Il diavolo biondo [The Blond Devil][Facsimile]. New York: Nicoletti Bros Press, 1916.
Title
Il diavolo biondo [The Blond Devil][Facsimile]. New York: Nicoletti Bros Press, 1916.
Description
Stanco’s eloquence and pessimism are amply illustrated in Il diavolo biondo. Martino Marazzi's Voices of Italian America: a History of Early Italian American Literature with a Critical Anthology (Madison, 2004) contains an excerpt from this work in translation, as does Durante.
The protagonist of the book is an Italian American detective, James Forley (born in Naples with the name of Giacomo Forlì), a resident of the Bronx with his young daughter Laurina, the governess nurse Giacinta, and Fox the dog.
Forley is dependent upon the celebrated poilice detective, Giuseppe Petrosino, head of the New York City Italian Squad. The “Black Hand” abducts Laurina. Orchestrating the abduction is the “blond devil,” Lady Ryton, wife of an English baronet, who in New York has recast himself as an influential Republican politician. In reality, the woman is none other than the baroness from Palermo, Livia Iamicelli. Years before (in the novel, these circumstances are introduced via a long flashback), in a nocturnal duel, James had killed her fiancé, his rival in love. Livia accepted him and fled with him, then gave birth to Laurina.
In the course of the search to recover Laurina, James becomes entrapped in a lunatic asylum of Brooklyn by a very wicked German psychiatrist; Petrosino enters the scene to save him, and in a tragic crescendo, James succeeds in liberating himself from the grasp of Lady Ryton’s accomplices. A dramatic recognition scene ensues as mother and child discover their respective identities.
The finale sees nearly all of the main characters dying: Laurina is killed, and in sorrow, her young suitor Anthony commits suicide. James also dies, falling from the Harlem Bridge, after having, in his turn, killed his daughter’s assassin. Triumphant, beautiful and perverse, Livia (Lady Ryton) is, naturally, “the blond devil.”
An entire page advertisement is in the rear for books designed for Italians to learn English.
About Stanco himself (b. Riccia (Campobasso), Italy, December 20, 1886–d. New York, 1954): he was born Ettore A. Moffa, and adopted the pseudonym of Italo Stanco, and, on other occasions, that of J. Cansado (stanco is Italian and cansado Spanish for “tired”). He undertook his first freelance writing activity in Naples, then in Florence.
In 1907, he emigrated to Argentina, where he worked for the Giornale d’Italia e dell’America del Sud (Journal of Italy and South America). By 1909, he was in the United States.
On July 23 of that year, Riccardo Cordiferro presented him at the Beraglia Hall, in New York, with the following words: “Still an adolescent, he began to contribute to the literary newspapers of Naples, revealing himself as a poet of no small significance. In Naples, with the printing houses of the Stabilmento Tipografico Torinese, he published one of his first volumes of verse, entitled Bandiere della miseria (Flags of Poverty). . . . He published some critical essays, entitled La penna italiana (The Italian Pen), in which he reviewed the principal literary productions of that time” (Cordiferro, “Italo Stanco,” in Mondo nuovo [New World], a New York weekly of politics and art, directed by Italo Stanco).
Italo Stanco was, in sum, a true man of letters; his pseudonym is emblematic, and his Neapolitan critical essays, especially La penna italiana (whose complete title includes the ancient word for Naples, Paralipòmeni), reveal tastes and knowledge far from banal.
In New York, he founded the review, Maga Arte, on art and criticism, and from 1916 to 1928, he was subeditor of La Follia. From 1925 to 1938, he was a reporter, then subeditor of the Corriere d’America. In the 1950s, Stanco was still active as director of La Follia di New York, and as a member of the Circolo di Union Square, a sodality that revolved about the sculptor Onorio Ruotolo, and published a weekly review, Divagando, in which the poets Antonio Calitri and Pietro Greco took part.
Between 1952 and 1954, it published a hundred or so installments under a rubric entitled, “Questo è il mondo folle and tondo” (This is the mad round world).
In 1958, Onorio Ruotolo dedicated to Stanco the poem “Notturno di rimembranze” [Nocturne of Memories].
Stanco’s production was vast and varied: novels, theatrical works, and translations from Spanish, English, and French, among others, translations of Alarcón, the Sibylle of Mirabeau, and various popular narrators.
In examining Stanco’s production, Martino Marazzi identified four of his American novels in volumes: besides Il diavolo biondo, Dopo la colpa [After the Fall], 1913; Sull’oceano [On the Ocean], 1922, q.v. also a facsimile copy in the Collection, similar to the moralistic stories of Edmondo De Amicis, from whom Stanco borrowed the title of the book. This story treats of a crime: L’amica del kaiser [The Kaiser’s Lady Friend], 1925.
From Marazzi’s examination emerge five other novels, published only in La Follia and Il Corriere d’America: Il re della pampa [The King of the Pampas], 1911; Il nemico del bene [The Enemy of the Good], 1914–15; I rettili d’oro [The Golden Reptiles], 1915–17, reprinted in 1952–53, in Divagando [Wandering]; Le piovre di New York [The Leeches of New York], 1925–26; and Reginetta di fuoco [Little Queen of Fire], 1931. Finally, there are numerous novellas, allegretti (short comic novels), poetry, and dramaturgic works.
Finding copies of Stanco's works is a frustrating experience, and in 25 years of collecting these materials, I have never found one (except this facsimile copies of Il diavolo biondo and of Sull'Oceano, as noted). In the category of "one that got away," occasional lunches with a fellow Grolier Club member years ago, the late Robert Raymo, a distinguished Chaucer scholar at New York University, revealed that he had been a good friend of Stanco's, and had had at one time copies of many if not all of Stanco's works.
The reason he no longer possessed them: Raymo's mother discarded them while a young Raymo was away, fighting in World War II. Sigh!
The protagonist of the book is an Italian American detective, James Forley (born in Naples with the name of Giacomo Forlì), a resident of the Bronx with his young daughter Laurina, the governess nurse Giacinta, and Fox the dog.
Forley is dependent upon the celebrated poilice detective, Giuseppe Petrosino, head of the New York City Italian Squad. The “Black Hand” abducts Laurina. Orchestrating the abduction is the “blond devil,” Lady Ryton, wife of an English baronet, who in New York has recast himself as an influential Republican politician. In reality, the woman is none other than the baroness from Palermo, Livia Iamicelli. Years before (in the novel, these circumstances are introduced via a long flashback), in a nocturnal duel, James had killed her fiancé, his rival in love. Livia accepted him and fled with him, then gave birth to Laurina.
In the course of the search to recover Laurina, James becomes entrapped in a lunatic asylum of Brooklyn by a very wicked German psychiatrist; Petrosino enters the scene to save him, and in a tragic crescendo, James succeeds in liberating himself from the grasp of Lady Ryton’s accomplices. A dramatic recognition scene ensues as mother and child discover their respective identities.
The finale sees nearly all of the main characters dying: Laurina is killed, and in sorrow, her young suitor Anthony commits suicide. James also dies, falling from the Harlem Bridge, after having, in his turn, killed his daughter’s assassin. Triumphant, beautiful and perverse, Livia (Lady Ryton) is, naturally, “the blond devil.”
An entire page advertisement is in the rear for books designed for Italians to learn English.
About Stanco himself (b. Riccia (Campobasso), Italy, December 20, 1886–d. New York, 1954): he was born Ettore A. Moffa, and adopted the pseudonym of Italo Stanco, and, on other occasions, that of J. Cansado (stanco is Italian and cansado Spanish for “tired”). He undertook his first freelance writing activity in Naples, then in Florence.
In 1907, he emigrated to Argentina, where he worked for the Giornale d’Italia e dell’America del Sud (Journal of Italy and South America). By 1909, he was in the United States.
On July 23 of that year, Riccardo Cordiferro presented him at the Beraglia Hall, in New York, with the following words: “Still an adolescent, he began to contribute to the literary newspapers of Naples, revealing himself as a poet of no small significance. In Naples, with the printing houses of the Stabilmento Tipografico Torinese, he published one of his first volumes of verse, entitled Bandiere della miseria (Flags of Poverty). . . . He published some critical essays, entitled La penna italiana (The Italian Pen), in which he reviewed the principal literary productions of that time” (Cordiferro, “Italo Stanco,” in Mondo nuovo [New World], a New York weekly of politics and art, directed by Italo Stanco).
Italo Stanco was, in sum, a true man of letters; his pseudonym is emblematic, and his Neapolitan critical essays, especially La penna italiana (whose complete title includes the ancient word for Naples, Paralipòmeni), reveal tastes and knowledge far from banal.
In New York, he founded the review, Maga Arte, on art and criticism, and from 1916 to 1928, he was subeditor of La Follia. From 1925 to 1938, he was a reporter, then subeditor of the Corriere d’America. In the 1950s, Stanco was still active as director of La Follia di New York, and as a member of the Circolo di Union Square, a sodality that revolved about the sculptor Onorio Ruotolo, and published a weekly review, Divagando, in which the poets Antonio Calitri and Pietro Greco took part.
Between 1952 and 1954, it published a hundred or so installments under a rubric entitled, “Questo è il mondo folle and tondo” (This is the mad round world).
In 1958, Onorio Ruotolo dedicated to Stanco the poem “Notturno di rimembranze” [Nocturne of Memories].
Stanco’s production was vast and varied: novels, theatrical works, and translations from Spanish, English, and French, among others, translations of Alarcón, the Sibylle of Mirabeau, and various popular narrators.
In examining Stanco’s production, Martino Marazzi identified four of his American novels in volumes: besides Il diavolo biondo, Dopo la colpa [After the Fall], 1913; Sull’oceano [On the Ocean], 1922, q.v. also a facsimile copy in the Collection, similar to the moralistic stories of Edmondo De Amicis, from whom Stanco borrowed the title of the book. This story treats of a crime: L’amica del kaiser [The Kaiser’s Lady Friend], 1925.
From Marazzi’s examination emerge five other novels, published only in La Follia and Il Corriere d’America: Il re della pampa [The King of the Pampas], 1911; Il nemico del bene [The Enemy of the Good], 1914–15; I rettili d’oro [The Golden Reptiles], 1915–17, reprinted in 1952–53, in Divagando [Wandering]; Le piovre di New York [The Leeches of New York], 1925–26; and Reginetta di fuoco [Little Queen of Fire], 1931. Finally, there are numerous novellas, allegretti (short comic novels), poetry, and dramaturgic works.
Finding copies of Stanco's works is a frustrating experience, and in 25 years of collecting these materials, I have never found one (except this facsimile copies of Il diavolo biondo and of Sull'Oceano, as noted). In the category of "one that got away," occasional lunches with a fellow Grolier Club member years ago, the late Robert Raymo, a distinguished Chaucer scholar at New York University, revealed that he had been a good friend of Stanco's, and had had at one time copies of many if not all of Stanco's works.
The reason he no longer possessed them: Raymo's mother discarded them while a young Raymo was away, fighting in World War II. Sigh!
Creator
Italo Stanco
Publisher
Nicoletti Bros Press
Date
1916
Format
21.5 x 14cm; 349 p.
Language
Italian
Citation
Italo Stanco, “Il diavolo biondo [The Blond Devil][Facsimile]. New York: Nicoletti Bros Press, 1916.,” Italian-Language American Imprints: The Periconi Collection, accessed April 24, 2024, https://italianamericanimprints.omeka.net/items/show/291.
Comments