|
Pietro Di Donato:
An Overview “The wop is in the
wheelbarrow,” were writin’ words for a young Pietro Di Donato. Spoken by a
cop when Di Donato asked if he had any news as to his father’s whereabouts
following a construction accident, those words became Di Donato’s call to
write a short story that changed the direction of his life. Born in Hoboken, New
Jersey, in 1912, of Abruzzese parents, Di Donato became a bricklayer, like
his father, after his father’s tragic death on Good Friday, 1923. Fourteen
years later, Di Donato wrote “Christ in Concrete,” a short story of his
father’s work site death, and sold it to Esquire
magazine. Within two years, the
story grew into a novel which became the main selection of the “Book of the
Month Club,” chosen over John Steinbeck’s Grapes
of Wrath. Di Donato never dreamed of becoming a writer, but the novel’s
success placed him in a national spotlight. Now, just fifty years
after its momentous publication, Christ
in Concrete, like its writer, lives on the margins of mainstream American
culture. There was no golden anniversary edition or celebration of this
novel. You won’t find his name or a word about his work in Contemporary Literary Criticism; in
fact, until recently, all of Di Donato’s books Christ in Concrete, This
Woman, Immigrant Saint: The Life of
Mother Cabrini, Three Circles of
Light, and The Penitent were
out of print. Immigrant Saint,
reissued this year in St. Martin Press’s “Religious Miracle Series,” could be
a sign of renewed interest in Di Donato’s writing. We have devoted a
significant portion of this issue to the writing of Pietro Di Donato as our
way of celebrating his contribution to American literature and
Italian/American culture and his coming 80th birthday. We begin with three selections
from his work. Because so much of his work has been reprinted in magazines
and journals, we have decided to present segments that have not previously
been re-printed. The first selection
comes from the “Annunziata” section of Christ
in Concrete. Set during the Great Depression, after Geremio’s infamous
death, this section presents Paul living up to his new responsibilities as
head of the family. He helps his godfather Vincenz’ find “Job” and,
inadvertently, death. The selection from Three
Circles of Light comes from the final chapter in which the young
Paolino’s struggle to come to terms with his father’s death becomes his exit
from childhood and into the harsh “world of man.” Both selections demonstrate
how vitally important italianità is
to Di Donato. Through much of his work we gain insight into the mysteries of
Italian immigrant life. Whether he is describing a work site or a bedroom, Di
Donato’s imagery vibrates with the earthy sensuality that early Italian
immigrants brought to their American lives. However, more than simple
autobiographical portrayals, Di Donato’s stories contain a powerful strain of
cultural criticism that can inoculate even the most detached reader against
the disease of indifference. At nearly 80, Di
Donato continues his cultural criticism in a daring new project called “The
American Gospels.” What appears here is the first published excerpt of his
latest work. From Dantesque terza rima,
to Joycean stream of consciousness, to biblical prose, the entire work is a
testament to intertextual complexity of this thoroughly postmodern effort. In
his own, unique way, “The American Gospels” is the author’s presentation of
the search for truth and justice. Yet unpublished, “The Gospels” comes fifty
years after his classic Christ in Concrete,
and demonstrates the continuation of Di Donato’s life long commitment to
social criticism through story. It is my hope that
these selections will give the reader an insight into the historical
evolution of Di Donato’s consciousness as a writer: from self-absorption to
immersion into “other,” from private to public life, from what Giambattista
Vico would call the “poetic” vero
narratio to “philosophic” prose. In essence, what we have with his latest
work, is a literary example of Vico’s notion of ricorso presented by a true poet-philosopher. Following these
selections are three very different essays. Tom Johnson’s “Pietro Di Donato: il professore dei lavoratori,”
presents, through interviews, the man in contrast to his works. In “ ‘Flesh
and Soul:’ Religion in Di Donato’s Naked
Author,” Anthony D. Cavaluzzi explores, in a more scholarly fashion, the
central duality of the sacred and profane, the physical and the spiritual,
that surface and submerge throughout the author’s various publications. Finally,
Art Casciato’s “The Bricklayer as Bricoleur: Pietro Di Donato and the
Cultural Politics of the Popular Front” focuses our attention on Di Donato’s
presence as a radical, working class-ethnic writer during a pivotal period in
which much of the American intellectual left was scrambling for cover through
variations of political correctness, reversing its movement from radical left
to democratic middle-of-the-road liberalism. Casciato’s analysis of the
attempted revisions of “Pete the Red’s” short speech to the 1939 Third
American Writers Congress, here published for the first time, exposes the
tension between the emerging working-class writers and the established
liberal middle-class writers during the period of the Popular Front. We offer these essays
and the reprinted excerpts of Di Donato’s earlier works to provide a context
by which to view his new writing in “The Gospels.” This entire section is
also offered in appreciation of and as testament to the vitality of one
writer’s efforts to present a view of American life and history from an
Italian/American perspective. Columbia
College, Chicago |