Sparkle Street Press
Published Works of Authors Mike & Raymond DeCapite
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.