Pascal D’Angelo wants
to break your heart.
He’s largely
forgotten today as a poet, or even as a writer of an immigrant narrative. His
memoir, Son of Italy, first published
in 1924, was not reprinted until 1975, and can be found most readily today in
its 2003 Guernica Editions version, which unfortunately has one of the dopiest
cover illustrations ever to come down the pike. But among the small circle of
writers interested in a certain finely tuned type of Italian-Americana, one
that deals in secret histories (myself guilty), D’Angelo inspires a kind of mania.
He is our brother, our grandfather, our father, our son. He’s operatic,
foolhardy, hardheaded, clumsy, passionate. He’s “big and elemental and simple,”
in the gently racist words of a Brooklyn
Daily Eagle writer from 1923. He is maybe our best self, the writer who
never—do people say this anymore?—sold out. He wrote and he wrote and he
starved and he suffered and, against the most miserable odds, he never gave in.
And then he abruptly departed the planet, dying at Kings County Hospital at the
age of 38.
The poet at the time of Son of Italy’s publication.
***
It’s quite a life,
the story of this man called the “pick and shovel poet,” and D’Angelo tells it
in Son of Italy in idiosyncratic self-taught
English and with plenty of heart. He was born Pasquale D’Angelo into a peasant
family in a hamlet near Introdacqua, a town in the Abruzzi, provincia L’Aquila, in 1894. The family
was poor. Everyone slept in one bed—this reads like a comedy routine in the
memoir—and the family’s goats and sheep were stabled downstairs at night, in
the rooms that served as living room, kitchen and dining room for the humans during
the day. Young Pasquale always worked, pasturing the goats and sheep on Monte
Majella and helping his parents cultivate fields they did not own, where they
“received a small pittance for wages” (25). At one point, as a
fifteen-year-old, he’s helping “a neighbor at harvest for two cents a day” (44).
Pasquale went to school intermittently from the age of seven until twelve—and
that was the extent of his formal education.
D’Angelo’s birth home in
Abruzzo, from TerzaClasse.it.
Trying to better
the family’s conditions, the father borrows money to rent “two large pieces of
arable ground on which he [toils] almost every minute of daylight” (49), only
to suffer a disastrous season. He finds himself worse off after paying back the
loan at exorbitant interest, and decides to go to America to join a work gang
and seek his fortune. Pasquale, sixteen years old and already “a broad, husky
lad” (59), decides to go with him.
They sail from
Naples—this is the first time Pasquale has seen the sea—and come in through Ellis
Island on April 20, 1910. Pasquale, his father, and the small group of men from
their village are met at the Battery by their foreman, a paesano, who whisks them off to their first job. D’Angelo’s memoir
captures the crazy newness of the experience, the confusion, the sensory
overload of the big city. He’s also funny. He thinks a father and son chewing
gum must be “afflicted with some nervous disease.” He sees “Ave.” written on
the street signs and thinks, “How religious a place this must be that expresses
its devotion at every crossing” (60).
They are taken
to, of all places, a forest—in either New Jersey or on Long Island, depending
on whom you read, and the muddle over this mirrors Pasquale’s confusion at the
unfamiliarity of his situation. He has no context for any of this, not even for
the tallness of American trees. That first night the crew beds down on planks in
a shack and, the next morning, D’Angelo writes, “We set to digging and handling
our picks and shovels. And I have been handling them ever since” (65). The crew
would be digging its way through a hillock, flattening the land for a paved road.
For this they are each paid two dollars a day; after deducting payments for
money advanced them for passage to America, D’Angelo would be taking home less
than 79 cents for a day’s labor (Jim Murphy, Pick & Shovel Poet: The Journeys of Pascal D’Angelo, 67).
In his memoir,
D’Angelo delights in stories about his early bewilderment over English. He comes
here not speaking the language at all, but in the first few months picks up
words like “bread,” “gloves,” and “milk.” He’s sent to buy a dozen eggs, and
the Polish shopkeepers offer him many things, including a dozen axes, until
young Pasquale begins to “cackle like a hen” (69). He mutates the words “fall
down” into “You damn!” and accidentally curses out people asking about a black
eye (70).
Then, after the
specificity of these stories, the narrative collapses: and four years, “a
monotonous repetition of laborious days” (70) is compressed into a handful of
paragraphs. The work crew toils up and down the East Coast, from New York to
New Jersey to Virginia to Maryland and back to New York again, all of the work thankless,
miserably paid, and anonymous: “Who hears the thuds of the pick and the
jingling of the shovel?” (72). D’Angelo interrupts this section with an
extended description of his first real acquaintance with New York City—a night
out on the town in 1914—when he’s at once dazzled by the city and amazed by the
jadedness of New Yorkers (and it’s not clear if he’s joking or not when he
mistakes a prostitute for “a lady of the aristocracy,” 78).
A Lewis Hine photo of
Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, 1912, from Shorpy.
D’Angelo and crew rented “a few dirty beds” from “an old Abruzzese woman” a blocks
west, on Franklin Street, around the same time.
From there it’s
more toil—in upstate New York, Connecticut, and on up to Massachusetts and
Vermont—until the work dries up. The crew of paesani decides to go back to New York City, to “the slums where
people of ill repute are not difficult to find,” and lay low until they can get
another job (81). The trouble is, no one has work for eight men, and the crew
doesn’t want to be broken up. Meanwhile, the money they’ve saved is running
out, and “it hurts the conscious of honest people when they have to live on
borrowed money” (90). At last, an opportunity is found: if they can each pay
the five-dollar fare, there’s a big job waiting for them in West Virginia, “the
land of summer and flowers” (98).
The reality they
find is very different. The train lets them off at a freezing-cold platform;
they must walk miles in the slush to get to their camp; their baggage with warm
clothes and cooking gear gets mistakenly sent to Pennsylvania. At the job site,
they’re grunted at and sent to a tarpaper shack with a weak and stinky coal
stove to bed down for the night. The next morning, hopping around in their damp
clothes to warm up, they’re greeted coldly by the foreman and Mike the
commissary man, who eye them as if they’re “pigs in our sty” (103). From here D’Angelo
goes into an explanation of the exploitative commissary system—how workers are
forced to spend most of whatever money they make at the commissary, buying
things at prices that “would make a New York profiteer green with envy” (104).
They’re effectively enslaved, owing their souls to the company store.
The job is hellish,
if confusingly described—they’re building a railroad, clearing rock after controlled
blasts. They must work quickly among huge machinery, steam shovels and steam
drills, and beneath immense derricks. Weeks pass, and they’re miserable and
ill-used; there’s talk of leaving, but they stay on.
And things go di male in peggio. A cable that holds
one of the massive derricks snaps, the derrick collapses, and two of Pasquale’s
work crew are crushed. One, the giant of the group named Andrea, is still
alive. The crew tries to raise the derrick, “but we were too excited; and as we
raised a ponderous weight, in spite of our taut muscles, it slid down the
embankment. With a horrible grinding sound of flesh and bones it crushed the
last life out Andrea” (106).
The crew does
break up now—they have “lost all heart.” Back in New York City, Pasquale’s
dispirited father wants to return to Italy. But Pasquale, now twenty years old,
wants to stay:
Something had grown in me during my stay
in America. Something was keeping me in this wonderful perilous land where I
had suffered so much and where I had so much more to suffer. Should I quit this
great America without a chance to really know it? Again I shook my head. There
was a lingering suspicion that somewhere in this vast country an opening
existed, that somewhere I would strike the light. I could not remain in
darkness perpetually. (106-7)
Pasquale gets a
job in the Erie Railroad yard in New Jersey, near the Fort Lee ferry. The pay’s
not great—$1.13 a day—and the work is dangerous. Men are crushed to death under
freight cars and in coal dumps or they suffocate in the steam house. “It was a
war in which we poor laborers—Poles and Italians—were perpetually engaged”
(108). Pasquale and the other men live in an unheated boxcar in the center of
the rail yards.
In time,
Pasquale is lured north by the promise of $2.25 a day working on state roads in
northern New Jersey, and sets off alone, spending the last of his money on the
fare. He joins a concrete gang—backbreaking work, with bad conditions
exacerbated by a tyrant of a foreman named Domenick, who speaks in a “weird
Calabrese dialect” and has it in for Pasquale (112). Domenick criticizes him incessantly
and, one wet day, browbeats him into taking an overloaded wheelbarrow of cement
down a slippery plank. The inevitable happens—Pasquale slips, the wheelbarrow
plunges into the foundation and, trying to save himself from falling, Pasquale jams
his hand through a rusty nail. The foreman runs at him shrieking, “Get out, you
fool!” (114). There’s nowhere to get his injury treated, so Pasquale walks in
the rain to buy a bottle of peroxide to “medicate” his hand … and then there’s
nothing for it but to lie around, in the cold bunkhouse, “like a hurt dog who
slinks off to some dark corner where it can lick its wounds in silence” (115).
The next day, his ballooning hand tied up in a handkerchief, he goes back to
work, expecting to be given a less demanding job. But Domenick, unmoved, shouts
at him to pick up his shovel. Pasquale drags himself back to the camp. That
night the other workers eventually stream back home to cook their dinners.
Pasquale can only watch. But instead of an extended lamentation for himself, surprisingly,
this is what he writes:
The night was beautiful. The stars were
like exquisite, happy, living spirits giving their bright laughter to the
silent night. A few [of the workers] were beginning to munch their food. The
rest were moving about or waiting. In spite of the soft weather they all seemed
to be in ill humor … it seemed that the balmy summer night had awakened deep in
their hearts the vision of another land, lovely and balmy and calm. A land that
doesn’t know any such things as foremen, in small towns where one is never
among strangers and people help one another. (119)
And, indeed, one
of them helps Pasquale by sending him off to seek work on a different crew.
Pasquale sets out and, of all things, runs into a drunken, vulnerable Domenick.
Terrible fury flashes up in Pasquale. He hurries toward the man; he pauses. And
then he feels a hand on his shoulder: It’s “old Michele,” an Abruzzese who works
with another crew. “‘And where are you going, boy?” Michele asks him. Pasquale
explains about his hand, the injury, the unfairness, his rage. Michele says to
him:
“Boy … a stupid world drove nails through
other hands—other hands.”
(121)
And perhaps here
old Michele has saved Pasquale from committing murder.
Weeks later, Pasquale
is back in New Jersey, living once again in his old boxcar. But something has
changed. He’s become weirdly light-hearted, laughing at foremen when their
backs are turned. It’s as if the worst has happened, and he has nothing left to
lose.
A group of
Mexican workers comes to the yard and he becomes friendly with one man in
particular, “a wiry young man, who had been with Villa and had been taken
prisoner by the Americans.” The man (alas, never given a name in D’Angelo’s
narrative) subscribes to a weekly Spanish newspaper, and Pasquale is amused to
see how much time the man spends reading it—Pasquale had “gotten to think of a
newspaper as something to start a fire with”—but then he also becomes
interested, looking at the paper to pick out words that look like the Italian. Soon
enough he’s buying English-language newspapers. He puzzles over them for hours,
struggling to read them, and when he learns a new word he writes it “in big
letters on the mouldy walls of the boxcar. And soon I had my first lesson in
English all around me” (129).
A friend takes
him to see an “Italian vaudeville show” on the Bowery—and Pasquale decides he
can write a better one. Somehow, he begins writing
in English. He reads his first attempt aloud, gets some laughs (whether
they’re with him or at him, he can’t tell) and then he’s off and running. He
becomes known for his joke-writing in the train yard. “Several good-natured
lads” even bring him writing paper. He buys himself an old dictionary for a
quarter … it’s “half-torn. But I thought I had gotten a treasure for the price.
And I proceeded to memorize it” (132). He becomes “that queer Italian laborer”
who knows so many big words in English that he’s challenged by a group of young
American brakeman who want to put him in his place—but he defines all the words
they throw at him, and even stumps them in turn with “caballine,” “anorexia,”
“phlebotomy.” After so much wretchedness, it’s a delight to read this passage,
with its strutting, boyish glee:
The defeat of these educated youths was,
is and will be an eternal one, because there is no other pick and shovel man
that can face them.
(135)
It’s when he makes
his way to Brooklyn to see Aïda, which
is “to be represented in the open air” at the Sheepshead Bay racetrack, that
his life changes:
… all at once I felt myself to be driven
toward a goal. For there was revealed to me beauty, which I had been
instinctively following, in spite of my grotesque jokes and farces … There were
parts of such overwhelming loveliness that they tore my soul apart. At times,
afterwards, when on the job amid the confusion of running engines, car screams,
and all kinds of bad noises, I heard those supreme melodies around me. (137-8)
He has found his
lodestar: beauty.
What D’Angelo saw at
Sheepshead Bay, from the NYT, July 27, 1919. Turns out it was a benefit to help victims of an earthquake in Florence. This
past year, 2016, central Italy saw two devastating earthquakes. My paternal
grandmother’s hometown in Le Marche, just north of Abruzzo, was one of the
worst hit: “Arquata del Tronto non esiste più”: “Arquata del Tronto does not exist anymore.”
D’Angelo makes
some stumbling attempts to learn music, and then he begins writing poems. He
writes and writes. He goes to the public library near Edgewater, and is “kindly
received in spite of [his] broken English and the ragged appearance of [his]
working clothes” (and God love that nameless librarian). In the library he
discovers Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. In
it he finds the same beauty that he has found in Aïda, but while “music was impossible” for him, he could “proceed
to emulate [Shelley] almost immediately” (144). And then, one November morning
in 1919, he decides to quit the laborer’s life entirely and devote himself to
writing poetry. “I reflected: what was one little starvation more or less in a
man’s life, especially in that of a self-appointed poet?” (147).
Inspiration.
Image from Wikipedia.
Image from Wikipedia.
Pasquale moves
to New York City to write, probably becoming Pascal along the way, and eventually
finds cheap quarters for himself in “the slums along the Brooklyn waterfront”
(148)—and good luck with that today.
He lives cheaply; he writes and writes; he sends his poems everywhere but finds
no takers; he loses heart and finds a job in the dockyard. “But the Enchantress
would not let me free” (152). He finds the cheapest, most miserable housing
available, an unheated hovel that used to be a chicken coop with an entrance
“through a toilet which served ten families besides unwelcome strangers and
dirty passers-by” (154). He lives on stale bread, rotten bananas, thin soup. He
perseveres.
These are some
of the most thrilling passages in this brief and ardent book, how he keeps
going through his despair, through his disappointment, through his hunger and
wretched physical discomfort, through what must have been all sorts of mockery
and derision, to achieve his heart’s desire. And he does it. He does it. He
writes an impassioned, impossible, ridiculous, beautiful letter to The Nation’s Carl Van Doren—the journal
is holding a poetry competition and Pascal believes he should win it, if only
on heart alone—and Van Doren hears him. As Van Doren would go on to write in
the introduction to Son of Italy:
If this was not an authentic cry, I had
never heard one. It drowned out the loud noises of Vesey Street; it seemed to
me to widen the walls of my cramped office.
Van Doren meets D’Angelo
and is taken with him: “He came with the mark of his hardships upon him … yet I
found him full of that quiet patience which is the underlying quality of the
peasants of his race, and capable of gaiety.” He writes a profile of D’Angelo
in The Nation, and D’Angelo becomes
something of a sensation. The work of the young poet is picked up by leading
journals—The Literary Review, The
Bookman, The Century—and he’s published alongside the likes of H.D. and
Carl Sandburg in The Bookman Anthology of
Verse in 1922. Van Doren urges him to collect his story in a narrative—and
the book Son of Italy is born. As D’Angelo
writes in the final pages of the memoir, “The literary world began to take me
up as a great curiosity and I was literally feasted, welcomed and stared at.” He
receives letters “from Boston to ’Frisco”; he is celebrated by his fellow
workers; and, perhaps most meaningful of all, his fame spreads across the sea
to his homeland:
And sweeter yet was the happiness of my
parents who realized that after all I had not really gone astray, but had
sought and attained a goal far from the deep-worn groove of peasant drudgery.
And
there ends his narrative—on a high note, and one that not only reflects the
reality of D’Angelo’s experiences, but that’s also, perhaps, driven by the
swell that accompanies the moment when one finally
finishes a book: the angels do sing. Sometimes falsely, but that’s what
revisions are for.
The
first edition, which would remain the only one for 50 or so years. You can order up a lovely, decaying copy of it at the NYPL and read it in the Main
Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street—perhaps at the very table where
D’Angelo had his few last pennies stolen from his coat pocket during the cold
winter of 1921, forcing him to walk all the way home to Brooklyn: “My clothes
became bright and studded with the frozen rain.”
***
From
one of the wholeheartedly positive reviews of Son of Italy, written by Elizabeth Stead Taber, which ran in the Literary Digest International Book Review.
Was
the book well received? I’m not sure I have the answer to this. It was reviewed
in the New York Times, and nearly
anyone who writes about D’Angelo cites some version of the beginning of this
piece, where the unnamed reviewer tells us that D’Angelo is:
… one of the few
Americanized immigrants whose success has been non-worldly yet decisive. Edward
Bok, Jacob Riis, to mention but two of our best-known national conversions,
stand for the practical, solid achievement that constitutes mundane success.
Pascal d’Angelo is one of that class of men, rare in America, whose success is
so spiritual as to be almost entirely devoid of material embellishments.
But read this
more closely—and keep reading—and one finds a review that’s actually quite sour
and condescending. It’s filled with jocular contempt for the big, striving
yokel, and peppered with “funny” phrasings (“the paraphernalia of Italian
peasant life” is described “with a candor that is disarming, even if a bit
affected”) that dismiss D’Angelo’s struggle. “One gladly passes over his
account of the privations on which he prides himself”—words that could only
have been written by someone who’s always had a full belly. Perhaps
snottiest of all, in response to D’Angelo’s moment of insight that comes toward
the end of Son of Italy—“without
realizing it, I had learned the great lesson of America: I had learned to have
faith in the future”—the reviewer writes: “This apparently was not enough, and
so he learned the second lesson of America: ‘It Pays to Advertise.’” And the reviewer wonders aloud:
… what percentage of [D’Angelo’s]
subsequent success is due to the mental laziness that makes people judge a
work of art by its source rather than on its merits, plus the inverted snobbery
which leads one to admire the “dancing dogs” of Dr. Johnson’s well-worn simile.
Remember the origin of that simile? Dr. Johnson was talking
about the spectacle of a woman preaching: “Sir,
a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done
well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” What is this attitude besides
the power group’s unwillingness to share the power? God forbid an Italian
peasant attempt to write poetry in 1920s America.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle loving on D’Angelo, March 25, 1923. You can
go here for a heartfelt appreciation of D’Angelo’s poetry, written just last year (in
Italian).
Dig
around in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
from that era (click here for a terrific, free resource from the Brooklyn
Public Library ) and you’ll find plenty of similar
amazement—in this case, however, it’s tempered by appreciation for D’Angelo the
human in a way that only a populist daily paper would have it. Lost in all of
this seems to be any kind of real discussion of the quality of the work. Am I
having it both ways when I say that, as far as the poetry, does it even matter?
It strikes me as serviceable, Romantic-inflected stuff, deeply rooted in the
land, with moments of beauty, moments of terror, plenty of near-misses, and
very often a frustrated striving toward grandeur. It’s young writing that needs
nurturing to keep growing.
But Abruzzesi
are notoriously hardheaded. We really don’t want to hear it at all! In Van
Doren’s introduction (which, frustratingly, isn’t included in the Guernica
reprint) the reader learns that D’Angelo at the height of his fame was offered
all sorts of assistance—everything from money to editorial jobs—but, “after
paying so high a price to be a poet, he was not willing to take his reward in
some meaner coin.” So what happened next? Son
of Italy came out in 1924 and D’Angelo died in 1932, and every source I
found said that he died destitute, with no money even to pay for his funeral. What
went down during those eight years? What did he write? How did he live? I wanted answers to all of these
questions, and I couldn’t help but fixate on something else. In all the
mentions of his death, I found none of where he was buried. Find-A-Grave, a
pretty encyclopedic resource, didn’t list him at all; and far as I could see
not even those notorious baptism-of-the-dead Mormon folks seem to have claimed
him online. Where were his bones?
Jim Murphy’s
young adult book, Pick & Shovel Poet:
The Journeys of Pascal D’Angelo, offers some interesting ideas about his
last years. He conjectures, for example, that perhaps it was D’Angelo’s
embarrassment over his lack of education and thick accent, rather than pride,
that kept him from taking a job as an editor. But I was looking for something
more concrete.
The answer was
actually very close at hand, in a book published just this past year. Tyler
Anbinder’s City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York has a terrific, engaged section about D’Angelo. He follows
the poet’s trail, filling in the blank stretch from Son of Italy’s publication to D’Angelo’s death eight years later.
Anbinder
writes that a few months after D’Angelo’s memoir was published, he dropped off
the map, disappearing from the New York literary scene entirely. Maybe he was
suffering from writer’s block? What’s clear is that, after a reprieve from his
wretched living conditions, he’d gone back living near the Brooklyn waterfront,
in what the Herald Tribune would
describe as an “incredibly bare and cold shanty.” Drawing from accounts
published in papers at the time of D’Angelo’s death—and I’m indebted to Anbinder’s
book for leading me to these sources—Anbinder writes:
He stopped answering
letters from his relatives… They wondered if “the strain and deprivations of
his struggling years had affected his mind.” Indeed, his landlady reported that
“he sometimes acted strangely.” Among other oddities, he decided that despite
his desperate circumstances, he had to teach himself Chinese. The onset of the
Great Depression must have made things even more difficult … By [1932] D’Angelo
had pawned his typewriter and could not even afford paper. He continued to
write, however, scrawling his poems in the margins of old newspapers, on the
backs of calendars, and eventually on the walls of his apartment. (City of Dreams, 388-9)
By the time D’Angelo began suffering from terrible stomachaches,
likely he had waited too long. “From his neighbors it was not possible to learn
much … except that he had been out of a job for some time,” a reporter writes
in a contemporary account in the Brooklyn
Daily Eagle. Those neighbors had to call for the ambulance that took Pascal
D’Angelo to Kings County Hospital, where he died on March 13, 1932, after an appendectomy.
No doubt his health was compromised from so many years of subsisting on trash.
D’Angelo’s
last address, the “incredibly bare and cold shanty,” from Google Maps. Zillow it and
you’ll see that its sale price is zestimated, God help us, at $1.74 million
today.
Trolling
through those newspapers of 1932, you read on as all the lamentations pour in. This
is by turns moving and strange and corny and infuriating, with plenty of
handwringing, plenty of sensationalism. Who will bury him? A brother, John, is
found in Paterson—who knew he
existed—but he’s a jobless laborer, in equally dire straits. A cousin, Arthur, turns
up in Philadelphia, and he says he’s “an automobile salesman and that’s just
like being out of a job at present,” in a cheeky-sounding assessment quoted in
the New York Herald. Arthur calls
MacMillan to see if any royalties are due from Son of Italy, and finds out that the poet’s estate is entitled to
$4.60. The paper also checks in on Van Doren, who remembers D’Angelo as a
“peasant boy who spoke English badly.” He recalls that he was “‘inert in
conversation’ but then so are lots of poets.” He describes D’Angelo as “the
only extremely unlettered immigrant I knew who wrote pretty good poetry without
rising above the level of a day laborer.” Van Doren seems to want to keep an
even tone, not dive into the sensationalism, but the effect is dismissive, as
if he regretted his earlier enthusiasm.
The
Herald reports that strewn around the
“two mean rooms,” besides an uncashed money order for fourteen dollars, are
manuscripts that, if stacked, would reach two feet high. Many contain “formless
snatches of unfinished poems.” Ten days later, a Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter and the poet’s brother are digging
through the garbage, attempting to retrieve these very papers. Among the things
they find is Pascal’s beloved 25-cent dictionary.
Hometown
sensationalism from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
March 20, 1932.
However, if the
landlady wasn’t so much a fan, it turns out that—pace Humboldt’s Gift—there were fans of modern poetry
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, D’Angelo’s huge booster a
decade earlier, rallies on the dead poet’s behalf—and helps raise money to save
him from a burial in New York City’s potter’s field. The coverage is lavish, excessive,
self-congratulatory (and in one instance, no doubt rushing to meet a deadline,
the typesetter has mashed up an article about Pascal’s burial with a wholly
unrelated one about a St. Patrick’s party—just after we read that “the body of
a romanticist whose reward for his ideals was only humility will rest in
dignity in a Catholic cemetery,” we discover that Mrs. J. Frank Fanning has
received “a large cocoanut pie last night as a gift”). The paper makes good,
and through its intercession D’Angelo is given a proper burial, where many seem
to have come to pay their respects (among them apparently was Garibaldi
LaPolla, who would publish The Grand
Gennaro, a touchstone of Italian-American fiction, the next year). Some
months later, the grave of Pascal D’Angelo is given a headstone—donated, who
knows why, by a now-closed girls’ school in Cooperstown, New York.
These good women
paid for D’Angelo’s headstone.
And then, the man buried, his life celebrated and lamented, the
coverage peters out. The last mention in the Eagle I found is from May
30, 1934, in an article titled “Grave of Poet Spared Poverty Plot Decorated by
Idolators”—fire that headline writer—which
is a short item describing how members of the Pascal D’Angelo Society placed a wreath
on the poet’s grave. It must have been a slow news day. By now, it seems that Pascal
has learned English through a “ten-cent dictionary,” losing a full fifteen
cents and, I suppose, gaining that much more in pathos.
It’s
a funny thing, the monolithic entitled-white-guy tone of so many critics of D’Angelo’s
day. I know, it’s unfair to criticize from our vantage point, but the unchecked
condescension is breathtaking these 90 years on. John Farrar—yes, that Farrar—hits a typical snide tone in
the introduction to D’Angelo’s entry in The
Bookman Anthology: “Convinced he is a poet, excited and pleased by each new
bit of public acknowledgement, he will come to you displaying his trophies: a
picture in an Italian paper, an article in a Sunday magazine, a new poem in
‘The Century.’” I wonder on Van Doren’s dismissiveness after D’Angelo’s death, on
the tendency of so many around him to see him as a sort of freak. Maybe to all
of these tastemakers, D’Angelo was ultimately more interesting as a story, not
as a person. Maybe it’s actually best of all if he’s dead, so that he can be
ruefully lamented—and finally out of their hair.
And
maybe the poet was not as dumb as they all thought.
Was
he reading those reviews? As his English got better, was he getting hip to all
that snark? Did it burn his peasant ass? Did he tell himself that he’d quit the
public poetry scene, lock himself away, sharpen his pencils and write his heart
out in his Gowanus hovel? That he’d perfect his poetry until he was finally
ready to come out perfect—not only mastering English, but speaking Chinese,
just to show everyone else how stupid and lazy they were? Once again I’ll deal
in some pretty subjective tribalism here and say that Abruzzesi are nothing if
not tenacious. We’re stubborn, we’re great fixators. But we’re also great
dreamers. D’Angelo had to cling to his beliefs, crazy as they might have seemed
to others; they are what made him, and what kept him going. Book people
criticized him for “advertising” his poetry—but would he have gotten anywhere
at all if he hadn’t come knocking on their doors? He recognized the mobility possible
in America, the opportunity to take his chances and make himself a new self—a poet,
which would have been impossible in Italy, even if he did grow up a stone’s
throw from Ovid’s native Sulmona, even if there was an actual tradition of
Abruzzese shepherd poets. The U.S. destroyed D’Angelo, but it also made him a
poet.
While the
Guernica edition doesn’t have Van Doren’s introduction, it does have an
absorbing and too-brief essay by Kenneth Scambray, who argues for a deeper
reading of D’Angelo’s book. Scambray doesn’t find it the Horatio Alger success
story that so many others do. He finds it “a countertext to the melting pot
theory that dominated American society at the time” (169). Not only was D’Angelo’s
assimilation unsuccessful but, he argues, he has nothing to do with “canonical
Italy.” Scambray points out that Van
Doren doesn’t call D’Angelo an Italian at all but “a typical example ‘of the
peasants of his race’” (176). The triumph at the end of D’Angelo’s narrative is
negated by the wretched end of his real life.
And yet
we have this lovely book to read.
So,
double back for a moment here. Before I found City of Dreams and the many
answers it gave me, I was fixating on where D’Angelo was buried. He died in
Brooklyn—but was he buried there? Had they shipped his body home, to the land
he loved so much? Not likely; too expensive. I happened to be emailing about
something else with my exceptional uncle, Raymond Firmani, a WWII bomber pilot, now 95 years old and fit as a fiddle and sharp as a tack, and he’d mentioned something about his
long-passed uncle Emil. Seriously, Emil, that was his name? Ray told me, No, it
was Emidio, but he changed it to Emil. Unsaid was that it was classier to be
French than Italian in those days.
And then
I realized: Pasquale D’Angelo. In the death registers, he would be listed as
the peasant, not the poet.
And so I found
him, at last, in Queens:
The anonymous Pasquale
D’Angelo, buried in Saint John Cemetery.
It’s not two
hours out by train and bus and the briefest of walks to St. John Cemetery,
final resting place of Gerry Ferraro, Mario Cuomo, Robert Mapplethorpe, and
more mafiosi than you can jam into Umberto’s Clam House. We went out there, I
with my map in hand, looking for Section 25, Row Y, Grave 113. It was a
beautiful autumn day, lovely and balmy and calm. We walked the sections and
then the rows, counting down the letters, and then we walked the line of
well-kept headstones. And there he was.
I don't know—why
is it so important to me to find his old bones? Why does it hurt my heart to
think of Dawn Powell’s remains turning to dust in an unmarked grave on Hart
Island? They’re not suffering. They’re up there smoking cigarettes and drinking
gin and eating flapjacks and playing the harp. But we’re still here, I’m still
here. It will sound corny as hell but perhaps going and finding them is just a
way of saying: I have seen you. I have read you.
You inspire me,
and I give you my thanks.
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