Carlo Levi's Fear of Freedom

I read Fear of Freedom (Paura della liberta`) in 1959, when I was a senior in college. It was the first book I read in Italian, after studying the language for two years, and I have never forgotten its impact on me. Levi's searching essay had already been translated into superb English by Adolphe Gourevitch and published in 1950 by Farrar, Straus, the same lucid version that's now reprinted in a splendid new edition from Columbia University Press. But I was unaware of that translation, finding only the Italian original in my college library, when I went looking for another book by Carlo Levi, having already been enthralled by Christ Stopped at Eboli, his first published book, the story of his internal exile, in 1935, by the Fascist government, in Lucania, Southern Italy, and his life among its peasant population, where, having previously given up medicine for painting and writing (he’d received his MD from the University of Turin), Levi returned to its practice, treating the impoverished residents of the community and gaining their respect.

Fear of Freedom was written in 1939, after Levi's release from confinement in Lucania, when he was living in France, again in exile from fascist Italy. In this essay, in the midst of war, Levi attempts to confront and understand the cultural, religious and political origins of the phenomena of Fascism and Nazism, along with the reasons for the capitulation to authoritarianism by whole populations in an otherwise democratic Europe. What troubles Levi is why so many people seemed so willing to give up their freedom--their independence and their autonomy--to dictators, instead of struggling to remain free. And one of the reasons Levi gives, in anticipation of Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (published in Britain as Fear of Freedom), is that, all though history, the dizzying prospect of freedom of choice and the responsibility it entails has effectively terrified people, and they would rather live in the certainty of the State and the Church, taking comfort from imposed forms and rules of thought and behavior instead of having to think for themselves and live according to their own self-created personal dictates. In a word, the presumed comfort of an unexamined life was easier to accept than the uncertainty of the rigorously examined life Socrates had proposed.

Levi's small but incendiary book had an enormous impact on me at the age of 21, an apolitical student just coming out of the McCarthy era and beginning to ask the kinds of questions Levi addresses in the book--Why do people shrink from freedom? Why do Americans seem so timid about expressing their beliefs and feelings? Why were we so afraid of Communism? What was the Cold War really about? Levi didn't answer those questions directly for me, but he gave me the intellectual and philosophical means to examine them for myself.

I think again of those questions and I'm moved to return to this marvelous new edition of Levi's powerful essay, as we appear to be living once more in a time of guilt by association, a time when expressing one's opinion about the debacle of the war in Iraq has often brought down upon one the accusation of treasonous behavior, a time of fear; indeed, a time of undue executive power and privilege. It is a time when all our freedoms appear again to be under assault. So this little book, written in exile by a great European thinker and artist; written when Levi had no hope of publication, speaks to us down through the years.

As Levi later wrote so presciently, "Every age has its own Fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will...and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned and where the security of the privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many."

Vincent Ferrini (1913-2007): All There, All of the Time: A Eulogy

For Vincent Ferrini community was as real as his Italian immigrant family, and as closely knit. It was as encompassing as the working class culture he’d been nurtured by in the industrial city of Lynn, and the Catholic Church he formed an uneasy truce with. Vincent understood community because he grew up in the thick of it. After graduating from Lynn Classical High School, he sought community at the public library, where he and friends developed their own college curriculum, while their high school classmates attended the universities Vincent and future novelist and historian, Truman Nelson, couldn’t afford; and later, when he became a factory worker, he found community in the trade unions he helped organize and in the Communist Party, which, quoting Melville, he called “his Yale College and his Harvard.”

But just as the need for community underlay everything Vincent strove for and wrote about, he was also a supreme individualist. He believed wholeheartedly in Emerson’s “infinitude of the private man;” and, in ultimately rejecting collectivism, his indomitable individuality drove him from what Vincent called “the Church of Politics.” No dogma ever held Vincent long in its thrall, except perhaps for his core belief in life as the poem and the poem as life itself, a concept potentially more radical than the politics he eschewed.

His nephew Henry’s brilliant film, Poem in Action, has given us Vincent’s biography and his history in stunning words and images—the poverty he grew up with in Laconia Court in Lynn’s Brickyards, the debilitating strikes and lay-offs he wrote so dramatically about in his first book, No Smoke—events which drove traumatic wedges into working class family structures; his father’s admonition that he was born into the wrong class to become a poet; his “graduation” from the Lynn Public Library, rather than any college that would, in his words, “un-educate” him; his life long hunger for books; and his plunge into the daily grind as a bench hand at General Electric in the midst of war mongering, war preparation, and war fear.

Community was also the WPA, where, in the 1930s, Ferrini, like so many other writers and artists, found work, in his case as a teacher and researcher into maritime history during the Great Depression. It was as a participant in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration that Ferrini learned that government was not the enemy but could be the great social equalizer and intervener of last resort, something he never forgot in his anger over what dangerous uses government had been put to under subsequent administrations.

Poets are not usually thought of as being political, as embracing the exigencies of citizenship, though many American poets have become activists out of necessity, if not of vocation. Vincent had been political long before he moved to Gloucester, in 1948, where he eventually became one of the great advocates for the fishing industry and the preservation of a working waterfront; nor was he driven from politics by McCarthyism, which had destroyed the lives of so many American writers, artists and intellectuals. Even after his disenchantment with ideologies, Vincent remained political. Along with the Catholic Worker and the Gloucester Times, which he devoured as soon as it was delivered to his frame shop at 126 E. Main Street, he subscribed to and read Time Magazine every week—religiously—“to find out,” as he said, “what the oligarchy thinks and what the ruling class is up to.” For Vincent never ceased, as he wrote in one poem , “upsettin’ da setuppa.”

The poetry Vincent began writing in Lynn was informed by the life he and his family and neighbors led, the life of working people, during the Great Depression. In fact, it could be said—and several scholars and critics have affirmed it—that his first book No Smoke, a series of poetic portraits of people caught up in hard times rendered in the manner of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, is one of the great documents of that era. Those poems and others in two subsequent books, Injunction and Blood of the Tenement were described by critic and novelist Mike Gold as being “as genuine as a soldier’s wound or a row of stamping machines;” and because of their depictions of grinding poverty, social injustice and the hardscrabble lives of the industrial working class, the writer and anthologist Walter Lowenfels identified Ferrini as, “the last surviving Proletarian poet,” an honor that meant more to Vincent than the award of any literary prize.

As soon as Vincent moved with his wife Margaret, daughters Sheila and Deirdre, and son Owen, to Gloucester in 1948, he found himself part of yet another community. Through the family of Captain Serio, his landlord at 3 Liberty Street, he gained entrance into the Italian fishing community, perhaps even more closely knit than the Italian community he’d left behind in Lynn. And he wasn’t here long before he and his wife Peg made the acquaintance of the large community of artists and writers, who had made Cape Ann their home. In 1949, Charles Olson, still living in Washington, D.C. and teaching at Black Mountain College before his return home to Gloucester in 1957, paid Ferrini a “fan visit” after reading some poems of his in a little magazine called Imago, beginning a long and fruitful, if sometimes contentious, friendship. The Ferrinis became friends with ceramicists Kalman Kybinyi and Doris Hall and their children, Moisha and Laszlo, who lived on Old Salem Road and owned a gallery and coffee house on Rocky Neck; with painter Edo Hansen Rhodes, who lived on the Back Shore, with painter Adlolph and weaver Eva Matz, who ran a campground in West Gloucester, with the Fehlharbor family at whose home on Washington Street one could meet Brandeis professor and historian, Ray Ginger, who had written The Age of Excess and the definitive biography of Eugene Victor Debs (two books we should take down off the shelf today), and with Doris and Jonathan Bayliss. Jonathan, a novelist and playwright, worked as a business analyst at Gorton’s, later becoming controller—and then treasurer of the city of Gloucester— while Doris ran a pre-school in their Washington Street home. Other friends included painter Albert Alcalay, his wife Vera and sons Leor and Ammiel, who spent summers on Rocky Neck during the 1950s.

Out of this community of artists and writers—and with the help of local patrons including art collector Harold Bell, dentist Bernard Cohen, psychologist Ruth Borofsky, and painter Dorothy Segal—emerged the first issue of Four Winds, Cape Ann’s first quarterly magazine of arts and letters, edited by Vincent and Margaret Ferrini, Gloucester High School English teacher David Meddaugh and his wife Ilmi, and painter Mary Shore. The table of contents of the inaugural summer of 1952 issue included poetry by Ferrini, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, as well as translations from the work of Gottfried Benn, one of Europe’s most respected post-war poets. Featuring poetry of that caliber, along with fiction by Jerre Mangione, a major Italian-American scholar and writer, and art by Albert Alcalay, Tom O’Hara, Stephan Antonakos and Serge Trubach, the founder of the Cape Ann Society of Modern Artists, Four Winds transcended it local origins.

What had originally attracted Ferrini to Gloucester—the community’s closeness to the sea, the working class culture of wharves and fish processing plants, and the intimacy of Brace Cove, where Ferrini walked every morning contemplating the natural world around him—soon found its way into his poetry. Leaving behind the strife of the factories (“abandoned by the Bosses/our skeleton teeth locked on the sky…”), the former Proletarian poet entered more deeply into himself. In books like Sea Sprung, The Infinite People, and The House of Time, one found a new lyricism, grounded in the personal, the subjective, as exemplified in “The Tiny Room:”

the factory

is in a forgotten

city

we dance

to the warbler’s chant

and explore

the sky

take time

apart

and with singing

eyes

approach

the magic world

of sleep

During this time Ferrini also began writing plays, which require a community to stage, plays eventually selected for publication in the Best Short Plays of 1952-53, and 1953-54 and performed in New York, Boston, and mostly happily for him, by his friend Michael MacNamara, in Gloucester. Having left General Electric to open his own picture framing shop, Ferrini set himself solidly down in the community. And the community came to him not only to have its pictures framed by a master (frames that were often more beautiful than the pictures they contained), but to talk and argue, to learn from Ferrini, who fused art and work in that shop, as he writes in one poem, “Eleven:”

I pull the plug out at 5

and all the nightbirds start whistling in my ears

trade is arrested

my hands forget the table

I’m in the bell throated song

But Ferrini did not remain inactive. His conversations with local customers, with workers in the sawmill and warehouses of the Building Center, where he purchased materials for picture frames, his many talks with his friend, writer and historian Joe Garland, who, like Ferrini, had also been a union organizer, and his encounters with the realities of life in a blue collar city reported daily in the pages of the Gloucester Times—fluctuations in the fishing stocks, the depredations of Urban Renewal, which his friend Charles Olson called “renewal by destruction,” the encroachment of development that would threaten the fishing industry or undermine the historic character of Gloucester—spurred Ferrini to a new activism, an activism that was reflected in his poetry, in which the personal and the social reached a new and dramatic synthesis.

And there was the war in Vietnam and the civil rights struggle, which affected the poet as they were convulsing the nation. Out of Ferrini’s own struggles of conscience came two powerful poems, “The Garden of the Apocalypse,” in which he wrote in his characteristic universalism:

The black man has no premium

On color and enslavement

Neither has the yellow man, nor the white

Nor the brown skinned

Each person

Carries a civil war within him

and “Lenin Speaks,” first published in the Guardian and reprinted in anti-war newspapers, in which one could hear again the fiery voice of the young radical, as Ferrini scored the Cold War bureaucracies of East and West for impeding freedom of thought and action:

Smash this Frankenstein Mausoleum

let breath in my frozen corpse

for the Winds to free!

we were the first to step off

the globe

and walk upon the OZONE!

and

imagine

me

an IKON!

who think the REVOLUTION

is

only

ONCE?

ah,

what surprises they are in for

Vincent understood from his personal experiences during the Cold War and the McCarthy period, that in shrinking from our revolutionary origins in America we deny our own radical traditions, our insurrectionary roots inherent in the Declaration of Independence—what his friend Truman Nelson called “the right of revolution.” For in the final analysis, Ferrini’s radicalism was native, a pure American radicalism, in part the Enlightenment heritage of Sam Adams and Tom Paine, but more closely linked to the radicalism of Emerson and Thoreau, of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and Orestes Brownson. Vincent Ferrini was at heart a Transcendentalist. Like Emerson, he believed in the radical transformation of the self and society, often telling friends that Emerson’s 1837 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, “The American Scholar,” (“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds”) had awakened him as much as The Communist Manifesto. With Emerson and Thoreau, Vincent also believed that the divine was reflected in the mundane; he subscribed to the holiness of every person and to our inherent inviolability. He loved Thoreau the naturalist, who wrote that all objects are symbols and history but a reflection of myth—Thoreau the hermit of Walden Pond, understanding that at some level all poets are condemned to be hermits in America. But he was also in tune with the Henry David Thoreau, who, in defense of Captain John Brown’s campaign to overturn the abomination of chattel slavery, had shouted out in Concord Town Hall, “I need not say what match I would touch, what system endeavor to blow up!”

To many living here in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Gloucester seemed much like the Concord of Emerson’s time, a community of artistic, intellectual and political ferment. There were the never-ending conversations with friends Charles Olson, Jonathan Bayliss, Gerrit Lansing, Harry Martin, Jean Kaiser, Vera and Albert Alcalay, Adolph and Eva Matz, Jay McLauchlan, and Celia Eldridge, individually and in groups, in the rear of Vincent’s frame shop, where, in later years, he lived in a book lined room that had the simplicity and spotlessness of a monk’s cell, in Olson’s magazine and letter-strewn kitchen at 28 Fort Square, or Bayliss’s big house next to the cemetery on Washington Street; in Geritt’s apartment on Main Street, or Harry’s above the pool room. Those were years when the flood of visitors to Gloucester to see Olson or Ferrini seemed unstoppable—Lawrence Ferlinghetti came, and Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Michael Rumaker, Joel Oppenheimer, LeRoy Jones/Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Robert Kelly, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ed Sanders, Diane Wakoski, Paul Metcalf, and filmmaker Stan Brakhage, to name but a few. Younger writers like me could only marvel at the talk that was generated around dinner tables and in living rooms, the books that were discussed, the art that was described and commented upon with an excitement and trenchancy that I had never experienced in college or in graduate school—conversations that continued after Olson’s death in 1970, at Gerrit’s house, at Jonathan's, at Jay’s, at Henry Ferrini’s, and always in Vincent’s frame shop, even after he retired to devote himself entirely to poetry. It was here, in the frame shop-turned-home, that Ferrini also completed his stunning autobiography, Hermit of the Clouds, published by Greg Gibson’s Ten Pound Island Book Company, in 1988 and later translated into Japanese.

Vincent’s rich life was not without sorrow. He never recovered from the death by leukemia of his younger daughter Deirdre, just as the loss of his baby sister Yolanda, when a stove exploded in the family’s Lynn tenement kitchen, continued to haunt him, though in later years he found solace in his grandchildren Ben and Carrie by son Owen, just as his daughter Sheila’s career in the theater was a source of great pride.

No account of Vincent’s life would be complete without mention of the range of friendships he enjoyed with so many people, and all those he corresponded with. Annie and Geoff Thomas were always there for Vincent, helping him in so many ways, as were Shaun McNiff, Paul Sawyer, Joy Buell, JoAnn Castano, Hartley Ferguson, Elaine Wing, and the staff at the Book Store. Also important to Vincent, especially in his final months, was the caring of his children, Owen and Sheila, Howard Richardson, Barbara Oliver, Susan Steiner, Henry Ferrini, Susan Frey, Jane Robbins, Helen McLeod, and so many others, for the omission of whose names I apologize.

By the 1970s, with the war in Vietnam that had so troubled him winding down, Ferrini was poised to enter a new community of rising concern over gathering threats both to his beloved fishing industry and the city’s treasured resources, her land, water supply and valued wetlands. Speaking at City Hal in favor of the 200 mile limit to protect American fisheries brought Vincent into contact with Lena Novello, Angela Sanfilippo and Peg Sibley of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives, who were beginning their many years of advocacy for the industry that provided them and their families a livelihood. Vincent grasped the parallels between fishing and the shoe industry in Lynn; for him the collapse of a community’s economic life blood would mean the collapse of the vital community they sustained. When the Wives opposed an extension road across the Babson Watershed, arguing that any threat to our water system would also threaten the fish processing industry, Ferrini was at their side, along with Richard Emmanuel, the activist pastor of The Church, in East Gloucester; and he continued to advocate for the endangered industry for the rest of his life. This renewed activism on his part informed the major poem he was working on at the time, Know Fish, in which all of the concerns of his life and work—the political, the personal, the social and the ecological—become fused in the metaphor of “knowing fish,” as Ferrri wrote: “The thrust of the whole work is in the title, knowing fishes, in men, women and the sea. The pitch is that only when we connect with the interior fishes are we discovering and extending life by the innate rules of Earth, and thereby saving the self, the family, the city, and the planet.” I do not know of a better description of ecology—and Ferrini would spend the rest of his life living it directly while elaborating it in book after book. His nomination as Gloucester’s first Poet Laureate, by his friend and fellow fishing industry advocate City Councilor John “Gus” Foote, and his unanimous election to that office by the Council, was one of the greatest moments of his life, an acknowledgement, Ferrini felt, of the caring he had expressed in words and actions for the community he had adopted and now, it seemed, had finally adopted him.

No tribute, however, can capture the intensity of Ferrini’s presence, the dynamism of his talk, or the never-ending fire storm of his perceptions. His nephew Henry Ferrini’s film, Poem in Action, gets as close as is possible to capturing what it was like to be in Vincent’s presence. He never gave up hope, even in the darkest of times; nor did he ever say no to experience, no matter where it led him. The loss of a person like Vincent, to his friends and to the community, is enormous, not only for those of us who were fortunate to have known the poet, but for others who will never have that opportunity.

Vincent was all there, all of the time, from when I first sought him out to the last letter I received from him fifty-five years later, in which he wrote: We cannot live without the hope that drives our dreaming!

I’d like to close with two short poems. This is the poem, first published in Four Winds that sent me to Vincent’s frame shop in 1952, when I was fifteen years old and out of sorts with the world and myself, fortuitously discovering the magazine at Doris Hall’s gallery on Rocky Neck and meeting the poet for the first time:

I pass

by day

and night

no one has

seen me

If you ever

want to find

me

and know me

leave behind

yourself

and enter

the caves

of other

people

there you

will find

me

who is

yourself

And this is the poem I most want to remember him by, Vincent’s summation of his life and beliefs, his own epitaph:

This house

is holier

than a temple

it is where

I live

and have my

being

this house

of bone

and blood

molded

by the weathers

of experience

is all

I have

this house

after

this house

which is me

only

is dust

I will be

in your

house

Thank you.

(This eulogy was delivered on Saturday, March 22, 2008, at a celebration of the life of Vincent Ferrini, Gloucester's Poet Laureate, at City Hall, in Gloucester, MA.)

Why I'm Supporting Barack Obama

The American people are tired of politics that is dominated by the powerful, by the connected. They want their government back.

--Senator Barack Obama

Richard H. Rovere, the New Yorker’s late Washington correspondent, once characterized himself as being radical by intellect, conservative by temperament and liberal by compromise. I would describe myself pretty much the same way. Though I’ve been a registered Democrat since I first began voting, I’ve really had no political home in America. If I lived in Europe, particularly in Italy where I came of age politically, I would vote with the post-communist Left. Contrary to what conservatives have erroneously represented, liberalism in America is not the left end of the political spectrum—it’s really the center, as Arthur Schlesinger once described it in The Vital Center—anymore than classical Burkean conservatism is the right. Though neo-conservatives come closer in belief and behavior to the old right, the far right in America has, since the 19th century, been occupied by a know-nothing native fascism, just as the left was traditionally the domain of communists.

To understand this shift of meaning and attention is to begin to understand the kinds of political derangement the country has been suffering from at least since the Goldwater campaign of 1964, whose aftermath saw the rise of a well-funded conservative movement focused on changing the face of political culture in the U.S., indeed moving the entire country from its natural, non-ideological New Deal liberalism to a hard core conservatism represented by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (remember, Lyndon Johnson was unanimously voted into office in 1964 by an electorate whose majority characterized itself as “liberal.”)

A crucial step in the process of moving the country rightward was the demonization of liberalism by associating it first with communism (even though most liberals were anti-communist) and then as being dangerously “out of step” with mainstream America. Indeed, it could be said that just as McCarthyism had demoralized and destroyed the traditional left in America, so under Ronald Reagan and the rising power of conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, liberalism was both discredited and forced into hiding. The L-word became the bugaboo of American politics. In retrospect, Barry Goldwater’s conservatism appears more like old fashioned libertarianism. Were he alive today, he would doubtless disown the neo-cons.

But I’m not setting out here to write about ideology—that can be for another time. I’m merely attempting to ground my argument—why I’m supporting Barack Obama for president—in the process of my own political evolution.

The first politician I admired was Adlai Stevenson. Although I remember President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom my nominally Republican parents idolized, he was still a shadowy figure from my childhood, a grainy image of a man in a cape, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, in Saturday matinee newsreels about the war, the Yalta Conference, and his death in Warm Springs, after which I first saw my father cry. I was in college when Stevenson made his second presidential attempt, in 1956; and I was old enough to understand his speeches, most of which he wrote himself in a resonant, elegantly literate prose (much like Obama’s today) and to canvass for his campaign as a member of Students for Stevenson. My classmates were Ike likers (“I Like Ike” was the first campaign button I remember); and I had separated myself from my parents, who, under the pall of McCarthyism, had re-embraced the Republican party. Once I heard Stevenson deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, I knew this was a man I could believe in, and nothing he did after his considerable loss to Eisenhower (a greater loss to the nation, I might add) disabused me of my admiration for him.

You might expect that after cutting my political teeth on Stevenson I would naturally have given the very first presidential vote of my life to John F. Kennedy, but I didn’t. I was living in Europe, where the Cold War arms build up was not a rhetorical crusade but a fact of life, and it was clear to me that there was very little difference between the militant anti-communism of Kennedy and his Republican opponent Vice-President Richard Nixon. I joined a group of expatriates, who signed letters, petitions and newspaper ads urging Americans living abroad not to vote for either candidate, as a protest against their joint refusal to curtail the nuclear weapons race. Indeed, after his election Kennedy proved to be every bit the Cold Warrior he promised to be.

Returning home frightened by Goldwater’s apparent extremism, I felt compelled to support Lyndon Johnson. I registered to vote as a Democrat and I have not changed that designation since, though I have voted for Republicans, notably Edward Brooke, who served Massachusetts ably as a senator, and Francis Sargent, who was one of the state’s finest governors, an early environmentalist and a liberal Republican of the old school.

I turned against Johnson as soon as he escalated the war in Vietnam, later canvassing for Senator Eugene McCarthy whose upstart presidential campaign drove Johnson from office. When Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 nomination at a convention reminiscent of Nazi Germany, I was forced to make another of the odious choices I have had to make as a Democrat, given the fact that Humphrey’s opponent was none other than Richard Nixon, who campaigned on a plan to end the war, which he kept running for another six years, resulting in the deaths of 55,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese. After my disappointment at Nixon's 1972 victory over George McGovern, another Stevensonian figure, I voted eagerly for Jimmy Carter in 1976, though as president he, too, disappointed me (he’s since become a hero for his courageous stand against Bush’s pre-emptive wars). I can say nothing more about the Reagan debacle (like Thatcher’s in England) than I wrote in column after column in the Gloucester Daily Times during his tenure as one of the worst presidents in history before Bush. I don’t subscribe to the conservative’s myth of Reagan as having ended the Cold War—not the Reagan who sponsored death squads in El Salvador, while illegally supporting a war against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua with funds secretly obtained by selling weapons to our putative enemy Iran. This was also the president who turned Americans against their own government, another of those conservative-managed derangements I’ve spoken of, under which Americans have been convinced to vote against their own best interests.

After George Bush’s prelude to his son’s invasion of Iraq, I welcomed a young, fresh-faced Bill Clinton to the White House, only to discover that he was another sweet talker, though a highly intelligent one, at least as regards policy matters. I might even have pardoned his philandering had he not done the unthinkable, when he effectively dismantled the Welfare system, "ending Welfare as we know it," and driving thousands of women and children deeper into poverty, not to “reform” a system badly in need of it, but to take the issue away from the Republicans as he prepared to run for a second term. The move was called “triangulation” (adopting for oneself the ideas of one’s opponent, both to take credit for them and to insulate oneself from criticism by the opponent on those issues) and the Clintons have been running on this fuel ever since. (Note: Under George W. Bush 37 million people, or 12.7% of the population, live in poverty, according to the latest Census Bureau figures--the highest poverty rate on record for the U.S.)

I’ve never believed that the Democrats were less corrupt or more honorable than the Republicans. After all, I live in Massachusetts, whose state politics and most of whose offices are controlled by an in-group of Democratic old boys (and girls), as intransigent politically as they are intellectually bankrupt. This is the gang that gave us a string of Republican governors, who have left cities living off lottery funds, turning public schools into dilapidated detention centers, where the only teaching that occurs is to prepare students for useless state competency exams. This is also the crowd we can thank for three LNG terminals that further undermine our endangered fishing industry, while leaving coastal communities more vulnerable to attacks from those who would target the terminals. And we can’t forget the gambling casinos that will soon be built, presumably to increase the state’s tax base, depleted for some twenty-six years as a result of Proposition 2 ½, one of the early anti-government initiatives conservatives foisted on an unsuspecting public. Would the state’s “liberal” Democratic leadership ever push to repeal this dinosaur that’s driven the Commonwealth into penury? Don’t even think about it!

If I’m cynical about the party I’ve belonged to and most of whose candidates I’ve voted for since 1964, the above is self-explanatory. You could ague that I’ve had alternatives in Ralph Nader’s spoiler campaigns or the candidates of the nascent Green Party. However, when you live in a two-party system it’s foolhardy to vote for or support third parties, even if their agendas are appealing. You may feel personally good about it, but you will usually be undercutting the lesser of the two evils we’ve been presented with for most of our recent political history. Of course, one can opt out of the system entirely, but in doing that one cedes any small effectiveness one might otherwise have enjoyed, and you only end up throwing your vote away. Politics in America is, after all, the art of the possible.

But this time I refuse to take the lesser road. As a “Democrat” I now have two choices for my party’s nomination, Senators Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, and I’m throwing my support to the candidate I believe to be the better choice, Barack Obama. Clinton and her husband (they are indistinguishable politically and they tell us disingenuously that if we vote for Hilary we’ll be getting “two for one”) represent the old politics of either party. Behind them lies the power of the special interests and their lobbies (especially the Israel Lobby, which has had such an inhibiting effect on American foreign policy), the money of the giant corporations and Wall Street, the health insurance cartels, the party hacks and back room old boys, who wouldn’t know a progressive idea if they fell over it; yes, and the Democratic Leadership Council, which has done more than its conservative opponents to undermine what little progressivism remains in the party. Beyond that, the presidency is not Hilary’s entitlement, as she seems to be suggesting. It may be an office she has prepared for and fought for during a good deal of her political life. She may even be the hard working senator she wants us to believe she is. But those not uncommon desires and putative accomplishments do not automatically guarantee her the highest elective office in the land.

If you listen to Hilary, who gave Bush permission (as Barack did not) to fire bomb thousands of women and children in Iraq and won’t repudiate her vote, you’ll hear the same old litany: “universal health care” but not “single payer,” or a much needed national health system, (Hilary and Obama both remain in the thrall of the health insurance industry); the conflation of the working class (which is now poorer than ever) with the middle class, which used to be the working class and still earns what the old working class earns, even as their industrial jobs dwindle or are shipped out of the country; no major critique of Bush’s phony “war on terror,” which has depleted our treasury and turned the rest of the world against us, just the same old “it’s a dangerous world and we need strong, experienced leadership” (it’s a dangerous world because every action Bush takes creates a more threatening reaction). Underlying so much of this is Hilary’s attempt to project a posture of power, of assurance (“I may be a woman but I am as strong and willful as a man.”)

However, the most significant factor for me in my decision not to support Hilary, is her uncritical embrace of neo-liberalism; and that, I believe, is the most insidious force threatening our political, economic and social wellbeing, far more than the canard of “terrorism” or Islamo-fascism. Neo-liberalism, an outgrowth of right-wing libertarian economic and philosophical principles, posits a market-dominated system, which seeks to privatize the entire public sphere into a globalized uber-market, which, according to social philosopher Pierre Bordieu, benefits least those who are most adversely affected by it, including the world’s poor and indigenous peoples whose local economies, communities, languages and folkways are endangered by globalization.

George W. Bush is also a neo-liberal, as is Tony Blair, for neo-liberalism makes no ideological distinctions. Its proponents believe in deregulation of markets, tax relief for the richest corporations and individuals (neither of whom need it), the transformative power of wealth, liberalization of trade, and market-determined interest rates—in other words, in non-governmental interference in an unfettered market. The consequences of neo-liberal economic policies are now being experienced by Americans as our economy falls into recession and millions of working people are losing both their jobs and their homes.

At bottom, Hilary and Obama are scarcely liberals of the Ted Kennedy or Gary Hart schools. They are both moderates and their records on that account do not differ much, though Obama gets higher marks than Hilary on his positions from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action organization.

When you listen to Hilary her speeches are all couched in terms of “I, I, me, me.” In contrast, Obama talks of “we, our, ours and us.” The differences are striking, if you care about the nuances of language and how arguments are framed. Hilary talks about giving us “solutions,” while Obama outlines ways of bringing people together to create our own solutions and to take back our country from the very special interests who support Hillary and Bill Clinton (and Bush). Deeper than that, Obama talks about hope, about caring again for our country and each other. Hilary, instead, raises the old Bush specter of fear. “It’s a dangerous world,” she reminds us, just as Dick Cheney did, while preparing to invade a country that was no threat to us. What emerges is the image of Hilary, who wants to be our first woman president, as Commander in Chief—as a warrior, a polarizing figure right out of the Cold War: “Us against Them.”

In comparison, Obama steps forth as a unifier, a healer. He wants to bring Republicans and Democrats, Independents and the disenfranchised together. I believe Americans are ready for that dialogue; indeed, we yearn for it. After eight years of the world hating us because of George W. Bush’s exceptionalism; eight years of secret government under an imperial presidency; eight years of payoffs to the rich, of thousands of deaths in unnecessary wars, and retaliation, threats and abuse against those of us who have tried to voice our opposition, I think the nation is poised for a new beginning. For that reason I’m placing my hope in Barack Obama.

Some Thoughts on Finishing a New Book

Et in Arcadia ego--Olympia, July 18, 1960

I’ve just finished a new book. It’s a sequel to At the Cut, my memoir of growing up in Gloucester, Massachusetts in the 1940s. I’m calling this one Going Home Again: After the Cut. I should be happy, or at least relieved after the completion of a not insubstantial piece of work. Instead, I feel sad—and it isn’t the melancholy one often experiences after giving birth or reluctantly letting go of something that has engaged us significantly. I’m sad because I think I’ve written a consequential book about how reading liberates, how education empowers, and how speaking up and fighting for what one believes in is ultimately liberating; yet I know there is little hope of its ever finding the kind of publisher who could make it accessible to a wider readership than it will have when it is inevitably published by a small press, or, barring that, when I bring it out myself.

I’ve read the stories about authors who self-publish and whose books are subsequently picked up by trade imprints after they create a sensation. But these books are generally of the self-help variety, or they are novels that would have elicited a commercial interest anyway, due to their subjects or the genre to which they belong—romances, mysteries, thrillers, the occult. There is a further story that accompanies the accounts of success of such books, and that usually tells how the authors promoted them vigorously and often with great creativity. I recently read about a couple in Salem, MA, who spent $50,000 of their own money self-publishing and promoting the wife’s historical novel about women with the ability to read the future in the patterns of old lace to the extent that it won the author a million dollar two-book contract from a major trade publisher. Again: history-mystery-the occult. Also: women's lives.

But I have not written such a book. There is little or no suspense or mystery in the story I’ve tried to tell about my life from high school to the present—the teachers who’ve influenced me, the books that have mattered, the places I’ve visited and the people I’ve met, both in my own country and in Europe. The book is also about my political and intellectual coming of age, narrated against the backdrop of life in America’s oldest fishing port. Furthermore, it’s a record of my search for and discovery of an identity through my involvement in the life of the place where I grew up, a city I left briefly, and, against all expectation, eventually returned home to live and work in.

In my earlier memoir, At the Cut, I wrote about my childhood in one Gloucester neighborhood and about the city, as I watched it change under the pressure of time and historical events. In this sequel, I’ve attempted to write about what it meant to attend a local high school at the height of the McCarthy “Red Scare,” and what it felt like to be a small town boy, the son of Greek immigrants, at an upper class college in New England. I’ve tried to describe what it was like to return to the Europe of my family’s origins during the Cold War—and then to come home on the eve of the war in Vietnam, where I married, started a family, divorced, and have spent the rest of my life living and working.

Going Home Again is not a memoir of trauma and recovery. It does not explain how the author overcame addiction, incest or abuse and found religion, peace, or a new life, as many current memoirs do. Neither does it describe how a writer escaped from her New York society life with a distant father and a drug-taking mother, who tried to seduce her boy friends, to find eventual happiness as a housewife and newspaper columnist in rural Montana, as another recent memoir, which one reviewer called “an emotional thriller,” recounts.

My book doesn’t have a single narrative arc--I always tell several stories simultaneously. It isn’t written to mimic a novel, like most memoirs published today. Though separate chapters focus chronologically on my life from high school and college to the present, the narrative also moves backward and forward in time, developing a series of inter-related themes, including my psycho-social development, my search for an identity, my political and intellectual growth, and a prolonged vocational crisis. Going Home Again also tells how an alienated bookish young man became a political activist, how I was finally able to combine potentially conflicting interests into parallel careers as a writer, teacher and social worker; indeed, how, contrary to what Thomas Wolfe suggested in You Can’t Go Home Again, I was actually able to return to the place of my birth and enjoy a rewarding life, though not without difficulty and struggle.

All of this should be of interest to book lovers beyond my usual readership on the North Shore of Massachusetts. But I’m skeptical. Agents or editors who have looked at my previous work tell me that because I focus on a single American place, which I know better than any other, my books are “too local,” or that they lack commercial appeal. One agent confided to me that the “gritty, unrelenting realism,” of my novel Broken Trip (which was eventually published by the late Grace Paley and her husband Robert Nichols’s Glad Day Books) wouldn’t sell because “readers want to feel good.” At the very least, they want “redemption.” In writing about loss and pain, about troubled lives at the bottom of the social ladder, about the violence of an addict’s life, I would apparently be depressing my readers, the implication being that everyday life is hard enough for most people, why make them read about adversity when all they are really seeking is escape?

Readers who, like me, grew up and went to school in the 1940s and 50s will remember that it wasn’t always this way. While publishers still churned out best sellers and television had begun to cut into the time many had previously spent reading, there was a wide readership for serious literature. Books also did not have to compete with the Internet, and we had not yet shortened the attention span of readers currently conditioned by cell phones, iPods and text messaging. Equally, the saturation in violent action and the hyper-visual stimulation today’s media offer make it more difficult for a reader to sit for hours absorbed in a book. Life moves too fast for those who do not already have the habit of print.

Nevertheless, like all of my books, my memoir is simply and directly written. I focus on a single American place, a city like Gloucester, which is fairly well known in the world. Even after the notoriety of The Perfect Storm, readers paradoxically don't appear to be curious about other views of Gloucester (so editors tell me); and there are so few readers of serious literary writing, fiction or non-fiction, today anyway. My best hope is to find a small press that will take a chance on me, like Grace and Bob did with Broken Trip, or a university press that likes the way I write and finds my work of some intrinsic interest or value because they ultimately know they won't make much money from me. Otherwise, I will publish and promote my book locally, with a friend’s small press or under the imprint a group of us have created to produce books and promote and distribute them via the Internet.

I am fortunate to have a loyal readership in Gloucester. These are the people I write for and care about, and they respond by coming to readings and buying books. To my great pleasure, they actually want to discuss my books with me. Still, like most writers, it remains my hope that somewhere out there is an editor who will pick up my manuscript and say, "This is interesting. I like the way he writes. The voice is unique and the approach to memoir is original. I think we'll take a chance on it." Perhaps one can still dream...

Addendum: February 21, 2008

As if to corroborate what I wrote about the current state of publishing, this morning's New York Times has a double review of father-son memoirs. The son is writing about his addiction to methamphetamines and the father is writing about the effect his son's addiction had on him. Again: addiction/recovery; trauma/salvation (redemption). The reviewer even notes that the nation seems "addicted" to reading this sort of memoir. I don't know what it will take to break the cycle. Publishers just seem to want to cash in.
But the rejection of books that don't fit into established (and marketable) patterns is a form of censorship, and that is very dangerous. It forces writers either into silence or the pitfalls of self-publication, which is both costly and often self-defeating because it's hard to gain a wider readership. Main stream media outlets don't generally review self-published or small press books. Without reviews book stores won't stock a title, hence sales are limited and the vicious circle continues.

There is a further concern. Just as market demands can act as a kind of censorship, there is the self-censorship writers are often forced to undertake if they write to meet commercial demands instead of writing the books they are compelled to create, books that take their own shape and find their own form, books that say what they want to say, regardless of what commercial publishers feel they can sell or what the readership wants. Some of the greatest books in contemporary literature, like Joyce's Ulysses, would never have existed if their authors had not fearlessly followed their own dictates rather than pandering to a market. Who is to say what significant books are lost to us today as writers turn away from what is best in them, away from the great risks that are inherent in our most important works of art? And what happens to the artist who is not faithful to his or her vision; what damage is done to one's creativity, not to speak of what is lost to the world when a writer or artist does not respond to what is best in him or her?

John W. Aldridge, 1924-2007

I heard John Aldridge speak only once. It was in 1956, during the spring of my freshman year in college, when he delivered a major address on the role of the writer in the university at an American literature conference held at Bowdoin. Renowned as a critic, though still young, Aldridge was an imposing figure. Looking more like a Southern aristocrat than a literary critic (born in Sioux City, Iowa, he’d grown up and gone to school in the South before graduating from Berkeley), Aldridge was tall and well built, dressed in a beautifully tailored dark blue suit. His hair was long for the time, though well cut, and he smoked a pipe constantly during the discussion period. Actually, I heard him speak twice that weekend because he also delivered a paper on Robert Frost during a session on the poet, a brilliant essay that advanced a reading of Frost's enigmatic poem "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep" that was so complex and densely argued that I missed its point entirely, though other scholars attending the conference challenged its premises during the often contentious discussion that followed.

But it was Aldridge’s keynote address on the growing phenomenon of creative writers—novelists and poets—as college and university teachers, and the rise of graduate writing programs, that forced me to confront an issue I had never considered before, especially since I myself had, that past year, begun to dream about becoming a writer with the expectation that I would also be teaching.

The substance of Aldridge’s presentation, based on two of his most important and controversial essays, “The Young Writer in America,” and “The Writer in the University,” was that academic life was no place for a creative writer. Not only was the teaching of literature counterproductive for a writer, who hoped to produce imaginative work of any originality or distinction, the life itself—faculty parties, departmental meetings, the seemingly endless grading of student papers, and the intellectual careerism—was deadening, he argued. Aldridge himself was a teacher. At that time he was an associate professor in the English department at the University of Vermont. He had also taught at Princeton, and he would continue to teach, beginning a long career, in 1964, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor that would last until his retirement, in 1992. But, as he later wrote about his own teaching, “I do not see that any purpose is served in attempting to make a virtue of the necessity which impelled me to teaching, nor in remaining blind to the many dangers inhering in it for the writer.”

Aldridge continued: “I am specifically concerned with the tendency now rapidly accelerating in the intellectual world to endow the university with creative powers and advantages which it cannot and does not possess, and I am particularly opposed to the development which has made the university the seat of literary politics and power in our time and which has transformed so many of our younger intellectuals into university apologists and literary politicians.”

Aldridge wrote these words in 1956, shortly before his Bowdoin address. They also formed the core of the presentation I heard. I needn’t point out how prophetic they have become to readers with any knowledge or understanding of academic life or literary politics today, when writing programs are centers of power and their faculties and graduates produce most of what’s published today as literary fiction and poetry.

All this was new to me as an eighteen-year-old with literary aspirations. But when Aldridge set the text of his talk back down on the lectern, looked out over the audience, and said, in effect, that if there were any aspiring writers among the students in the hall they shouldn’t be listening to him, they should be on the first train out of Brunswick, I was stunned.

“You will not learn how to write by first studying the writing of others,” he said. “That can come later—most good writers do it on their own anyway.” “What is primary,” he insisted, is that the young writer gain “a fund of experience in the world outside of the academy.” He didn’t say “real world.” It was not a term used then. Travel the country, Aldridge advised, like Jack London, Dreiser and Hemingway; take a series of jobs; do manual labor; work for a newspaper. Get the feel of the country. Come to know a diversity of people, men and women you will never meet in college. “Saturate yourself in the particulars of daily life—that’s where art comes from,” not from “an artificial environment,” like the university, where, Aldridge insisted, “more ideas are conceived than are ever put to use,” and “more passions are analyzed than are ever felt.”

As for those writers who were already teaching, Aldridge warned: “Remain here at your own risk and the integrity of your work, if not of your lives.” Writing and teaching about writing or literature were mutually exclusive practices, he concluded.

I left Aldridge’s talk reeling. A friend, with whom I had published in the college literary magazine, dropped out immediately and hitchhiked to New York, where he got a job and began living and writing in the Village, subsequently producing a remarkable series of plays. Another classmate left in June, heading for San Francisco, from which he sent me some poetry that made what had been published in our undergraduate magazine seem the merest imitation. Overhearing my own writing teacher, novelist Stephen Minot, in discussion with Aldridge and speaking with Steve later, I realized the impact Aldridge’s talk had on him. “It forced me to re-think my own choices,” Steve said.

I finished college, largely because I was afraid not to. I think it was also because I couldn’t bear to disappoint my parents. But my deepest wish had been to drop out, to travel across the country with my friend Mark Power, who’d gone ahead to San Francisco, and begin the living Aldridge posited as the primary consideration for a writer. I finished college and I went to graduate school, two in fact, though I was never a committed scholar and I always felt that writing was the principal focus of my life. Yet, as I struggled with remaining in school, I returned often to that warning Aldridge had issued to hopeful writers and to the books he’d written, which advanced and deepened his own critical thinking about writing, its making and function.

Until I’d heard Aldridge speak, I hadn’t read much literary criticism or even thought about it as a separate genre. I began by reading two books by Aldridge that had recently been published, After the Lost Generation (1951) and In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity (1956). I can’t begin to describe the impact of those books on me. In fact, it can be said that if anything helped me ultimately decide to become a writer it was reading Aldridge, who had written so poignantly about what it meant to be an American writer, first in Paris in the 1920s, when he focused on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and other members of the Lost Generation, and then in post-war America, in his no less powerful chapters on Norman Mailer, John Horne Burns, Vance Bourjaily and Gore Vidal. Aldridge gave me American writing as it was then being practiced, more directly than from any course I might have taken; and he also gave me the first means I had of evaluating that writing beyond the narrow New Critical precepts that were built into our English instruction. After reading Aldridge I went on to read Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, his first-hand report on the Lost Generation, and then Cowley’s The Literary Situation, about writing and publishing at mid-century. From Cowley I moved on to read Edmund Wilson’s literary criticism (it would be some years before I found To the Finland Station and Patriotic Gore) and Alfred Kazin's seminal study of American prose, On Native Grounds. By sophomore year I had begun to read formal criticism of a more academic nature in my literature courses; and then I took a year-long seminar from Lawrence Sargent Hall in the theory and practice of criticism. But it was Aldridge who got me started, and I have been reading criticism ever since, not only for what I can learn from it about writing, but also because I find the best criticism incredibly stimulating on a purely intellectual level.

I bought and read every one of Aldridge’s subsequent books, and there were many, including, A Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis (1966), The American Novel and the Way We Live Now (1983), and Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction (1992). There were further collections of his critical essays, Classics and Contemporaries (1992) and The Devil in the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture, 1951-1971 (1972), an omnibus of his career. Aldridge even published a novel, The Party at Cranton (1960), which was coruscating in its criticism of academic life, especially English departments. He also published a book of social criticism, In the Country of the Young (1970), an attack on the inherent anti-intellectualism of the growing youth culture of the 1960s, which I disagreed with at the time, but have since come to appreciate for its prescience, the same clairvoyance that obtained in Aldridge’s essays about the danger of academic life for the creative writer.

As Aldridge aged his focus narrowed, as one might expect. Just as he had called for “heresy” in 1956 and when it arrived in the persons and work of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs he didn’t like it, Aldridge later rejected the fiction of Raymond Carver, who, like Hemingway before him, had given new voice and form to the American short story. Yet it was thrilling to see how Aldridge penetrated the stilted preciosity of John Updike’s prose and over-determined plots and the pseudo-portentousness of William Styron's "big" late novels, while being among the few critics to have understood the kinds of risks Norman Mailer was taking in books like An American Dream and Armies of the Night.

It is said that Aldridge was working on a memoir—he called it “a literary biography”— before his death, in Madison, Georgia, on February 7, 2007. I once saw a chapter about his early life and family in a literary review and found it hauntingly beautiful. I’m posting this essay in part because, aside from a death notice in the June 2007 newsletter of the Hopwood Writing Awards program at the University of Michigan, which Aldridge once directed, I was unable to find an obituary for him anywhere on the Internet, though I can’t imagine a writer and critic of his importance not having been memorialized. I’ve also written these words of tribute because had it not been for hearing John Aldridge speak in 1956, and having then discovered his books, I would not be writing today. I would probably not be the person I am either.

A Canticle for Bread and Stones: Emilio DeGrazia's novel of Italian-American life

Growing up in immigrant families one hears stories. These stories are one of the ways we make sense of our histories, of each other, ourselves. When we are very young we can’t get enough of them. As we become acculturated we can’t seem to put enough distance between ourselves and the stories. And then there comes a time when we must have them again, a time when these stories are so essential to us that, at any risk, we must recover them, even though the original tellers may now be dead or suffering from the attrition of memory that comes with age.

A Canticle for Bread and Stones is a novel about stories; it’s a novel of stories. More specifically, it is a beautifully imagined narrative of the Italian experience in America, and as such it is a response to what Gay Talese asked for in his 1993 New York Times Book Review article, “Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?”

In that controversial article, Talese, a novelist-turned journalist, asserted that “it is a fact that there is no widely recognized body of work in American literature that deals with this profound experience.” While there may not yet be Italian-Americans who have produced an oeuvre like that of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud--and Talese offers some of the reasons for this disparity--there are both established novelists like the late Pietro di Donato and Gilbert Sorrentino and emerging writers like Joe Torra, Maria De Marco Torgovnick, Frank Lentricchia and Rita Ciresi, who have written trenchantly in memoirs, stories and novels about what it feels like to grow up Italian in America. With the publication of A Canticle for Bread and Stones Emilio DeGrazia, already the author of two prize-winning collections of stories, Enemy Country and Seventeen Grams of Soul, and the Minnesota Voices Award novel, Billy Brazil, joins their company.

The drama of this luminous novel involves not only the telling of stories about four generations of an Italian family’s experience in a mid-Western city, but the very quest for such stories. Its narrator-protagonist Salvatore “Sal” Amato, is an unemployed 28-year old “BA in History, City University” whose marriage is dissolving even as he and his non-Italian wife Sandy cling to each other sexually. As Sal half-heartedly looks for work, entranced by the women he encounters on the street and in shops (“God, what a lovely woman the stranger was!”) he becomes obsessed with a family legend.

The legend is about his great-grandfather Raphael, an accomplished stone mason, who left his native village of San Giovanni, south of Naples, to travel with the famous French architect Pierre Vente to America There, in a city bisected by a wide river, they were commissioned to build a great cathedral to be called St. Paul’s through which Raphael could make concrete his and Vente’s dream of a structure symbolizing faith, love and the redemptive nature of work (“He was in charge of the stones,” Sal’s mother says of Raphael. “He built the walls.”) The cathedral was completed to wide acclaim, but Raphael did not remain on the job to see his vision made manifest. Depending upon who tells the story, the family or the local diocese, Raphael was either dismissed from his job or left of his own volition because of irreconcilable differences about the details and design of the structure. The family’s version is one of betrayal, dismissal and regret, and it sets the theme for the family’s sense of its unsuccessful history in America. For in the next generation Raphael’s son Guido, Sal’s grandfather, was forced out of business, according to the family, by an unscrupulous landlord who sold him the building that housed his grocery store and then foreclosed on him when he was unable to make two mortgage payments.

The sense of betrayal and a concomitant loss of the promise of America emerges again in Guido’s son Paul, Sal’s father, recently retired after thirty-three years of hard labor in an automotive factory, where he made “the side part for carburators…three hundred a day.” Yet Paul reminds Sal, whom he calls a bum for not working, “Who ever said you were supposed to like work? We all hate work. That’s life.”

So it falls to Sal, who, with his pianist-composer brother Bruno and his “little sister” Bea, still an undergraduate, are the only members of the family to have had a college education, to get to the heart of the mystery of the family’s betrayal by America and the dream of success which has eluded them, and to find some way beyond their ambivalence about the very work that was to make the dream come true. Paul tells Sal, “Our people came here to this country to get out of the jungle, and we worked like animals all our lives. We came because we didn’t have washing machines and cars, because we were tired of living from hand to mouth, because we worked in the field all our lives.” Yet Paul, like his father Guido, yearns less for success or wealth than for a small plot of earth where he can grow beans and tomatoes; and Guido, long bereft of his store, returns daily to its empty rooms and backyard to brood over the lost business and his ruined garden. What are Sal and his siblings to make of this legacy of betrayal and ambivalence, of the conflicting and conflicted feelings about the new country the family has uneasily settled in, the nostalgia for the one that was abandoned (Sal’s mother’s mother Serafina had left America for Italy, never to return; while Guido, in his 90s, talks constantly of “going home” again—“It’s all in my mind, just the way everything was.”)?

Bruno’s choice is to make a precarious living playing piano in nightclubs and dives. By day he composes music (“some crazy blue tune”) in the vacant storefront of Guido’s old grocery, his grandfather constantly brooding outside in the garden. His lover Kate, born Protestant like Sal’s wife Sandy (“You Catholics are really weird.”) runs the Socialist Workers Party headquarters across the street. Kate idealizes work, but Bruno remains a drop-out from the Great Society, and Sal refuses to spend a life doing “stupid useless things.” Of himself and Bruno he says, “Bruno and I were alike: We both wanted to find a habitable hiding place away from a world growing too ugly for words.”

Under pressure from wife and parents, Sal searches desultorily for a job. He also searches for the elusive woman, the “soul,” which his father tells him is counterpart to man’s “flesh,” embodied in the unknown women he encounters in the ever more alien streets of his native city or the waitresses who serve him coffee along the Via Crucis of his quest. But his real search is for the truth of Raphel’s abandonment of St. Paul’s and for the man, Waldman, who cheated Guido out of his store, a German immigrant, now Catholic, now Protestant, who became a self-made millionaire. In getting to heart of Guido’s dissapointment and in finding and perhaps even punishing the mysterious and contradictory Waldman, Sal hopes to live up to his name and become the Savior of his family’s honor and history. Only this, he feels, will provide release from the uneasy tension he experiences in his marriage and from the taunts and exhortations of his family to become a man, that is, a worker, and a father himself.

The quest will not be an easy one. It will end with his mother’s death and the demise of his marriage. Sal will find a job briefly as an apprentice wood worker and uneasy comfort in seeing Bruno and Kate married and the parents of a child. He will watch his father entering a new life with Edna, a born-again Christian Pentecostal whom his mother befriends before her sudden death. Bea will settle down with Kate’s hippie-musician brother Dylan, and Sandy will move out to live with another man. Equally, Sal will come closer to an understanding of Raphael’s relationship with the church heirarchy under whom he was to build St. Paul’s. He will even confront Waldman, who emerges less an exploiter than a recluse whose wealth has brought him only confusion and isolation. But, more ominously, Sal will witness the destruction of his neighborhood as the city evicts his father, Bruno, Kate, and himself from their houses to make way for a gigantic sports complex. And with the razing of the places where the family has lived out its history the visible monuments of that history will dissolve.

All that will remain will be the stories and versions of stories, which Sal has patiently listened to, gathered, sifted and compared, his family’s stories and those of his mentor and ex-professor of history, Seymour Markels, who guides Sal’s work as family historian. All that will remain is what Sal has learned from the attempt of others to make sense of the myths of belief, labor and family they have accepted largely on faith and under the pressures of tradition. Sal’s own education, warily assented to by his parents, for they know it will eventually take him away from them, provides no key to his enlightenment, nor even a well-paying job in a city that renews itself by destruction as racial tensions mount and public space becomes privatized.

If A Canticle for Bread and Stones is a novel of stories it is also a novel of voices. Just as DeGrazia shows exceptional skill in weaving the stories told by and about the novel’s characters throughout the narrative, he is equally skillful in giving us the voices of the characters themselves. There is the sound of Sal’s father’s rough resignation: “Thank God I’m through. Thank God I’m almost dead myself.” Of Guido’s feisty hatred of the land that he never made his own: “Don’t talk to me about Amerdica!” Of his wife Rosina’s fluent piety: “All these years and no baby comes. What do you expect? Don’t forget to say the rosary every morning and night by your bed. You’ll see then a baby will come.”

If the bread of the novel’s title is what Sal’s family has lived on, the warm, sustaining, sacramental homemade loaves his mother has baked and served in spotless white napkins since his childhood, whose recipe will die with her, it is the stones of the world the men must ultimately shape and master in work in order to feel that their lives have purpose. The women have faith in prayer and song, the men seem to need something more concrete, those three hundred carburetor parts hatefully turned out or the plot of tomatoes lovingly tended after a day on the assembly line.

Canticle is song or psalm, celebration. In the book’s division into thirty-three chapters or cantos, each with its own theme or refrain, Emilio DeGrazia has given us more than a novel of Italian-American culture. A Canticle for Bread and Stones is also hymn to a vanishing way of life, to the once vital ethnic communities now disappearing everywhere in the face of mass culture and consumerism, and to love in all its exalted or perverted forms, especially, as Sal re-discovers as an Italian and Roman Catholic, the love of woman—Queen of Heaven, mother, sister, wife, stranger:

“What did I know about Her? Maybe even less than she knew about Me. But this I felt deeply and therefore knew all along: That she was vital to my work, that she who could bring new life out of passion (call it love) had the power to create and conserve I craved, that in her absence all work went wrong.”

(Emilio DeGrazia. A Canticle for Bread and Stones. Rochester, MN: Lone Oak Press, 1997. 312 pp. The author's photograph is reproduced from the dust jacket.)

Reflections on Turning Seventy

(Sky in Honfleur by Nicholas de Stael)

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...

I