A conversation with professor John J. Iorio is a romp through history and art, with the occasional detour through Italian cuisine or wherever curiosity leads him. Good luck keeping up.
By RICHARD BOCKMAN
Published May 14, 2004
[Times photo: John Pendygraft]
“I’m a paradox,” says John J. Iorio, retired professor and father of Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio. “I’m an immigrant kid who didn’t know English, and I teach English. I enjoy reading nonfiction, and I write fiction. I’m like Stravinsky, a composer you can’t make much sense of. There’s a pattern underneath there somewhere, but I can’t figure it out.”
[Photos courtesy of John Iorio]
Italy 1986. The Iorios stopped at the Park of Monsters in Bomarzo, north of Rome. “It’s a grotesque theme park,” John Iorio says, constructed in the 16th century, filled with gargoyles, mythological figures and animals carved in rock. Dad and Pam, then 27, imitate the gargoyle behind them.
Hollywood, Fla., 1963. Dad with the kids: Jay, buried in the sand, was 8, Paul was 6 and Pam was 4. Today Jay is a technical adviser for IEEE, the world’s leading society for engineering technology, computer engineering and communications. Paul, a freelance writer, has interviewed the likes of Frank Zappa and Roman Polanski. Pam we know.
Hollywood, Fla., 1965. Posed in front of dad’s Triumph TR4. Paul was 8, Pam was 6.
John Iorio, above foreground and below, was 19, in training at Fort Benning, Ga. He was with the 542nd Parachute Raider Battalion, a unit that he says was like a precursor to special forces. “They were all very tough, all they talked about was how to kill somebody.” He says the experience shapes him still today. “It makes you a lot more humane, a lot more practical. It makes you distrustful of abstractions, shibboleths, platitudes. . . . ”
It was maddening, impossible. The sentence, in the unbiased (!) opinion of its author, featured a brilliant metaphor and exquisite word choice. Why couldn't he make it work?
He tried it at the beginning of the paragraph; alas, shine it did not. To the end it went, and back to the middle.
"I loved that sentence. It's a kind of self-love, but it wouldn't work."
He tinkered, wrote and retinkered for hours until his gaze fell upon the Dante section of the library, his personal library. Hoping to draw inspiration, or at least pleasant diversion, he opened the Divine Comedy and trusted providence to take him to a page that would suitably inspire.
(Really now, who among us has not found inspiration from Canto 3 of the walk through hell?)
Dante wrote of the Circle of Indifference, people without the backbone to take sides, who float with the winds and never arrive anywhere, forever condemned to chase banners in the night.
Duly inspired, the writer returned not to his devil paragraph but to a new tale, Paradise Acres, he titled it, which poured forth whole, in less than two hours.
We shall return to Paradise Acres, The Friendly Community, in due time.
* * *
John J. Iorio, where does one begin?
Near a burning haystack in World War II Germany, where a teenage soldier discovered humanity and learned, truly, to love life?
Or a few years later, in the philosophy library at Columbia University, where a young man endeavored to make sense of why he was spared when so many around him were taken?
His story could start in the early '60s, out on Tampa's Fowler Avenue, where a university rose from the sand, and where in the coming three decades thousands of students would learn from the engaging English prof.
Another start point could be campaigning for his daughter. For years people knew Pam as Professor Iorio's daughter; now he's the Tampa mayor's dad.
He's a writer; where would he start his story? The question stumps him, and as we shall see, John Iorio is not easily stumped. Absent help from him, then, we start with the tomato.
* * *
Iorio cherishes and celebrates his Italian roots, born 79 years ago in the village of Casandrino, near Naples. Colleagues, students, friends, they all praise his culinary talents. He's almost as good a cook, they say, as he thinks he is, a red sauce master.
Professor Iorio, can you talk about the tomato?
His face lights up (it always lights up), and it's off to the races.
"It started in the New World, North America. Until the Renaissance, when explorers took the tomato, and the potato, back to Europe. They thought it was an ornament, they wouldn't eat it.
"Italians began using them in sauces. The priests used to berate the peasants for doctoring up their pasta with salt and pepper. It was too much. One priest said, "We understand the peasants are putting salt and pepper on their pasta.' And now tomato on pasta? It was like the sensuous life, the good life. It was too much. Putting tomato on pasta was looked down upon."
Historical perspective segues into his sauce recipe (don't skimp on the olive oil) and circles back to a hot pepper variation, called Morgan Pasta.
"The pirate Morgan, he used to sail all over the world. When he was in the Mediterranean he would stop in Sicily. They knew he liked his tomato sauce hot, so they would throw in hot peppers, and that's Morgan Sauce."
How about the tomato in literature?
Hmmm. All he can summon is the tomato as metaphor for woman, as in, That's a nice tomato. "But you don't hear that much any more."
* * *
He was just 17 when he enlisted. The FBI followed him, picked through his trash and asked teachers which books he read. He was born, after all, in enemy country. Never mind that he was an American citizen, his parents having brought him to Trenton, N.J., before he turned 3.
He remembers the intelligence officer who questioned him. "Capt. Abrams, he was, he says, "You're flying a bomber, would you drop bombs on your home town?'
"I say, "What, are you crazy? Why would I drop bombs on Trenton?' "
A paratrooper with the 17th Airborne Division, Iorio fought in the Battle of the Bulge, in which U.S. casualties numbered more than 80,000, including 19,000 killed.
"It was a slaughterhouse. Your beliefs are shaken. People are dying all around you. You figure the next day it will be your turn. You're in constant dread 24 hours; you never know when you're going to get it. Day after day. Every time they say we're going to attack, you know you're going to lose men."
Bitter cold was another enemy. One night the Americans were dug in, facing Germans in the woods. A phosphorus shell hit a huge haystack in the field between them, igniting a bonfire. Iorio watched from his foxhole, one platoon over.
"The Germans came out of the woods, with no arms, no flag. They just came out and they're warming their hands. Then the Americans came out of their foxholes and started warming their hands. They're standing like 10 feet apart, just warming themselves."
The bonfire dying and dawn coming, the Germans returned to their positions, the Americans to theirs, and got back to the killing business.
Iorio went in thinking he might make a career of the military. Combat taught him otherwise.
"It makes you a lot more humane, a lot more practical. It makes you distrustful of abstractions, shibboleths, platitudes. Don't give me a lot of malarkey about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You're down to your inner self, it strips away all the phoniness you've ever had."
Even now, 60 years on, the experience frames his every day. "You know you should have died, but maybe you didn't, so you'd better appreciate everything."
He appreciates (in no particular order) family, writing, Greek statuary and architecture, his pipe, war buddies, a cup of fine coffee, Italian Renaissance artists, a game of bocce, an off-color joke, Schubert, the electronic music of Stockhausen and Berio . . . .
* * *
At the University of South Florida English department, advisers would steer disenchanted students to a class with professor Iorio; he'd turn them on. Of his multiple awards across the years, he's most proud of the one that came from students. Best teacher at the university, 1969.
Marilyn Sherman had him for two classes 35 years ago, one a literature survey course, the other on the 20th century novel. She's 70 now, a pharmacist, and still gets together with her old professor. Sherman observes that his library (the converted master bedroom in a condo above Tampa's Hyde Park Village) reflects her old prof's mind.
"It's all bright colors. There's light coming in from everywhere. It's artistic and eclectic, the way he thinks. There's a lot of light there."
She suggests asking him about mortadella, Italian bologna with spots of fat: "It brings tears to his eyes."
It can be reported that he was not reduced to tears, though his rapture was palpable.
"Mortadella. The smell of it absolutely sends you off. You become the mortadella.
"You might think it comes from death, mort, but it's from the Romans, it's like mortar, cement mix, everything holding the fat spots together in the mortadella is like cement. It's beautiful stuff. It's not especially good for you, healthwise, with all the fat, but once in a while . . . .
"That's what Platina said, eat anything, but eat in moderation. Platina said to observe the Greeks, because the Greeks tell you, everything in moderation. If it's in moderation, it can't really hurt you."
Vintage Iorio. His mind pings through philosophy, history, the arts and eventually back to the subject at hand. Ask about his affection for small sports cars and he charges into an analogy of the Spanish Armada (the Chryslers and the Cadillacs) defeated in the invasion of England in 1588 by the smaller, more maneuverable British ships (not unlike his old Miata and Triumph TR4).
Raconteur, renaissance man, the working man's intellectual. He is a storyteller void of pretense, gleefully following his synapses wherever they take him. Keeping up is half the fun.
Platina's real name, it turns out, was Bartolomeo Sacchi, the first librarian of the new Vatican Library, circa 1475. He wrote De honesta voluptate, which discusses the nature and cultivation of foods and spices, and the medicinal uses of food of the classicists and ancient poets.
Ask John Iorio about mortadella, of course Platina's gonna come up.
* * *
He would blanche at any Platina comparison, but Iorio did put together a little cookbook of his own, so the children - Jay, Paul and Pam - could carry on the family's Italian traditions.
The recipes include asides from the author, who can't help himself. To wit:
Aglio Olio calls for six or more cloves of chopped garlic. "More if you have a cholesterol problem - less if you have a dating problem. If you have both problems, toss a coin."
Bolognese Sauce. "Simmer for about an hour or even two. It was Kierkegaard who said that man is a being in waiting. This is his kind of sauce."
Shrimp, Clams and Squid Sauce. "Cook for a few minutes. Taste and adjust. That's it. If it's so-so, it'll knock one eyelash off. If it's good, it will knock off two."
Pizza Pieno. "Roll out one pound of dough until it resembles a bedsheet for two large cats." Got that?
Caponata. "This is a great dish because I like it."
Gnocchi. "Gnocchi is great because it promises more than it delivers. And that's the point - you keep eating it because you always expect more from the next bite."
Polenta. "Polenta requires some imagination because when you lump it into a dish it's just a mass without much personality. If it had a consciousness it would have an identity crisis. But when I think about it, that's true about rice and pasta and a lot of people we know."
Sadly, his recipe book (cleverly titled, The Cookbook) had a limited edition printing of four copies. It is out of print, unavailable for purchase, at bookstores or online.
* * *
After his real world education in Germany, Iorio came home for his junior and senior years at Trenton Central High School. In a single year he completed both and found the love of his life, Dorothy Lockett.
"I was attracted to his vitality, his incredible energy," says she. "I was completely fascinated by that."
"She was a woman," says he, eyebrows arched. It's as sentimental as he'll get in public.
"Dorothy, she's her own person," says good friend Katherine Wyly. "She's the perfect complement to him. When he's in danger of going overboard, she grabs him by the collar and pulls him back."
Thanks to the G.I. bill, Iorio, one of eight children in a poor, immigrant family, enrolled at Columbia, where he studied under a who's who of luminaries.
Lionel Trilling. "I took the Romantics from him. There were 11 students, we'd sit around a table and he'd come in with his hat and cigarette. He'd question you, using the Socratic method, the real Socratic method, where you ridicule the student, make him appear foolish. He made me sweat."
Mark Van Doren. "He taught the Narrative Art. He said, "I don't believe in God, so if that offends any of you, you can leave now. I propose to teach the Gospels as literature, not religion.' He was so humble, so sensitive."
Jacques Barzun. "He taught Thought and Culture in the 19th Century. We were expected to come and ask questions. He would retort and you would debate. There were 30 books required reading."
Joseph Wood Krutch. "20th Century Drama. He was a great lecturer, the only professor I ever had where he was so good that the class stood up and applauded in the middle of the lecture."
Iorio's master's is in modern British literature, with additional graduate work in American Studies. He aspired to write fiction but went into teaching for the paycheck and for summers free to write.
He taught at Dickinson College, Vassar College and for eight years (translation, eight winters) at Colby College in Maine. He started at USF in 1963, taught (by his rough estimate) 9,000 students and retired in 1991. A decade before he retired, he counted 52 different courses he had taught at USF, from freshman English to graduate criticism, from Italian directors to a lit class he called Love, Sex and Violence.
"John Iorio is the only person I know in academe who had no enemies," says historian and professor Gary Mormino. "It's a profession driven by ego and jealousies, but John Iorio was beloved by everyone. I don't believe I've ever met anyone who's had a bad word about John."
Flora Zbar, who taught Literature and the Occult with Iorio, says there's bound to be a student out there, somewhere, maybe even two, who didn't get turned on by his teaching. "You'd sit in one of his lectures, he didn't use a note, an hour and 15 minutes later you'd wonder where the time had gone. You were never bored."
He embraced retirement, more time to write fiction.
"Fiction writing is the only field of human endeavor that gets into the inner state, the mind of a person. Even the soul of a person, if the fiction is good enough. It's a form of the truth. All other activities work on the surface of things.
"You know more about Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) than any character you know in real life. You're in his mind. All of us would like to know what's in another person's mind. Only the fiction writer can do that."
His short stories have been published in the Southern Review, Texas Quarterly and Southwest Review; three times he made honorable mention in Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories. In his computer he's got more than 50 short stories going, plus two novels.
Why write?
"Writing gives me the most pleasure. No, pleasure isn't the right word. Writing gives me the greatest sense of significance. You do it because you have a psychological need to do it. Who knows what it means? Maybe I have a need for a sense of self-importance? I don't know. You don't go into analysis over it.
"Andre Gide said, "I write not because I want to, but because I have to.' I need to do this. It's significant that I write. It gives a pattern to my world."
Paradise Acres, the aforementioned story inspired by Dante's Circle of Indifference, takes the reader into the mind of a professor who doesn't speak up for a colleague. In the car that freezing night, his wife admonishes him. He tells her, "My policy is to keep my mouth shut and stay out of trouble."
They get lost in their new subdivision, where every house looks the same, driving round and round until they run out of gas. No house has its lights on; there is nobody to take them in.
Iorio named the man Joe, for the average Joe, everyman, and named his wife Mary, because Iorio's sister Mary lived in Levittown, the mother of 20th century tract housing. He gave them a baby to intensify the danger of driving around, lost, in the cold.
A professor who studied the story opined that Iorio had fashioned a latter-day holy family, with Joseph, Mary and the Christ child. Iorio said he intended only a criticism of modern culture, but heck, he says, who knows what his subconscious was up to.
In The Siege of New York City, published more than 20 years ago, Iorio's protagonist bombards the city with 81mm mortar shells, the sound of their launch covered by the noise of a passing train, their approach silent until the thunder of impact. Weeks pass, the bomber raining terror, eluding capture. Capt. Lorenzo Mangiatesta heads the new Search Unit of Detection Systems, SUDS for short. (Mangiatesta: head eater.)
The culture adapts. The state bases its lottery on predicting the number of rounds and time of day the terrorist will strike. "Mortar barrel style" is the rage in women's fashion.
New York University offers a course, the Mortar in Literature, the professor lecturing on TV: "To besiege or not to besiege, that is the question. . . . Today we will answer such questions as why does the besieger besiege? Why is the city besieged? Who besieges? Who is besieged? Can sieges have meaning? Heidegger tells us . . . ."
Iorio's bomber has no agenda. He loves the aesthetics of his violence; he's an artist of terror. And no artist can abide another stealing his technique, which leads to the indignity of the final paragraph, when the bomber passes a newspaper box:
". . . I glance at the late afternoon headlines and discover that two shells have landed in downtown Chicago, two in Los Angeles and one in Philadelphia. Sonsabitches! I'm being done in by a handful of nuts. Once again, anonymity. Bastards! Someone is always cashing in on someone else's success."
* * *
Does Iorio consider himself a success?
"No. No. No. Absolutely no. In terms of what I set out to do, I'm not a success."
Please, who is he kidding? He found love, raised three high-achieving children, was awarded a Purple Heart fighting for his country, published his fiction and inspired who-knows-how-many students.
"In those terms, yes, you're successful. But as Joseph Conrad said, every man sets up an ideal vision of himself, against which he measures himself. He doesn't measure himself against others, he measures himself against the vision he has of himself."
Iorio cannot rate himself a success because he has not become the "great novelist" he envisioned. Remember, though, this is a man who cherishes life, he does not abide gloom. He cannot leave his response a downer.
"The question - are you a success? - it's not applicable. I haven't failed, I haven't succeeded. I'm still working. I'm not a success in terms of what I've accomplished. But in terms of process, that I'm still involved, that I'm "engaged in a making,' as the Greeks would say, that's successful. The work isn't done yet."
He smiles.
What does he want people to know about him?
"That I'm here. And I'm just beginning."
- Staff writer Richard Bockman can be reached at 813 226-3436 or bockman@sptimes.com
