Sparkle Street Press
Published Works of Authors Mike & Raymond DeCapite
Herald Tribune, April 1961 – Book Review: The Coming of Fabrizze
Shall we perhaps have a ground rule or two, right here at the starting line?
You are an austere reader with a taste for realism and a quick, disapproving eye for the half-smile that occasionally creeps by mistake into those books that make up so much of our literature these days. Even the great ones of the past, if they give way to humor or romance, are not for you.
On this the ninety-fifth anniversary of “Alice in Wonderland,” for instance, you are moved to stick a pin into a helpless image of Lewis Carroll. One midnight is as good as another for throwing a glass slipper at the head of poor Cinderella. Tom Sawyer is a pest. And you can have no use whatever for “The Coming of Fabrizze.”
Enchantment in Ohio
But perhaps you are not addicted to any of these dour notions, in which event you must find yourself delighted with this first novel by a thirty-four year old Clevelander. There is every sign that he really is an irresponsible one, this Raymond DeCapite, who has put on an outrageously sentimental, comic folklore festival about an Italian-American colony in Cleveland, Ohio, back in the 1920s when all the land was a little slaphappy–and no one more so than these transplanted countrymen of the Medicis, Giuseppe, Garibaldi, Christopher Columbus, F.M. Shaine, Enrico Caruso and others whose hearts have belonged to Italia.
Indeed, it is hard to think offhand of any one quite like Mr. DeCapite since the early William Saroyan. You surely remember those crazy Saroyan Armenians in and around Fresno, California. Mr. DeCapite’s Cleveland Italians are their cousins by temperament if not by blood. The wine flows incessantly. The music never stops. You can all but smell the sausage and onion frying right out there on the printed page. A bit of neighborhood gossip takes off like–appropriately–a Roman candle. A casual inquiry after a neighbor’s health glows like a lyric.
Work? What of It?
When they are not tending to one another’s business at a furious rate, some of the colony work on the railroad, but even then they have their own way about it.
“What can we do for him?” asks Fabrizze, the boss of a track construction gang, when one of his crew solicits a job for a compatriot.
“He plays the clarinet,” says the emissary.
“Tell him to come to work,” says Fabrizze. “He’ll play for the men during the lunch hour.”
The truth is, Fabrizze is the boss of everything and everybody in this beguiling haven of song, drink, food and perpetual talk that sounds like poetry translated from another language into prose in our own. Fabrizze, of the golden hair and the big smile, is larger than life, and in general handsomer. Every one in the colony has loved him since he arrived, an innocent from the Abruzzi, under the patronage of his Uncle Augustine, who had returned to the old country, but then got homesick for an American pick and shovel and brought his young relative back with him.
Might As Well Surrender
The matchmakers pursue Fabrizze on behalf of nubile clients, and finally the right one turns up. Even then, the disappointed ones love him. They and all the other colonists love him when he launches a most successful homemade wine business, and opens a grocery store whose every item is straight from Elysium. They even love him when having accepted their money for investment in the Big Market, they discover that Fabrizze himself cannot single-handedly reverse the melancholy trend of October, 1929. (“Where is the money?” his wise wife kept asking as the paper profits piled up. It was a point that escaped many a learned economist dwelling on the Plateau of Prosperity).
You don’t have to believe a word of it, of course, but if you know what’s good for you I think you will give in at once.
The Saturday Review of Literature 14 May 1960 – On the Merry Road to Market
by John Fante
Raymond DeCapite is a writer of exquisite talents: phrase-maker, dreamer, poet, teller of fairy tales, a new novelist with a charming ability to avoid reality without boredom and to concoct a novel that one can read from beginning to end without stopping to wonder or care about the plot.
With marvelous enchantment Mr. DeCapite makes the immigrant ordeal in America a lark almost to the point of nonsense, and all the joys of sweet poverty sing out in his pellucid phrases.
His effortless Italians work on the railroad as section hands, and Mr. DeCapite makes it delightful work indeed, which it isn’t, but his people sing at it, drink lots of wine, and life is a graceful canzone.
But presently, as one reads on, trapped deeper into the delicate web of the author’s magic, there begins an eye-blinking suspicion that his people are idiots, quaint and extremely stylized in the manner of Steinbeck’s paisanos in Tortilla Flat. Life is even better among DeCapite’s gentle folk: There is neither hunger nor despair, and the problems of the immigrant in the United States are never stated. Not that Mr. DeCapite is a liar so much as that he can’t be bothered with the truth at this writing: maybe in some other novel, some other time.
He sees America of the early 1920s with streets paved in gold, and to prove it his joyous section hands actually take a fling at the stock market and do very well for a time. True, they are wiped out in the spectacular crash of 1929, but even this is something to sing about, for they become the first section hands (to my knowledge) who participated in that high-toned debacle. Moreover, Mr. DeCapite keeps hopes high to the very end, and persuades the reader on the last page that prosperity is just around the corner.
The hero of this bewitching fabrication is a young man called Fabrizze—blue-eyed, golden-haired, optimistic, a born leader from the mountains of Abruzzi. Arriving in Cleveland, Ohio, he lives with a colony of other Abruzzese and takes a job on the Great Northern Shore Railroad. His rise is rapid. He becomes boss of a section gang and, with friends, accumulates enough money to go into the grocery business. At this point a mystery figure enters the story, one Vivolo, a money manipulator, a sharpie in stocks and bonds. He becomes Fabrizze’s friend and advisor on the ever-expanding market.
Fabrizze prospers. He invests not only for himself but for his cronies. After the Crash, he disappears, grief-stricken for having betrayed his friends. Rumor has it that he has gone to Chicago, working on the railroad again, starting at the bottom, but steadily rising once more. From time to time his friends in Cleveland get letters from him, and he sends them money to compensate for their losses on the market. Then:
“Spring came to remind them of the gay flashing days of the recent year. Sweet with hope was the time and it was made perfect by a long letter from Fabrizze. He saluted each of them by name, and then he announced that he was sending to Italy for his cousins.
“’Why not?’ said Fabrizze. ‘Let them come, let them come. I am longing to see them. Augustine tells me that they have nothing but hope. What more do they need?’”
One cannot help answering that in the year 1930 they will need considerably more money than a section hand can save, merely for the passage, and they will need passports to a country that, in the depths of the Depression, took a dim view of unskilled laborers entering her gates. But to quibble with Mr. DeCapite about these minor facts is to lose sight of the spell he evokes. He is a sweet writer.
The New York Times, 08 April 1960 – Book of the Times
When Augustine went home to his native village of Rivisondoli after eight years’ hard labor in a railroad yard in Cleveland, he intended to stay there. He had saved his money, had never looked at a woman and had lived largely on beans and lentils. But somehow he couldn’t tell his old friends and neighbors the whole truth about life in America and what he did tell them made them all doubly anxious to go there at once. Augustine’s orphan nephew, Fabrizze, was the most anxious of all! And so, almost without Augustine understanding how it came about, he found himself back again in the seething Italian district a few blocks from the railroad yard and even swinging the same shovel with his initials on it in the same gang. But there was n important difference. Fabrizze was there, too, and there never was anybody in Cleveland like Fabrizze, the engaging here of Raymond DeCapite’s engaging first novel, “The Coming of Fabrizze.”
Raymond DeCapite, whose father and grandparents were born in Italy, was born and reared in Cleveland and lives there now. In “The Coming of Fabrizze” he has written a modern folk tale so filled with love, laughter and the joy of life that it out to persuade anybody that any Clevelander not a member of that city’s Italian colony was sadly underprivileged. To miss such bubbling gaiety, such delight in food, drink, kindness and spontaneous friendship!
Way of the Lighthearted
Reading these merry pages is something like eating a dinner of the very best spaghetti and meat sauce with plenty of Chianti and a string orchestra near by playing “Santa Lucia.”
To his Uncle Augustine’s surprise Fabrizze turned out to be a natural leader and an organizer with a golden touch. In no time at all he was a section foreman in the yard and soon afterward an acting supervisor. He opened a store selling imported Italian foods. He made wine in his basement and sold it for more money than he earned working for the railroad.
Fabrizze wrote and read letters for others and sent money home to help old friends come to Cleveland to find husbands, wives and jobs. He himself was a great catch, but he avoided the girls paraded before him until he met and married Mary Mendone, whose every movement was like a dance. Kind, high-spirited and gregarious beyond the understanding of any Anglo-Saxon, Fabrizze was a great man and a hero.
Does it all seem to idyllic—these joyful immigrants singing, dancing, drinking and loving without a shadow of unemployment, poverty or grief? Not really, because this is not a realistic, documentary novel. It is a fairy story of innocence and euphoria in an Eden named Cleveland without even a serpent in the garden. Mr. DeCapite’s characters are real enough and deftly portrayed. Their escapades are pleasantly humorous. But Mr. DeCapite does not contend that life in Cleveland during the Nineteen Twenties was every exactly like this. His purpose is only to please and to provide and appropriate ending that endows his story with something of the nature of a parable.
This comes when Fabrizze and his friends discover the wonders of the stock market, so much more exciting than any sort of gambling previously known to them. They never did understand the character of paper profits, but as theirs mounted their fever rose also and became mania. And so there was a serpent in the garden after all, a serpent named reckless irresponsibility. Fabrizze and his friends were too childish and ignorant to be meanly greedy. They were just enthralled by the most marvelous of America’s many marvels. Who wouldn’t pick up diamonds in the street or take advantage of so easy a way of getting rich?
Spoken by Soothsayers
Mr. DeCapite extends his cheerful story only a little way past the fatal stock market crash and so concludes it on a properly moral and edifying note. To explore further into the dark days of the depression would not be in keeping with the fanciful tale he has to tell.
The old man was talking “I went out for a walk,” said Bassetti. “The trees were fresh in the wind. The warmth of the sun reached into my bones. I saw a smile here and there among the neighbors. Children were playing. And then I heard music. It was Igino playing the harmonica. They say it’s a song of love.”
“Beauty on every side,” said Fabrizze.
“And trouble enough into the bargain,” said Mendone.
“I came here,” said Bassetti. “It was enough to make an old man suspicious. And so I came looking for Mendone.”
“I was sleeping,” said Mendone. “I was trying to recover from the day before.”
“I used to ask for things,” said Bassetti. “I asked for this and that and the other. And now? Now I ask for life.”
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