Of Mario Puzo and Balzac

Mario Puzo's The Godfather opens with an epigram from Balzac's Father Goriot--"Behind every great fortune there is a great crime"--while it is widely held that the famous line Don Corleone speaks about making a man "an offer he can't refuse" derives from, in that very same Balzac novel, the arch-criminal Vautrin's "an offer no one would refuse" to Eugene de Rastignac. However, the attention to the influence of Balzac on The Godfather--and indeed, the extent to which Puzo's novel may be considered Balzacian (as Zola is Balzacian, as Dreiser is Balzacian), does not seem to have got much attention, perhaps unsurprisingly. After all, for a whole host of reasons Puzo is not an author to which the sort of literary critics who would write about such things have paid much attention, all as they aren't exactly attentive to Balzac either these days. (Indeed, it seems to me significant that it was not my literary studies that directed me to Balzac but rather Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.)

Still, there seems to me to still be something to say of the subject, starting with, rather more important than an epigram here or a line there, the themes that are the heart and soul of Balzac's book--the contact of traditional values with the modern capitalist world and the "cash nexus" at its center, the interest in what Henry James in an essay on Balzac called "the machinery of civilization" and the foundation of drama on exactly that, its darker side included. Thus is it the case that Amerigo Bonasera, desirous of being part of mainstream society, counts on officialdom to protect him and his, finds out the hard way that it is not people like him and his family that officialdom protects, turns in his grief to the husband of his only daughter's godmother--and offers to pay him to exact revenge, an offer that to the thoroughly Old World Corleone is an insult. Thus is it the case that Puzo's book devotes a good deal of time to the extensiveness of the Corleone family holdings, from brokerages on Wall Street to hotels on Miami Beach to casinos in Vegas, and the mechanics of corruption necessary to sustain that empire, down to the question of "To which Congressman do we give this task?" during Corleone's own only daughter's wedding. And thus do we also see a young Vito Corleone amass the power that he has--like so many Balzac protagonists, a young "provincial" come to the great metropolis of his age and rising in the world in a very un-Horatio Alger-like way--Puzo, indeed, treating the "American Dream" with Balzacian realism as an immigrant who arrived with nothing seizes opportunity where he finds it, goes from rags to riches, and seeking new gains ultimately heeds Horace Greeley's old advice, "Go West, young man."

However, one should also acknowledge the limits to Puzo's working in this manner, not least his comparative idealization of the Corleones--like so much else in the novel intended to make it acceptable to a wide audience still accustomed to thinking of gangsters as one-dimensional villains. Mobster that he was, Don Corleone is as upright as a man can be in his position--making those he needs something from a genuinely "reasonable" and mutually beneficial offer before he "gets tough," as it seems relevant that Puzo assigns him control of gambling rather than, say, prostitution (a different order of human exploitation and traffic in misery), and that the mob war so important to the story is ignited by his refusing to use his resources on behalf of the drug trade (he gives pragmatic reasons for declining involvement, not moral ones, but all the same, he refuses), all as by far the greater part of the violence they do is in self-defense of they and theirs (especially when one remembers that in their world making it clear one will retaliate for an injury is indispensable to protecting oneself), and even on those rare occasions where self-defense is not a rationale, the victims are never "ordinary, decent" people (as the disgusting Jack Wolz is not). Indeed, Vito Corleone is devoted family man about whom there is not a hint of unfaithfulness in a book drenched in sex, if ruthless in business also open-handed with the community to which he is "godfather," and capable of such charitable acts as not only taking in Tom Hagen, but seeing him through law school. It all strikes the more critically-minded as sanitized--a thing which no one has ever accused Balzac of being. Still, for all that the old master's influence is there, and the work not just richer for it, but hardly imaginable without it.