|
The Bricklayer as
Bricoleur: Pietro Di Donato and the Cultural
Politics of the Popular Front “All
writing is hard work. It’s bricklaying. It’s no
secret.” —Jimmy Breslin, CBS Nightwatch, 22 October 1991 Perhaps the most
extraordinary cultural event of the 1930s—a decade marked by a frenzy of
organizational activity among intellectuals and artists—was the Third
American Writers’ Congress. Sponsored by the League of American Writers, the
American Communist Party’s leading cultural “front organization,” the
Congress was held in New York in early June 1939. More than 500 leftist and
liberal writers—Thomas Mann, Louis Aragon, Langston Hughes, Kenneth Burke,
and Malcolm Cowley among them—participated in the Congress’s three-day
sessions. Its theme was “the defense of a free world in which writers can
function,” and its opening rally at Carnegie Hall was attended by over 5000
people, some of whom wept when Dr. Eduard Benes, the deposed president of
Czechoslovakia, described the enslavement of his country by the Nazis.
Moving, too, was Mann’s tribute to his friend Ernst Toller, the emigre writer
who, despondent over events on the world stage, had hanged himself in New
York in late May. It was in fact the physical and spiritual dislocation of
exiled anti-fascist writers that supplied the Congress’s keynote.[1] The Third Congress
was a traditional “literary” success as well. An impressive spirit of
solidarity prevailed when writers gathered at the New School for Social
Research to discuss the problems of their crafts. There was neither the
professional back-biting that had marred the First Congress in 1935 nor the
political dissidence that disrupted the Second Congress in 1937. “It was
. . . the first occasion,” remembered Cowley, “on which I heard a
great many writers talking about their problems without being boastful or
snickering or self-conscious—simply talking because they had something to say.”[2] Given its passion and
achievement, it is surprising that we know so little about the Third
Congress. One reason for this is that its published proceedings are
unreliable. Entitled Fighting Words,
the official record of the Third Congress did not appear until July 1940,
after what the screenwriter and League president Donald Ogden Stewart called
“an unexpectedly long and arduous job of editing.” The main source of
Stewart’s surprising difficulty was, of course, the signing on 23 August 1939
of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which made unacceptable much of what
had been said at the Third Congress. Stewart’s dilemma was how to bring the
proceedings into line without alienating writers for whom the unexpurgated
original had been, as Cowley testified, “an extraordinary affair.”[3] Stewart’s solution
was to cut the offending language from the speeches and to stitch them back
into an apparently coherent narrative told in the folksy idiom of the Popular
Front: “The streets are
full of people, some of them talking. You walk into a park and sit down on a
bench. What do you listen for among the afternoon voices?” This is a writer speaking. He is talking to
other writers at a gathering at which they are discussing their common aims;
he is telling them of his experiences in listening to the voices of New
York—the voices of children, taxi drivers, the employed, the unemployed. He
is paid by the government for “listening”—but he is not a G-man. He is not
hunting for a criminal; his search is for “the voice of the people.” Stewart’s slick
cut-and-paste job, however, produced a wholly unsatisfactory account of the
Congress. Missing altogether were the impassioned speeches by European
exiles—the real “fighting words” of the Congress—as well as anything that
might suggest that the Congress had endorsed collective security against
Hitler. And although Stewart resisted Party pressure to delete at least one
speech from the record of the Congress, one should not make too much of this.
With its countless deletions and elisions, Fighting Words must be judged, as Stewart himself admits in his
memoirs, “another casualty of the Stalin-Hitler pact.”[4] But Stewart’s attempt to impose
political correctness on the text of the Congress’s proceedings obscures a
second level of censorship motivated not by the expediences of Soviet foreign
policy but by longstanding American anxieties surrounding issues of class and
ethnicity. These ideological concerns can be recovered most readily by
examining the textual history of the speech delivered at the Congress by
Pietro Di Donato, the Italian/American bricklayer whose novel Christ in Concrete had recently been
published. Di Donato spoke at the Sunday afternoon fiction meeting which, if
attendance and reputation are our measure, was the Congress’s most successful
session. Approximately 250 writers assembled at the New School to hear
Richard Wright, Christina Stead, Dashiell Hammett, Louis Aragon, and others
discuss such topics as “The Social Character of the Novel,” “Literature as a
Social Process,” and “Tempo and the Contemporary Novel.” Entitled “A Book is
Like Building a House,” Di Donato’s extemporaneous performance was far less
technical than his peers’, his idiom far more personal. Published here for
the first time is the unedited version of his speech taken from the
stenographer’s report of the fiction session, the closest we can get to what
Di Donato actually said at the Third American Writers’ Congress: What began as vengeance has developed into
what seems a writing career. But regardless of what happens, I won’t change.
What little I have to say about writing—whenever I am stuck I revert right
back to that which has kicked me around and I make something of it. I am not
interested in writing for class conscious people. I consider that a
class-conscious person is something of a genius—I would say that he is sane,
whereas the person who is not class conscious is insane, in a sense. What is
my aim in writing? I am fortunate enough to have started at this time when so
many writers are organized and are helping each other and as soon as they
discover some one who has something to say, they help him and put him up
where he can be heard. In CHRIST IN CONCRETE—I can’t speak of prolific works
or anything like that—I aimed at the darkness of certain lives. For many
years I was known as Pete the Red and I am still known by that name. They
kidded me along about being a Red. Naturally, since CHRIST IN CONCRETE has
been published or part of it and I am able to drive up to the job in a new
car—they listen to me—that car seems to impress them. I’d like to tell them:
‘You bastards, couldn’t you understand me before?’ But I realize that in
reaching out to the worker I must disregard all the lieutenants and generals
of the Capitalists, disregard the Capitalists as shrewd men who are going to
get what they can out of it. I say to the worker, you are the guys that are
permitting this, and you are hurting me, too. How to reach them and tell them
that they are permitting it. What makes them submit, what makes them embrace
suffering? Immediately the smart guy will answer ‘ignorance.’ But ignorance
has its own organic form, an almost immediate satisfactory eroticism. The
pain of working on a job can be very dramatic—when a guy gets killed on the
job it’s dramatic. Then there is the sweat of working; the worker likes to
smell of his own stink, and the animal luxury in bed when he gets home—these
are his entire world. How to show him something different, to make him
discontent, to show what life can be. In writing CHRIST IN CONCRETE I didn’t
mean to be mystic and revel in self-mortification. I was trying to use this
idea of Christianity, to get an ‘in’ there, using the idea of Christ. My idea
was that when a worker gets through reading it he will say, ‘I don’t know, I
don’t know, but may be—may be. . . .[5] Stewart, it would
seem, did not have to edit the text of Di Donato’s speech, innocent as it was
of the kind of political indiscretions that three months later would make
Party functionaries blush and cringe. However, if Di Donato did not stumble
across the coming Party line, his insistence on the “worker” as writer,
subject, and reader must have seemed anachronistic to most in his audience,
recalling, as it did, not the supposedly democratic atmosphere of the Popular
Front but rather the frankly sectarian climate of the early 1930s when the
Party endorsed a muscularly proletarian literature by, about, and for the
working class. Di Donato obviously knew too much to embrace the romance of
“the worker” as class-conscious revolutionary; but neither had he adopted the
prescribed literary posture of the day in which the writer would efface his
or her own class or ethnic identity in order to speak in the sonorous voice
of “the people.” In Fighting Words
Stewart tried to disguise Di Donato’s heresy by introducing him in the purest
Popular Front terms: The fact of the
emergence into literary prominence of Di Donato the bricklayer-writer,
fulfills almost too perfectly the hopes of my opening chapter: the teller of
the “true story” of the people who have no spokesman; the “answers to the
questions” of the inarticulate; the culture of a whole democracy. Most significant here
is not Stewart’s clumsy attempt to incorporate Di Donato’s speech into the
official Party rhetoric of the moment, but rather the unruliness of Di
Donato’s discourse, the way it inevitably exceeds the context designed to
contain it. Moreover, by deploying Di Donato to fulfill “the hopes of [his]
opening chapter,” Stewart inadvertently exposes the instrumental character of
the relationship between middle-class writers and their working-class
counterparts always lurking just behind the phantasm of a seamless (and
classless) people’s culture.[6] That liberal
middle-class writers might be threatened by the presence at the Congress of ethnic
working-class ones is clear from the reassuring postscript Stewart added to
complete his framing of Di Donato’s speech: That is the strong
voice coming from the crowd; not the flute of the lonely poet in his ivory
tower. There must be more voices—and they must be stronger. This does not
mean, God forbid, that every writer need to be a bricklayer. Nor does it
signify that the crowd can do without the help of every “intellectual” who
wishes to speak for it. There are as yet few Donatos; there are many who
would help and their number is increasing. Stewart’s rhetorical
performance here is dizzying. He begins by resuscitating the old figure of
the “ivory tower,” so powerful during the revolutionary days of the early
1930s, but now, in the shadow of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact,
necessarily cut off from its usual oppositional referent, “the barricades.”
In its place Stewart substitutes Di Donato’s “strong voice coming from the
crowd,” but in doing so, he worries that he might frighten middle-class writers
for whom the Party’s pre-Popular Front practice of sending them to sell the
Daily Worker in the subway was still an uncomfortable memory. By assuring
them that they need not become bricklayers, Stewart assuages their fears that
Di Donato’s presence at the Congress predicted a return to the working-class
masquerade of the first half of the decade. Instead, Stewart suggests a more
consoling (and controlling) figure of ventriloquy by which liberal
intellectuals “help” members of the “the crowd” by speaking for them.
According to the logic of Stewart’s representation, the helpless (and
apparently voiceless) and the helper are inscribed in the intimate but
distant and unequal relations of charity.[7] It is exactly from
the lofty vantage of the “ivory tower” that working-class ethnics like Di
Donato can blur into such amorphous constructions as “the people,” and by the
end of his postscript, Stewart has middle-class writers safely re-ensconced
at the penthouse level, ready and able to articulate the desires and needs of
“the crowd” below them. We can see, then, that Stewart’s “fixing” of Di
Donato’s speech was not simply in response to the political strategy and
tactics of the Soviet Union; his was also an ideological construction of
otherness, an attempt to “fix” the American working-class ethnic subject in
its place as a stable object reflecting back to the American middle-class
writer his own sense of mastery and control.[8] This process of
political and ideological “fixity,” however, involved more than Stewart’s
attempt to coerce Di Donato’s speech into the text of Fighting Words. Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of the New Republic, had attended the fiction
session and was sufficiently impressed by the proceedings to want to publish
them in his magazine. Working from the stenographer’s report of the session,
W. L. River, a leftist short-story writer, prepared a 23-page edited version
entitled “Novelists Speak for Themselves,” which he submitted to Cowley near
the end of June. River’s vetting of Di Donato’s speech was perhaps only
slightly more extensive than what he did to those of the middle-class writers
who spoke at the fiction session, but in all cases River’s aim seemed more
supplying clarity and coherence than toeing the Party line. He let stand, for
example, Di Donato’s nostalgic remark about “lieutenants and generals of the
Capitalists” at a time when Party orators regularly wrapped themselves in the
rhetoric of democracy. Despite Rivers’ efforts, Cowley returned Di Donato’s
speech, asking him to persuade the bricklayer “to clear up exactly what he
meant.” To Cowley’s request, Di Donato responded with this heavily revised
version of his speech, imbued with full authorial intention when he assured
River that this was “as [he] meant it to be”: What began as
vengeance has developed into what seems a writing career.—But regardless what
happens, I will not change. I am not interested in writing for
class-conscious people. They to me are of genius. They are the sane. Have you
seen the insane?—Tearing their flesh and being their own keepers? Into their
awful asylum would I reach, and with CHRIST IN CONCRETE I aimed bolts of fire
into Darkness. I am a worker—and
have known no other life. Worker is blinded, gagged and driven, goaded and
beset like huge elephants maddened by mice. This Earth’s vermin are viciously
aware of Living’s transiency; their social and spiritual philosophy is: Down
with the head and soul of man, and after comes the Deluge! In their
hysterical contempt for Fellowman they appoint themselves GOD—to debase the
simple man, crying out through false oracles, commanding him to profitless
toil and cheap, bitter death. I say to the worker, you are permitting this,
and you are hurting me, too. You are the ones who give armies to Fascism; you
destroy yourself and your brothers! Oh, how to reach you! What makes you
submit, what makes you embrace suffering? Why do you conform to the weird
terrible ritual? Has Ignorance its complete immediate satisfactory eroticism?
Is the pain of endless exploitation dramatic for you—is the sweat of working
in the flower of your own stink and aching animal huddling in poor-poor
manger your entire world?!!! Oh . . . how to show him differently?
To reveal what the gift of Life could be! With CHRIST IN CONCRETE I tried to
send one gleam through the pall, the vast black hypnotism, that
self-mortification that taints the bloodstream of humanity. With my first
book I plainly mean that great WORKER created CHRIST in his own tortured
cheated image, and my HOPE is that when HE gets through reading it He might
say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know—but maybe . . . maybe!’ River was apparently
none too sanguine about the chances of the revised speech being published.
“Good luck with Di Donato,” he wrote at the close of his cover letter to
Cowley. “I tried hard, he’s really a pterodactyl.”[9] Whether or not Di
Donato ever revised to River and Cowley’s satisfaction is impossible to
determine. On August 2, 1939, a League secretary wrote to Cowley asking when
she might receive payment for the fiction session paper, but none of the
speeches finally appeared in the New
Republic. Thus, the only version of Di Donato’s speech ever to be
published was the one in Fighting Words,
wedged uncomfortably, as we have seen, between Stewart’s obfuscating
introduction and postscript. The published speech is at a considerable
distance from the unedited stenographer’s report that most closely
approximates Di Donato’s talk at the Congress, a kind of hybrid text that
draws upon both River’s original editing of the stenographer’s report and the
substantially rewritten version that Di Donato produced at Cowley’s request.
However, I point to these variant versions not because I am interested in
either establishing the text of Di Donato’s speech or in using this interesting
case of textual transmission to intervene in current editorial debates
concerning “original” and “final” authorial intentions. Rather, as my
discussion of Stewart’s handling of Di Donato’s speech suggests, my interest
in this textual history (and its attendant documents) lies in what it reveals
about the attitudes and behaviors of liberal and leftist writers toward
working-class ethnics during the Popular Front.[10] The collaboration
between River and Cowley is, in a sense, a microcosm of the Popular Front in
which leftists and liberals temporarily put aside their political differences
in order to join forces against a common enemy, fascism. Thus, the Popular
Front was essentially expedient and negative in character, a short-term
tactic against something rather than a long-term strategy for anything. Its
positive referent “democracy” always remained unstable. Even the Spanish
Civil War, the Popular Front’s most galvanizing cause, was more clearly a
battle against the forces of German
and Italian fascism than for the
Spanish Republic. For American writers, already unsure of themselves in the
arena of political struggle, this lack of consensus concerning some positive
goal was even more problematic. No longer able to articulate their
differences on the site of “proletarian literature,” liberal and leftist
writers fell back upon the seemingly uncontested and transparent decorums of
“good writing.” Irony and restraint were once again privileged over energy
and engagement, and thus the performative vitality of a speech such as Di
Donato’s was lost even on an old Dadaist like Cowley. What is most
significant about the editing of Di Donato’s speech, however, is the way in
which it manifests the negative logic of the Popular Front. Instead of
promoting a professional colleague, Cowley and River come together to treat
the working-class ethnic as if he were an enemy to be subdued. Stewart is
similarly implicated when, in his introduction, he designates Di Donato as
“the bricklayer-writer,” a hyphenate construction based on class that
inscribes even as it erases (for the Popular Front’s sake) the more typical
ethnic designation, “Italian-American.” Stewart’s hyphen is not merely a
neutral linguistic marker but, as Daniel Aaron, Anthony Tamburri, and others
have argued, an ideologically charged one meant to hold, in this case, the
working-class ethnic writer “at ‘hyphen’s length,’ so to speak, from the
established community.” Viewed in the context of Stewart’s philanthropic
rhetoric, this particular hyphen’s length would seem to measure the distance
between “the crowd” below and the top of the ivory tower where liberal
writers seemingly never work but create.[11] River further
cooperates in this distancing of the working-class ethnic writer when he
calls Di Donato “a pterodactyl,” that strange prehistoric flying reptile,
more bat than bird. River’s insult is unconsciously polyvalent. If it
announces the extinction of proletarian writers during the Popular Front, it
also testifies to the “primitive” power of their writing. For it is exactly
Di Donato’s capacity to resist the “modern” and thus supposedly proper ways
of building his various structures, that is, to work out of his own
experience and not according to some received conception of “good writing,”
that in part accounts for Di Donato’s success as a writer. In Christ in Concrete, this resistance is
most clearly evident in his frequent omission of articles preceding nouns (as
in “Nazone cast his trowel to scaffold”) and his habit of giving literal
translations of Italian phrases in dialogue (“per piacere,” for instance, is
rendered not as “please” but as “for pleasure”). In adhering to the diction
and dialect of his people, Di
Donato seems less the bricklayer than the bricoleur, Levi-Strauss’s inspired
tinkerer who abandons pre-existing plans and concepts and instead works with
the materials that are at hand. It was also as the bricoleur that Di Donato
presented himself at the Third American Writers’ Congress: “What little I
have to say about writing—whenever I am stuck I revert right back to that
which has kicked me around and I make something of it.” What Di Donato made
of his own anguish was a speech that sacrificed the formal consistency and
clarity that Cowley, Stewart, and River demanded in order to achieve what
Helen Barolini has called, speaking for all Italian/Americans, “the white
heat of telling our story.”[12] In closing, I’d like
to return briefly to River’s figure of the “pterodactyl” in order to attempt
my own bit of bricolage on Di Donato’s behalf. However damning it was meant
to be, River’s insult inadvertently remembers that remarkable passage in
Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates
likens the ascent of a loving soul to the flight of the Pteros, here not imaged as a flying reptile, but rather as a
fallen, featherless bird: For, as he receives
the effluence of beauty through the eyes, the wing moistens and he warms. And
as he warms, the parts out of which the wing grew, and which had been closed
and rigid, and had prevented the wing from shooting forth, are melted, and as
nourishment streams upon him, the lower end of the wing begins to swell and
grow from the root upwards; and the growth extends under the whole soul—for
once the whole was winged.[13] There was obviously
precious little “effluence of beauty,” nothing warming or nourishing in the
way that the literary gatekeepers of the Popular Front reflected Di Donato
back to himself. But in an age alive to a pluriculturalist notion of American
letters, we can hope that this flightless pteros,
this Pietro, this Pete the Red might once again begin his ascent.* Miami
University of Ohio |
[1]“Program for the Third American Writers Congress,”
Archives of the League of American Writers, housed at the Bancroft Library of
the University of California at Berkeley. Hereafter cited as LAW archives;
Donald Ogden Stewart, “American Writers’ Congress, June 2nd-4th,” Publishers’ Weekly, 135 (May 20, 1939):
1833.
[2]Cowley, “Notes on a Writers’ Congress,” New Republic, 99 (June 21, 1939): 192.
[3]Stewart, By a
Stroke of Luck! (New York: Paddington Press, 1975): 250; Cowley, “In
Memoriam,” 103 (August 12, 1940): 219.
[4]Stewart, ed., Fighting
Words (New York): Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1940): 7; Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck!: 250.
[5]The stenographer’s report is in the Malcolm Cowley
Collection at the Newberry Library.
[6]Stewart, Fighting
Words: 35.
[7]Stewart, Fighting
Words: 36-37; my discussion of charity is indebted to Allen Carey-Webb’s
essay, “Representing the Homeless,” forthcoming in American Literary History.
[8]For a fuller discussion of the notion of ideological
fixity, see Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Colonial Discourse and the
Stereotype,” Screen, 24 (Winter
1983): 18.
[9]River to Cowley, no date, Cowley Collection, the
Newberry Library; I found Di Donato’s revised version of his speech in the LAW
archives.
[10]Jo Clementi to Cowley, 2 August 1939, Cowley
Collection, the Newberry Library.
[11]Aaron, “The Hyphenate Writer and American Letters,” Smith Alumnae Quarterly (July 1964):
214-7; Tamburri, To Hyphenate or Not to
Hyphenate: The Italian/American Writer: An Other American (Montreal: Guernica Press, 1991); Marshall Grossman, “The
Violence of the Hyphen in Judeo-Christian,” Social
Text 22 (Spring 1989): 115-22. The quotation is from Aaron.
[12]I’ve taken my examples of Di Donato’s stylistic mannerisms
in Christ in Concrete from Jerre
Mangione’s excellent review, “Little Italy,” 100 (August 30, 1939): 110;
Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966): 16-36; Barolini, “Interview” in Fra Noi (September 1986).
[13]As quoted in Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
UP, 1987): 64.
*I would like to
thank my colleague Valerie Ross for her support and good fellowship during the
writing of this essay.