Mario Before the Mob

Mario Puzo Before and After The Godfather

Dear Republic,

Early ROL contributor Atar Hadari (Muriel Rukeyser) returns with this searching investigation of the oeuvre of Mario Puzo. If anything is more important to literature than myth, it must be the money.

-ROL

MARIO BEFORE THE MOB

It is a major part of Mario Puzo’s story about himself, the myth of The Godfather if you will, that before writing this piece of trash he wrote literature. ‘I have written three novels. The Godfather is not as good as the preceding two; I wrote it to make money.’ He says The Dark Arena (1955) ‘received mostly very good reviews saying I was a writer to watch’ and that The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965) ‘received some extraordinarily fine reviews. The New York Times called it a “small classic” – that he himself immodestly thinks of it as art. So pervasive is Puzo’s myth that when I got in touch with another writer and mentioned I was writing about ‘The Godfather’ he replied that he’d been meaning to read ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ because that was the great book Puzo wrote before he condescended to write for money. Puzo concludes his lamentation about ‘The Godfather’: ‘The book got much better reviews than I expected. I wished like hell I’d written it better. I like the book. It has energy and I lucked out by creating a central character that was popularly accepted as genuinely mythic. But I wrote below my gifts in that book.’

There are problems with this story. In ‘The Dark Arena’ certain sections appear deliberately pornographic (and Puzo was earning his living working for a men’s magazine at the time so he would have known that), while certain sections are over-written in a literary way, and certain sections just slack. But the structure of it stood up. You want to know what happened to the protagonist, you care about his German girlfriend who becomes his wife and bears his child. You keep reading. This does not make a classic, but it is the foundation of any book people will read without being forced to at school.

I turned to ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ expecting something better in light of Puzo’s story about himself but the reverse was in many ways true. There was more literary grandstanding in sections, but less story. Put simply it is the story of Lucia Santa, mother of seven children by two different husbands, who must hold her family together on Tenth Avenue in New York and get them out of the tenement to achieve the great American dream, buy a house on Long Island. Puzo’s portrayal of Lucia Santa is passionate and evocative, there are splendid scenes and great characters, a touch of tragedy to many of those small characters and small scenes, but there are two insuperable flaws to the book. One is that there is no thread to compel you to keep reading. I was writing a piece about Puzo and had to force myself to pick it up again and again until the last third when it finally gained momentum. Secondly, nothing happens.

What do I mean, nothing happens? Asked to teach an introduction to fiction course at a university in Israel I quoted my students Michael Caine’s remark that when offered a script he would read the opening fifteen pages, the last fifteen pages and assess if the character had changed. If they hadn’t, he would assume nothing much had happened in intervening pages and not bother with the script. Caine is not a literary critic, but his method of judging a script is very practical. Lucia Santa is a compelling character, and Puzo makes us care about her, but the suffering and love he depicts does not finally change her in any way. She endures. One son, Vinnie, dies in a suspected suicide in the train yards. One son, Larry, a babe-magnet charmer with a great deal of Sonny Corleone in him gets a job working as a union collector and becomes a minor league gangster. Her eldest daughter marries a Yiddish poet, a younger and more literary son Gino is forced into his dead brother’s job and runs off by enlisting in World War II. Lucia Santa hopes he will come home but knows he won’t. Everything else is local colour but not a story. Nothing happens. The story he tells about his fall from glory is a self-exculpating myth rather than an accurate assessment of his own gifts.

There are tiny moments in ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ that presage the later book. When Vinnie dies, Gino’s first inkling to the change in his older brother Larry’s line of employment comes when Larry threatens an old neighborhood pal to get him to change the railway report suggesting a suicide. Later Larry tells Gino he will have to take over Vinnie’s job and: ‘Gino felt the now-familiar physical fear and realised he must have looked frightened. Larry was protecting him. He was bewildered by the terror that now swept over him.’ There in miniature is Fredo’s future relationship with Michael Corleone.

Dr. Barbato, a finely drawn minor character who despises the peasants he ministers to but feels obliged to show compassion to them, also presages Michael’s complicated relationship with his background. At the close of ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ we find he ‘volunteered for the Army and in Africa had become a hero of some sort, with his pictures in the magazines and a story of his exploits so terrifying that his father suffered a stroke from sheer exasperation at his son’s foolishness.’ Or as Don Corleone later remarks of Michael’s war medals for bravery, ‘He performs these miracles for strangers’.

But the main character is Lucia Santa, a representation of his own mother, who Puzo credited as the model for Don Corleone himself. That is, any earthy wisdom and shrewd judgement that came out of Don Vito’s mouth had previously come from Puzo’s mother in his own mind’s ear. Puzo compares himself often unfavourably to Joyce and reading this novel I was reminded of Joyce’s story collection ‘Dubliners’ – that is, the writing was in places very richly textured but the whole was not more than the sum of its parts. Joyce proceeded from ‘Dubliners’ to write the story of a young man, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ which had some tension to it and finally to ‘Ulysses’ which is the story of one man’s journey across Dublin in the course of a single day which finally ends up with a soliloquy by his wife. I think it is a considerable judgement against ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ that Joyce’s highbrow masterpiece actually has more structural narrative tension to it than Puzo’s family narrative in New York’s Tenth Avenue. I do not mean to trash the book – to paraphrase Don Vito, ‘Doesn’t matter to me what a man does for a living, but drugs is a dirty business’. Puzo is entitled to over-rate his earlier book if that is a comfort to him, but illusions are an expensive liability.

What Puzo took from ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ was its milieu (Santa Lucia all but ends the book with the wedding that starts ‘The Godfather’, the first favour Don Corleone grants in the novel is for a loyal baker member of the bakers’ union protection racket he organised ‘in his salad days’, a union very like the one Santa Lucia’s son becomes a collector for). ‘The Godfather’ is very much a shift of focus in the world of ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ to that small corner which revolved around crime, but the central character does not change. What Puzo added was to make that central character male and therefore able to make instantly visible decisions of life and death (bang bang) rather than the rather longer-term decisions of life and death which Puzo clearly demonstrates Santa Lucia makes for all her children.

Puzo had attempted to portray those inner worlds of women twice, to an extent in his portrayal of the protagonist’s German wife in ‘The Dark Arena’ and again in ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ but failed to make that element carry the story, most spectacularly in the latter, and so made one key change in The Godfather. To his portrayal of his mother, aside from changing her sex, he crucially added a threat. Santa Lucia makes no fatal error or misstep that leads to the destruction of her family. Don Corleone has to confront the threat of Solozzo, to survive his assassination attempt, and hand power over to his favourite son, who he profoundly hoped would be a legitimate businessman if not a Senator. That is a tragic structure. In ‘The Godfather’ he took some of the pornographic elements and narrative tension of The Dark Arena and the central and minor characters of The Fortunate Pilgrim and made a satisfying story with narrative tension and genuine emotional force. He would be trying to recapture that formula for the rest of his days, sometimes by reintroducing Michael into The Sicilian, sometimes by revisiting the milieu.

‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ starts with a scene of Larry riding heroically down the streets of New York in a parade, just as Vincent Mancini would in Godfather III. But the writing is strained and works too hard. Then two pages in the subject shifts:

Earlier that evening, in twilight, when Larry Angeluzzi saddled his horse in St. John’s Park, his mother, Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, also mother of Octavia and Vincenzo Angeluzzi, widow of Anthony Angeluzzi, now wife of Frank Corbo and mother of his three children, by name Gino, Salvatore and Aileen, prepared to leave her empty flat, escape the choking summer heat, spend her evening with neighbours in quarrelling gossip, and most of all, to guard her children playing in the darkness of the city streets.

Derek Walcott once remarked that you could tell how solid a speech was by watching the actor’s feet as they delivered it. If the actor was uncomfortable or tense, not quite sure of the speech in their mouth, their foot would be half in the air, the heel would be off the ground. If the actor was confident of the speech, their foot would be flat on the stage. When I read that sentence I felt Puzo had found his character and was no longer straining. The actor’s foot was flat on the ground. He’d found the central character of his major book, all he needed now was to find a way to write about her. That he did, in the next book.

Puzo told Carol Gino that he ‘sold out’ writing this book because he believed in ‘Joyce and Dickens and Dostoyevsky.’ I think that statement bears thinking about in many regards. Let’s take the easy ones first. Dostoyevsky’s most famous novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ was written as a serial to pay his gambling debts and abridged a teeny bit to go into book form but not so much. Who were you selling out here, Mario? Dickens wrote every novel he wrote for magazines or anthologies published first by others and then by himself, that is, for money. I’m still not getting who Mario sold out.

Last and most important is the comparison with Joyce. Joyce was the writer’s writer of the twentieth century. He never sullied his hands with money. He got himself sponsors to underwrite his expenses. And yet, and yet. There is something in Joyce’s declared intent in his first novel, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’ about forging the uncreated conscience of his race, that actually does ring a little of Puzo’s endeavour in ‘The Godfather’, for all that he claimed he just wrote it for the money. There is nothing as sweeping or unsparing in its critique of American life in Puzo’s previous two novels. There is no scale, there is no brutal, inexorable inevitability to the tragedy. (He attempts that in ‘The Dark Arena’ but the protagonist losing his wife there is seen as partly his own inertia, not even a localised decision on his part, not an inherent part of his chosen way of life. And, of course, the protagonist of ‘The Dark Arena’ does not kill his brother or betray his wife for the sake of his criminal family business.)

To the extent that Puzo’s novel entered the language with a whole array of quotes, to the extent that his analogy of crime to American government and corporate culture has become commonplace, to the extent that you cannot separate the Corleone family from late twentieth century American culture, Puzo did exactly what Joyce set out to – he told the Italian-Americans, he told Americans altogether, who they were. He didn’t sell anybody out. By writing for money he acquired the freedom to attempt scale. And succeeded in getting an audience for his vision that the literary novel would not have afforded him. Like Dickens and like Dostoyevsky he wrote for the huge, hungry mass reading public. But like Joyce he also made a hero and an epic of his Italian-American locale. He told Charlie Rose modestly that he’d ‘stumbled across an epic character,’ in the Don. The Don is an epic character, but Michael and his compromises at the end of the twentieth century are a mirror for everyone.

In 1969 when Mario Puzo published ‘The Godfather’ it was already twenty years since Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ on Broadway, with its acknowledgment that the American dream was a scam and the salesman will not live to pay his mortgage but commit suicide to try and claim the insurance and give his kids a stake. The plot of Puzo’s later ‘The Last Don’ revolves tangentially around a writer who commits suicide to try and claw rights back from the studio to ensure the financial security of his family. Puzo would have recognised Miller’s Willy Loman as his own flesh and blood.

What made ‘The Godfather’ a hit was that everybody perceived by 1969 what it took Miller dressing up in a modernist play with flashbacks in 1949. By 1969 there was a deep nostalgia for a time and world in which a father could shelter his family, for the idea of a family as a nurturing unit of society in which anyone could be sheltered, for the notion that you could pass something on to your children that you could try, even if you failed, at least try to have control. That time had passed. The Rolling Stones had sung about it – ‘Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In the Shadows’.

Joan Didion’s essay ‘The White Album’ includes this entry on 1968:

It was a time in my life when I was frequently ‘named.’…I was even named, in 1968, a Los Angeles Times ‘Woman of the Year’, along with Mrs. Ronald Reagan, the Olympic swimmer Debbie Meyer, and ten other California women who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works but I tried to keep in touch. I was responsible. I recognised my name when I saw it. Once in a while I even answered letters addressed to me, not exactly upon receipt but eventually, particularly if the letters had come from strangers… This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility… Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative that I knew.

Seen from this perspective The Godfather is a much less experimental, much more conservative artistic response to American social change than the noir crime novels of the 1930s or 1940s and their view of say Los Angeles as a deeply corrupt city from top to bottom, or Miller’s play of 1949. In 1969 Puzo with his family story of a transition of power and attempt to retain order captured the longing for what was gone and made a tragedy of someone who attempted to keep going what was no longer possible, even if you were the boss of all bosses.

Don Corleone is so central to the success of the book and his relationship to Michael so pivotal, and protestations that Puzo ‘wrote below my gifts in that book’ so loud that I was moved to check how and what he did better in some of these later books. It seems to me Puzo’s basic story in ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ is the child Gino’s attempt to escape the all-powerful mother. In ‘The Godfather’ he repeats that story only the son on returning from the war that Gino goes off to doesn’t get away and the same voice of folk-wisdom is emanating from a wise Don rather than a chastened widow. What did he do with this structure on other occasions?

Puzo returned to this structure again in ‘The Sicilian’ (1984), drawing on the history of the Sicilian bandit Turi Giuliano to shape the oedipal conflict another way. Giuliano stages his Sicilian robberies and kidnappings as a political uprising against the government in Rome but also a personal duel with Don Croe Malo, the supreme crime lord of Sicily, who covets Giuliano as a powerful son and heir to police and then inherit his empire. The depiction of Don Croce is much more three dimensional than some other depictions of gangsters in Puzo’s books but in that very knowingness somewhat reductive. There is no passage in ‘The Godfather’ that gets inside Don Corleone’s head in quite this cynical a commentary:

Don Croce shifted his huge bulk in the chair and mused whether it would really be worthwhile making this olive-head of a Sicilian the Premier of Italy. But his very stupidity would be an asset to the Friends of the Friends, and if he turned treacherous he would be an easy man to destroy. Don Croce said, in the sincere tone for which he was famous, ‘I thank you for your friendship and will do everything in my power to help you in your fortunes.’

It would have been difficult for Brando to make a wholesome everyman out of such a figure, though it is a compelling book and in this case Michael Cimino made what some claim to be a great movie, especially in the director’s cut, from Puzo’s own screenplay, but there remain structural flaws marring the pay-off of the story.

Puzo manages to have his cake and eat it – Giuliano the demi-god is defeated but not by his father-figure rival but rather the betrayal of his friend. And the Sicilian people are ground down by Don Croce in the absence of their champion. But I am always reminded of a large black woman who got up and walked out of the cinema during the closing credits of Michael Mann’s ‘Heat’, in which the ostensible protagonist burglar is killed by the other protagonist cop. She said, loudly for all the world to hear, ‘I didn’t sit there for three hours for him to get shot.’ I felt the same about Giuliano. Don Croce doesn’t triumph and Giuliano doesn’t die a tragic death due to a character flaw, for all that Puzo inserts an after the fact discussion between Michael Corleone and his father, seeking to assert that Don Corleone is a realist while Giuliano wanted to be a legend and die. Constant comparisons of Giuliano and his friend and betrayer Aspanu to the cast of ‘The Song of Roland’ do not help. I would go so far as to say Puzo’s literary ambition damages the book sometimes with passages so good they seem to belong in a different book:

But Giulano, dying, thought he was still running. The shattered neurons of his brain tangled and he thought he was running through the mountains with Aspanu seven years before, the fresh water flowing out of the ancient Roman cisterns, the small of strange flowers intoxicating, running past the holy saints in their padlocked shrines, and he cried out, as on the night, ‘Aspanu, I believe,’ believing in his happy destiny, in the true love of his friend. Then the kindness of death delivered him of the knowledge of his betrayal and his final defeat. He died in his dream.

I once went to a public interview with the crime writer Ian Rankin and asked him why there were literary passages in his Inspector Rebus series – sometimes lines and sometimes who paragraphs like one near the end of his fourth Rebus novel ‘Strip Jack’ which is rather like that passage in ‘The Sicilian.’ Rankin said there were lapses of character in Rebus’s internal monologue, even a literary allusion to Walt Whitman that embarrassed him, then he said: ‘Sometimes you see flashes of a different writer that you once maybe wanted to be. But sooner or later you have to be the writer you actually are.’

None of Rankin’s books have sold as well as ‘The Godfather,’ though his novels have sold over 20 million copies. But a lot of them have done better than ‘The Sicilian’ and I think his remark about the slippage between your former ambitions and your current book is very apt to Puzo’s own conflicts. In ‘The Sicilian’ Puzo managed to over-reach himself. It is beautifully written, the Don and Giuliano are memorable characters as are many of the supporting cast, but finally it does not matter to Don Croce that he didn’t get an heir in Giuliano; it’s strictly business, and in ‘The Godfather’ both the disappointment of the father and the defeat of the son as he is absorbed by the business do matter. It’s not strictly business, it’s personal.

W.B. Yeats: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ There is an endless conversation in the mind of any writer about art and money. That was a conversation Puzo was always having, with his mother. He made her immortal as Don Corleone. He did not write below his gifts. As Francis Ford Coppola acknowledges in his Notebook, it was not he who made Mario but Mario who made him. And ends his reflections of how his life was changed, Thank you, Mario. I would join him in that sentiment with just one caveat: Puzo is a great model for how to write one great book and a terrible model of how to think about your work if you ever want to write another great book again. He did not grow as an artist as Joyce did from ‘Dubliners’ to ‘Portrait’ to ‘Ulysses’ and perhaps even to ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’ Rather Puzo tried to recapture himself. In that, if not any other way, he failed to live up to his heroes, those great commercial artists Dickens, Dostoevsky and yes, even Joyce.

Atar Hadari is the author of Rembrandt's Bible, Gethsemane, and Arik and Company. He is also the translator of Songs from Bialik and the Pen Translates award-winning Lives of the Dead: Collected Poems of Hanoch Levin.