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.
This book also touches on the issue of mental illness and explores the attitudes and treatments of that time. Indeed, the early scene with the spinning chair is quite horrifying. What were you most surprised to learn in your research?
Psychology was a young science a century ago, neurological research just beginning, and the only pharmaceuticals available for treating mental illness were varieties of opiates, like the laudanum Teresa uses. Sigmund Freud’s brilliant, exciting explorations of the unconscious couldn’t help practitioners with wards full of patients who were too poor to pay a psychotherapist or whose illness didn’t permit talk therapy.
I first learned of the terrible treatment of the mentally ill in America while working on a fifth-grade social studies report grandly titled “The History of Mental Illness, by Pamela Schoenewaldt.” But my school library sources had not elaborated the degree to which ignorance linked with ingenious sadism, sheer brutality, and perversion. My Dr. Galuppi is fictional, but his “treatments” were real enough in both Europe and America. Treatment worsened (if possible) when patients wer
e lower class, poor, or female; didn’t speak English; had other handicaps; or were simply inconvenient. Of course, compassionate, thoughtful professionals like Dr. Ricci did their dedicated best, and some sanitariums offered healing care to those with means, but too many public institutions were as I described or worse, closed away from public oversight, overcrowded, underfunded, understaffed, brutal, filthy, and unsafe. Lucia was right to fear them.
The forced sterilization that Teresa endured was tragically common. As immigrants poured in, newspapers, public officials, and academics began warning of “germ plasma” infecting good American stock with genetic material prone to insanity, imbecility, indigence, and promiscuity. “Scientific proof” was summoned and delivered. The solution: sterilize the undesirable “deficients.” As one medical historian noted, it’s easy to be shocked and scornful of this conflation of racism and pseudoscience, but it remains to be seen how a century’s experience will judge our current practices.
As you wrote, did any of the characters take the story in directions that surprised you, or did you keep them fully in line?
Although I work out the overall plot before starting to write and begin each chapter with an outline, there are always discoveries and inventions. In successive revisions, one character begins to shape another and hence the plot. For example, Enrico’s enthusiastic involvement in the strike deepens Lucia’s relationship with him and hence her anguish at his death. Her friendship with Irena, her first true girlfriend, leads to Lucia’s discovery that fluency in the same language isn’t essential for intimacy; perhaps this experience gives her faith that a mixed marriage can be, in her word, “negotiated.” I’m not sure at what point in the writing process I saw Lucia and Teresa walking to Vesuvius in Lake Erie. It wasn’t in my original outline, and, yes, that direction certainly surprised me. I’m glad they returned.
The process of novel writing is a constant push and pull of the global and the local, the controlling needs of plot versus the outward push of character. Too much freedom for each character would shred the novel into a series of possibly vivid but less connected sketches, while slavish devotion to a predetermined plot strangles the very characters whose facets, evolution, and contradictions are the soul of any story.
Your characters always feel so layered and real. Do personalities of loved ones or people you’ve known and met ever find their way into your writing?
My first experience of the devastation of mental illness came when I was seventeen and my boyfriend suffered a schizophrenic collapse. One week he was himself, charming, witty, kind, brilliant, and so forth (first love, I was quite smitten). The next week he was incoherent, coarse, delusional, and grotesquely childlike. He was nobody I knew. Like Lucia, I found the shock horrific: What warnings had I missed? Was the mind truly that fragile? Who else in my life might collapse without warning? Could it happen to me? I’m sure my telling of Teresa’s collapse was influenced by my own experience.
However, all the characters of Swimming in the Moon were inventions, even those loosely based on real people, like the union leaders Isadore Freith and Josephine Carey. It would seem logical that narrative arts are rooted in one’s own experience, but in practice it seems to me that most of the layers come from looking into the scene, going over and over the material, seeing and adding more, realizing depths and limitations. My fictional Josephine, for example, probably isn’t capable of Lucia’s depth of intimate relationships; perhaps her organizational effectiveness comes in part from her emotional distance. Yolanda’s friendship has its limits, Lula’s bluntness masks a delicate compassion, and Mr. Weiss has a larger heart than his son at first realized.
Your husband is Italian and you lived near Naples for many years. Do you ever find yourself yearning for the oversize lemons, fresh mozzarella, and sun of Naples? What about your experience, if anything, made its way into this story?
Of course, I miss much of our life near Naples. It’s hard not to. The beauty, the complex history, cuisine, language, art, and customs there are a world away from our current home of Knoxville, Tennessee. Out of nowhere come memories of sunset over the Mediterranean seen from our kitchen window, the coastline and islands, the Baroque intensity of the city, moonlight on medieval castles by the sea, hikes and city walks and long dinners with friends. Yet, in the ten years I lived outside of Naples, most of my writing had American settings. Writing about my adopted country on such short acquaintance seemed presumptuous. Time and distance have made this setting possible for me, as have the measured permissions of the historical fiction genre.
Yet, there is much in today’s Naples that Lucia would recognize. The Palazzo Donn’Anna has been made into apartments and noble titles are officially abolished, but the fish markets still thrive, and you can buy gelato at Caffè Gambrinus as Teresa and Lucia were sent to do. We lived for several months in a basso across a narrow basalt-paved street from a mattress-maker. When the power went out, as it often did, the inner room was cave-dark. You can still buy mozzarella di bufala made that morning, an exquisite delight like no other. On summer days in Knoxville, what I miss most are the lemon salads that we (and Nannina) made. Try one yourself if you come upon big, sweet, thick-skinned lemons. Peel off the rind, squeeze out a bit of juice, and chop the flesh in bite-size pieces. Add some good olive oil and mix in black salted olives. Enjoy and be refreshed.
Reading Group Guide
1. Lucia and Teresa’s life in Naples had its advantages and challenges. In what ways would Lucia’s life have been different if she and Teresa weren’t forced to leave?
2. When they leave Italy, Lucia and Teresa are told: “You can be who you want to be in America.” True?
3. How does the immigrant experience today compare with that described in Swimming in the Moon? Are there other ways in which we are “immigrants” besides the literal moving to a new country?
4. Lucia has a deep emotional connection with Irena, even though they do not share language fluency. What does this say about Lucia and, more generally, about the way that people from different cultures can connect?
5. Lucia earns money by “scribing,” writing letters for fellow immigrants. In the process, she often passes on what are essentially lies about their lives. Why? Lucia also lies to the countess in her letters. Why?
6. What sets Lucia apart from the other immigrants in her neighborhood? What do you think Lula means when she says that Lucia “wants so much”? Have you ever felt that you wanted more than you were supposed to want?
7. Teresa’s absence while she is on the vaudeville circuit and her emotional and mental problems deprive Lucia of a sustaining maternal figure and ultimately make Lucia her mother’s caretaker. How does Lucia compensate for this loss?
8. In America, Lucia’s thoughts often return to her life in Naples. What various functions do you think these memories fulfill as she comes to adulthood?
9. How does Teresa’s beautiful voice both divide her from and bind her to Lucia? What does the voice do—and not do—for Teresa? How does Lucia develop her own voice?
10. What challenges do workers in the novel face? How do they compare with those facing workers today?
11. What factors drive Lucia to take up the issue of workers’ rights so passionately and endure so many sacrifices for the strike, even when the worker community is often bitterly divided?
12. Lucia learns that only eight in one hundred Americans in her time have high school diplomas. Far fewer, of course, went to college. Graduation has a variety of meanings for Lucia. Can you discuss some of them? Yet, toward the end of the novel, formal education becomes less crucial. Why?
13. What draws Lucia and Henryk together? What pulls them apart? Compare their evolving relationship with that of other couples in the novel: Elisabetta and Paolo, the Reillys, Yolanda and Charlie, Giovanna and Frank.
14. Lucia vividly recalls a line from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” How does this line
relate to Lucia and Teresa’s circumstances—and to all of our lives?
15. While the past century has brought profound changes in the treatment of mental illness, in what way is Teresa and Lucia’s experience timeless?
16. What is the significance of the title, Swimming in the Moon? What image does it conjure for you?
17. Why did you or your group choose to read Swimming in the Moon? What did you take away from reading the novel?
Read On
Suggested Reading
HERE ARE SOME BOOKS I’ve read recently (although not all were written recently) in which the beauty and power of the voice seemed wonderfully honed for the stories they told:
My Father’s Notebook, by Kader Abdolah
Little Bee, by Chris Cleave
Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger
Good King Harry, by Denise Giardina
Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones
Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder
Humphry Clinker, by Tobias Smollett
The Space Between Us, by Thrity Umrigar
Have You Read?
More by Pamela Schoenewaldt
When We Were Strangers
Too poor and too plain to marry, and unwilling to burden what family she has left, twenty-year-old Irma Vitale sees no choice but to flee her Italian mountain village. Risking rough passage across the Atlantic and the dangers facing a single woman in an unfamiliar land, Irma boldly pursues a new life sewing dresses for gentlewomen.
Swept up in the crowded streets of nineteenth-century America, Irma finds not only workshop servitude and miserable wages, but also seeds of friendship in the raw immigrant quarters. When her determination to find a place for herself leads at last to a Chicago shop, Irma blossoms under the guidance of an austere Alsatian dressmaker, sewing fabrics and patterns more beautiful than she’d ever imagined. Then tragedy strikes and her tenuous peace is shattered. From the rubble, and in the face of human cruelty and kindness, suffering and hope, Irma prevails, discovering a talent she’d never imagined and an unlikely family patched together by the common threads that unite us all.
Swimming in the Moon Page 33