Back From the Dust : Scholars seek to burnish the reputation of John Fante, the legendary Los Angeles writer

John Fante, who died of complications from diabetes in 1983 at the age of 74, is one of the lost souls of American letters, an author whose work has an almost legendary stature among writers and critics, but remains curiously unknown to the public at large. Born in Colorado to Italian immigrant parents, Fante made his way to Los Angeles in the early 1930s and sold his first short story to H. L. Mencken’s “The American Mercury” in 1932. Unlike contemporaries such as Nathanael West, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, however, Fante undertook his California pilgrimage as an unknown and, initially at least, had little interest in Hollywood, settling instead in the fading downtown neighborhood of Bunker Hill, where he aspired to create novels, not scripts. (Later, with four children to support, he would forgo fiction to find work at the studios, writing some 30 screenplays, of which eight were produced.)

Fante’s first novel, “Wait Until Spring, Bandini,” was published in 1938. But it was his second, “Ask the Dust,” released a year later, that was to prove his masterwork. Revolving around the author’s fictional alter ego, an aspiring writer named Arturo Bandini, “Ask the Dust” is a seminal work of Los Angeles literature that captures unsparingly all the dingy illusions of Southern California, the “sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet.” Fante, of course, was a man rather classically out of place, writing literary fiction in a town built on celluloid dreams, treating seriously a city the Eastern cultural elite had deemed unworthy of such consideration. According to Stephen Cooper, a full-time lecturer in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach, “Fante was well-received critically, but nobody noticed him.”

In an effort to insure that his work will continue to speak to others, Cooper organized “John Fante: The First Conference,” held last weekend under the auspices of Cal State Long Beach. Featuring scholars from as far away as the University of Bucharest and the Universite Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux--Fante is especially popular in Germany and France, where his books have sold more than 300,000 copies--the conference brought together critics, academics, relatives and fans in a two-day celebration of Fante’s life and art. At times, in fact, it seemed like a cross between an academic symposium and a family reunion, particularly when Fante’s widow, Joyce, their children and his brother Tom took the podium to share their recollections, and filmmaker Frank Spotnitz screened a presentation reel of his documentary-in-progress on Fante.

“Ask the Dust”--despite positive reviews, including one in “The Atlantic Monthly” that likened it to Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther”--sold only 600 copies, and quickly fell into out-of-print purgatory. It remained there, along with the rest of Fante’s writing, for more than 40 years, until Charles Bukowski brought it to the attention of John Martin at Black Sparrow Press, which reissued the novel in 1980. If Bukowski was one important champion of Fante (his work, the San Pedro author noted, “was . . . a lifetime influence on my writing . . . written of and from the gut and the heart”), then Cooper is another, a dedicated reader who hopes to see this most quintessential of Los Angeles talents finally receive his due.

Cooper’s fascination with Fante dates back to 1974, when he came across a Los Angeles Times interview with Robert Towne, in which the “Chinatown” screenwriter praised “Ask the Dust.” “If there’s a better piece of fiction written about L.A.,” Towne said, “I don’t know about it. It’s much better than ‘The Day of the Locust,’ which many people consider the best Los Angeles novel.” Cooper searched out Fante’s book and was so taken that he wrote a letter to the author, who responded, in typical fashion, with the admonition that “writing is a great joy, but the profession of writing is horrible.” Twenty years later, Cooper has begun work on a biography, with the cooperation of the family and complete access to the files. “Like a lot of people,” he says, “I was in my early 20s, living in a room, trying to write, and Arturo Bandini spoke to me.”

Given Fante’s neglected status, it’s hardly surprising that the conference focused primarily on its subject’s position as a literary outsider. More unexpected was the attention directed at the role Fante’s Italian-American heritage may have played in his career. In his talk, Gay Talese suggested that “to be an Italian-American writer . . . is to be without allies,” a situation he ascribed to the lack of any kind of indigenous readership. During the conference, he elaborated on this point: “You need mentors, people who are going to have the influence to put people onto your work. Fante never had that, because the Italian-American is not the professor of English literature, nor the literary publisher, nor the critic, nor the agent. Worse, Italian-Americans are not readers. So there was no one behind him; the Italian-American audience isn’t there.” Both Talese and Fred L. Gardaphe of Columbia College in Chicago traced the importance of the immigrant experience in Fante’s writing, which, Talese noted, explores in dramatic fashion the conflicts between father and son, old world and new, “taking us from the hands of a bricklayer to the hands of a writer.”

Talese’s point is an interesting one, providing a framework for reading Italian-American literature as a genre of its own. But his eloquence notwithstanding, the issue is perhaps more emblematic of our current fixation with identity politics than of any essential thread in Fante’s work . Although Joyce Fante said that her husband “did feel the cause of the Italian-American very deeply, and in a sense, he was carrying the torch,” his aesthetic, first and foremost, had to do with his inner life, a state of being as linked to his past as it was to the present he discovered in California. From that perspective, he was, if anything, a modernist writer in the tradition of his times, for whom the filter of personal subjectivity was the preeminent means of engaging the world. After all, as Spotnitz reminded us, “fiction and autobiography are inseparable in the work of John Fante.”

One of the areas in which Fante’s real and imaginary lives are most tightly conjoined is in his experience of Catholicism, and a number of conferees spoke of the religious motifs that recur throughout his books. Jay Martin of the University of Southern California argued that Fante, in part, overcame the burden of modernism by returning to the Catholic tradition of meditation as explicated by St. Ignatius Loyola. “What he understands is that the least person of all can be the most heroic,” Martin explained, portraying Fante as, in some fashion, a modern metaphysical poet, his work built on an appreciation of the ordinary, and how it can rise to the level of the sacred. This theme was picked up later by Loyola University’s Andrew Horton, who, in analyzing two Fante screenplays, “Walk on the Wild Side” and “The Reluctant Saint,” connected them with his fiction by suggesting that there is “a constant need in Fante to transcend the physical moment,” a spiritual push.

Horton’s comments are especially instructive, since one of the questions surrounding Fante’s career is the extent to which he was corrupted by Hollywood, if at all. It’s a notion rejected by Cooper and Fante’s publisher John Martin. “(John) might have bought that,” Martin acknowledges, “but I think he produced just about everything he had in him. Some people are really prolific and turn out a book a year while others, like Fante and Nathanael West, turn out a handful of books that are really focused.” And Gay Talese says, simply: “He did what he wanted to do.” Nonetheless, while “there were entire years,” in Cooper’s view, “when he did nothing but write screenplays, gamble, and golf,” Fante’s relationship with the movie business was bittersweet at best. At the family panel, his second son, Daniel, remembered: “My father wrote for money. He liked the good life. It was tough for an artist to write for money. It was the thorn in his side.”

One of the most exciting moments of the conference came when Frank Gaspar of Long Beach City College unveiled an uncollected piece of short fiction called “Eleven-Thirty” that the undergraduate Fante had published in the 1932 issue of Edda, the college literary magazine. Taken by itself, “Eleven-Thirty” is pure juvenalia, a melodramatic tale of a double suicide, mostly overwrought. Considered next to “Altar Boy,” however--the story with which Fante broke into “The American Mercury” a few months later--it provides a remarkable insight into how quickly he developed. And it underlines how Fante became a writer during his early days in Southern California, one whose essential territory, as David Fine of Cal State Long Beach correctly pointed out, “was not Hollywood but Bunker Hill.”

So it was fitting that, in the last years of his life, Fante--blind, confined to a wheelchair--returned to fiction, dictating a novel, “Dreams From Bunker Hill,” to his wife in order to complete the saga of Arturo Bandini he had begun half a century before. Cooper calls it “a heroic response to his situation,” and I’m inclined to agree. But there is something else at work in this final book, also, an almost mystical belief in the magic of the written word, in the redemptive ability of literature to turn back time. And Fante’s decision to write it is unequivocal and telling, an indication of what he thought was important, and where he meant his legacy to reside.

“I stretched out on the bed and slept,” Fante writes at the end of the novel. “It was twilight when I awakened and turned out the light. I felt better, no longer tired. I went to the typewriter and sat before it. My thought was to write a sentence, a single perfect sentence. If I could write one good sentence I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever. But suppose I failed? Suppose I had lost all my beautiful talent? . . . I had seventeen dollars in my wallet. Seventeen dollars and the fear of writing. I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers.”