The Catacombs

by William Demby

Genres: General Fiction; African American; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

An expat in Rome makes his way as a writer in this gripping and genre-defying novel, first published in 1965 by a rediscovered great of Black American literature.

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.

Release date: January 13, 2026

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 256

Sample

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 interested in the problems of school desegregation, you would have taken a more active part in the dramatic developments in your town last year. These are not problems you are truly interested in (I wrote a novel about the same things last winter: it too rang false, and I gave the MS to Gigi, the neighborhood junkman). Remember your poem about the Hollyhocks? Already then (you were only eleven years old) it was obvious to all that you were an authentic poetess . . . my suggestion then is that through short, intense, profoundly intense, poems you talk about yourself and the crisis you are going through (and believe me, your crisis is by no means unique—­I am just now beginning to get out of my crisis by writing another novel, this one important slow and good!). Strangely, you are in an enviable position to touch the fundamental key to your crisis and the crisis of young people and young poets everywhere. I hope you will think seriously about this. At first write very short poems (I will be glad to try to place them in one of the reviews published here or in Paris), poems which crystallize your unique experience (Donald gazing blankly at the TV screen in the evening after hours and hours at the hospital touching with his own hands the wet messy wounds of concrete human suffering: how does he manage—­one doctor for over ten thousand Negroes? The boat anchored in the river only after a special law was passed in the county seat). Urgently, you must try to touch reality, the reality of your own rich and unique experience. Remember, you are a poetess, and I think possibly a great one. Later, you shall try the theater again, or perhaps a novel. Pull yourself together, then get well. (Do not worry about the obscenities which instinctively come to your lips after a drink or so too much. Obscenities are after all words, poetic words: they do no real harm, but in their magical connotations are better used in poetry. Actually, I found you in fine and sharp intellectual form when we met in New York this fall; I am sure Donald is too. By the way, has he ever thought of doing wild way-­out New Yorker–­type cartoons on some of the more grotesque aspects of being a Negro doctor in a small Alabama town, or about the “Race Problem”? I am sure they would be very saleable: I still remember the cartoons he drew to illustrate his med school yearbook.) My blessing to you all, and especially to gold-­minted precious Mammy Starr. Much love, William.

The doorbell rings. This must be Doris at last. I hastily fold the letter. I pause a moment until my heart stops pounding (I wonder if I am falling in love with Doris and, if so, whether this will harm or enhance the novel I am writing about her). I open the door. It is the mailman—­an invitation from the United States Information Service here in Rome to attend a lecture being given by Fernanda Pivana Sottsass (she is the Italian translator of my first novel, Beetlecreek) on “The White Whale and Other Myths,” a postcard from Harold Engels, who is vacationing on Procida, and an invitation to the opening of Giulio Turcato’s show at the Tartaruga Gallery (the presentation by the poet Emilio Villa begins: “The laborious hands of Ulysses become skinned on the sharp rocks and leave tiny shreds of epidermis . . .”)

I return to my table and gaze moodily at the disorderly array of newspapers. I pick up Il Giorno and see that there is another excerpt from N.C.’s “Algerian Diary.” N. is a young aristocrat whom I first met five years ago in Positano. I was not particularly impressed with him then. He seemed soft and indolent, somehow spiritually dehydrated, my idea of a typical decadent Italian aristocrat (for some reason, ever since childhood when my brother and I built a model of the Coronation Coach from plans in the Sunday comic section of the Pittsburgh Sun-­Telegraph, I have been obsessed with aristocrats; even today I eagerly read every scrap of news I can get my hands on about Princess Margaret, for whom I have had a secret passion ever since I was twelve years old).

Yet here he is today a national hero, having displayed rare courage in defying the European Secret Army’s order for all Italian journalists to leave Algeria or face certain death. The other Italian journalists left Algeria twenty-­four hours after the ultimatum. N. has just returned to Italy after three days of hiding in the Casbah. Last night I saw him on television. Even this brief appearance must have required great courage, since one of the correspondents for the Italian Radio-­TV network, who in a special TV interview reported on his harrowing experience, was threatened by Secret Army agents here in Rome, who up to now have been operating with disconcerting freedom. N. seemed to have aged, he seemed genuinely frightened, which makes the courage he displayed all the more remarkable (but who knows of what mysterious chemistry the fabric of courage is woven). But his slender pale hands lay with calm limpness on his knees as he described the unbelievable chaos that reigns on the corpse-­littered streets of Algeria, and I remember asking myself whether the calm repose of his hands was due to his aristocratic breeding or to tranquilizer drugs . . .

“Monday, March 5,” the excerpt from his diary begins. “Early this morning, shortly after four, I am awakened by a series of explosions. I count about thirty of them, and then give up counting. Some of the explosions are faint and distant; others, though, are so near and violent that the windows in my room rattle. The explosions continue for almost two hours. It is as if Algeria is being bombed. Shortly after the sound of explosions in the night, there comes another sound: the screaming of police sirens and the sirens of ambulances speeding through the streets . . .”

Suddenly sick of the world, sick of the poisonous potion of anxiety and anguish filtered through row after monotonous row of identical typeface, I pick up my copy of Viking Press’s Portable Walt Whitman and read from his Civil War Diary: “. . . The night was very pleasant, at times the moon shining out full and clear, all Nature so calm in itself, the early summer grass so rich, and foliage of the trees—­yet there the battle raging, and many good fellows lying helpless, with no accessions to them, and every minute amid the rattle of muskets and crash of cannon (for there was an artillery contest too, the red life-­blood oozing out from heads or trunks or limbs upon that green and dew-­cool grass). Patches of woods take fire, and several of the wounded, unable to move, are consumed—­quite large spaces are swept over, burning the dead also—­some of the men have their hair and beards singed—­others holes burnt in their clothing. The flames of fire from the cannon, the quick flaring flames and smoke, and the immense roar—­the musketry so general, the light nearly bright enough for each side to see the other—­the crashing, tramping of men—­the yelling—­close quarters—­we hear the secesh yells—­our men cheer loudly back, especially if Hooker is in sight—­hand-­to-­hand conflicts, each side stands up to it, brave, determined as demons, they often charge upon us—­a thousand deeds are done worth newer, greater poems on—­and still the woods on fire—­still many not only scorch’d—­too many, unable to move, are burn’d to death . . .”