Sparkle Street Press

Herald Tribune Daily Book Review, 25 September 1961 – A Lost King

Just about everybody who met Raymond DeCapite’s folks in “The Coming of Fabrizze,” which brightened the spring of 1960, is going to have to journey out to Cleveland to meet another batch of them in his second novel, “A Lost King.” At the risk of being a shade peremptory about it, let’s call this an order. As the armchair travelers will discover when they get there, it will also prove a pleasure.

No Silence, Please

Mr. DeCapite’s folks, gratified readers of “Fabrizze,” will recall and newcomers will presently learn, aren’t exactly members of his family, but then again they are, in a manner of speaking. They populate the Italian-American colony in Cleveland where he was born and raised. They populate his stories, too, and fill them with food, talk, wine, talk, music and more talk. They laugh and cry with vast exuberance. They are wonderful.

The cast is smaller and less exclusively Italian-American, and the tone somewhat more restrained in “A Lost King” than in “Fabrizze,” that sunlit folklore festival. Some Greek-American and Polish-American neighbors and others have roles in “A Lost King,” and the tale it tells has its somber side. But in general the air is much the same, that of an Old World enclave whose foreigness is fading but still discernible as it melts into the American mainstream.

Why Work?

Thus, it would be startling to hear that there is a good bit of Mr. DeCapite himself in “A Lost King’s” narrator, young Paul Christopher, who has an Italian father, a poet’s aversion to the demands of workaday commerce, a wry Mediterranean wit, and music in his soul. In any case, we have here a father-and-son story that is also the story of foreign-born ;parent and first-generation American American child, by turns tender and comic, to wit.

The old widower, embittered by the loss of a beloved wife, made still gloomier by illness and a daughter’s elopement with a go-getting no-good, dreams that this teenage son will have the success that he himself never knew. The son has other ideas about what constitute the American dream—for instance, playing the harmonica while riding around on a wagon with a watermelon peddler, and thinking about a girl named Peggy. What is life for if it is not to be enjoyed?

He tries, though, to please the father who regularly clouts him across the head because the son loves and understands his father and would like nothing better than to make the old man proud of him. Mr. DeCapite has a lot of rueful fun with young Paul’s struggles with the American economic system–none of them successful, of course, since a harmonica player isn’t apt to be a good assistant butcher and one who is a poet at heart is sure to have his troubles feeding a gluing machine in a carton factory.

This is familiar stuff, you may say, and you would be right. But Mr. DeCapite moulds it into something distinctly his own, partly by way of a simple style that sings, mostly with an unsentimental poignance, an authentic humor born in his people and never imposed upon them. Yes, I think you will enjoy this second trip to Cleveland.

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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.

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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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