New Perspectives on William Demby: A Special Issue of African American Review

Abstract

New Perspectives on William Demby:A Special Issue of African American Review Melanie Masterton Sherazi (bio), Ugo Rubeo (bio), and James C. Hall (bio) Introduction Following his service in Italy during World War II, William Demby (b. 1922) returned to live in Rome in 1947. Inspired by Giorgio de Chirico's paintings that he viewed often at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum in his youth and by Roberto Rossellini's films, Demby considered a move to Rome as the "gritt[ier]," less obvious choice than Paris for an artist.1 Rents were cheap in a city rebuilding itself from the rubble of fascism and war and a revolutionary antifascist current flowed through the artistic circles into which Demby landed, rather serendipitously, upon his postwar return. He was invited almost immediately to live in a flat on Via San Teodoro overlooking the Ancient Forum with a group of Italian leftist and Communist artists and filmmakers, including Renzo Vespignani and Marcello Muccini. There, he got back to work on his debut novel in progress, Beetlecreek, and was driven to complete it as an artist living among other serious artists. From his bohemian flat across from Rome's ancient ruins, Demby took a writing sojourn in the Palazzo Ca' Dario, an elegant, late fifteenth-century residence on Venice's Grand Canal, where Peggy Guggenheim was living just a few doors down.2 Of his first novel's extraordinary composition history, Demby himself acknowledged that some positive astral conjunction might have worked in his favor, recalling that "it all came together in a palace in Venice; and the first thing I know is that I had finished a novel" (qtd. in Micconi 131). Beetlecreek was, in fact, a novel several years in the making: Demby had work-shopped it before the war as Margaret Walker's student at West Virginia State College, then an HBCU.3 He continued drafting it during his service in Italy and while completing his studies at Fisk University under the mentorship of Robert Hayden.4 The spectacular Italian settings of Beetlecreek's composition are at odds with the novel's eponymous, fictional town in the segregated, Depression-era US South. Moreover, Demby's own mobilities signal the dizzying quality of his lived experiences in this period: a move with his family after high school from an integrated neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Clarksburg, West Virginia; his later wartime service in Italy in an African American troop; his settling into a flat overlooking the ruins of Ancient Rome; and his aforementioned retreat in a Venetian palace on the Grand Canal—all in the span of just a few years.5 In these ways and more, Demby's life and work resisted the entrenched racist norms of Jim Crow America. This special issue of African American Review appears in the centenary year of Demby's birth on Christmas Day in 1922. Although he was honored with an Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, Demby's body of work has struggled to gain a lasting foothold in the African American literary canon and in classrooms, perhaps for the very fact of his living off the radar for decades in Italy. In actuality, Demby often traveled between Italy and the United States while working and visiting family. The issue aims to energize new directions in the study of the overdetermined workings of literary reputation and of place, genre, and style in [End Page 111] the shaping of an African American canon. Presented largely in chronology with Demby's artistic career, which spanned over sixty years, the issue's essays celebrate and contend with his work's generative eclecticism and transnational orientations. Italian Contexts Just a few months after Beetlecreek's appearance in 1950, another fortuitous event happened to propel Demby's early career when the major Italian press Mondadori's "Medusa" series—widely acclaimed, and dedicated to the works of "Great Narrators of All Countries"—published Festa a Beetlecreek as Series No. 243 in its signature emerald-green hardcover. Demby's novel's translator, Fernanda Pivano, was a young intellectual from Turin who, though not an academic, was already on her way to becoming one of Italy's leading Americanists...