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From
Silence to Salvos A woman’s life-story
can hold the mirror up to all women; in another’s life we see reflected many
facets of our own lives, or, instead, a stark contrast that also illuminates
and instructs. Italian-American women have had little such material by which
to relate their lives to the wider matrix of their specific culture let alone
the dominant one, to validate feelings and experiences shared by others. There were powerful
blocks in old country tradition to keep Italian-American women from being
writers of anything, least of all autobiography. In an ethos of hear nothing,
see nothing, and above all speak nothing, it is remarkable that there have
been Italian-American women who authorized themselves to be authors and who,
joined with the men of their group, give the lie to the patently disingenuous
and uninformed Gay Talese diatribe on the front page of the New York Times Book Review a few years
ago that declared that Italian Americans are not novelists because they are
inhibited from writing about family. Where has he been? Our prime
material—because of its very tensions—is the dialectic between family and
self! A dozen years ago I
contacted Louise DeSalvo for a contribution to The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women
and one of the gems of the collection is her incisive and humorous piece, “A
Portrait of the Puttana as a
Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” Encapsulated in the title are DeSalvo’s salient
themes: how she had to overcome a culture that considers women who deviate
from a family-centered life as wayward or worse (Puttana means whore), and how, from an unlikely beginning in an
Italian-American working-class family, she emerged first as a scholar, then a
novelist, and has now turned to autobiography to tell in her always vigorous
and forthright style the story of how she empowered herself and became the
hero of her own life. That piece re-appears
in her memoir Vertigo,[1] but the pivotal chapter is “My Sister’s
Suicide,” the moving account of her sister Jill’s death at age thirty-eight.
It led DeSalvo to an evaluation of her own life in order to account to
herself how she survived their mother’s legacy of depression while Jill did
not. What DeSalvo tells us in Vertigo
is that reading, working, writing made her safe, made her sane, let her
escape the disabling disorder. Vertigo
is not the usual “Reader, I was born . . . .” DeSalvo’s approach
is not the linear one of chronology but a looping around significant events;
basic themes are set out in her Prologue and used as building blocks for the
ensuing chapters. Her continuous engagement in battle is the fight to be
herself. DeSalvo is bold, a fighter and no faint-heart. But it is a willed
and achieved stance; a tough act to cover-up inborn dread. That it all came
at a price is manifest in her fainting spells, outbreak of hives, dizziness,
shortness of breath, anxiety attacks, an almost fatal asthma. She is often
angry in Vertigo, angry at forces
(familial and otherwise) which would limit her intellectual ambition and her
determination to live her life on her terms. She harnesses her anger into
achievement but along with it comes ambivalence and the inevitable somatic costs. DeSalvo’s story
parallels that of other successful Italian-American women who have
experienced the deadlock between individual needs and what seems a betrayal
of family. The pull back toward family is powerful; the push ahead to
autonomy and self-enhancement is ineluctable. DeSalvo’s exploratory style is
pungent and sophisticated. It also has a
familiar ring: all of us Italian-American women writers have had, it seems,
angry, raging-bull fathers and disappointing mothers who were the passive
enablers of the system. But, it has been pointed out, you rebel against your
father and then one day you find you have become him. DeSalvo absorbed her
father’s anger constructively but finally finds compassion and understanding
for the man whose return from World War II service brought, she felt, the end
of happiness to her life. But that, too, is contradictory: for she was
ecstatic at his return. Just so, though critical of her mother, it is her
mother who inspired her to read, to write and whose high school medal hangs
in her study. Vertigo
is a fine achievement that helps fill the dirth of autobiographical writing
by Italian-American women. It was simply not in the tradition for women to be
wrapped up in self, to keep a journal, to look inward. Among the few
exceptions was Sister Blandina Segale’s late nineteenth-century journal of
her mission to the Far West, published as At
the End of the Santa Fe Trail; Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s gripping
memoir of growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, Visions of Glory; and the 1954 autobiography by Bella Visono
Dodd ominously titled School of
Darkness, a rueful account of her transitory glory as an activist in the
Communist party and of her upscale but failed marriage to a mainstream
American for which she broke ties with her Italian family. It is a stark and
foreboding cautionary tale that seems more an act of penance on Dodd’s part
as she returns to her Catholic faith than the testament of a super-educated
Italian-American woman who was unable to transcend her background to write
deeply of relationships and to understand the depths of her internal turmoil. The rise of Feminism
has made a difference and forty years later School of Darkness is light years away from Vertigo and “success stories” such as Beverly Donofrio’s Riding in Cars with Boys the account
of her rise from a troubled youth as a pregnant high-school student and
addict to a woman directed toward college and a writing career, and Marianne
DeMarco Torgovnick’s Crossing Atlantic
Avenue which documents her flight from Bensonhurst into higher studies
and the academic world. These are the beginnings of informed self-disclosure
emanating from women popularly thought of as silent. DeSalvo’s memoir is
filled with vivid scenes: a wartime neighborhood in Hoboken; family life in
three rooms without doors and no bathroom where personal washing as well as
laundry was done at the kitchen sink; the repellent foods of a frugal Italian
menu given to innards; the competition in school to outdo classmates; the
haven of reading the local library presented; the precocious ninth grade
initiation to sex and its revelation of independence and power as well as
pleasure. Pleasure is also in DeSalvo’s intellectual work and in her domestic
skills—especially cooking. Her powerful totems are those of the kitchen:
having felt starved as a child with unedible foods, her appetite burst out in
the passion of exquisite meals. This is so Italian American! Is that why my
own book about food, Festa, is in
fact a covert autobiography as was Diane diPrima’s Dinners and Nightmares? In a sense all of us
Italian-American women writers write the same book: a sense of wonder and
gratification at what, despite the inner and outer odds, and often without
much recognition, we have still managed to achieve. Using the
contradictions of her life, DeSalvo has summarized it in the compelling
word-play of vertigo/verse, the two words sharing a common Latin root meaning
to turn, the first a disordered whirling and the second a turning of phrase;
in DeSalvo’s account, the words stand for the two parts of herself. She is
prone to the disordered condition and fearful freefall of vertigo; she is
also moored to verse in the sense of the writing that has steadied her life
and given it meaningful direction. All writing, said the
Italian author Alberto Moravia, is a form of autobiography. And so DeSalvo’s
distinguished books on Virginia Woolf helped illumine her own life as she
learned from her mentor, a victim of sexual molestation, who wrote, “By
putting it into words . . . I made it whole; this wholeness means
that it has lost its power to hurt me.” There is a fine edge
of contained frenzy in DeSalvo’s writing; we feel her both at the end of her
tether, and at the same time, looking back at herself, cool, ironic,
funny—and quite in control. She voices the ambivalence and contradictoriness
we all share—toward our family of origin, toward marriage and children,
toward our work, ourselves. Adrienne Rich envisioned women as “the makers and
sayers” of our culture. Just so DeSalvo is the maker and sayer of hers. |