John Domini, Fellow Traveler

John Domini and I traveled well together. We shared the dais at Italian American Studies Association conferences, we met now and then for drinks in New York, we talked occasionally on the phone, and one time, when funds were tight, we shared a hotel room. But I traveled with this prolific, generous, garrulous, and gifted writer and critic most often to Naples, an ancestral city for both of us, whose streets my feet have only touched once. With each of his four books about Napoli, John ventured more deeply into the underworld of that living necropolis, to find the Neapolitan origins of his self and soul, and mine, and yours.John didn't look like an explorer. Out and about he tended to wear a conservative sports coat and, when it struck him, a fedora recalling the mid-twentieth-century bourgeoisie. He appeared, on the surface, to be a polite, respectable, and relatively humble middle-aged writer. He was those things, of course, decorous and well regarded for his fiction and his reviews of fiction, and an exemplary literary citizen who valued other writers’ work at least as much as he valued his own. He was also cool, bohemian cool, cool and free enough to move easily between the US and Italy without worrying too much about lucrative employment or literary status. In my review of his 2021 Naples-set memoir The Archaeology of a Good Ragú, I wrote, “Erudition is part of Domini's cool.” He was nothing if not an intellectual and a scholar. Intrepid as both, he took Naples as a primary subject, because he knew that, dead and alive, the city is a dangerous place, a city of catacombs and cartels and secrets, dangerous for what it reveals about the differences between those who descend from its legends and those who pledge allegiance to American myths. He writes: “For a sensibility like mine, this glimpse of endless diaspora, what Salman Rushdie termed ‘a century of wandering,’ prompts a terrible need to find out about the lost tribal homeground. The old mysteries began to ululate irresistibly. ‘We beat on against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ That's The Great Gatsby, of course, another of the prayer-objects that decorate my interior chapel. Like a million other bookish boys and girls, I first read it as a teen, and nowadays I see that family had its own Gatz-becoming-Gatsby.” Vicedomini-becoming-Domini, John's father's story and his, as a man and as an artist, was a story of wandering and return.Sure, John was born in New York City, and he lived his later years in Iowa, but those places were way stations on his travels and frequent working trips to “The City of the Sun.” He became the diasporic mind in motion, continually redefining diaspora on his journeys and in his work. That work anticipated the direction of what we used most often to call Italian American studies. A generation back, John was writing about Naples as though the future of Italian American identity depended upon understanding not just its culture of a century ago but its entire cultural history to the present, its global influence, and its customs as they help us to understand ourselves, our bond, and our alienation from our ancestral cultural consciousness.The denizens of Secondigliano and Spaccanapoli, like pugilist and publisher Tullio Pironti, whose autobiography John translated as Books and Rough Business, and the immigrants to Naples, like the characters of The Color Inside a Melon or the American travelers in Earthquake I. D., all are part of the diaspora because wherever they wander, they are part of the ancient metropolis, once and therefore always. John understood reconciliation with the city, with Napolitanità, as a means of reconciling familial and internal conflicts. Thinking of reconciliation with his estranged child, who “had worked out a way back to Naples” on a “soul-satisfying visit,” he claims, “There's no place like Naples to show you that ‘making amends’ is just another step, and that there are many more than twelve.”The city is a portal to our collective past as healing force. It is the apotheosis of Southern Italian mores and folkways. It stands on the eternal pillars of struggle, domesticity, and beauty, which even the stranger, even the wayward American, with some effort, can access. John cast himself, for our benefit, as that seeking stranger. John again: You reach another corner of the city, so quiet and distant and easy that it's hardly city at all, though in getting here you've had rough trade and long travel, and it's something else again. It's something new; it's taking your ease. The bed's too narrow, the porthole opens no more than a finger, yet here you lie, profoundly asleep. Not entirely comfortable, no, naked and sweating and bumping the wall, but nonetheless it comes together as healing. You know yourself and your rhythms, the nightmares that ought to follow a turbulent day. . . . Yet now you've got sweet dreams, falling back into embraces you'd forgotten, better stirrings right through the night and long into the morning, here where the dream-maps put the border of city and not-city. The thread of air through the window lends its flavors, jasmine, pine, myrtle, and later the kitchen sends up odors of espresso and marmalade, but these too merely melt in among the others, like the faint laughter, the good mornings and goodbyes.Arrivederci, amico, e ben arrivato.