William Demby

Demby, William (b. 1922), journalist, actor, film adapter, and expatriate novelist. W. E. B. Du Bois argued in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that African Americans possessed a unique “double consciousness” because of their “twin rooted” heritage of being both African and American. For William Demby, this dichotomy of racial and national oppositions became an asset rather than a handicap. Born 25 December 1922 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Demby spent his formative years in a middle-class, multiethnic neighborhood where its three African American families resided harmoniously with first-generation immigrants. Individualism prevailed concomitantly with nationalism so that people felt proudly ethnic, but still American, recalls Demby. He never felt divided because of nationalistic practices of discriminating against blacks.

Demby's parents, however, experienced the color problem that Du Bois predicted would be facing the twentieth century. William Demby and Gertrude Hendricks had been aspiring architectural and medical students to Philadelphia's colleges, but were denied entrance. They lived during the race riots and lynchings of blacks punctuating America after World War I. When they married in this period and moved from Mead to Pittsburgh where William and his siblings were born, the senior Demby redirected his goals. He first worked in a munitions factory and then joined Hopewell Natural Gas Company as a file clerk, which enabled him to support his family comfortably.

Pittsburgh's diverse community inspired young William's fledgling creative impulses to blend the real and fantastic like Romantic writers. Ghosts of Indians seemed to dwell in the woods near the thirteen-year-old's home. Ordinary transaction sheets that he processed as an after-school file clerk at Hopewell Gas Company seemed filled with Romantic characters. By the time Demby completed high school with friends and classmates who were ethnically Irish, Polish, or Italian; religiously Catholic or Protestant; or politically Socialist, Republican, or Democratic, he had become conscious of both ethnic pride and ethnic hate. His father owned one of the few radios in the neighborhood, and Demby heard the fearsome messages of fascist dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and the awesome prizefight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling in 1936 that diminished notions of Aryan superiority. This multiplicity of cultures sparked exciting musings, recalls Demby, practically forcing him to become a writer.

Demby's family's move south after his graduation from Langley High School in 1941 greatly influenced his worldview. The predominantly black world of Clarksburg, West Virginia, enthralled Demby. A socialist, writer, and jazz musician in high school, he further pursued these musical and philosophical interests at West Virginia State College. Demby took writing classes from poet-novelist Margaret Walker and pursued his first love, jazz, to the extent that it became academically detrimental. With World War II in progress, Demby frequently skipped classes to play at the Cotton Club in South Carolina. His absenteeisms eventually compelled Demby to join the army in 1942 and he spent the bulk of his two-year tour in Italy. Following his discharge, Demby earned a BA in liberal arts in 1944 at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee.

Europe, nonetheless, beckoned Demby to return. When he migrated to Italy in 1947, Demby began a fifty-year, self-imposed exile that was broken only by periodic trips to America for temporary employment or vacations. He initially went to Rome to study painting because jazz had begun to change from swing to bebop. Demby quickly became involved with Rome's artists, including Roberto Rossellini for whom he adapted two films. His present-day position of film adapter of Italian films into English stems from this early period.

Affiliating with Rome's artistic members eventually inspired Demby to become a writer. But unlike expatriate Richard Wright, Demby never felt compelled to avow allegiance to any movement or political group. Instead, Demby incorporated the dualistic symbolism of his bicultural heritage as a structuring trope in his writings where fact and fiction collide or merge. A prominent feature of Demby's three novels, for instance, is his integration of his alter ego or fictional writer persona in his works. In Beetlecreek (1950), Demby's first novel, he posits a fictional community reminiscent of Clarksburg, West Virginia. Primarily about a rite-of-passage experience of a black Pittsburgh youth and his meeting with an elderly, reclusive, white male resident of Beetlecreek, the story employs the motifs of simultaneity and destiny that cause the paths of Johnny Johnson and Bill Trapp to intersect in tragedy. This bleak, naturalistic novel earned Demby international acclaim and representation by Mondodavi, one of Italy's prestigious publishing houses.

With The Catacombs (1965) and Love Story Black (1978), Demby's alter ego is less camouflaged in the characterizations of William Demby and Professor Edwards, the respective fictional writers of each work. A motto of the real Demby is that “The novel to be born will be written.” The Catacombs is about the act of writing over a two-year period at which time the writer's kernel idea literally is born and becomes self-controlling. Doris, the persona Demby invents, assumes an autonomous life in the real world surrounding the Roman catacombs. Love Story Black repeats the fact and fantasy dualism when Edwards becomes involved in the fantasies of an eighty-year-old virgin, ex-vaudeville performer while writing her life story.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Demby also produced a series of journalistic tracts—“The Geisha Girls of Pontocho,”“They Surely Can’t Stop Us Now,” “A Walk in Tuscany,” and “Blueblood Cats of Rome”—whose subjects reflect Demby's global consciousness. His belief in individualism among diverse groups at a global level was evident by his interracial marriage to Italian poet-writer Lucia Drudia with whom he shared an “artistic marriage.” Their son, James, is an Italian composer. In the late 1990s, Demby was working on his next novel about Tillman, a cook from his old army outfit. To William Demby the author, the real world and the fantastic have no boundaries.

Bibliography

• Edward Margolies, “The Expatriate As Novelist: William Demby,” in Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Black American Authors, 1968, pp. 173–189.
• Robert Bone, “William Demby's Dance of Life,” Tri-Quarterly 15 (Spring 1969):127–141.
• Robert Bone, introduction to The Catacombs, 1965; rpt. 1969.
• John O’Brien, ed., Interviews with Black Writers, 1973, pp. 34–53.
• Roger Whitlow, Black American Literature: A Critical History, 1973, pp. 122–125.
• Margaret Perry, “William Demby,” in DLB, vol. 33, Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, eds. Thadious M. Davis and
• Trudier Harris, 1984, pp. 59–64

Virginia Whatley Smith

writer

Personal Information

Born William Demby on December 25, 1922, in Pittsburgh, PA; married Lucia Drudi (died 1995); married Barbara Harris, 2004; children (first marriage): James Gabriel
Education: Fisk University, BA, 1947.
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Army stationed in Italy and North Africa during World War II.
Memberships: European Community of Writers.

Career

Independent writer and film translator, 1947-; College of Staten Island, City University of New York, English professor, 1969-87.

Life's Work

While he has never quite achieved the stature of such contemporaries as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, William Demby is without question one of the most important African American authors of the twentieth century. His novels address issues of race and national identity with an unsurpassed power and command of imagery. An expatriate living in Rome for much of his career, Demby brought to his writing a unique insider/outsider perspective on the American experience.

William Demby was born on December 25, 1922, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he and his six siblings spent their early childhood. His father, William Demby, worked as a file clerk for Hopewell Natural Gas Company. Both the elder Demby and his wife, Gertrude Hendricks, had aspired to better careers in architecture or medicine, but were denied entrance into college because of their race.

After the younger William graduated from Langley High School in 1941, the family moved to an ethnically diverse, middle-class neighborhood in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where William Sr. landed a job with Standard Oil Company's natural gas division. This move southward, where Demby had greater contact with African-American culture, proved pivotal in his development as an artist. He enrolled at West Virginia State University, where he studied writing with poet-novelist Margaret Walker. He spent most of his time, however, pursuing his other, greater passion: jazz. Demby spent so much time playing music in area jazz clubs that he often neglected his studies, and he had a tough time deciding whether to strive for a career in music or in literature. One of Demby's cousins was the renowned alto saxophonist Benny Carter, and having Carter as a role model only strengthened the tug of jazz on Demby's loyalties.

Demby's college career was interrupted by war. He joined the U.S. Army in 1942, and while stationed in Italy began writing for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. That experience--in combination with a realization that he could not compete with the top bebop players of the day--helped tilt his career decision toward writing. Upon his return from World War II, Demby resumed his education at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he received his B.A. in 1947. From there, he returned to Italy, where he began studying art and art history at the University of Rome. Apparently Italy agreed with Demby; he became one of a generation of expatriate African-American artists. He continued to live in Italy for more than two decades, returning to the United States only for occasional visits or temporary teaching gigs. He married an Italian woman, Lucia Drudi, and his son, James (a composer), was born in Italy.

In Rome, Demby became connected with artists working in a variety of fields. He obtained steady work translating Italian films into English. He adapted two films for acclaimed director Roberto Rossellini. Demby's first novel, Beetlecreek, was published in 1950. Beetlecreek reflects many elements of Demby's own childhood. Set in a community similar to the West Virginia one in which he grew up, it is the story of a white former carnival worker who has chosen to live in Beetlecreek's black section, and a black teenager sent from his hometown of Pittsburgh to live with relatives in Beetlecreek. The novel received international acclaim and quickly placed Demby among the elite of contemporary African-American authors.

It would be 15 years before Demby's next important work, the novel The Catacombs, was published. The Catacombs, which takes place in Rome and features a character who bears a striking resemblance to the author himself, is about the process of writing, tracking an author's progress from a germ of an idea to an all-consuming spell. The main character, like Demby--an African American author living in Italy--is attempting to write a novel that contrasts the lives of a sexy actress/model and an African nun. The Catacombs met with mixed reactions from critics. Its avant-garde style confused some readers, while others considered it a modernist masterpiece and compared Demby to the likes of Gertrude Stein. Critic Helen Jaskoski wrote in the journal Critique that the novel "draws on significant formal and thematic traditions with a long history in Western literature. Within the specifically African-American tradition, Demby engages the themes of freedom and literacy,...the recurring hallmark of African American tradition; however, modernist Demby recasts the quest in light of the expatriate intellectual's relationship to a worldwide struggle for national independence."

Between novels, Demby wrote shorter pieces for publication, including a series of magazine essays with such titles as "The Geisha Girls of Ponto-cho," and "Blueblood Cats of Rome." In 1969 Demby returned to the United States and took a teaching job at the College of Staten Island, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. His third novel, Love Story Black, came out in 1978. Like The Catacombs, Love Story Black features a Demby-like character, an expatriate African American novelist teaching in a New York City College. This time, the Demby alter ego is attempting to unravel the mysterious past of Mona Pariss, an elderly entertainer, for a magazine article he is writing. According to some sources, Demby published another book, Blue Boy, shortly after Love Story Black, but it is unclear whether it was actually made available to the public in any legitimate way. In fact, as Demby told Contemporary Black Biography, he has never seen a copy of it, and does not really remember what it was about.

Upon his return from Italian exile, Demby settled in Sag Harbor, New York, a site of great importance in African-American history. Blacks have lived in Sag Harbor since the time before the American Revolution, trading freely with both colonial Americans and the British. Some early black residents relocated to England and eventually moved to Sierra Leone.

Demby retired from CUNY in 1987, and has lived a relatively quiet life since then. In 1987 he worked with noted feminist author Betty Friedan to organize the Sag Harbor Initiative, a three-day gathering of leading writers and intellectuals to discuss important social and political issues of the time. While Demby continues to maintain a residence in Sag Harbor, he has lived primarily in Italy since retiring. His Italian wife died in 1995. In April of 2004, Demby married Barbara Morris, a lawyer and civil rights activist who had, among other things, played a key role in the Medgar Evers case. Demby and Morris had been friends at Fisk University back in the 1940s, but had fallen out of touch when Demby moved to Italy. They reestablished contact only recently. The couple spends most of their time in Florence, Italy, where their activities include running a music festival. Demby told CBB that he is working on a novel called King Comus, which he expects to finish in 2006 or so, though he has not set a rigid deadline for himself. As with his other novels, it will be done when he decides it is done. Even if he never decides that his next novel is finished, William Demby's position as a key figure in the history of African-American literature is secure.

Works

Selected writings

• Beetlecreek, Rinehart, 1950.
• The Catacombs, Pantheon, 1965.
• Love Story Black, Reed, Cannon & Johnson, 1978

• "The Geisha Girls of Ponto-cho," Harpers, December 1954, pp. 41-47.
• "They Surely Can't Stop Us Now," Reporter, April 5, 1956, pp. 18-21.
• "A Walk in Tuscany," Holiday, December 1957, pp. 141-145.
• "Blueblood Cats of Rome," Holiday, April 1960, pp. 203-206.

Further Reading

Books

• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955, Gale, 1984.
• Margolies, Edward, Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors, Lippincott, 1968, pp. 173-188.
• Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 208-209.

• Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1994, p. 181.
• Triquarterly, Spring 1969, pp. 127-141.

• "William Demby," Annie Merner Pfeiffer Library (West Virginia Wesleyan College), www.wvwc.edu/lib/wv-authors/a_demby.htm (March 1, 2005).
• "William Demby," Biography Resource Center, www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC (March 1, 2005).

• Additional information for this profile was obtained through an interview with William Demby on March 8, 2005.

— Bob Jacobson