A Man of the Ages

If the Italian immigrant experience has a presence beyond the mythic Mafia of Mario Puzo, it is through the short stories and novels of John Fante. While he has never been a highly recognized American writer, by 1940 when he was 21, Fante had already published two novels, “Wait Until Spring, Bandini” and “Ask the Dust,” as well as half of his lifetime production of short stories in national magazines such as the American Mercury, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar and Scribner’s Magazine, many of which were published in his first short story collection, “Dago Red.” Until recently, there was little we knew about this author’s life, aside from what we could glean from his highly autobiographical fiction.

Through Fante’s work, I, like other Americans of Italian descent, came to understand the experiences of our grandparents. Much of this realization comes through his great Bandini novels, “Wait Until Spring, Bandini,” “The Road to Los Angeles,” “Ask the Dust” and stories like “The Odyssey of a Wop.” Because of Fante, I understood why my mother recoiled at the sound of words like dago and wop, words whose meanings my mother and I did not share, that had never stung me as they had her. “From the beginning,” writes Fante, “I hear my mother use the words Wop and Dago with such vigor as to denote violent distaste. She spits them out. They leap from her lips. To her, they contain the essence of poverty, squalor, filth.”

One of the earliest American writers of Italian descent, Fante adapted the oral tradition of southern Italian peasants to a literary culture. His sentence structure is simple and characteristic of the language used in oral storytelling that depends on memory for the maintenance of important information. He strategically repeats words, phrases and sentences to emphasize a feeling or to drive home a philosophical point. His narrative never drags and his dialogue always pushes the story ahead. In crisp, clean, accessible language, he mingles realistic images of working-class characters with the youthful romanticism of a protagonist longing for love or the accolades of success.

Since I first discovered Fante in the mid-1970s, I have read every Fante work published. For my book on Italian American literature, he became an Italian Hemingway. He taught me that American literature is more than just what descended from the Pilgrims. Through him I learned to make sense of the drama inside the Catholic Church, to understand the sturdy pagan underpinnings of my family’s fears of the “evil eye.” Through Fante, my grandparents’ broken English is transformed from a source of embarrassment into beautiful music. Through him I hear the sounds of their language as though for the first time; these resurrections have kept me sane and searching for more of Fante’s work. But it wasn’t always easy to find Fante’s work, at least not until Black Sparrow Press, at the suggestion of the late poet Charles Bukowski, began republishing it in the early 1980s.

The resurrection of Arturo Bandini, one of Fante’s storytellers, brought us an archetype that embodies the dilemma of growing up ethnic in America. New generations would hear a voice that could only be American, one that distilled the essence of being raised by American immigrants. Bandini was obsessed with achieving fame as a writer.

In Fante’s prologue to the novel “Ask the Dust,” the voice of Bandini could be Fante’s own, speaking to us today from the grave: “Am I alone now? Poof! My loneliness bears fruit, and there shall be a Los Angeles of tomorrow to remember that a Voice trod these stairs, and Benny the Gouge down on the corner of Third and Hill will weep for joy as he telleth his grandchild that he once spoke with a man of the ages.”

*

Like Mark Twain, Fante wrote about the places where he’d lived--Colorado and Los Angeles--and like Twain’s work, Fante’s writings speaks to all Americans. His use of down-home American humor to tell tales of his times transcends the period of time in which he lived. Unlike Twain, however, and more like Edgar Allan Poe, Fante’s strongest impact has been in Europe, where his writings continue to sell better than in the United States. Fante’s fame and influence are only now, nearly 20 years after his 1983 death, being acknowledged in the land of his birth.

W.E.B. Du Bois once remarked that “Great writers need great critics,” and finally they are arriving at Fante’s works. A biography, a critical study and an additional collection of Fante’s short fiction should give him the attention he has always deserved and convince scholars, critics and new readers that Fante is indeed an author for the ages.

For nearly 10 years, Stephen Cooper, a professor of English and film at Cal State Long Beach, has been talking to Fante’s surviving relatives and friends; he also has dug through the Fante papers, which are not stored in a prestigious archive but in filing cabinets on a service porch of the Fante Malibu home. Much of the biography is based on the contents of those files: letters, unpublished stories, never-developed screenplays and the bits and pieces of a literary life kept safe by Joyce Fante, the author’s widow, who has overseen the recent renaissance of her late husband’s career.

Told as a story in 17 chapters (didn’t anyone tell Cooper that the number 17 is considered by Italians to carry bad luck?), “Full of Life” is a chronological accounting of the life of a man who spent his career writing about that very same life. The biography takes its title, ironically, from one of Fante’s least autobiographical novels, one that was made into a 1956 film starring Judy Holliday and Richard Conte. Cooper’s narrative draws in a range of perspectives: There’s the poetry and journal of his wife; accounts by their children; interviews of Tom Fante, the author’s youngest brother; and the writings of friends such as Ross B. Wills and Carey McWilliams, who help counter Fante’s autobiographical accounts of key events and nights on the town.

We see Fante as a man who, after a writing binge, would purge himself by drinking and playing with the boys. Cooper has managed to create a mosaic of the author’s life that is as much puzzle as picture. Strong in his detective work, Cooper makes the important connections that help us understand how the demons and muses made Fante’s life matter to those who knew him personally and to those who only knew him through his writing.

Cooper’s research for the biography also resulted in the uncovering of a great deal of previously uncollected and unpublished fiction. These works have been assembled in “The Big Hunger,” a collection of 18 Fante stories written during his formative years, 1932-1959.

The earliest, “Horselaugh on Dibber Lannon” and “The Still Small Voices,” are young boys’ stories reminiscent of Huck Finn’s. In them we find the origins of Fante’s wonderful juxtaposition of short, repetitive sentences with long, winding embedded sentences that creates a rhythm, a pace and a style so clear that the story shines through. Cooper includes excerpts from Fante’s unfinished novel about Filipino Americans, the complete prologue to “Ask the Dust” and a number of stories that appeared in major magazines such as Esquire, Women’s Home Companion and Collier’s.

Like home movies, these stories become a chance to once again watch the development of one of America’s great writers; reading the stories in order means watching the writer progress from youthful struggles into mature confidence. Cooper’s notes about the stories help provide a context for understanding how they were or were not published and where they fit into the author’s career.

*

More interpretive than narrative, Richard Collins’ “John Fante: A Literary Portrait” is best read after you have familiarity with Fante’s writing. Collins, a professor of English at Xavier University in New Orleans, attempts to connect Fante’s life to his work and to sort fact from fiction, life from legend. He argues for Fante’s status as a major American writer--and makes an excellent case--and identifies many of Fante’s literary influences like H. L. Mencken, Knut Hamsun, Homer and Dostoevsky.

Not having the same access to Fante’s papers as Cooper, Collins must depend on his own instincts to distill fact from fiction. Collins’ critical insights are considerable and commendable, but “John Fante: A Literary Portrait” better serves teachers and scholars than the casual reader of Fante’s stories or novels. The book begs for an index that would have made this well conceived study more reader-friendly.

The study opens with a discussion of the major thematic concerns of Fante’s work: family and religion. Collins connects ethnicity to religion to show how a man’s upbringing can fashion the form and content of his literary and even his cinematic writings. He suggests that “Fante’s familiarity with . . . the oral tale of his Italian American upbringing and the confessional of the Church, was no small part of what made movie-writing or scenario-pitching so easy for Fante.”

Collins moves through Fante’s fiction as though each story, each novel, each screenplay were an entry into an autobiographical scrapbook. The result is a thorough consideration of Fante’s work, analyzing much from his earliest to his posthumous publications. Collins contends that “Fante does not hide behind literature, but uses it in a more relevant and rebellious endeavor, to expose himself. . . .” What Fante exposes through the power of ironic self-mockery, Collins demonstrates, is what makes for his unique contribution to American literature.