Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

<i>Furnished Rooms</i> (review)

2009; Penn State University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wcw.2009.0011

1935-0244

Christopher K. Coffman,

American and British Literature Analysis

Reviewed by: Furnished Rooms Christopher K. Coffman Furnished Rooms. Emanuel Carnevali. Ed. and Afterword by Dennis Barone. VIA Folios 43. New York: Bordighera Press, 2006. 102. $12 (paper). “How much of myself,” Emanuel Carnevali asks in his Autobiography, “have I left in furnished rooms?” (87). References to such rooms are frequent in Carnevali’s writings, and these spaces alternately provide themselves as images of the suffering endured by immigrants to America in the first half of the twentieth century and as the very heart of the country’s promise. Carnevali sometimes identifies his poetic self with the population inhabiting such rooms, going so far as to declare a category of “furnished-room poets” in the volume under consideration [End Page 113] here (25). Readers must welcome this aptly titled new collection of writings from Carnevali, for it renews access to some of the most important works of an intriguing and well-known, if rarely-read, poet. In his own autobiography, William Carlos Williams declared Carnevali a “prominent one-book” man, “who promised great things” (266). Williams’s portrait of Carnevali ends in mystery, yet it is sympathetic and leaves the reader curious about the work of this Italian immigrant poet. Other comments about Carnevali, in memoirs, autobiographies, and letters by contemporaries (Kay Boyle, Sherwood Anderson, Robert McAlmon, Edward Dahlberg, Harriet Monroe, Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound), only fan the flames of one’s interest about him. For too long, unfortunately, this curiosity was doomed to be left unsated. The one book to which Williams refers, A Hurried Man—and it did indeed prove to be the only one published in Carnevali’s lifetime—was printed in the limited edition characteristic of its primary publisher, McAlmon’s Contact Editions, in 1925 (the publication was actually a joint venture, and it also bears the imprint of William Bird’s Three Mountains Press). No more than 500 copies of this volume were produced, and a full shipment of these was apparently lost to U. S. Customs officials. For decades, the handful of copies of this fugitive collection, and the many similarly hard-to-find poems, stories, essays, reviews, and other pieces printed in small magazines, stood as the slim record of Carnevali. A partial redress was offered by Carnevali’s friend and long-time champion, Boyle, who saw a collection of his autobiographical writings into print in 1967. In 1970, Cambridge’s San Souci Press released a very small edition (99 copies) of Fireflies, which was beautifully printed but contained only a handful of poems (“Fireflies,” “Cypresses,” “Chat While It Rains,” “Dead Books and Their Authors,” “Certain Families,” six short pieces gathered under the title “Shorties, and “Mountains”). Aside from the Boyle-compiled autobiography, then, Carnevali has remained largely inaccessible to his potential readership. Fortunately, Bordighera now offers Furnished Rooms as part of the VIA Folios series. This series, “dedicated to Italian studies and the culture of Italian Americans,” partially ghettoizes Carnevali as a poet of hyphenated Americans, but, as with many of its other publications, it also offers access to works for which a real need is felt by many. Included in the volume are not only those poems originally printed in A Hurried Man, but also a prose piece from that volume, “The Book of Job Junior.” This latter piece, offered as preface to the poems, is something of an ars poetica, although readers of Carnevali will know that he is far too inconsistent and energetic to hold one position—with regard to art or anything else—for as long as the fourteen pages that this prefatory piece occupies. Still, the essay does [End Page 114] give the reader a taste of Carnevali’s prose, and illustrates that Carnevali, like Whitman before him, saw the seeming contradictoriness of poetry as a sign that it is the realm of truth and an arena for the revelation of the unity of seeming contradictions. That “The Book of Job Junior” is included is undoubtedly to the volume’s advantage, for it allows readers, especially ones new to Carnevali’s writing, the chance to see the degree to which his works in different genres are of a piece with one another. In addition to these works...