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Mario Puzo (1920-1999) |
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American novelist, best-known for his Godfather saga. Mario Puzo's novel stayed on The New York Times' best-seller list for sixty-seven weeks. This work had a deep impact on American society through its film adaptation, and the saying "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse" has became a cliché. However, Puzo always claimed that he had never met a gangster in his life before writing his cynical bestseller. Don Vito Corleone was a man to whom everybody came for help, and never were they disappointed. He made no empty promises, nor the craven excuse that his hands were tied by more powerful forces in the world than himself. It was not necessary that he be your friend, it was not even important that you had no means with which to repay him. Only one thing was required. That you, you yourself, proclaim your friendship. And then, now matter how poor or powerless the supplicant, Don Corleone would take that man's troubles to his heart. And he would let nothing stand in the way to a solution of that man's woe. His reward? Friendship, the respectful title of "Don," and sometimes the more affectionate salutation of "Godfather." (The Godfather, Berkley trade paperback edition, 2016, p. 14) Mario Puzo was born into an immigrant family in New York City
in the area known as "Hell's Kitchen". Both of his parents, Antonio and
Maria Le Conti Puzo, were illiterate immigrants from Avellino, a town
outside Naples. His father worked as a railway trackman for the New
York Central Railroad. Puzo's mother had four children from a previous
marriage; her first husband had been killed in a dokcs accident. At one
time or another Puzo and his brothers also worked for the railroad.
"But everybody hated their jobs except my oldest brother who had a
night shift and spent most of his working hours sleeping in freight
cars," Puzo recalled. ('Choosing a Dream' by Mario
Puzo, Los Angeles Times, July
11, 1999) When Puzo was in his early teen, his father deserted the
family and they moved to a housing project in the Bronx. His brother
Antionio was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized. The
discovery of public libraries and the world of literature led Puzo in
the direction of writing, although his mother wanted him to become a
railroad clerk, and had no understanding of his omnivorous reading.
After graduating from Commerce High School, Puzo worked as a
switchboard attendant for the railroad. During World War II Puzo served
in the US Air Force stationed in East Asia and Germany. For his combat
service, he earned numerous decorations, though he never fired a shot –
he had poor eyesight. After the war he stayed in Germany as a civilian
public relations man for the Air Force. Puzo then studied at the New
School for Social Research, New York, and at Columbia University. In
addition, Puzo took classes in literature and creative writing. He
admired Tolstoy, Dickens, Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky. 'The Last
Christmans', Puzo's first published story, appeared in American
Vanguard in 1950. Puzo worked for 20 years as an administrative assistant in government offices in New York and overseas. In 1946 he married Erika Lina Broske, whom he had met in Germany; they had three sons and two daughters. After Erika's death in 1978, her nurse, Carol Gino, became Puzo's companion. At the age of 35, Puzo published his first book, Dark
arena (1955). The novel dealt with the relationship between Walter
Mosca, a tough and embittered ex-GI, and Hella, a German native, his
mistress. Hella dies of an infection, denied the drugs that would have
saved her, and Mosca avenges her. From 1963 on Puzo worked as a free
lance journalist and writer. He contributed to men's magazines, among
them Stag and Male, and published book reviews,
stories, and articles in such journals as Redbook, Holiday,
Book World, and the New York Times. His second
novel, Fortunate Pilgrim
(1965) followed one family of Italian
immigrants from the late 1920s through World War II. The plot centers
round an Italian peasant woman, a twice-widowed matriarch Lucia, and
hardships she endures as an immigrant in America. Neither of Puzo's
first two books gained financial success, though both received good
reviews. "I didn't believe in religion or love or women or men," Puzo
said of his life as a "failed" or "undiscovered" novelist. "I didn't
believe in society or philosophy. But I believed in art for forty-five
years. It gave me comfort I found in no other place." (The Godfather and American
Culture: How the Corleones Became "Our Gang"
by Christian K. Messenger, 200, p. 4) Puzo's fourth work, The Runaway Summer of David Shaw (1966), was a children's book. After an expensive medical emergency – a gallbladder attack – Puzo decided to write a novel that would also be a commercial success. While working in pulp journalism, he had heard Mafia anecdotes and begand to collect material on the East Coast branches of the Cosa Nostra. The themes of love, crime, family bondage, Old World morals –
including the concept of individual honour – were further developed in Godfather
(1969), Puzo's international breakthrough novel. Whenever the
Godfather
opened his mouth," Puzo said years later, "in my own
mind I heard the voice of my mother. I heard her wisdom, her
ruthlessness, and her unconquerable love for her family and for life
itself, qualities not valued in women at that time. The Don's courage
and loyalty came from her; his humanity came from her." (Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its
African American Edge by John Gennari, 2017, p. 69) With this work Puzo achieved his
financial goals, but he also said that he wrote below his gifts. The central character, Don Corleone, is a sentimental tough guy, an individualist inside a tightly structured crime syndicate. Along with Captain Ahab,
Norman Bates, Joker, and Hannibal
Lecter, he is one of the greatest American fictional
villains. Don Corleone's
values are at the same anti-social and those of a bourgeois person; he
is a conservative fundamentalist and his illicit activities spread
corruption and violence. "The embodiment of a capitalist ideology which
promotes material wealth and personal power above all else, Vito
Corleone is the dark side of the American dream." (Dinah
Roe, in Defining Moments in Books:
The Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events that Shook
the Literary World, edited by Lucy Daniel, 2007, p. 518) The Corleones family layer Thomas Hagen states, "Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have to fathers to look after him, and that's why they have Godfathers." (The Godfather, Berkley trade paperback edition, 2916, p. 54) Puzo describes Don Corleone's rise among the underworld bosses into power, and how family values are transferred from one generation to the next and how they change under social pressure. While there are refences to real-life events and persons, in general the historical frame remains mostly in the background. Famously, one of the characters has similarities with the singer Frank Sinatra. He ignored the author in a restaurant, where a man, called in the story as "a famous millionaire" was throwing a party for Puzo's friend: "I'd like you to meet my good friend, Mario Puzo," the millionaire said. Many who have seen Coppola's films, have never read the novel.
Coppola did not like the book when he first sat down to read it: "my
first impression was surprise and dismay; this was more like a Harold
Robbins or Irving Wallace book, a potboiler filled with sex and
silliness." ('Introduction' by Francis Ford Coppola, in The Godfather, Berkley trade paperback edition, 2016, p. iii) Nevertheless, his Godfather and Godfather Part II,
received several Oscars, including best picture and best script
(written by Puzo and Coppola). The production was beset with
difficulties. Before shooting began, the Italian-American Civil Rights
League held a rally in Madison Square Garden and raised $600 000
towards attempts to stop the film. Finally Coppola agreed to eliminate
the words "Mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" from the screenplay. He had heard Don Corleone say once, "A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns." (The Godfather, Berkley trade paperback edition, 2016, p. 46)
Coppola's unlinear narrative technique and flashbacks in Godfather II puzzled critics. He cut back and forth between the late fifties and the late 1890s and early 1900s. Robert De Niro is the young Vito is an immigrant in New York, and Michael (Al Pacino), his son, gets mixed up with the downfall of Batista's Cuba. Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times (December 13, 1974): "It's a Frankenstein's monster stitched together from leftover parts. It talks. It moves in fits and starts but it has no mind of its own. . . . Everything of any interest was thoroughly covered in the original film, but like many people who have nothing to say, "Part II" won't shut up. . . . Looking very expensive but spiritually desperate, "Part II" has the air of a very long, very elaborate revue sketch. Nothing is sacred." The third part (1990), which was not based on the original
book, was written by the director Coppola and Puzo, starring Al Pacino,
Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Andy Garcia, and Eli Wallach. Coppola's
well-made film was a self-conscious mafia opera but did not find the
critical or commercial success of the earlier pictures. The story was
set in 1979, Pacino is now an aged don who wants to leave the world of
crime behind. Compared to the movies, the book was less romanticized and it had more graphic sex and violence. Concerning the portrayal of women, feminist readers have seen Puzo's work as reactionary, even misogynist. Coppola's attitude toward the corruption is more cutting and he draws parallels to contemporary politics: the Watergate scandal was simultaneously revealing the reach of criminality into the highest levels of government. In the film, civil servants and Cardinals of Vatican are as crooked as the mobsters. In the mid-1970s, Puzo worked on the scripts of Superman 1 and 2. His next novel after Godfather was Fools Die (1978) set in Las Vegas, Hollywood, Tokyo, and New York during the 1950s and 1960s. In was not an autobiographical novel, although the central character, John Merlyn, writes a bestseller that becomes a hugely profitable movie. "But remember I'm a master of magic. I can bring all these people truly alive. I can show you what they truly think and feel. You'll weep for them, all of them, I promise you that." (Ibid., p. 4) Readers found the book aimless and dull. The Sicilian (1984) was based on the life of Salvatore Giuliano, the so-called Robin Hood of Sicily. The Fourth K
(1991) was a global political thriller in the spirit of Frederick
Forsyth
and Ken Follet. "Unfortunately, "The Fourth K" is not often enough at
its best. Having boldly placed the Kennedy name at the center of his
fiction and thereby captured its nonfiction magic, Mr. Puzo surrounds
it with characters unmagically named Oliver Oliphant, Helen Du Pray,
Oddblood (Otto) Gray, Christian Keen, Eugene Dazzy, Arthur Wix and
Theodore Tappey." (Christopher Lehmann-Haup, The New York Times, January 10, 1991) In The Last Don (1996) Puzo returned to the
world of Godfathers. The head of the most powerful Mafia family in the
country, Don Clericuzio, decides to make his enterprises legal, and the
story follows how the don's plan for his family future succeeds.
Clerucuzio's daughter Rose Marie marries a member of the enemy family;
she gives birth to a son who grows up into a rough man. Other central
characters are Pippi De Lena, a hitman, and his son, Cross. Mario Puzo died
from heart failure on July, 1999, at his home in Long Island, after
completing his final organized crime book, Omerta. This work
came out in July 2000. Puzo depicts a family whose members represent
the legitimate world and organized crime. And as one can guess, the opposite sides of the law come into conflict. His last years Puzo spent
collecting material and writing The Family, dealing with the
Borgias, masters of intrigues and one of the most influential families
in Renaissance Italy. The book was completed by his longtime companion,
Carol Gino. "The Family does not read like a Mario Puzo novel, even a
lesser one. A work of such historical depth requires strong,
interesting dialogue and even stronger characters to deliver it -- the
very qualities that always raised Puzo's work to a higher plane.
Neither exists here." (William Heffernan, The
Washington Post, January 6, 2002) Puzo was 58 old when he met Gino; she was 37, twice married, and a feminist. "In the time we spent together, he taught me much more about life, love, power and writing than I had ever hopes to learn," Gino said in her book of memoir, Me and Mario: Love, Power & Writing with Mario Puzo, Author of The Godfather (2018). She tells that Puzo used an old black metal Underwood or Royal typerwriter; he hated computers: "If it knows how to spell, it can learn how to plot, and I can't write with something in my room trying to out plot me." For further reading: The Immigrant Experience, edited by T.C. Wheeler (1971); The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions (1972); The Italian-American Novel by Rose B. Green (1974); New York and the Literary Imagination: the City in Twentieth Century Fiction and Drama by Edward Margolies (2008); The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became "Our Gang" by Christian K. Messenger (2002); 'Vito Corleone: The Godfather' by Dinah Roe, in Books, edited by Lucy Daniel (2007); New York and the Literary Imagination: The City in Twentieth Century Fiction and Drama by Edward Margolies (2008); 'Mario Puzo's The Godfather: Immigrants' Home Country Reterritorialised in the US' by Irina Kabanova, in Topographies of Popular Culture, edited by Maarit Piipponen, Markku Salmela (2016); The Godfather Notebook by Francis Ford Coppola (2016); Me and Mario: Love, Power & Writing with Mario Puzo, Author of The Godfather by Carol Gino (2018); The Godfather and Sicily: Power, Honor, Family, and Evil by Raymond Angelo Belliotti (2021) Selected bibliography:
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