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3. The New World of the Second Generation:Pietro di Donato and John Fante
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178 3 The New World of the Second Generation: Pietro di Donato and John Fante “You too are here for the World’s Fair!” he smiles happily as the elevator stops, and the door opens wide. —Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini The rise of the second generation, which offers a very different expressive world, is well represented by two notable “neoAmericans ,” Pietro di Donato and John Fante. By the end of the thirties, as I’ve said, narrative in Italian was clearly on a downswing. Bearing witness to this is the scarcity of production, the dark and problematical plots, and above all the quantity and the quality of books written in English, which are no more, as in a long and glorious past going back to the eighteenth century, the isolated fruit of strong personalities but the expression—individual and traumatic, if you like—of a collective adjustment within the adopted society. For this very reason it is important to pick out the points of contact between the two generations, to observe, so to speak, the young writers as they leave the house of their parents. When The World of Tomorrow appeared, in English, in the yearbook Leonardo at the beginning of 1939, Pietro di Donato (1911–92) had not yet published Christ in Concrete, the proletarian novel that immediately roused a “wave of emotion” (Rimanelli), impressing the name of the self-taught writer on the attention of America. The novel came out a little later, in April. A few months afterward, with enviable timing, it was mentioned in Italy by Elio Vittorini (at the peak of his work for Americana) in the weekly Oggi (28 October 1939), on a page that, after seventy years, seems to express the high quality of the Italian literature of that period. Landolfi denigrates Panzini, Giansiro Ferrata reviews Gadda’s Le meraviglie d’Italia, and, finally, Vittorini presents Christ in Concrete with harsh disdain: For long stretches, the book is loaded with tedious old-fashioned psychology ; with characters drowning in details of pure contingency . . .; and 179 voices of italian america with scenes developed according to a taste for an almost provincial realism that recalls the Italian realism that originated with Verga. . . . This useless firing of big guns is due perhaps more to bad habit and sluggishness of taste than to an ineluctable personal inclination. It should be noted, however, that, despite these criticisms, di Donato ’s novel was soon offered to the Italian public.1 But we are still at the start of di Donato’s career, a step back with respect to his masterpiece. With painful irony, the “world of tomorrow ” that is mentioned in the story in English refers to the promotional title of the massive construction project of the World’s Fair (completed in 1940), conceived and directed by the demiurge of urban architectural modernism in New York, Robert Moses; and it is at a construction site at the fair that the narrator temporarily finds employment.2 The physical exhaustion and daily hard labor of the autobiographical protagonist are in stark contrast to the unrestrained speculative, innovating energy symbolized by the citadel of commerce. The description of waking up and traveling from home to the job in a cold, windy dawn immerses us immediately in the dim, dark atmosphere of the commute. Rapid, almost inessential, the names of the “stations” of this ordinary collective calvary rush by: the Sound (the arm of the sea that separates Long Island from the mainland: the di Donatos had just moved from West Hoboken, New Jersey, to Northport , on Long Island), the railroad hub of Jamaica, the crowded neighborhood of Flushing, in Queens, and finally the arrival at the Fair site. Similarly, signs of a corrupt, already threadbare modern life creep into the narrator’s not-quite-awake senses: from the ring of the alarm clock to the rumbling of the cold engine, from the metallic rhythm of the train to the disturbing appearance of advertising posters. And even meetings with a young blonde and two Irish cops are little more than flashes, instantaneous, which allude impressionistically to a stimulus of the senses and a curiosity about the small details of the day (it is not hard to pick up, if fleetingly, a certain imaginary Italian American, caught between ethnic rivalry and the wish for assimilation). Even before setting foot on the site, therefore, the writer-worker, along with a crowd of similar types, has had to endure the weight of the most trite mass rituals...