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“Flesh and Soul”:
Religion in Di Donato’s Naked Author Most assuredly,
Pietro Di Donato’s place in American literature has been secured with Christ in Concrete. And among the many
themes developed in that novel is Di Donato’s portrayal of immigrant religion
as it relates to the daily experiences of Italian/Americans. The relationship
between religion in America and the elusive American Dream (viewed in capitalist
economic terms) is drawn primarily through abstract images. For a young,
non-cynical Paulie, the virtues of basic Christianity are very much like
those of the new promise of American fecundity, the same enticements that
brought the immigrants to this new land. Once Paulie has seen the realities
of the dream quest, once he is witness to and victimized by the harsh
brutalities that eventually engulf those who are not part of the “haves,” all
that he had previously championed is now rejected outright, the Church and
the Dream. For Di Donato, the
recommitment to the immigrants’ religion, at least thematically, is apparent
in his subsequent works, Three Circles
of Light and This Woman and
more obviously in his religious biographies, The Life of Mother Cabrini and The Penitent. These works demonstrate, to varying degrees, Di
Donato’s coming to terms with what Rose Basile Green defines as that
“Catholic necessity for the purification of the Confessional in order to
consummate the unity of the body; flesh and soul” (154). In Naked Author, largely a collection of
condensed portions from his novels, Di Donato has encapsulated the totality
of his attitude toward religion and the role it has played and continues to
play in the lives of most Italian/Americans. While that attitude is both
complex and simplified in his various manifestations and seems to have
undergone revision more than once, there does remain a constant throughout
the body of his work. In an interview in 1987, Di Donato stated, “I’m a
sensualist and I respond to the sensuality of the Holy Roman Catholic Church,
its art, its music, its fragrances, its colors, its architecture, and so
forth—which is purely Italian. We Italians are essentially pagans and
realists” (von Huene-Greenberg 36). This merger of the
physical and the spiritual, the “flesh and the soul” has always been present
in Di Donato’s work. And not surprisingly, it produces the greatest conflicts
for him. The thematic development of the youthful voyeur grown to the
lustful, sexual adult forever dominated by a deeply rooted Catholic morality
is unmistakable. Male-female relationships are always driven by physical
dependency. In “The Hayloft,” a young Pietro climbs into a loft to watch the
illicit lovemaking of Innocente and Gina. “I felt like God, who sees all,” he
muses. The initiation into the world of sex, however, creates a skepticism in
the young males that henceforth isolates them from the old world acceptance
of God’s will. No longer are they subject to the whims of a “. . . world . .
. created more by the devil than by a benign God” (von Huene-Greenberg 38).
When young Pietro sees a nude woman for the first time, the change in him is
immediate. “I saw the church as a theatrical building, the mass as primitive
mumbo-jumbo, and Christ and the Saints as painted plaster statues” (Broken
Scaffold 58). The impact is similar
for him in “O’Hara’s Love” as he recounts losing his virginity to Milly
O’Hara, the whorish wife of an insurance investigator and close family
friend. The entire episode, fantasized in Pietro’s mind for days, actually
culminates in a few brief, clumsy moments on the dirty floor of Milly’s
bathroom. He likens the event to his “fall in the Garden of Eden . . .” (96).
His mother is cognizant at once that her son has been changed by the puttana. Even the customary visits to
the local medium to contact their deceased husband/father no longer hold any
validity for him. The submission to the world of physical satisfaction
elicits a reality he could not replicate in the mysticism of priests, mediums
and ritual. I saw it all
differently from when I was virgin. I wanted the wilderness of the truth. My
future sex life could not bear to have heaven as an audience. My senses
clamored for the smell and feel of woman and not for the sterile
phantasmogoria of heaven. In the transformation I gained serious liberty and
forfeited the assurance that all things were the will of God and death the
door to the eternal true life (97). This emancipation
from the restrictive, non-sexual world does not end here, however. It results
in a radical metamorphosis that com-pletely abhors all manner of traditional
separation of the physical and the spiritual. Rather than reject the
confinement of religious law and condemnation, Di Donato merges the two so
that each “. . . accrue to the greater glory and sublime pleasure of the
other.” Whereas religion alone had heretofore called for the rejection of the
material life, now the foray into the realm of sexual gratification is
manifested as the philosophical affirmation of self. “My spirit and flesh
dwell indivisible in heaven and in the beds of beautiful girls. I have united
passion and heaven for myself” (O’Hara’s Love 97). Old mores are easily
scrapped, the Di Donato character soon learns after the initial excitement of
the first sexual encounter dissipates, though Old Testament laws against
adultery still hold sway in the wandering consciences of these men. When
Pietro discusses the art of seduction with his friend Dave in “The Fireplace,”
he is told that most any woman could be had but there are still some for whom
the Biblical sanctions against infidelity remain in force. This does not
deter him from tempting the resolve of just such a woman. The pursuit of the
untouchable, the supposedly unwilling, incorruptible, the religious, is too
great to forego. What he discovers, however, is Leda, a woman whose sexual
passions, though initially dormant, rise above mere satiation to a delirium,
a “sexually religious frenzy,” replete with classical allusions to Dionysus
and Bacchae. Ironically, Leda’s
commitment to Old Testament principles seems not to have been compromised by
this indiscretion. In fact, while he believes his irresistible seductive
power has overwhelmed the woman, he discovers that he has been the dupe of
both Leda and her mother in their scheme to get the daughter pregnant since
her husband was sterile. When he asks why Leda stopped coming to his room
weeks later and had turned cold toward him, Sarah, the mother, says he was no
longer needed since the daughter was now pregnant and to have continued the
liason beyond that point would have been sin. “We are old-fashioned,” she
tells him. “To us marriage is sacred” (108). The irony here seems
less paradoxical when one examines the dichotomy between Di Donato’s view of
the restrictive and punishing attitude toward sex espoused by Christianity
and that held by the more radical Judaism. For Di Donato, the viable elements
of Christianity are to be found in its fundamental Jewish tradition. As he
has said, “If you put Catholicism in the crucible and remove all the dross,
you’d come right down again to some of the beautiful parts of the Jewish
philosophy” (von Huene-Greenberg 44). The Jewish characters
in Naked Author are all portrayed
posi-tively with their Jewishness clearly central to Di Donato. Indeed, the
23rd Psalm has a role in young Pietro’s conversion in elementary school from
a problem student to a more conscientious and productive one when his
favorite teacher, Miss Mains, reads it to him in class (Pharoahs 22-23). And
Leda, in “The Fireplace,” is a “stunning black-haired Hebraic beauty. Solomon
has described her in the song of songs” (102). In fact, when he is
unwittingly selected by Sarah, herself embued with latent Hebrew eroticism,
to be her daughter’s lover, it is precisely because he had the “soul of a
Jew” (108). Perversion of this
tradition results only in the destruction of life as in “Wide Waste” when the
deranged psychiatrist (a common Di Donato portrait) raves to his wife about
the superiority of the old Jewish law of human sacrifice and idolatry.
Eventually he commits incest with his daughter prompting his now ex-wife,
years later, to question whether having “religion” would have made a
difference. Here Di Donato’s message is clear. What is positive in his
assessment of Jewish tradition, its sensual and physical beauty reflected
espe-cially in women and its radical acceptance of the uncommon, is to be
cherished and cultivated. To subvert those qualities only leads to vitiation. In spite of the
appealing mystical Cabbala of Judaism, it is Roman Catholicism that remains
deeply entrenched in Di Donato’s psyche, both as a historical entity and a
contemporary compulsion. The rela-tionship between the religion and the
community is best represented by the Italian festa. Di Donato’s highly
evocative portrait of “New York’s Little Italy” uses the feast of Saint
Anthony to illustrate just how clearly the Italian spirit and identity are
nurtured by the religious celebration. The festa rallies the community;
indeed, it is the community and
when confronted with the competition of a rival feast, St. Vito’s, the battle
of pride produces an enthusiastic outpouring of music, singing, eating and
dancing. This is little Italy, the author writes, homogeneous and Italian and
clearly where Di Donato wants to be. But while the
positive elements of the Catholic culture are rooted for him in its communal
spirit, its hegemony that resides deep within the guilty conscience of Pietro
Di Donato is inescapable and ultimately defeating. Perhaps the most
revealing examples of the failure of religion in general and Catholicism in
particular are Di Donato’s characteri-zations of the clergy. These include
Father Craig, a defrocked Jesuit who violated his vows for a woman who
eventually left him for a lesbian. When we see him bloated and alcoholic, he
is living with a prostitute. In “Sicilian Vespers,” we find Padre All Saints
and Brothers Blessing and Crucifix, members of the infamous 13, a criminal
organization on trail for their Mafia Activities. Not even Protestant clergy
are spared. In “Broken Scaffold” a woman and her lover, a minister, are shot
by her husband after he finds them in bed. And in “Tropic of Cuba,” a man
leaves his wife after discovering her making love to his best friend, a
Lutheran minister. The most memorable and scathing portrait, however, is
reserved for the aptly-named Don Savronola. Physically repulsive and
lecherous, “he looked more like a Devil than a priest” (The Hayloft 29).
Unable to satisfy his own carnal desires for the African beauty Gina, he
rails against her adultery with another man: “Confess and repent! Evil woman,
purge yourself of the Devil and beg Christ’s forgiveness!” he screams. “Your
Christ and my Christ are not the same!” she returns. “Repent yourself,
hypocrite!” (36) Gina’s cutting retort
to the sexually frustrated priest reflects Di Donato’s own rejection of not
only the double-standard practiced by the Church, but also what he views as
the total perversion of the meaning of Christ. For him, Christ represents a
radical Jew, promoting a socialist, non-materialist world; a world where the
“have-nots” are the masters (von Huene-Greenberg 36). When the clergy fails
to provide the leadership and guidance necessary to implement this program of
reform, and even participates in the continuance of the communal betrayal,
then it no longer functions on a humanistic or spiritual level. Ironically, the one
religious figure who does fulfill the role prescribed by Di Donato isn’t
really a member of the clergy but rather a self-proclaimed “Messiah.” A
hippie who had suffered brain damage during a clash with some hard hats at an
anti-war demonstration in the 1960s, and who later had himself crucified in
front of the White House to protest the U. S. invasion of Cambodia, he now
lives in a sanatorium. Weeks of fasting have left him emaciated, yet he
continues to walk the halls of the wards, offering words of peace to
everyone. Even the most dangerous residents of the institution do not harm him.
When a visiting priest engages him in discussion, it is the priest who is
unable to accept the inmates as God’s children. The contrast with the
tolerant, loving, caring and respected “Messiah” is clear. Even when Di Donato
finds a member of the clergy who has some measure of commitment, such as
Father Vittorio in “New York’s Little Italy,” who refuses to offer Mass for a
Mafioso, he tempers it with the admission that the priest cannot wait until
he gets his two months vacation in Rome. While he realizes what must be done
in the community, Father Vittorio is willing to go only so far, preferring to
escape the total commitment, unlike the “Messiah” who has sur-rendered all
for his beliefs. It is apparent that
formalized religion has, for the most part, failed those who are its devoted
believers. But as Daniel Orsini has written, “Di Donato demonstrates that,
though many immigrants may have spurned traditional religious experiences,
individual Italians retained—and redirected—their spiritual fervor nonetheless”
(204). What they retained was what Rose Basile Green calls the “folk
religion, that substratum of faith that exists below the level of organized
religion” (155). In “La Smorfia,” an
excerpt from his novel, Three Circles
of Light, Di Donato recreates the immigrant environment of the early 20th
century where superstition and religion merge in that folk tradition.
Christian imagery dominates the story in an often grotesque reenactment of
Catholic ceremony. The two central characters are La Smorfia, the local witch
and her associate, Maria La Virgine, who is always bathed in Madonna-like
white robes and who walks the streets crying out the Lord’s name and the end
is near. She frightens the paesanos who make the sign of the cross as she
passes. “Dio had a reason for
removing her senses,” remarks the narrator’s mother. “La Virgine is given by Dio to speak the future” (14). She
keeps the seven month fetus of her stillborn in a jar of formaldehyde,
believing it to be the Divine Infant. These women are
revered by the old paesanos in the community while the traditional figures of
Italian respect, the priest and the doctor, are ridiculed for their
ineptitude. When an epidemic of influenza accompanies a prolonged drought,
the community becomes frustrated with the failings of these two men and turns
to La Smorfia and La Virgine for help. A long, solemn procession, led by
Virgine carrying the jar, moves slowly through the streets, passing
genuflecting paesanos, on toward Saint Rocco’s church where, unknown to
Father Onorio, a “Mass” is to be celebrated. At the church “La Smorfia
reverentially placed the glass jar upon the altar. She put a votive flame and
lit the incense lamps before the glass jar. In the lambent shadows, she was a
giantess in company with the looming statues of the Saints, more gaunt and
her mouth more twisted. She circled La Virgine and swayed in a ritual
unknown; she made the motions of a life sized Christ and said: ‘Bring wine of
thy bread, the blood of my children to the son of Maria!’ “ (18) At that moment a
bizarre scene ensues in which mothers prick their children and suck the
blood, then smother La Virgine’s jar with their bloody kisses. La Smorfia is
in a frenzy as fierce lightning and torrential rains blast open the skies and
the drought of 1917 and the flu epidemic are ended. While the story is indeed
filled with distorted images and is no doubt offensive in its revision of the
Catholic Mass, what cannot be lost is Di Donato’s depiction of the strength
of the immigrants’ faith. In spite of incompetent medical care (the doctor
had diagnosed a stomach tumor for a woman who later delivered a child with
the assistance of La Smorfia) and a priest who himself falls victim to the
flu (the wrath of Dio, according to
the old immigrants), their passionate dedication and unrelenting faith
remain, rechannelled perhaps, but nevertheless undaunted. Over twenty years had
elapsed between the publication of Christ
in Concrete and the writings anthologized in Naked Author. While Di Donato’s views may have been distilled and
his disillusionment with religion somewhat tempered, it is clear that the
subject still resides at the core of his work. The need to satisfy the
desires of the body is never far removed from the often submerged but
omnipresent Catholic morality in his writing. As with many of his countrymen,
native in America and adopted in Italy, he views the Church and its clergy as
devoid of any spiritual mission and always hypocritical toward the very
people they serve. Yet, when the pleasures of the body fail to provide the
satisfaction sought, he invariably returns to that one constant in his life:
the Catholic conscience. Though that conscience is often troubling, it never
neglects to offer the refuge of the confessional. And when it can converge with
the sexual self, then Di Donato is fulfilled. . . . as much as I
fought against being a hypocrite, the Catholic soul-saver, the Holy Roman
moralist in me always came out and intruded upon the scene. I could not have
sex without my spying soul watching. I don’t think I’d want it any other way
(Sugar, Spice 219). Adirondack
Community College Works Cited Di Donato, Pietro. Naked Author. New York: Pinnacle
Books, 1971. Green, Rose Basile.
The Italian-American Novel. New
Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1974. Orsini, Daniel.
“Rehabilitating Di Donato; A Phonocentric Novelist.” The Melting Pot and Beyond: Italian Americans in the Year 2000.
A.I.H.A. Proceedings, Providence RI, 1987. von
Huene-Greenberg, Dorothee. “A MELUS:
Interview: Pietro Di Donato.” MELUS,
Vol. 14, No. 3-4, Fall-Winter 1987, 33-52. |