Puzo had aimed high but when, armed with glowing reviews, he returned to his publisher to request an advance for the next novel he wanted to write, he was greeted warmly, treated politely, and shown the door empty-handed. His stock may have been rising but his income was tumbling, not an unfamiliar dilemma in any genre of art throughout history. He notes there that the New York Times called The Fortunate Pilgrim “a small classic,” and he added, “I even like the book myself and immodestly think of it as art.” Art is all very fine, but he ruefully records that the first book made him $3,500 and the second, $3,000. “My first two books were very serious, and I didn’t care whether publishers or readers liked them.” He expatiated on this theme in a chapter of The Godfather Papers, a book published in 1972 on the back of his newly acquired fame and which carried the bashful subtitle and Other Confessions. He entertained no doubts on the value of these first ventures into fiction. And he wanted the big bucks as well as the cachet of an artist. (Nor indeed had Wilde.) Puzo’s first two novels, The Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965), attracted respectful, even enthusiastic, reviews and gave him the status of an emerging writer to watch, guaranteed a niche following, but the works failed to bring home the bacon. On this subject, he spoke in terms Oscar Wilde would have recognized, except that he had no intention of starving for that art. At the outset of his career, he had, as he repeated to anyone who would listen, an aspiration to produce art. (In fact, The Godfather was read with pride by the mafia in both New York and Palermo.)Īs the reference to Wuthering Heights implies, Puzo was more high-minded about his writing than anyone who associates him only with The Godfather might expect. Relations with politicians and judges are what count, and writers, especially novelists, are not worth bothering about. From the late 1950s, denunciations and exposés have tumbled from the presses, causing some excitement for a day or two, but they know it will soon die down and they can continue as before. As Puzo learned, mafia criminality does not include random thuggery, nor are they unduly interested in what appears about them in print. It was like something out of Wuthering Heights.” This fear showed Puzo’s misconceptions about the mafia and its ways. The villages were sunk in valleys surrounded by stone. The American consul wanted to give me a bodyguard, but I figured that if I kept moving from place to place they would never catch up with me. “I spent two weeks in Sicily doing research for the novel, but the country scared the hell out of me. He did go to Sicily before the publication of his book The Sicilian (1984) to deepen his knowledge of the mafia, but this offered him no extra stimulus. Puzo agreed that he had “known in the neighborhood someone you went to with problems, a godfather if you like,” but the story and the characters were invented. His family was of Neapolitan, not Sicilian, origin and while Naples has had to struggle with its own organized crime syndicate, the camorra, its code differs in some respects from that of the mafia. In the first place, he insisted that his knowledge of the mafia came from research, not firsthand experience. Puzo was a surprising figure, whose aims as a writer did not fit facile expectations. In his view, the ethics of cinema executives were not noticeably different from those of mafia bosses, even if they did not leave horses’ heads in the beds of their rivals. The occasion was supposedly the publication of The Last Don, a novel intended to depict his experience of the film industry and Hollywood, but, seemingly to his surprise, the mafia had muscled its way into that book too. Nowadays, online interviews are routine, but then technology-or at least my technology-was primitive: a recorder taped onto a phone. I was a poorly paid lecturer in Italian with a fascination for all things Sicilian and was also an occasional contributor to the Edinburgh daily, The Scotsman, so I gladly accepted an invitation to talk to him. In 1997, two years before Puzo died, I did a transatlantic interview with him. The man deserves more credit, however, than he has received for a work that critics call mythic-the highest of postmodern praise.
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