FOUR DOGS FIGHTING FOR THE SAME BONE

On October 4, Professor Lustri-Pungiglioni[1] passed away. He taught language, literature and Italian civilization at Brander College.[2] For many years he went by the sole name Lustri [luster], a name that fit him perfectly, by the way. He fell in love with the historical figure of Princess Pungiglioni,[3] a star of Italian Rinascimento so important that to this very day scholars are tracking down the lists of her dirty laundry and the recipes of famous dishes prepared by her cook. Since he wrote a book about her, Professor Lustri convinced himself that he had become a member of the family. He thus appealed to a judge to have the name Pungiglioni added to his own, explaining that he could not live without it. He couldn’t add the title of prince because American law does not recognize such titles. However, he could change his name. American law allows even a street sweeper to call himself Washington or Lincoln even though these names belong to the national patrimony. With foreign names they are even more lax, even if one chooses Bonaparte[4] or Pungiglioni. Back in Italy, the real Prince Pungiglioni protested but he could do nothing against an American decree that has validity only in America. There is no patent to protect the name Pungiglioni: his ancestors forgot to apply for one in Washington, D.C. And, incidentally, Washington, D.C. did not exist in those days.

The news of his impending demise leaked out of the family circle and trickled into the little world that occupies itself with Italian studies; and, most of all, occupies all the college teaching positions in Italian—which have not changed at all for the last twenty years. Here some curious phenomena begin to appear. Since there are no new university positions in Italian, whenever someone leaves by resignation, retirement or death, the event is immediately object of intense interest; like what happens in the army when a general retires. As the news of his imminent demise spread, secret meetings were scheduled. Letters were written. Telephones rang off the hook. Discreet visits took place. Some individuals, who had not talked to each other in a long time, had lunch together. College presidents received as gifts volumes from people they had never heard from before. Even the cardinal was quietly told that, after a brief stop in purgatory, a new soul would be soon on his way to heaven; and that, in the meantime, a chair would be available right away for a Catholic professor.

Comforted by the fervid prayers of the aspiring candidates, wrapped in veils of sighs and sorrow, Professor Lustri-Pungiglioni finally became a “dear departed.”

As soon as the city newspaper published the obituary with a biography prepared by the family, the phenomena increased in intensity and relevance.

Meanwhile, in Orlando, Florida, the author of the History of Italian Teaching in the United States and other Italophile essays, was counting the years before the age for a full pension after teaching Italian grammar without ever teaching his student to speak Italian. These students were the children of lucky farmers of orange groves. He taught them for more or less sixty semesters, always using the same identical textbook since the beginning of his academic career, which happened to be just after he dropped out of medical school in Naples. The news of Lustri-Pungiglioni’s death arrived by means of the local Italian language newspaper he was using in class; despite the fact that the periodical is written in lingua cafonica,[5] namely a mixture of sentences in the dialect of Abruzzi translated into Italian and mixed together with local terms derived from English. The short news item was originally a wire sent from New York to Italy by the agency ANSA and published in an Italian newspaper. With a few translation mistakes and typos picked up along the way it finally landed in Florida. Here it sparked in him a sudden burst of enthusiasm, something that had never happened before. He decided that this time he would give it a shot. Up until now, he had never applied for a position that would finally reward his labor as historian of Italian culture. The position was in New York, with those great libraries, archives, and the possibility to give lectures to a knowledgeable public. Finally he could get out of his borgo selvaggio[6] [hicks’ hamlet]. (That’s how, in his literary jargon, he would call that beautiful city nested among citrus groves—but only in the secrecy of his own mind, never in public, to avoid creating conflicts.) He could not miss the chance. So, certain of his entitlement he started gathering his credentials.

In Boston, on the eastern hill, where many unremarkable Italian families live, lights were shining in Ms. Bonuzzi’s parlor. Her husband was a teacher of Italian in one of the city’s middle schools. But because there were very few students of Italian, he had to refresh his Latin studies from the time when he was a young lad. He was also teaching Spanish, which he had learned in summer school in intensive programs administered with huge injections of forty-day courses. The lady of the house had always dreamed of living in New York where her family also lived and would scold her husband for not being smart enough to get a job there. When she heard the news on the radio, a torrent of images flooded her mind. Weekends with her family… Strolls along Fifth Avenue… As soon as her husband walked in the door with a bundle of papers to grade under his arm, she gave him one of her usual lectures. It was urgent for him to go to New York as soon as possible and see that college’s president. But first he should ask his Boston colleagues for letters of recommendation; collect all the book reviews he had written for professional journals; all the radio interviews; and even that rare congratulation note from the Italian consul. He should wear his best winter coat, new shirt etc. etc. It was an endless flow of instructions, one on top of the other, so chaotic and rambling that if he had followed these he wouldn’t be able to follow those and vice versa.

From a country in central Europe, where she was teaching in a finishing school for rich young ladies, a girl[7] sent a telegram to the college president: “Profoundly sorry death adored teacher, eager to continue splendid tradition.” To tell the truth, to those of us who knew both the deceased and the candidate, that note sounded a bit off-key. Many times we heard the young candidate wonder how such a vane individual, enamored only of himself and his own eloquence, ever managed to become a professor of Italian literature in a prestigious college. And, on the other hand, many times we heard the teacher joke about the critical theories of the girl he himself had promoted with top grades. To him her criticism was just a bunch of foolishness, typical of today’s youth perverted by critics like Benedetto Croce[8] and De Sanctis about whom the only thing he knew were the names.

Marquise Boninsegni[9] had just disembarked from the ocean liner Cristoforo Colombo when, on the pier, she ran into a friend, a teacher, who was surprised to see her in New York. The first thing the teacher told her was that the professor had suddenly died and his position was vacant. Marquise Boninsegni wasn’t really a marquise. She was the daughter of a marquis but she wasn’t the oldest child.[10] Moreover, she was married to an American commoner whom she had met during WWII, stuffed in an U.S. Army officer’s uniform, with an automobile, and tons of chocolates in his pockets. So she married him. Once she got to New York she must have been a bit disappointed when she found herself doing house chores with her husband who had a modest job working in a bank. When she heard about the position she started hoping she could make use of the laurea[11] she had been awarded in Italy several years earlier. It was a nice laurea that showed that the marquise, a beautiful lady who knew how to dress beautifully, had studied Latin and Ancient Greek with a final grade of 80/100.[12] Her thesis was on a canzoniere[13] of the 15th century. The marquis in all those years had not given a single thought to Italian literature. First it was because of the war; then the marriage; then the need to learn English so she could communicate with her husband’s family that looked at her askance when she tried to pronounce the th sound that always came out like a t from her splendid set of teeth. All these things had kept her mental abilities and time totally busy. On top of this let’s not forget to add that she had achieved a rather solid position thanks to her canasta-playing skills. Now, the idea that she could take advantage of the degree she had in the drawer went straight to her head. “An Italian laurea…. It must be worth a lot.” When she realized that the marquise was interested in the position, her friend—who wouldn’t have minded the position for herself—suddenly turned cold. Her friend told the marquise that in New York City only private schools can hire people with foreign degrees. Public schools demand an American degree, plus a dozen courses on pedagogy that teach people how to teach so that they end up knowing absolutely nothing about the subject they are going to teach. And, finally, she said, it was more important to have the correct English accent than a native Italian accent, even if the position was in Italian. The students, she hinted, would laugh at a teacher with an accent and the school’s prestige would plummet. The marquise was crushed. At dinner that night she took it out on her husband: “What kind of country is this America of yours… A bunch of barbarians... They don’t even recognize the value of an Italian laurea… Do they even know who Professor Vandàli was?”[14] To tell the truth, the marquise attended only two lectures by Vandàli, either because she skipped his classes or because Vandàli was always away on some kind of academic business and barely lectured at all. Her husband, who kept hearing that name, at a certain point sought out information whether the two of them had something going, but he got back excellent reassurance: Vandàli was an old, harmless man in a good state of preservation. No danger loomed.

In a university in a western state there was a young professor of Italian who never read Italian newspapers and knew he wouldn’t learn a thing from the Italian-language newspaper published in his town. Indeed, he prohibited his students from reading it. He preferred reading the classics, critical essays and erudite journals. He was passionate about new studies that tried to reconstruct the context of literary works through the investigation of paintings, sculptures and architectural works. He followed Berenson and Heinrich Wölflin.[15] For him Italian literature, even contemporary literature, was dead literature to be studied like those of the Aztecs and the Babylonians. Much of what he talked about was way over the heads of his students who, from previous studies, had learned about heritage, environment, religion and race. Some of them managed to learn the new language made of structure, engagement, models and sensibility. He would ask, for instance, if the Divine Comedy was a drama or a narrative. He was up-to-date with new critical trends and his writings were very involved, alluding to a profundity that wasn’t there. He spoke agile words and conducted subtle analyses with a rich English vocabulary. His taste led him to poets of turbulent and dark periods, complicated and ambiguous. Here he could practice his critical skills that consisted more in inventions than discoveries. He too was caught by the frenzy to send his publications to the college president.

In a few days the table of the college president was flooded with dozens of diplomas, piles of books, newspaper clips, abstracts from academic journals, letters of support and recommendation. He received applications from two full professor, four assistant professors, some twenty lecturers, a couple of unemployed journalists and more. Suddenly a rumor started circulating from north to south and from east to west. The successor had already been selected. Before the search had even begun.

New York, December 23, 1956