Sacco and Vanzetti Ride Again

Little went right for Bartolomeo Sacco and Nicola Vanzetti, the pro-labor, antiwar Italian immigrants charged with murder during the xenophobic 1920s: Certainly not their trial, and definitely not their failed last-ditch attempt for a stay of execution. And, now, Mark Binelli's debut novel, Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! (Dalkey Archive), an August Book Sense Pick, is mostly "not their story." Instead, the pair is grist for a dutifully chronicled, archived, and analyzed faux-ography. Binelli, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, starts with the real story and then heads ersatz, creating a comedic team of knife-juggling film stars who leave no pie unthrown.

"In my history class, there was Columbus, Mussolini, and a passing reference to Sacco and Vanzetti, and that was about it for Italian historical figures," said Binelli, who grew up outside of Detroit and now lives in Manhattan. "I had always heard about these sweet guys Sacco and Vanzetti. It wasn't till much later I learned that these one-dimensional martyr figures were also radical anarchists. They were far more complex and interesting."

Binelli's fictionalized Sacco and Vanzetti are definitely interesting, but more anarchic via their comedy than anything else. The novel follows their entire made-up filmic oeuvre, starting with Sacco and Vanzetti Dessert the Cause, pausing briefly at You're Shvitzing Me, where the knife-jugglers evade bootleggers in a bathhouse on the Lower East Side, and moving on to Jacks in the Box, which "takes place entirely in a wooden crate, in which S&V are trapped for the duration of a five-day sea voyage, along with a book of matches, a flask of rye, a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets, half a salami and an organ-grinders monkey (wearing a vest, boots, and a fez and, unfortunately, trained to steal meat) aptly named Sir Filch-a-lot." Eventually they wind up captives of interplanetary women jailors (in bikini armor) in Mars Needs Sacco and Vanzetti. A range of real film stars, like Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle, along with historic Italian figures are dropped into the mix.

Interspersed are fake Woody Allen-esque exegeses that examine, in hilarious detail, everything from Sacco and Vanzetti's knife juggling skills as representative of the ultimate human fate deferred ("Yes, death, in any of these scenarios, is dodged, once again. And yet, the perils remain,") to their sexual orientation, particularly in the bathhouse scene in You're Shvitzing Me.

Performing the factual research for the book was its own education and entertainment for Binelli, who spent time at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan and the Boston Pubic Library, although he did much of the writing itself at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Manhattan. "When I decided to pluck random Italian historic figures like Italo Balbo and Primo Carnera and drop them in out of context, it became fun," he said. "And I wasn't that schooled in the whole history of film comedy. I hadn't seen any Buster Keaton. It was a pretty great part of my research, going into video stores." But, Binelli cautioned, the research had its own dangers. "You can fall into research hole," he said. "I ended up cutting a lot. In the original version I probably digressed way too much."

Some of the information about knives came right out of Binelli's family background. "Dad was a knife grinder," he said. "So were my two uncles on my mom's side. My family is from a little town in Italy called Pinzolo. It's kind of hotbed of knife grinders -- it's their regional specialty."

His intermingling of fact and fiction was, Binelli said, inspired by writers like Michael Ondaatje and Anne Carson. "Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid are both weird collages where he'll pick up actual historical stuff and mix it in with poetry, photography, and pure fiction. Formally, that was a big influence. I was also thinking about Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. She has a weird mixture of fake interviews in there and straight up poetry. I like a lot of formally surprising books. So often it can go really wrong, but when it's done well, it's great."

As the novel unfurls, more of the real Sacco and Vanzetti appear through the scrim. The politically incorrect movie title Two Wops in a Jam is lifted almost verbatim from a reporter's comment about the real trial of the anarchists, which Binelli uses as an epigraph: "There's no story in it. Just a couple of wops in a jam." Binelli includes a description of their electrocution, and quotes from newspapers that show an overt prejudice against Italian Americans, and a shortlist of the literary works the trial inspired, including Upton Sinclair's Boston, John Dos Passos' The Big Money, and Howard Fast's The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend.

This represented an intentional balance between the comic and tragic. "I liked the idea of veering back and forth and keeping people slightly off balance," Binelli explained. "I was thinking about writers I like, like Beckett, who so wonderfully can strike a balance between being hysterically funny and unbelievably dark.

"I definitely didn't want to disrespect the real Sacco and Vanzetti. I have nothing but respect for them, and I think ultimately my book honors their memory. I don't want to just treat them as innocents snatched out of bed in the middle of the night. Recasting them as ridiculous figures has a way of stripping away the other sentimental stuff, and so, hopefully, I can sneak back in some of the more serious and moving parts of their story." --Karen Schechner