!!!

While it's pretty completely off-topic for this blog, I'm thrilled to report that my husband has an article in the New York Times' "Modern Love" column.  I am so happy for him.

IO VIVO! The Encyclopedic Palace Rises Again

Friends, I wish I had the words to describe my happiness when I learned last week in an article in the New York Times that my grandfather’s great labor of love, an architectural model he called the Palazzo Enciclopedico, has once again been rescued from oblivion and is back up at the American Folk Art Museum – now at their space near Lincoln Center. (Thank you, Tom Hachtman, for that email.)

My grandfather, Marino Auriti, and his “crazy” endeavor meant, and mean, so much to me that it’s hard for me to assemble my thoughts about him.  I tried to write an essay about him at MacDowell in 1998, but merely succeeded in smoking lots of cigarettes, eating lots of carrot sticks, and banging my head against it all summer.  Later still I started a mini-comic about all this and made two issues, but then ran out of steam because of my seriously feeble drawing chops, and maybe more so because of the sadness that comes over me when I think too much about my family.  So please bear with me on this.      

Marino Auriti was born in 1891 in the town of Guardiagrele (provincia Chieti, regione Abruzzo) – I can still hear my grandfather saying ’Uardiagrele, with the world’s fattest U-sound in his dialetto Guardiese.  He was a carriage maker by trade, but had a dreamy turn of mind, and a facility for mechanical things.  Architecture was his great love.  As my mom would tell me when I was a kid, when the Fascists came to power, my grandfather was an outspoken critic – he published in a local paper satirical anti-Fascist poems, which she quaintly termed “bathroom verse” (and geez, one wishes one had a copy of that for the family archive).  As I wrote in my Tresca post, my grandfather really was one of those men who was forced to drink castor oil in the streets by Blackshirt goon squads.  Things got so hot that he and his brother and their families left Italy in the late 1920s.  I remember my mother telling me that the Fascists had taken their house, “one of the best houses in Guardiagrele.”  If it’s the same one I saw in the 1990s and again in 2006, not so much.  Many years after the fact, however, the loss of that house was loudly lamented, a downscaled version of exiled White Russians grieving over the loss of their dacha. 

Although my grandmother, Maria Rachele, was an American citizen (born on Christian Street in Philadelphia in the early 1900s) she was taken back to Italy when she was a baby and was very much an Abruzzese, or to get micro-specific the way Italians do, a Pretorese.  Still, she could have come back into this country easily, but because of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the quota for Italians, among others, was tightly restricted – Italians emigrating to the U.S. went from an average of 200,000 per year in the first decade of the 20th century to less than 4,000 after the act was passed – and my grandfather could not enter the country.  The families went to Brazil instead, where my mother was born, in Catanduva, in the state of São Paulo, in 1928.  There my grandfather and a business associate invented something called a coffee thresher, which, family lore had it (the White Russians twisting their pearls again), would have made him a millionaire if the other man hadn’t stolen his patent and claimed the invention as his alone. 

No matter, though, because shortly thereafter, the Brazilian coffee market crashed.  The price per pound fell from 22.5 cents to 8 cents between 1929 and 1931.  I well remember the shock of recognition when I was in college and, in my beloved German film class, I saw the Bertolt Brecht-written film Kuhle Wampe.  At the end of the film, there’s a scene on a train where the characters talk about the tumbling world coffee market and someone cries out, “They’re burning coffee in the streets of Brazil!”  I was sitting there, in the dark in the middle of a lecture room in Fayerweather Hall round about 1988 and I realized:  God, all this really did happen.  These things played out on the world stage, this wasn’t just some piece of secret family history.  All the sorts of abstractions about History became real for me, if at a very late date.   

The family eventually came in through Ellis Island in the 1930s, and settled in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania because, as my mother would tell me, the cypress trees reminded my grandfather of home.

My grandfather built himself a huge garage, and set up an auto-body shop and “artistic framing” business; although I suspect, in the cultural hot spot that was Kennett, he never made any artistic frames for anything but his own work.  On the picture-framing side of the garage was his studio, where he made oil paintings after everything from old masters and photographs clipped out of National Geographic.  He was a pretty old guy by the time I was a kid (he was in his late 70s when I was born) and he’d given up painting by then.  I remember the last, unfinished painting on his easel, its outlines gridded out in pencil, of a Japanese woman eternally lifting a veil to her head.  I remember the wall of mitred frame corners, all so ornate, hanging in upside-down Vs and covered with the thick dust of many years. 

 Me, circa 1976, in my grandparents’ front yard in Kennett. I’m wearing my favorite 100% polyester shirt-and-scarf set, patterned with yellow roses set against a blue lattice background. Note mushroom house across the street. If you’re on the East Coast, check your button mushrooms or your baby Bellas – chances are they came from Kennett Square.

I have my grandfather’s copy after the second-tier Pre-Raphaelite painter, Henry Holiday, of The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice (charmingly titled in pencil, in my grandfather’s hand on the lower right-side, “MEETING DANTE AND BEATRICE,” kind of like Eating Raoul or Being John Malkovich).  It’s objectively pretty inept, has little to do with the original, but I worship it.

 The Henry Holiday painting, compliments of the Walker.

 Marino Auriti’s copy.

 And me, in Florence in 2008, by the bridge that was built at that crossing in the sixteenth century, the Ponte Santa Trinità – the same bridge that I note in an earlier post was bombed to bits by the retreating Germans during WWII, and reconstructed with its original stones, dredged from the Arno, in 1958. It’s flanked by allegorical statues representing each of the four seasons; the head of Primavera was not recovered from the river until 1961.

In the garage, on the other side of the studio wall, were hung salon-style, almost floor-to-ceiling, scores of his paintings, all of them, needless to say, artistically framed:  Raphael and Michelangelo he especially loved, and Leonardo, and others I’ve sadly forgotten now. (When I’d see the real version of one of these paintings in books as a kid, I’d say to my mom:  “Pop-pop painted that.”)  But the really cool thing was in the back, beyond the oil-soaked cement ground, the car parts, the enormous chassis of an old, long out-of-commission car (an Edsel?).  And that was the Encyclopedic Palace.

 Marino Auriti in his garage, with his models.

I can only imagine the frustration my grandfather must have felt, living in a town known as the Mushroom Capital of the World, enlivened only by, to hear my mother tell it, visits from the Javella water salesman.  My grandfather was an inveterate tinkerer and was always making things out of wood – cutting boards, footstools, and eventually architectural models.  I remember a tiny, beautiful building that I think was a model of my cousin Emma’s house and, of course, the elaborate, stepped cathedral with gold domes, surrounded by spindly cypress trees.  But it was after my grandfather retired, in the 1950s, when he set to work on his pièce de résistance, the Encyclopedic Palace.  This one wasn’t just a model, though. 

It was a design for a museum, a national monument. He filled notebooks developing its concept; in his statement of purpose, in my stiff translation from his Italian, he called it “…an entirely new concept in museums, designed to hold all the works of man in whatever field, all discoveries made and those that may follow.”  He wanted it built on the mall in DC – and if built at the time, at 136 stories, it would have been the tallest skyscraper in the world.  With its surrounding piazza it would take up 16 city blocks.  He built the model, at a scale of 1:200 meters, out of wood, brass, plastic, and tiny celluloid windows on which he drew mullions; for the tiny balustrades, he cut down hair combs.  And this time, so no one could scoop him, he secured a patent for his creation. 

In his statement of purpose, he proposed a plan for construction consisting of a skeleton of steel and cement; the round form, he noted, would allow the distribution of natural light internally to best advantage (not so much, considering the impossible depth of the building core, but that’s the pragmatic architecture-firm-day-job me talking here).  The building would have twenty-four entrances, 126 bronze statues of “writers, scientists, and artists past, present, and future” and, on the piazza, 220 Doric columns with more statues of writers, scientists, artists.  At each corner would be domed laboratories, topped by statues of allegorical figures representing each of the four seasons, much like the Ponte Santa Trinità. 

Apparently my grandfather wrote letters to find interested parties to fund the construction of the real Encyclopedic Palace (I wish I had just one of those letters) and had the model exhibited at a bank building on Broad Street in Philadelphia in the 1950s.  Outside of this, however, nothing else happened with his dream.  The Encyclopedic Palace, eleven feet tall and encased in a glass enclosure with its brass steeple poking though a hole in the top, sat in the corner of his garage in Kennett Square – the stuff of local myth – until my grandfather passed in 1980. 

After he died, no one knew what to do with the model (or models, plural, because the cathedral was also pretty big).  Both were taken apart and put in it a storage locker in some grim section of Newport, Delaware.  As the years went by my mother would write letters to try and find a home for the Encyclopedic Palace, and only get vague replies, if any.  People weren’t talking so much about “Outsider Art” in those days.  As I got older, after college, I took over this job from her, writing letters and offering to donate the model, until one bizarrely mean response from the Franklin Institute – of all places! And I’d had such fond memories of visiting the Heart there when I was a kid – made me lose heart, so to speak, entirely.

The knowledge that this thing was moldering in storage was always somewhere in my mind though, and in 2001, when my mother’s health got very bad, my sister Poogy and I decided we had to do something about it.  Damian and I went down there and, in the car driving to the storage locker on a miserable, overcast afternoon, we all tried to calculate how much money twenty-two years of monthly storage locker payments had been costing my grandmother’s “estate”…porca miseria.  The key to the locker had long been lost, and so my brawny brother-in-law Jimmy cut the lock.  We opened up the storage locker and, inside…the shit looked terrible.

I was heartbroken. We put a new lock back on the storage unit, and drove away.  This seemed just like another huge piece of folly, like everything else the dreamers in my family touched.

Another year went by, and we rallied.  We went back down there, unlocked the unit, and took out some pieces…I held them up to the light, the clouds parted…and the pieces looked beautiful.  In need of some restoration.  But beautiful.

 Inside the storage locker, after twenty-two years.

 Out in the light...

The American Folk Art Museum had just put up its new building, designed by Tod Williams/Billie Tsien, on 53rd Street, and an architect I worked with was telling me about how among its collection was, of all things, an architectural model of the Empire State Building made entirely from wooden toggles.  They like architectural models, fabulous, I thought!  I paid the museum a visit and…I felt a huge letdown.  It was pure sweet Americana, weathervanes and quilts and Shaker valentines…no old weird America here.  But then, as I went down the stairs to the more modern floors, I saw a painting by the great self-taught Italian-American painter Ralph Fasanella.  It was of his father, an iceman, crucified in a block of ice pierced with pairs of ice tongs.  I looked at this painting, and I felt such a mixture of grief and hope that I burst into tears. 

 Ralph Fasanella's Iceman Crucified #3.    

And then I thought:  this is the place! 

I wrote the main curator there an impassioned letter describing the Encyclopedic Palace and telling her my family would like to donate it.  Amazingly, I got an instant reply.  They sent a pair of art handlers and a curator down to Pennsylvania, and my sister and I drove out with them to the storage locker.  As the art handlers took out pieces of the model – the idea was that they’d bring it to their warehouse in Queens to evaluate whether they could acquire it or not – the curator was, bless this woman, trailing after them picking up tiny celluloid windows and carefully putting them in zip-lock baggies.  I remember Poogy giving me her characteristic look of high absurdity – of course they wanted this thing if they were treating it with such care.       

And, of course, they did want it.  I helped raise money for its restoration, through the company I worked for, and it was unveiled at the American Folk Art Museum as part of its Folk Art Revealed show in 2004.  My grandfather would have been 113 years old that year. 

 Folk Art Revealed, 2004

The Encyclopedic Palace was on display into 2006 or so and then I heard through friends who went there to see it that it had disappeared.  It wasn’t part of the permanent display.  It was put away somewhere, in storage…in some big storage locker in some dim part of the city…. 

Over the last few years, I kept reading about how the American Folk Art Museum was having financial trouble.  As I read increasingly dire articles about it, I kept thinking I should get in touch with my contact there, wonderful Brooke Anderson; then I read she’d left to go to LA MoCA.  Last year the museum went off the rails financially and sold to MoMA the 53rd Street building, for which they’d disastrously overspent.  There was talk of transferring the collection to the Smithsonian or some of it going to the Brooklyn Museum.  Oh, splendid, I thought, now the Encyclopedic Palace has officially vanished.  Polvere tu sei e in polvere tornerai…

 

So you can probably imagine my amazement and delight when, late last month, I got the email with a link to the New York Times article, with a wonderful write-up by Ken Johnson ("You have probably never heard of Marino Auriti...") with a huge photograph of the Encyclopedic Palace. 

Photo from the New York Times, by Chester Higgins Jr.  

As a child, I remember my grandfather as a dour presence, rarely smiling, never laughing.  He didn’t seem to have a lot of use for English, or America, or the late capitalist twentieth century.  He and my grandmom seemed to always carry so much grief within them – over the loss of their homeland; maybe, for him, the loss of his dreams.  My mother was devoted to her father, and when he died she was in her fifties but she still called him daddy.  The house in Kennett so beloved by us all was sold, without any kind of consultation, by my bumbling father, and the garage was converted into a lousy vinyl-sided hunk of junk.  My mother was so sad over the whole thing.  Then she told me about a dream she had about my grandfather.  She was back at the house in Kennett, and walked out of the kitchen door and into the side yard (how well I remember that yard).  My grandfather was standing there, looking like a young man, and in his hand was a tiny, living tree with its root ball intact.  He looked at her and said:  Io vivo.

I live.       

What Ever Happened to Francis Pollini?

The first book by Francis Pollini I ever saw was a copy of Night in its Olympia Press Traveller’s Companion edition – those intriguing green paperbacks that always seem to hold the promise of great writing, a slap of European gravitas, and a tickle of something naughty.  The copy was in a used bookstore notorious for its creepy, Grinch-like owner (my husband once heard him order out of his store an old lady who, in the voice of a gentle lunatic, asked him if he’d enjoyed her Christmas cards) as well as for the promiscuity of its prices.  That copy of Night was $20, and when I opened up the book to look at it, its forty-year-old British spine went crack!   

For years that was the only copy of Night I’d held in my hands, and the book’s obscurity made it all the more alluring.  Who was this Francis Pollini, with his Italian surname and all?  I knew that a lot of Olympia Press writers, whether writing erotica or “legit” literature, published under pen names, but the name didn’t sound made up in the way that, say, Akbar del Piombo did.  When I finally took home a copy of Night, its author information page was brief but promising:  Pollini was born in 1930 in Pennsylvania; he went to Penn State; he served in the Air Force; and since Night was published in Paris in 1960, he “has written two further major novels, Glover and Excursion.”  Further major novels, wot?  Even on the all-gathering web, there was – and still is – not so much ready information about Pollini.  Who was this fellow, and why did he fall off the map? 

  

Night is set during the Korean War, after a group of American soldiers has surrendered to the Chinese and is marched into a POW camp.  Narrated, mostly, from the point of view of a Sergeant Marty Landi in close third-person – and intercut with italicized passages of interior monologue – the book follows Landi in his descent down the rabbit hole from resistant “reactionary” to dehumanized shell (and, perhaps, wretched informer).  Through sleep deprivation, constant fear, and subtle, nerve-racking interrogation mostly under the watchful, oddly kind eyes of a Communist officer named Ching, an elegant, polished man who speaks flawless English and who talks to Marty like a bright pupil who unfortunately doesn’t “work to ability,” Landi is broken down, and brainwashed (indeed, when the book was reissued by Houghton Mifflin it was subtitled A truthful novel about the nightmare called brainwashing).  There are situations that play out because of the differing degrees of indoctrination among the POWs; there are several episodes of outright violence; there are well-rendered pieces of dialogue using period-specific Commie jargon, sometimes with handfuls of POWs spewing it back, and some little comedy in a few Chinese characters talking like ESL students; but the trajectory of Marty’s disintegrating mind is pretty much the total scope of the book, and there’s virtually nothing resembling a subplot.  

 Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

The book begins with staccato, short-sentence narration, very limited description, and punchy, terse dialogue much like war movies of a certain era, but without the helpful visual cues that let the reader know what’s going on.  This shouldn’t be a liability; I love being thrown into a narrative and having to look sharp to assemble the story. (One of my favorite novels of the last few years, and perhaps of my lifetime, is David Grossman’s To the End of the Land, a book also shadowed by war, which begins with random voices in a contextless dark, and requires the reader to “work.”  To the End of the Land is so great a novel that it frustrates the ability to properly praise it – a problem that the axe-grinding writer of this uncharacteristically obtuse review in the NYRB obviously didn’t have.)  One expects such a narrative to open out from its cryptic beginning, and give the reader something she can hang onto, but I’m not sure that Night ever really does.  Once the book finds its feet, those feet just shuffle along. 

There’s almost no scene-setting, little description, and no real “effects” in Night, no high highs and no low lows, just sensation rendered for the most part with a unspecific, hazy numbness.  It’s as if you’re reading the book through a fuzzy pinhole (Night is at least perfectly titled).  It’s a strange little hermetic document, a novel drained of all color and most every referent that would give it life.  On the surface, this sort of claustrophobia might be compelling in the way that the existential fictions we read in our teens were, especially given that Night takes place in a prison camp.  Instead, since the reader catches on pretty quickly that we’re slouching toward the inevitable brainwashing and/or betrayal, and because this is forever hanging in the close air of the book, there’s very little drama in the narrative.  There’s a feeling of static sameness to the proceedings.  The endless cat-and-mouse interrogation scenes between Ching and Marty are rendered very well and I think they’re the most compelling things about the book, but because there are so many of them and they’re so repetitious, any power they have at first has been shot to hell by the end of the book. 

A huge problem with Night, I think, is its voice.  Because of the lack of tags and description, the reader spends too many early pages not sure whose close third-person narration she’s following.  Much worse, the point of view speedily breaks its own rules, leaving Marty and roving around inside the heads of other POWs.  (Such a thing seems to me a beginning writer’s mistake – and one that, after many clueless years, I’ve hopefully finally rid myself of – and usually comes from spending too much time writing in the first person and not knowing how to answer the dictates of the close third.)  There are little blips of this point-of-view problem at first but by the last third of the book it’s open season, and the particular flaw feels more and more ruinous as we spend time in the mind of another GI, Phillips, and, closer to the end, we zip from POW to POW, most of them just names, a few of them names attached to attitudes (usually noxious, sometimes in an interesting way – more on this later).  It’s as if Pollini got tired of the prolonged claustrophobia of his own book. 

[Throughout Night I found the errors of a young writer who sees the story so clearly in his head that he’s shocked to learn that a reader might find it hard to access.  It’s all there, you moron! the writer wants to shout at her clueless reader, how can you be so dense?  It might be all there, but it’s frustratingly underwrought – which might be a side-effect (just a guess) of being influenced by the kind of lean, “masculine” prose that certain kinds of tough guys of the era wrote, while their chick counterparts nattered on about hairdos, pessaries, and Mary Quant.  A great writing teacher I once had would often use the phrase, of an imperfectly realized piece of writing, “It needs more dreaming.”  In this case, what we need here is less dreaming, and more articulation – more signposts, and more awareness that no matter the form or the style, one of the writer’s duties, as grating as this might be, is to communicate.]

New English Library, 1970.

I mentioned the italicized passages of the book.  These are usually flashbacks, sometimes of simple, fond memories, more often of miseries and self-flagellations, which Marty has while under interrogation; in them is much of Marty’s back-story, the thing that should get us to care about him.  It’s the soup of his unconscious being stirred around and ladled up, and some of the passages are compelling – but, again, they’re too disconnected to add up.  In the delirium of some of these passages I read the delirium of the writer trapped at his desk watching himself as he is engaged in the act of writing…and allowing himself to flip out and free associate, because he can.  This kind of writing is usually more fun to write than to read. 

During the course of the many interrogations, Ching’s refrain remains the same:  You must confess.  Confess to what?  The command acts on Marty’s (Catholic) guilt over, it would seem, his lusting after his mother (and perhaps sister and/or girlfriend), and also perhaps over his mother’s death, over wishing his father dead, or over any one of a score of other self-lacerating episodes stirred up in the soup of Marty’s head under interrogation.  Late in the book, this free-floating confession finally finds its object – Ching wants to know the identity of the POW responsible for leading raids on the indoctrinated Americans and killing seven men, among them one of his favorites, a lick-spittle named Slater.  (Slater represents the worst of the POWs – those who “happily” capitulate, whereas the man leading the raids, Phillips, perhaps represents the most impossibly noble – he’s an old-school tough guy, notably a WWII vet, who will go down fighting.)  Marty is caught in the middle – he doesn’t want to give in to the indoctrination, nor does he want to join the murderous raids on the “Progressives”; he only wants to come out of the war alive.  

Though it’s not exactly clear, it would seem that Marty finally does “confess” to Ching, and in a very specific way.  In the penultimate scene of the book, Marty’s been given warm clothing and fuel – things promised to those who give in – and he’s been reduced to the state of a zombie, “his eyes fixing on something, on one thing, the inner dead thing.”  As Marty stumbles around in his reduced world, the new leader of the “Progressives,” flanked by Chinese soldiers and in an atmosphere of great fanfare, crosses a field to the huts of the “Reactionaries.”  He is carrying a round package, and he unwraps it…

…not completely, just enough so that in the next instant, when his arm moved, sending it rolling, tumbling towards them, it easily discarded its wrapping, and he was laughing, shrieking, and they were following it, all of them, absolutely still and silent, watching it come to rest, finally some two or three yards from them, before them….

It was Phillips’ head.

This should have been an amazing scene but, frustratingly, for this reader it had no power at all.  The logistics were confusing, the language flat, and the narrative leading up to it had already broken apart into its multiple, prodigal points-of-view so that all suspense had been squandered, and I might as well have been reading a recipe for applesauce.  Ultimately I was left thinking that the author shouldn’t have named that character “Phillips,” because the possessive apostrophe on a word ending in S is almost invariably awkward. 

Which leaves us with the book’s short epilogue.  Marty has come “safely” home only to swim out into the ocean one drunken evening and, it would seem, drown himself in the water.  In this one sees the ultimate absurdity of self-protection in the face of an evil too huge for one flawed man to bear.  The evil is war; the evil is a corrupt society – and by this Pollini seems to be indicting both the U.S. and Communist China/North Korea; and, ultimately, the evil is Marty’s own personal demons.  Unfortunately, there’s no drama in Marty’s drowning scene either.  In David Seed’s Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control: A Study of Novels and Films Since World War II, which has an excellent passage on Night, he writes that the epilogue is “…curiously featureless; it is as if [Landi] has not regained any purchase on his home country.  As a result of this ideological and psychological displacement, Landi’s suicidal walk into a black void only actualizes a mental process that has already taken place.”   

Seed also writes “Pollini could not place the novel initially with any U.S. publisher, partly because of its sexually explicit language and partly because ‘the setting was not very comfortable to American readers,’” (this last phrase is Pollini’s).  There’s a long-enduring, totally crummy discourse that holds that Americans soldiers in Korea weren’t made of the same strong stuff that, say, WWII soldiers were, and that most POWs capitulated (which was not the case).  In this very interesting article, Missing action: POW films, brainwashing and the Korean War, 1954-1968, Charles Young writes about what may have helped drive this misperception:  

The attention put on POWs was due in part to the wider Korean stalemate which threw into question the resolve of the entire nation. America’s inability to prevail was transferred to the prisoners’ failure to do the same. We may have betrayed the POWs in Vietnam, but, in Korea, they betrayed us. The hypersensitivity over prisoner performance contrasts with World War II, where victory made introspection unnecessary.

Maybe because of the lack of a grand rah-rah finale, the Korean War is also known as the Forgotten War.  You’ll find no photos of sailors kissing nurses in Times Square when the cease-fire was signed in 1953.  Korean vets were in some cases shunned, as is related in this brief article about a lecture given just this year by historian James Wright, during which he “recounted the story of a Korean War veteran who was denied entrance to his upstate New York Veterans of Foreign Wars club because ‘he was not a veteran of what they called a war.’”  But this seems to be all of a piece with the almost routinely deplorable way vets get treated in this country – might as well just hit a person in the head with a teargas canister. 

The article also talks about how because of the lack of greater reflection on the war – “national indifference” – this country has “failed to learn essential lessons that would have been applicable to contemporary wars,” from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq.  The Korean War probably lives largest in this country’s consciousness as a backdrop for the TV show M*A*S*H. 

To return briefly to Night, it was a big relief to me that the book pretty much steers clear of racist slurs.  There are moments but, given the severity of the circumstances, they are mild.  There seems to be more rancor directed at the unseen Koreans than at the Chinese captors (perhaps because, from what I’ve read, Korean solders were more often guilty of war atrocities than the Chinese?).  I also fell to wondering if Pollini’s own experience of growing up the child of immigrants in coal country, Pennsylvania might have made him, let’s say, sensitive to name-calling.  Interestingly, the most racist character in the book, who Pollini names Willy Coughlin (shades of the fascist-lovin’ Father?) and whose racism comes out toward Black Americans, appears to be among those most easily indoctrinated by the Commies.  This would have been a fascinating angle to explore.  Similarly, I also wanted to hear more about Landi’s specific strain of Italian-Americanness.  We get tiny bits of this, such as when Landi, phasing in and out of reality during a late interrogation scene, thinks of how his mother had only learned “a few English words,” and of: 

The town on the hilltop, far away, in her own, true land, which had sustained her, which she had sustained, vividly, intact, within her.  That ancient cluster of buildings… He wanted to touch her hand…  She had never left it… to see what it felt like to see… The new country, the new life, become just a horrible nightmare, from which one glorious day, she would waken…oh God of the past…o Dio del passato… Closer he came.

However, frustratingly, like so many other snippet-like episodes in the book, these things are there and then they’re gone, washed over by the river of sameness that is the narrative.

John Calder, Ltd., 1961.

I wondered, finishing this book, what is the author writing toward?  If I believed this was his experience (which I somehow do not) would I be more taken with it?  What are his other books like?  There’s so much promise in Night, which was Pollini’s first book, and so little satisfaction delivered.  It’s one of those books that, if you were to go back and start reading it again, it would probably be much more clear and maybe incrementally more compelling the second time around.  And you could go back and read it again; or, gentle reader, you could read something else. 

You could, in fact, hunt up another one of Pollini’s books, such as the signed copy of Dubonnet that I found at the Strand for eight bucks.  Which is what I’ll write about next time.

Finally, for no good reason, here’s a clip of Joan Sutherland singing Addio del passato.  I’m more of a La Divina fan, but La Stupenda was my mother’s favorite soprano.  Enjoy!