Mother Tongue Read online

  All in all, the city is gorgeous

  MOTHER TONGUE

  AN AMERICAN LIFE IN ITALY

  WALLIS WILDE-MENOZZI

  With a new foreword by Patricia Hampl and a new preface by the author

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  TO PAOLO

  I would like to thank Jonathan Galassi, my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for having asked me to write this book. His unwavering faith and his subtle suggestions were essential. The multiple directions in nonfiction about two countries and self meant that I took lots of intuitive and blind turns. Jonathan’s belief in the creative process, his precision, and his love for and knowledge of Italy were inspiring gifts. To his assistants, Aoibheann Sweeney and Anne Stringfield, to the copy editor and design and production people, I also am grateful.

  I would like to thank Susan Tiberghien, Robert Keohane, Willard Spiegleman, Bianca Venturini, and Anita Bucci, who made suggestions on the text, as well as lending support as dear friends. Elizabeth Pauncz, who has read my work since university days, followed the book through its many versions; besides offering her insights and encouragement, she helped to lift it up.

  Paolo and Clare, my husband and daughter, like my editor, gave me full freedom to write as I wished. For as long as I can remember, in heart and deeds, both have shared this dream. Thanks merely scratches the most shallow surface.

  I would like to thank the staff at the Palatina Library in Parma for their great generosity, Pier Paolo Mendogni of the Gazzetta di Parma, Franco Furoncoli and Stanislao Farri for their beautiful photographs, Dr. G. Silva of Artegrafica Silva, Georgio Belledi and Aldo Zanettini of the Feltrinelli bookstore in Parma, and the many others from Parma who played parts. Kathy Eckhouse, an American who lived in Parma for a few years, reignited a dialogue with my own literature. Gian Luigi and Cosetta Rossi, the Gill children, Paolo’s family and my mother, my brothers and their wives, my sister and her husband, as well as many dear friends who are not named, have also added to this book and the richness of my life by their very existences.

  Need I add that the point of view—the struggle to give form to change and complexity—is my own? I hope, with its lapses and points subject to debate, that this work is accepted as a creative search.

  FOREWORD

  by Patricia Hampl

  How tempting to describe Mother Tongue as a page-turner, as it surely was for me more than twenty years ago. But really, it’s a page-pauser. The instantly trustworthy voice invites the reader (me, soon you) to slow into its fine focus, its uncanny, acute parallels and oppositions, the deft leaps from the frustrations of a Renaissance abbess commissioning Correggio to paint her room in Parma, say, to the homely act of buying bread at the corner store in the same city almost five hundred years later. Much underlining, notes and exclamations crammed in the margins. I’ve been in conversation with this book for many years.

  That enthralled first reading probably had something to do with its moment in modern literary history. Mother Tongue appeared in the early wave of personally voiced books in which the narrator is not a heroine, though she’s the protagonist, the seeking soul. This was nonfiction (wasn’t it?), but also lyric, essayistic, inquiring, thoughtful prose. Yet not dowdy “belles lettres.” Research underlay some of it, but it wasn’t scholarly—just reliable. There was even stealth poetry. A mind was revealing itself—to itself. And I, the reader, got to eavesdrop.

  There was something intriguingly feral, without guile but with native intelligence, about the book. And all the more engaging for refusing the narrative device of plot, ascending the high wire of associative thought to spin across the trajectory of time. Astute asides about politics—Communism, the Catholic Church, past, present. A passionate inner manifesto was claiming the right to a personal “take” on the world. Yet how did it manage to avoid being self-regarding?

  The book employed autobiography as a kind of scaffolding for the real subject—which was an account of an independent mind seeking meaning of and from the world and from the milky reaches of history. There was a moral imperative at the heart of the enterprise. Heart is the right word for the pulse of feeling penetrating the thinking. It wasn’t just a “story.” Still, the book hoisted itself aloft with captivating vignettes from a supposedly ordinary life, translated improbably from a Wisconsin upper-middle-class Protestant girlhood to Italian family life in still very Catholic Parma, wartime desperation sharp in its memory.

  Autobiography may be centuries older in the Western canon than the novel (Augustine sits down in North Africa in 397 to write his Confessions), but when Wallis Wilde-Menozzi was writing this book, the term “memoir” was newly adopted to label works that were not reminiscences or the bully tales of “great men” (or great lovers). She was one of the writers—often women—colonizing the dusty self-advertising form and turning it into the quest literature of the age.

  Memoir of course remains a celebrity genre—apparently you can’t run for president without writing one or having one ghosted. But memoir as Wallis Wilde-Menozzi was employing it ceased to be an old-age summing up or an advertisement for the self; it turned into an urgent midlife project. Just as Dante, not all that far from Parma, began his exile quest: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, the straight way lost.”

  History’s encounter with contemporary, immediate life is the lodestar and essential business of Mother Tongue. History with a capital H and other histories as well. The history of paper, for example, an early Parma specialty, leads to dismay that it has never been understood as “the embodiment of the infrastructure between private and public; it visibly holds thought.” There should be a Paper Age, the author feels, like a Bronze Age and an Atomic Age. Or the consideration of midday lunch in Parma—a hot sit-down meal, family together, please—a model of incontrovertible social control. On and on, the scalpel makes its meticulous nicks on the surface of life, opening, revealing.

  This is not a how-I-got-to-be-me memoir. Those inevitable parental players—mother, father—do come and go here, ghostly midwestern shapes moving through the mists of the life. They matter—of course. But the beloved daughter is a brighter star, growing up a Parma native as her mother never will be. Or the Italian spouse, a scientist who believes in the intelligence of poetry, for whose love her exile has been undertaken.

  But always, the immediacy of history—the great abbess Giovanna’s convent a brief walk away from the Menozzi home, a Renaissance woman modeling early humanist thinking: cloistered, shut down, shut up. The injustice of her enforced silence simmers down the centuries to be protested here by this American woman with the birthright of free speech. Yet perhaps the greatest grandee of the spirit is Alba, her husband’s mother, widowed early, the lean embodiment of postwar labor and love: the hardness of her life, with her love at least as hard—and sharp.

  I was heartened, all those years ago, to see it was possible to “write a life” and yet not be hopele
ssly self-absorbed. That it was possible to think with emotion and to feel with intelligence. Here was a writer’s attentive curiosity, as engaged as a scientist studying a slide under the microscope, knowing this attention could lead not only inward, but outward.

  Mother Tongue is “an American life,” as its subtitle says, lived in provincial, family-laden Parma (not international Rome, not the Amalfi coast, nor a restored Tuscan villa). This is a life knocked wonderfully off-balance (well, wonderful for the reader) to reveal an almost shockingly frank intelligence. A rare candor pervades and enlivens these chapters. No doubt its keen focus is bred of isolation, even loneliness. Such is exile. The job is to say what you see—inside and outside. It’s an act of faith in our supposedly faithless world.

  The exile is not only geographic. It’s linguistic. This is an American writer; English is her business, but her life and the life around her is lived in Italian. “English carried me,” she writes in one heartbreaking line, “but it no longer exists for daily traffic.” She is alone with English—her mother tongue—(not a bad thing, perhaps, for a writer). It’s clear she speaks fluent Italian, though we don’t learn how she acquired it, and she can argue with Italians. My favorite episode is her very American fury at the Italian linguistic stop sign: “Impossible.” Impossible, she is told time and again, the word employed to shut down—well, anything, including statements of fact. “Impossible” is a wall without a gate. She storms it, a can-do American. Not that she breaches that wall. “In Parma I have taken this word like a slap in the face, a punch to the stomach, an insult that I am unable to blast in spite of my protests.”

  She is left with history, especially what it means to think about women’s lives over time and in time, and to acquiesce to daily life when nothing can be assumed as a cultural given. Assumption about the simplest daily gestures is erased, maybe left back in Chippewa Falls. Such is the fate of exile—the freight of uncertainty and the development of a necessarily keen eye and ear. For this is not an expat story, not about being a visitor observing exotica. Rather, from an American point of view, it’s a reverse immigration story: here the American is the alien trying to wedge into a deeply rutted, traditional way of life, yet determined to maintain her authentic self—whatever, whoever that is.

  Her dislocation is often painful, but never expressed as a complaint (love brought her to Parma, and to that fact—spouse, child, widowed mother-in-law—there is unbroken loyalty). This relentless attention requires radical honesty, a form of inventive humility. That’s what you get from this writer. No wonder I couldn’t put the book down.

  Books seem permanent—there they are, chunks of effort, bound, stamped with title and author name. But they come into existence, like everything, in time. They are more likely to be ephemeral than eternal. Some books, initially ignored or even vilified, endure and become classics much later. Think Melville and Moby-Dick: “The style of his tale is … disfigured … hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed” (London Athenaeum, 1851).

  Nabokov insists that rereading is the real reading. It allows for greater intimacy, but also for fresh judgment. Almost a quarter century (put it that way, and take a deep breath) has passed since this book was new. The bright daughter of this book, a child no longer, is a mother herself, and gone from Parma. Even the touching reference to the exiled writer’s passionate anticipation of “the feast of mail” arriving with the postman has been superseded by the flash-fluency of email. The Italian Berlusconi in the book now seems an unwitting harbinger of the American Trump. Yet Mother Tongue is now more, not less, “relevant,” to use a catchword from the era of the book’s first publication. Partly that’s because the questions the book engages are enduring, indeed eternal—the religious term feels accurate here.

  Sensuous writing, the exactitude of metaphor—reading’s signal pleasures—are evergreen on rereading: the “forthright woman … round as an opossum, with permanents that made her hair look like grapes on her head,” and the streets of Parma, “often tucked in by wisps of fog, have a domestic, sleepy, elegant charm …”

  Beyond the elegance of its stone-cut language, the fact of exile envelopes the book. It’s even more eloquent today than twenty-five years ago. At no time in human history, we are told, have so many people been migrants. The exile, back turned from the language and habits of home, facing uncertainty, is the emblem of the human being in our world.

  The value of “writing a life” that Wallis Wilde-Menozzi undertook a quarter century ago against great odds and alone in her exile language is now the model to express our times. “Everyone who turns any light on herself,” she writes, “will find sadness and disorientation, ruins, missteps, as well as stupendous beauties and dreams. You change when you act, just as you exist when you stand your ground. The important thing is not to panic, not to give up what you can’t relinquish, and never confuse life with art.”

  PREFACE TO THE 2020 EDITION

  Starting in 1981, for years, on every return flight to my permanent Italian life, my working tools, books in English—poetry, history, memoir, philosophy paperbacks—took up nearly my entire weight limit. That was before microchips changed how we live. Now, it’s one or two titles, and whatever is missing can be obtained on the web in Parma. The internet router, with its eight lights blinking in our hall day and night, says “the world, the world.” Besides that, I possess good Italian after thirty-five years. Italian as my daily map has influenced the way I think and write. More importantly, Italian has opened my mind to the way perceptions change, not only in time but as seen in different cultures.

  Italian words are overflowing little jars. The English language, still adding words at eclectic speed, offers precise, flat pebbles to choose among. There is no pragmatic, literal level to Italian’s ambiguous beauty. Echoes of Dante, Boccaccio, Leopardi carry forward. My mind hums finding new pitches in human relationships because culture is a shaping presence. This complexity is a subject: how life is felt and described. The challenge became Mother Tongue.

  Before we moved permanently to Italy, Paolo, my Italian husband, and I worked at Stanford University. In Palo Alto, California, my neighbor Maisy (she and her mother arrived there when it was countryside and its fresh air was a cure for her TB) had two apple trees, one on the east side of her yard, which produced apples that were pink inside, and one on the south side, which produced yellow-skinned apples, tart as lemons. She brought baskets of them to us in our apartment across the street.

  “Aren’t they different? Aren’t they juicy? They are as fragrant as perfumes.”

  Those ordinary local varieties were felled long ago, when another kind of Apple put down roots in those plain, modest streets. Her grassless back yard, with its loaded clothesline always flapping, was sold to developers and covered over with apartments, as nearly every other free inch of Palo Alto has been.

  The unique wobbly shapes and unrepeatable tastes of Maisy’s apples are gone.

  I aspire to language as nuanced as her apples. This language carries troves of distinctions to be shared, given away, laden with other times. Fertile words that connect to what is authentic, present or missing, have always challenged the persuaders whose vocation it is to erase them, streamline and sell. The reach of their methods has never been more mesmerizing and unchecked.

  Once, flocks of passenger pigeons were so dense that North American skies turned black as they passed over, churning the air with the rushing sound of a million wings. Until the last female died in 1914 without laying an egg, who believed that commercial interests could extinguish a population numbering two billion?

  When I moved permanently to Italy in 1981, immigration was not a political crisis. Without ever applying, I was given Italian citizenship because I had married an Italian. No one considered me an immigrant. I was an expatriate, even though I met no Americans for my first five years in Parma. In provinces, generally, townspeople decide what outsider means and when being labeled a foreigner is a way of being permanently dismissed. Until I beca
me an expat in Parma, I had never felt exclusion and difference as personal rejection. Nor had I felt patriotic tugs of loyalty. Those experiences made me imagine millions of other immigrant lives. My dislocations awakened me more deeply to the energy, challenge, and pain of fractures. Living outside my country gave me freedom to put contrasts together without knowing precisely where my imagination would lead. Identity was put under pressure.

  Day to day, being foreign never ends, when assimilation is a wish and a need. How do we turn otherness into a dialogue where differences can be expressed? That is one reason Mother Tongue is being reissued. Culture is complicated.

  The humanitarian side of foreignness has grown to be one of our century’s central dramas. In Italy, on nightly television for years, we have seen near-biblical scenes of immigrants being dragged ashore in Lampedusa, saved from drowning. This complicated but generally accepted position is being questioned. The United States is living a particularly brutal period of not responding to the rights and needs of people entering from other places. The narratives we construct for why immigrants are seeking help often mirror a basic ignorance of history, including our own.

  All immigrants carry memories that don’t match what confronts them once they arrive. Some write about what they see and feel. Some are literary minds, not fleeing immediate emergencies, but all immigrant writers are witnesses for shifting meanings of good and bad. Poets Meena Alexander and Derek Walcott used the sap flowing from cut branches of language to create new ones. Scholastique Mukasonga and Joseph Brodsky kept memories of nightmares alive. Zadie Smith, W. G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shaped truth-telling into intrinsically political imagination. Like Maisy’s apples, immigrant writing often contrasts intense tastes with the uniformity we expect as readers. It deepens perspectives on irony and injustice that might be lost in a world trying to avoid pain; it carries new pitches for laughter and sorrow. These new lights show us darkness differently, following its oscillations from outside to within ourselves. They turn us toward noticing blindnesses and radiance from other points of view.