AN UNHAPPY IMMIGRANT

When he was still a boy, Angelo M. Pellegrini[1] emigrated with his family from the province of Lucca, in Tuscany, and settled in a remote part of the northern United States, the state of Washington, by the Pacific Ocean. He did a variety of jobs and thanks to his intelligence, his family’s sacrifices and the opportunities afforded to him by the American educational system, he pursued his studies until he became professor of English literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1949-1950 he won the prestigious scholarship awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation. His project was to study “the contribution of Italian immigration” to the United States. Once he arrived in Italy he decided, instead, to focus on something different. The book he wrote, Immigrant’s Return[2] was accepted for publication by the publisher Macmillan, one of the major American houses. It was received with positive reviews and, I imagine, good success. The theme of the book is the disappointment suffered by an American of Italian origin who returns to his ancestral homeland. Here, he realizes that he is not at all Italian: he understands he is fully American. Italy was not a good fit for him. We are not talking about the Italy of arts, literature and landscape, and in fact the book has very few references to these aspects. It’s the Italy of Italians, the Italy of the public habits and the Italy of politics. This immigrant returned believing he would feel in himself a surge of his Italian soul. Yet, he was taken aback by everything, or almost everything, he saw. Everything seemed foreign to his cultural and personal structure. What he missed most of all in Italy was the sense of democracy. This may displease my readers and trigger irritation, condescending smiles and objections. However, it is an important testimony: based on my experience, many of the observations are common to many Italian Americans who may not express them out of reticence; or because they don’t have the stomach; or the guts or the possibility to talk openly about their feelings. Pellegrini’s book may displease and certainly will displease many; however his testimony is a reality that we must take into account. We could analyze what the book misses and I am sure we would find lots of things. However, his perspective is sincere (maybe a bit narrow); his words are fluid albeit not artistic; and facts appear to be true or verisimilar even when they are stripped of their historical and concrete context. Now let’s see what he has to say.

Pellegrini’s book is an autobiography, therefore a rare and important document. The overwhelming majority of Italians who immigrated to the United States never had the time to write true autobiographies. The only traces they left were dry statistics: how many came; how many children they had; how many died; how many ended up in prison; how many ended up in insane asylums; how many went back to Italy in defeat; how many became rich. The reality of their sufferings and triumphs remains, however, without history. The few narrative works produced by their descendants, written in a new language, never succeeded in creating an artistic rendition of those lives. Those truly are lost generations.

Pellegrini had the good luck of positive circumstances. His family migrated to a state far from the big cities; in the middle of the woods; with lots of space and surrounded almost exclusively by Americans. He didn’t end up in the Little Italies where vice and crimes festered and where the immigrants got stuck, kept there by the contemptuous attitude of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class. The Pellegrini family, instead, lived among simple lumberjacks and the dominant impressions he recorded as a boy were two: abundance and equality. When Pellegrini writes lyrically about the American breakfast and or about mass education, it is easy to understand that he did not live like the great majority of Italian immigrants. This is enough to shift the entire paradigm of comparisons in the rest of his book; for the simple reason that he does not take into account that his is an almost unique perspective and definitely a relative one. His book would have been profoundly different had he lived on MacDougal Street[3] in New York; or in the neighborhoods on the other side of the tracks in Chicago; or many other American cities populated mostly by poor people. Edward Corsi, who came to America in the same period, around 1915, in his autobiography wrote about boys who scavenged along the railroads picking up pieces of coal that fell off the trains to heat their houses in winter.[4] This American professor doesn’t look like much of a professor. By that I mean that he doesn’t seem to have much critical spirit: the first condition to validate an experience is to distinguish between personal facts and general facts.

When Professor Pellegrini, educated in America, went to Italy, his mind was stuffed with a bunch of clichés about the differences between Americans and Italians. Among them, for instance, was the cliché whereby Americans chase dollars while Italians are idealist; that Italian cuisine is better than the American; that Italian films are better and so forth. Step after step, all these delusions fell apart in his mind. In his journey though Italy, Pellegrini discovered a country that he didn’t know.

He begins the story with the ship that should have maintained a certain speed but couldn't because of problems with a piston. In every trip a piston breaks down. And if one piston does not break down, it is because three or four pistons break down. Food on board is decent but not as good as often described by other accounts. Wine is fake, “phony.” The waiters are helpful but they gather around the table “like chickens” and don’t give him enough space to enjoy peace and quiet. Once he arrives in Italy, the vaunted Italian slow-going for Pellegrini is one of the worst disappointments, in comparison to the stigmatized American frenzy. The Italians he sees are breakneck nuts who drive cars and motorcycles faster than Americans; and everybody is rushing trying to grab public transportation with a kind of ferociousness that amply surpasses the Americans’. When he goes to the movies, he doesn't find films by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica but Forever Amber.[5] Every theater screens American movies. He looks for wine and finds that Italians drink Coca-Cola. He thinks he will be able to smell the aroma of oleanders, but he only picks up the stench of public urinals. Obviously, he is scammed in a restaurant where a soup he did not order nor eat was added to the check. About money; his travel mate, the typical representative of a particular segment of the crass Italian middle class, arrogant and full of itself; tells him that “Americans are only about business and dollars.” However, Pellegrini’s “first and last” impression is that “Italians are even crazier than Americans about money.”

When he arrives to his native hamlet, Casabianca,[6] near Montecatini, nothing has changed in the last forty years: same poverty; same resignations to calamities; same passive acceptance of fecal filth and related flies that inevitably come with it. With it, he also sees their fears: fear of losing whatever little they have; fear of hunger; of being swindled by their neighbors; the kind of fear that makes people harvest grapes before they are ripe, so that the wine in the end will end up lousy. They dress in rags, they age prematurely, and they are envious. Later, in Montecatini, Pellegrini encounters maids and waiters: they are the best in this world, but they are servile. And, as a counterpoint, he depicts the clients of the famous spa with swollen bellies; who demand to be addressed as cavaliere and commendatore. The portraits of resignation are immediately followed by those of cynicism.

It doesn't seem that Professor Pellegrini is particularly well prepared to express a judgment on whether “spiritual values” are stronger in Italy than in America or, as he decides at the end of the book, stronger in America than in Italy. His artistic taste, just to mention one aspect, is defined by a belief he shares with the American philosopher Dewey. His thesis is that the value of a work of art is determined by the ideas it presents. It is a fairly clear criterion. However, the direct consequence would be that Cabiria[7] is D’Annunzio’s best work and that Uncle Tom’s Cabin[8] is one of the most important texts of the nineteenth century; that the Canzoniere by Petrarch is no big deal; and that Victor Hugo[9] is more artistic than Guy de Maupassant.[10] Pellegrini apparently does not know Italian writers other than Carlo Levi[11] and Ignazio Silone.[12] And he is really stunned when some critics tell him that Silone is a bad writer. After all, how could it be, since he is one of the only four foreign members of the American Academy? To him this is sufficient proof. In Italy he talked to people from different social strata. However, it seems that the only group of intellectuals he has had exchanges with is the group of Carlo Levi, Gaetano Salvemini and Pietro Calamandrei.[13] The only Italian writer from the past he quotes is Giuseppe Giusti,[14] maybe because the peasants from Montecatini and surrounding areas are familiar with him.

Now, someone should submit to Professor Pellegrini a few issues he has not thought about. First of all, he didn’t ask himself why that land full of poverty and degradation “where no man or woman in America would accept to live,” has generated for centuries so much intellectual and artistic light; and, in the broadest terms, has created an organization like Catholicism that has been sufficient to respond to the spiritual needs of millions of people, good Americans included. He didn't ask himself whether the social life of peoples, over the centuries, isn’t like that of human organisms; where you can change a part without destroying the whole; and if in history we aren’t forced to accept some accidents in exchange for certain kinds of benefits. In Italy, the result of these socio-historical factors resulted in the formation of an aristocratic civilization. Pellegrini protests against this in the name of America’s democratic civilization. By the same token an Italian professor could go to America and protest against democracy, which was the initial and heroic feat that created America, imposed by a minority. By the same token one could complain that girls in certain countries have blue eyes instead of dark; or blonde hair instead of black.

Pellegrini tells the truth when he acknowledges that he is American. He is American particularly in the characteristic way of the majority of American tourists and scholars who have no sense of historical depth. Suffice it to say that they have actually looked for “spiritual values” as if they could find them. And it doesn’t matter whether they looked in Italy or in America. These are questions for American professors. Italian spiritual values are in Italy, American spiritual values are in America.

One more question, more embarrassing, would be: why is it that many Americans, who are not dumb and ignorant; indeed some of whom are highly educated while others are natural and simplistic but intuitive, such as the majority of artists and American writers whose list would be too long; why, I was asking, did they feel relieved in going from America to Italy? This has happened not just at the time of Horatio Greenough[15] and Samuel Morse,[16] but it is still happening today, at the time of Alfred Hayes,[17] Truman Capote[18] and Ernest Hemingway.[19]

Take Samuel Morse. Before inventing the telegraph, he was an accomplished painter. He went to Italy to study and lamented that Americans don’t care about art the same way Italians do. He wrote: “I, in general proud of my compatriots’ spirit, recognize that they care little about fine arts and about men of taste and science. Here [in America] men are judged by their wallets…. A beautiful painting or a marble statue is very rare in the houses of the rich people of this city….” Thusly wrote Morse, who was a ferociously anti-Catholic Anglo-Saxon.

Professor Pellegrini did not invent the telegraph, as we would say in Italy. He discovered that there is no democracy in Italy. It isn’t a discovery. It’s old hat, at least if by democracy he means the American kind. If he means something else, I can assure Professor Pellegrini that in the region where he was born, and where I was educated, there is much a more natural and humane form of democracy than in the Deep South of the United States.

New York, January 16, 1952