William Demby
Biographical Information
African-American novelist William Demby was born on Christmas Day 1922 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He grew up in Clarksburg, West Virginia, surrounded by five brothers and sisters. His father, the elder William Demby, worked for the natural gas division of the Standard Oil Company. He attended West Virginia State College for a time, including enrolling in a creative writing class taught by Margaret Walker. His education interrupted by World War II, Demby entered the horse cavalry of the United States Army, serving in both Italy and North Africa. While in Italy, he wrote for a time for the Stars and Stripes. After the war ended, Demby returned to the United States and enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, to continue his education. He completed his BA in 1947 and returned to Italy, studying art history at the University of Rome. Demby lived and worked in Rome for many years, writing filmstrips for the Italian film and television industries and translating Italian screenplays into English. He married an Italian woman, Lucia Drudi, and the couple had a son, James, who continues to live in Italy where he was born. Demby returned to the United States in 1969 to teach English at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, where he was an assistant professor until his retirement in 1989.Though he was living in Italy when it was written, William Demby’s first novel, Beetlecreek (1950), is set in the West Virginia of his childhood. Expanding on “St. Joey,” a short story Demby had first written while a student at Fisk, Beetlecreek is a novel of race relations in a remote West Virginia town. It is the story of Bill Trapp, a white former carnival worker who has lived in self-chosen exile in Beetlecreek’s black quarter, and of Johnny Johnson, a black Pittsburgh teenager who has been sent to live with relatives in Beetlecreek by his ailing mother – both are lost souls looking for acceptance and meaning in their lives, but their tentative friendship leads to tragic consequences for both when the unspoken social code of Beetlecreek is broken. One Beetlecreek reviewer called the novel “a moving condemnation of provincialism and fundamentalism” and praised it as a new voice in African American literature, one that is “neither the ghetto realism of Richard Wright nor the ironic modernism of Ralph Ellison.”
His second novel, The Catacombs, was published in 1965 and was not immediately received or understood by critics. The novel is written in an avant-garde style that involves a narrator who is a novelist (who like the author is an African-American living in Rome) writing a novel contrasting the lives of an African nun and a sensuous model and actress romantically involved with a European aristocrat. Demby’s third novel, Love Story Black, was written and published after his return to the United States. Love Story Black is of a noticeably different style from Demby’s first two novels—Demby commented shortly after it’s 1978 publication that “People who have found themselves frozen inside The Catacombs are a little bit upset; I guess they expect something else from me.” The novel features a Demby-like narrator (expatriate African-American novelist teaching in a New York City college) who is trying to unravel the mysterious past of an elderly entertainer for a magazine article. The woman will only consent to be interviewed if the narrator, named Edwards, strips and lies chastely beside her. What follows is a novel one critic called “a mélange of the romantic, the humorous, the satiric, and the serious.”
Demby published his fourth novel, Blueboy, in 1979, but Beetlecreek remains his best-known and most-admired work. Demby himself commented on the book in 1998—“It still seems to be that is about the absence of symmetry in human affairs, the imperfectability of justice, the tragic inevitability of mankind’s inhumanity to mankind.”—and sadly those themes remain constant in the human condition, making Beetlecreek relevant and real to a new generation of readers.
Critical Responses
Writing almost fifty years after the publication of Beetlecreek, one literary critic commented “First published in 1950, Beetlecreek stands as a moving condemnation provincialism and fundamentalism. Both a critique of racial hypocrisy and a new direction for the African-American novel, it occupies fresh territory that is neither the ghetto realism of Richard Wright nor the ironic modernism of Ralph Ellison.” Arna Bontemps in the 1960s wrote “Demby’s troubled townsfolk of the West Virginia mining region foreshadow present dilemmas. The pressing and resisting social forces in this season of our discontent and the fatal paralysis of those of us unable or unwilling to act are clearly anticipated with the dependable second sight of a true artist.” And it is this rich understanding of human nature and social forces that have allowed William Demby’s works to remain vibrant and relevant fifty years after their original publication.His work, particularly his second novel, The Catacombs, has also been admired for its unusual use of language and form, a unique pairing of traditional themes and modernist style. While some critics complained about what they called a lack of clarity and coherence in The Catacombs, others praised it as experimental action writing and compared it to the works of avant-garde thinkers Chardin and Gertrude Stein. Helen Jaskoski, writing in Critique, “The Catacombs 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, which Stepto notes as 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.” Jaskoski goes on to explain “he [Demby] formulates a significant part of the novel’s argument in terms similar to the poems and treatises on Christian principles that were cast in the form of dialogue and debate…Demby does not employ the formal structure or terms of the debate, but rather invents a series of scenarios that frame the issues within the new, postmodern context.”
Commenting on his own work, William Demby has said that he has a deep private vision that he wants to share with the world, but only on his own terms, in his own way, and in his own time. He has done so in a voice that is clear, articulate, unique, and timeless.
Works Published
- Beetlecreek
- The Catacombs
- Love Story Black
- Blueboy
Selected Bibliography
Bone, Robert. "William Demby's dance of life." Triquarterly 15 (Spring 1969). pp. 127-141.Hansen, Klaus P. "William Demby's 'The Catacombs': A Latecomer to Modernism." The Afro-American Novel Since 1960. Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer, eds. B. R. Gruner, 1982. pp.1234-43.
Jaskoski, Helen. "'The Catacombs' and the debate between the flesh and the spirit." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 35(3), Spring 1994. pp. 181+.
Perry, Margaret. "William Demby." Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 33. pp.59-64.
Author Website
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