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Pietro Di Donato: Il professore dei lavoratori[1] In the summer of
1985, I spent some time with Pietro Di Donato at his home near the Long Island
Sound. He lived in a house that he and a brother built with brick salvaged
from an abandoned sanitarium. The conversation lasted throughout a torpid
afternoon and evening, and was continued some days later while the writer and
a neighbor boy harvested oysters from a nearby bay. We capped our talk with a
bottle of zinfandel and fresh oysters served with lemon slices and the
writer’s “secret sauce.” As we looked out over a vegetable garden that could
easily cover a city lot, the words, ideas, and memories bounced around in no
apparent order. Later on, Di Donato would show me his study. Light-headed
from the wine and warm weather, we leaned on a mantle that displayed a photo
of a sotted Norman Mailer grinning with an equally-drunken Pietro. Other
memorabilia in the room included book jackets in seven different languages.
Like a great many U.S. artists, Di Donato has a much larger international
reputation than he does in his homeland. And so we leaned and
dreamed while the room spun. And the disjointed pieces of talk found a
pattern as if they were being sorted in a centrifuge. “Damn the Scaffolding!” On Good Friday, 1923,
Pietro Di Donato was a twelve-year-old boy who lived in an Abruzzian
community (“the land of the paesani”) in Hoboken, New Jersey. By the end of
the holy weekend, the community became enveloped in a tragedy that would
change Di Donato forever, and become the source material for Christ in Concrete—the novel that is a
primary root of Italian-American literature. Di Donato remains obsessed with the
tragedy and retells its details as if it had happened yesterday, as if he had
never written about it. According to the Long
Islander, his father, Geremio, had complained to a general contractor that
the scaffolding on a construction job was too weak to hold the weight of the
materials in the soft-walled hole, but the boss ignored the warnings. “Damn
the scaffolding, keep working” the boss ordered. Damned, the timbers gave way
under the weight of tons of cement, stone, and the pressures of the sandy soil. He stands as he
describes his father, Geremio, a masonry foreman, and other bricklayers
shielding themselves from the pulverizing blows of the heavy wooden
scaffolding “that snapped like so many toothpicks.” Some were crushed
outright. Others suffocated in the debris. Still others died later from
trauma. The writer falls
limp, shoulders forward, as he continues to hear a deathly silence pierced
only by moans of the dying—the dust not yet settled. Unabashedly, he cries,
telling how it took days to extricate the victims from the rubble. Yet when
the boy went to a local police station to find out about his father, he had
hope. “I went up to the
desk sergeant,” he remembers. “The station was chaotic, filled with families
trying to get information. The cop at the desk, he looks down at me and says:
‘The wop you’re lookin’ for is in the alley.’ The wop was the body of my father stuffed in a wheelbarrow with a
sheet of cardboard thrown over him, just like he was a piece of garbage.” The scene would haunt
Di Donato throughout his life. It is the image of his father’s body stuffed
in a wheelbarrow in an alley behind a police station that eventually lead to Christ in Concrete. “The book is
simply the truth about my family,” he says. “It tells the story of my father
who wanted to do his job and take care of his family; a wish that was stolen
from him with his life.” In Pursuit of the Maelstrom Di Donato guesses
that he would have been an artist of some kind, if not a writer; as a child,
he dreamed of being a movie actor. “I’m an anachronism,” he says. “I was
uneducated, but always an intuitive intellectual . . . even as a
child. I loved the movies. I ran away four times before I was ten years old
to go to Hollywood.” He laughs as he remembers the mother-torturing jaunts.
“And my mother beat me because she said that I went to so many movies that
I’d go blind.” He continues: “I
always wondered what it would be like to be someone else—a different race or
class—a different type of person. Life then was percolating with a maelstrom
of races. But initially I lived in the womb of the Abruzzian clan; it was a
culture that helped people to keep their lives intact. Until finally I began
to realize that there were other people in the world. Other gods. As soon as
I was confronted by the reality of differences, I became curious and
confused, and wanted to know what it would be like to be different. Because,
you know, every race that you can think of was dumped through Ellis Island.
Life in Hoboken was a bazaar...and bizarre.” The consciousness of
difference hounded the artist-in-formation: “I guess I was always different from the other Italian kids. I didn’t fit
into the scheme as well as they did. I was a dreamer and an idealist, even as
a child. I lived in a world of compulsive love for my parents: my mother was
a heroine and my father was a god—Eros. I was fascinated by dualities, even
then. I was especially fascinated by the Italian duality of the sacred and
profane. “I was ever the
sensualist. I revelled in the sights and sounds and the tastes and smells
around me. I still remember a fetus in a jar at the Aioro’s Drug Store
. . . my father running a hand up the leg of a Spanish piano
teacher . . . the smell of garlic and oil . . . the
Turkish woman with a tatoo who smoked a corncob pipe . . . the
languages: Italian, Hebrew, Greek—you name it. “I was surrounded by
mystery and religious rituals of every kind. I was liberal. I absorbed
everything that I saw and heard. I pursued
it. I lived in the street world, always play-acting and mimicking the life
around me. It was a dream world . . . a world of make-believe.” But Di Donato’s dream
world was shattered by the reality of the construction site cave-in. “With
the death of my father,” he says, “there was only one goal—to keep the family
together.” Keeping the family together meant going to work. At the age of
twelve, the skinny dreamer picked up his father’s tools and went to work as a
mason’s apprentice. With the help of a godfather, he left his dream world and
entered the work world, “with the paesani and its many facets of tribal
brutality.” A Second Apprenticeship Something else
happened too. As the boy worked his way to becoming a master mason, he
received another kind of apprenticeship. On the job, to his surprise, he
found a new outlet for his idealism and imagination. He met workers, who—like
him—were “different.” They were radicals and activists who had chased their
own dreams for a better life for working people. And like the paesani, they
were immigrants and the children of immigrants. He says, “These were the
workers who were attempting to right social wrongs—union people. The majority
were Jews—working-class Jews. They were glaziers, iron workers, dairymen and
laborers. And they were dreamers and idealists like me . . .” Di Donato, barely a
teen, became enveloped in the wave of revolutionary idealism and social
reform that washed up against the xenophobia and red scare hysteria of the
Roaring Twenties. He was active in the effort to free Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti—two Italian immigrant anarchists—who were executed for
having the temerity to be Italian and leftist in the United States. Though
the campaign to free the reformers failed, and though it left a bitter legacy
for Di Donato and other Italian/American progressives, the struggle helped to
create a social consciousness in the young mason—an awareness that would
eventually become an important ingredient in his writing. Meanwhile, Di Donato
and his family prospered, even during the early years of the Great Depression.
The clan moved to Long Island and the mason was able to find plenty of work
because he’d become a master in his trade. But the Depression and labor wars
caught up to him in 1936; he was fired during a strike. He chuckles now and
says: “The boss, he didn’t know he was creating a writer, did he?” An Explosive Entrance “I had nothing but
time, so I went to the library. I discovered books. I read voraciously—a book
a day. I read the great classics. It was like being Rip Van Winkle. I awoke.”
Pietro Di Donato began an intense exploration of the world of work—and the
world at large—through the eyes of writers. He says, “Like Walt
Whitman, I felt that the strength of our nation is in the people. In the
sense that they produce, they break their backs, they sweat, they put up
buildings, they dig coal, they die in accidents, they fight wars, and they
pay for all the charlatans and prostitutes—all the evil people who run
things.” Di Donato had discovered that ideas called “foreign and subversive”
when proposed by immigrant laborers lived in the lines of some of the
greatest literature in the United States. Soon, he was to get a
job with the Works Progress Administration—the WPA of the New Deal. “They
made a friend of mine and me heads of a theatre,” he remembers. “Hell, I
never read a play or even saw one performed; now I had my own theatre. It was
a great chance at being somebody else. “We started an improv
theatre. We did what you’d call psychodrama. We did whatever came to us,
whatever worked. We had a great time. Oh, we were broke; it was the
Depression. You were always broke. We’d sneak into farmers’ fields and
organize vegetables. We’d go down to the Sound and dig for clams and
oysters.” During this theatre
period, Di Donato was shown the play “Awake and Sing,” by Clifford Odets. “I
said, ‘You call this shit writing? I’ll show you some writing.” Claiming to never
have written a word before, Di Donato set out to write his father’s story. He
called it “Christ In Concrete.” He decided to send the story to Esquire magazine because he’d seen one
in a drug store, but he’d never read it he says. He enclosed a cover letter
that said, “Fuck You. This is real, not the shit you publish,” and challenged
the magazine to print the story. Esquire
published the story. It became so successful that the editors republished it
in a hardbound edition and it was picked up in Best Short Stories of 1938. Di Donato then expanded the story
into the novel that was published under the same title in 1939. The book was
chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection. (Ironically, the BOMC refused
John Fante’s Wait Until Spring Bandini—an
Italian/American novel about Fante’s brick mason father—that same year). The book received
mixed, but passionate, reviews and Di Donato became an instant celebrity at
the age of 28. “No one would believe that I’d been a master bricklayer for
ten years,” he says, but the reviews of the time don’t agree. Nearly every
one comments upon the power of his writing, literary skill and their relationship to his original
trade—good or bad. L.B Salomon writes in
the Nation: “Only a man whose
muscles and stomach have felt the fatigue of hard manual labor and hunger can
paint characters with such blunt, convincing strokes.” His editor, Lambert
Davis, concurs: ‘Christ in
Concrete’ . . . is about labor itself—what some people call the
curse of Cain and what others think of as the sacrament that makes all men
brothers. . . . Only an Italian, I think, writing of poor Italian
workmen and their families could achieve the simple humanity of ‘Christ in
Concrete.’ [Yet] It is the great talent of Pietro Di Donato that being
. . . Italian and writing of . . . Italians, he is at the
same time an American writing of America . . . he makes you feel
that these people are the builders of America, as much a part of it as its
rivers and mountains . . . [in] a language as American as that of
Walt Whitman. (Source) However, an unnamed
reviewer in the (London) Times
literary supplement sniffs: “The author has a coarse virility of phrases that
is sometimes impressive and a turn of luscious dialogue . . . But there are also yards
of rhetorical and overwritten stuff, lashings of the horrific and an
excessively immature fondness for prose experiment.” Slouching Toward Oblivion When World War II
officially broke out, the mason/writer declared conscientious objector status
and enlisted in a work camp in Cooperstown, New York. There, he met Helen
Dean, a widowed actress from Chicago. They were married by New York mayor
Fiorello La Guardia in 1943. Di Donato was now officially a star. He and his wife moved
to Long Island and he spent the post-War years occupying himself as a
celebrity, building contractor, and heavy drinker. He explains: “I didn’t know what
else to write. And I’ve always been a sensualist. I’ve always been a slave to
passions and feelings. I figure that we have to pay for living by dying, so I
went all-out. I’m a mercurial, volatile, changing entity.” In 1958 he wrote
another novel, This Woman, an
attempt to explore his confused feelings over having married a woman who
wasn’t a virgin. The book sold poorly, was banned and went out of print. He
continues to rewrite the novel, trying to discover a play in it. In 1960, he wrote Three Circles of Light, a story that
describes the life of his family before the period told in Christ in Concrete. Though the book
was written more than two decades after his masterpiece, it was compared to
it—quite unfavorably. The kindest critics write that some of the scenes had
the power and life of the original story, but none felt that it had the
continuity to make a novel. A Rehabilitation in Plastic Di Donato’s next two
books were biographies. Immigrant
Saint: The Life of Mother Cabrini (1960) was well received, but quickly
went out of print; it has recently been republished by St. Martin’s Press. A
few years ago, he sent a xeroxed copy to Mario Cuomo, the governor of New
York. The politician wrote a long and complimentary letter in return that may
have helped to reestablish the book’s value. The second biography,
The Penitent (1962) is a story of
Alessandro Serenelli, the murderer of Maria Goretti, a twelve-year-old
Italian peasant girl who was sainted after the murder. The book is a powerful
argument against capital punishment, describing how Serenelli eventually
suffered through a long and arduous process of redemption and conversion. The
book also describes the tremendous role that media (in this case the
equivalent of Italian supermarket tabloids) play in the development of
popular consciousness. The Penitent
can be seen as a predecessor to the “new journalism” that developed in the
United States later on in the 1960s. It is also out of print. During the rest of
the ‘60s and well into the ‘70s, Di Donato concentrated on short fiction and
journalism. He published in a number of major magazines in the United States
and his stories were collected in Naked
Author (1970). In 1978, he won the prestigious Overseas Press Club Award
for an article, “Christ in Plastic.” The piece, published in Penthouse Magazine (Dec. ’78) is an
account of the kidnapping and murder of President Aldo Moro of Italy. Di
Donato spoke to members of the Red Brigade guerilla group that executed the
politician, and describes how Moro is sold out by his own Christian
Democratic Party and its clerical allies. Though nearly seventy when he wrote
the story, Di Donato was at his apex as a journalist. Presently (1985) he
is working on a major project entitled “The Gospels.” Di Donato’s gospels are
an imaginative retelling of the biblical tales for which they are named.
“I’ve never overcome my Catholicism,” he confides. “And you must remember,
that the Bible was not written by
professional writers. It was originally told by the Apostles of
Christ—working men.” Di Donato’s version
of the Gospels weaves contemporary discoveries, such as black holes in space
and nuclear weaponry, into more traditional concerns, such as the eternal
struggle between good and evil. “I’m the kind of writer who writes to
unburden his passions, his rage . . .” he says. He rages against
the potential destruction of humankind. Continual Flowering “I don’t want to talk
about trivia,” he warns. “If you’re a writer, you have to have something to
say. If you don’t, you’re just a hack and may as well write soap operas.” The writer’s contempt
for television is naked. “We have no cultural cohesion in this country
because of television, as much as anything else. It makes everyone a
‘caffone’—a lout. ‘Duh,duh,duh. Look a me. I’m Rocky. Uggah, uggah.’ The
potential of people, the potential of our
people, is being wasted in front of that box. I agonize over the reality of
the common people today . . . “And now I look back
on those years that I wasted myself. We have so little time to waste. I look
back with bitterness, too. I’m bitter, righteously bitter like Lot’s wife,
Orpheus, and Eurydice. First, I’m a celebrity and then I’m ignored like I
never existed. My books sold throughout the western world, but not nearly as
well here in the United States. Yet, I continue to look back . . .
I will always look back. The magic of writing is the catharsis of being able
to look back.” He could have added, a catharsis that television doesn’t
allow. “I look to the
present, too,” he says, pointing to a neighbor fiddling with a speed boat in
the driveway next door. Di Donato shakes his head and the color drains from
his face as he takes a long drink from his glass of wine. “He is the present.
All through the Vietnam War, he pretended it didn’t exist. And now (in 1985)
millions like him have no regrets, no memory. They have no conscience. It took decades for us to recognize what
the war meant to our own young people; but we still don’t give a damn about
the millions of Southeast Asians that died, or that the entire subcontinent
was poisoned by Agent Orange. We just don’t give a damn.” There is a long
silence. Then his face lights up again. Maybe it’s the wine. He leans over
the small table between us. The feeling is intimate. “Nothing remains
static,” he says in a low, rasping, confidential voice. “Eventually, the wisdom
of the working people will prevail. The world can’t function without workers.
These are the people who should be given a voice,” he says, looking me
directly in the eye as if he’s making an accusation. “Until the working
people take responsibility for the world, there’s only going to be more
stagnation and degeneration.” He’s pounding the table with each word now. Then he sits back in
his lawn chair and he gestures freely and talks with great enthusiasm like a
professor or preacher who has finally discovered the nugget of the talk: “Take the state of
Italian/American culture, for example. I’m dismayed. There are so few
Italian/American artists with soul, with zeal, with fanaticism. Whether it’s against the insulting image of us in the
media or the silence about the hundreds of unknown Italian/Americans among
us—we seem to have lost the will to fight for renewal. The fight for renewal
has always been at the heart of the Italian/American genius. First, you protest.
Then, you have to say: ‘If these so-called Italians on TV and in the movies
are Italian, then I’m not Italian.’ Now is our time. We can still have an
Italian/American culture with an idealistic soul, with fight in it. Boldness
leads to continual flowering.” Chicago,
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[1]This piece was originally published, in slightly
different form, in Fra Noi
(September, 1985) Northlake, IL.