Mario Puzo, Family man

Ever hear tell of The Dark Arena? No bells ring? The Fortunate Pilgrim? The silence is deafening. The Godfather? Sure, they peal out like...

Ever hear tell of The Dark Arena? No bells ring? The Fortunate Pilgrim? The silence is deafening. The Godfather? Sure, they peal out like a grand carillon. That was Mario Puzo’s enduring tragedy. His first works were written in a serious, committed phase in his life, when he would rather have taken on the mantle of James Joyce than Dashiell Hammett. Both titles received critical acclaim, then sank swiftly without a trace into the churning waters of mid-century American letters. And then came The Godfather — 21 million copies sold and 67 weeks on top of the lists.

Urban legend has it that The Godfather was the result of a wager. Someone told Puzo that no serious author could ever write about the clammy, grey-seamed underbelly of post-Depression America. It is a believable legend, entirely in keeping with the spirit of the era. About the same time, Isaac Asimov wrote his littleknown classic I’m in Marsport without Hilda, in response to a charge that the science fiction writer was too cerebral to write anything with sex in it. Hilda was effectively a user’s manual for sex in zero gravity.

But the story about Puzo happens to be completely untrue. The Godfather was written for plain hard cash. Here’s what he told Larry King in 1996, when he broke his silence after 20 years of refusing interview requests: "You know, I was working as a government clerk and then I was working on the magazines — the adventure magazines — and I figured… I had five kids, and I thought: I’d better make some money."

Puzo went about it with the precision of a caporegime moving into a new territory. His book would be about organised crime, America’s leading obsession, but more significantly, it would be about family. Decades before Clinton, he had sussed out the magic hold that word has on the American psyche.

Born in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in 1920, he did not have to seek far either for locations or characters. In his neighbourhood, he had seen the Mafia transform itself from illiterate ghetto dwelling hoods who could not look beyond prostitution, the races and bootleg Canadian whiskey, to the sophisticated commercial empire that took a dusty stretch of desert highway with one gas station and turned it into the Las Vegas Strip.

He saw the sons of hard men in suspenders grow up to be hard men in pinstripes, with investments in Hollywood and contacts on the Hill. And so was born Don Vito Corleone, the Godfather of the Sicilian community, who would begin his career as a petty protection-racket killer and go on to become the chief of a commercial empire that employed at least as many accountants and lawyers as hitmen.

But there is a quirk in Don Corleone’s bloodline that genre fans might find difficult to stomach: his character is based on a woman. He is, in fact, Mario Puzo’s mother. "Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth," Puzo himself has said, "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. The Don’s courage and loyalty came from her; his humanity came from her."Despite that oddity, which was carefully hidden away for years, Puzo’s work relegitimised the hardboiled genre, which was being slowly disowned by an increasingly politically correct hieratic tradition as a cult of violence nestling under the figleaf of the cult of the lone lawman. It also made sleaze, violence, gaming, and unions legitimate subjects for American writers of the order of E.L. Doctorow.

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But sadly, Mario Puzo will be remembered only for his commercial success. He wrote to provide for his family. When he died last week in his home on Long Island (where the Corleone compound is also located) he left behind an estate that will keep several generations in clover. And he did it with a story about the mother of all Families.