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| Cornerstone UK 40th Anniversary Edition, 2009 |
For the second time he saw Michael Corleone's face freeze into a mask that resembled uncannily the Don's. 'Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal. Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes. Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult. So I came late, OK, but I'm coming all the way. Damn right, I take that broken jaw personal; damn right, I take Sollozzo trying to kill my father personal.' He laughed. 'Tell the old man I learned it all from him and that I'm glad I had this chance to pay him back for all he did for me. He was a good father.'
The Novel: How do you write a bestselling novel? Whether they're willing to admit it or not, this is a question that most novelists — the literary prize winners along with those accused, justifiably or otherwise, of being talentless hacks — have asked themselves at least once during the course of their careers. Nor is it difficult to understand what might prompt them to ask such a potentially maddening question. Nobody willing to devote themselves to the lengthy and painstaking task of writing a novel does so because they wish that novel to go unread or to be read only by a handful of people before being permanently consigned to the scrapheap of oblivion. Every novelist dreams of publishing a book that will be read and enjoyed by millions. That's human nature and novelists are nothing if not imperfectly human.
Mario Puzo was one of the fortunate few who possessed the gift for writing what was wildly popular, a writer whose need to settle his gambling debts and support his family saw him create what remains one of the bestselling works of long form fiction ever published in North America or, for that matter, in any other part of the world.
The story of the Corleone clan and its wily patriarch Vito — the Don or 'Godfather' of the title — has become a pervasive contemporary myth in the half century since it entered the world's collective consciousness, an updated Jacobean revenge tragedy that combines the classic Hollywood gangster film with the familial elements of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov to produce a tale that, for many, has come to define the term 'organized crime.' Many of its more memorable phrases — 'I'll make him an offer he can't refuse' and 'I'll reason with him' being just two of several quotable examples — have entered the language, moving beyond their original context just as certain lines by Shakespeare and other poets have moved beyond their respective literary contexts to become go-to descriptions for certain key events and mutually experienced states of mind.
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| Editora Expressao & Cultura Portugal, 1970 |
The plot of The Godfather, which examines the passing of power from father to son and the corrosively corrupting influence that the possession of unlimited power exerts on those who wield it, features all the elements — crime, violence, sex and a contempt for the law and all forms of authority that is nothing short of anarchic — that are deemed to be an integral component of 'popular' (as opposed to allegedly superior 'literary') adult fiction. But it is in the story's emphasis on family, on the importance of the different relationships the term 'family' encompasses, that remains the most uniquely striking element of The Godfather and possibly serves to explain its enduring appeal. There's only one thing the Corleones love more than power and money and that is each other. Most of the crimes they commit are committed to protect members of their immediate or extended family and to ensure they retain the respect of the other New York crime families with whom they do business, albeit reluctantly at times.
It is this insistence on being treated with respect that transforms Michael Corleone — the watchful youngest son who disappointed his father the Don by going off to 'fight for strangers' with the US Marines in World War Two — from a law-abiding citizen who yearns to pursue a career as a mathematician into a ruthless Mafia assassin and, eventually, into the coldly calculating head of a criminal empire to whom no door is ever closed and no potential enemy or ally is ever completely inaccessible. As Michael says to his father's non-Sicilian consigliere [councillor] Tom Hagen, he takes the attempt made by the drug dealer Virgil Sollozzo and his backers the Tattaglia family to kill his elderly father personally. When these monsters attacked the Don, they were also attacking him. It's not a matter of logic, highly-prized though the concept of logic is by himself and his recuperating parent. It's a matter of blood and nothing, in their world, is more important or more worthy of defending than a direct blood connection.
The Corleones succeed because they function as a single indivisible unit, a smoothly functioning corporate entity that refuses to tolerate any form of dissent within its ranks. The most grievous sin a Corleone can commit is to betray a member of that entity as is the case with Michael's older but weaker brother Fredo who, filled with resentment after being passed over for the family's top job, makes a secret deal with strangers to have Michael murdered in his home (the same building, Michael eventually makes a point of reminding him, in which his 'wife and children sleep'). The only suitable punishment for this lack of fealty is death, a sentence that can only be carried out after the matriarch Mama Corleone has passed away. The act can't be committed while the mother remains alive to accuse Michael of having ordered the execution of his own brother. Fratricide is too appalling a sin for even the benighted soul of a Corleone to carry on their conscience for all eternity.
Of course, The Godfather is much more familiar to most people as a film despite the fact that the novel had sold nine million copies by the end of 1971 (and millions more since) and remained on The New York Times Bestseller List for more than sixty weeks. The 1972 film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and co-written by him and Puzo, is considered to be the superior work of art by the critics, most of whom prefer to ignore the fact that the film could not have existed without the novel to serve as its template. This is the most patronizing kind of literary snobbery, a backhanded way of belittling Puzo's success and the gift of readability that enabled him to earn that success after publishing two novels that, while critically praised, were both commercial failures. While The Godfather is not without its flaws — Puzo himself said that he 'wished like hell I'd written it better' and it's sometimes easy to see where more diligent revision would have sharpened its impact — the fact remains that it's almost impossible to put down once you start reading it, combining salaciousness, various forms of major and minor wrongdoing and brutal violence with a specifically Sicilian view of what constitutes 'loyalty' and the events — births, christenings, marriages, deaths, premeditated or otherwise — that bind families together and provide their members, male and female alike, with an ongoing sense of purpose and belonging.
The novel also does an effective job of highlighting how important these qualities are in immigrant communities where it can be difficult to retain a sense of identity given the continual social pressure to renounce your ethnic heritage and assimilate at any cost. This is another important feature of The Godfather that is often overlooked. Ostensibly the story of a family, it is, first and foremost, the story of an immigrant family — one that prospers and eventually comes to wield enormous influence over every aspect of the financial and political life of its adopted homeland. The 'otherness' of the Corleones constitutes a large part of their appeal. They're outsiders who operate beyond the law and make no apologies for doing what has to be done to take care of their own — an attitude that became increasingly normalized in immigrant and other marginalized communities whose members sought to emulate the kind of urban-based glamor exemplifed by successful, high profile gangsters like Al Capone and Sam Giancana, vicious criminals who openly flouted the conventions of mainstream society and prospered by doing so, making a mockery of the idea that crimes does not pay. Crime does pay. In the case of the Corleones, it pays extremely well.
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| Film tie-in edition, c 1974 |
And then there is the pivotal character that is Don Corleone himself — courageous, modest, loyal, deeply conservative and willing to go to any length, overcome any obstacle, to defend those who turn to him for help and protection. Nor is the Don's concern for these people in any sense conditional. He helps everyone who comes to him and oberves the required rituals of gratitude and obedience, be they his down-on-his-luck godson, the former crooner and movie star Johnny Fontane, or his local baker or a grief-stricken undertaker seeking revenge for the unpunished rape of his daughter. The Don is the ultimate patriarch, an omnipotent and omnipresent father figure who understands how corrupt and corrupting the world is and that the only hope he and his community have of surviving and thriving amid such corruption is to beat those who would exploit them — crooked cops, judges on the take, selfish politicians, autocratic movie moguls — at their own nefarious games. He's a classic folk hero in the tradition of Robin Hood and Batman, living by his own stringent moral code and dispensing his own ruthless brand of justice to anyone unwise enough to cross him. He inspires feelings of admiration even as we realize he represents everything that's wrong with if not patently evil in Western society, a contradiction that raises serious questions about the validity of a system that could permit such a man to flourish in and ultimately come to dominate it.
This is why The Godfather is and will continue to serve as such a potently attractive myth in post-modern Western culture. There's something inside human beings that's programmed to respect strength and courage and they do not come much stronger or much more courageous than Don Vito Corleone and his son Michael even if the price both men pay to possess these qualities, according to the Catholic faith whose teachings they claim to live by, may well be their eternal damnation. We admire their principles even as we recoil in horror from their actions, respect their loyalty and their dedication to the preservation of their family even as their attitudes and decisions mortify and repel us. Yet they never do what the majority of us are compelled by necessity to do every day of our lives. They never compromise.
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| MARIO PUZO, c 1972 |
The Writer: Mario Puzo maintained that the character the world knew as Vito Corleone was a thinly disguised portrait of his mother Lucia — a tough, loving woman of great resilience and fortitude who raised her twelve children by herself after Puzo's father, who worked as a trackman for the New York Central Railroad, abandoned the family when he was still a small boy. 'Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth,' he once told an interviewer, '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… and so, I know now, without Lucia Santa, I could not have written The Godfather.'
Puzo was born in what was then the predominantly Irish section of west Manhattan known as Hell's Kitchen on 15 October 1920. His parents were first generation immigrants who had come to New York from the impoverished southern Campania region of Italy seeking a better life, only to find themselves struggling to earn a living in the lowest, most despised section of North American society. Exploring the cultural conflicts experienced by Italian-American families would be the key theme of Puzo's work, featuring not only in The Godfather (1969) but also in Fools Die (1978) and the other Mafia-based novels that followed them.
Puzo graduated from City College in New York and enlisted in the US Army Air Force shortly afterwards, eventually being sent to Europe where his poor eyesight saw him assigned to work as a Public Relations officer in occupied Germany. It was here that he met his future wife Erika, whom he married in 1946 before being demobbed and shipped back to the United States. He attended the New School for Social Research and Columbia University and subsequently found work as a writer/editor for the Magazine Management Company where he wrote freelance articles and action-based short fiction, under the pen-name Mario Cleri, for a variety of men's publications including Male, American Vanguard, True Action and Swank.
Needing a more steady source of income to support his wife and growing family, Puzo eventually became a government clerk, finding time to combine this uninspiring occupation with his lifelong love of gambling and the writing of two novels — The Dark Arena, a World War Two story published in 1955, and The Fortunate Pilgrim, a book based on his mother's life as an immigrant, published a decade later, that he always considered to be his finest work. Although they were positively reviewed by the critics, neither novel sold well, with his editor commenting that The Fortunate Pilgrim may have enjoyed a wider success had he thought to include a few more scenes featuring gangster characters in it.
That advice, plus his mounting personal and gambling debts and the fact he and his wife now had five children to raise and educate on his modest weekly wage, saw Puzo plan a new novel set entirely in the Italian-American underworld — a world he had almost no direct experience of despite his decidedly urban New York upbringing. Although his outline was rejected by several publishers, he was finally granted a meeting with an editor at Putnam who offered him a contract after listening to some of the Mafia stories he'd picked up while working as a magazine writer. 'I was forty-five years old,' he told a reporter after this novel, titled The Godfather, appeared in March 1969, 'and tired of being an artist. Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks and assorted bookmakers and shylocks. It was really time to grow up and sell out as Lenny Bruce once advised.'
The novel, which went on to sell more than twenty million copies worldwide, was quickly optioned by Paramount Pictures which assigned an exciting young director named Francis Ford Coppola, another Italian-American, to direct its screen adaptation. Coppola and Puzo wrote the screenplay together, as they would again for its 1974 sequel The Godfather II and the final instalment of the trilogy that was released, to very mixed reviews, in 1990. The original 1972 film, which won five Academy Awards and revived the ailing career of Marlon Brando, also made an overnight star of its relatively unknown male lead actor Al Pacino.
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| CAROL GINO and MARIO PUZO, c 1991 |
Puzo, who wrote the first draft of the script of the disaster epic Earthquake before rejoining Coppola to work on The Godfather II, did not publish another novel until 1978 when Fools Die appeared, earning him what was then the record sum of $2.25 million for the paperback rights. (He did publish two nonfiction titles during the earlier part of the 1970s, the autobiography The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions in 1972 and Inside Las Vegas in 1977.) His next novel The Sicilian, considered the literary sequel to The Godfather, was published in 1984, by which time his wife Erika had passed away and he had written the screenplays for the films Superman (1978), Superman II (1980) and the World War Two project A Time To Die (1982) which was based on his early short story Six Graves to Munich.
Puzo continued to combine screenwriting with the writing of novels until 1992, publishing The Fourth K, a work of speculative fiction in which a nephew of the late John F Kennedy is elected President, in 1990 and The Last Don six years later. His final, poorly received Mafia novel Omerta appeared in 2000, one year after his death from heart failure on 2 July 1999. Another novel titled The Family, about the life of the fifteenth century Pope Alexander VI and his family the Borgias, was completed by his companion Carol Gino and published by HarperCollins in 2001.
Use the link below to visit the website of North American novelist, screenwriter and journalist MARIO PUZO:
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| Random House US, 2004 |
The CORLEONE SAGA continues in The Sicilian (1984) by MARIO PUZO and The Godfather Returns (2004) and The Godfather's Revenge (2006), the latter both written by MARK WINEGARDNER. A prequel by ED FALCO titled The Family Corleone appeared in 2012. These books bear little to no relation to the cinematic sequels and are intended to be read in conjunction with the original 1969 novel.
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| Universal/Sony BluRay collection, 2017 |
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