HomeEssaysRiccardo Cordiferro: an Italian American Archetype - Francesco Durante*

Riccardo Cordiferro: an Italian American Archetype - Francesco Durante*

Riccardo Cordiferro is, in a sense, the most typical of first-generation Italian American writers, in that he best personifies those characteristics that were considered in his contemporary America to be typically Italian: incurable sentimentality; exaggerated populist passion in politics; grandiose and ornate (if not downright histrionic and borrowed from the grand opera stage) in word and gesture; and an unrepentant seducer’s spirit combined with a paradoxical, quasi-religious worship of the domestic virtues. 

In other words, he represented the Italian male, appealing and at the same time rather untrustworthy on account of his ever-changing, capricious and unpredictable character. A little-known portrait photo buried in the pages of the prestigious 20th-century American magazine, The Bookman,1 corresponds precisely to these preconceived notions. Cordiferro is discussed there under the mouth-watering title, “An Anachronism in Bohemia.” The anonymous author asks himself, “Where is the old, Bohemian spirit of Henry Murger, the time-honored belief that the poet must be more careless, more improvident, more unaccountable and more unexpected than other men?” And he answers himself that the spirit lives on in Cordiferro and in the poems of his last book, Singhiozzi e sogghigni (Hiccups and Sneers), a work, published in New York by the press of the Araldo italiano, that covers the long period from 1893 up to that work’s publication in 1910.

The anonymous writer reminds the reader that the weekly La Follia di New York, full of the “spontaneous passion of the lower part of the Italian peninsula,” was established in 1893.2 Cordiferro, the writer recounts, was the poet, and his brother, Marziale Sisca, dealt with the practical aspects of publishing the journal. in the early days, the two brothers ate when they could, and the ability to publish the periodical was in the hands of Providence. And yet, a bit at a time, a “little band of orthodox bohemians” rallied around Cordiferro’s inspirational poetry. Cordiferro “sometimes wrote his poems for the next issue of the paper from the interior of a jail where he had been unkindly imprisoned for criminal libel.”

As the years passed, however, Marziale created a place for himself in society: he became middle class and prosperous, he married, he moved his family into a nice house complete with servants, and he drastically reduced his appearances in the more popular coffee houses of the old Little Italy. his brother, Alessandro (Alessandro Sisca being the generally-known real name of Riccardo Cordiferro), did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, throughout the period he “keeps the old traditions relatively intact.” Certainly, “he is better dressed than of old and a little more regular, and the paper now has ten or twelve pages and many advertisements, and the temptation for a poet to see the eloquence of American ideas is very strong.” And yet, “Cordiferro still nurses the Muse” and “proudly maintains that, in spite of his clothes and the money he can borrow from his brother, he is still a poet at heart,” something that, consistent with the sympathetic Bookman article, emerges clearly from the pages of his new book that is “so full of tumultuous feeling and lyric emotion.”

Returning to the title, “An Anachronism in Bohemia,” we see that Cordiferro’s Bohemian spirit did not appear anachronistic only in America and in the cities where, almost a half-century earlier, writers of the same temperament used to linger into the wee hours at tables at the Pfaff beer hall. The Bohemian spirit was also anachronistic in Italy. Indeed, it could be said that the very same famous Puccini opera, La Bohème, was, in 1896, almost a tombstone. Still, the association of Cordiferro with Puccini’s Rodolfo can be considered just about total. The Parisian garret inhabited by artists; the Café Momus; the articles written for magazines; and, obviously, the loves of anxious young girls weakened by consumption (Mimì and Musetta), all transport us to a world extraordinarily similar to the world of which the bard, Riccardo, sings.

As far as Italian literature goes, the Sicilian poet, Giuseppe Aurelio Costanzo (1843–1913), thoroughly evoked this world in a collection that preceded Puccini but bore the truly Puccini-like title, Gli eroi della soffitta (The Heroes of the Garret). The book was first published in 1880 and an additional five editions, at least, were published by 1904. No doubt Cordiferro must have been exposed to this very popular volume as a model in his formative years in Naples, where he studied with such prestigious teachers as Francesco De Sanctis, Luigi Settembrini and Silvio Spaventa, and where Costanzo also had his start.

And so it was that, in an act of spontaneous acceptance, Cordiferro felt himself a full-fledged member in the company of the “Many [who] refuse to bend their backs to the rod / Or their necks to the halter “ and who, “Like lions and eagles / Strong and wild hate the crib and flock / And yearn for the chase and flight, / But without a morsel in the mouth or a spur in the flank.”3

Cordiferro’s identification with this company must have been all the more profound in that, in the meantime, it had assumed “political” significance. And Cordiferro — the very young Cordiferro of the 1890s — just like the Cordiferro impassioned in old age by his adoption of anti-fascist ideals, with his contributions to magazines such as Il Martello (The Hammer) of Carlo Tresca or Il Nuovo Mondo (The New World) of Augusto Bellanca and Luigi Antonini, reveals in America his “subversive” tendencies, clearly not channeled by any rigorous party discipline. On the contrary, those tendencies resulted from a natural sympathy for the humble and oppressed, for the “lowest” to whom he had to feel a deep sense of brotherhood. In the vast field of emigration from Italy at the end of the 1800s, this intellectual company could hardly remain insensitive to the anarchist and socialist speeches frequently made by able Italian compatriots who were part of an exhilarating oratorical tradition. This “political” element is present in Cordiferro’s work, moreover, in an ingenious way: not as the product of complex rational analysis, but in a sense that could be described as “poetic.”

In 1911, the same year The Bookman reviewed his book (a rare privilege for a first-generation Italian American), Cordiferro also was reviewed in Novatore, the “free review published every 15 days for all the energetic young who have something new and ingenious to say,” edited by the anarchist Libero Tancredi (real name: Massimo Rocca) in New York at 500 East 16th Street. Novatore dedicated a short review4 to a leaflet recently edited by La Follia, a poem in the form of a monologue in hendecasyllabic blank verse titled Il pezzente (The Tramp). And it is as if Tancredi — who, moreover, would soon return to Italy and then, in 1919, become a fascist, which he remained at least until the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 — took advantage of the occasion to give Cordiferro a little “lesson” in political discipline.

The theme of Il pezzente, a story of “a starving man thrown into prison for his hunger,” was not new; “rather, it was,” said Tancredi, ”one of the themes that was in vogue among the sentimental subversives, when the revolution was not so much considered the triumph of a capable and strong working class against the soft and useless bourgeoisie,” as much as “an obscure and angry vendetta of the boundless and miserable masses against society’s fortunate ones.”5 In Cordiferro’s monologue, the poor “tramp,” compelled to beg for charity on the frozen streets of a New York blazing with Christmas holiday plenty, recovers his dignity at some point. This, notes Tancredi, “demonstrates that denying charity is the most noble action that one could take, if for no other reason because this could instill in the beggar, after his blind revolt against the man who refuses to be charitable, the certainty that both in individual and in larger social relationships, one gets to keep only what one has the force and the merit to take.”6

This is certainly an argumentative reading, among other reasons because Cordiferro’s monologue, created for the stage and meeting (according to multiple sources) popular acclaim in the Italian community’s small theaters, ends with the work’s key scene, a scene that is the exact opposite of an affirmative position based on class consciousness. In a coup de théâtre clearly inspired by the puppet theater of the Grand Guignol, the tramp, imprisoned after having attempted armed robbery, strangles himself with his own hands. But Tancredi glosses over this detail. he stops at the class consciousness-raising of the tramp, and he notes: “And it is precisely in the conclusion flowing spontaneously from this little work that one finds its subversive value.”7

A certain anachronism is almost the natural condition of the immigrant, on whom falls the task of perpetuating on the shore where he makes landfall the image of his own land of origin exactly as it was at the moment of his departure. Nevertheless, one cannot help but note that Tancredi pretended not to know that Il pezzente was the late-maturing fruit of a fundamentally pre-political creative idea based on a text from at least sixteen years earlier: its first printing appears to date back to 1895. Riccardo Cordiferro was just twenty years old at the time, having been born at San Pietro in Guarano, a small town in the province of Cosenza, in Calabria, on October 27, 1875.

In Naples, where his father Francesco, also a poet, moved to work on the court house staff, Riccardo made his debut early, publishing a few poems in short-lived magazines such as Napoli Letteraria (Literary Naples). In 1886 he entered the San Raffaele a Materdei seminary. His vocation could not have been very strong if, as legend would have it, he was expelled for having expressed anti-clerical views and he began to enjoy the company of well-known leaders of the radical left, including Giovanni Bovio and Arturo Labriola. In 1892 he left for America, settling in Pittsburgh, possibly to avoid military service in Italy. He later went to New York, where his father and brother, Marziale, joined him.

Alessandro Sisca started the magazine La Follia di New York in 1893, when he was not quite eighteen years old. At that moment his career began as the “bard” of the Italian colony of the lower east Side. Cordiferro, his favorite among many pseudonyms that he used at the beginning became, as a practical matter, his established name. The name may find its origins from reading Walter Scott, but this is not clear. With this and other names he published La Follia; and his works also appeared in other publications, from La Sedia Elettrica (The Electric Chair) to The Haarlemite to, significantly, La Questione Sociale (The Social Question) of Paterson, New Jersey, one of the most authoritative and combative anarchist leaflets in the united States, founded in 1895.

All of Cordiferro’s vast output — drama, poetry, journalism — had a very strong “social” bent, the work of an artist who was socially engaged, though without a precise party orientation. In this sense Cordiferro did not distance himself much from the general tendency of Italian “colonial” literature which, at least until the rise of fascism, was pretty much all of the same color, slightly red. Still, one can recognize in Cordiferro a true leader of a literary movement, a founding father who, until 1894, worked with other mythical figures such as Antonio Maiori and Pasquale Rapone, the two most celebrated heads of theatrical companies and dramatic artists in Little Italy. Cordiferro’s writings for these two leading artists included L’onore perduto (Honor Lost) (1901), a social drama in four acts fortunate enough to be performed until the 1930s and to command a sequel in 1906 entitled L’onore vendicato (Honor Avenged).

Without entering into the details of the plot of the two plays, generally they advance a very powerful argument against the wickedness of the wealthy, of the exploiters, and in particular of the prominent sharks — bosses and bankers — who grow fat at the expense of their poor fellow countrymen. Cordiferro’s rhetorical paraphernalia is, as previously mentioned, borrowed from the Italian social tradition, from poets such as Costanzo, Mario Rapisardi, or Olindo Guerrini (and possibly one might add to the list Italy’s first national poet and first recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature (1906), Giosué Carducci).

Anti-clericalism, an ingredient hardly alien in Italian literature of(the Risorgimento, weighs heavily in Cordiferro's work. A garish example of this anti-clerical bent is found in the text of Cordiferro's conference presentation, Il prete attraverso la storia, q.v., read publicly in a number of different fora from Buffalo to Brooklyn to Toronto, in confirmation of an intense evangelical effort that he undertook side by side with the anarchists. The insistent and bombastic tone of the work weighs even more heavily and prompted the more refined literary types (including the "American," Giuseppe Prezzolini, whose political views, moreover, were opposed to those of Cordiferro) to respond with disdain. Notwithstanding these limitations, Cordiferro's impact was real and unique, particularly in his ability to focus on the reality of the immigrants, to align himself with their hopes, their desires, their incurable nostalgia as well as the tenacity and leonine courage with which they figured out how to invent a new life for themselves across the ocean.

One could conclude, based on what has been said about Cordiferro, that he was, in essence, a revolutionary writer, the son of an era that assassinated kings, emperors, and presidents. And yet, it would be an incomplete portrait. As Cordiferro described his work, in something of a humble con- fession in the preface to a collection of his poetry, Poesie scelte (Selected poetry) (1928), “the only secret I have learned is the ability to portray a profound sense of what i see around me simply and clearly.”8 He might have added that he obtained that deep sense through a profound sharing of those experiences, including many difficult moments that marked his life from the time when, in 1897–98, he suffered the deaths first of his wife, Annina Belli, and then of his children, Emilia and Franchino. In the end, the theme underlying all of Cordiferro’s work is real life lived and then transformed into an ideal according to the tastes of the times; life with its tragic and its sweet moments, with its tears and laughter.

Also in 1911 Cordiferro wrote his most famous verses, the only lines that guaranteed him universal fame: the lyrics of the Neapolitan song, Core ’ngrato (Ungrateful Heart), a copy of which is in the collection, one of the finest examples of the genre. The song is a lament of the abandoned lover of the beautiful Catarina (Catarì) who has become incapable of recognizing in the singer the man who dedicated his entire life to her. “Don’t you forget / that i gave you my heart, Catarina / Don’t you forget!” The song, Core ’ngrato, is also an anachronism. The music was composed by maestro Salvatore Cardillo who, like Cordiferro, emigrated from Naples to New York. Cardillo cloaked the verses in a score that was simultaneously operatic, solemn, dramatic and filled with pathos, closer to the late romantic style of Francesco Paolo Tosti than to the more modern style of Giacomo Puccini. The true appeal of Core ’ngrato, making it one of the most fateful Neapolitan songs of any period, lies precisely in this quality of being “ancient,” in requiring a tenor voice capable of hitting a bold B flat in the high-pitched finale: a voice comparable to that of his friend, Enrico Caruso who, not coincidentally, was the first great performer of this song (followed by, among others, Tito Schipa, Carlo Buti, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti).

Love, therefore, is the theme. A love that, by the way (remarkable if one recalls that the lyrics were written by a ferocious, self-proclaimed enemy of the clergy), prompts the heartsick lover to seek comfort from his confessor who is a “holy person” but who also, in his own way a practical man, advises the lover, “My son, let her be.” This brief religious interlude aside, love and revolution are the classic pairing.

Among Cordiferro’s contemporaries we find this combination in the personality of Carlo Tresca. Cordiferro was Tresca’s equal in these matters, even if Cordiferro’s lovers were all (unlike the lovers of the famous anarchist labor leader) of humble origins. Lucia Fazio was an actress and the daughter of actors. Her marriage to Cordiferro in 1899 was his second one, and her letters to her Riccardo are instructive. The letters between Lucia and Riccardo can be found at the Immigration History Research Center of the University of Minnesota. A number of Lucia’s letters brim with jealousy for a man known to favor amorous adventures. One letter, dashed off from Hoboken on December 11, 1898 following one of their many arguments, informs Cordiferro that their four-year relationship is over. Lucia confronts Riccardo with his too-numerous escapades. “No, you are incapable of loving holily, ideally. I pity you because you did not make yourself into what you are; the women you have encountered have made you so. Oh, how I have cried, and how much I have cried. I have cried not only when I have known you but also when I have read your verses. And how many times have I prayed to the God you have mocked. I, who have told you not to kiss me, you have hated. Go ahead, hate me, disdain me, think of me as a kept woman, whatever you like to think. This is the last time I write you. be happy, and I hope you find a woman who will make you happy.”9

As we know, the woman he finds will be the same Lucia. She will take on the role of the consort who is patient, understanding, silent. So much so that Riccardo, imbued with libertarian doctrine that certainly included free love, did not hide his multiple appetites, to the point of recalling his “lovers on the trains, in the electric cars, in the parks, in the coffee houses, in the restaurants, in the hotels, in all the discretely quiet corners of our frequent amorous encounters,” as he wrote in the previously cited preface to Poesie scelte. The charm in all this lies in how genuinely bohemian and melodra- matic it is: this is the real cultural soup, the cultural background of Riccardo and of poor Lucia who, in the previously quoted letter, lets off steam in such a way as to prove, for those who have been rejected, surprisingly prophetic: “My God! how ungrateful the human heart is!”

In a word, it’s as if there were no distinction between life and art, as if each character could declare (as does Tosca): “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” (I lived for art, I lived for love). Nor does the chord of pathos and sentiment exhaust Cordiferro’s poetic resources. A writer capable of grasping all literary forms and finding nourishment in all sources, he is perhaps even more effective in satire, a form he practiced throughout his career, particularly in La Follia. His Brindisi ed augurii (Toasts and salutations) (New York, Società Libraria Italiana, 1917), in the collection, contains, for example, a toast made by a completely illiterate, prominent immigrant, on the occasion of a picnic organized under the auspices of a leading Italian American society. Preceding by a decade or so a little masterpiece of first-generation literature, Pasquale Seneca’s story, Il Presidente Scoppetta, ovvero La Società della Madonna della Pace (President Scoppetta, or The Society of our Lady of Peace), q.v., on a topic thoroughly examined by many other writers (not the least of which was Eduardo Migliaccio’s character, ’o cafone c’a sciammeria (bumpkin in a tuxedo), Cordiferro, in his “toast” set in triplets, displays a lively ability to mimic the improbable language of a certain category of immigrant who enjoyed economic success but came from the humblest origins. We are treated to the ever-evolving italian American pidgin, a picturesque form of speech of extraordinary expressive power, in which a speech (Eng.) becomes not a discorso (It.) but, instead, a spiccio (phonetic SPEE-che-oh); a business (Eng.) is not an affare (It.) but a bisinisso (bee-zee-NEES-oh); and a solemn promise is one to repay one’s associates bai-baie (by-BY-eh), meaning by and by.

On many other occasions, notably including the “comic satire” Il prisco cavaliere (The knight of olde), q.v.,10 Cordiferro launched contemptuous attacks on this portrait of a self-styled personage. In the personage’s toast, however, there appears a trace of sympathy. Cordiferro appears to say, yes, this person is truly an ignorant bumpkin, but he is someone who broke his back and merits his good fortune. Let’s listen to the successful bumpkin for a moment:

Voi sapete però che una perzona strutta non so, ma quanto abbasta saccio per decidere in caso una quistiona. Del resti, io non m’imbiccio e non m’imbaccio, giacché rebbo penzaro al bisinisso: ca si quillo falliscio, io po’ che faccio?

(You know I ain’t no educated guy, still I know enough ta figure out what’s what. All that other stuff, I couldn’t care less; all I gotta care about is the business, because if that goes down, what am I gonna do?)

Cordiferro’s very good ear allows him to deal confidently with the eloquent babble of the great personage. in his own, unique way, the personage borrows from the language of his new home. Drawing on the rich and variegated background of his italian dialect of origin, the personage breathes Southern Italian tonality into those once all-American words. The Italian dialect, even more than the adopted American terms, is twisted as the prominent immigrant pronounces words in such a way as to place him definitively in a specific inland area in the region of Campania. He says “perzona” instead of “persona;” “so” instead of “sono;” “saccio” instead of “so;” “m’imbiccio” instead of “m’impiccio;” “rebbo” instead of “debbo,” and so on, not to mention some comic ambiguities, for example when he says “strutta,” corresponding to the italian word “istruita” (educated or cultured) but which could also mean, in Neapolitan dialect, “distrutta” (destroyed).

The Neapolitan dialect is one of those areas in which Cordiferro most distinguished himself and in which he achieved greatly appreciated results. his contribution to Neapolitan song has already been mentioned. There is also, however, a Cordiferro from Calabria in harmony with the family tradition that he received from his father, Francesco Sisca, the author of a Calabrian poem entitled Lu ciucciu (The donkey), in the collection. The son was no lesser than the father, and one of his many books was Ode alla Calabria (Ode to Calabria), in the collection (known to this writer in its 1933 edition published in Buenos Aires; it was not unusual for a first-generation literary work to move quickly from one America to another).

Notwithstanding the fact that the more apparent side of Cordiferro’s cultural development related to his years in Naples, he remained faithful as well to his roots in Calabria, one of the regions of Italy that most contributed and continues to contribute to Italian immigration; his connection remained strong and a source of pride. Cordiferro felt such pride notwithstanding the not-always-flattering reputation of the people of Calabria, who “. . . pòrtanu | Na mala nduminata, | Ppecchi la capu tenanu | Cchiù tosta e na granata (. . . have a bad reputation because their heads are harder than a grenade).” Ode alla Calabria. Cordiferro, with the help of another colonial, Francesco Greco, wrote a poem in the Calabrese dialect on the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti. in delivering this eulogy Cordiferro did not feel the need to limit himself to the dialect of his own personal background. indeed, there remained in his memory the image of an enchanted agro-pastoral world high in the mountains with torrents and streams of the freshest water and clear skies; a wilderness that, on the skids of memory, can obscure the proverbial wilderness of America. (indeed, if the waters of Calabria are the freshest, then the waters of America seem to him “bbru- oru e baccalà,” codfish soup.)

Cordiferro saw that, to some degree, Calabria also had an ungrateful heart. Calabria saw to it that its people had to leave to seek their fortunes elsewhere. This was not cause enough, however, to allow the children of Calabria to declare that they did not love their native land:

Tu érramu luntanu me mandasti,

Nchiuvandume a ssu scuògliu,

Ma io bene te vuogliu

Nsinca campu.11

(You sent me far away like a tramp, nailing me to this reef, but I’ll love you for as long as I live.)

Riccardo Cordiferro died in New York on August 24, 1940.

(Translated by Richard l. Mattiaccio)

*Reprinted from Strangers in a Strange Land · Italian-Language American Imprints: The Periconi Collection (omeka.net)

Notes

1.   No. 5, vol. XXXII, January 1911, pp. 450–451).

2.   See an example in the collection.

3.   Giuseppe Aurelio Cortanzo. Gli eroi della soffitta. Roma:          Libreria Alessandro Manzo, 1880.

4.   Fra le stampe, series II, year II, no. 1, January 1, 1911.

5.   Ibid.

6.   Ibid.

7.   Ibid.

8.   Foreword to: Riccardo Cordiferro, Poesie scelte,                      Campobasso: Edizioni Pungolo Verde, 1967.

9.   Alessandro Sisca Papers, IHRC 2408, Box 1, Folder 5.

10. There is a play of words here, in that the word “Prisco”            means “of olde” but it is also the Cavaliere’s surname.

11.  Poesie scelte.

Francesco Durante (1952-2019) was the author of Italoamericana. Storia e letteratura degli italiani negli Stati Uniti 1776-1886 (Vol. I), 1886-1943 (Vol. II), issued by Mondadori in 2000 and 2005, the second volume of which was translated into English and published in 2014 by Fordham University Press as Italoamericana. The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943 (General Editor to American Edition, Robert Viscusi; translations editor Anthony Julian Tamburri; bibliographical editor James J. Periconi). Founder of the annual Salerno Literary Festival, Durante was the author of many works, including Scuorno (2008) and I napoletani (2011), and translator into Italian of the works of John Fante and Bret Easton Ellis, among others.