Mario Mazziotti Gillan, Italian Women in Black Dresses GuernicaJack FoleySome years ago I was invited to a poetry reading presented to Jungian analysts. The reading was effective, and afterwards the poet--herself a Jungian analyst--asked the audience to share some of their own subjective experience. What happened next was nothing less than an outpouring of kvetching. Analyst after analyst did nothing but complain. Finally, I said, “You are all Jungian analysts, people trained to understand the subtleties of mental experience. In speaking about your experience you have done nothing but complain. Have none of you felt any joy--ever?”Kvetching is close to consciousness: poor me (or the Jewish don’t ask!) is always available in one form or another when someone says, “How are you feeling?” There would be far fewer popular songs if we eliminated the emotion of self-pity. I was reminded of these speculations when I read Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s new book, Italian Women in Black Dresses--a book which, incidentally, has sold better than any of Ms. Gillan’s other books. A few years ago I reviewed Gillan’s Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems. The fierce opening lines of the book are At thirteen, I screamed,As an Italian American myself--and, like Gillan, a working-class Italian American--I remembered such feelings. I thought the book was a masterful examination of the tensions and contradictions inherent in family life--indeed, in love itself. Italian Women in Black Dresses continues Gillan’s examination of family. It is as well-written and skillful as Where I Come From, but it contains far fewer tensions and contradictions--though there are moments. In “Doris Day,” Gillan writes, We tried for years not to knowAnd in “Since Laura Died,” in perhaps the finest lines of the book, and now, with Laura gone and Mom and Dad gone, too,Gillan’s own marriage is a subject of this book- “How right we are for each other,” she remarks at one point--but things have become extremely difficult since her husband has developed Parkinson’s Disease: “It’s like living / with a dead person.” The poems to her husband, Dennis, which conclude Italian Women in Black Dresses are the best things in it--and they are all the more remarkable because there are so few poems dealing with the difficulties of long life and age. How can one deal with someone who is simply disappearing: You aren’t evenThe lines addressed to Gillan’s brother Alex are an expression of the poet’s own fears of abandonment and loneliness. Thinking of an old photograph of her mother-in-law, whose degeneration Gillan patiently watched over, she writes I cannot connectYet, even these poems--moving as they are--are unfortunately affected by what seems to be the primary impulse of this book, certainly of its first half: kvetching. The word “fit” brings us back to an earlier poem, “Going to the Movies in the 1950s.” Gillan and her friends regarded the figures on the screen as “foreign creatures inhabiting a world / we knew we couldn’t live in since we’d never fit in” (my italics). Again and again Gillan tells us how other people were able to function so successfully (or to be so “beautiful” or to be so “blond”) whereas she and her friends were “awkward,” “dark,” somehow improper. This is from “Halloween Costumes”: Diane looked beautiful with her“The Bed I Remember” begins, The metal bed, not the beautiful iron bedsGillan can’t describe her old bed without pointing out that it is not one of “the beautiful iron beds” the reader might be picturing. In “Dorothy,” a teenage girl who “wore pale powder blue...that set off [her] light blonde hair” and was “the most popular girl” naturally captures “Charlie,” whom the adolescent Gillan adores: “when he smiles my insides shake, but of course, / he sees only you.” In an interview Gillan remarked, “I don’t like poems that are solely intellectual exercises. I think you should write out of your own background and life. Don’t neaten it up. What poetry needs is to be un-neatened.” That’s fine, but what we are dealing with here is not an honest and difficult appraisal of high school life for Italian Americans circa 1950--I lived that life too--but with unresolved adolescent envy which has continued into adulthood. We are dealing with someone who is still angry about things that happened to her forty or fifty years ago: we are dealing with kvetching. No doubt the young Maria (called “Mary” by her sister Laura) had such feelings, and they were very intense. But again and again Italian Women in Black Dresses insists on dividing absolutely everything into two (“I think / how we are all broken in half like this”) and particularly into an “us” vs. a “them”--which is hardly the best way to address a complex reality. We see Maria vs. her mother, Maria vs. Doris Day, Maria vs. Dorothy, Maria vs. Diane, even the young Dennis vs. the current Dennis--all instances in which an idealized image of some sort is played against someone who doesn’t measure up. “Cheap” begins Cheap--the clothes I wore when I was in grammar schooland continues in that vein as it progresses through the poet’s whole life. Unfortunately, one feels that Gillan is generating these dichotomies not out of genuine self-awareness but out of a basic desire to complain--and not to complain at a universal level (as Samuel Beckett does) but at a simple, personal level: poor me. Never once does Gillan acknowledge that Diane or Dorothy might have problems too or attempt to describe the larger social context in which both Diane and Maria function. At times, Gillan’s desire to see things in black and white terms even leads her into falsehoods. “Going to the Movies in the 1950s” has this: We went as oftenNaturally Gillan contrasts her own “dark” image to these “foreign creatures inhabiting a world / we knew we couldn’t live in,” but the real point to be made here is that what she is saying isn’t true. The kinds of movies Gillan is describing were not produced during the 1950s but during the 1930s. In the 1950s filmmakers and producers were discovering that it was possible for working-class people to be cast as romantic leads. In the 1930s the working class could be represented but only in comic roles or partly comic roles--or in gangster roles: Wallace Beery in Min and Bill or W.C. Fields; James Cagney. * In the 1950s figures such as Marlon Brando (like Gillan, Italian-American) and James Dean were beginning to function as the central figures of films. “Upper class” stars still remained (Grace Kelly, Cary Grant--though he never boasted the “pencil-thin moustache” of “witty...sophisticated” 30s stars John Barrymore and William Powell), but the fact is that the 1950s produced a sudden, powerful influx of working-class dramas such as On the Waterfront (1954) or the slightly earlier Force of Evil (1948)--to say nothing of the “realistic” working-class world of European (often Italian) films just beginning to be appreciated as masterpieces. The Academy-Award-winning film, From Here to Eternity (1953) centered on working-class heroes. Going to the movies in the 1950s was not like what Gillan says it was; there was an attempt at that time for films to represent people not so different from Gillan and her family. But had Gillan confessed to the truth of the matter, she would have had to abandon the easy dichotomy which her poem exists to exploit. I don’t mean to create the impression that Italian Women in Black Dresses is a bad book. Gillan is a fine writer no matter what she undertakes, and--no small feat--at her best she is both “accesible” and complex. Yet everything in Italian Women in Black Dresses suggests that the author is trying to be painfully honest (“What poetry needs is to be un-neatened”), and I think that a certain dishonesty has crept into this book. Gillan’s desire to communicate the simple-minded anger and envy of her adolescent self mars even some of the deeply moving and, yes, honest poems which also adorn Italian Women in Black Dresses. What we have instead of a deep examination of a life--which the book is sometimes--is a well-written book in which constant complaining sometimes transforms itself into grief: Only this cloth remains,* Clark Gable was cast as a romantic lead and was clearly working class. Yet Gable was usually cast as a successful working-class person, someone who--despite his lack of “breeding”--had made it.
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Jack Foley