A Conversation with Frank Lentricchia

 

Editors’ note:

    With this Conversation we deviate from VIA’s usual interview format for the purposes of bringing you the entire transcription of the conversation between Fred Gardaphe and Frank Lentricchia which took place in June of 1993.

    Frank Lentricchia is the Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature at Duke University. His critical books include After the New Criticism, Criticism and Social Change, Ariel and the Police, and the forthcoming Modernist Quartet. His latest publication, The Edge of Night: A Confession (Random House 1994) is reviewed in this issue.

VIA: Let’s start with your pre-professional career. What was Utica like? That’s where you were born, right?

Frank Lentricchia: Yes, in 1940. Utica is an upstate New York town of about a hundred thousand, 40,000 Italians, 20,000 Poles, and smaller concentrations of Blacks, Lebanese, and a few Americans. When we used to go on . . . what was that holy day of obligation when we vis­ited the churches? Remember that? My friends and I as teenagers would go from church to church and every once and a while someone would say, rarely, “You know what that is, that’s a Protestant Church.” Every once in a while we would see such a thing and wonder what was that grey, uninteresting structure.

VIA: So you grew up with your whole family around you, grandpar­ents and all that.

FL: I grew up in the house that my grandparents owned. We lived in one apartment. My grandparents lived on the ground floor, we lived on the upper floor, and I spent my first 20 years that way, that’s how we lived.

VIA: What kind of expectations were placed on you?

FL: To be smart in school. I was a male.

VIA: You weren’t expected to work for some uncle or something?

FL: No, I did very well in school from the very beginning, and that impressed everybody. I got no pressures to work in any other way. If I said I had to study they respected that.

VIA: Do you have brothers and sisters?

FL: I have a sister three years younger.

VIA: So you were the first born?

FL: I was number one.

VIA: Of all the grandchildren, you’re the first in America?

FL: Which grandchildren, grandchildren on my mother’s side? Let me see, I would have been the first on my fathers’ side, because he was the first to get married on that side, and from my mothers’ side I was not the first grandchild, I was maybe the second or third.

VIA: OK, but you were one of the first American products?

FL: One of the first pure American products, after the second genera­tion. I was among the first of the third generation.

VIA: What was the family’s relationship to writing, literature, books, and things like that?

FL: Nobody read what we would call books, I never heard the word literature pronounced until I went to school. But my mother was a reader, is a reader. My mother read a lot of fiction. So one of my prime memories of my mother is someone who worked very hard on the as­sembly line at General Electric, and also someone who read. In fact, she was the one who had to sign special permission for me to with­draw certain books from the Utica Public Library that were on a shelf for adults only, books like From Here to Eternity, books by Nelson Algren, that kind of naturalist novel that I was reading as a high school student. They wouldn’t let teenagers take them; they were not on the open shelves in the library; they were in a special place, and if you asked for that book, if you were not a certain age you couldn’t get it; you had to have a letter from home. My mother was always happy to sign. She knew what these books were like and was amused by the fact that I was reading such things. She said it was bad, but she was pleased that I was a reader.

VIA: What was your father’s relationship to this?

FL: To reading?

VIA: Yes.

FL: My father worked virtually two jobs all the time, so it wasn’t like he had time to read anything but the newspaper. But I was never has­sled about reading by anybody, except when I brought books to the table at dinner. They weren’t for that.

VIA: Later on, in some of your other interviews, you talked about your need to say, “Listen I’m working even though I’m sitting down and reading books.” I keep thinking in relation to me, my father gave me many opportunities to do my homework but he wanted to know imme­diately when I was done so he could put me to work doing something.

FL: No, I had nothing like that. My parents’ idea was that I would be successful if I never did anything remotely resembling what they did, that is, hard work with the body and the hands. The theme they pressed was do well in school, finish school, get good grades so you don’t have to lead the life we led. That was their major thing.

VIA: Where do you think they got that model from? To tell you not be like us, just to be successful, or to be more successful.

FL: I don’t think that’s an Italian model, I think the Italians had a notion, a fatalistic notion, that your children couldn’t improve. I think this idea came from their southern Italian origins, that you were who you were, and if you were born poor you would always basi­cally have those circumstances. But I think my parents must have got that model, as you say, of improvement and success, they must have soaked that up somehow from the American ideal.

VIA: What was their relationship to your grandparents? What kind of work did your grandparents do?

FL: When she was younger my grandmother worked in the textile mill, and she worked for tailors, so they all worked all the time, but by the time I came along she was not working. My grandfather on my mothers’ side ran a grounds crew at a Masonic home in Utica. These were the people that did the landscaping and dug the graves when the old people died at the home. I worked for him one summer, and dug some graves on his behalf. That was the work he did, he worked there for over 50 years, and by the time I came to awareness of his work he was the foreman, and all of his guys were his generation Italians. He hired all these Italians, so they were all about his age. And then they didn’t have to retire from the Masonic home, they let them work into their 70s and 80s on this job. It was phenomenal, those guys never quit. They would say, “We’re collecting our back pay,” meaning at 75 they were permitted to collect not only their pay, which was modest, but also Social Security too. That was the deal then, I don’t know if you can do that anymore.

VIA: No, I think if you work you have to claim it. And then they ne­gotiate.

FL: But at 75, then, if you continued to work you could get both your pay and your Social Security, so they were collecting two times, so they would work until they dropped dead. And they worked hard, I worked with those guys one summer, they were in their 70s; I was a strong 18 year old teenager who could barely keep up with them. They were unreal!

VIA: That was probably before they had those big machines?

FL: Oh yeah, it was all hand pushed mowers and so on.

VIA: So when he comes into this.  . . .

FL: That’s my mothers’ father I’m telling you about; my fathers’ fa­ther is a different kettle of fish. He was a writer—a secret writer and reader, a great reader, who worked for the railroad when he could work. He lost a lot of his jobs, I later found out. He constantly was out of work in the 20s and 30s because of radical political opinions which he didn’t keep to himself. I guess he was known as a troublemaker on the job. It’s hard to believe that this soft-spoken man was known as a troublemaker, but he was unbending on justice and his political views. He lost a lot of jobs, but eventually he stayed on with the railroad.

VIA: Did you have any sense of him being a writer other than later on?

FL: No, I had no sense at all until I was well along in college. I think his kids knew he wrote, but it was never a thing they mentioned. I knew he was interested in books because he would send me books.

VIA: What kind of books would he send you?

FL: Books about Michelangelo which would have text and illustra­tions, Thomas Paine, political works, Walt Whitman, a mixture of things.

VIA: What were the street of Utica like when you were growing up?

FL: They were not violent. I lived in a neighborhood that would be considered an ethnic working-class neighborhood, but there was no crime in the streets. There was no assault, no muggings, no rapes. I never heard anything about crime.

VIA: No Mafia?

FL: Yeah, but they did their own business, they lived in their own world, they dealt with each other, rather than with normal people, civilians shall we call us. And there was a black neighborhood that we bordered on, and we went to the same schools, and the integration at the level of friendships was very high then. I had no sense that the streets were dangerous, to tell you the truth. That was exactly what it felt like.

VIA: That’s one aspect of the streets, the other aspect of the streets is the politics. You were talking earlier about how your grandfather had these radical views.

FL: He was a socialist, an anarchist, that’s what he was.

VIA: How did that option enter into your life?

FL: It didn’t. Again, this particular grandfather, the writer/radical, and his family moved to Florida in 1940 or so, so I saw him rarely. When I hit college I understood he was a political person.

VIA: I guess what I’m getting at is, looking at the evolution of your writings, you always seem to have a sense of there’s something in lit­erature that connects to the life outside of academia, does that sense come from growing up in Utica? Does it come from reading Tom Paine as opposed to the critics of your generation who, except for a few like Jameson and Said, are following Eliot , saying it’s a separate world.

FL: I don’t know where it comes from, I can’t answer the question. I haven’t thought about this quite on these terms till you asked me the question, but I suspect that my strong ties with my family and back­ground, grandparents, the life they had, the work they did always has made me feel that a literary criticism that cannot see the roots of literature in our culture, in our everyday existence, is for me, if I prac­ticed that unblinkingly, a betrayal of my background. I’ll use the word betrayal. I’m not sure why I think it’s a betrayal. Now, you un­derstand, on the other hand, that I’m also a great aesthete.

VIA: What I see is, even in your first book, The Gaiety of Language, is that you’re straddling the streets and academe in a way that very few people will. They might slum in the East Village, but they won’t bring those street experiences into their writing. They’ll separate it, or they’ll do a closet streetperson, whereas throughout all of your work, especially as you get into Frost, when you pick up on Frost you’re picking up on somebody who, today people would consider him to be canonical, but back then he was not canonical; he was on the fringes of the canon, let’s say people were pushing him in and out. So you had a sense of championing the underdog.

FL: I don’t know if I did or not.

VIA: I would say so for the Frost book.

FL: Yes, I’m remembering the Frost book now. It was true that one of my intentions in doing that book was to say to critics of modern litera­ture that Frost belonged as a very serious figure alongside Joyce, Stevens, Eliot, so Frost was in the company. By the way, I just fin­ished my book on modernism.

VIA: I thought you said you were never going to finish it.

FL: It was one of the themes in The Edge of Night. I did finish it, Cambridge will publish it next fall; I call it Modernist Quartet. I won’t describe the whole book to you, but the reason of the title is the quartet of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and Frost. I think that whatever other impact that book might have, if it has any at all, that one of the statements it makes just by virtue of what I say the quartet is, that Frost is in that group, you know, he sings with these people.

VIA: Because they always talk about the triad of modernism as being Pound, Eliot, and Stevens.

FL: I think that Frost is every bit at that level. So in that sense, early on, I did think of myself as bringing . . . you’re right, he was an under­dog, I never thought of myself as doing that.

VIA: Let’s get back to your education; was yours a pretty standard high school experience in the 50s?

FL: Exactly, in a high school on my side of town which was 99 percent Italian.

VIA: So you don’t know you’re on your way to a place like Duke?

FL: I thought I was on my way to a school for engineers, a place like Rensalear Polytechnic Institute. In the 50s all the kids who were do­ing well, especially the males who were doing well in high school, in math and science, were in the trajectory and on the road to becoming engineers. To be an engineer was the great ideal of my high school. The word itself was magical. My route was mathematics and science. I loved mathematics; I had a hard time with physics and chemistry. I did all right, but hated those subjects.

VIA: You went to the typical public school?

FL: Yes, great math teachers, great English teachers too. That was the other thing that was happening. I was always a reader. I didn’t realize that that was my real thing, that was what I did naturally. I thought I would become an engineer. That was what I was targeted for.

VIA: Is there a great awakening that happened?

FL: The great awakening occurred when I went to college and saw that, though I could perform well in math, my real love, my passion was in literary studies, and then I realized that I could simply major in English and do what I would do anyway, which is read books.

VIA: Where did you go to college?

FL: I went to Utica College, which is a branch of Syracuse University, maybe half the kids there were from the east side of Utica. That’s when I realized that I wanted to be a literary teacher.

VIA: What are you doing outside of the classroom?

FL: Work. I worked weekends and certain evenings when the stores were open late at a shoe store, sold shoes. I worked the same job in the summers.

VIA: So you worked your way through college?

FL: I didn’t have to work my way through because I lived at home and the tuition was something like 300 dollars a semester, or 300 dol­lars a year. It was ridiculous. I had sufficient guilt that I wanted to earn that money and didn’t want my parents, who worked hard, to have to pay for it, and I wanted to have my own spending money.

VIA: But there was no question on their part that once you finished high school you could go on to college?

FL: This was something I was urged to do constantly. They were thrilled by that. They were extraordinarily proud of the fact that I went to college, was going to college, and doing well, and was getting top grades, and every once in a while at college there would be this or that honor given out to the top one, and I would get in the Utica pa­pers, a picture, an article, they were thrilled by all that.

VIA: Did you want to go to other colleges?

FL: No.

VIA: What was the transition like from Utica to graduate school?

FL: I knew I wanted to be a college teacher, so I had to go to graduate school. I applied to Duke because a guy who had gone to Utica College and graduated a year before I did had gone there for an MA and said that the people were really nice and the professors were human, which was true, they were. So I applied there, and I got a scholarship. Two thousand dollars, or something like that, for a year, which was a phenomenal amount of money in 1962. It paid all my tuition, my room and board, spending money, which I couldn’t spend. It covered everything, so I had no problems, I didn’t have to ask my parents for a cent.

VIA: So how was that experience, even just going to the location of Duke, different from Utica?

FL: I often get asked that. Was I culturally disrupted, did I find my­self in an alien world? I always answer this question in the same way, and it tends to surprise people, though it probably won’t surprise you. I went from one homogeneous ethnic culture, in a sense, to another one, so though I didn’t technically fit in North Carolina, I felt comfort­able because I recognized it as a coherent culture. I was not unaccepted. Southerners are extraordinarily gracious people. I found it very easy to slide in. I wasn’t black, I’m not black, and I was there during . . . you know ‘62 was when all of the civil rights struggles were happen­ing on the streets, I saw it on the streets of Durham.

VIA: That was in terms of culture, but what about in terms of literary studies, and approaches, how was the training at Duke different from Utica. Did they basically say, “You’re at Duke now, forget every­thing you’ve learned in the past”?

FL: No, they’re historians mainly at Duke, literary historians. They didn’t stress critical examination of literature. Utica was more the critical approach. My teachers were interested in looking at the text for what it was. The text was at the center of the class, let’s say, and when I went to Duke the text sort of disappeared, and that was trou­blesome for me. But I had one teacher, Bernard Duffey, who balanced these things, so he was kind of an island of security.

VIA: This is in the 60s, so the leading critics are the New Critics. Where do they fit in at Duke or do they not?

FL: They didn’t fit in at Duke, Duke literary historians didn’t think well of New Criticism. I think a lot of my teachers thought they were unsound. Bernard Duffey was my mentor, he was the man I modeled myself after as a student. I wanted to get out and teach in his mode, and he taught 20th-century American Literature. So that was the primary shaping experience.

VIA: Did he primarily do it by lecture?

FL: He sat at the desk very quietly and talked.

VIA: Did he just talk or did he read his notes?

FL: He had notes which he never looked at. He simply talked qui­etly, you had to listen to him. He was not flashy, he was not what you would call a theatrical presence in the classroom; he was quiet and intensely intellectual.

VIA: Did he encourage dialogue, or was it more of a monologue?

FL: He would entertain your questions when you asked them, but mainly you listened.

VIA: Are there any other outside influences, people that you’re read­ing who are going against the grain at Duke? Are you reading critics like Ransom.

FL: I was reading the New Critics by myself, and then I read pretty widely in the history of critical theory privately with Duffey in a tutorial. That was sort of my against-the-grain experience, with-the-grain was bibliography—textual bibliography, literary history of an older sort that concentrated on backgrounds and never mentioned texts, and so to learn the critical tradition with Duffey in his office was my outsider resistance to what I was getting.

VIA: What are some of the earlier things that you’re working on that you’re being encouraged to continue with? In other words did you find a kernel of your thesis in an early course?

FL: The kernel of my doctoral dissertation, which became The Gaiety of Language, was found in the course of my studies with Duffey in 20th century. That came out of his classes basically. That book is half his.

VIA: What’s going on in America while you’re at Duke? Are you insu­lated from the 60s?

FL: The 60s do not really start till ‘65 or ‘66 and by then I had gone to UCLA; I went to California in ‘66. That’s where I began teaching.

IA: Why UCLA?

FL: It was a job offer, it was hard to turn down.

VIA: Were there other offers?

FL: I think maybe I had one or two others, or I was waiting on some others and UCLA came along first. First of all the west coast was a terrific dream for me. I hadn’t been west of Cleveland, so the west coast was a great, attractive vision. UCLA is a first class school, and I got excellent pay. The offer was 8700 dollars. That was considered a lot, and it was a lot, by the way, it was more than I could spend.

VIA: What’s going on in your family while you’re at Duke? Is your mother sending you bread and cookies?

FL: I brought stuff back from holidays.

VIA: But are they saying oh Frankie, you’re changing?

FL: No, because I didn’t change. I always led a secluded, quiet life at home. I was always a bookish kid, you understand. I spent a lot of time in my room reading books when I wasn’t on the playground. I didn’t really change.

VIA: What happens then, you get the word you’re going to UCLA. It’s a quite different from the Utica to Durham move.

FL: That was a shock, it was exciting.

VIA: What about for your family?

FL: My mother, in particular, was very concerned that I had gone so far away. That was troublesome for her. In ‘66 the west coast was far­ther from the east coast than it is now. So that was a concern. I found my immediate feeling in California was that it was beautiful and the weather was fabulous, but that I could never really live there, and it took me 18 years to really get out. But my first impression was that I didn’t belong in Southern California, and I was right, it just took me 18 years to get out.

VIA: So you’re hired at UCLA in ‘66, everything’s starting to happen on campus really in ‘67, what are you teaching at UCLA.

FL: Modern literature, 20th-century British and American.

VIA: Did you see a difference between you as a professor and the stu­dents that you were dealing with then?

FL: When I got to UCLA I was 26 years old, so I was a very young PhD, and my students were 21, 22. The fact that we were close in age was nice. I think that at every stage in a teacher’s life, it can be nice. Right now I’m more of a father figure specializing in tough love.

VIA: So probably back then you were more like a cousin, right?

FL: I was a cousin or a brother.

VIA: You finished your dissertation before?

FL: I finished my dissertation before, in fact, and revised it through the summer.

VIA: For the book? Because the book comes out in ‘68.

FL: Yes. I had rewritten the dissertation, and the book had to be re­typed at UCLA, they had a Faculty typing service. It was reworked, retyped, sent, so that fall when I got there it was ready to go.

VIA: Do you remember the reception of the book?

FL: The reviews were mainly positive. In fact there was a review in the L.A. Times.

VIA: What is it about people who write books who don’t want to read their books anymore?

FL: We have this myth that we’re constantly getting better and it’s the writing we’re doing. To me, the excitement is always with what I’m doing at the moment. It always feels richer and stronger. But I don’t feel this way about all of my books. After the New Criticism, for example, I still think that’s a strong book.

VIA: That’s the book that made your career, wouldn’t you say?

FL: That’s true.

VIA: Because that’s the first book of yours that I read, and I worked my way back. And I began to see you working out a lot of these things that you get to very clearly there in your earlier works. Even though The Gaiety of a Language is much more of a “Look what I can do with these two poets” books, and picking up Frost next is pretty much say­ing, “Look what I can do with this person you ignored.”

FL: The book on Frost was really an extension of The Gaiety of Language in many ways.

VIA: What you’re doing there, the way I see it, you’re beginning to historicize at a time when people are trying to stay away from his­tory, and I see After the New Criticism coming as sort of a rupture be­tween the New Criticism and deconstruction, which basically do the same thing with history they pretty much ignore history, whereas you’re saying, “I’m historicizing these people and I’m showing you what happens when you fail to historicize.” But, there’s a tone in After the New Criticism that is different from the earlier books, there’s a much more genteel tone in the earlier books.

FL: Tell me what you mean by that.

VIA: Less so with the Frost book, but with the Stevens book, with Yeats and Stevens I really think you’re just saying “Here, try out these ideas on these people.” You’re much more laid back. Laid back in a tense way, you’re not really pushing any peoples’ buttons. You are in the Frost book, a little bit, but more so in After the New Criticism. But all of this, is really a preface for your latest writing. Once The Edge of Night comes out I know the critics are going to say, “Aha, Frank Lentricchia comes through clearly,” and my argument is that he always did, and that there are as many Frank Lentricchias as Frank Lentricchia found Frosts. You called the Frost a polemical preface. And After the New Criticism what do you call your preface there? Provocations? Or was that in Criticism and Social Change.

FL: That’s Criticism and Social Change.

VIA: Are you getting angry with academia?

FL: Yeah, yeah.

VIA: But what is it? Are they misguiding students? You’re going through the reality of the 60s, in the meantime the guys in France are writing about the failed revolution, the May 1968 Paris revolution that never really happened. Barthes, Foucault, and all these people are beginning to rethink the relationship between academia and the streets.

FL: Are you trying to get at what the source of my anger is, really, in these books?

VIA: Ben Morreale, who co-wrote with Jerre Mangione La Storia, has been trying to figure out the Italian intellectual’s relationship to the world, and he conceptualizes a notion he calls cultural anger—that in spite of the fact that we can make it better than our grandparents did, there’s still some resentment in society against Italians being intellec­tuals.

FL: The Polish jokes are matched by Italian jokes, the main point of these jokes is that Poles and Italians, Pollocks and Wops, are funda­mentally, by nature, dumb. That’s the story about those jokes.

VIA: But you are this anomaly in your time. Most of the guys, if they went to college in your time either became doctors, lawyers, or they went to work for uncles.

FL: Or they didn’t go to college at all. You’re right. I was anomalous. I was never resisted in my family when I said I wanted to study English, that I was going to major in English. I didn’t get the resis­tance because I always had the answer as to what I was going to do. “What are you going to do?” Teach. Now that’s a job, it’s still highly respected, no matter what the surveys say, it’s still a highly re­spected profession. But then, even more so, and amongst people of my parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation to be un maestro was an unbelievable thing, it was very high on the social ladder.

VIA: But what about writer? To me that’s the most interesting thing that I think we could bring out of this discussion, because there was a writer there from the beginning and he didn’t really surface until After the New Criticism. Did you get tenure that year or something?

FL: No, I got tenure in ’75, actually. So I had it.

VIA: But, there’s an authority there, maybe it’s the years of teach­ing. But there’s an authority there that. . . .

FL: Doesn’t exist in the earlier books.

VIA: Not at all.

FL: And how do we account for it? I don’t know.

VIA: Style, tone, all the things that you’ve been looking at in these others, they’re beginning to infiltrate your work so that in your Frost book or Stevens book, you refer to us readers/critics as non-geniuses.

FL: Ironically, tongue-in-cheek.

VIA: Well, I’m not sure, you would do that after After the New Criticism. I think one of the things that’s happening with the Frost book is that you’re moving from the object of the poetry to the subject. You didn’t do much of that at all, you stayed pretty much with the poetry of Stevens and Yeats. You’re making this move from the object to the subject, these personalities who are creating this work, and then After The New Criticism, you’re taking on the critics as you used to take on the texts.

FL: Right. By the way, let’s not forget to get back to this theory about the source of the anger. This subject, I wanted to say some more about it.

VIA: You’re beginning to see, and maybe it’s because you’ve traveled in the circles around . . . I don’t know what your experience was be­tween ’78 with the Frost book, it’s only a couple of years, so these ideas must have been cooking around, but you’re beginning to see where the power is. In the one interview you talk about where the padrone was, but there comes a time when you realize that the padrone of culture is in the universities, and you’re taking on all these padroni. I would never write it this way, but the metaphor is, like when Michael Corleone takes power, what does he do, he knocks ev­erybody else out.

FL: You could write it that way. I don’t mind if you write it that way.

VIA: Well, I just think there’s too much dependence on The Godfather metaphor in your career.

FL: Well, people have used it.

VIA: I don’t think you’re murdering these critics, although you’re def­initely rubbing them out.

FL: That was the intention.

VIA: Was that from cultural anger too? I can’t tell you how much time I spent reading Derrida, Foucault, and DeMan, just because somebody said I should read it.

FL: Now see, that’s where it comes from. What is the source of this anger? I don’t know, but one theory I have about my own is that I have always detested what was fashionable, and what was derigeur to be involved in, and to read, I’ve always felt that if it’s the center, it’s false. I’ve always believed it. That’s an irrational reaction I have. I don’t know what the foundation of that is, but my gut thing is that if all the kids are wearing hats backwards, it means nothing except im­itation in fashion, and it’s empty. Wearing the hat backwards is no different from speaking a certain kind of jargon and language in the university, they do it because they’re supposed to do it, and I have no patience with thinkers and people who choose to be like everybody else, who don’t try to be individual and different. A certain amount of this is unavoidable, and it’s healthy, and it’s not to be remarked upon. I’m remarking really not about fashions of hairstyles or dress, what I’m really talking about is intellectual fashion. Because imita­tion at the level of what kind of shirt we wear or how we comb our hair is one thing, but imitation at the level of intellectuality strikes at the moral heart, there we sell our souls to somebody when we imi­tate. And this is what I see all the time in the university, fashion, imitation, people anxious to find the new “in” words to use, it drives me insane. That’s always been the case. Where that comes from, I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s healthy, but this is who I am on that level.

VIA: I don’t know, I think it is healthy, but taken to an extreme it might not be. What I find, then, in Criticism and Social Change is you’re beginning to connect the subject of what you’re writing to who you are. There’s this really strong progression, here is the kid who did this great dissertation on Yeats and Stevens, here’s this guy who comes out of left field and brings Frost in, we’ve got to read him be­cause we’ve ignored Frost, but then all of the sudden, a new chapter in criticism comes along and you just go through these guys, like I said in my piece, like a raging bull. You just go through these people and just start tossing them left and right. But after the criticism you seem to have found some hope in Foucault, which is then immediately dashed, certainly in Ariel and the Police, but even in Criticism and Social Change, I think one of the things you do early on is you say, “Hey, you guys, we ain’t as American as we think we are.” And you talk about Poirier and R. W. B. Lewis. There’s a Euro tradition, and you bring a lot of this stuff back to the Euro tradition, you’re coming out of Emerson, perhaps, and saying, “We’re totally separated from them.” But how did you find Burke for Criticism and Social Change, because Burke is really marginalized.

FL: Burke goes back to Bernard Duffey’s tutorial on literary theory.

VIA: He brought Burke in?

FL: Oh sure, he knew Burke. So Burke was lodged in me way back then, and it was a matter of rediscovering him.

VIA: But you brought him in at a time when everybody said, “Who is this guy?”

FL: A lot of people found him unsound. Carlo Tresca is a name that we should mention here a little bit, because my grandfather, my father’s father, the poet radical, knew him. As I understood from my grandfa­ther’s best friend, Carlo Tresca came to Utica at the beginning of World War I and counseled young Italian immigrants on how to stay out of the draft. You know about that?

VIA: He spent a lot of time traveling around New York State.

FL: But he did come to Utica, and he did counsel my grandfather and a friend of his. So they knew him. Do you know the story on his death? The story is that he was. . . .

VIA: . . . bumped off by the mob through Mussolini.

FL: Is that the story?

VIA: Jerre Mangione, who knew Carlo Tresca very well, wrote a novel called Night Search, and it’s the story of trying to find out who killed Carlo Tresca. It’s an important novel because it’s really one of the few literary attempts by an Italian American to historicize and create literature out of that experience, about Tresca. I want to begin moving a little more into this, because I see in Criticism and Social Change, you’re beginning to say, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m not going to be like these other critics. I’m not going to follow the fashion.” So you find Burke, and you begin talking about the responsibility of the critic, which also means the relevance of the critic. Is there some­thing happening where you’re beginning to see your work in the class­room becoming more relevant or less relevant to what’s happening out in America? Whereas I see the work of Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault as attempts to find a way to supersede the fiction, or the nar­rative work, or the poetry that they’re working on. I see you making the argument in Criticism and Social Change that we’ve got a respon­sibility both to the people we teach and to the places they come from, which is what Said is arguing. You must be reading Said at this time, or he’s reading you.

FL: I knew him a long time, we knew each other from the middle 70s, certainly, and we have common sources.

VIA: I’m going to back up just a bit. How did you get into the first issue of italian americana.

FL: That goes back into the 70s. I think it was out of the blue. You’re asking me a question that I literally don’t remember the answer to. How did this happen? You’d have to backtrack more. In the late 60s and early 70s I was putting together a big anthology of Italian-American writing that no one wanted to publish.

VIA: How did you become aware of Italian/American writers? It didn’t happen in my life until I read The Godfather which was in ’69.

FL: That’s how it happened to me. Exactly.

VIA: The Godfather?

FL: Exactly. I read this book that my mother had read first, and my mother said it was a good book. And indeed, I sat down and I couldn’t put it down. I must have read it in two days. It’s a long novel, I just simply had to read it through. And at the same time there was all this movement.

VIA: Anti-defamation?

FL: There were all these efforts to publish minority writers then, too. Chicano stuff, black stuff, Indian stuff. It was starting to be pub­lished.

VIA: It was more political at that time to publish it with the minor presses.

FL: Then the commercial presses were picking it up, and I thought, “Hmm, is there Italian/American literature?” And so I started pok­ing around the libraries, I found some bibliographies, and from there I began to read. At a certain point, for some reason, I wanted to raise the question as to who was the first Italian-American writer, and when did this thing come out, and I had this small bibliography, not the Green, but the Peragallo, that said 1913, and for some reason I knew that that was factually in error. So then I started poking around, and with the help of reference librarians, I wasn’t great at this all on my own, even though I went to Duke, but I knew who to talk to. The reference librarian and I started looking around in Irvine, and then I wrote to one at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. And I dug out that this thing was early, in the 1880’s. And I thought, that’s interesting. And then they had to get me the book, and the book was not available on the west coast, it came from Amherst, I think, or Dartmouth. It took a month or so to get me the book that that little story was in. It’s with other stories too, that’s not the only story writ­ten by Ventura. I think I must have mentioned this.

VIA: Yeah, you do. But in retrospect, to me, that’s as important an ar­ticle as Gates finding Harriet Jacobs’ books.

FL: Yeah, but who has ever made any deal out of my little piece.

VIA: We’ll have to, that’s all. You’re just way ahead of your time.

FL: The most interesting thing about it was the author’s effort to in­troduce, in a kind of defensive way, the Italian immigrant to America. There’s a lot of painful stuff in that story.

VIA: Getting back to the anthology you were compiling . . . 

FL: People didn’t want this thing.

VIA: What kind of writers did you have in there? You had the guys you found in the library, right?

FL: I had the classic ones from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. You name the names I had the excerpts from the works. And I had an anthology that was big, it was maybe in the 500 page range. We’re talking about 1970, I had ended with The Fortunate Pilgrim. Now it would have to brought up to date. I didn’t realize that publishers would say that no one would buy an Italian-American book. I think, in retrospect, that they were right. It angered me, but they wouldn’t tell me the truth. What they told me, if they had told me the truth flat out, I could re­spect the economic argument, what they would tell me was this was not first-rate writing, this is not excellent writing, that’s why we can’t publish it, and I was saying “You mean this is not excellent, but the stuff you’re publishing by Chicanos and Blacks is Shakespeare and Milton?” Bullshit. So I felt they were lying to me, they were giv­ing me the argument of aesthetic excellence. They were telling me that Italian Americans could not write as well as Blacks and Chicanos. What they were really saying is, “We can’t sell these books, because Italian Americans don’t buy books.” I think they were right, and I think that’s less true today. But I don’t think an Italian/American audience will go for The Edge of Night.

VIA: I think that book’s going to sell very well, but not for the same reasons that if you had not been a literary critic of international renown. A lot of your ex-students are going to buy it.

FL: We’ll see. Random House will be happy if it sells, so will I.

VIA: But, the point is that the Italian/American intellectual mem­oirs, or whatever you want to call it, or excursions, I haven’t figured out the words for yours yet, “imaginary” excursions into ones life, or something.

FL: Well, that phrase will do. That’s a good description. It’s an imaginary excursion into my actual life. Emphasize the word imagi­nary, that’s important.

VIA: Definitely. I think that what happens in that book is that there are images that relate to the last 50 years of American history that you deal with in ways that can connect everybody else who reads the book. I’m beginning to see that in your writing you’re really capturing, and I think you talk about this in your Pound article, the last one you published in The South Atlantic Quarterly.

FL: That’s part of my modernism book. Did you like it?

VIA: I liked it very much. The thing is you’re dealing with something Pound wrote, something you quote in that article: “The man who tries to explain his age instead of expressing himself is doomed to destruc­tion.” The other thing is, you’re writing a critique of The Edge of Night through this other book, that’s why I’d love to see the mod­ernism book side by side with it. “Original writing proceeds as al­ways in the dark, driven by difficult questions, the answers to which are never known in advance.” Those two, to me, are the epigraphs for The Edge of Night.

FL: Great, those are nice.

VIA: Getting back to the Italian/American anthology, you just tossed that project?

FL: Well, I gave up.

VIA: But you did go looking for other Italian-American intellectuals to help you out?

FL: Who? I didn’t even know who they would be. They were not liter­ary either, they were historians and sociologists, but I was a literary person. Let’s put it this way: if I were doing that thing, if when I was putting that together in 1970, you were on the scene, I would have called you up.

VIA: No, I was just graduating high school.

FL: But who would I have connected to?

VIA: You’re right, except if you would have gone to some of the other writers, but what happens with that era is that everybody thinks that they’re the only Italian/American writer.

FL: They were awful about one another. When I was in California I talked a little bit to Fante on the phone, and to Pagano. They were isolated people.

VIA: Oh, sure. In fact, even when Helen Barolini starts with the women’s writing, that’s why she went straight to women’s literature, other than the fact that the women’s studies movement was picking up, and it was the right thing to do because she got no support from the men. You’re gathering up these Italian/American writers, there’s no Italian/American intellectual community to speak of, so you drop this stuff.

FL: Right, like a ton of bricks. I just gave up. I despaired of making contact with a publisher, and I think I was probably right to give up at that point. I don’t think anyone would have touched it, they were saying they wouldn’t touch it.

VIA: To this day we still don’t have an historical anthology. So you’re reading Puzo’s Fortunate Pilgrim, Godfather and where do you find DeLillo?

FL: Not ’til much later, 1980 or so.

IA: But those are the two writers, other than your modernist people that you’ve been dealing with for years, that you’re paying attention to. From what I heard, you teach a class, but you’re not writing on these guys. You don’t write on Puzo or DeLillo. Or you haven’t written on them.

FL: I’ve written on DeLillo, but not Puzo. And I’ve never talked to Italian/American writers. Puzo doesn’t think well of The Godfather, that’s because he’s embarrassed by its success. Because he’s an actual high-modernist aesthete in his tastes. He’s ashamed that the book was successful, but in fact the book was a powerfully written work.

VIA: So there is no camaraderie amongst other Italian Americans, someone like DeLillo probably doesn’t relate.

FL: No, he doesn’t.

VIA: You didn’t seek other communities either, you didn’t run to the deconstructionists . . . 

FL: No, I never have, it’s very much in line with what I’ve always done . . . I’m uncomfortable with that. You haven’t asked me, I’m glad you haven’t, but I’ll bring it up. You haven’t asked me do I consider myself an Italian/American writer. My answer to the question that you are not interested in asking, for good reason, and I appreciate that you haven’t asked it, is I consider myself a writer, and I’m also Italian American. I’m a number of things, my background is a major dimension of my experience, and it certainly comes into my work. But the idea of an Italian-American writer, or a black writer, or a woman writer, I find reductive, as you do. But certainly The Edge of Night is a book written by an Italian American, it’s undeniable. If you miss that, you’re not reading the book.

VIA: In that respect, let me talk about some of the things that I’ve found in Italian/American literature, and let’s see whether or not they apply. The idea of bella figura, publicly presenting a beautiful figure—to me the Italian culture, even Southern Italian culture is filled with irony and literary figures, even though they’re not con­sidered literary. You talk about, in the opening of The Edge of Night, your mother, I think.

FL: I gave her a monologue.

VIA: Exactly, which is really all a part of bella figura, presenting your best, even though it might not be you. To me that’s the whole irony.

FL: Bella figura is a beautiful surface.

VIA: Surface, right, but, I extend the definition, and I see bella figura and brutta figura.

FL: I like to present brutta figura too, as you know, plenty of times. But they’re figurae, both of them are, both of them are, as you say, masks. They’re constructions. And they’re both beautiful, even the brutta.

VIA: Exactly, my example, when someone comes up to me and says, “What’s an example of brutta figura” and I’ll say, “Colombo.” The character Colombo, the guy looks disheveled, he looks like the brutta figura, but he’s using that to mask the intelligence. I think people do that to you, I don’t think you do it, I don’t think you come out and say, “I’m this tough guy, I’m the gangster of literary criticism.” People put it on you.

FL: They made it up. In this book, The Edge of Night, there are two or three sections in which I create myself as a brutta figura. You know, the killer, the guy who gets revenge for JFK.

VIA: Exactly, and what happens is when people don’t know about this aspect of Italian culture, they won’t read it. They’ll take it lit­erally. That’s why so many Italian Americans are usually the worst critics of Italian/American literature or art; they see films like Goodfellas and The Godfather, and they say, “Well, that’s not real­ity.” But they’re not reading into the masks that Pileggi and Puzo are creating. There’s a sense of omertà, there’s things you don’t talk about. And every culture probably has that.

FL: I violate omertà.

VIA: No, I think that that’s the whole characteristic of your genera­tion.

FL: To violate it? Is that right?

VIA: Of course, I think that’s what makes an Italian American.

FL: Really?

VIA: Exactly, look at Sonny Corleone, Sonny Corleone violates it.

FL: This is true, I hadn’t thought about that. OK, so I don’t feel so bad.

VIA: Oh, no, Diane di Prima did much worse than you. She opens her Memoirs of a Beatnik recounting the loss of her virginity, and she ends up describing and orgy with Ginsberg and Kerouac and so on. She just broke it totally for women. Before her, you just didn’t talk about that stuff in public.

FL: Just on that theme, one more word, I wrestle in this book with my reactions to what I’ve written, and to the book I’m writing now, with feelings of guilt about revealing things about my family that maybe they would not want revealed.

VIA: Which is a real strong Italian trait.

FL: To keep it quiet.

VIA: No, to struggle.

FL: That’s why I used imaginative ways to. . . .

VIA: I think it works, totally. I know I’m going to be able predict the criticism that comes out, they’re either going to say, “See, I told you Frank was a jerk” or “I knew Frank had this side of him when he at­tacked feminism, this is what was behind him.”

FL: He’s an animal. He’s a killer.

VIA: Exactly. They’re going to say that. I know that a feminist critic will get hold of that and say, “See, look, everything Gilbert said about him is true.” I want to get into that a little bit later. Are you really breaking omertà or are you creating this imaginative mask of a person who breaks omertà, and by the same token keeping it? Because, to me, that’s the key to reading DeLillo. DeLillo says, “Hey, I ain’t Italian American, I don’t want to be stuck with that label, I’m a writer.” But I think that what DeLillo does is to replace Italians with other marginalized people like Jews. If you look at his earliest work, he’s replacing Italians with other ethnic groups. In fact, he creates this hyper WASP in David Bell, who’s so WASPY he’s Italian; he doesn’t fit in to the WASP society. And he ends up running off into the margins of American society.

FL: I accept that as a description of what I’ve done, that the omertà is kept and violated through imaginative means. On the one hand I want to say that my mother, in her core statement, said what she says in the beginning of my book, on the other hand I want to say, “Well, obviously I’ve made up this monologue.”

VIA: It sounds like she would say it.

FL: But it’s true and it’s not true.

VIA: The idea of a hyperbolic style, it really comes through in some­thing like di Donato. He uses, basically, whatever he can. Realism, naturalism, modernism, whatever it takes.

FL: Which is what I do. Often.

VIA: One characteristic of Italian/American literature is the ex­tended use of hyperbole. Italians do it all the time. I just got done reading a book called A Matter of Honor, by Remo Franceschini, who wiretapped gangsters, and he said that basically they always exaggerated when they were talking about things, which is a real Italian/ American characteristic. I find that if there’s a potential for bad news, when I communicate it to my wife, it’s worse than it is.

FL: It’s worse than it is, and you’ve already imagined it happening.

VIA: Exactly, you’ve figured it out, how you’re going to deal with it, and you’re still avoiding it, and you’re making it sound worse, I don’t know if it’s a survival instinct.

FL: I do this all the time. I put myself through hell doing it, because you imagine tragedies that have not occurred.

VIA: Right, I do the same thing. Exactly the same thing.

FL: Why do we do this?

VIA: I don’t know, I don’t know at all. If it’s some kind of that rem­nant of fatalism, I think one of the problems is that we have the in­tellect to know we are being fatalistic, where the generations before didn’t have that, they just expected bad things to happen. There must be some kind of way it had been communicated through our parents, our grandparents, or something. Unless there’s a gene.

FL: My mother is that way. I’m sure this is where it comes from, it comes from our families. They expect the worst.

VIA: I have a friend who’s my age who stayed in the neighborhood, who opened up a restaurant, and he says you know, no matter how smart we get, we’re still peasants.

FL: This is true. I always feel I’m hiding in the university. Not now, now I’m much more relaxed about it, but early on I felt that I was an interloper, a guy in the wrong world. It’s the world I wanted to be in and I loved, but I didn’t have the right name for it.

VIA: Getting back to some of the characteristics of The Edge of Night that I think put you into this tradition, another thing is spectacle. The whole idea of spettacolo. When Italians do something they have to do it large, in public.

FL: Operatically.

VIA: Yeah, exactly. And it’s not because they are stupid and are act­ing . . . there are the stupid displays, I think this is a spectacle. . . .

FL: The Edge of Night?

VIA: Exactly. It’s like. . . .

FL: It’s theatre, self-theatre.

VIA: Exactly, in fact that’s where spettacolo comes from. But it also comes from mirror. The focus on . . . again a lot of it is going to depend on the audience, so far I’ve been the only audience that I’m aware of, of this text. The interesting thing is once this thing gets announced, presented, and reacted to, you’re still waiting to go on stage.

FL: I like what you say to me, so far, about this book, it’s very pleas­ing. This is interesting, you, an Italian American, are not reacting to the crude, I mean the raw Italian/American content of my work, but you’re talking about the stylistic and aesthetic affects. Bella figura, hyperbolic style, the spectacle, you have reacted to my work exactly the way I hope people will react to it, as writing, as a kind of oper­atic writing. Which is what it is.

VIA: Right, but, see, the problem is that people are not used to seeing that. So few people know how to read Italian/American literature that they are going to read you the way they read the weaker critics, who are the majority of the critics, the way they read Scorsese, DePalma, Coppola, and so on.

FL: Straight? This is the story of an Italian American . . .

VIA: And this represents all Italian Americans . . .

FL: And why don’t you begin with your birth? And so forth, and so on.

VIA: I think that a lot of things are happening here. One is, I think you even say this, the dead-end of a tradition, or something, in The Edge of Night. Do you see yourself as a dead-end of a tradition?

FL: Where I say forget my children, the fourth-generation, being in­volved in, having any relationship to this at all.

VIA: I would say that it’s a different kind of tradition. I think that they’re going to inherit the same kind of things from you. Your grand­parents are going to reach them through you, and whatever it is that filters through that. It’s going to be a different kind of response to that tradition. I think every generation responds to tradition that comes before them.

FL: Do you have any other categories? I’m interested in all of this. After spectacle?

VIA: Well, one of the things I want to talk about is oral tradition ver­sus literary tradition, and you bridge the two. But that’s the key of Italian/American literature.

FL: There are layers of literariness in the book.

VIA: Right, but still you go back to your mother’s father, Tomaso, but that’s the connection there.

FL: But they’re all writers, whether they write it out or speak it. The talking writer.

VIA: Vico does the wonderful thing with The Iliad and The Odyssey, where he basically says, everyone’s a Homer. Homer didn’t write this thing; Homer translated the oral tradition into literature. Vico talks about Homer meaning “a people.” And I think that’s one of the main problems in the public’s reception of Italian/American writers who might seem to be crude, seem to be less literary, because they’re much closer to the oral tradition than even Shakespeare was. Shakespeare was pretty close to the oral tradition, but you’ve got to go back hundreds of years before you get to the point where people aren’t writing in English culture. Whereas, in Italian/American cul­ture you’re it, you’re the first one of your family, and your grandfa­ther Iacovella is too.

FL: Well, to me, my grandfathers and Yeats and Stevens, and Eliot are all part of the same company, the same family.

VIA: See, that’s what I mean when I say connecting oral tradition and literary tradition.

FL: It’s not a versus, it’s a connection.

VIA: Right, but what happens is the people who are trained in Yeats and Stevens, etc., they have to separate those guys from your grand­fathers. They have to separate them, it’s because I think they would prefer identification with the literary types. My basic theory is that whatever anybody writes is autobiography. I believe in your criti­cism for example, you are writing just as much about your relationship to the subject as you are about who these guys are; and I think that’s something that’s happening in academia today, people are beginning to realize that. I do think it’s also a little to hip to talk about autobi­ography in criticism now.

FL: That’s good.

VIA: Well, the other thing, we talked about this before on the phone in terms of The Edge of Night, is process versus the product. I think that this book needs to be read as a process, and not as a product.

FL: It’s about its own process of writing. The process of its creation is what it is; it’s really page by page where the excitement is for me.

VIA: Definitely, and for the reader too; there’s no way to predict this book where this book is going.

FL: Where it’s going next, page by page.

VIA: Right, which is exactly why it violates all the straight tenets of traditional autobiography.

FL: But it should keep the reader interested. “What’s he going to do next?”

VIA: It does, which is what theatre . . . can you imagine Ben Franklin or Henry Adams doing theatre? I think there’s a lot of play in some of those writers, but they are very formulaic. And that’s the other thing, breaking formulae.

FL: Now that we’ve brought this up, my whole hope as a writer, my desire as a writer is to keep the reader intrigued and interested para­graph by paragraph. I worry about the reader getting bored, and so I become the reader for myself when I read my stuff over for revision, you want there to be a surprise, keep yourself surprised. My assump­tion is that readers are like me, that their attention span is about two seconds long, that’s my attention span, and that my reader is like that, and in order to keep the reader interested you’ve got to keep that show going.

VIA: I like the way you refer to it as a show. But the other thing, too, is the inseparability of pop culture and high culture, that’s very strong in Italian/American work, I wouldn’t say only in Italian/American work because a lot of people deal with it, but I think it’s sometimes so obvious in Italian/American work that people tend to trivialize that. Look at anything that Puzo writes, there’s always a Frank Sinatra song coming in, you can’t separate those worlds. And I think that’s a natural bridge, and even somebody who has reached the pinnacle of American intellectual success, and people are going to think, “What the hell?” I don’t know what people are going to think about this, but the whole idea of coming back to some­thing like The Edge of Night, they’re going to say the same thing about this book that they said about your photo on the back of Criticism. How many essays have been written about that photo?

FL: Millions. It was a joke, it was a play, a spectacle. The Edge of Night, you mention the connection of high and popular culture and me. It’s absolutely strong, that connection. Soap opera and James Joyce.

VIA: And Joyce was doing it too. He did it a little more obscurely, perhaps. The Edge of Night, when I started playing with the title it reminded me of a movement in Italian poetry in the beginning of the 20th century which was a revolution against tradition, and it was called i crepusculari, the Twilight Poets. They took traditional stuff and they parodied it, satirized it, using pop culture as well. I don’t think you’re consciously aware of that while you’re doing it, but it’s an interesting academic thing to begin to put in there. I think it comes from the effects of the product as opposed to the motivation for writ­ing it. In other words, the effect that this is going to have is that it’s going to take autobiographical memoirs up to a new level. A lot of people have tried to say that Native American is part storytelling, part this, part that, there’s probably more books written about Native/American autobiography than any other phenomenon in eth­nic-American literature, but they begin to explain it, and I think that’s the wonder of your book is that, every time you try to explain something it gets undone. Another connection to this book and a lot of Italian/American work is that in-your-face style that, interestingly enough people have come to associate with Scorsese, but it comes from way before Scorsese.

FL: I’ve been influenced by Scorsese’s movies, as you can imagine.

VIA: If Scorsese wanted to do a film about a writer/literary critic this would be the script. Because, here, see this, that’s what Italian/ American culture is. What book was I reading? DeLillo’s. There’s this one story, “Take the A Train,” where I think the father is teach­ing his son about sex and he grabs the son’s penis and he says, “This is what makes you a man,” and that’s it, that’s what I mean when I say in-your-face style. DeLillo, in his earliest work, let that stuff out, then he closed it back up, but it’s still creeping out. That’s what I mean, any genteel literary person would not bring that kind of stuff into their work. And then the other thing too, besides that in-your-face style is the bridging, first of all the separateness of Italian and American culture, but then the work itself, through character some­times, you bridge those two cultures, so that in many respects those are the Americans these are the Italians, but the ultimate result is the bridging of that dichotomy. There’s a lot in The Edge of Night, where you’re actually picking up on. You end up making The Godfather more real than Coppola and Puzo did, because you’re tak­ing that cultural artifact and making it apply in such an imaginary way that it makes it more real, and I know it sounds convoluted, but the analogy I want to use is that after . . . and I spoke to this guy Franceschini 35 years in New York Police Department, he was one of the first guys to wire tap the mob, and he said after The Godfather, not the upper echelon, but the lower street guys, they started acting like the movie. To me, that’s a lot of imitation, and to me it’s almost like kids acting like any TV show they see.

FL: Like life imitating art, Oscar Wilde.

VIA: But you take that art, and you make it relate to life. In other words, Puzo creates this construction and puts it down on the page, and other people are free to interpret it and determine if it’s real for them or not; but by taking The Godfather, you’re making it much more real than Puzo did, you’re using it to apply to real life.

FL: I get what you’re saying. It’s part of my way of understanding. It’s a category of my understanding of reality. It’s one of my categories.

VIA: But why that category as opposed to all the other thousands of categories you picked up for decades reading philosophers?

FL: That’s a great question. Well, the categories that come out of Puzo and Scorsese just strike me as authentic. I believe them, I believe that they’re categories, they’re inventions, but they seem to me inventions that illuminate experience better than the continental categories.

VIA: Exactly, I don’t know Scorsese at all, but my guess is he doesn’t know much about philosophy. He may.

FL: He’s very instinctual.

VIA: Exactly, and I think that there is, in that instinct, the same kinds of things that were in the intellect of people.

FL: When I wrote The Edge of Night, or as I now write a work that is even more fictional than this one, it’s going to have to be called . . . it’s not a novel, because I think a novel has a certain kind of form, if a work of fiction doesn’t have novelistic form, which is a strong, narra­tive form, it’s not a novel, but it’s fiction, it can be fiction. Most of Calvino’s works are fictions and not novels. I think that what I’m do­ing now is a fiction rooted in strong autobiographical sources, which are named as such, with the real names of the people, family mem­bers, but it’s fiction. I’m going to get into a lot of trouble. When I do this, or when I was doing The Edge of Night, I’m trying not to work out of my intellect, my intellect is my enemy.

VIA: That sounds like a great title for the book, “My Intellect is My Enemy.”

FL: The explanatory, theoretical side of my life and my mind, has to be put to sleep for this instinctual, spontaneous stuff that’s really at my fingertips.

VIA: That’s interesting, because I had the opposite experience. I had to bury all that instinctual, sensual stuff with an intellect in order to get away from that heavy street life.

FL: That’s what I did too, the process is now being reversed. That whole process you and I went through, now I’m reversing the trajec­tory, and going back to it.

VIA: I wonder if it’s easier to go back to it than it was to get away from it. Is it more comfortable going back to it?

FL: I can’t say it feels difficult, I’ll tell you that, I’ll admit that to you. Not that writing is easy, sometimes it is. But maybe at this stage of my life, it’s not as hard to go back as it was 30 years ago to get away. It was a real struggle to get away. A lot of work had to be done, we had to read a lot of books that were hard to read, in order, maybe, to get to the point where we could live with ourselves, to get back to this process.

VIA: We talked a little bit earlier, and you can tell me a little bit about the reception of this book at Random House. And other publish­ers had turned it down.

FL: My agent had submitted it to, I forget the exact number, maybe six or seven other publishers had expressed admiration for it, but one of them, for example, expressed horror, that the man who has written this book is not a man I would want to meet. This editor said this is a person who scares me. This reaction came from two or three. Or, that was one reaction, visceral, afraid of this guy, so on and so forth. Came from women, by the way. Another reaction was, I admire this writing, they all said wonderful things about it, I admire this, but, the tone of it disturbed them.

VIA: These are the same kinds of things said about early Italian/ American literature.

FL: “Who is this guy? Why doesn’t he speak directly to us?”

VIA: Tell them maybe they should go back and watch Columbo. One of the phrases I have here is the place of the intellect today, because I feel that what you’re doing in The Edge of Night is that you’re peeling back that intellect, but you can’t totally separate, because that’s part of the beauty of the work, I think what gives it other lev­els is that you make the sense speak to the intellect, whereas most academic criticism is intellect without sense. The best fiction, or the best creative non-fiction, whatever they’re calling it now, touches you on both levels. My mother, for example, is more of a sensory type per­son. If she can’t see it, taste it, smell it, she won’t read it any more. And I think one of the things that we do with education is we create this sort of alter-ego inside people. This intellect, that questions. Should I have another drink? Maybe a conscience, not just education. Which is probably the classic struggles of human beings is how do we relate the two, but I see, especially with this book I think it’s really going to show people that you can have both and not be afraid to have it.

FL: I like the way that you put it though. I hope that I do make the senses, as you say, speak to the intellect.

VIA: There’s no doubt about it. Anybody who has ever struggled with writing, which I would imagine there are more people who have, will read this and realize this guy is not only telling us this, he’s go­ing through this struggle. One of the problems, I think, with people who aren’t literary critics is that they don’t realize the work that goes into writing a text, and I think that you not only have the garden there, but you’ve left the shovel there, you’ve left the pails there, it’s all in there, and I think, to me, what makes this . . . the more I think about using the title The Edge of Night, I think that people are going to throw it off. I think, that what you created with this book is a maze. It’s a labyrinth. I think everybody’s going to end in a differ­ent place by the time they get done reading it. And to me, that’s what art is. When I look at something, and I can read something and when I could say what it is, I’ve done nothing. If I could come through this and say, “This is what Lentricchia is doing in this book, wrap him up in a nice package and pass him on.” That is the problem I think that you’ve dealt with in all your earlier work, where you say, “Wait a minute, we’ve been accepting these critics, and we’ve been teaching them, and we’ve been swallowing what they’ve been saying, and we’ve been spitting it back, it’s time to stop doing that, and here’s why” which is what you do in After the New Criticism, Criticism and Social Change, and Ariel and the Police. Because, it seems to me, in your earlier work, whenever you’ve come to a hero, and Bloom would probably play around with this, you end up, in your next book, saying, “No, he’s not that great.” It would be interesting now to see your new book on modernism, and to read it from the perspective of what you produced before. Somebody asked me the other day, I was on television yesterday, this taped show, and somebody said, “The reason people don’t take Italian Americans seriously in their attempt to create anti-defamation is because people like Joe Columbo got up and started protesting, and then he gets hit by the mob while he’s giving a Columbus Day Speech.” They said, “People like him have no business speaking about injustice if he’s unjust.” I said, “Don’t you un­derstand that’s the beauty of the Italian character.” I said, “You can be a Catholic and a Communist. You can be unjust and speak out against injustice.” And they thought I was just . . . where is this guy coming from. So the guy said, “So you want your cake and eat it too.” I said, “We want to have our cake, we want to eat it too, and then we want you to buy it.” I said, “That’s the Italian character.”

FL: Where are these people coming from who are asking you these questions?

VIA: These are TV hosts.

FL: They should have the honesty to say, “We want the same thing too, but we’re afraid to say what you just said.”

VIA: Definitely, and even by saying that in public, on TV, I don’t know what the reaction’s going to be in the Italian/American commu­nity in Chicago. What do you think Camille Paglia might say about your new book.

FL: She’ll hate it. She’ll trash it.

VIA: Oh no, I think Paglia would see the irony there. And if she doesn’t, then she’s been much more influenced by those supposedly left-wing feminists than she will ever let on. What about what you’re working on now. Any new critical projects in the works?

FL: I feel that I have probably done most of the work in literary criti­cism that I’m going to do, now that I’ve finished this large book on modernism in particular, which has been underway for nine years. My energy will be in this new kind of writing.

VIA: But aren’t people going to come to you . . . well, you didn’t fall into that Bloom factory-type of professorship, where Bloom’s got his name on half the books in the library.

FL: I get asked to do things, I just say no, I say no a lot. I did say yes to one thing, a friend in Ireland has asked me to write a piece on Yeats for a book that Cambridge is doing on modern Irish literature, that sort of completes my trajectory on modernism anyways, and I’ve been wanting to do a big piece on Yeats, so I will try to do that. I’m a little nervous about having accepted, because the deadline for this is the fall of ’94, and here I am now involved in a new book.

VIA: Well, you can’t shift.

FL: I find it almost impossible. I have to do a little bit more with the modernist book. I have to write a preface and a little afterward, lit­tle bits, but I’m worried about doing that this fall, because I’m on to this thing, I’m about 50 pages into this new thing, and putting it aside for a month will be hard, it’ll be very hard, but I may have to gut it out and do that. I’ll try to turn it into an advantage. I’ll brood in that period.

VIA: And then you can write about having to interrupt this thing. One of the keys goals of a university is having professors who attract stu­dents, which is one of the reasons, I’m sure, that you were brought to Duke. You’re still going to continue to teach?

FL: Oh yeah, that’s how I earn my living. I like to teach. Not as much as some people do. Let’s just say this, I love to teach, but it’s ex­tremely demanding, and to teach heavily is something that I can’t do.

VIA: Back to teaching, is Duke going to say, “Hey Frank, hey we hired you to this literary criticism stuff, you can’t stop now you’re in the middle of your career.

FL: I’m immune to those pressures now. I have to be honest and say they can’t do that to me any more. They might like to, but they can’t.

VIA: I did want to talk about teaching, and the way you said, this is what a critic, this is what an educator should be both responsible and relevant to the people that they’re working with. I think the writing you’re doing right now would make you much more responsible and relevant in the classroom than, for example, another book on mod­ernism.

FL: I think that’s true. When I started in the middle ’60s, I was a very strong teacher, I think, I know I was. Then I got into a very inconsis­tent mode where I’d be very good or I’d be very down on teaching, but in the last couple years since I started doing this writing, my teaching has gone back to being consistently satisfying. I think it’s a much friendlier classroom, and in many ways a much more concrete class­room. I’m pleased with it, I’m happier now than I’ve been in a long time, and I think this writing is the source of it.

VIA: I want to talk about multiculturalism. One of the ways that I’ve gotten both pushed aside and allowed into contemporary academia is because the argument that I’ve made that Italian Americans need to represented in this notion of multiculturalism. Today, anything dealing with traditional, canonical, American Literature, you should only study that if you’re thinking of going to grad school, and you shouldn’t study that at the expense of not studying the theory, which seems to exist in a field of its own. Some of the older Italian/ American intellectuals, like Felix Stefanile.

FL: I read that interview you had with him.

VIA: He says that multiculturalism is just a way of doing equal op­portunity in a field that doesn’t require it. There is no equal opportu­nity in literature, the best survives is what he says. The question is who accepts the best, and one of the ways I’m able to write about Italian/ American literature the way I do is because I’ve read other discourses, like Jewish/American, Asian /American, Native Americans, Mexican/ American literature; I’ve read how those peo­ple have formulated their criticisms. I gave this paper on DeLillo at a Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States conference, and people were saying, “You know I never, ever thought of DeLillo as an Italian-American writer and now I am.” And I said, “Well, I’m not trying to show you he is an Italian/ American writer, I’m trying to show you that if you know how to read the Italian stuff that appears in his work, it’s going to give you another way of reading him, and I’m trying to teach another way of reading.” And people have said, “The problem with you is you refuse to come out with a syllabus, a canon of Italian/American writers that we could all then go and teach, if you could make it easy for us . . .” I said, “I’m interested in teaching you new ways of reading, I’m not interested in teaching you who to read here, because I’m going to come up with my favorite writers, and Mary Jo Bona will come up with her ten favorite and so on. You have expe­rience in the history and philosophy of literary studies, do you see multiculturalism as the same old fight, but with a different team?

FL: I’m not sure.

VIA: You made a case to include Frost.

FL. No, I think multiculturalism is fundamentally not about a liter­ary study at all. It’s a response to a history of social injustice. The problem is with the ism, there is a multicultural reality in the United States, whether you like it or not there it is, it exists. We ex­ist in a multicultural way. We have lived for a long time as if it were not true, we have been blinded to the heterogeneous texture of American culture, and now if the multiculturalist purpose was to sim­ply say, “Look let’s tear away these veils, and look at them, and make sure we recognize that it’s there”; that’s fine, but now they’re making an ideology out of its being there, and that concerns me, be­cause when it comes to the study of literature, which is what I’m all about, most of the time, it says to me that I have to believe that writ­ing comes directly out of one’s ethnic identity, or directly out of one’s sexual orientation, or directly out of one’s gender, and I don’t believe that any of that is true.