John Fante:
Consumingly Tortured and Ultra Talented: Better than Hemingway ?? "Ask the Dust"
The
ANNOTICO Report
Often
great artistry can only come from a tortured soul. John Fante
was a from a tortured background, that he bequeathed
to his son.
But
did he also pass on the talent?
The
West Magazine offers a rather extensive exploration of the person of John, and
his son Dan, and their extended family. It's gritty and cuts to the bone!!!
But
in wanting to provide you with a little back ground, I came across articles
both in Salon and Beach, that concentrate on the
writing chronolology, and are not nearly as
depressing, and provide the evidence for many to consider Fante
better than Hemingway!!!!!!
The
Rage that fueled John Fante came from the
ugly bigotry John endured as a kid. Italians, Dagos, were the lowest of the
ethnic totem pole through the 1920s in
The
Movie version of John Fante's
Novel "Ask the Dust " was released on
To
Remind you about the importance of John Fante, here from Salon:
The
Italian American author of "Ask the Dust" was the quintessential
In his current
book, "An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America,"
George De Stefano bemoans the fact that young Italian Americans know themselves
only through skewed popular images: "They know all about John Gotti but not John Fante."
Unfortunately, you don't have to be Italian American not to know who John Fante was, though perhaps a few more will discover his work
thanks to Robert Towne's adaptation of Fante's
best-known novel, "Ask the Dust," starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek...
If it weren't for
Charles Bukowski, who regarded Fante
as his (please excuse the term, but it applies) literary godfather and who
dedicated poems to him, it's likely that few would remember Fante's
name today. Bukowski, who was known in the early part
of his literary career to go around shouting, "I am Arturo Bandini!" in tribute to Fante's
ebullient, raw-nerved literary alter ego, was instrumental in getting Fante's books back into print in the late '70s, shortly
before Fante's death in 1983. (Twelve of his books
are currently in print from Ecco, including all four
of the Arturo Bandini novels.)
John Fante...
Hemingway by the Bay
Beach-
The Magazine of
By
Steve Weinstein
The deftest writer nobody knows—perhaps
the greatest writer
"Fante
thought he was better than Hemingway," said Stephen Cooper, a professor of
film and English at Cal State Long Beach, whose biography of Fante, the first ever, will be published in February.
"His son told me that he remembered the old man sitting there, typing like
mad and saying, "that old bastard Hemingway couldn’t write anything
this good." And if you’re talking about his best three or four or
five books, I wouldn’t argue with that. "He was a magnificent writer
who deserves to be known and read as much as Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel
West and Joan Didion and all the others.
Without John Fante,
you are overlooking a major voice, maybe the major voice, in and of
Los Angeles Weekly articles
editor Tom Christie has labeled Fante "the
father of the
Even in a book riddled with shocking
passages, the massacre of the crabs in The Road to
Fante revered and studied the great Nobel Prize-winning
Norwegian, Knut Hamsum,
perhaps the father of modernism, whose first novel, Hunger, published in 1890,
predated James Joyce and Marcel Proust in chronicling
in prose a character’s deeply interior voice, self-awareness and the
dawning of consciousness. But Fante, in a way,
one-ups his master by allowing the savagery of Bandini’s
consciousness, held painfully inside by Hamsum’s
genius of a protagonist, to gush forth in crazy bursts of cruelty and
self-humiliation. While Ask the Dust the saga of Bandini
a few years older, living on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, struggling to
survive each day in order to write his celestial prose at night and falling
unrequitedly in love with a beautiful hophead--is indisputably Fante’s finest, The Road to Los Angeles, while
unrulier, less masterful, certainly less mature, is more purely, emotionally
riveting. It’s not pornographic.! It’s not
perverse. It has few dirty words. Yet you cannot read the book without your
mouth falling open.
"I remember buying that book when it
was finally published in 1985 and reading the first couple of pages in my car
and going, Whoa!‚" Cooper said. "Raw
is certainly the word. It is certainly rawer and maybe stronger than Ask the
Dust. Anybody who has had even one moment of unbridled emotion, and a lot
of us grow out of that or tend to forget it on purpose, but anyone who has felt
that and has access to the memories of that intensity has to recognize
themselves in that book."
Fante started the book in
Cooper interviewed one of Fante’s cousins who attended
The earthquake in 1933, which he described
in Ask the Dust and some of his short stories, sent Fante
scurrying, scared shitless, out of
But Fante’s
first publisher, Stackpole Sons, was successfully
sued for copyright violations when it published an unexpurgated version of
Hitler’s Mein Kampf
in an effort to show the real monster he was. That sapped its promotional
budgets, its attention, its strength. Then the war
came and Fante, just 32 when the Japanese hit
The magnificence Arturo Bandini
fantasized about so achingly in The Road to Los Angeles has never really
materialized. Bukowski saved Fante
from eternal obscurity in his 1978 novel The Women, in which the
narrator declares Fante his favorite writer, the best
ever, because of his brave emotional brilliance. When Bukowski’s
publisher, John Martin at Black Sparrow Press, wondered if Fante
was a fictional representation of some flesh and bones writer, Bukowski replied that Fante was
real, alive still, his writing peerless.
Black Sparrow then proceeded to republish Fante’s out-of-print masterworks, starting with Ask
the Dust in 1980, which included an introduction by Bukowski,
who as a young, starving, drunken wannabe found the novel by accident on the
shelves of the Los Angeles Public Library downtown and immediately fell in
love. Bukowski fans snapped up Fante.
Slowly, mouth to mouth, hand to hand, a new cult audience, primarily here in
The bustling Beverly Hills Public Library
stocks just one of his books. Walk a step out of L.A., San Francisco and New
York, and you’re far more likely to find people who know who’s
sixth in line for the British throne than could identify Fante.
And like some great neglected American jazz artist, Fante
sells far better in France, Germany and Italy than here in the city he lived
and memorialized. "Black Sparrow has done a phenomenal job in keeping his
books available and getting it out to lone readers through word of mouth,"
Cooper said. "But he hasn’t had a big New York publisher behind him.
And lamentably, he has never had the professoriat
behind him. English teachers are notoriously slow to recognize what’s
going on. And if an author doesn’t have an entry in the Norton
Anthology of Literature, then you will never get out there to the
multitudes." A cure, or a least a band-aid, is on the way, however.
Coinciding w! ith the
publication of the biography, a new book of nearly twenty as yet uncollected or
unpublished Fante short stories, most culled from the
stacks of papers and manuscripts Cooper dug out of the man’s Malibu desk,
has just come out. A filmmaker in Amsterdam is currently shooting a documentary
on the author. And perhaps, what would surely be the biggest Fante public relations bonanza of all, Robert Towne and
Francis Ford Coppola have rekindled their interest in shooting Towne’s
already-written film adaptation of Ask the Dust. Leonardo
DiCaprio as Arturo Bandini?
The crown prince of Hollywood could never do more to bring real art to the
world. And, just maybe, this radiant lost soul of twentieth-century literature
would be dust no more.
http://beach.littoral.net/04.05.2000/features/fante_1.29.2000/
"A
Biography of John Fante" by Stephen Cooper
West
Magazine
J.R.
Mochringer
April
30, 2006
John
Fante drank and raged and wrote some of the best
prose to come out of L.A.
J.R.
Moehringer talks to his son Dan, who drank and raged
and is determined to write some of the best prose to come out of L.A.
This is a big night for John Fante, and for his son,
Dan, who is proud of the old man, even if he doesn't often say so. Dan needs to
be in the right mood to speak well of John, and tonight you can see in his
smile, he's in the right mood. Tonight Dan is setting aside the bad memories,
the sorrow and rage and resentment over John, for a few hours. For as long as
any son can set aside such things.
Many consider Dan's father the best novelist Los Angeles has ever produced. In
spare, gleaming prose, John painted a city that was nasty and harsh, but also
shot through with magic—part land mine, part gold mine. "Los
Angeles, give me some of you!" John wrote in the 1930s, while starving in
a downtown flophouse. John's Los Angeles, where it was normal, even noble, to
be a loser, where you could be down to your last nicke!
l and still preen like a diva, won him a cult
following, including Charles Bukowski, who famously
called John "my god."
Of course, most of the actors and producers attending tonight's premiere of
"Ask the Dust," the film version of John's masterpiece, wouldn't know
John if he fell in their laps. They're here for the booze-and-schmooze. Nor
would they recognize Dan, which amounts to the same thing, since Dan is a dead
ringer for the old man. (In Dan's vernacular it's "the old man,"
rarely "my father.") Dan, 62, not only looks like his father, but
writes books like his father, and wants to follow in his father's footsteps.
That is, some of his father's footsteps. Certain of his father's footsteps lead
directly to the grave.
The Fantes are a remarkable tandem: One of the few
father-son acts in American literature, they are profoundly different, and yet
they have more in common than some twins. Like his father, Dan loves fast cars,
mean dogs, good books. Like his fa! ther, Dan can hold forth on all
the classic masculine subjects—boxing, baseball, poker, pretty women.
Like his father, Dan can give off an air of menace, with a gravelly voice and a
large tattoo and eyes that narrow suddenly into the kind of scowl that precedes
a knife fight. And yet, like his father, Dan can also be deeply sentimental,
and terribly fragile. Tonight, for instance, Dan is still smarting over a
slight suffered earlier in the day, when a publicist called his last novel
"depressing."
But the key link between the Fantes is the way their
lives are defined by a trinity of risky activities—drinking, writing,
fathering—each of which can be a coping mechanism, or delivery mechanism,
for rejection. And rejection, above all, is what binds Fante
father and son. Rejection is their muse, their curse, their subject, and
rejection is the best one-word prиcis of Dan
and John's relationship. All his life Dan has been seeking and rejecting John,
a rejecter of the first or! der.
It's stirring, therefore, and symbolic, that tonight, after decades of professional
rejection, John will get his turn in the spotlight, and Dan will be here to see
it. John won't see it, because he died 23 years ago, but Dan is fully capable
of standing in for the old man. Collin Farrell plays John in "Ask the
Dust," but Dan can play John in his sleep. Dan can conjure John in a
sentence, as John did his own father. (In the opening
sentence of his first autobiographical novel, in 1938, John described his
father's footsteps: "He came along, kicking the deep snow.")
So here comes Dan, kicking in the old man's footsteps, making his way through
the well-wishers in the lobby of the Egyptian Theater, proudly taking his seat
in the VIP section. Dan's younger brother, Jim, is in the VIP section too. He
sits a few seats from Dan, alongside their younger sister, Vickie. Strained smiles. The siblings haven't always gotten along,
and things have been extra tense since ! their mother, Joyce, died last June. For months the Fante siblings have been negotiating a division of the
estate, and recently they reached an accord. Tonight, on top of everything
else, Jim will hand Dan a check for his share. The money will help Dan pay his
bills and finally focus full time on writing.
It's a very big night for Dan.
In walks Robert Towne, the legendary director, the John Fante
of directors, who put his own literary stamp on Los Angeles with his
masterpiece, "Chinatown." He steps to a
microphone below the screen and the crowd quiets. By way of introducing his
film, Towne recalls first meeting John in around 1970. He describes John's
pessimism. John doubted that Towne could turn "Ask the Dust" into a
film, and tonight Towne is beaming with pride, a prodigal returning to prove
the old man wrong.
Dan beams too. He can relate.
Towne closes by thanking John's children for their help with the film. He asks
them to rise and be recogn! ized. He names them.
Jim.
Vickie.
Jim and Vickie stand. Applause, applause.
Towne doesn't name Dan.
Has he forgotten Dan? Does he not know Dan is here?
The lights go off. The theater is pitch dark. Then the
screen gives off a soft glow that rolls over the audience like a fog. But as
the name John Fante appears in giant letters, a kind
of darkness still seems to hover over one seat in the
VIP section.
The memorial service feels like a 12-step meeting: All the mourners are
alcoholics, the deceased was an alcoholic, and every eulogy is turning into an
alcoholic's "inventory."
An inventory is a drinker's confession, a dead-eyed reckoning of wounds
inflicted and sins committed under the sway of booze. In 12-step programs it's
called Step 4. Dan stands in the back of the church, eyes cast down, lips down,
everything about him pointing down, because the deceased was the first person
to hear Dan's inventory, 20 years ago, w! hen Dan
stopped drinking.
Dan was 42 at the time, and he'd spent his life doing what he'd seen the old
man do—raging. But at least the old man had raged now and then on the
page. Dan had raged in the streets and in barrooms, and at 42 he had nothing to
show for all that rage. He'd run out of money, energy and time. He'd been
arrested twice for drunken driving, and he'd recently shoved the barrel of his
.357 magnum into his mouth. The only place left to him was here, among these
alcoholics, "working the 12 steps" instead of following in the old
man's footsteps.
Upon joining a 12-step program, Dan made a friend, a fellow alcoholic—the
man everyone has gathered here to remember. Dan asked the friend to receive his
inventory, which Dan had pounded out on a typewriter. It totaled 31 pages,
single-spaced, and Dan asked his friend to listen while Dan read it aloud.
Sitting on his friend's sofa, Dan read about growing up in Malibu, in a
household clenched with fear. He! read about cowering
from his old man, who was forever screaming at everyone in his path. "I
went deaf as a child for six months," Dan says. "They told me it was
my adenoids blocking the hearing canal, but I believe in fact I lost my hearing
because of my dad."
During Dan's childhood, much of John's rage was born of rejection. His second
novel, "Ask the Dust," though well reviewed, hadn't sold, possibly
because it appeared in 1939, a year that saw a glut of seminal California
novels—"The Big Sleep," "The Day of the Locust,"
"The Grapes of Wrath." His next novel was summarily rejected by John
Steinbeck's editor, Pascal Covici, and that was that.
John gave up. Stopped writing novels, stopping writing anything besides the
occasional Hollywood piecework, to pay the bills, which left him humiliated.
When he did gather himself to write another novel, his work was invariably
praised by critics and ignored by readers, which would send him into another
period of gloom and indole! nce.
John was respected, but he wanted to be lionized. He was well paid, but he wanted
to be rich. When reality failed to meet his expectations, he felt betrayed by
the gods of literature. In later years, as his books fell out of print, he
spent long stretches doing little more than golfing and sulking, and some days
his fury about his failure hung in the Malibu house like smoke from his pipe.
Most of Dan's boyhood memories are of hiding, on a surfboard, in a closet,
anywhere out of range of the old man. "He wasn't anybody I wanted to be
around," Dan says.
Dan read to his friend about getting a girl pregnant when he was 19. She had a
son, and Dan fled, to avoid his father's wrath as much as his own
responsibility. Dan read to his friend about hitchhiking to New York, trying to
become an actor, driving a cab instead. He read about his carousel of jobs—carnival
barker, private detective, window washer, dating counselor, telemarketer. With
each job Dan drank to ea! se his sense of failure, but
he didn't need a reason. Drink was in his blood. His father was a drinker, as
was his father, Nick, a bricklayer from Abruzzi. "They're all
drunks," Dan says of the Fante fraternity.
Nick also had that congenital Fante rage: Near the
end of his life he stabbed a man to death in a barroom brawl. "My
grandfather was such a difficult man," Dan says. "He was my father's
role model—and he was no role model."
Stephen Cooper, author of "Full of Life," the definitive biography of
John, says Nick arrived in America around 1900 with a chip on his shoulder.
"He had an attitude toward the world in general, and family life in
particular, that, especially in dealing with his eldest son, John, came out in
some pretty pyrotechnic ways."
John, like Dan, spent his boyhood cowering and hiding from his old man.
Why such animus between Fante fathers and sons? Dan
sometimes blames the Italian blood. Other times he says the Fante
men were ar! chetypal
pre-Freudian patriarchs, who defined themselves through work and disadained wives and children.
Whatever the cause, Cooper's research, going back to the early 1800s, shows a
staggering intractability in the Fante paternal
tradition. Invariably, Fante sons follow the bad
example of their fathers, until the sons become their bad fathers. John would
vanish for days at a time, carousing and drinking, just as Nick had done, and
Nick was merely emulating his father, Giovanni, who sailed for America by
himself at the turn of the century, leaving his family to starve. Nick went
after his old man, and found him in Colorado, passed out in a Denver saloon,
near the start of 1902. Nick "threw him over his shoulder and carried him
out into the Rocky Mountain winter," Cooper writes.
Thus did the Fantes arrive in America, with a son
following his father, then bearing the burden of his father, and this
mini-drama would be enacted again and again over the next 100 years! .
Dan poured all this out to his friend, 31 single-spaced pages, about his
troubled family history, about getting married in 1964, about having another
son and getting divorced soon after, in 1969. He read aloud to him about
returning to Los Angeles in 1975, marrying again in 1980, divorcing two months
later. He lost touch with both sons, bounced from job to job, made money, lost
money, tried therapy, tried drugs, chain-smoked, guzzled gin, slept around,
attempted suicide, landed in jail for public drunkenness, then again for being
drunk on an airplane—a harrowing odyssey.
Rock bottom was a rented house in Laurel Canyon. Drunk, Dan used his gun to
blow holes in a mirrored wall. Afterward he was forced to see in the shot-up
shards what he'd become. "When I had the gun in my mouth with the hammer
back—it was a pretty good indication I'd had enough fun," he says.
"I got sober and began going to meetings."
Near the end of his inventory, Dan glanced up. His! friend
wasn't exactly riveted. "He started reading the newspaper," Dan
recalls. "Then he fell asleep." When Dan roused him, the friend asked
meekly: "How much more are you going to read?"
Though Dan's first stab at autobiographical narrative met with rejection, he
wasn't discouraged. Sure, his friend hadn't listened—but he also hadn't
judged. Or criticized. More importantly, Dan had
written something. He'd worked at it every day until he'd finished, and it felt
good. It felt like the thing he was supposed to do. "The inventory,"
he says, "was the key to letting me know I could write."
After that first inventory, Dan wrote more, which he called poems. He started a
longer, more ambitious inventory, which he called a novel. The writing was
hard, but Dan didn't stop, didn't dare stop, because writing seemed to widen
the gap between his new self and his old—even as it narrowed the gap
between himself and the old man. By the time Dan quit drinking John had been
dead t! hree years, and
booze had been the root cause. Decades of abusing red wine and scotch had
brought on diabetes, which led to blindness and the amputation of both legs. In
taking up his father's trade, Dan hoped to avoid his father's fate—though
his father's fate was partly the result of that trade: John's sense of rejection
picked up where his alcoholic genes left off. So Dan's decision to follow in
certain of John's footsteps, while carefully avoiding others, was fraught with
peril.
Dan got a chilling reminder of how much peril when his older brother, Nick,
named after their grandfather, drank himself to death in 1997. Dan's entire
right forearm is covered with a ghastly green tattoo-epitaph that commemorates
his older brother:
NICK FANTE
DEAD FROM ALCOHOL
1-31-42 TO 2-21-97
Now, near the end of his friend's memorial, Dan walks to the front of the
church and stands before the microphone. "I'm Dan and I'm an
alcoholic!" he says.
"Hi ! Dan!" the mourners shout.
Dan clears his throat and delivers a brief eulogy in which he credits his
friend for saving his life. My friend was kind, Dan says. My friend was
patient, Dan says. My friend was loving, Dan says,
eyes glassy with tears, because his friend was everything his father was not.
Dan describes that long-ago night when he read to his friend. He tells the story
well, in a self-deprecating tone, but the mourners have heard too many stories.
And they have begun to notice that coffee and cake are being served in the
back. As Dan recalls his friend not listening, his audience isn't listening.
Like the formless readers every writer fears, the mourners are fidgety,
distracted, keenly aware of other things they would rather be doing. The
layering of inattention upon inattention, rejection upon rejection, is
daunting. But Dan presses on.
In this moment, dead sober, watching his words fall on deaf ears, Dan might be
as different from the old ma! n, and as like the old
man, as he's ever been.
Sons of celebrated novelists don't become novelists. And if they do, they don't
become celebrated. There are no Kirk and Michael Douglas among American
novelists, no Bobby and Barry Bonds. Dan thinks the reason is simple. Writing,
unlike acting and baseball, can't be taught. Fathers can pass along the hunger
to write, but not the skills.
John didn't try. On the contrary, Dan says, John hoarded his skills, squelched
Dan's early literary bent, tried to make Dan self-conscious about his
intellect. John berated Dan about his report cards, needled him in print about
being glib: In "Brotherhood of the Grape," John's narrator belittles
his two oldest sons, who couldn't be more like Nick and Dan, for their
"icy ability to verbalize."
Thus, in 1991, when Dan began to write, to really write, not just the
post-sobriety free verses, but a novel, he had to fight more than his muse. He
had to go 12 rounds with the old ma! n. "When I'm writing," Dan says,
"I can hear him. Why the [expletive] did you think of putting a comma in
there, you stupid [expletive]?! Jesus Christ, Dan, what kind of sentence is
that? Only a moron would do that!"
And if he wasn't hearing the old man's criticism, he was hearing the praise
heaped upon the old man by the critics of his day.
"I don't envy Dan," says Cooper, the Fante
biographer. "And I admire him for doing what he's doing."
Dan contended with the old man's ghost by confronting him head-on. He moved
into John's house in Malibu, where his mother still lived, and commandeered the
old man's Smith-Corona. He found it in the garage, along with John's last ream
of paper, 500 yellow legal-sized sheets. On the old man's machine, on the old
man's paper, Dan launched the search for his own voice. Sort
of.
In four of his novels John spoke through a first-person narrator, Arturo Bandini, who was his double—a young naпf from Colorado who fled !
his drunken father, lit out for Los Angeles and lived
on nothing but oranges and rage while trying to write. Through Arturo, John
could vent and rant and rhapsodize, often about his father, and nearly 55 years
later Dan decided to do the same. He birthed his own doppelganger—Bruno
Dante. He opened his novel with Bruno walking out of a "nut ward" in
New York, after another hellish bender, and learning that his father, a great
writer named Jonathan Dante, is near death from diabetes.
Bruno flies to L.A. and comes face to face in the hospital with the specter of
his old man—blind, legless, unconscious. "I went to the bed and
picked up one of the hands," Bruno says. "The fingers were short and
thick. Hammer handles. I recalled those fingers. I remembered once thinking
Michelangelo must have had fingers and hands like these."
The lines recall John's about his "fictional" father, also dying of
diabetes, whom he doesn't even bother to rename. Nick, he writes, "was a f! lawless craftsman whose
imagination and intelligence seemed centered in his marvelously strong hands.
And though he called himself a building contractor I came to regard him as a
sculptor."
Bruno is there when the old man breathes his last, and he responds by bolting.
Overcome by grief he holes up in a motel on Sunset with plenty of booze, a
15-year-old hooker, and his father's pit bull, Rocco. Dan freely concedes that
he wrote about real events and flesh-and-bone people. "It's
autobiographical fiction," he says. "It's biography taking poetic
license." ("It's different from biography," John once wrote of
his own work. "Yet it's very much like it.")
Dan finished the novel in 1994 and with his thick Fante
fingers tapped out the title page: "Chump Change." "It just kind
of roared out of me," he says of the book. "It's a really intense
book."
Part of its intensity derives from its relentless evocation of John. When not
recounting actual events surrounding Jo! hn's
death, "Chump Change" is speaking in a style that recalls John's—that
finely honed simplicity, that primal screaming at
John, in "Ask the Dust": "They hate me and my father, and my
father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down."
Bruno's boss calls him "a lover of man and beast alike." The same
phrase appears in "Ask the Dust." It's how Arturo refers to himself
when feeling proud.
Aside from John's influence, "Chump Change" also shows the influence
of Bukowski and Henry Miller. Raw, bleak, its
language is gleefully vulgar, its narrator unapologetically Bacchic.
While drunk, Bruno has sex with men, women and one teenager, and he commits one
awful self-debauch on an airplane—all of which may explain the lack of
enthusiasm from publishers. "I couldn't believe all the rejections,"
Dan says. "I co! uldn't believe some of the rejection slips, what they
said."
Evan Wright met Dan while he was writing "Chump Change," and the two
became friends. Wright was dreaming of doing a book, and feeling like a failure
because he was already 30. (In 2004, Wright published "Generation
Kill," an acclaimed memoir of his time with
In 1996, Robert Laffont Fixot
Seghers in
American reviewers largely ignored Dan's book, but "Chump Change"
refused to disappear. It went on to be published in 11 countries, every now and
then beguiling another critic. "Absolutely tremendous," said the
Birmingham Post in
Long before "Chump Change" was published Dan was hard at work on the
next project. He'd witnessed his father stop writing, then
fail to start again, so Dan dove quickly into a play, "Boiler R! oom," based on his days as a
telemarketer. It ran for two years in
Then, in 2002, Dan wrote "Mooch," also published by Canongate. "Mooch" not only resumes the suicidal
odyssey of Bruno, it fairly resurrects John. The novel contains so many
allusions to "Ask the Dust," it seems at times a T.S. Eliot pastiche
of references and appropriations. Though there are important differences between
the books, in their language and sensibility, and in their views of sobriety,
the similarities are striking.
In "Ask the Dust," Arturo lives in a
In "Mooch," Bruno lives in a
If Dan feels any "anxiety of influence," Harold Bloom's famous
description of the unease poet! s feel toward their
predecessors, he doesn't acknowledge it. Yes, he says, his father's books
influenced him. But far greater was the influence of Hubert Selby's "Last
Exit to
"You're right," he says, sounding astonished.
john might be even more intimidating as a writer than
as a father. He might be a fiercer literary opponent than he was a parent.
After all, the man drank with F. Scott Fitzgerald, palled around with William
Faulkner and William Saroyan. Critics called him one
of the virtuoso stylists of the 20th century, and compared his best work to
Steinbeck, Hemingway—even Goethe.
To whom is Dan compared? John. And it frustrates him.
"I just want my day in the sun," Dan says. "I would like to have
my work as well received as—no, received. In the
States. I'd like to sell s! ome
books in
As if making his case to a panel of critics, Dan begins to delineate the
differences between himself and the old man. "I don't think he could write
what I write. I don't think he could be as honest." Also, John wanted to
be literary, Dan wants to be a visionary. "I have an ax to grind,"
Dan says. "I believe books can change people's lives."
Versatility—there's another category where Dan feels he's got the old man
beat. "My old man wasn't a playwright. He wasn't a [expletive] poet."
Productivity? Score another point for Dan, he says.
Dan has two books coming out this spring: a collection of short stories,
"Short Dog," and a play, "Don Giovanni." "My father
wrote in fits and starts. I don't do that. I write all the time. I'm always
writing. I write six days a week."
Left unspoken is the implication that Dan can write every day because his mind
is clear. Dan takes life one day at a time, and every day he takes sober is
another v! ictory he takes
over the old man. Sometimes, even in the midst of praising John, Dan can't
resist burying him. " 'Ask the Dust' is a much a
better book than `Catcher in the
As if competing with his father weren't enough, Dan also competed with his
mother. When "Chump Change" first appeared, Joyce fired off letters
to critics and publishers, disavowing Dan. As John's literary executor, Dan
says, Joyce was enjoying the resurgence of John's reputation, making good money
off his recently reissued books, and she resented the idea of the Fante brand name being diluted. "My mother tried to
sabotage my work," Dan says grimly. "She saw me as some kind of
competitor for attention."
The day Dan learned what his mother was doing was one of the worst of his life.
"It was literally the only time I've ever actually been driven to my k! nees."
Eventually he made peace with his mother, but the old wounds fester. He's fond
of saying that, rather than children, "my parents should've raised
chickens."
Soon there might be another Fante competing with Dan,
vying for space on the same crowded shelf at the local bookstore. Dan's younger
brother, Jim, plans to write a book. An autobiographical novel, he says.
Jim, who has more happy memories than Dan of growing up, says the Fante household was an extremely competitive arena. And yet
Jim insists that he feels no rivalry with his father, no pressure from John's
legacy. Asked how he views his brother's books, how they compare to the old
man's, Jim pauses: "I would say the main difference is: My father was more
of a natural."
In "Don Giovanni," a newly sober Bruno returns to
Told that "Don Giovanni" resembles "Long Day's Journey Into Night," its family of articulate drinkers
eviscerating one another, Dan demurs. " 'Don
Giovanni' is the superior play," he says. "O'Neill was a bit
wordy."
Bravado is another way of competing with John. And another
way of imitating him. Bravado was John's response to rejection. It's the
bravado of the boxer, the put-'em-up stance of
Hemingway and Mailer. John did box as a young man (trained and managed by his
father) and Dan loves boxing too. One day, attending a match in downtown
Dan begins speaking very rapidly, recalling the old man's ferocious love of the
sport. The old man sure knew his straight rights from his left hooks! The old
man loved Arch! ie
The bell rings. The boxers dance toward each other. Dan says the smaller boxer
looks gamer. "He's a banger," he says admiringly. "Won't
go down."
(In "Mooch," Dan writes of a phone salesmen:
"Freebase was old school, like me—a relentless banger.")
The other fighter, however, is a natural. Blessed with greater reach, and a
longer body, he immediately lands hard punches, from long range, at will.
Everything Dan's fighter does is quickly outdone by his opponent. Soon Dan's
fighter is bleeding from the eye. Dan yells at his fighter to throw a combo,
work the body, but after two rounds Dan's fighter is so behind, so discouraged,
he's simply trying to stay upright.
By the end Dan's fighter is walking straight into punches. He rallies briefly,
but his opponent flashes an effortless left-right-left, squelching! all hope. Dan grimaces. Still, Dan's fighter won't quit. To
the last bell Dan's fighter keeps banging.
The judges' decision is unanimous. Dan's fighter slouches on his stool. His
corner men whisper condolences into his cauliflower ear. He turns and peers
through the ropes, scanning the crowd, then spots his wife, directly in front
of Dan. He gives her an apologetic smile. Then a wink.
It's OK—we'll get 'em next time. In that small
gesture of grace, of acceptance in the teeth of a defeat that seems
predestined, Dan's fighter suddenly is the nobler figure in the ring.
"There's some Bruno in Dan," says Ayrin,
Dan's wife. "But for the most part it's not him at all. At least I hope
not."
What brings out Bruno? Rejection, Ayrin says. Lack of recognition, lack of sales, lack of respect. Dan
gets his hopes up, and when his hopes are dashed, "it just levels
him," she says.
Ayrin met Dan in 2002. A mutual friend brought them
together because Ayrin was a
s! truggling actress in
search of a part, while Dan was a playwright with a hit under his belt. Ayrin liked Dan at once, but Dan was aloof. For starters, Ayrin was 24 years younger. Also, Dan had been married and
divorced yet again—he wasn't looking to go down the aisle a fourth time.
Above all, Ayrin was engaged. "I loved the fact
that he didn't care," Ayrin says. "He was
so uninterested!"
After their first meeting, a brief coffee date, Ayrin
walked straight to Barnes & Noble and bought "Chump Change." She
read it in one sitting and found it reminiscent of Mary Shelley's
"Frankenstein." Soon after turning the last page, she phoned Dan and
asked him to meet her for another coffee. Then she called off her engagement.
Two years later she and Dan were married.
Curiously, in the four years she and Dan have been together, Ayrin has never read any of his father's books. She tried
"Ask the Dust" but couldn't get into it. She did, however,
"meet" the author. Posthumou! sly. When Dan brought Ayrin home
to meet his mother, Ayrin found herself
face-to-face with the old man. "I actually saw him," she says.
"John was in the room. It took me a long time to explain that to
Dan."
Ayrin says she's been "clairvoyant" much of
her life, but especially after suffering a head injury five years ago. Spooky,
she admits—but not so different from what Dan does. Doesn't he speak to
his dead father every day, in his books and plays and poems? "I actually
feel like Dan's trying to communicate with his father," she says, "to
touch him."
For all her extrasensory perception, Ayrin didn't
foresee the kind of father Dan would become. Their son, Giovanni, was born 20
months ago. "I've been amazed," she says. "They're incredible
together."
The Fantes live in a one-bedroom apartment in
This afternoon is cold, windy, and a heavy fog engulfs father and son as they
walk down the street to the little park by the ocean. Dan sets Giovanni on a
swing and gives him a gentle push. The boy goes backward, then forward,
screaming with delight. "You like that?" Dan says.
John never did this with his sons, Dan says. Not once. He wasn't around, and
when he was around, he wasn't pleasant company. "He had two moods,"
Dan says. "Angry and angrier."
"I didn't want the role," John once said, through his
narrator, of fatherhood. "I wanted to go back to a time when I was small
and my father stood strong and noisy in the house. To hell
with fatherhood. I was never born to it. I was born to be a son."
Dan's early failure at fatherhood, he says, led to his downfall. "I
couldn't stand that I'd abandoned my son like my fa! ther had done to me," he
says. "That's why I drank."
Though Dan has salvaged a relationship with his second son, he and his first
son remain estranged. Now Giovanni gives him a fresh start. And
more. "This is a joy," he says, giving Giovanni another push.
"It's not even redemption—it's a gift to me." He takes Giovanni
off the swing and sets him on his feet, tells him to run around. He follows a
few steps behind.
Dan and Ayrin might soon leave
Quit the city his father helped define?
Dan shrugs.
The city also helped defeat his father.
Giovanni tumbles toward the edge of a duck pond. Just before he falls in, Dan
catches him by the wrist. Dan turns Giovanni and aims him away from the pond,
toward the middle of the park. Again he follows a few steps behind.
Giovanni discovers a broken water fountain. ! The boy dashes to it and cups his
palm in the rust-colored water. He tastes. Makes a face.
Nasty. He does it again.
"Giovanni!" Dan says. "What are you doing?"
Dan takes Giovanni's hand from the fountain. As Dan turns away, Giovanni goes
right back to the fountain. "OK," Dan says, "we're done."
His tone is final but amused. He understands the attraction to a poison
fountain.
Holding Giovanni's hand, Dan tells him to come along. They walk a few steps
before Dan notices Giovanni dragging his feet. He lifts Giovanni onto his hip
and carries him home, and for the moment every rejection in their lives, past
and future, seems as soft, as penetrable, as the gathering fog, because of how
eagerly each accepts the other's grasp.
J.R.
Moehringer is a senior writer for West and the author
of the memoir "The Tender Bar."
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