“I Wanted to Be a Good American”:
The Godfather Paradox

 

 

In the summer of 1993 I saw another Italian American, roughly my age, crossing Venice’s Piazza San Marco. His T-shirt pro­claimed him, in bold letters, to be “PROPERTY OF THE MAFIA: 100% Italian.”

This was in the middle of Italy’s long, brutal struggle with its underworld (in which Sicily’s Mafia plays a prominent, though not exclusive, role). But my countryman seemed happily unaware of the scandals, bombings, and murdered magistrates. Nor did he seem to guess what Venetians might think of Sicilian criminals, or how happy any Italian city, in any season, might be about organ­ized crime. Least of all did he seem to grasp the irony of his situa­tion: his proclamation of Italian identity was announcing his foreignness, and his loss of the Italian perspective, as little else could.

It’s illuminating that the tourist wanted to claim his ethnic identity by identifying himself with crime. And I was fascinated by his making the claim in Italy, surrounded by native Italians, at the moment when he seemed most American. That his proclama­tion backfired only makes it more striking that he had embraced something most Italians fear and despise as a badge of cultural identity, even a source of pride, central to his definition of “Italianness.”

He was shocking, he was wrongheaded, and he must have seemed grotesquely inappropriate to the “one-hundred percent Italian” Veneziani all around. But he did not surprise me. I under­stood his mistake, and even felt an odd sympathy. He was a member of my generation, sharing my place and my inherited predicaments in American culture, and I too might have come to make his mistake, but for a few accidents along our ways.

Neither was his error the first of its kind I had seen. One of my Italian-American friends was passionately devoted as a college student to Coppola’s film The Godfather. He was not particularly interested in Marlon Brando, either as seminal figure in American acting or as peculiarly Italian-American star, nor was he interested in the wider body of Coppola’s work; he was interested only in The Godfather, and in Brando as the Godfather. This man is not a brute, not a mindless consumer of screen violence or a lover of crime. He is mild, sensitive, fastidiously law-abiding, Ivy-League-educated, and he has difficulty raising his voice in anger. But his fascination abides. During the summer I shared a house with him he was trying to broaden his range, renting movies that might deepen his grasp of Coppola’s film. (He rented On the Waterfront, for example, to better understand Brando’s Don Corleone.) But On the Waterfront was dismissed; Ladri di biciclette would not serve. Neither was the Godfather.

Today, this gentle, sensitive, proudly Italian-American man is a prosecuting attorney in a major American city, partly engaged in fighting the same criminals The Godfather glorifies. But he has felt, firsthand, the seductive appeal of America’s contemporary Mafia narratives, and I know how he feels. So when I saw the American T-shirt in Venice, I knew at once where to lay at least a fraction of the blame: on the shoulders of Mario Puzo.

Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1971 film from his screenplay, are now inescapably part of Ameri­can culture. For an Italian American born near the time of their release, they can feel like disreputable cousins, just enough older to go into the world and stain the family name everywhere you are ever likely to go. Puzo’s is easily the most widely read and available novel written by an Italian American about explicitly ethnic themes; no other openly Italian-American novel has been gained such broad acceptance. Writers like Pietro di Donato and Helen Barolini, artists of ethnic and family life, languish on back­lists or fall out of print completely. Novelists like Gilbert Sorren­tino and Don DeLillo achieve mainstream celebrity but give little, if any, space in their fictions to Italian-American experience. Only The Godfather manages to put its ethnic “difference” on display in every American mall. “The Godfather was the first novel with which I could completely identify,” Italian-American critic Fred Gardaphe writes, “. . . in spite of its emphasis on crime, Puzo’s use of Italian sensibilities made me realize that literature could be made out of my own experiences” (10).

The book and film have created a foundational myth, defining America’s ideas about the Mafia, Italian America, and especially Italian-American assimilation. It has not merely shaped America’s imagination of the Mafia, but created it. Gardaphe, recalling his first encounter with the novel, writes:

 

The only problem I had was that this thing called mafia was something with which I was unfamiliar. I was familiar with the word mafioso, which I had often heard in reference to poor troublemakers who dressed as though they were rich. But that these guys could have belonged to a master crime organization called The Mafia was something I could not fathom. (10)

 

If Gardaphe, reading soon after the book’s publication, could find Puzo’s notions of Sicilian-American crime odd, no American reader today could escape those notions’ familiarity. Repetition has long since enshrined them as commonplaces. Teenagers en­countering the book now find a vision of the Mafia that jibes nicely with what they already know, or think they know. There are no real first readings of The Godfather any more, because its myths have been embraced and spread everywhere in American culture, and its claim to accuracy draws authority from ideas that it originated itself. Readers who matured before these ideas gained currency experience something quite different from the readings of my generation. For us, the book’s most reckless claims can often seem incontrovertible, and its half-truths both seductive and self-evident.

The Godfather’s success cannot be explained by lurid content alone. There have been many gangster tales before and after Puzo’s, with equal doses of sex and violence, including stories about Italians, which have achieved nothing like his success.[1] However, the novel works admirably for a dual audience of Ital­ian Americans and non-Italian Americans, serving on one hand as a pseudo-sociological portrait of “colorful” ethnic life, and on the other as a Horatio Alger story of the immigrant’s rise to dizzying success. The particularly American issues that grip the Italian-American readers’ attention often go unnoticed by “mainstream” Americans, for whom those “American” values are so common­place, so unremarkable, as to be almost invisible. To actual Sicilian Americans, it is the little details about traditional weddings and foods that are commonplace and unremarkable. To Italian Ameri­cans, the novel is about America; to others, it passes as a piece of ethnic exotica.

A non-Italian reader’s attention may be captivated by Italian words like padrone, compare, or lupara, for example, and by details about traditional weddings, home-made wine, or the position of “consigliori” (Puzo’s spelling). When such readers encounter a gang lieutenant plotting a murder as he polishes his Cadillac (Puzo, The Godfather 102–04), they are apt to notice the character’s methodical reasoning, his matter-of-fact and unexpectedly logical planning, and the sociological detail of “going to the mattresses” (renting an apartment as a “wartime” hideout) which gives the murderer a pretext to distract his victim. But these readers might overlook the Cadillac itself, the gangster’s beloved symbol of suc­cess in the New World. Like Michael Corleone’s WASP fiancee, such readers tend to see Puzo’s criminals as “wildly exotic” (48), a perspective that Michael himself finds amusing (18).

To the Italian-American reader, the novel holds out the promise of upward mobility that sets America apart from the mother country. Don Corleone is interesting and unusual for such readers not because he was born in Sicily and lost his father to a vendetta, or because he gives his daughter a traditional Italian wedding, but because he can throw that wedding in an expensive family com­pound on Long Island. In the screenplay Puzo even writes a scene in which Don Corleone, nearing death, wishes Michael had be­come governor or senator rather than mafia don; the criminals’ wealth and power are seen only as stepping stones in the immi­grant quest to enter the establishment. Michael’s response, “We’ll get there, pop. We’ll get there,” puts the aspirations of a working-class immigrant son into the mouth of a gangster.

The book and film have special resonances for late-generation Italian Americans[2] who have been largely assimilated and seek reconnection with their Italian roots. For this audience, the story’s dual appeals, as tale of the American Dream and exotic “Italian” sociology, fuse with particular power. The vision Puzo offers out­siders is equally convincing to the insiders’ Americanized grand­children, and a book that offers to “explain” Italian-American ways has a special lure for grandchildren trying to regain what the grandparents cast off. And since the novel is built around the de­sire to become American, the assimilated Italian American may embrace Puzo’s vision without sacrificing the American dream. Puzo gives my generation a thoroughly Americanized myth that seems exotically Italian, and lets us feel close to our roots without abandoning our American perspective. But in Puzo’s vision those roots are entwined with criminality.

Thomas J. Ferraro claims, persuasively, that the novel’s appeal lies in its conflation of family life with business (a conflation he sees reflected in actual sociology), a resolution of the dilemma between capitalist success and old-fashioned family structures. This business-or-family problem is part of the immigrant’s larger choice between assimilating as a successful American or main­taining ethnic identity and remaining loyal to tradition. Puzo is hardly unaware of this dilemma. His first specifically Italian-American novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, addresses the paradox of assimilation in the classic, conventionally understood, terms.

 

The women talked of their children as they would of strang­ers. It was their favorite topic, the corruption of the innocent by the new land. . . . Ah, Italia, Italia; how the world had changed, and for the worse. What madness was it that made them leave such a land? Where fathers commanded and mothers were respected by their children.

   . . . And at the end of each story the woman recited her requiem. Mannaggia America!—Damn America. But in the hot summer night their voices were filled with hope, with a vigor that never sounded in their homeland. Here now was money in the bank, children who could read and write, grandchildren who would be professors if all went well. They spoke with guilty loyalty of customs they had them­selves trampled in the dust. (Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim 7–8)

 

Puzo chooses to resolve the tradition-or-assimilation dilemma neatly, and temptingly, by holding out the possibility of having it both ways, becoming American by remaining Italian and gaining power in the new society by clinging to ethnicity. In a story pri­marily about assimilation, and the process of becoming American, this fantasy becomes the cornerstone.

The story’s main plotline involves the Godfather’s favorite son, Michael, who wants to escape his family’s criminal lifestyle, but who joins the Mafia to protect his father’s life and ends up “the most powerful Family chief in the United States” (Puzo, The For­tunate Pilgrim 440). It might alternately be titled The Seduction of Michael Corleone. The crime drama, Ferraro points out, is a double story of capitalist triumph and familial reintegration, the tale of both the Italian boy making good in America and the prodigal son’s return to tribal roots.

The novel begins with the stories of three favor-seekers, each somehow blocked in his assimilation, begging Don Corleone’s as­sistance. An immigrant undertaker, who has “trusted law and or­der” for “[a]ll his years in America” (11) sees criminals who have beaten his daughter go free because of their higher standing in the American establishment; a famous singer (meant to recall Frank Sinatra) finds his career and his marriage to a non-Italian actress in shambles; and a baker seeks citizenship papers for his future son-in-law. Notably, the characters who set the tone for the open­ing are all struggling to be American and succeed in the new country. The singer, chasing national fame, has left his Italian wife and children to marry “the biggest star in Hollywood” (36). The baker wants a literal place in America for his son-in-law, secure residence status as a citizen. And the undertaker, who makes a fetish of behaving “like a good American” (36), has previously steered clear of the Corleones: “America has been good to me. I wanted to be a good citizen. I wanted my daughter to be Ameri­can” (32). The undertaker’s first name (and the first word of the novel) is “Amerigo,” a deliberate choice indicating the character’s assimilationist dreams and the novel’s general concern with be­coming American. The film begins even more explicitly, with a tight close up of the undertaker saying, “I believe in America.”

But while these petitioners are driven by desires of America rather than Sicily, their ambitions are only satisfied by the inter­vention of Don Corleone, Puzo’s idea of a “traditional” Sicilian patriarch. The Mafia is seen as an Italian ethnic power base that helps overcome resistance from the mainstream establishment, making achievement in the New World possible. But Don Cor­leone insists on a renewal of Sicilian ties as the price for promoting his clients’ assimilation. The baker, who has been almost feudally loyal, has his request easily granted, but the undertaker is forced to reforge “traditional” bonds of ethnic solidarity and deference. And the singer is required to restore his ties with his children’s mother and promote the career of a childhood friend, a lesser singer who plays the traditional Italian mandolin. Ethnic “tradition,” in the guise of Don Corleone’s underworld, is seen as the route to successful, prosperous assimilation.

The same paradox plays out in the main story, the wayward son’s corrupt redemption. The outset of the novel finds Michael breaking with his roots for the new world’s sake. He has defied his father by serving in World War II, choosing loyalty to America over loyalty to family and defying his father’s “express com­mand” (17).[3] He has enrolled (without bothering to inform his family) in Dartmouth College, a route not only to the American mainstream but the American elite. He plans to become “a mathematics professor” (78). And he first appears sitting in a dis­tant corner at his sister’s wedding, “to proclaim his chosen aliena­tion from father and family” (17). Most significantly, he has brought home his New England Yankee fiancee, an “American girl” whose family has “settled in America two hundred years ago” (17) and whom he plans to marry secretly, without any tra­ditional Catholic ceremony, “cut[ting] his close ties with his fam­ily” (78). Michael is at the crisis point of the ethnic assimilationist, about to finalize a break that is conceived as irreparable. But he is drawn back to the family (and the Family) by a very different cri­sis, in which he proves indispensable.

 Michael’s success where his brothers and foster-brother fail, his mastery of the criminal world that defeats them, is explicitly attributed to his natural legacy, his oft-remarked similarities to his father. But he is prepared for his final triumph by a sojourn in the old country, where he is sent after committing a pair of murders to protect his father’s safety. His Sicilian interlude, in which Ferraro sees him being “symbolically rebaptized a Sicilian” (31), renews his ethnic awareness and consciousness of his heritage, empow­ering him to return to America and assimilate more thoroughly and successfully than he could by abandoning his traditional loy­alties. His Italian becomes “almost accentless” (Puzo, The Godfather 329), and he marries a native Sicilian woman, who speaks no Eng­lish, after a highly traditional courtship. Michael’s fundamental reconnection to old ways is meant to give him the vitality and per­spective his brothers have lacked.

Barzini, the chief rival Michael must defeat, has assimilated in a way Michael’s father has not; he is described as “much like Don Corleone, but more modern, more sophisticated, more business­like,” with “the confidence of the younger, brasher leaders on their way up” (285). Barzini has temporarily gained ascendancy over the Corleones by becoming more American than they, breaking from old ways by taking the “progressive” side in a de­bate over the heroin trade. The conservative peasant values Puzo sentimentally ascribes to Don Corleone include an abhorrence of illegal drugs, and the Corleones have refused to facilitate their sale, but Barzini and his allies abandon that tradition to enter a new, lucrative market. Initially, the forces of the “Americanized” Mafia, fueled by the hopes of drug profits, gain advantage over Don Corleone’s sons, who obey the limits of their father’s tradi­tional approach but lack his vital connection with their heritage. But with Michael’s return, the situation is reversed, and the revi­talized son overthrows the younger, more assimilated generation of mobsters, proving ethnic fidelity more powerful than assimila­tionist compromise. Because Michael has become more Sicilian than his rivals,[4] he gains the upper hand in the struggle for American power.

Similarly, Michael first marriage to the Sicilian Apollonia (whom Puzo conveniently kills off before his return to America) allows the reborn Sicilian to woo his American fiancee again, on his own terms rather than America’s. While he once planned to abandon his family’s world for hers, he can now have both bride and tradition. Kay Adams Corleone becomes “more Italian than Yankee” (397). The novel ends with Kay’s conversion to Catholi­cism, “undergo[ing],” in Ferraro’s word, “a rite of cultural trans­formation to make herself into the kind of Italian-American woman the criminal environment expects” (33), and the last chapter portrays her reconciliation to Michael’s criminality on Mi­chael’s terms.[5]

The first marriage makes the second possible, allowing Michael to win the symbolic American bride without self-surrender be­cause he has already received a marital education in Sicily. The end of the novel holds out the hope of not merely gaining accep­tance in America, but of actually converting non-Italians to Italian ways, fostering a kind of counter-assimilation in which the main­stream tries to ape the immigrants rather than the reverse. In the figures of Kay Adams and Tom Hagen, The Godfather promises Italian Americans that they can transform America instead of be­ing transformed.

Puzo’s subtle, flexible, and seductive myth of assimilation-by-tradition leaves only one crucial question unanswered. Why is criminality the source of upward mobility? Why must the renewal of tradition be found in crime? The answer goes a long way to­ward explaining the tourist with the T-shirt in Venice, and the Godfather’s appeal to my lawyer friend. The answer on one level is as simple as marketing. “Puzo’s usage of ethnicity within his ca­reer,” Ferraro notes, “parallels . . . the use of his ethnicity depicted in his novels” (206–07). Like the Corleones, Puzo has attained fame and success in America through close identification with his Italian-American roots, using his ethnicity itself as a vehicle for assimilation; he sells himself as an Italian American, and non-Italian America pays him a rich price.

But that sale demands that his “Italianness” appeal to a broad, mainstream marketplace. His first novel, The Dark Arena, is largely devoid of Italian-American issues, and The Fortunate Pilgrim, with its depiction of struggling immigrants, won its author only the most modest success. But in The Godfather, Puzo manages to frame an idea of Sicilian-American life that non-Sicilians find attractive enough to reward. Puzo succeeds by remaining Italian, but must become the kind of Italian the mainstream chooses to believe.

If America at large prefers to believe in the Sicilians of The Godfather instead of those in The Fortunate Pilgrim or Christ in Con­crete or Mount Allegro, that preference is inextricably bound with the desire to scapegoat. The idea of Sicilian Americans as “traditionally” criminal forms a barrier to Italian-American as­similation, allowing Italian Americans to be excluded from the American establishment or included on the most ambiguous, stigmatized terms, so that the man in the street can suspect figures like Mario Cuomo of mafia connections on the sole basis of eth­nicity. America is willing to grant Sicilian Americans a place if it can bestow an accompanying stigma, so that the outsiders may be marked as less desirable after generations of assimilation.[6] The respect given writers like DeLillo or Parini or Lawrence Ferlin­ghetti is carefully denuded of any reference to their ethnic back­grounds, and novels with positive ethnic role models do not gain Puzo’s kind of foothold. America only allows the assimilation-by-tradition that Puzo seeks when it can be awarded with unflatter­ing connotations. Since Puzo’s Italian Americans are unsavory, they and he can be accepted as Italians, and Puzo can gain am­biguous acclaim as a “popular writer.” A DeLillo must minimize references to his background, becoming a “serious novelist,” which is not associated with being “Italian.”

Indeed, this process of bestseller-making and literary canoni­zation, dividing Italian-American writers between explicitly ethnic “pulp” writers and “serious” writers whose ethnicity is publicly invisible, parallels the very economic and social redirection that created the American mafia. The “mafia” we understand today, as I believe even Puzo knows, is not an intrinsically Sicilian phe­nomenon but an American one, born from the crowded tenements of American cities and the illicit economic opportunities of Prohi­bition.[7] While “mafia” criminals may have opportunistically seized upon ethnic solidarity, or Sicilian traditions of patronage and cooperation, as a convenient organizational tool, the funda­mental purpose and energy of their enterprise came from the American economy.

Coming mainly from families of peasant laborers, with little tradition of education or upward mobility, Southern Italian immi­grants initially found few opportunities beyond low-paying man­ual work. However, the peculiarly American experience of Prohi­bition offered lucrative opportunities for people with little place in society to lose. Prohibition coupled an overwhelming demand for alcohol with a general unwillingness of “respectable” Americans to risk selling it. But the excluded poor, barred in practice from most hopes of legitimate advancement, were more willing to ac­cept high risks in exchange for financial prosperity. The main­stream’s eagerness to reward a taboo economic service effectively functioned to recruit disadvantaged ethnics as criminals, purvey­ors of the “legitimate” society’s proscribed desires. America did not reward Italians for being construction workers. It is still un­willing to reward novels about Italian construction workers. It raised indirect barriers for Italian Americans hoping to enter the professional middle class, and ethnic writers of middle-class nov­els are still expected to soft-pedal their roots. But America was happy to reward mafia bootleggers, if it could simultaneously de­spise them for being bootleggers. Similarly, Puzo is ambivalently rewarded for catering to desires that many of his readers profess to despise.

Like the bootleg gin that many Americans purported not to want, Puzo’s myths of romantic criminality nourish the unac­knowledged appetites of its consumers. Beyond simply scape­goating Sicilian Americans on the rest of America’s behalf, the novel provides a deeply American fantasy of capitalist success and power, disguising it as part of foreign traditions. We return to the question of multiple audiences; a non-Italian reader can choose, even without awareness of choosing, to overlook the nar­rative’s American nature but still vicariously enjoy time-honored daydreams of wealth, upward mobility, and “individualistic” freedom from the constraints of law. When various mafia leaders convene for an executive-board-style meeting in “the director’s conference room of a small commercial bank” (Puzo, The Godfather 279), and reach businessmen’s agreements over life and death, Puzo indulges America’s on-and-off fascination with a kind of lucrative, lupine Darwinian capitalism. And when Don Corleone makes an “old world” oration, using “old world” phrases like “I forgo the vengeance for my dead son” (293), the wolfish nature of American business is concealed under a veneer of immigrant cul­ture, disavowed and projected onto an “un-American” other. This image of Italian Americans, attaining their American dreams but giving other Americans the chance to despise them, is what has made Puzo so wealthy in our cultural marketplace.

Knowing this, I find it easier to forgive my countryman in the Piazza San Marco, or indulge my prosecutor friend’s idolatry of Coppola’s film. The Godfather story promises Italian Americans of my highly generation the hope of regaining our ethnic heritage without losing our American prosperity, and how can such a se­ductive promise be entirely ignored? If Puzo’s solution is ethnic renewal through criminality, then he is only bowing to the pres­sures of the culture around him, which chooses to glorify Italian-American criminals but pose Italian-American poets, bankers, and surgeons an artificial dilemma between broad acceptance and eth­nic tradition.

If the tourist in the San Marco embraced the mafia as his link to his heritage, it was because he saw no other Italian Americans that the dominant culture was willing to respect as Italian Americans. When one chooses to admire those who rob you, and despise those who do not, one must not pretend surprise at the snatched purse or picked pocket. I think of that tourist sometimes, and the bargain Mario Puzo has made, when I go to the movies or watch younger cousins watch MTV, when I see huge sections of the American people portrayed either as powerful criminals or law-abiding victims. When I see white middle-class teens mimic gang­sta rappers, or Latino actors stereotyped as dope kings, I think of how the Mafia became a symbol of my ethnic heritage, and I won­der what new monsters we are manufacturing, right now, in some video screen’s promising glow.

 

Jim Marino

Stanford University

 

 

Bibliography

 

Ferraro, Thomas J. “Blood in the Marketplace: The Business of Family in the Godfather Narratives.” Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: U of Chi­cago P, 1993. 18–52.

Gardaphe, Fred. The Italian American Writer: An Essay and an Anno­tated Checklist. Spencertown, NY: Forkroads, 1995.

Puzo, Mario. The Fortunate Pilgrim. New York: Atheneum, 1964.

___. The Godfather. New York: Putnam, 1969.

 

 

 

 


[1]It is, however, one of the first American gangster stories I can think of that ends with the criminals’ triumph, glorifying their success and relegating the police to a minor supporting role.

[2]Or at least, male Italian Americans. The novel’s most prominent female charac­ter is a WASP, and the special challenges of Italian-American women, which Puzo tried to examine in The Fortunate Pilgrim, are ignored.

[3]The decision to enlist is also depicted as an escape from family and ethnicity in Puzo’s Fortunate Pilgrim.

[4]The film even chooses to make Barzini look appreciably more Americanized, and less “Italian-seeming” than any of the other mobsters.

[5]She is prepared for final resignation in a conversation with the novel’s other “converted” Sicilian, Michael’s foster-brother Tom Hagen. Hagen, raised but not born a Sicilian, acts as a kind of ambassador between the Sicilian-American world and the non-Sicilian expectations of Kay and the readers.

[6]Of course, this stigmatization is only one band in America’s spectrum of ethnic scapegoating. But despite the gains Italian Americans have made over recent generations, American culture still marks Italian Americans as “other” and sees ethnicity selectively, imagining positive achievements as separate from ethnicity and anti-social behavior as part of ethnicity.

[7]Puzo knows that the Sicilian and American phenomena are different, and that the influence of each upon the other is sometimes mutual. Michael hides under the protection of a Sicilian Mafia chief who is, like Don Corleone, being chal­lenged by “a new breed of Mafia leaders . . . influenced by American gangsters deported to Italy,” who have no “scruples” about drug dealing and prostitution (Puzo, The Godfather 325).