Lingua Franca: Writing Across Cultures

Everything about Wallis Wilde-Menozzi fits, from the two Ws followed by their upside-down twin in her initials, to the way her writing weaves together strands from the quotidian of everyday life—the pet cat’s misadventures with the neighbor, flowers from a friend in Florence, the bread of Parma—with meditations from a larger world, ranging from Hans Schubert to Martin Heidegger and from Natalia Ginzburg to Romano Prodi. Physically, Wallis is what southerners call a tall drink of water, and she is one of those lucky individuals whose voice fits her physical presence. A rich, throaty sound seems to come from the soles of her feet, and the listener hears a voice that leaves its corporal boundaries only after it has been well-tempered with reason.

This physical and mental unity of Wallis is subverted, however, on another plane. Brought up in the starchy Midwest, a time and place of white gloves, white skin, white thoughts (her father forbade her to use the word “clap” when she meant “to applaud” because of its other, tawdrier meaning), Wallis has lived for more than 25 years in the peach and umber tones of Parma, Italy, a medium-sized city in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. There, in the home her mother-in-law built, she writes poems, essays and books, and she holds writing workshops of longstanding in Parma and shorter sessions in Geneva, Paris and elsewhere. Wallis’ journey to Parma was straight-forward in physical if not mental terms. Her Italian husband was offered a university chair in his hometown. She and their six-year-old daughter, Clare, left Stanford for Parma or, as she describes in her book, Mother Tongue, he goes, she follows: “The words [follow him] link me to all the Ruths that ever were. They press down hard on the writer and freedom seeker whose search oscillates between open rebellion and inner contemplation.”

In a world that rewards writers like Frances Mayes and Peter Mayle and countless others who have escaped to impossibly beautiful lands like Tuscany or Provence, a “flight” like Wallis’ would at first blush seem more a romantic dream than the dialectic it became between soul and expression. Before leaving for Italy, she was a young writer on the verge of making her mark as a poet. “Howard Moss, [then poetry editor at The New Yorker], was beginning to notice my work,” she said, “and we were establishing a working relationship. But I moved to Italy and was caught up in that process before I could reestablish the connection. He died not too long after.”

The move, the broken link, the settling in a new country, language, culture, didn’t stop her writing, but she became frustrated not only with American disinterest in foreign subjects but with the more maddening—and probably more powerful—stasis of the Italian postal system.

“This was before easy Internet communication,” she said, “and manuscripts would take weeks if not months to arrive in the United States and then more time to receive a response.” But she doesn’t blame this fallow period of non-acceptance simply on the whims of the postmaster. “My subject had changed. Who I was as a writer, who the reader was. Everything changed.”

She doggedly kept submitting poems and essays but, she said, “Magazines I had worked with before all of the sudden found my writing too long and strange.” After three long years, James Gill, publisher of a small but highly regarded literary journal 2PLUS2, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, accepted a series of her poems, and she finally relaunched her writing career in Europe. James Gill introduced her work to many editors, and he worked with her as an editor, writer and translator for 2PLUS2. Once established in an international context, work picked up back in the United States, and her essays and poems were published in International Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, Mississippi Review and Agni. While Wallis was leaving literary tracks, an editor at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux was observing. He was especially taken with an essay she wrote on another American ex-pat writer, Iris Origo, whose books on the Merchant of Prato and her diary on the Second World War in Tuscany during the years in which she and her husband sheltered orphans, hid British soldiers, and were forced to house Germans on their Tuscan estate have become minor classics. After reading the essay, he asked Wallis to stay in touch and send him others when she published them. A couple of years later, Jonathan Galassi asked her to drop by the next time she was in New York. “Have you ever thought of writing a book?” he asked.

“This speaks to a very non-European system,” Wallis said, “where an editor-in-chief still reads small journals.”

Without a contract, and only a seemingly interested question to suggest that he had offered her a project, Wallis decided to write a memoir. “I knew I didn’t want to write a book: ‘this is what Italy is really like,’ ”she said. “No one can do that. Especially a poet knows that only details have crunch.”

Wallis committed to writing every day and in about eight months she had 100 pages. “I made my own decisions,” she said. Describing her feeling when she turned in nearly 200 pages a year after he had posed his question, “I didn’t know what to expect, what reaction I would get,” she said.

Her editor told her that it was beyond anything he had imagined, but he sent it back for a major rewrite with a Mies van der Roheish admonition: “Go through it all again and remember less is more, more is less.” He also told her that she needed to write a first chapter that would set the stage for what was ahead. “He is a very supportive, intelligent man.”

Another year spent in writing, resulted in Mother Tongue, published in 1997. This memoir stands apart from most other contemporary works in this genre. It was published before the spate of intimate memoirs made such an impact on the best-seller lists, books like Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club or Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, not to mention the brief flame of the regrettable A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. Mother Tongue perhaps is better defined by what it is not. It is not strictly chronological, it is not a long whine about an unfair life or is it shallow story contrived to display a clever wit. Mother Tongue differs largely in its framework, which is organic, not linear. “Each chapter stands alone,” Wallis said, “but they all hang together.” Indeed, elements from an earlier chapter show up again in a later one, which then loops back to a chapter between the two. Metaphorical butterflies, for example, flit throughout the book, even making a physical appearance on some of the pages in deft water-color brush strokes. Their folded wings signal confinement, but with open wings they float away on the updraft of liberation. From Wallis’ father forbidding her mother to be in the church choir to a 16th-century abbess physically locked inside a cloister, images of mental and physical confinement loom throughout the book.

Remarkable characters people the book, whether they are animate like her mother-in-law, Alba, or inanimate, like Calvin’s chair. Alba, whose name means dawn in Italian, deserves her own book. Born illegitimate to a tenant farmer’s daughter, who worked in the owner’s house on a large estate, Alba plays the opposite, energetic force to her own mother’s selfish, trivial and depressed indolence. Alba, married to a local doctor from a small town in the mountains, bears three children. Her husband dies of tuberculosis, and one of the most touching scenes in the book describes Alba on the train down to the TB hospital in Naples, changing from her soot-stained clothes to a fresh linen blouse and pert hat so she will look fresh for her dying husband. Alba supports her family by teaching farmers’ children in a one-room schoolhouse high up in the Apennines, loading, stoking and cleaning the wood-fire stove herself. Her job is three hours by bus one way from the home she has begun to build in Parma, so her young children are left to fend for themselves during the week, living for a long stretch of time in the shell of an unfinished house. She did all this in the years immediately after the war, when Italy was still starving and people were at their limits. But through sheer force of will and iron-clad determination, Alba keeps her family together and produces among her children a teacher, a physician and a university professor.

“There are many Albas in this part of the country,” Wallis said. And indeed the region is known for its independent, outspoken women, women who fought against fascism shoulder to shoulder with the partigiani, women who ran their own farms, traded, bartered, bought, formed guilds, were part of the religious, economic and social life of the region for centuries. And in the book, Alba exemplifies this tradition just as much as another woman Wallis writes about: Giovanna Piacenza, a 16th-century abbess whose life mirrored the changing tides in the Catholic Church. Wallis takes the reader through a brief 500-year history of this elite Benedictine order for women of wealthy families who were self-governing. Among their many freedoms was that of commissioning art as well as managing family property and arranging various businesses. As the popes changed, so did the rules. Wallis writes a portrait of the last of the independent abbesses, Giovanna, who when faced with being cloistered challenges three Popes. “To you your rights, to me mine.” Giovanna, who had even commissioned Correggio to paint a remarkable cupola of mythical creatures, rams’ heads and curlicues, eventually is cloistered with her order in 1524. During her battles with the Popes, Giovanna inscribes motti (plural of motto) admonitions, declarations and exhortations on the walls of her church-imposed prison. Written in Latinate font, they prefigure Ed Ruscha and other contemporary word artists by about 500 years.

Alba became an integral part of the Paolo and Wallis’ early married life, and when she died, Wallis’ reaction stood not only as grief over a loved one but over a much larger loss, the sacrifices of women, and resulted in the temporary loss of her voice. After a brief vacation following Alba’s death, Wallis writes:

Returning from the sea was hard. We still felt bruised. The discrepancy between Alba’s death and petty repetitions in our lives overtook me. So much had been displaced; yet we were returning to our own ways that had not changed. Soon after we entered our front door. I open my mouth to say something simple and a scream began.

Let me draw it with a gold point. It was long, sounded terrifying, and has not found space in many books. It was me rushing out into all that was bigger than me, unable to shape it or stop. It was human, deeply human, and under the grief was fear.

The unsettled bargain that Wallis had struck with Parma (I will show you my polite, Midwestern manners, I will behave, if you accept me into your community) came unraveled at a talk she gave to the community ostensibly about “being American.”

The good burghers of Parma, sitting that night in their seats, eagerly waiting to hear this American confirm their beliefs that America—with its death penalty and poverty— was all that was evil, and the simple life in Parma where tradition and values trumped modernity and progress exemplified all that was good and eternal. She writes in Mother Tongue,

I began by saying that I was worn out by living in Parma, worn out by the obscenity of having to defend myself and my differences and to apologize for saying I believed in some simple ideas of good. I said I objected, a priori, to the idea of ‘impossible.’ For me, short of death, nothing was impossible and even that reality had its challengers, starting with Christ.

As she continued to challenge the assumptive conformity that permeated the schools, the government, the students in her writing classes (“You love the neat and the fixed and the abstract. Why are you so frightened by the personal?” she asked her audience), an image began to hover in the far corner of the room.

On a trip to Geneva, she had accidentally uncovered Calvin’s ungainly chair, momentarily out of context in a broom closet in the cathedral. Its tiny triangular seat and stiff, disproportioned arms became an object of misfit, tightness, rigidity, suiting neither the body or the soul. But as it swirled around the lecture hall in a hallucinatory vision as she was talking, “it came to symbolize something entirely unexpected and liberating: “Outside of me,” she writes, “I could appreciate the way it stirred things up. . . . I could sense it was far from a mechanistic chair. Unafraid, willing to differ, it appeared to be my long-lost power of speech.” In another culture, the Puritan conscience she abhorred in the Midwest and in herself when she moved to California, was just what she needed to reclaim in order to stand up for her own identity.

When Mother Tongue was first published, it was met with stiff, mouth-pursing disapproval from many of her fellow Italians. “No one knew what to make of it,” she said. One thing for sure, it was not the paean to Italian life that she was expected to write. Beppe Severigni, a noted columnist for a national daily newspaper and writer of books with his own take on Americans as well as fellow Italians, was the moderator when Wallis presented her book. He acknowledged that he never would have had the courage to commit to the words Wallis had written.

The book has endured and enjoys a renewal in readership from the 2003 paperback edition, including some five-star ratings from that most cruel of critics, Amazon.com.

Wallis derives satisfaction from the different kinds of people who have been touched by her book.

But one of her biggest pleasures is that someone in Parma—still unknown—bought 50 hardback copies when it first came out. “I like to think it was someone who gave it to their friends,” she said. These days, Wallis is shopping a novel she has written, a book she believes is just as avant-garde as her memoir was. “And that’s part of the problem,” she admits. Set in 1994 Florence, the book, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, encapsulates a day in the lives of several characters who, although living in their own world, are connected to each other in mysterious and symbolic ways. “It is a polyphonic book that shows how each of us carries a whole world inside, and when we come from different cultures and cross each other’s paths, we are actually perhaps no more separate than any two individuals who come from the same place.”

She is also preparing a book of essays on the theme of writing as transformation and she continues writing poems, conducting workshops and investigating the world of words, art and philosophy.

And in her community of Parma, Wallis is witnessing change as well. With the euro flattening economic differences, the European Union planting a large division of its bureaucracy in Parma and immigration bringing in fresh waves of darker skin tones, non-Latin-based languages and a work ethic based on labor rather than patronage, Parma too is evolving. Wallis and her writing group have witnessed this phenomenon at the microeconomic level. The group, which continually reconfigures itself like a starfish regenerating a new arm when one is lost, has over the years published a small literary journal called New Grains. Now in its eighth edition, the journal has evolved from mimeographed, stapled sheets into a professionally typeset and printed publication. Although the works are in English, readings are well-attended, and for the first time, the community is contributing funds to print the journal.

“I feel we have finally arrived,” Wallis said, “but it also attests to Parma’s maturing, its willingness now to accept different viewpoints.”

The writing group comprises a mix of voices, most of whom have at least one foot firmly planted in Italian soil, either through parentage or marriage. Yet it is still a group of about 10 to 12 regulars, who need this outlet for their own voices, voices that are accented by native French, a Scottish brogue, a Texas drawl and a British received pronunciation.

“It always surprises me, the amazing amount of talent in people,” Wallis said of the groups she has worked with over the years. “So many people long for meaning and creativity. A lot of people are satisfied just to write, with no commercial value put on it.”

She relates the story of a young mother who was in her writing class years ago. The woman realized that it was all right for her to write just for herself, that she had the right to do so. It was an amazing moment of freedom, this realization, and she had it in the shower and stood there until all the hot water was gone.

Wallis helps people express themselves when they are often in a world where the outlet is difficult if not impossible. In her book, she compares the process to many of the themes found in the poems of Ovid, himself exiled:

The silence of writing outside of any exchange, of having others know what you write, is still another level of speech loss. Writing about things that are under people’s noses but being unable to convey that in everyday speech and living, because the shared perceptions are not there in the tissues of admitted culture, is a problem with no way out.

The “ultimate truth,” she writes, is that no one escapes change. And this is why some writing groups fall apart, she acknowledges. Speaking of one that didn’t work out, she writes: “The work was excellent, however there was no momentum.” Continuing would have meant change. “It would have acknowledged that we must challenge our assumptions.”

In her current writing group, in the workshops she gives abroad and to specialized groups like physicians, Wallis is repeating what she writes about on her web site:

Clutches of violets eke through a stone column in front of our house in Parma, Italy, all summer long. Their strategy of flutter is never that. They intend to spread and even demolish, by putting roots in the stones and crevices in the wall. I’ve found that living a fixed, foreign life outside of English––deeply outside day after day—I need the violets’ wit.

Through her teaching efforts and by example, Wallis is growing a veritable riot of transplanted foliage in foreign soil.

Quay note: Because we are always interested to find out what writers read and what writing teachers recommend, here is a “List of Twelve Very Good Books” from Wilde-Menozzi.

Photographs by Paolo Menozzi.

Karen Riedel