Down and Out in the City of Angels

John Fante is one of those tragic figures of arts and letters whose best work was coldly and cruelly overlooked in his own lifetime, only to be “discovered” and celebrated long after his death. When Fante died at 74 in 1983, he had earned a bed in the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills by reason of his work as a journeyman screenwriter in the old studio system--”the most disgusting job in Christ’s kingdom,” he once called it. But he also left behind a collection of novels and short stories so accomplished and so stirring that he is now compared favorably with Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway.

“John Fante could not have known that less than two decades later he would be regarded as an important figure in 20th century literature,” writes Fante’s biographer, Stephen Cooper, in his preface to “The John Fante Reader,” “nor that he would also be recognized internationally for his influence on younger generations of writers.”

Much of Fante’s best-loved work is still in print, including such early novels as “Wait Until Spring, Bandini” (first published in 1938) and “Ask the Dust” (1939) and later efforts like “The Brotherhood of the Grape” (1977), published by Black Sparrow Press, the house that first resurrected his writing in the 1980s. “The John Fante Reader” features excerpts from many of Fante’s most famous books, but Cooper also includes fragments of less-celebrated stories and unpublished letters, thus demonstrating to new readers exactly why Fante has come to be so highly regarded.

The magic begins with the very first selection in “The John Fante Reader,” “A Kidnaping in the Family,” a short story from “The Wine of Youth” (1983), in which the narrator describes how, as an adolescent, he fell in love with a photograph of his mother that he found in a locked trunk. He barely recognizes the beautiful young woman in the snapshot as his aging and careworn mother, and he is lifted out of the tawdriness of their real lives by the visions that the photograph inspires.

“I would stare at that strange picture, kissing it and crying over it, happy because it had once been true,” he writes. “And I remember an afternoon when I took it down to the creek bank, set it upon a stone and prayed to it.”

The most telling moment in the story comes when the young narrator interrogates his mother on how she came to marry his father. She gives him the hard facts of life and love in a poor Italian American family at the turn of the last century, but he is sizzling with the Oedipal urge--”I searched my catechism and prayer book for a law which stated that mothers could not marry their sons”--and he succeeds in enlisting his mother in conjuring up a rich and provocative fantasy that would invalidate his father’s claim on her as her rightful husband:

“‘Didn’t he do anything to you? Didn’t he kidnap you, or something?’

“‘I don’t remember being kidnaped.’

“‘But you were kidnaped!’

“‘Yes!’ she said. ‘He did kidnap me! He came one night when I was asleep and took me away.’

“‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes!’”

The same clash of reality and fantasy, the same delicate interplay between one’s deepest longings and one’s mundane circumstances, can be traced throughout Fante’s life and work as it is reflected in Cooper’s anthology. Set mostly in Southern California, and spanning a period from the Depression to the early 1980s, the writing collected in “The John Fante Reader” allows us to see the world through the eyes of a man who was wholly free of sentiment and self-deception and yet who was fascinated by his own origins and afire with his own passions. “On Nietzsche’s anniversary, which is my Christmas, I always get stewed,” he wrote to H.L. Mencken in 1932. “I would rather write than anything else.”

A professor of English and film at Cal State Long Beach, Cooper has already distinguished himself as Fante’s anthologist (“The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959” by John Fante) and biographer (“Full of Life”). But, other than his artful selection of illuminating passages from Fante’s work, his own scholarship is mostly absent from “The John Fante Reader,” in which Cooper pays Fante the compliment of letting him speak for himself.

“You’re nothing but a boy who’s read too many books,” says his mother in an excerpt from “The Road to Los Angeles” (1985). But “The John Fante Reader” allows us to see how the written word was, quite literally, his own salvation: “When I was a boy I had prayed to St. Teresa for a new fountain pen,” Fante writes in “Ask the Dust.” “My prayer was answered.”

Every review of a book by Dan Fante seems to note that he is the son of John Fante, and this one is no different. After all, Dan Fante’s first novel, “Chump Change,” depicts a crisis in the life of a man, dubbed Bruno Dante, whose father is a gifted but long-neglected writer. And now Dan Fante brings Bruno back in “Mooch,” a novel in which the character’s mid-life crisis deepens into a sexual catastrophe that threatens to swallow him alive.

“Jonathan Dante, my father, had been dead for eleven months,” announces Bruno at the outset of the novel. “He died broke, brokenhearted, collecting a stinking Writers Guild Pension and $762 a month in Social Security. A forgotten screenwriter. I had returned to L.A. from New York City to watch him die.”

Now Bruno is reduced to making a living by hawking computer supplies over the phone in a telemarketing operation in which a prospective customer is called a “mooch” and each paycheck depends on how many cold calls result in sales. But his day job is only the battleground from where he sallies forth to confront his real demons--his struggle with alcoholism, his failed aspirations as a writer and his tormenting love affair with a beguiling young woman called Jimmi: “Half Mexican, half Iranian, twenty-six, beautiful and street smart, from the Pacoima projects.”

“I knew why I loved this woman,” Bruno declares. “She was like my dead father, at war against her own life and time. Ten thousand disappointments would kill her as they had killed him.”

Dan Fante allows us to glimpse a Southern California demimonde that surely escaped his father’s attention--the distinct and often disturbing subcultures of the strip club, the porno video arcade, the “sober-living” house where Bruno is stashed by his sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous and the cheap motel on Sepulveda Boulevard where he holes up when he goes on a binge. “Mooch” is always intense and harrowing, occasionally titillating and sometimes even funny, but only rarely and grudgingly does Fante give us a moment of redemption.

“My real difficulty--my problem--wasn’t my depressions or my drinking or my job failures or even the unarticulated fear that I was [an] ... insane whack,” confesses Bruno. “My problem was people. And they were located everywhere.”