva Amendola, brought out by Bompiani, the publisher of Vittorini’s anthology (also 1941). And as if to confirm, in wartime, the assertion of di Donato’s proletarian neorealism, a note from the publisher—in all probability attributable to Vittorini—went so far as to declare that “intimately, spiritually, as the reader will clearly see, this is an Italian 23 voices of italian america book as few books in Italian are.” It was a statement between the opportunistic and the propagandistic, intended to feed the casual myth of a categorical Italianness operating outside historical, cultural , and linguistic boundaries. It was a mistake that was quickly spotted and returned to the sender by Cecchi in the above-mentioned review: called into question in the name of a nationalism with, if anything, even narrower, coarser, and angrier features, and of a more experienced and aesthetically shrewd sense of the literature of the United States. Today, however, the reading of that prophecy raises rather different considerations. Above all, it seems to us that we can say that the “great and true book” was in fact written, although outside the time frame: that is, the autobiographical trilogy of Joseph Tusiani, which flowered slowly and brilliantly from the roots of that dried-up and dying agave represented by the Italian language in the United States (that is to say, from a literary point of view; in the sociolinguistic area, as Haller’s studies demonstrate, it should be considered anything but dead). Tusiani’s work is a triptych composed in prose of classical elegance, behind which decades of literary mastery can be felt; it is a work in which an explicit theme is the affectionate and at the same time unmistakable detachment of the author from the by now selfreferential milieu of the immigrant community’s last literary circles, whose principal points of reference in the fifties were the socialist periodical La Parola del Popolo in Chicago, the weekly Divagando in New York, and the Union Square Club in downtown Manhattan. Apart from the strictly biographical aspects, Tusiani’s “new word” marks the nearly, if not fully, complete achievement of a different identity, constantly in search of a fruitful relationship between the two nationes. Rather than denying Cecchi’s prophecy, Tusiani’s work invites us to undertake an excavation back into the fertile soil deposited by more than a century of immigration, to discover the literary culture of the immigrant communities. Even if we wished to narrow our focus to narrative, a context emerges immediately in which theater and cinema, journalism and publishing, social and political activism intermingle daily, delineating a cultural dimension that for a full half century (from the 1880s to the end of the 1930s) is, in its complex variety, organic and unitary. The dialect of immigration is expressed with comic force in the...