|
Coming Home—Through
the Front Door: Fred Gardaphé’s
Literary Odyssey Fred Gardaphé’s
“Breaking and Entering: An Italian American’s Literary Odyssey” appears as
the lead essay in the premier issue of Forkroads:
A Journal of Ethnic-American Literature (Fall 1995). Forkroads Press
editor, David Kheridian, is also publishing books, the first of which is a
reprint of Gardaphé’s essay along with an indispensable thirty-three page
bibliography of Italian/American writing, the most thorough and accurate of
its kind. Gardaphé’s title in the Forkroads
issue anticipates well his autobiographical emphasis on the subversive
activities of a brainy Italian/American boy, who found himself running to the
library to escape street-corner hooliganism and the frowns of his family. The
recurring motif Gardaphé uses to describe his development into a writer and
scholar deserves special commentary: Gardaphé employs the language of
criminality—“breaking and entering,” “rap sheet,” “I needed a front,” “I was
being chased,” “punishment for my cultural transgression,” etc., to describe
what it felt like to have a hankering for reading and writing in a family
and educational community that either did not understand these activities
(the family) or refused to accept the viability of Italian/American
literature and culture (the high school and college). Gardaphé’s essay also
employs the language of adventure (lighting out to San Francisco to meet
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for example) to reinforce his belief that his
development into a writer was/is a process, an ongoing movement that brings
him to places and ideas previously untapped. Cleverly appropriating the
language of the mafioso in the
service of his literary and academic pursuits, Gardaphé offers the reader
another version of an “odyssey of a wop,” one that debunks stereotypes about
Italian Americans at the same time it provides interpretations of
Italian/American culture.[1] Several years ago at
the Immigration History Research Center, Rudolph Vecoli asked if my choosing
to write a dissertation on Italian/American women at the University of
Wisconsin made me subject to comments about filiopietism. Gardaphé’s own
situation at the University of Chicago disallowed any association with Italian/American writers, an attitude that
in effect strengthened his decision to continue probing and discovering the
voices of Italian Americans elsewhere. Now, having successfully revised his
dissertation from the University of Illinois—at Chicago for publication at
Duke University Press,—Italian Signs,
American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative—Gardaphé
candidly admits that “you can’t avoid getting personal about the literature
that comes from your ancestral culture.” The ways in which Gardaphé gets
personal provide important reiterations of themes prevalent in
Italian/American literature; moreover, Gardaphé’s passion for and dedication
to his ancestral heritage has made him an essential figure in Italian/American
studies. In equating being
alone with being ill in the Italian/American culture, Fred Gardaphé joins the
company of well-known writers such as Jerre Mangione and Helen Barolini, who
were likewise considered odd for reading and dissuaded—unsuccessfully—from
doing so. Raised in a Little Italy in Chicago, the young Gardaphé was rarely
left alone and was subjected to “countless interruptions from family and
friends who passed through the house regularly.” In order to fulfill his
literary yearnings, he found refuge at the library, his “asylum, a place
where I could go crazy and be myself without my family finding out.” The
relationship between reading—an activity that requires self-isolation—and
illness in the Italian/American household once again reinforces the culture’s
emphasis on the interdependence of la
famiglia and its accompanying requirement of omertà, the imposition of silence. Coming from a
Southern/Italian background in which the family—for better or worse—was the
only institution that could be counted on, Italian emigrants carried over the
ocean their distrust of words. But not unilaterally. Gardaphé received gifts
of books (Barzini’s The Italians
and Puzo’s The Godfather) from his
relatives, even though these presents were “considered not only impractical
but taboo.” Spelunking through bookstores and libraries, Gardaphé discovered
that “Italian-American literature was giving me my self.” Recognizing that
the writers from this tradition, especially the women, were writing about
their families—toppling the iron wall of silence—Gardaphé learned that he,
too, as a writer could break “the cultural code of omertà, . . . and still live.” On his literary
odyssey, Gardaphé joins other Italian/American writers such as Robert Ferro,
Susan Caperna Lloyd, Justin Vitiello, and Anna Monardo by visiting the
homeland of his ancestors. The first American-born member of his family to
return to Castellana Grotte, Fred feels as though he regains a part of himself
that was lost when his grandfather died. In this way, Gardaphé and other
Italian-descended writers compel a reconfiguration of American writers
abroad. For the nineteenth-century writers such as Hawthorne and James, Italy
provided a past and a history they felt was sorely lacking in young America.
While Hawthorne found his ruins in Rome, twentieth-century Italian Americans
are finding themselves in their ancestral villages, reestablishing
connections with relatives. The return to Italy has become thematically
relevant, especially for third- and fourth-generation Italian Americans, and
it provides those of us dedicated to analyzing our literature the means by
which to compare visions of Italy from the early to the latter part of the
twentieth century. Returning from
Castellana Grotte a “born-again Italian,” Gardaphé nonetheless still felt
like a divided self, a phenomenon experienced by ethnic writers in general,
who are often torn between their inherited culture and mainstream America.
Like Jerre Mangione, Gardaphé was Italian at home and American in the world
outside. Specifically for Gardaphé, the outside world meant graduate school,
where he was encouraged to “bail out and do the work [of Italian/American
studies] on my own.” To alleviate his sense of outsiderism, Gardaphé joined
forces with Chicagoland’s monthly newspaper, Fra Noi, where he continues to pursue Italian/American writers
with a tenacity bordering on the ecstatic. (His forthcoming publication Dagoes Read: Tradition and the Italian
American Writer (Guernica Editions) features originating articles from Fra Noi on Italian/American writers.)
Returning to graduate school to complete a Ph.D. in English, Gardaphé
eventually probes the relationships between
Italian/ American writers and mainstream, “canonical” writers—between Fante
and Hemingway, Puzo and Mailer, for example. In doing so, Gardaphé welds the
contributions of Italian/ American writers to “American” writers, recognizing
the Italian contribution to American letters. For Gardaphé, helping to bring
Italian/American writers into visibility and prominence contributes to the
larger goal of those of us committed to American literary scholarship. As
Gardaphé writes, “I have no doubt that the American writers of Italian
descent will have their place in American history.” A word on Gardaphé’s
generosity. He demonstrates little braggadocio when he yearns to function as
a literary advocate for writers who “were dying with little or no public
record of their existence.” Through his columns in Fra Noi, his editorship of VIA
(Voices in Italian Americana), his
relationship with Guernica Editions, and his ubiquitous presence at
conferences, readings, community events, etc., Gardaphé has given us an
invaluable example of how his unremitting work has helped Italian/ American
studies grow into a formidable and exacting discipline of its own. Gardaphé’s checklist
does not pretend to be exhaustive. Such a list adds to Green’s The Italian-American Novel, Barolini’s
The Dream Book, Tamburri’s,
Giordano’s and Gardaphé’s From the
Margin, and the 1993 Fall/Winter Issue of Italian Americana. The author describes the checklist as a
communal project and, as such, it is subject to corrections and additions. To
demonstrate his sincerity, Gardaphé includes his academic address to encourage
comments. Divided into five categories—Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction and
Autobiographies, Anthologies, and Criticism, the list includes 426 separate
entries, a testimonial to the growing number of Italian/American writers
actively engaged in this field. I like the fact that Gardaphé includes Italian/Canadian
writers and Italian writers living in America and writing in English, for the
relationship to our North American neighbor and our mother country continues
to inspire the works under consideration. My own additions include an early
critical study on Italian/Canadian writing called Contrasts: Comparative Essays on Italian-Canadian Writing,
edited by Joseph Pivato, the first of its kind, including a selective
bibliography with addenda through 1989; the second would be Thomas Ferraro’s
Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in
Twentieth-Century America (1993); though the study contains only one
essay on an Italian/American writer (Puzo), it analyzes the immigrant genre
and develops a critical exegesis for reading ethnic writing. In sum, Gardaphé
has offered us a generous sampling of his passion for Italian/American
writing and writers. His voice will stay with us for a long time. Gonzaga University |
[1]Fred Gardaphé, The Italian-American Writer: An Essay and an Annotated Checklist (Forkroads/Spencertown, 1995) Pp. 58.