F. K. Clementi’s memoir South of My Dreams vividly tells the story of a Roman woman’s dramatic introduction to life in New York City.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A sparkling and quirky look at life as an immigrant academician.””
In her own words, here is F. K. Clementi’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir South of My Dreams:
When I was a little girl, I went around asking my mother, my father, all my uncles and aunts and whomever had ears to lend, “Where was I born? Are you sure it wasn’t Noyork?” (my toothless way of pronouncing New York). I was obsessed! The answers were sometimes humorous, often dismissive, always shattering. “We found you in a dumpster, maybe an American tourist ditched you here.” “Nowhere near New York.” “Go play outside, you need fresh air.” I was not born in New York, I was born in Rome. Not a big fan of reality, not even at that young age, I kept dreaming that perhaps it would turn out that I was from a better elsewhere, not from “here.” I both loved and hated my “here”: a town and a country, which, although blindingly gorgeous, were also full of corruption, social ugliness, and, to me (a child who wanted to become a queen, to rule the world, to marry a brilliant Jewish man with the greatest sense of humor, to have the dazzling bohemian life of the genius artiste), unbearably provincial. In other words: not Noyork.
My mother loved America, where she had never been. She made up for the real with films and books by American authors to which she persistently exposed me. My father, a trumpet player, added the soundtrack to my childhood through the music of Glenn Miller and the old American standards. In our house, all day long, you could hear anything from Brahms to Bob Dylan, Mendelssohn to Joan Baez, Christopher Parkening to T-Bone Walker. One of the first things I remember my father teaching me was that a cousin of ours, Romolo Balzani, was the composer of one of the most famous hymns to the city of Rome, “Er Barcarolo.” My father used to do a solo-trumpet interpretation of “The Man I Love” that even as a small girl made me go weak in the knees: “He’ll build a little home / Just meant for two / From which I’ll never roam / Who would, would you?” I could not understand the lyrics then, or the English language, yet I got the message loud and clear through the eloquence of those Gershwin’s measures.
My imagination was completely formed through the influence of music and Hollywood films—and a combination of the two. I became a philosopher the day my older cousins brought me with them and their friends to the movie theater to watch Jesus Christ Superstar: I was just five years old. I understood that any trick to pursue my dreams was fair game and that I was entitled to the whole sky, not just a piece of it, when I watched, jaw dropped, tear-stained, the greatest film of all (perhaps the first) for the girls of my generation: Yentl. I can still sing you every song of those soundtracks with undiminished rhapsody. Cat Stevens’s Father and Son opened my eyes to the fact that the rebellious indignation burning inside me was not only expected but necessary: that cutting my ties with people I didn’t like was an option (and boy, if I grabbed that option!). To this day, I still think in notes. When I wish to tell someone about an experience I just had, the first words that come to my head usually sound like this: “You know, it was like hearing a Mahler symphony for the first time! It totally took me by surprise and shocked me!” or “It was like being in a Woody Allen movie!”
When I sat to write my memoir, South of My Dreams, I looked back at the long trace of years behind me, and more than “see” my life I think I “heard” it.
If I think of my graduate days in Waltham, Massachusetts, from 1996 to ’98, the inner radio immediately starts blasting, at full volume of emotion and pain, Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping.” Despite liking this song just as much as, say, The Cranberries’ “Zombie” and Alanis Morissette’s triad “Head Over Feet,” “Ironic,” and “You Oughta Know,” to this day, if any of these comes up on the Smart Player in my car, I scream in Pavlovian reaction, “Alexa, next!” at the first two notes to avoid the deep perturbation they stir in me.
The year “Tubthumping” was released, 1997, I was being knocked down in a very literal way. I remember singing the song in moments of near manic elation—when my abuser went MIA for a while and I thought I had defeated, banished, dispelled him for good—at the top of my lungs, bouncing up and down in the little attic room of a big house I shared with sympathetic roommates. “I GET KNOCKED DOWN, BUT I GET UP AGAIN / YOU ARE NEVER GONNA KEEP ME DOWN!!!” My own resistance anthem!
When I got up again, after eventually being knocked down to a point of almost nonreturn, I was never able to listen to this song again.
The music I listened to in those days in my cold Massachusetts attic had to be put away like the painful memories, under strict control, so I could move on, away from a pain too big to carry. Because the bad and the good are always indistinguishably interlocked, codependent.
When I finally moved to New York City in 1998 and started a new life, realizing my childhood dream, I could afford a few manic moments. I held my cat, Milli, tight to my chest, dancing with her barefoot in the empty living room of my great rent-stabilized apartment in Inwood, to the notes of Morissette’s “Thank U”—released, just like me, that year. Freed from the darkness of only a few months earlier.
Often I get the feeling that my life tries to talk to me, to give me clues, to send me signals, through music. South of My Dreams is scored by loads of songs I quote to reconstruct the atmospheres of my past.
“America,” Simon and Garfunkel
The first time I saw New York was on a one-week visit to my dearest friend Galina, who had just married another good friend of mine, Brett, to whom I had introduced her. It was the early ’90s, and of course I had brought along a Walkman and a couple of cassettes. My friends encouraged me to move to the States as they had (the former from Poland, the latter from Canada). They shipped me for a day to Boston—where I was instructed by them to research applying for a graduate program in one of its great institutions of learning. I loved what I saw. I knew then that everything I had ever hoped for and desired was to be had here, in this country: I understood that I had been right all my life about this! On the Greyhound to Boston and back, I took out my Walkman and pressed Play. The tape was a compilation of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs. Their lyrics began to speak to me … to tell me that I wasn’t the first, nor the last, to pursue this very dream. That, like many before me, I too could make it. “They’ve all come to look for Ameeeeeerica / All come to look for Ameeeeeeeericaaaaaaa…”
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Sung by Judy Garland
I’ve never liked The Wizard of Oz. The story never spoke to me as a child. I didn’t appreciate its aesthetics, most of its soundtrack, and the idea of its protagonist, Dorothy, who is lucky enough to be whisked away from drab Kansas yet doesn’t want anything else from life (and magic!) than to return to it. I (who asked for nothing more than a tornado to blow me out of my house and deposit me in Times Square) couldn’t hate her more. However, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is, admittedly, as dear to me as Kansas must have been to silly Dorothy. I see in its lyrics precisely what Dorothy saw: The promise of a great, better place for both dreamy little girls.
“September Song,” Kurt Weill, Sung by Sarah Vaughan
My 10 years in New York were a mix of melancholy and joy. I wouldn’t exchange them for anything. But I would certainly wish to redo them. This song embodies the way I often felt while walking in sync with millions of unknown people through the streets of Manhattan. Or curled up with Milli on a lonely Friday night eating Chinese takeout and taking in a romantic comedy (often about success, connection and happiness in Manhattan). Or sitting on a bench in Central Park and watching couples pass by, admiring other people’s dogs, imagining their grandiose houses and VIP friends, and hoping that one day things would finally turn a corner for me as well. Few songs capture the melancholy of the passing of time as iconically as this old melody by Kurt Weill.
“Still Crazy After All These Years,” Paul Simon
The opening line, “I met my old lover on the street last night,” was the refrain of my life for a period. There was a lover, indeed, whom I kept running into… and at the same time, constantly “missing.” We met at all the wrong times. And music, you know, is all about tempo.
“Our Love Is Here to Stay,” Music by George and Ira Gershwin
Milli saved my life. She and I were an item. Inseparable. The presence of her scrawny body on top of mine in bed, her nails in my shoulder when I forced her to dance with me, the funny expression in her grumpy eyes and her habit of licking my face or kneading my favorite sweaters while I wore them, gave meaning to my days and made me want to live.
Then I met Philippe, a music producer and piano player from France, in search of “the big break” in the big city. Finally, my life healed: truly, completely, hopefully forever. The three of us had a home in New York City, we had one another and an endless stream of music to play, sing, dance and dream by.
One night, returning home together after dinner, his left arm over my shoulders, his back bent to watch the emotions run across my face better, Philippe made people’s heads turn as he sang this song to me, publicly, beautifully, with the languor and class that only Gene Kelly, before him, had put into it in An American in Paris.
“I’ll Be Seeing You,” as Sung by Dick Todd or Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra
This is the only song against which dissociation (my dear helpful friend) has no power. So, I cannot listen to it and sometimes cannot even think of it without coming undone. A tsunami of sensations overtakes me. Unlike those other tunes from my early graduate days, which are uncontrollable PTSD triggers, “I’ll Be Seeing You” fills me with sadness, tenderness, and sweet nostalgia for the good that the unstoppable tide has taken away. Philippe’s irreplaceable love, Milli . . . My bench in Central Park, my thirties . . . I mourn myself, too, in this song.
“Graceful Ghost Rag,” William Bolcom (Piano and Violin)
Speaking of mourning…
I often associate people with their own special tune. For example, Philippe is “La Bohème”sung by Charles Aznavour. My mother is Claudio Baglioni’s “Viva l’Inghilterra” and “Questo Piccolo Grande Amore.” My father: “Er Barcarolo”through Lando Fiorini’s voice, and “Chitarra Romana”sung by Claudio Villa.
No one ever told me what melody I am. But I have an idea. The year I was born, William Bolcom composed a series of musical tributes to the forgotten ragtime tradition. I would ask those I’ll leave behind one day to remember me by the notes of Bolcom’s “Graceful Ghost Rag” in his own transcription for violin and piano. To my ears, the most American piece of music of all.
F. K. Clementi is a writer, public intellectual, and a professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma.