Required Reading for Italian-Americans...

Sicilian Culture: News & Views

More Italian Hours & Other Stories
By Helen Barolini

A few years ago, a friend of mine submitted a novel about working class Italian-Americans to a major New York publisher and found to his amazement an Italian-American editor who loved it and told him in person that her company would publish it. "A contract," she told him later on the phone, "will be in the mail in a couple of weeks."

He waited a couple of months with no contract arriving and then called the editor. Sobbing as they talked, she told him that no contract would arrive, that the firm's editor-in-chief had turned down his manuscript because, given the milieu and background of its characters, he said, the novel did not have "enough blood and guts in it." After no other house accepted the manuscript, my friend broke the novel into stories and published them in a variety of literary magazines.

I tell this story because it relates to a major problem facing Italian-American writers. Editors, influenced by Hollywood, the popular media, or their own bias, expect goons in action, preferably violent action, in Italian-American stories, and the writer with a thoughtful, literary turn of mind is unlikely to find a sympathetic audience among them. Early modernist writers, from Henry James and E.M. Forster all the way through Arthur Miller, portray Italians and (in Miller's case) Italian-Americans as brutally violent, primitive, and, if educated, as in James, devious beneath a smooth exterior. For these writers Italians and Italian-Americans represent animal vitality, but they are clearly shown as brutal, morally stunted, dangerous or pathetic remnants of a fallen civilization. In the end, Edward Gibbon's influential Decline and Fall, which reveals great love for empire but absolute disdain for a multi-cultured Italy, may be a more fundamental part of American bias toward Italians and Italian-Americans than "Scarface," Mario Puzo, or "The Sopranos."

That bias persists, despite our Italian-American cultural and intellectual tradition's foundation on the music and philosophy of Dante, the stateliness of Virgil, the experimentation of Pirandello, and the metaphysical complexity of Petrarch and the Troubadours. Thoughtful and realistic, Italian literary traditions have emphasized the decisive, analytic role that language plays in shaping human life and the world we live in. From Boccaccio and Machiavelli to Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, Italian literature's strength derives from poignancy and intellectual analysis, as well as humor, not from violence or "blood and guts," as the New York editor put it.

In More Italian Hours and Other Stories Helen Barolini has gathered together fifteen elegant stories about Italians and Italian-Americans shakily balancing on the delicate wire connecting their two worlds. Without sweat, tee-shirts, or the gunshots my friend's editor hankered for, Barolini portrays a class of professional Italian-Americans who make a living with their minds rather than their backs. They can afford to visit Italy frequently, even live there as expatriots, and despite the sophistication of their experience, language, and reading, still feel off-balance and ill at ease.

In "Shores of Light," the central story in the book, Matilde, an academic in Venice to present a paper on Henry James strolls along the streets and canals of the city ruminating on her mother, a failed scholar, her Italian father,who was a Venetian poet, her husband, Manning, child of wealthy New Englanders, and, of course, Henry James. Throughout the walk, she evaluates her life and self, probing character, wondering about her multi-cultured background and her own place in it, "jettisoned," as Barolini puts it, "between Italy and America." Dining with her father's two elderly sisters, Matilde suddenly feels out of her depth, wondering about the proper way to use the napkins at the table and suffering the tensions of her inner character, so different from her self-confidence when she sees a conference poster with her name featured on it. Made up of her Italian-American mother, her gentle Venetian father, her stuffy Yankee husband, and her burgeoning academic career, she puzzles through her future and her past, finding a rational, yet hazy self-definition. One doesn't give up, she tells herself.

As a teacher, writer, daughter, and wife she moves on through the "struggle in the dark" that life represents, hoping through mind and thought to find Lucretius's promised "shores of light."

In the collection's title story, "More Italian Hours", a younger, less successful Italian-American professional woman named Connie searches for illumination also, living in Rome and hoping to become a journalist, all the while earning a living as a teacher of English. During a trip to Sicily with her Italian boyfriend, Giorgio, to interview a famous poet who also happens to be a Sicilian count she concludes that any glimpse of light for her will be at best temporary. The count, exhausted by age and simply waiting for death, convinces her that luminous visions are temporary at best, that her love, at least with Giorgio, will not last, and that life in Italy has very little future. Yet she likes being an American in Italy: "It made her in turn tender towards her childhood in Chicago," Barolini writes, "where she had only been a wop."

Connie, whose grandparents sailed from Palermo to the new world, feels the pull of their emigration from Sicily as she talks to the old count, and by the end of the story she perceives his poems as "polished fragments of a world caught on the brink of extinction." Later, as she and Giorgio journey back to Rome, Connie recognizes her commitment to the present (America) and thinks of herself as one with her grandparents rather than the poet. She thinks of herself, Barolini says, as a "Sicilian who got away," a feeling that represents many of the characters in this book.

Other moments of insight fill these fifteen stories, most forming in an epiphany of thought when past and present, Italian and American life, as well as memory and dream, after struggling to annihilate each other, suddenly coalesce into a bittersweet understanding for the central character. Without much physical action, these characters (usually women) illustrate Henry James's famous advice to a writer in "The Art of Fiction":

"Try to be one of the people upon whom nothing is lost." In stories like "Diving into Eternity," "Gianni on the Rocks," "Michaelmas Daisies," and "Bobbing," Barolini's wit and clear-eyed, subtle writing encourage the reader, especially the Italian-American reader, to see life completely, with the past luminous in the present, memory lighting up the dream, and the brightness of all four together revealing a clear path through the uncharted dark. As Fran, an author who is the central character in "Diving into Eternity" says, "sometimes readers wrote to her and said that she had written things they thought only they had felt but hadn't known how to put into words."

Such is the communication a reader finds in More Italian Hours. It is a wonderful book, philosophic, filled with intelligent, independent Italian and Italian-American men and women who grasp life with their minds as well as their hands. They may stagger beneath its weight, but these characters also stumble forward out of sheer energy and love for what they see, feel, and hear around them. We owe Bordighera thanks for putting these stories before us in such a beautiful trade paperback edition. With Barolini's Chiaroscuro and More Italian Hours, Daniela Gioseffi's two collections ofpoems, Lewis Turco's essays and poems, and other volumes in the VIA Folio series, the editors have performed an important service in righting American publishing's failure to take seriously Italian-American subject matter in works of literary value. Be "one of the people upon whom nothing is lost," the master said. That's advice the New York editor and others like him ought to heed.

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