American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women

The Novels of Mari Tomasi

The Novels of Mari Tomasi alfred f. rosa 1975 From two published books we are able to learn more about Mari Tomasi’s writings. The first of these books is Vermont Literature: A Sampler, an anthology of regional writing edited by Arthur W. Biddle and Paul A. Eschholz, which includes Miss Tomasi’s short story ‘‘Stone.’’1 The second book is Rose Basile Green’s comprehensive study, The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures, which includes a four-page critical analysis almost exclusively concerned with Miss Tomasi’s second and last novel, Like Lesser Gods.2 It is fitting as well that each of these books emphasizes one of the two major concerns of her life and writing. The first places her in the Vermont tradition; the second concerns her place in the history of the Italian-American novel. Mari Tomasi was born February 1, 1909, in Montpelier, Vermont.3 She went to school there before attending Wheaton College and Trinity College in Burlington. Both of her parents came from Turin, her father settling in Vermont after a tour of South and Central America convinced him that the Green Mountains of Vermont closely resembled the lake region of northern Italy. Mari wanted to study medicine; her sister was a nurse, and her brother and four of her cousins practiced medicine in Vermont. But when her father died she abandoned that goal and decided instead to become a teacher. Writing, however, seemed to be her major interest, and before she took her degree, she left Trinity College to become a freelance newspaper and magazine writer. Later, in 1940, she published her first novel, Deep Grow the Roots.4 The next year she won a Breadloaf Writer’s Conference fellowship. She also worked at this time on the Vermont Writer’s Project and served as the city editor of the Montpelier Evening Argus. The most interesting work to come out of the Vermont Writer’s Project was ‘‘Men Against Granite,’’ 166 The Novels of Mari Tomasi 167 a collection of stories (in manuscript) in which she bared her feelings of guilt and shame concerning the Italian involvement in World War II.5 ‘‘Men Against Granite’’ also deals with the history of Barre, Vermont, and the granite industry, two subjects that serve, in part, as the basis for Like Lesser Gods. Mari Tomasi apparently continued to write after the publication of Like Lesser Gods, but little, if any, of this work was of a creative nature.6 For many years she was a very active member of the Vermont Poetry Society. She died, after a brief illness, in Burlington on November 10, 1965.7 Favorable comments by three prominent women novelists of the day— Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Ellen Chase, and Faith Baldwin—appeared on the dust wrapper of Tomasi’s first novel, Deep Grow the Roots, but the reviewers were too kind. They implicitly passed it off as a slight production by praising its lyric qualities even though the book ends in tragedy. Structurally , the book is overly long for the simple tale it tells, and it ends not only in too contrived a manner but also too quickly, in comparison with the earlier , more laconic pace of the exposition. Luigi, a young man of Ibena, Piedmont, nurtures his chestnut grove with the expectation that it will provide him a handsome-enough income to marry the beautiful Nina. Just as all appears to be headed for a happy ending, Mussolini, whose foreboding footsteps are heard throughout the novel, makes his presence felt in the remote hilltown, and Luigi is drafted into the army to fight in Ethiopia. Luigi attempts to avoid the army by smashing his foot with a large stone, but ironically the wound turns gangrenous and kills him. For reader appeal, the novel relies almost entirely on the beauty of the love affair between Luigi and Nina, an affair that has a delicately balanced tension between its outward actions and a sexuality and coyness that run beneath the surface. More importantly, the novel is a clever attempt on Miss Tomasi’s part to present even native Italians as innocent victims of Mussolini and in so doing to further dissociate Italian Americans from Mussolini’s actions and Italy’s involvement in the war. Whatever strengths Deep Grow the Roots has, they lie outside the area of story and plot. The sense of place that Miss Tomasi creates is almost symbolic , but it is neither overdrawn...