VIVA TRESCA!

 

So I was at another PEN event in January with my great friend Ken who introduced me to his friend Richard who asked me, who remembers why, if I knew the writer Nunzio Pernicone.  How funny, I said, not personally but I had his book Italian Anarchism 1864 – 1892 and I’d been thinking of writing about it.  He said Pernicone had once posed a question to him:  What happened to all the Italian-American radicals?  And then Professor Pernicone answered his own question:  They married all those nice Catholic girls who (I’m paraphrasing here) whupped the radical right out of them.   

You find this theory expressed a bit more formally in Pernicone’s engrossing and well-researched biography of Carlo Tresca: 

Despite acquiring some new blood during the interwar period, the Italian-American resistance undoubtedly lost more adherents than it gained.  The primary reason was the failure of the sovversivi [“subversives”] to produce a second generation large enough to replace the departed…. The offspring of the sovversivi were generally more assimilated into American society than their parents, accepting American values and rejecting the ideas and principles of their elders.  Political and cultural discontinuity between parents and children was also a function of the disproportionate number of male to female radicals, a deficiency fatal to the movement because marital unions generally occurred between a radical father and a non-radical mother, who raised the children Catholic and conservative. (138)

Tresca – agitator, journalist, humanist, anti-Fascist – is a thrilling subject, and Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel is filled with great stories of his fearlessness, pluck, unique charisma, and commitment to fighting the good fight, which he did right up until the moment he was shot to death in the street on January 11^th, 1943.  

Before we get to the good stuff, however, it must be said that as a lover and a partner, Tresca was a rat.  He cheated quickly and robustly on his long-suffering wife Helga – four years into his marriage he was caught in flagrante delicto with a girl under sixteen at a hotel in Philadelphia – and he ran around on his long-term lover, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (IWW leader, later CP member, and famous inspiration for Joe Hill’s song Rebel Girl).  Tresca went so far as to cheat on Flynn with her own sister, and father a child with her; and for this son and the daughter he had with Helga he rarely paid any kind of child support.  Even when he was an old fat guy looking a lot like the Burl Ives Claymation character in the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials, Tresca somehow managed to keep cheating on his last lover, Margaret de Silver who, reportedly, found his alliances “amusing” (246). 

While I was reading the Tresca biography I happened to also be reading Jacques d’Amboise’s delicious autobiography I Was A Dancer (which as a piece of writing is a spotty taped-together thing but, really, who cares – because his heart is so joyful and his love of dance and life so great that you want to fly with him anywhere), and I was amazed by the fact that d’Amboise, deeply Catholic, was a virgin when he married and seems to have been a good father and faithful husband throughout the course of his fifty-plus-year marriage.  Something about the contrast between the subjects of these two books made me think: well, who can blame these nice Catholic girls for wanting to corral their husbands?  On a purely practical level (bear with me, friends, while I go out on a retrograde limb here), if it’ll keep the guy home, why not beat some Jesus into your partner?  After all, it’s the woman who gets stuck with the babies.

 Pity the woman who tries to whup some sense into this man.

Reading this biography took me back to when I was all over radical histories and biographies such as The Autobiography of Mother Jones, Alexander Berkman’s Life of an Anarchist, Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Labor’s Untold Story, We Shall Be All, The People’s History of the United States (both of which I confess I’ve never finished) and what’s probably my favorite, Emma Goldman’s wonderful Living My Life, which I later gave to a cousin of mine who greeted it with a resounding Duh! What is this stupid book?, which hurt my tender cousin-feelings deeply.  This cousin later apologized, and I understand she’s now at a Buddhist retreat in Vermont so who says people have to remain assholes all their lives?  Anyway, I realized in reading Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel that I got away from books like these because nostalgia for the glorious radical past was starting to suffocate me – and it only made the present feel even more flabby and ill-prioritized.  I mean, what does it say about how New York has changed to know that the headquarters of the IWW and the offices of Tresca’s paper Il Martello were once at 94 Fifth Avenue?  Half a block north, on the corner where Tresca was murdered, today there is a Bebe store.

Indeed, based on addresses in the book – even those of the many offices of Il Martello alone – one could do a self-guided radical walking tour of Manhattan, only to shake one’s head sadly over what was there and what’s there now. 

Bryant Hall, meeting place for the International Hotel Workers’ Union, during their 1912 – 1913 strike.  “On the afternoon of January 24, guards hired by the Hotel Men’s Association were pelting Bryant Hall with rocks from the elevated train station on Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street.  Hundreds of strikers poured out into the street ready to battle any adversary” (63).  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was clubbed by cops and Tresca arrested in the melee. Today, an ugly green-glass corporate tower housing the likes of MetLife and Verizon stands on the site. Photo from the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council’s website. 

As I said, this book is incredibly well-researched, though at times it almost gets bogged down in minutiae (though I do love minutiae – in a footnote one reads that Professor Pernicone’s own father, Salvatore, produced, directed, and acted in Tresca’s play, L’attentato a Mussolini, a “surprisingly good political satire”) (167).  The book led me to Max Eastman’s two-part profile of Tresca in the New Yorker from September 1934, which I read online, and I have to say it was a little disheartening to read something written in that sort of gently amused old-school New Yorker tone – which tends to survive only, thank goodness, in things like especially twee “Talk of the Town” pieces – applied to what I consider a serious subject.  Worse than this, Eastman delighted in reproducing Tresca’s “colorful” English in funny, funny little bits so that by the end I felt like I’d read a profile of Father Guido Sarducci.

 Not Carlo Tresca.

To get back to the book at hand – it’s when Pernicone turns his focus on larger currents in the Italian-American and radical communities during Tresca’s lifetime that the book really fascinated me.  For instance, I’d always wondered how many Italians in this country were pro-Mussolini back in the day, and this is the first book I’ve read that addresses the question.  The findings are dismal:  Pernicone quotes Gaetano Salvemini as estimating that, among the Italian-American community, 10% were anti-Fascist, 5% “out-and-out” Fascist, 35% philo-Fascist, and 50% apolitical.  He goes on to say that Salvemini was providing these estimates in 1940, “anticipating war between Italy and the United States; his inclination was to present Italian-Americans in as favorable a light as possible lest they suffer persecution as supporters of the enemy”:

           

In reality, among the “apolitical” mass of first generation immigrants and their children, respect, admiration, and even veneration of Mussolini (as opposed to Fascism per se) was exceptionally strong and widespread. (128)

Pernicone provides possible explanations for the embrace of Fascism by the immigrant community:  after years of discrimination and economic exploitation, they finally had a strongman who could prove their detractors wrong.  “Disappointment and resentment fostered among many elements – especially middle and lower-middle-class Italian Americans – a ‘nostalgic nationalism,’ which was easily transmuted into an aggressive proto-fascist form of nationalism” (127).  He then talks about the network of fasci, or Fascist squads, organized in the U.S, the first dating back to 1921, a year before Mussolini’s rise to power.  I was frankly amazed to read how widespread these fasci were, and how many prominenti (prominent Italian-Americans citizens) were in on the game.  My maternal grandfather, his brother, and their families left Italy in the late 1920s to escape the rising tide of Fascism – my grandfather, Marino Auriti, really was one of those men who was forced to drink castor oil in the streets by Blackshirt goon squads – so I think I had some fool notion that Italian-American support of Fascism was limited to a few random kooks or certain kinds of sentimental, uneducated people.  Such as the families of some girls I went to high school with, who had pictures of Il Duce up in their kitchens, this in the 1980s. 

It’s Tresca’s unwavering fight against Fascism that really makes him a hero, and these chapters in the biography are thrilling to read.  Tresca was the main man among anti-Fascists in the U.S. in the ’20s, putting Il Martello “at the disposal of many prominent radicals who lacked publication outlets” (136), helping raise money for victims of Fascism, harassing Fascist dignitaries and local fasci, and generally sticking his neck out for the cause: 

Directly or in collusion with American authorities, Mussolini’s official representatives and local disciples caused Tresca to suffer periodic harassment, several arrests, loss of his Italians citizenship, a four-month prison term, a narrow escape from deportation, destruction of his property, and a bomb attempt on his life.  But Tresca never relented. (135)

And he really was fearless:  maybe having been arrested and beaten up so many times – he was even slashed across the throat by a razor-wielding Mano Nera thug in Pittsburgh back in his early labor-organizer days – made Tresca immune to intimidation.  He stood up to every threat.  One example among many:  in 1926, Fascio Mario Sonzini, a group in the Bronx – which was “the borough where the Blackshirts had achieved their greatest gains…especially the Arthur Avenue section” (170) – sent goon squads to roam the neighborhood, “beating up known anti-Fascists whenever they encountered them singly or in groups of two or three” (171).  They issued a public challenge for anti-Fascists to set foot in the borough, and “Tresca and Vidali [CP member who later turned into a full-throttle Stalinist assassin] received a special warning promising death should they venture north of Manhattan.”  Tresca, Vidali, and a group of comrades got right up there, baiting the Fascists by “strolling past known fascist haunts, eating ice cream and singing ‘Bandiera Rossa.’” Later, as up to 2,500 anti-Fascists massed, Tresca and others spoke to the crowd and demonstrators marched past Fascio Mario Sonzini, singing songs and challenging the Fascists to come out:  “Wisely, not a single Blackshirt showed his face…” (171). 

I think of other books about the Fascist era – such as Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings, a book beloved by me – and the beautifully drawn image of Ginzburg’s father running laughing through the streets of Rome while bombs burst over his head (I gave my copy to my niece years ago, so I’m writing this from memory).  I think of the kind of beautiful glee that comes over you when you know you’re on the side of the just, even if it might cost you your life. 

Another fascinating topic given a lot of discussion in the book is the behavior of the Communist Party in America.  Easy to say from my perspective many years down the line, but I always wondered how these benighted folks, some so well-intentioned, kept their blinders on for as long as they did.  I well remember late 1991, when the Soviet Union was finally unraveling, sitting with my then-boyfriend in his parents’ boishy apartment as his grandma, born in 1907 and an old CP member from waaaay back, came shuffling through the door.  Well, she said, terrible things are happening in the Soviet Union.  We paused over our morning tartine-and-New York Times routine.  I don’t know what all the celebration is about, she said.  We said something vague, she looked at us, and then old Doris shuffled on out again, shaking her head at our shameful ignorance.

If only to be reminded of how many murderous Stalinist thugs were running around with ice-picks back in the day and how sheep-like the behavior of so many CP members were, chapters like “Taking on the Stalinists” are well worth reading.  Tresca was immediately suspicious of the Popular Front.  “As an anarchist, Tresca rejected electoral alliances of any kind, but he might not have opposed the Popular Front if it were a true ‘united front’ of anti-Fascists functioning as equals….but a united front dominated by a partnership between communist and socialist parties essentially serving the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union was unacceptable to him” (227).  The chapter talks about the “May Days of Barcelona,” when “elements of the communist Partido Obrero Unificat de Catalunya and Catalonian government police” murdered some 500 anarchist and Marxist dissidents, among them much-loved anarchist and Matteotti Battalion co-founder Camillo Berneri, who was brutally gunned down in the street. 

Camillo Berneri.

Back in New York, Juliet Stuart Poyntz (née Points, Barnard class of ’07; I’d just read the article “Undercovers” about her in the Fall 2010 edition of the usually quite boring alumnae magazine), a prominent member of the American CP, confided in Tresca her disillusionment with the Soviet Union after returning from a visit there in 1936, during which time she observed first-hand some of the show trials.  “Although they differed politically, Tresca and Poyntz had been personal friends for more than twenty years, and he became fearful for her safety” (232).  Shortly afterward, Poyntz vanished without a trace. 

Tresca pointed the finger at a member of the CP, telling his story to the New York Times and testifying before a grand jury.  The Communist press attacked him from all sides, calling his story “‘an anti-Soviet cock-and-bull story…and a tissue of lies’” (233).  Even Vito Marcantonio, who is supposed to have been a good guy, got into the act, saying Tresca was “‘completely discredited in the eyes of the population of New York’” (234).  The anarchist paper L’Adunata – which had a long-running beef with Tresca, perhaps on an I’m-a-cooler-anarchist-than-you-are level – jumped on the bandwagon, denouncing Tresca as a spy in the pocket of the bourgeois police.  Even Tresca publishing a letter from Emma Goldman supporting his stance did not shut these people up:  “‘It’s a rather disagreeable job to have to apply to a Capitalist court to expose the Stalinist gangsters, [Goldman wrote]. All in all I do not envy your job though I think you should go ahead and expose the disappearance of Miss Poyntz’” (236).  It is of course an article of faith among anarchists that you don’t run to the Man for help, and this seems to have hurt Tresca’s standing more than anything:    

But even Italian anarchists who rejected L’Adunata’s portrayal of Tresca as a “spy” were dismayed by his action in the Poyntz case, for by providing information to the government he had violated a sacred tenet of anarchism.  Many old comrades severed relations with him.  Thus, in the end, the Poyntz case, rather than enhance his reputation as an anti-Stalinist, accelerated the decline of his career. (236).

Because what’s one dead woman when you have a reputation at stake?  Juliet Stuart Poyntz’s disappearance has never been solved.  

Juliet Stuart Poyntz in her Barnard years.

Similarly, Tresca’s own murder has never been solved.  He had a lot of enemies, and all sorts of theories abound – was it a mob hit, a CP hit, a Fascist hit?  Pernicone seems to have studied every single angle, and unpacks each of them in the last chapters of the book.  He arrives at the conclusion that a high-echelon mobster named Frank Garofalo paid a mob thug named Carmen Galante for the hit as payback for a public snub Tresca gave him at an Italian-American fundraising banquet the year before.  There are many subtleties in the theory that I won’t go into, and one can do an internet search of something like “Carlo Tresca, murder” and come up all sorts of theories on all sorts of websites, many of them Mafia-lore sites written by people who go on even longer than I do.

Obviously a labor of love as well as scholarship, Carlo Tresa: Portrait of a Rebel is packed with information – so much so there’s a feeling of something like exhaustion in its final passages, when the book doesn’t end so much as stop.  I think I wanted some kind of summing-up, a bit more of the elegiac – but this is a small quibble.  Oddly, Tresca seems to have foreseen his own death. His two brothers both died of cancer the year before he was killed, and he went around saying goodbye to people in the weeks leading up to his murder.  Two days before he was shot to death, there was a banquet for Tresca, during which he made “what was to be his last public statement”:

“When I see young people who carry on the struggle against Fascism and totalitarianism, then I am glad.  For I know that my life work has not been lost; that the seeds I have sown are bearing fruit.” (271)

  Flowers for Tresca at Fifteenth and Fifth.

On a less somber note, god bless AK Press for publishing books like these, and please get them a proofreader.  Reading this book I was reminded of when, many moons ago, I did some pro bono proofreading for a reprint of a Dwight Macdonald essay that the similarly cash-strapped press Autonomedia was putting out.  I combed over it meticulously and, I have to say, in the published edition, I found no errors – except in the spelling of my own name on the thank you page.  “Thanks also to B.G. Fiarmani…”  No, honey – thank you!

And just to play six degrees of separation, Carlo Tresca’s lover Margaret de Silver was a close friend and benefactor of the late great writer Dawn Powell who was a friend of translator and writer Jacques LeClercq who was the father of peerless NYCB dancer Tanaquil LeClercq who, of course, was partnered by Jacques d’Amboise in many a ballet during the golden Balanchine years.  Here they are dancing Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun in this clip on YouTube.  They take my breath away.

On a final note, and more to the point, I was trying to sum up the particular qualities of Carlo Tresca that made him so beloved by those around him.  The Nation’s Lewis S. Gannett wrote that Tresca “was always lovable…that was the quality that surprised many people, meeting him for the first time, when they had heard only of his fighting quality…he loved people, and people of all kinds responded to his world-embracing smile…” (237).  On the surface, fierceness and kindness seem antithetical qualities to find in one person.  And then I realized, of course – Tresca, an Abruzzese, was truly forte e gentile.  

 

George Panetta's Viva Madison Avenue!

Wonderful jacket by Rudi Bass. 

One really wants this book to be the out-of-print gem to email the folks over at New York Review Books about.  OMG, one wants to write, please rush this unjustifiably ignored book back into print!  Sadly, someone else will have to get behind it. 

Can we please have a moratorium on designs for Italian-American-themed 

books that look like food-product packaging?

I first read George Panetta’s fiction in the Italian-American Reader where there’s a sketch called “Suit,” written in an easy colloquial style full of oddball charm.  When the Reader came out, back in 2003, Damian and I went to a reading for it at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square.  What I remember is Nick Tosches, who seemed very grumpy, intoning the word “monotheism” over and over until we were all bleeding from the ears.  And Gay Talese reading from Unto the Sons – elegantly dressed, boring as pudding.  It must be a generational thing.  Don DeLillo was in an Italian-American mood during that time and read from Underworld, with its sections that take place in Belmont, Bronx’s Little Italy, which is full of lovely, watcher-watching-himself-watching textures (“They were playing salugi in the street….Salugi, they cried, that strange word, maybe some corruption of the Italian saluto, maybe a mock salutation – hello, we’ve got your hat, now try and get it back.”) and pitch-perfect dialogue that sounds like many an old G I’ve stood next to at the pork store (“Maybe you heard, Albert.  The hunchback died, that used to carve things out of soap.”).  He brought the house down. 

Just a moment here to dwell on the excellentness of Don DeLillo.  This past October I went to the PEN Awards at the old B. Altman’s with my cugino Ken Gangemi.  Mr. D was given the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and, true to the embarrassed-by-attention Molisano he seems to really be, instead of fluffing out his feathers and doing a strut across the stage, in his acceptance speech he talked about what a wonderful writer Saul Bellow was.  After the event, the audience was supposed to wait until the awardees had left the auditorium, but some folks dawdled and I got swept away with the tide until there was a kind of bottleneck at the door, and who do you think was suddenly behind me?  The Don.  I mean, just there.  So I summoned up all my mental reserves, and turned, and said in the high-pitched voice of an ignoramus 14-year-old:  “Mr. DeLillo, I love your work, and thank you, and I’ve always wanted to shake your hand.”  The Don said, “Oh thank you,” and we shook hands.  It was like taking a bird’s wing.  And I couldn’t say another word, nothing like, Mr. D, how I loved listening to the recording of you from the 92nd Street Y reading the prologue from Mao II when I was working in the Trade Center, and how wonderful it was when you take that slight pause just before you say “The future belongs to crowds,” because you know it’s perfect and you just have to stop in the moment…and how I’d listen to that and my eyes would fill with tears…  Well, I figure it’s a good thing I didn’t say this, because the poor man probably would’ve done the duck-and-cover.  As it was, the Don was a vapor.  I shook his hand and in a moment he was gone – like the nun in the internet ether at the end of Underworld.  He was so unassuming, like a certified public accountant.  After that I totally understood how he can put on a pair of tinted aviator glasses and walk the streets of NYC unrecognized.

Sad to say, when I told people at work the next day what happened, no one except my friend and officemate Mike knew who Don DeLillo was…sigh.  This reminded me of something that happened years ago.  My best friend Kim was using the pay-by-phone option on her Con Ed or Brooklyn Union Gas bill, and was put in touch with an account manager called Mr. DeLillo. 

“As in Don DeLillo?” she said, joking. 

And the guy said: “Wow, how do you know my cousin?”

Like a hip-hop artist, he has never been photographed smiling. 

Mr. D, like George Panetta, did time at an advertising agency, and you find some crazily good stuff on that “culture,” albeit masquerading as that of a television network, early in his first novel, Americana (which also, briefly, has a minor character called B.G. in it – which is always nice).  A background in advertising and names that end in a vowel, however, are pretty much the only things the two writers have in common.

“Suit,” it turns out, is one of the sketches in Viva Madison Avenue!, which came out in 1957 and undeservingly – even given its flaws – seems to have sunk like a stone.  No second printing, no paperback.  The hard-sell flap copy is pure dopey ’50s:  Readers may never recover from this madcap plunge into comedy.  And Madison Avenue may never recover from the hilarious adventures of Joe and George – two of the most wildly likeable guys ever to engage in riotous battle with the gold-plated brass hats of Advertising Row.  Hey, dude, while I die of hilarity, why don’t you block that metaphor?!  Thankfully, Panetta’s prose is much, much better than this. 

Though sometimes billed as a novel, the book is really a series of self-contained sketches, inspired by Panetta’s time as an advertising copywriter.  The premise of each is simple and comic, much like that of a half-hour sit-com.  In “Washington,” George (what Panetta named his narrator, in a fit of proto-postmodernism) and his buddy Joe are dispatched to cover the 1948 presidential election at the Democratic headquarters in DC, which is expected to be a sleepy little outpost, because “Dewey was going to be president; everybody knew it.”  In “Love,” George and Joe play matchmakers for a young woman in their office to keep her from always kissing on them and embarrassing them.  In “Suit” – probably the most satisfying of the bunch – Joe buys a suit that seems tan or gray but turns out to be white, which is just awful because white suits, as George puts it, “belong on street cleaners.” What’s consistent throughout the book is George’s obsession with being one of the few Italians in the sea of, as he always calls them, “Anglo-Saxons,” in the advertising agency where he and Joe work.  The first sketch, “Washington,” begins:

Me and Joe worked in a big advertising agency, and after we worked there a couple of years, they found out we were worse than Italians:  we were Italians who were never going to move to Westchester or Connecticut no matter what happened, and from that time on it was us against the Anglo-Saxons.  

To George’s mind, the Anglo-Saxons think the Italians are thieves, liars, crybabies, no-accounts, skirt-chasers; and the comedy comes in when George and Joe prove themselves to be all of the above by cheating on expense accounts, lying about where they’ve been, making sad faces to manipulate their boss, drinking their lunches, ogling women, etc., all of which proof is given in George’s regular-guy Who, me? self-deceived narration.  The effect is funny in a mild sort of way – it’s another era’s comedy – and I was with the book until I got to the fifth sketch, “Hotel.” 

In that sketch George and Joe follow a girl on the street who seems to be giving them the eye, get her liquored up, and then trick her into going to a hotel to listen to Perry Como (!) records.  She’s drunk and falls down on the bed…and then Joe tries to rape her.  This isn’t working – her girdle is too tight, etc. – so he leaves in a huff, and George tries to have his way with her, albeit more gently.  But she goes into the bathroom and locks herself in; when she doesn’t come back out or respond to his knocking, George thinks she’s dead.  He panics – thinking of the scandal and his “poor wife” – and is on the verge of throwing himself out the window.  Eventually a hotel clerk gets the door open:  the girl has simply passed out.  Joe comes back, and together:

…we got her all dressed up, and kissed her like fathers and told her how sorry we were, then put her in a taxi and took her home, a furnished room on Fifty-sixth or Fifty-seventh.  That made us feel all the more sorry for her. 

This is supposed to be “funny” – except that it’s not.  It’s part of a terrible, knuckleheaded strain of sexism and stupidity peculiar to the 1950s such as I remember from films like Anatomy of a Murder and some others of the period.  (I like to think that it’s less the case today that a certain type of man thinks this way, but it may be that such a man now knows better than to open his big dumb mouth about it.)  At any rate, this shit ages badly. 

So Viva Madison Avenue! lost Constant Reader at that point and did not win her back.  It wasn’t only because of “Hotel”; the book’s concerns are too repetitious – the Italians v. the Anglo-Saxons; George and Joe ogling girls, gambling, drinking their lunch.  To keep up the book’s style of humor, the narrator must play at being dumber than he really is:  so we are stuck in a static world with no forward thrust – much like, I’ll say it again, the boring framework of a sit-com.  The other option, given the milieu, would have been to make George the slick, self-hating adman lamenting the death of his creativity.  But he’s just too much of a feckless chooch for thoughts like these.  He’s an innocent fool, no kind of manipulator of public opinion – no Anglo-Saxon – and therefore there can be no crisis of faith of the sort that usually besets the ad man in fictions about the advertising world. 

I imagine something like this happens in the TV show Mad Men – which seems to me to have a huge debt to a book about the history of advertising called The Mirror Makers, down to the truism that the only Italian-Americans in advertising at that time, Panetta notwithstanding, were art directors, because Italians love beauty and all.  Anyway, I’m not sure how that crisis manifests itself in the show, though I’ve tried watching it mostly because a number of people close to me love it.  Six episodes later, I find myself immune to its charms.  All the characters seem to be enacting ideas of the era, the ’50s hangover of 1961.  Thus the wives enact things like fear-of-divorced-women-in-safe-suburban-neighborhood, Jell-O desserts, and girdles; the secretaries enact sleeping-with-the-boss, lipstick, pretending-to-be-a-dumb-bunny; the ad execs enact sexism, scotch-drinking, smoking, etc., and so on:  empty vessels playing out period-specific tropes.  It’s kind of like an early ’60s SimCity.  I was trying to remember what literary critic said that a character who is a bus driver does not, actually, always think about being a bus driver.  Similarly, people in 1961 most likely didn’t walk around relentlessly embodying the idea of it being 1961, their inner lives dimmer than the faintest flicker of a Zippo lighter. 

 Inexplicably, this image was in the Yaddo newsletter.   

Their enthusiasm makes me feel very lonely. 

Then I thought maybe Mad Men was operating on a meta level, as a subtle critique of the shallow images perpetuated by advertising – what with it basically being a soap opera, a form which of course has its roots as a vehicle for advertising.  I tendered this idea to my officemate Mike, a person who knows from meta; we bandied it around for a while, but he eventually shook his head.  All of which made me wonder:  why on earth am I wasting so much time talking about Mad Men?  Similarly, I recently considered writing a review, focused through the generous lens of Giambattista Vico’s notion of cultural pluralism, of Snooki Polizzi’s A Shore Thing.  But then I put down my crack pipe.    

Holla!

Panetta had a great ear for a certain kind of colloquial dialogue (“What’s this he has a beer?” “We can work it beautiful.” “Him I should never’ve trusted.”) and in fact, after he left advertising, he wrote for the theatre, with varying degrees of success – an adaptation of Viva Madison Avenue! seems to have closed after one night, while his play Comic Strip won an Obie award.  I read his play Kiss Mama and it’s cute, but so slight, and you can see the plot spooling out before you on lines as predictable as the 5:05 to Greenwich.  It’s cursed by the same terminal mildness and What’d I do? attitude that Viva Madison Avenue! is.  Contrast this with characters in Dawn Powell’s business satire Angels on Toast, or almost any sketch by Damon Runyon (to whom Panetta seems to me something of a literary heir):  with both of those writers, there’s a feel of the real gritty world out there, the world that will eat you alive. Viva Madison Avenue! seems to want to be meaner than it is.  Some kind of real anger must have come out of Panetta’s being one of the few working-class “white ethnic” guys, Brooklyn accent and all, sitting in his office at Y&R.  If this had made it into his writing we’d have a different book entirely, something with teeth. 

I’ve often wondered if DeLillo’s characters are the way they are because they’re so relentlessly deracinated (Underworld being an exception).  They have no roots, no family.  Panetta’s characters seem to have the opposite problem – they have too much family, they’re steeped too utterly in one narrow identity.  The family is always there, looking over his shoulder, and he’s too much the good son not to care about what they think.    

The Wound: Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete

 

This is the worst book that I’ve ever loved.

Actually, it’s not the worst book – it’s a young man’s novel, madly uneven, spilling over with pain and a prose made hyper-precious by its burning need to testify.  It was first published to much critical acclaim in 1939 – it apparently beat out The Grapes of Wrath as a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club – and it’s based so closely on the central wound of di Donato’s early life that, contrary to reigning opinion back then, I find it almost critic-proof.  Di Donato’s investment in telling the story of this wound was so all-consuming that the only way he could find to capture it was with a kind of bloated, “poetical,” quasi-biblical prose so weighted with its own portentousness that it becomes at times almost unreadable.  The book hasn’t dated well. 

Here is the wound, and horrible it is:  when di Donato was still a boy, his father, a bricklayer, was killed in a construction accident.  He was drowned in concrete.  Di Donato’s mother Annuziata was left with seven children, Pietro the oldest among them, and one more on the way.  Pietro – called Paul in the novel – has to quickly become the man of the house to keep the family from starving.  Planting himself at his father’s former job site, by sheer force of will he becomes a bricklayer at the age of twelve, a master bricklayer at fifteen.  His childhood is obliterated.  A sensitive, “good” boy, he suffers torments on every level – humiliation, physical exhaustion, guilt over his developing sexuality as he grows into young adulthood and, finally, a loss of religious faith. 

All the makings of the classic bildungsroman are there.  But the style of the prose, rather than drawing the reader in, is like a stiff arm keeping the reader away.  Maybe nothing dates more quickly or worse than “poetic” prose, particularly that of a young person (I think of such early Thomas Wolfe locutions as “Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?” – oh, brother).  Open Christ in Concrete at random and you’ll find sentences like: 

But she remained, belly full-bursting, and overworked breasts sprawled, showing dumbly with her ungraceful limbs. (42)

And hours were wings of fantasy to a mother and son. (157)

Morning-born senses bought vividly the solarized city into ken. (280)

Similar to Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep (1934), the foreign language spoken by the characters – Italian in di Donato’s case, Yiddish in Roth’s – is rendered in an English of formal, poetic cadences and idiosyncratic word choices (the idea being that it’s like a too-literal translation).  In the case of di Donato, this seems to have determined much of the narrative voice as well.  But the style, and thus the tone, changes throughout the book, sometimes almost paragraph by paragraph; di Donato sometimes uses a de-familiarizing dropped-article, “muscular” style that reminds me, of all things, of Henry Green’s Living (1929) – a ruling class author’s very successful attempt to capture the lives and speaking styles of working-class factory hands (there are probably other precedents for such a style among the many proletarian novels of the period but I’m just not familiar with them). It’s when di Donato writes past the mannerisms and uses comparatively “plain” prose that, for me, the book takes off. 

Because the story is all.  The death of the father, the squalor of the tenements, the harshness of immigrant life – they’re all so horrible they need no special stylistic flourishes to work on the reader’s mind and heart.  It’s often during the most extreme scenes that di Donato’s prose becomes “biblical” and overblown, as if to remind the reader what side the angels are on.  But we need no reminding.  The sense of injustice is huge throughout the book, in spite of the prose’s urgings, not because of it.  One of the most shocking moments is when Paul and his sister go to the police station to find out what happened to their father in the building collapse:

    The sergeant thought for a moment, and called to the next room: “Hey Alden, anything come in on a guy named – Geremio?”
    A second later, a live voice from the next room loudly answered: “What? – oh yeah – the wop is under the wrappin’ paper in the courtyard!”

    Oh yeah – that dead wop.

There’s also the painful scene of Paul wandering the streets in search of something for his family to eat, being rebuffed by the shopkeepers, and finally going to the parish priest, a well-fed, sanctimonious man sitting down to an enormous dinner.  When the priest insists he can’t help the boy, and ultimately sends him off with a slice of cake, you really do want to slap the man in his fat face.  There’s a scene in which Annuziata and her many children go before the workers’ compensation board, and it’s quickly apparent that the boss and the board are on the same side.  Though the accident was the fault of the cheap-assed boss, he places the blame on the dead man (“…I’ve always had the same difficulty with Eyetalian laborers…. I’ll be hanged if I can prevent them from hurting themselves!”) and the family, screwed and lacking the language or power to fight back, goes home with nothing.  Just like early scenes in Jane Eyre, these episodes do what they’re supposed to do – build up the reader’s indignation – but (unlike Jane Eyre) the effect is quickly squandered when the prose whips itself up into the inevitable tragic crescendo that comes next.   

A strange shadow of darkness hangs over the world of the book.  It’s almost as if it takes place in an enclosed, cramped space.  The unnamed city of the novel – a sort of nightmare New York City – is a cage.  The lack of place names and the self-directed scope of the narration give the city its dream-like air; it’s a kind of black-and-white cinematic or even comic-book quality (to the author’s credit).  And, despite “Job” (always rendered with a capital J and no article so that it almost becomes, if you will indulge me in a cliché, like another character in the novel) being the oppressive thing that kills the father and burdens the son, it’s also what makes Paul a man; thus, many of the descriptions of the work itself ring with vitality. 

There’s a strange, long scene in Part V of the book, “Fiesta,” in which the novel’s problems of tone really jump out.  (Inexplicably enough, just about every snippet of Italian in my 1939 edition of Christ In Concrete is a mess – “festa” is “fiesta,” “informazione” is “informatzione,” cafone is spelled wrong, as is biscotti – “biscuiti.”  This is, I guess, the legacy of illiterate immigrant parents and their English-language-schooled first-generation American children having to do a lot of guesswork to figure out the language – which was often dialect – but one wonders why the publisher couldn’t find a copy editor who could read this exotic language, Italian.)  The scene comes toward the end of the book, after the worst has passed, and Paul’s Uncle Luigi, who had lost a leg in a distractingly bathetic scene earlier in the book, is married to a neighborhood widow.  The wedding feast begins daintily; but as the guests drink their cordials and wine and eat the exhaustively described dishes (“Bitter green Sicilian olives and sweet Spanish olives, whitings and squid pickled in saffron, Genoese salami and mortadel, pickled eggplants, long pointed peppers and cherry peppers…” being only the beginning), the mood grows increasingly excited, then lusty, then sentimental…the mandolin comes out, they all sing, they reminisce about the old country.  This would all be fine and good, but after the endless meal has wound down, everyone sated to the point of exhaustion, in the middle of the night the guests get a kind of second wind and must have – spaghetti.  The men snap to action and prepare another enormous meal and, inexplicably, slather it right on the table-top, where they dive into it, “with only the face,” like pigs at a red-sauce trough.  What’s this scene doing here?  Acting as satire?  But there weren’t enough representations of Italian-Americans in existence at that time to provide the need for satire.  It’s an episode expressive for its own sake, something probably based on a memory – a moment of crazed over-indulgence given into by people for whom deprivation is the norm.    

Nonetheless, this distressing scene is, I’ll just posit here, the moment in literature when the Italian-American gavone, real and fictional, was born.  And every last cringe-inducing G from the loser guys in Saturday Night Fever to the depressing, self-advertising slobs, male and female, on Jersey Shore come out of its overcoat.  It’s as if they’ve retained the gavone way of being while having no clue why such an attitude might have come about. 

Di Donato was a Communist – he joined the party after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed – and, while one could probably have guessed this given the times and the themes of the book, it doesn’t read like propaganda. “I dramatized the economic struggle,” di Donato is quoted as saying in “A Visionary Speaks,” La Parola del Popolo, January-February 1980, by Michael Esposito (quoted in his excellent essay, “The Travail of Pietro di Donato" in MELUS, Summer 1980), “and let the reader add it up.”  There’s no rapturous ending as there is in Jews Without Money (like Call it Sleep, a spiritual brother of the book) with its paean to O Great Revolution.  Instead, Christ in Concrete ends with what appears to be the death of Annuziata, after Paul’s revelation of his loss of faith effectively breaks her heart.  The scene is kind of a terrible one, and not in a good way, with Annunziata cradling her teenage son and battily crooning as she slips away.  

And yet, for all its huge flaws, this book haunts me.  I’ve read it twice over the years and will probably read it again.  The sound of its prose is the sound of striving, of a tremendous moral burden, and the book reads like a broken heart.  Di Donato bled these pages.  

Pietro Di Donato. Photograph by Eve Arnold, 1960. 

From American National Biography Online.