additional text and Author's Commentary

A SICILIAN-AMERICAN COMEDY

JOSEPH J. CORSO, JR.

2015, 2017

PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED SEGMENT FROM CHAPTER THREE: THE WHITE BUTTERFLY
(Material appears as pages 194-198 in second addition)

The Granddaughter of the Great Gatsby

I was trying to find some solace in the rejection slip I held in my hand. After deciphering the handwritten scrawl, I noted the absence of the phrase “does not fit in with our publishing plans at this time,” as in other rejections I had received. Instead, Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli lauded my instinct for a good story about Fitzgerald’s time in Great Neck, New York. Alas, it “didn’t break new ground,” and couldn’t supplant the “many fine pieces” already slated for publication in the Fitzgerald Hemingway Annual for 1978. I would keep the note as a memento for the day when my first acceptance letter would arrive and supplant it. But that was eighteen years ago!

The year 1996 was especially important to me because we celebrated the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birth. I found myself caught up in the whirlwind of literary and social activities planned for the year. Regrettably, I was unable to participate in most, but was determined to attend the one event I believed essential: the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary Celebrations at the University of South Carolina (USC), September 24-26, 1996. USC is where Matthew Bruccoli, Jeffries Professor of English at the University, was spearheading the essential tribute to Fitzgerald. I had to go, and Rachel and Silvia gave me their blessings and best wishes. I took a week’s leave from work and flew to Columbia, full of great expectations.

The campus was alive with movement for four days: students, faculty, literary celebrities (James Dickey, Joseph Heller and Budd Schulberg) and other visitors like me. In large groups we undulated into and around obstacles to the activities at Thomas Cooper Library, Russell House, Gambrell Hall and the Drayton Theatre. There Fitzgerald’s libretto to Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! was brought to life in this 1914 Princeton Triangle Club student musical comedy. Fitzgerald loved musicals, and considered pursuing a career on Broadway. However, he relented because he wanted to moralize not just entertain: so he pursued fiction. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald did infuse his stories with popular songs: often those from Broadway musical comedies, like Mary, which he saw in 1921.

That’s really why I went there: to “break new ground” in Fitzgerald scholarship. I was going to reveal the link between Mary’s popular song, “The Love Nest” and Fitzgerald’s cryptic note about Chapter V in The Great Gatsby. It was written on the endpaper of Andre Malraux’s Man’s Hope in 1938: “V. The meeting all an invention. Mary.” I had seen a production of Mary at the Equity Library Theatre in Manhattan in March of 1989. It was evident to me that the show’s setting, plot and characters’ aspirations were possibly a paradigm and source for aspects of Gatsby. I worked sporadically on the idea over five years, waiting for the right moment to offer it. Rachel thought it was a serious breakthrough for me. Bruccoli was going to beam, and I was going to have my fifteen minutes of fame with my scoop on Fitzgerald’s Centenary! It would lead to my faux Pulitzer as a hack writer: quickly gone with the wind but still my moment!

I was so anxious and nervous about my discovery that when I had to sit across from a woman I didn’t know at dinner that night I was afraid to talk about Fitzgerald. We exchanged names and mindless comments about the cramming in the Basil Pot where we were dining. I said I was invited because I knew the son of a faculty member, a lie. Then I brusquely asked why she was there.

Polly Stone, fortyish and plump, but with a pleasant face, warm brown eyes and beautiful complexion, seemed intimidated by my question. I softened my tone with an explanation:

“I mean, are you a student or an academic?”

“Neither,” she said, “I’m here because,” she hesitated and the naturally pink cheeks on her face reddened slightly. “I’m here,” and her voice fell to a whisper: ”I’m here because I’m the granddaughter of The Great Gatsby. I have to tell someone.”

Red Riding Hood is Back in the Woods

I was so surprised by her response that I neither laughed nor spoke, but my left eyebrow uncontrollably, skeptically arched.

“Look, Mr. . . .”

“Tommaso,” I instinctively volunteered again, anticipating her repeated mispronunciation. “But call me Jerome, and run that granddaughter thing past me again. I’m a big Fitzgerald fan.”

“My grandfather,” she said, “knew Fitzgerald in Great Neck in the twenties, and told Fitzgerald a story one night. The story was used by Fitzgerald, when the events of James Gatz’s early life appeared in The Great Gatsby. My mother was a child when this happened, but she inherited an autographed copy of Gatsby, a letter from Fitzgerald to grandfather and a newspaper article about my grandfather’s youth. She never told me about any of this.”

“We were estranged from the time I left Yale to marry a professor at Harvard against her wishes. Paul and I relocated to Berkeley where he joined the faculty in the 1970s. I found a new calling there, and did my graduate work at UC Davis. Paul left me two years later, when I met a graduate student who became my second husband. I threw Carter out when he supported Reagan in 1980.”

Polly’s expression saddened, and then hardened when she realized her confessional was excessively frank.

“I never saw mother again. She died last year in Great Neck, New York, and I was left these things in a box of her memories. I recently came across them. They didn’t mean much to me. My area of expertise is soil analysis and conservation. I didn’t read Gatsby until I found it in the box. At least it was a quick read. I brought it and the other items with me, but I don’t know if I want to give them to Professor Bruccoli or anyone else.”

I was stunned, yet found myself salivating at the thought that a path to a piece of literary immortality might be sitting across from me. I smiled benignly, dimpling my cheeks, and took Polly’s trembling hands in mine, assuring her I shared her concern.

“We need to talk Polly but not here. I would love to see what you have. Please trust me. Where are the materials?”

“They’re in my hotel room.”

I grimaced. “I really want to see them, but I don’t want to invade your privacy.”

“It’s the only safe place I can show them to you. I’d like to trust you, Jerome. Are you married?” she said, glancing at my vacant, left ring finger.

I smiled, showing my perfect uppers, volunteering “I’m not married, and I think we’re on the same page, Polly. Let’s go.”

One Not-forgotten Summer Night

I prefaced my examination of the Fitzgerald materials with a brief explanation to Polly of my interest in Fitzgerald’s work, and my experience teaching community college classes on The Great Gatsby. I felt I needed to establish some bona fides to cement her trust. She nodded her head a great deal, but I sensed that I was pulling her into an ivory tower when her heart was in terra firma. I looked at her lovingly and we moved on.

The first edition of Gatsby I held in my hands was in excellent condition, with the original dust jacket, which showed some wear. But the cover art, reflecting Francis Cugat’s gouache painting, was still vivid. We see a woman’s haunting and faceless eyes, with what appears to be a single tear floating down from the right eye. Pink lips complete the image, which hangs on a veil of deep blue night. This fascinating scene hovers over a Coney Island-like amusement park burning brightly in the lower background. I read somewhere that Cugat received $100 for his cover art: the only one he ever did. Fitzgerald loved it, and said he had written it into the book, after seeing the painting before the manuscript was completed.

This experience was as close to possessing a literary holy grail as I was ever to get. The handwritten inscription on the first page reads:

Dear Bob:

Keep reading and you’ll finally come

to your own adventures which you told to

me one not-forgotten summer night.

Your Friend

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald must have sent this copy to his friend around April of 1925, shortly after the book was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York.

Next was Fitzgerald’s handwritten letter sent earlier, probably around July 1924 from St. Raphael, France:

Great Neck – I mean

St. Raphael, France

Villa Marie

Dear Bob:

Thanks for your letter & for selling the membership many thanks indeed. One hundred and fifty is more than I expected. I hope some time that I may be able to return the favor.

The part of what you told me which I am including in my novel is the ship, yatch I mean,& the mysterious yatchsman whose mistress was Nelly Bly. I have my hero occupy the same position you did & obtain it in the same way. I am calling him Robert B. Kerr instead of Robert C. Kerr to conceal his identity (this is a joke – I wanted to give you a scare. His name is Gatsby).

Best to you all from all of us and again thanks enormously for your courtesy & your trouble.

Sincerely,

Scott Fitz----

My dreams of Mary and her revelations vanished like Berlin’s “gambler’s lucky streak.” What a puerile idea that was!

The Lost Moment

What a literary discovery! My eyes moistened. Then Polly spoke.

“Jerome, I just can’t disclose this stuff to Bruccoli or anybody else. I’ve been having dreams – bad dreams about the people my grandfather exposed to Fitzgerald. I, too, became interested at first, out of a strange, almost voyeuristic fascination, reveling in an eighty year old illicit love affair. I researched the lovers’ lives and collected printouts of microfilmed news articles and other public documents. To the facts I added my vivid imagination to fill in the unseen intimacies of two strangers. It was unseemly.”

“Then the dreams started, and the vague outlines of a man and woman in torment cried out to me: ‘Please spare us the scandal, infamy and public ridicule you will cover our bones with. Let us rest in peace, until heaven judges us. Please, please!’ I always tried to live by the Golden Rule and not judge others for fear of their judgment of me. I was ashamed of myself!”

“Jerome, please help me destroy these things. No literary value outweighs the need for privacy concerning the intimacy of people’s lives. More so, for the deceased who can’t defend themselves.”

I looked at Polly through glazed eyes. Could I challenge her position? Could I live with myself? And what would my Rachel say? My soaring resolve to achieve some sort of glory had suddenly plunged into the chilled water in an icehouse. I saw the eyes of Edward G. Robinson close in acceptance of his deserved fate in the cold waters of The Red House: down, down, down to perdition.

I gave up the ghost, reluctantly. “Polly, let’s burn them after midnight. We’ll have a small bonfire of the humanities: not quite a Wagnerian immolation but a fiery blood pledge to keep the secrets of the dead! We’ll spread the ashes over the campus. How’s that for poetic justice? But may I keep the dust jacket?”

“Thank you, Jerome. Of course you may keep the dust jacket. Now we’ll let them all rest in peace, forever. Amen. I, too, feel like the flames will purify our task.”

My left eyebrow arched again, hearing my own hyperbolic voice in hers. Wistfully, I looked at my last, best chance for some taste of immortality, putting the dust jacket safely away. I recalled George C. Scott’s final words in Patton about the slave who holds a crown above the head of Roman heroes as they ride a chariot. Parading in triumph before the Emperor, the slave whispers: “All glory is fleeting.” I was now denied even an ephemeral sense of accomplishment. One more illusion evaporates. Oh Rachel, Rachel!

AUTHOR’S COMMENTS

In A Sicilian-American Comedy I told the story of four generations of the Tommaso family in Calatafimi, Sicily and America’s Brooklyn and Queens Counties, New York City.

In Chapter One, The Red Swan , a third person narrative spans the years 1885 to 1920 in Calatafimi, Sicily: from the time Annunziata Greco, known as Cignu Russu (Red Swan), blossomed as a child in Calatafimi, and at 16 married Pippinu Tommaso, to the departure of her youngest son, Girolamu Tommaso, to New York City.

In Chapter Two, The Blue Bunny, a third person narrative continues from 1943 into 1953. Girolamu and his wife, Sonia Yarmolinsky Tommaso, live in Brooklyn with Sonia’s son Lathem from her first marriage, which ended with her first husband’s death as a soldier in World War II. Sonia is now expecting a child fathered by Girolamu.

In Chapter Three, The White Butterfly, the story moves in a first person narrative, in flashbacks, covering the years 1943 to 2011. Cignu Russu’s grandson, Jerome Tommaso, son of Sonia and Girolamu, begins to narrate his autobiography. Jerome’s daughter with Rachel Zipel, Sylvia Zipel-Tommaso, represents the fourth, and current, generation of Tommasos in America.

DANTE'S INFLUENCE

Each chapter in the book has a symbolic title, named for non-human creatures of the natural world, e. g., the butterfly symbolizes spiritual growth and transcendence in its transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. Each title and subheading, provide literary cues to prompt the reader to further exploration: Spawn of the Swan; Spawn of Seneca; and Spawn of Ovid. What do the titles and literary cues suggest?

Dante Aligheri, poet of the Commedia, inspired the titles, e.g., Inferno becomes The Red Swan; Purgatorio becomes The Blue Bunny; and Paradiso becomes The White Butterfly. These are not intended to replicate Dante’s story but, instead, to make the reader aware that there are elements in the chapters, which I chose to reference, in order to make a corollary or ironic point. The subheadings reference the myth of Lida and the Swan in Chapter One. Also, Helen of Troy (one of Lida’s children by Zeus) and her lover Paris are consigned to the second circle of Hell by Dante because they surrendered reason to lust. The Oedipus of Seneca and Shakespeare’s Hamlet are referenced in Chapter Two, with Freud lurking in the background, and the Metamorphoses of Ovid, reflecting human transformations, for better or worse, is referenced in Chapter Three. Generally speaking, the world of the Tommaso family is the reverse of Dante’s orderly, symmetrical cosmos, with currents of irony and disillusionment running through it. Of course, my references to the novels The Great Gatsby and The Maltese Falcon, suggest how we are pulled back into a past we can never quite escape.

DANTE AND BEATRICE

The following information is not based on verifiable fact, and we can’t be sure that Beatrice Portinari was Dante’s beloved “Beatrice.” The story goes that Dante Alighieri was nearly nine when his father took him to a party at the home of Folco Portinari, a wealthy Florentine citizen, and there he met his host’s little daughter, Beatrice, about a year younger than he. Twenty years later, in his Vita Nuova, he wrote in Latin “She appeared to me dressed in a most noble color, a rich and subdued red, girded and adorned in a manner becoming to her very tender age.” He further noted that at that very moment his heart trembled and said, “Behold a god stronger than I is come to bear rule over me”: his soul and intellect began to marvel and said to his eyes: “Now is your bliss made manifest”: his senses lamenting replied: “Alas! How often henceforth shall we be troubled.”

These things do happen. The British poet, Sir Osbert Sitwell, told a similar story over nearly 600 years later: “as though you had been hitherto colour-blind, and now, by looking for a moment at the face of a stranger, had been made whole and given the entire world of vision. … Why should this single glimpse of a stranger raise life to a level I had never hitherto known, and why should the memory of it remain with me now, albeit I have long forgotten the child’s name, to persist, no doubt, until the hour of my dying?” (The Scarlet Tree, p. 208)

Dante’s life’s work was the answer to that question because he gave us her name and an angelic presence to revere.

Lastly, in the film, Citizen Kane, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles created a classic story that begins as the newspaper tycoon, Charles Foster Kane dies uttering a single word: “Rosebud.” A journalist is sent out to find the meaning of the word. During his efforts, he interviews a Mr. Bernstein, once Kane’s editor on the Enquirer, Kane’s first newspaper, in 1898.

Bernstein responds to a question about “Rosebud,” by saying: “That Rosebud: maybe, some girl? There were a lot of them back in the early days – “

The reporter interrupts: “Not some girl he knew casually and then remembered after 50 years, on his deathbed.” Bernstein smiles, saying “You’re pretty young … A fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day back in 1896, I was crossing over to New Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in – and on it was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on – and she was carrying a white parasol – and I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all – but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl. See what I mean?”

Beatrice Portinari married the banker Simone dei Bardi in 1287. Dante was 18 when she first acknowledged and spoke to him in the street. In 1289, Folco Portinari died, and a year later, Beatrice, aged 20, passed. For Dante, the light had gone out of life, and the whole city of Florence was widowed by her death. Is Dante’s version of his encounters with Beatrice a fact, or a fictional, poetic truth? We will never know.

THE GOLDEN BOUGH: A STUDY IN MAGIC AND RELIGION

As written by Sir James Frazer, this classic work of human anthropology, myth, religion and magic became a touchstone for literary allusion by some of the greatest writers of the 20th century, including Freud, Jung, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence.

Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison and their fellow “Cambridge Ritualists” argued that:

“All myths are echoes of rituals, and that all rituals have as their

Primordial Purpose the manipulation of natural phenomena.”

Rituals of cannibalism are referenced in my book, pages 170-174.

GREEK MYTHS AND DANTE

The Egyptian’s Osiris myth follows the ritual of his death and the scattering of his body to restart the vegetation cycle as a rebirth.This was a key example of the rebirth process in that initially only the Pharaohs “had an Osiris,” but later other Egyptian nobles acquired it, and eventually it led to the concept of soul for all individuals in Christianity.

Jung believed that Christianity itself derived its significance from the archetypal relationship between Osiris and Horus: God, the Father and Jesus, his son. However, Jung said that the rebirth applied to Osiris (the Father) and not Horus, the son.

In Greek mythology Dionysus, the son of Zeus, was a horned child who was torn to pieces by Titans, who lured him with toys, then boiled and ate him. Zeus then destroyed the Titans by thunderbolts, as a result of their killing and eating Dionysus. From the Titans’ ashes, humans were formed. (See Wagner’s Ring Cycle for another version of gods perishing to foster humanity). However, Dionysus’ grandmother, Rhea, reunited some of his pieces (from his heart which was spared) and brought him back to life. Rhea was the Titaness daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus, and sister and wife to Cronus, often referred to as the mother of Olympian goddesses and gods. The Romans identified her with Magna Mater. The second largest moon of the planet Saturn is named for her.

Rhea gave birth to Zeus in Crete, handing Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he promptly ate, as he had eaten her five other children. This he did because he learned from his parents, Uranus and Gaia, that he was destined to be overcome by his own child, as he had overthrown his own father. Rhea’s subterfuge allowed Cronus to be punished for his acts against Uranus and his own children of Rhea. Zeus then rescued his siblings from Cronus’ stomach.

In Li Frati Mangiaracina, Chapter Three, page 173 of my book, the victim’s heart is not mentioned because the heart was not included in the ritual. In my imagination, the victim’s heart would be removed by the Mafioso’s wife and boiled for the Mafioso’s Cane Corso dog to eat. The dog’s feces would be buried in the Mafioso’s own vegetable garden, assuring the deceased would serve him in death and thereafter, as a posthumous act of fealty and loyalty that was not shown in his lifetime. This is a twist on the Greek myth with intended irony.

Dante consigned one Count Ugolino to the frozen confines of Hell’s ninth circle in the Inferno for his complicity in the battle of Campaldino (in which Dante fought) in a betrayal of Florence. In addition, Dante references a story circulating at the time of the Commedia’s writing that Ugolino and his four children were imprisoned without food and water, and that Ugolino ate each of his children after they died in prison.

Michael Haag, author of the 2013 book, Inferno Decoded: the essential companion to the myths, mysteries and locations in Dan Brown’s Inferno, writes about the Ugolino matter that “Dante here has produced an inversion of the central Christian mystery, the ceremony of the Eucharist in which believers consume the blood and flesh of Christ.” (See pages 166 and 173 of my book) Also see references to The Cult of Dionysus.

In the latter part of the 20th century, Francis Ford Coppola filmed an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, setting it in Vietnam. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now alluded to Frazer’s work. Near the end of the film, we are in a primitive part of Cambodia where Colonel Kurtz, a rebel American Army officer, is stalked by an American Army assassin, Willard, sent to terminate Kurtz’s command for inexplicably “going native” and insane. Strangely, Kurtz seems to welcome Willard as his successor as part of some primitive ritual to replace one leader with another. As we survey Kurtz’s lair, the camera briefly focuses on The Bible and two other books: Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Frazer’s The Golden Bough. This is a cinematic allusion to literary texts that “speak volumes” about where Kurtz’s head is and the nature of the primitive cult of Cambodians he lords it over.

THE AENEID AND DANTE'S GUIDE VIRGIL

The source for the book’s title, The Golden Bough, is in Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid. It is a section of a mythic tree, plucked and used by Virgil’s Aeneas to gain entry into the underworld; there he will see the shade of his dead father, Anchises. This takes place after the end of the Trojan War: Aeneas looks to found a new nation near ancient Hesperia, now called Italy, named for its leader, Italus.

Publius Vergilius Maro was born on October 15, 70 BCE in a small village between Mantua and the Po River. He went to Rome circa 53 BCE to study law and rhetoric. From Rome, Vergil went to Naples in 47 BCE to study philosophy. He was a peace-loving man and usually stayed away from Rome, retreating from the turmoil that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination, Cicero’s execution and the 10 years of chaos that preceded the establishment of the Empire. Most of his life was spent in the quiet countryside of Campagna, the province containing Naples, Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Virgil is best known for his last work, the Aeneid, an epic which he wrote from 30 to 19 BCE in 12 books of verse narrative, modeled on Homer’s epics, and dedicated to Augustus and his illustrious ancestry. Virgil is thought to have deviated from the rustic themes of his earlier works to historical themes, after witnessing Julius Caesar’s grand triumph: the spectacular thanksgiving parade which marked Pompey’s defeat in Egypt.

Virgil died on September 21, 19 BCE in Brundisium, with Augustus at his side. He had not finished the Aeneid to his satisfaction and wanted it destroyed. Instead, Augustus assigned two of Virgil’s poet friends to edit the manuscript for publication, assuring that they make no additions to the text. The process was completed near the end of 18 BCE.

Virgil’s influence as one of the great epic writers of world literature is found amoung many major poets, including Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Tennyson and Eliot. The Church of Rome considered him a “virtuous pagan,”partially because of his “supposed”messianic prediction of a miraculous birth in his fourth of ten pastoral poems called The Eclogues .Therein, is a depiction of the birth of a child marking the advent of a new Golden Age.

Dante’s choice to make Virgil his guide through the first sections of his Commedia was a logical selection, and gave the work a Latinate continuity and historical perspective. Dante wrote his great epic poem to trace the journey of a Christian soul through Hell and Purgatory, ending in Paradise. The title signifies a procession from the worst toward the best – a very medieval conception of comedy. Shakespeare’s comedies are similar in that they proceed from thorny complications between young lovers to the happy resolution of love fulfilled and nuptials.

For Dante, his world was orderly, as was God’s world in the afterlife. Dante believed there was no element of the unknown in human destiny. The “Flitcraft Parable” in The Maltese Falcon (See page 80 of my book) suggests otherwise. Flitcraft had an epiphany one day when a falling beam just missed hitting him as he walked from his office to get lunch. “The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now, a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. . . . He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.”

In my book, 13 beams fall affecting all the main characters.

ERRATA

My book was first published in the fall of 2015. It had a few mistakes in spelling and punctuation which eluded my and other’s eyes in the editorial process. In addition, it lacked genealogical tables to connect the various Tommazo family members. Further, some of the Sicilian and Italian words and phrases in the book were not always translated into English. The two latter circumstances were brought to my attention by people who had read the book. Eventually, I approached the publisher with the idea that we correct all these deficiencies with a smaller, second printing. Also, two reviews of the book were submitted to the publisher after initial publication, thus presenting an opportunity to quote excerpts in a second edition.

In the fall of 2017 the second edition was printed, after my dear cousin Catherine Merolle scrupulously edited the revised text, which included a new subsection to Chapter III: The Granddaughter of The Great Gatsby. This new edition represents a great improvement over the original text but alas, there is one error I personally failed to correct.

SAINT JEROME

In Chapter III, the error I made and never changed was Girolamu’s actual date of birth, as shown on his and his mother’s headstone: 09 09 1910. While his birth month is identified as September in the first chapter, the day is incorrect, as I intended it to be the 30th. I alone knew the 30th to be the day, because it’s the date of the feast day of the Catholic Church’s Saint Jerome who died on 09/30/420 CE. As such, Cignu Russu could convince Pippinu to name their new child for the saint, instead of another dead relative. Note that “Girolamu” is Sicilian for Jerome.

The saint was known as a pleasure-bent youth who pursued women, rejecting the morality he was brought up to follow. Although a most learned secular scholar, known for his sarcasm and great wit, Jerome eventually returned to the Roman Church in 366CE, baptized by Pope Liborius. He did refuse to become a priest, following his own path. Jerome is most famous for his translations of the Hebrew, Greek and Old Latin texts, resulting in the Vulgate Bible, ultimately the standard text commonly used by the constituents of the Roman Catholic Church. The Vulgate also affected Protestant biblical texts, including a marked influence on The King James Version of the Bible. The famed Gutenberg Bible is a printed 1455 edition of the Vulgate text.

The character of Jerome, Girolamu’s son in Chapter III, reflects an ironic twist on Saint Jerome’s scholarship when compared to the mediocrity of Jerome’s academic achievements. Girolamu’s skills as an artistic carpenter who worked in wood connects us to Pippinu, his cuckolded father, from whom he learned the craft. The nativity scene he created for Don Silvio in Chapter III, pages 126-129 aligns him with both Jesus and Joseph in an ironic juxtaposition.

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