A gripping and genre-defying novel by a rediscovered great of twentieth-century Black American writing, about what it means to be a writer at the dawn of a new era
In this masterpiece of metafiction set in the Rome of the tumultuous 1960s, Black American expatriate Bill Demby narrates his attempts to write a novel about his friend Doris, another Black American working as one of Elizabeth Taylor's handmaidens in the filming of Cleopatra. Utterly dependent upon Doris for the development of his novel, Demby is both a participant in and observer of her life as she begins an affair with an Italian count. Demby's growing emotional and artistic involvement in the tumultuous affair of his character-friend leads him on an existential quest for the meaning of truth and fiction, both lived and created, in a world torn by the social upheaval of the early sixties.
First published in 1965, The Catacombs is gripping and genre-reshaping novel by a rediscovered great of twentieth-century Black American writing, about what it means to write at the dawn of a new era. "One of the great novelists of the last 100 years."-Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo
"[Demby is] a true artist." -Arna Bontemps, author of Black Thunder William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on December 25, 1922. His works include Beetlecreek (1950), The Catacombs (1965), Love Story Black (1978) and King Comus (2017). He died in 2013. I
This is a day in March. Here in Rome it is nine o'clock in the morning. The sun has finally come out and my Rotella collages have begun to dance like gorgeous jungle flowers. I sit here at my desk, waiting for Doris to come. With her approval I am writing a novel about her. I know that she has spent the night with the Count, and I am waiting for her to come tell me all about it in detail. In the meantime, I read my newspapers-five from Rome, one each from Turin and Milan. Other people collect stamps or matchboxes, or raise chinchillas, or invent games based upon Euclidean logic. I see no reason, then, why some of my friends find it eccentric, or a waste of valuable time (time, always time, and who among us knows what time, always time, really is?) that I experience so much pleasure in reading some fourteen or fifteen Italian newspapers and magazines every day. Reading my newspapers, relishing (gourmand of the printed word) the immaculate virginity of the crisp almost white paper and the urgent seduction of adventure in the smoky anthracite smell of the ink, analyzing even the most minute (but human) event, linking it to the blaring rhetorical headlines of several days before, recalling some insignificant item reprinted from a provincial newspaper months and months before-no, I feel not like God, but rather like some benevolently mad theatrical impresario who eagerly, paternally, leafs through the press clippings of his countless actors and actresses, dispersed monads, who like nomads are wandering over the theatrical caravan routes of the world. No: I do not gain pleasure from stamps, from matchboxes, from chinchillas, from the invention of games- my warmest, most secretly perverse pleasure comes from observing (and vicariously participating in-alas, my trade is that of a writer) the seeming mutations, the illusory motion, the dreamlike sense of progression and progress which occur when the sun's ray shifts on the eternal and timeless, the static, the sacredly silk-threaded tapestry of lives . . .
I stop to write a long overdue letter to a friend in Alabama, who has sent me a play of hers to read: Dear Trudy, I have purposely waited writing to you until I was truly convinced of what I am about to say. You are in crisis. Most sensitive people today are in crisis. But as a writer, a born writer (or perhaps better, a born poetess), your crisis is reflected in your writing. This play of yours does not interest me very much-nor does it really interest you very much. Were you seriously i
