CARICATURES AND CHARACTERS

FROM THE WORLD OF THE TRANSPLANTED

FARFARIELLO

THE CAFONI OBSERVED BY A BOURGEOIS

I don’t know who the first writer was who jammed a word from the Italian American lingo into an Italian-language poem, but this I know for certain: he couldn’t have cared less about art. The same must have felt those who came after him and created a genre that turned out to be a cross between a storytelling musical and a Vaudeville-like act, the kind of show that had great success in small theaters in all the Little Italies of the United States between 1890 and 1940. Farfariello, alias of Eduardo Migliaccio,[1] was the most important, original and popular interpreter of this genre. He had phenomenal success all over the United States and also in Italy. He succeeded in attracting a non-Italian public that nicknamed him “The Italian Harry Lauder.”[2] For those who don’t know Lauder, just as I didn’t know before I began researching Farfariello, he was a Scottish baritone who became greatly popular in those times with a repertory of popular songs. Yet, Farfariello, as far as I am concerned, was something else. He was a critical and moralistic observer with a satirical vein. He was, in a sense, a historian of the curious characters that lived (and live) in the world of the Transplanted: on one side the cafoni; on the other side their exploiters. In order to portray them accurately, he used the lingo of Italian Americans because it was the most effective way to reproduce their identities. He created the caricature-characters of the cafone scostumato [offensively uncouth bore], Pasquale Passaguai [Pascal Always-in-Trouble], the cafone risagliuto [new-rich], the cafone patriota [patriot], the cafone nervoso [irritable, anxious], the cafone sciampagnore [squanderer], the cafone cantante [ever-singing], the cafone ‘ngannato [gullible, deceived], the cafone socialista [socialist] and finally… lu presidente dello globbo [the president of the social club.] In total he created some five hundred characters that mirrored the sociological and anthropological types of Italian immigrants. The writers of satirical poems knew they were handling controversial material, and in fact on paper they used to underline with a red pen the words taken from the lingo to emphasize their provenance. To them this was not poetic material. In order to understand the difference, we should go back to the use of Italianized English words by other true artist-writers, such as Gioacchino Belli[3] and Giovanni Pascoli.[4] In one of his sonnets Belli gives a cabinet maker the responsibility to explain the meaning of gratis and picnic vulgarized and Italianized into aggratis and picchenicche. The first word is from Latin; the second

from English by way of French:

 

Sto picchenicche è una parola grega,                                                                     

Che vvo’ di’: ppagà er pranzo a un tant’a testa

 

[This picnic is a Greek[5] word / that means: each one pays for his own lunch.]

The sonnet ends with these words:

Be’… dunque… aggratis significa a uffaggna

Picchenicche vo’ddi’: ppaghi chi mmaggna.

[Well, then, gratis means for free / picnic means: if you eat you’ll pay.]

For Belli, foreign words adapted to the Italian ear are a local-color issue. His satire has to do with social classes: the man-of-the-people from low-class Rome explains with all sorts of errors the meaning of new words used by the wealthy, adopted from a language he calls ”Greek.” English words underwent the same treatment by the writers of Little Italy (even if they didn’t know Belli.)

In Pascoli, the artistic use of English or Italian-English words gives a veneer of local color in the well known poem Italy.[6] Here the touch of local color has a sentimental and patriotic value, tinged with nostalgia. No one else was able to bring the Italian American lingo to such a high level of cultural and emotional expression. Pascoli is also the only one, as far as I know, who was able to extract new effects from the rhyme of Italian words and words of the new lingo imported from America.

I won’t debate Livingston’s analysis of those words and his claim that Pascoli used them incorrectly, perhaps because of his limited knowledge of English. The issue is not Pascoli’s philological precision, rather his artistic ability to use new material. He understood both its validity and limits. Those words are like tiles introduced into a mosaic to give it a sense of primitivism, like Middle Ages paintings with the crown on the Madonna’s head made of real gold with precious stones rather than painted.

Pascoli’s smiles are unlike Belli’s full-mouth laughs: they are hints of sweetness and understanding. Pascoli is taken by surprise by these new beings that appear unexpectedly in the middle of Tuscany—where he lived at the time—carrying the echo of a faraway experience, the resonance of money, customs and words. In the same way, French or Arabic words must have impressed thirteen century people who heard them in the mouth of other Italians; merchants and navigators who had traveled to foreign lands and were bringing back foreign smells, animals and rare specimens never seen before. In order for those words to become poetry, however, they require the magical touch of someone like Pascoli, curious like a smart peasant and sensitive like a girl.

The storytellers and Vaudeville artists—Farfariello first among them—were cut of a different cloth. They wrote thousands of poems with music performed in Italian theaters. Texts and scores were printed on thin sheets of paper with funny vignettes from woodcuts and sold everywhere in the stores and newsstands of the Little Italies. The authors used the lingo as an identification badge. Then, alas, when they tried to write serious poetry, they would switch back to the kind of Italian laden with clichés that schools had taught them. But, even in these songs one can still find an implicit attitude of superiority by the semi-educated class toward southern peasants. Yet, they left behind images of a cafone who, with his poor, limited and concrete language, could express his defiance, scorn and pain for the tribulations he had to endure in America. It is the kind of attitude and emotion that surfaced in all its clarity in the apologue regarding a no-nonsense female character who was reading a script, written in passable but stereotypical Italian by some know-it-all high-school dropout. The playwright insisted that she should use the word palazzo[7] instead of the standard term bildingo. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “You call this bildingo a palazzo?” Under the pressure of capitalist exploitation; of racism from the Irish who were competing for the true profession of the Catholic faith; and the disdain of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class; the cafoni developed a language that was much livelier than the sausage-stuffed semi-official Italian made of dead expressions preserved under brine in a dictionary, and good only for patriotic rhetorical plays.

Eduardo Migliaccio was born in 1880 [sic] in Cava dei Tirreni[8] where his well-to-do Neapolitan family used to spend the summer. His grandfather migrated to the United States, invested his fortune in a Pennsylvania mine but—based on what I heard from the last descendants in the family—ended up losing everything. His grandson arrived here probably when he was eighteen years old. He found a job in a bank but didn’t last long. That kind of work wasn’t for him. According to an interview he gave to the periodical Americolo[9] (founded by Fiorello La Guardia), to make ends meet Farfariello started working as a scribe, writing letters under dictation for illiterate immigrants to their Italian relatives. He discovered feelings, expressions and personalities that made a deep impression on him. Like many Italians he could write rhymes with ease. In fact, he was only thirteen years old when he wrote his first sonnet (Apollo, [10] apparently, forgave him.) In his earlier years, in Naples he had admired the work of the “grandissimo Maldacea.”[11] In New York he hung out with Italians and started going to the local theaters where wannabe entertainers were performing. It didn't take long before he decided to try, confident that he could do better than them. His first gig was in a small variety theater where he was paid seven dollars a week. In a short time he became a success. Cleverly, he used the material he had learned working at the bank and as a scribe, and he started with satirical portraits and caricatures of the people he had met. Later in his career he said he had realized that “the Italian community was infested with all sorts of swindlers who devised every possible scheme in the world to scam and bleed the poor cafoni.” Apparently, he was animated by the spirit of a reformer, something very rare in an Italian, and even more in a Neapolitan. And maybe he was sincere. Poor Italian immigrants were squeezed by their oppressive American bosses, but also by the more odious exploitation of small southern-Italian wheeler-dealers who could barely read and count, but knew how to take advantage of fellow countrymen with the callousness of usurers and the avidity of merchants. Before legitimate Italian banks opened branches in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, the communities were dominated by were so-called bankers, notaries or travel agents that took advantage in every way possible of the ignorance of the immigrants and who, systematically, would go bankrupt and flee back to Italy with bags full of money. Nothing in this world is as expensive as ignorance and Italian immigrants were the ideal victims predestined to pay the tribute that naïveté and ignorance have always paid to knowledge and cunning. Who knows? Maybe Farfariello’s songs helped alerting the immigrants of the most obvious scams perpetrated by despicable shysters and crooks. Many of these were genuine criminals and convicted felons who had entered the United States at a time when no passport was required. Indeed, many were pushed to leave Italy by the local police, happy to see them go. Unfortunately, though, in the end, in artistic terms, Farfariello left us with a much stronger and vivid caricature of the gullible immigrant, rather than the satire of the scamming élite.

Descriptions portray Migliaccio’s as tall and stocky, with gray, penetrating eyes and bushy eye brows. His photos as a young man show a handsome adolescent with typical Neapolitan features, a pleasant smile, a vivacious spirit and luminous eyes. His grandfather was deeply disappointed when he decided to become an entertainer. For a solid, respectable bourgeois family it wasn’t considered proper to have a child who worked as a clown. I was told that his grandfather never went to see him perform. Migliaccio, however, maintained a behavior in line with his social class. In his family he imposed very rigid morals, he was quiet and, if anything, private and somber. A person who did business with him told me that he behaved more like a funeral home director than a Vaudeville comedian. He always dressed impeccably in the fashion of the time, in spats, with a black jacket, striped pants, whirling a cane. He didn’t like to travel. An American observer mentioned seeing him often alone, sitting at the table of a café in Little Italy, intent on observing clients and passers-by. From his own word we know that he was picking his caricatures from real life, trying to penetrate their thoughts. Like many artists, he took care of the most minute details of his characters. For instance, he made all his wigs by himself. He used fake beards and moustache or, sometimes, full-face masks. He had a mid-range voice, not too powerful but pleasant. He had a very wide repertoire, with an estimated five hundred characters. He also imitated famous personalities of his days. Among the most successful ones was Enrico Caruso. Often he impersonated women, or a Bowery bum,[12] or an Italian recruit in the American army. In the course of one show he would impersonate about five or six of them. At times he was doing four shows a day.

Farfariello’s caricatures—as well as those of other performers—reveal the real problems and the emotional issues of the immigrants of the first generation. We see these poor people confronting the new circumstances of their lives; often unable to understand what was going on around them and constantly penalized because they could not make sense of reality. Thus, the general theme turns out to be their animosity toward the country that had lured them in with the myth of easy wealth. Hopes and dreams crashed, followed by the teary or ridiculous stories of their tragedies; of the conflicts with the law; of the rejections by women; of the humiliations when they spoke English. The emblem of this whole world is the mythical figure of Pasquale Passaguai, who runs into every trouble imaginable (the name Pasquale in Neapolitan dialect already suggests a bumbling idiot.) At the same time we see the re-evaluation of the motherland that slowly becomes a mythical entity thanks to her ancient glories and, most of all, for having given birth to Christopher Columbus, without whom America would not exist. Here is the origin of the consoling myth that for centuries has comforted Italians in all their defeats: “When today’s oppressors were small barbaric tribes, Italians were already a great civilization.” Typical of the first theme is the invective America Sanemagogna[13] [America daughter of a whore] that closes a sonnet by Carlo Ferrazzano.[14]

Typical of the second theme is the skit Orrè Italy [Hurrah Italy], in the style of the Commedia dell’arte.[16] Here is the text, by the same author:

Na serra dentro na barra Americana dove il patrone era americano, lo visco era americano, la birra era Americana, ce steva na ghenga de loffari tutti americani: solo io non era americano; quanno a tutto nu momento me mettono mmezzo e me dicettero: “Alò spaghetti; iu mericano men?” “No! no! Mi Italy men!”

“Iu blacco enze?” “No, no!” “Iu laico chistu contrì?” “No, no! Mi laico mio contrì! Mi laico Italy!” A qusto punto me chiaviene lo primo fait! Dice: “Orrè for America!” Io tuosto: “Orrè for Italy.” Un ato fait. Dice: “Orrè for America?”“Orrè for Italy.” N’ato fait e n’ato fait, fino a che me facetteno addurmentare, ma però “orrè for America” non o dicette!

Quanno me scietaie, me trovaie ncoppo lu marciapiedi cu nu pulizio vicino che diceva: “Ghiroppe bomma!” Io ancora stunato alluccaie: “America nun gudde! for orrè Italy!” Sapete li pulizio che facette? Mi arrestò. Quanno fu la mattina lu giorge mi dicette: “Wazzo maro laste naite?” Io risponnette: “No tocche nglese!” “No? Tenne dollari?” E quello porco dello giorge nun scherzava, perchè le diece pezze se le pigliaie!...

[One evening in an American bar, where the owner was American, whiskey was

American, beer was American, there was a gang of loafers, all American. I was the only non American. Suddenly they surrounded me and started talking: ”Hello spaghetti, you American man?” “No! No! Me Italy man!” “You Black Hand?” “No, no!” “You like this country?” “No, no! Me like my country” I like Italy.“ At this point I took the first fight [punch]. He says: “Hurrah for America!” Me, tough guy: “Orrè for Italy!” Another fight. He says: “Hurrah for America?” “Hurrah for Italy.” Another fight and another fight, until they knocked me out, but “hurrah for America” I didn’t say it.

When I woke up I found myself on the sidewalk next to a policeman who was saying: “Get up, bum!” Still out of it, I looked at him: “America no good! for hurrah Italy!” You know what the policeman did? He arrested me. The following morning, the judge asked me: “What’s the matter last night?” I answered: “No talk English!” “No? You have dollars?” And that pig of a judge wasn’t kidding, because he took his ten pieces [dollars].]

This is not high poetry. Actually, to be honest, it isn’t even poetry. But at least it’s alive. At the same time, the petty bourgeois that finished college in Italy, or at least high school or even vocational schools, were “making the presses squeal” as we used to say. Their poems were in correct Italian, a language with no contact with reality; full of clichés and bombastic images; teary or bleating; always false and rhetorical; leftovers of memories and rhyme repertories such as the literary pustules of Riccardo Cordiferro. Sometimes you could hear the effects of this rhetoric even in authors who were writing in English, like Arturo Giovannitti.

In comparison, these caricatures, created for commercial reasons (the ten pezze is the compensation Ferrazzano received for his pieces,) had a purpose and were welcome by a public that felt their sting and appreciated their satirical intent. Rough, uncouth, many times with double entendres, they were coming out of a historical necessity and, to this day, they are among the few genuine documents left of the first period of Italian immigration to America.

July 15, 1962