Straight Out of Brooklyn: A Critical Memoir

Illustrations

Preface: The Interdisciplinarian

The grandson of Italian immigrants to the United States, I took my undergraduate degree at the University of Florida, where, much to my parents’ horror and dismay, I majored in German literature. The thought of going to graduate school and getting a Ph.D. in German studies was initially very appealing to me—until I met a French girl and we started going to the movies together on a regular basis. The French girl went back to Paris, but the movies stayed with me and have stayed with me up to the present day.

However, the thought of studying cinema on an advanced level in the academy was almost unheard of at the time—the early 1970s. So, after stints as an orderly in an army hospital, a reporter on a metropolitan newspaper, and as an English teacher in an inner-city high school, I fulfilled my sublimated need to get out of the study, yet still satisfy my intellectual urge, by turning to the theater. I became one of my country’s first dramaturgs, or literary advisors, in which capacity I worked for several years for a variety of professional theaters on the east coast of the United States. I wrote program notes, did historical research and translations, conducted post-performance discussions with audience members, and served as an in-house critic of productions-in-progress and as the theater’s public-relations liaison to the media.

I got the idea for this kind of work from my reading of German authors such as G. E. Lessing and Bertolt Brecht. I would have remained a dramaturg, never to have re-entered the halls of academe, save for the fact that I could not make much of a living at such a job in the largely commercial American theater—where my kind of work was perceived as a luxury, at best, and a nuisance, at worst. So I went back to school, graduate school, in theater studies, first at Tulane University in New Orleans and then at Yale in Connecticut.

Why the theater and theater studies? Because theater, like film if somewhat less so, is by its very nature interdisciplinary. That is, it potentially includes all other art forms: architecture, music, literature, dance or choreography, photography, sculpture, painting, song or lyric poetry, even fashion and interior design. Both theater and film are therefore sometimes called Gesamtkunstwerke, or total works of art, in an appropriation of the German composer Richard Wagner’s term. By its very nature, each of these two arts must be collaborative, which is another way of saying interdisciplinary.

As we all recognize, it takes a number of people to produce a play, including but not limited to the playwright, the director, the producer, the actors, the designers, and the person who writes or selects the musical score. It takes all of these people and even more to make a film, as anyone knows who has sat lately through the entire closing credits of a movie—some credit-rolls take more than ten minutes! We can add to the list the editor or film cutter but we had better not forget the special-effects people, the sound technicians, and the set dressers—all of whom must cooperate or collaborate across disciplines to produce the final finished filmic product.

What made interdisciplinary film even more appealing to me than theater was its peculiar universality. The drama may be comparative across cultures, but the cinema is the most universal art form in the sense that it is the only one using words which, whatever its national origin, is almost instantly available, worldwide, through the application of computer-generated subtitles—followed by the uploading of the individual film to the Internet. Complementing its universality is cinema’s democratic aspect. Photography made all faces equal—made every human face reproducible, not only the faces of those who could afford to engage portrait painters. Likewise, starting in 1895, film placed the world at every human being’s disposal, not just the disposal of the rich who could afford to travel anywhere and see anything they wanted. And the cinema, once it began to talk, lent its democratic assistance to new immigrants to a nation like the United States: that is, it helped these people, as it did my extended Italian family, to learn to speak English.

So you could say that I was bitten quite early by the Faustian bug to be as transcendent, cross-cultural, and all-knowing as possible. Of course, I knew that I couldn’t really be these things, but I did want to try and, above all, I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. So as a graduate student in theater studies, I continued to work on theatrical productions—sometimes as a dramaturg, sometimes as an actor, and occasionally as a director. I took as many courses as allowed in departments other than theater—especially at Yale, which at the time had stellar English, German, and comparative literature departments. And I kept up my interest in the cinema by seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of movies. I kept a long, long list of the films that various scholars had deemed the best or most significant, and for the seven years I was in graduate school, I watched five or six movies a week, every week. This was before videotapes and later DVDs had become available, which meant that I had to be ever on the lookout for choice items and even ready to travel some distance to see them.

Still, I didn’t forget my academic origins, as I wrote my doctoral dissertation on German comedy, of all subjects. And I have continued to write about German drama, as well as German film, during a career that has spanned four decades. But my interests go far beyond Germanistik, as I trust I’ve made clear by now: they include world drama, theater history and theory, Anglo-American literature, comparative arts—theater and film, fiction and film—and film history and criticism, in addition to academic writing and editing. Courses I have taught thus include Contemporary World Cinema; American Popular Culture; Film Theory; Film Aesthetics; Italian Cinematic Neorealism; Tragic Drama; French New Wave Film; Postwar British Cinema; American Theater; Modern European Drama; Film in the Weimar Republic; Play Analysis; Theater History; Twentieth-Century Anglo-Irish Drama; Playwriting; Czech Renaissance Film; Shakespeare; The Euro-American Avant-Garde; Freshman Composition; and Research Methods.

As the teacher of such courses, I have belonged to the following departments, as a visitor or full-time member, at various colleges and universities across the globe: American Culture and Society; Performance Studies; English Language and Literature; Theater and Drama; Media and Communication; Comparative Literature; Film and Digital Media; Modern Languages; and Art and Art History. As a scholar, critic, translator, interviewer, theorist, anthologist, and bibliographer, I have published articles in journals as different as the New Republic and the Journal of Aesthetic Education; the Sewanee Review and the Germanic Review; South Atlantic Quarterly and Asian Cinema; the Yale Review and Modern Drama. And my books range in title from Theories of the Avant-Garde Theater to Film Adaptation Theory from 1916 to 2000; from In Search of Cinema to What Is Dramaturgy?; from Interviews with Akira Kurosawa to Antigone Adapted to André Bazin on Global Cinema. But I think you get the picture by now.

Am I, because of all this various and sundry activity, seen as a dilettante or—dreaded word—generalist by other academics? Absolutely. One book reviewer even called me a journalist, in what was clearly meant to be an insult. Another quipped that I had not even had the decency to die before allowing some press to publish a collection of my ephemeral film chronicles. Think of that! Moreover, among faculty search committees, some old prejudices die hard: theater and film are still considered by many traditional scholars to be bastard arts—bastard because their finished products cannot finally be attributed to one person in the old Romantic sense of the towering, isolated genius. So now, I am a bastard in addition to being a dilettante, a generalist, and a journalist. But, unlike some scholars of British literature, I’m a bastard who knows, as a result of his German studies, that Romanticism began in Germany—in the late eighteenth century—not in England.

I also know, because of my theater studies, that the young male actor playing Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet, in the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love, is not intended to be a homosexual in feminine attire—as a number of movie reviewers at the time initially believed. So-called boy actors, playing female roles, were common in Elizabethan England, where women were not permitted to perform on the legitimate stage. Through my acquaintance with British literature, moreover, I can show you how the nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens provided the seminal American director D. W. Griffith with a number of cinematic techniques, including equivalents to fades, dissolves, the breakdown into shots, and the concept of parallel editing. Some dramatists even imagined their work in a narrative, episodic form and a first-person, subjective-camera perspective that anticipated the birth of the cinema—most notably, and excitingly, the German Georg Büchner in his 1836 play Woyzeck. From my otherwise scanty knowledge of cognitive psychology, I can show you in addition how, millions of years before the invention of cinema, the human mind was nonetheless predisposed to cinematic grammar as if it were an entirely natural, inborn language. Why? Because we spend one-third of our lives in the nightly world of dreams, where images are fragmented and different realities collide abruptly with what seems to have great meaning—exactly as in the case of film editing.

Finally, from my knowledge of military history—much of it gleaned from my father, a veteran of the Asia-Pacific War, as well as from voluminous reading and documentary-watching—from this circumscribed knowledge I can name a number of historical or medical inaccuracies in Steven Spielberg’s 1998 blockbuster Saving Private Ryan, inaccuracies missed by almost all critics at the time. So many mistakes, in fact, that they spoiled my screening of the film, which I declined to review. Here are a few of those errors or oversights that might interest the reader:

To reverse the last line of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel The Unnamable, I could go on, but I won’t go on—at least not in this preface.

What follows is a kind of introduction to, and culmination of, my interdisciplinary journey through life. Chapter 1 of this critical memoir, Brooklyn Boy, details my Italian-American beginnings in the New York of the 1950s and the profound effect that my extended, working-class family, as well as the borough of Brooklyn, has had on my life. So great has this effect been that, as I age, I think less of the momentous history through which I have lived or of the intellectual life I have enjoyed. More so, I focus on things far more permanent, profound, and primordial: the people and places I knew as a youth and those that knew me; the English my family learned as well as the Italian I unlearned, or lost in translation; the Mafiosi I met and marked.

Chapter 2, The Baseball Player, is an encomium both to baseball and to the extraordinary baseball-playing abilities of a boyhood friend of mine, who, mysteriously, never played again after high school. I attempt in this piece to discover why and, in the process, attempt to evoke the beauty, majesty, and meritocracy of the quintessential American game.

In Chapter 3, Withnail and Yale, I remember another good friend. But I come at him through the cinema: by suggesting that the fundamental way, conscious or not, in which we determine the quality of a film (or any other work of art) is by the degree to which we re-experience ourselves through it—and the degree to which that re-experiencing coincides with our pride, our shames, our hopes, our honor. I then adduce Withnail and I (1987) as an autobiographical film that speaks not only for its writer-director, Bruce Robinson, but also for me. I go on to show that my own review of Withnail and I is evidence, in Oscar Wilde’s words, that criticism itself is a mode of autobiography. I follow my critique with a portrait of the autobiographical impulse behind it: my relationship with the good friend, in this case from college and graduate school, who once shared my artistic-cum-intellectual aspirations.

Chapter 4, Faith, Sickness, Mystery, examines my mid-life crisis of religious faith in the context of my near-death experience during an extended hospital stay. My closest relationship during this period was with a Catholic priest in residence at the hospital, and it was this relationship more than religion itself that gave meaning to my illness—and to my life to come.

My closest educational relationship was with the film-and-theater critic Stanley Kauffmann, and Chapter 5, S.K., Remembered, records fond memories of this critic—and artist—when he was teaching drama, film, and writing at Yale University. Kauffmann had a profound influence on a number of students (including me), personally as well as professionally, and I try here elegiacally to explain how and why this happened.

In Chapter 6, Film Art, Teaching Life, I conduct an interview with myself on the subjects of film art, film acting, and film directing; practical criticism and popular culture; autobiographical writing; realism in the cinema; the academicization of cinema studies; ethnicity and film; the movies and technology; teaching and contemporary learning; international education; film and the dumbing-down of the global populace; professorial mentorship; and drama school.

I follow up this self-interview, in Chapter 7, with The Critic as Writer, in which I consider the critic-as-writer on a par with other writers (as opposed to academics and mass-circulation reviewers), and thus elevate criticism to the level of literature. In support of my argument, I cite Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist (1891) and give examples from the work of such critics as Max Beerbohm, Irving Howe, Richard Gilman, and Maynard Solomon.

Chapter 8, The Theater and I, continues in the same vein as I discuss the profession of theater criticism—its history, rationale, practice, and corruption; the differences between theater critics and reviewers, on the one hand, and between theater and drama criticism, on the other; and my own brief tenure as a theater critic in metropolitan New York.

Chapter 9, Gained in Translation, treats the issue of literary-critical translation: its advantages and disadvantages, boons and banes. I speak of myself here not only as the translatee—the person for whom a translation is made—but also as the one whose work is being translated.

Chapter 10, Seeing Stars, considers translation of a different kind: how I translated, or interpreted, my brief encounters with living movie stars, among them Jon Voight, Meryl Streep, and Al Pacino. This piece also considers yet another kind of translation, in this case channeling: the eerie phenomenon of seeing deceased stars come alive, on a regular basis, in their old pictures—as viewed on television, in a theater, or even on a computer screen.

In Chapter 11, Me and E.B., I follow up on the more theoretical nature of Chapter 8, The Theater and I, and conduct a practical interview with a critical star, my former teacher Eric Bentley, as well as myself, on the nature, current state, and possible future of American theater criticism—and of the American theater itself. Plays, playwrights, and producers discussed include Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Waiting for Godot (1953), Waiting for Lefty (1935), the Living Theatre, the Open Theater, Henrik Ibsen, and Bertolt Brecht.

Finally and cumulatively, in Chapter 12 of Straight Out of Brooklyn, A Cinematic Education, I examine a number of American films (among them Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five) from the perspective of the first time I saw them, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, versus the perspective of today. What I discover is that I do not feel—or think—the same way about the films in question. In the process of making this discovery, I explore not only the subjectivity of memory, but also the subjectivity of (film) criticism; the changes that have occurred in movie viewing over the years, which themselves have affected perception; and the place of the cinema in one’s life—past, present, and beyond.

Past, present, and beyond: the focus, after all, of this memoir or any other one. Speaking of past, present, and future, I say little in Straight Out of Brooklyn about film as a medium for tragedy, or what must approximate tragedy in the (post)modern era, precisely because action in film is more of a journey in the present than a confrontation based on the past (the usual form of tragedy in drama). One is filled with possibility or promise, the other with suspense of foreboding. By its very form, film reflects for spectators the belief that the world is a place in which humans can leave the past behind and create their own future. I don’t mean by this that there aren’t tragic possibilities in film, only that tragic characters in the cinema are more often makers of their own destinies in the present than they are victims of the past.

I trust that I am not one of those tragic characters, despite my focus in this book on the past. I embrace that past even as I look forward to the future it has helped to shape. The title Straight Out of Brooklyn means just that, a boy’s origins in one place and a man’s progression toward others: other places, other times, other people—and more memories.

Chapter One: Brooklyn Boy

Like many Italian-Americans of my generation, I grew up around a bunch of characters. The first eight years of my life were spent in Brooklyn, New York, in the Clinton Hill neighborhood near Fort Greene, Pratt Institute, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, this area was akin to an Italian ghetto, even though no one was really poor—just working-class to lower-middle-class families inhabited the place. But everyone, or nearly everyone, was of Italian descent. I remember meeting only one person from those days who wasn’t from our tribe: my Uncle Joe Duffy. When my father introduced me to Uncle Duffy (married to my mother’s sister Louise, and called such because we already had too many Joes in the family) for the first time, he said, This is your uncle. He’s Irish, but he’s O.K.

We lived at 121 Hall Street and my maternal grandparents, the Fattorussos, lived nearby at 99 Hall; several aunts and uncles lived around the corner, more or less. Life for our family, for all of my mother’s siblings—she had five brothers and four sisters—revolved around life at my grandparents’ house. My father didn’t mind; he loved my mother’s mother, in particular, because he had prematurely lost his own just before he was drafted into the Second World War. Dad was a Sicilian (each of whose four siblings married a Sicilian), whereas my mother’s side was Neapolitan. There’s a difference, and there was more of one back then. So much so that my Grandpa Luigi didn’t want my mother to marry my dad because of his origins: this is the story according to my father (undisputed by my otherwise frowning mother), who said that Gramps relented when he saw Dad’s checkbook with the three zeros. My grandfather’s hesitation was ironic, considering that my father’s family was clean—no Mafia ties—whereas my mother’s family . . . well, more on that later.

Our neighborhood was carefully circumscribed. I can remember the names of only a few streets or avenues other than Hall: Ryerson Street, DeKalb Avenue, Fulton Street, and Myrtle Avenue on the corner, home of the El, or elevated train (elsewhere known as the subway). We were near downtown Brooklyn, where my mother went for shopping; we almost never went to Manhattan, for any reason.

What for? my mother would ask. We have everything we need here.

Once, to get some fresh air, she walked my older sister, Linda, and me across the Brooklyn Bridge and then right back—instead of continuing with us into Manhattan. And you could forget about the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island.

As for the other Brooklyn neighborhoods—Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Canarsie, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Bensonhurst, Crown Heights, Brownsville, Brighton Beach, Red Hook, Bushwick, Gravesend—I knew nothing of them. They were like foreign countries to me. Bay Ridge I had heard of—my father’s family was from this area, and that’s where I was born. Prospect Park, yes: my dad accompanied my sister and me there so that we could ride our bikes. And Sheepshead Bay, on the way to Coney Island, I knew, because my father and I used to fish from one its piers (for eel, of all things). That’s about it, except for Ebbets Field in Flatbush, where Dad took me on occasion to see our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers.

My mother took to me to the movies. There was a theater right around the corner—there seemed to be a movie theater around every corner in the 1950s—and we would go there two to three times a week, in the early afternoon, before she had to pick up my sister from school and cook dinner. If we walked in late, we simply stayed (at no extra charge) to see the part we missed during the next showing, which usually consisted, before television and even after it for some time, of an A-picture (with top stars), a B-picture, a newsreel, and a cartoon. The atmosphere was very relaxed, even homey, and it was also smoke-filled as well as a bit noisy, since the snack bar, though tiny, was located down front right below the screen.

My father didn’t go to the cinema (Reality is enough for me, he was fond of saying), and my sister liked radio and the new TV more, so I became my mother’s bosom companion at the movies, many movies. Mom liked romances, of course, but she also liked anything starring George Raft, about whom she once said to me, knowing I wouldn’t get it, He can put his shoes under my bed any time. (I still see films from this period that I know I have never before seen as an adult, yet, eerily, as if bubbling up from my unconscious, they somehow seem more than familiar to me.) Our neighborhood theater was the place for my mother: it was a genuine, old-fashioned picture palace—complete with balcony, wide screen, velvet curtains, nicely upholstered surroundings, and attentive ushers—not some chic screening room in the City or prefab Cineplex at the mall; it had its own unique bouquet and its own carefully circumscribed sense of space, of specificity.

So circumscribed was Hall Street’s own space that, if you didn’t want to, you didn’t even have to leave the block. Almost everything came to us, including horse-drawn vegetable carts, the milkman, the fishmonger with a wheelbarrow full of ice-packed seafood, a guy who sold clothing from the back of his truck, and another guy who sold household implements—brooms, mops, brushes, cleaning fluids—from the back of his. Each of these fellows regularly cried out the name of the item or items he was selling, and what a cacophony there was when several hawkers were traversing the block at the same time! All the while, kids and teenagers were playing stickball in the street and handball from the stoops of brownstones, scooting around on roller skates and skate crates or participating in some invented game like buck-buck, in which one group of players climbed on the backs of a second group in order to build as large a pile as possible—or cause the supporting players to collapse.

For the little ones, there were not only carnival rides, set up on the floor of open vehicles that regularly toured Hall Street during the spring and summer months; there were also pony rides. (I still have a photo of myself, at age three, sitting atop one of these placid little ponies with one of my fingers in my mouth.) And the schedule routinely included rooftop weddings, dinners, dances, or religious celebrations—like the one for my first Holy Communion. In addition, we had a public pool of sorts: the fire hydrant or Johnny pump (after the first name of its nineteenth-century inventor, John Giraud) located at mid-block, which was illegally opened to all in warm weather for swimming and frolicking. And there were dogs and cats, bicycles and tricycles, everywhere. What more could you ask for?

Especially during the Christmas season, when the snow and cold of winter sealed the block off even more. We bought our tree from the back of yet another passing truck. My sister and her friends skated on an ice pond my father had built in the backyard. On Christmas Eve, I kept a watchful eye on our roof, waiting impatiently for Rudolph and the other reindeers to alight there, of all houses in the neighborhood. One of my uncles played Santa Claus on Christmas Day (we didn’t need to visit Santa in any department store), and the parish priest from Queen of All Saints Church came around the next week to bless our home for the New Year.

We even had our own window decorator: my mother’s youngest brother, whom everyone called Junior, and who worked as a creator of wondrous window displays for Macy’s in downtown Brooklyn. He worked his wonders in other ways, as well. Uncle Junior took me in 1953 to see the world premiere of the film Peter Pan—based on the 1904 play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, by J. M. Barrie—at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater. So enamored of this picture was I that, to commemorate my experience and encourage me to bathe regularly (as my mother desired but as I was loath to do), my uncle bought me a bar of Peter Pan soap-on-a-rope. This little trick worked but it also paid an unwelcome dividend, for I thought, at age five, that using such soap would also enable me to fly. After all, Peter used it and he could fly. So after a bath one evening, I headed, naked, for the stairs down to the first floor of our Hall Street house and . . . let fly. Fortunately, the shocked Junior was there at the bottom (using the vestibule phone) to break my fall, if not actually to catch me. Fortunately, as well, my parents were not at home.

Uncle Junior was present that evening because he would occasionally babysit for my sister and me when my folks decided to enjoy a night on the town. He would also come to our home every Christmas to work his decorator’s magic on the largest window facing the street, ideally a bay window; he did this at my grandparents’ place (where he still lived), too, and at the houses of other relatives nearby. Usually Junior fashioned some kind of Nativity scene, but sometimes he just put together an outdoor extravaganza-in-miniature of the kind featured for real at Rockefeller Center: with snow, skaters, sleds, lights, musicians, wreaths, and kids. Designed in green, gold, and red, the finished window was always beautiful and something like the inside of a glass globe—which is exactly how Hall Street felt at this time of the year, if not all other times.

Hall Street and Clinton Hill were circumscribed in a different way, however, and for another reason. We never saw the police. When I once asked my Uncle Teddy DiDona (married to my mother’s sister Kay) why, he briskly responded, Who needs them? By which he meant that we were otherwise protected: by the Mob. But the truth is, the cops didn’t want to be in neighborhoods like mine. The New York City police force had been mostly Irish since the 1870s, and, since the Irish immigration to America had preceded the Italian one by several decades, the conflict between the two ethnic groups was inevitable. (My grandparents, both sets, emigrated from Italy to New York in the early twentieth century.) The result was that the Mick cops, or the Paddys—after the common Irish forenames Michael and Patrick—punished the Italians by under-policing their neighborhoods, which created a vacuum filled by the Mafia. (On one occasion, from the window of our car I did see a police van passing us on the highway, and, not knowing what it was, asked my mother; without blinking, she called it a Paddy wagon and said not to worry: it didn’t concern us.)

What’s often forgotten in any consideration of its criminality is that the Mob fulfilled a social, protective function among the Italian immigrant population of New York. If it had not done so—if it had limited its activities solely to bootlegging, gambling, loan-sharking, extortion, and prostitution—it would not have been tolerated and could never have survived. The Mafia took, but it also gave. That is why, to this day, Italian-Americans are not so quick to condemn it. That is also why a film such as The Godfather, which highlights the Mob’s communal role—and in which the two most frequently heard words are family and business—was a surprise only to non-Italians whose familiarity with Sicilians was limited to the formulaic gangster movies in which they had seen them violently caricatured.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s familiarity with Sicilians, or the Mafiosi among them, was not so limited. It’s fairly well known, for example, that during World War II the American government struck a secret deal with Charles Lucky Luciano, the dominant crime boss in the U.S. at the time. In 1942, the Office of Naval Intelligence was concerned about Italian agents who were entering the United States through the New York waterfront. They also worried about sabotage on these facilities. Knowing that the Mob controlled the waterfront, the Navy contacted Luciano—imprisoned at the time—and, along with the State of New