Read Swimming in the Moon: A Novel Online
Authors: Pamela Schoenewaldt
Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (42 page)
I used many sources for the dating of popular songs and apologize to music historians for instances in which fancy for a particular song had me snatch fiction’s privilege and slightly fudge a publication date.
An authoritative guide to classic Neapolitan cuisine is Vittorio and Lydia Gleijeses’s
A Napoli Si Mangia Così
. For Teresa’s sea tales I drew on
Leggende del Mare,
edited by Francesco Rocchi. My sources for opera history and technique were Karen Nickell, Vladimir Protopopescu, and
The Letters of Arturo Toscanini,
edited by Harvey Sachs. Mark Loudermilk helped with questions of historical banking and accounting practice.
For medical and birthing issues, I consulted with Leonard Bellingrath, M.D.; Elizabeth Johnson, RNC, FNP; and Corrine Rovetti, FMP-BC, specialist in women’s health. Research for this novel involved diving into the gloomy topic of treatment of mental illness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For more detail on this national nightmare, I recommend Robert Whitaker’s
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
and Mary de Young’s
Madness: An American History of Mental Illness and Its Treatment.
In constructing Teresa’s constellation of symptoms and behaviors, I was generously assisted by Dr. Laurel Goodrich, Dr. William MacGillivray, and Dr. Vance Sherwood.
For issues of Jewish-American culture, I thank Marian Jay. Judith Appleton helped with issues of Polish Jewish traditions. Readers Rosalind Andrews, Gaye Evans, Jamie Harris, Jo Ann Pantanizopolous, and Alan Sims helped me keep moving forward and prevented many infelicities. For a keen eye and listening ear, I thank Odette Shults.
My husband, Maurizio Conti, was once again wonderfully present and supportive, my own sine qua non.
Nothing tongue-ties a writer more than expressing the magnitude of appreciation appropriate for an agent and editor who create the ground, the guidance, and the critical acumen to shepherd a book from concept to production. To my agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, and editor, Amanda Bergeron of HarperCollins, and her magnificent team I give heartfelt gratitude for their support, discernment, and skillful guiding of this project. And finally, to Miss Silvia Conti, who steadily prodded me to finish the book before her sixth birthday, I’m happy to say I did that.
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Meet Pamela Schoenewaldt
P
AMELA
S
CHOENEWALDT
lived for ten years in a small town outside Naples, Italy. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines in England, France, Italy, and the United States. She now lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her husband, Maurizio Conti, a physicist, and Jesse, their dog.
www.pamelaschoenewaldt.com
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In Conversation with Pamela Schoenewaldt
Swimming in the Moon
touches on many themes—the immigrant experience, workers’ rights, mental illness, self-discovery—but at its heart it’s the story of a complex mother/ daughter relationship. Which of these pieces came to you first as you wrote? How did this story come together?
For days, the basic pieces of the story floated around my head like big soap bubbles. I wanted to return to the urban immigrant experience at the high tide of European immigration and to explore a mother/daughter union. One floating image was the moonlit Palazzo Donn’Anna, built out into the Bay of Naples. Masa Lamberti, my first Italian teacher, grew up in a magnificent apartment there, and when we became friends she took me through the maze of magnificent rooms with massive oil paintings, Venetian chandeliers, rosewood furniture inlaid with ivory, and an enormously tall window looking out to sea in an elegant sitting room. Had the doomed sailors been pushed to their deaths from that very window? I asked. “It’s a
story,
Pamela,” said Masa. But such a story that when she first told it in our Italian class I was sure I’d mistaken the vocabulary.
Now, years later in Tennessee, I imagined an immigrant with memories of lavish chambers such as these. Why would such a person leave home? Ah, a servant might, or two servants, a mother and daughter might be forced to leave. Why? Something about the mother . . . With much digital scribbling of scene fragments and story points, pop! The bubbles came together in the beginnings of a plot.
I was attracted by the idea of varying talents: a mother with a natural ear and magnificent voice utterly not understanding how someone of her own blood could have neither, and yet inspiring and instructing this daughter in how to move others with spoken language. The particular intimacy of Teresa and Lucia was an intriguing challenge: almost of age to be sisters. They are constant workmates and bedmates, yet very different in talents, interests, and character even before the terrible complication of madness.
Vaudeville seemed like a natural venue for a singer in those years, and I have my own interest in labor issues. Thinking purely as a novelist, however, I wanted this protagonist to have a set of issues beyond her own needs. In
When We Were Strangers,
Irma manages her own escape from a workhouse. I wanted Lucia to struggle, successfully or not, to bring a measure of justice to many workers.
You’ve written two novels about the immigrant experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Did you find that conditions had changed for immigrants in the decades between
When We Were Strangers
and
Swimming in the Moon
? What had changed for women in that time?
I’m not a historian, and volumes have been written on the massive transformation of the United States between the 1880s and the 1910s, but I can point to some changes that would have impacted immigrants such as Teresa and Lucia. The frontier had closed by Lucia’s time, and most newcomers went into crowded cities to make (or not make) their fortunes. Ethnic groups were more organized, sometimes against each other, as depicted in
Swimming in the Moon.
Anti-immigrant prejudices were growing in many quarters, as Lucia experienced. Settlement houses offered useful services, but with an agenda: Immigrants must let go of their foreignness, their customs and languages. They must blend in, but also not make trouble, ask for too much, or threaten “real” Americans. Lucia constantly bumps against these expectations, in her valedictory speech, for example, and of course later in her union work.
Torrents of inventions came in the years between the novels: telephones, moving pictures, automobiles, and washing machines. Crossing the ocean was faster, even for the poor. Medicine had advanced, with widespread use of antiseptic practices still questioned in Irma’s time, although antibiotics were years away. Life expectancy had improved, childbirth was less dangerous, and Margaret Sanger was broaching the idea that women could and should safely control fertility. Conveniences and pleasures available only to the rich of Irma’s day were now within reach of the working class, but many like Lucia were asking why workdays were so long that little time remained to enjoy these blessings of progress.
Lucia’s reading of the names of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire victims is a very moving moment. Did that historical event play into your decision to set this story when you did?
Yes, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City connects to my story in several ways. First, I began writing the novel in 2011, the widely reported anniversary of that tragedy. In my own city of Knoxville, Tennessee, I joined protests at a bridge construction site managed with flagrant disregard of worker safety. In workplaces around the country, it’s questionable how far we’ve really come in the last century.
Getting back to the novel, Cleveland and New York were the nation’s leading women’s clothing producers before World War I, employing thousands of immigrants, mostly women. Many union leaders, like Josephine Carey, worked in both cities. It’s possible that news of the Triangle fire pushed Cleveland garment workers to launch their own strike before establishing a support network that might have made success more likely. The names of the fallen were published widely, and it seemed likely to me that union brothers and sisters in Cleveland would have honored the dead in that way. I hope it will be clear from the reading of names that the garment workers most vulnerable to unsafe conditions were Italian and Eastern European, mostly single young women like Lucia and her friends.
How did you choose Cleveland as your setting?
I lived near Cleveland when it was a scruffy postindustrial city, before its recent renaissance. I experienced the frigid winter winds, summer heat, and spectacular autumns of northern Ohio. The Lake Erie/Bay of Naples contrast was attractive for my purposes, and of course I had done some Cleveland research for my first novel. Finally, there are many fine New York–based immigrant novels, and I wanted another setting.
As mentioned in the acknowledgments, the immediate impetus for Lucia’s story came when I was visiting Cleveland for readings of
When We Were Strangers
sponsored by the Italian consulate (I’m a new-minted dual citizen of Italy and the United States) at Western Reserve Historical Society. Between readings, I was able to access archival material in the Society’s Italian American collection. I began researching the 1911 Cleveland Garment Workers Strike, and, in that process, I imagined Lucia walking out to Lake Erie on a muggy summer night.
Lula appears in your first novel, and again in
Swimming in the Moon
. Are there characters from this book that you’d see finding their way into future stories?
I truly didn’t expect to have Lula in this book, but I enjoyed her spirit in
When We Were Strangers
and missed her when Irma left Cleveland. Early in the writing process for this novel, it occurred to me that Lula was clearly a survivor and that her success in the intervening thirty years would be credible and certainly deserved. So I put her in
Swimming in the Moon
and was glad I did: She becomes something of a mother-surrogate to Lucia after Teresa’s collapse. There are fewer settings in this novel, which means more opportunities to develop layered relationships, such as the one between Lucia and Lula. However, to the question, I don’t have any plans to return to the characters of
Swimming in the Moon,
but if readers have thoughts along those lines for their own amusement, my e-mail address is on my website, www.PamelaSchoenewaldt.com.
