Remembering John Fante

By: A collection of essays written by the Fante family | Photography from the Fante Estate | August 05, 2009 | Non Fiction

INTRODUCTION |  BY STEPHEN COOPER

You’re flying over the green expanse of Point Dume. The year is 1950 and what you see when you gaze down is rolling countryside, a winding road and, just before the surging Pacific, a strangely Y-shaped structure. For miles there’s hardly another dwelling in sight. You marvel at the isolation and you ask yourself, “Who would live there?”

The answer, had it come, would have been as strange as the house itself: the patron saint of Los Angeles writing.

Having lived the first half of the life that would earn him posthumous literary canonization, the devilish John Fante settled into that house in 1951 to live out the tumultuous second half. To call that life a study in extremes would be a flat and pallid understatement. Fante was equally familiar with starvation, poverty and the privileges of self-made wealth. From moments of foul-mouthed fury, he could slip into a religious fugue lasting for hours.

A physical specimen in his youth — star pitcher, quarterback, clubhouse fighter — before he was finished, he would lose both his eyesight and his legs, and his razor wit would be reduced to raving lunacy. First, however, he would work with some of Hollywood’s brightest luminaries and write some of the most honest, hilarious and emotionally searing fiction of 20th century American letters — a fair chunk of it in the house on Point Dume.

Born in Denver in 1909, the first of four children to poor Italian-American parents, the young John grew up in Boulder under the shadow of a brutal and domineering father. A bricklayer by trade, Nick Fante was a fiend not only for work but also for wine, poker, barroom brawls and women. Beatings were a given in his Old World view of home life, for wife and kids alike.

When Nick lost at cards, the family went without. Mother Mary scrimped to send their children to the local parish school. There, John showed enough promise to be admitted to Regis High, the Jesuit boarding school in Denver. This temporary escape from the physical and emotional violence of home did not prevent him later from recalling his father as in many ways “a beast.”

The final blow came when Nick ran off with another woman. Devastated, John lit out for California. He was 20 years old and wanted only to write, as if in fiction he could reimagine his shattered world and forge a new identity.

Landing in the Wilmington area of Los Angeles, he worked backbreaking jobs on and around the docks of L.A. Harbor while writing story after story about his youth. Soon he was publishing those stories in the country’s best magazines and gaining a reputation.

He moved to the now-vanished Bunker Hill area of dilapidated Victorian rooming houses in downtown Los Angeles, and he signed a contract with Warner Bros. Thus was launched the long split in his career between writing “hokum” for a studio paycheck and world-class fiction for posterity. By the end of the 1930s he had made a name for himself as a competent scenarist of B-level studio product. He had also published two novels.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini, written in 1938, tells the story of Svevo Bandini, a volatile Italian bricklayer in Boulder, Colo., and his 14-year-old son Arturo. When Svevo abandons his long-suffering wife and children to take up with the rich widow, Hildegarde, Arturo risks committing a sin in order to reunite the family.

The reviews were glowing, and in 1939, Fante followed up with the book now widely considered both his masterpiece and the best novel ever written about Los Angeles. By turns hardboiled, uproarious and swooningly lyrical, Ask the Dust catches up with Arturo at 20. Now an aspiring writer starving for his art and burning for a “Mayan princess,” Arturo is at large in a city brimming with cruelty, poverty, beauty and desire. “Los Angeles, give me some of you!” is the way Arturo sings, “Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.” With Ask the Dust, Fante was poised for greatness.

But greatness didn’t happen — not yet. It takes a whole biography to scrutinize the run of evil luck that derailed what should have been Fante’s breakout success and his entry into the top ranks of American writers. Suffice it to say that a witches’ brew of Adolf Hitler, Orson Welles, an aborted novel, the inherited curse of alcoholism and an insatiable addiction to golf conspired to pitch John Fante into a decade-long downward spiral.

When he emerged, the world had changed. It was suddenly the 1950s, and the novel that he produced in response to his wife’s icy challenge to prove he was a writer and not a fake turned out to be the ticket he needed to escape the insanity of L.A.

Movie money enabled the escape. Producer Stanley Kramer paid $40,000 for the rights to Fante’s new novel, Full of Life. When a real estate agent mentioned an odd property on a breathtaking acre far out in Malibu, Fante handed over $29,500 and whisked his wife Joyce and their four children to the remote ranch house on Cliffside Drive.

There began the most flush period of his life. Commanding one of the highest salaries then being paid to contract screenwriters, Fante worked his way around from one major studio to the next. For the most part he toiled at projects for which he had only contempt. One exception was his script for Full of Life. The sunny domestic romp became a box-office hit starring Judy Holliday and Richard Conte, and earned for Fante a 1956 Writers’ Guild nomination for Best Written American Comedy.

But not all was sunny at Rancho Fante. In 1955, Fante was diagnosed with diabetes. Up until then, he had lavished himself with many if not all of his father’s vices. A writer, not a bricklayer, John nevertheless had always put his work and his pleasures before everything else. True, he was a good provider to Joyce and their four children, but the fact remains that the eldest two sons, Nick and Dan, grew up with a different father — an unhappier John Fante — than the one Vickie and Jim grew up with.

Evidence of this fact comes across clearly in the accompanying interview and commentaries by all four Fante children. It also informs some of the best fiction that John Fante produced while living in and writing about Point Dume and Malibu.

One fine example is The Big Hunger. A study in extreme autobiographical irony, the short story centers on seven-year-old Dan Crane — whose brother and sister are named Nick and Vicky — and his overactive imagination. Since irony is the art of saying one thing and meaning another, it is important to remember while enjoying the account of the fictional Dan’s adoration for his father — “Gee, Dad. You’re great. No foolin.” — that the real-life relationship between John and Dan Fante was often considerably more complicated.

Also ironic but closer to the facts is the masterful comedy of the 1960s, My Dog Stupid. Henry and Harriet Molise live in a rambling Y-shaped home on the tip of Point Dume, beset by the encroaching challenges of a long marriage, the waning days of parenthood and late middle age. A sold-out-novelist-turned-screenwriter facing the fact that his professional prime has passed, Henry resists the noisome new world of his four ingrate children, each more feckless than the next. When a libidinous misfit dog strays into his life, Henry takes comfort in identifying with the beast while suffering the loss of his children as they leave the nest, one by one.

Shining through it all is the sense of time’s mellowing force. Gone is the overreaching self-sabotage of the young Arturo Bandini, replaced by Henry’s bittersweet acceptance of the way things are. So too did John Fante mellow in the years after contracting diabetes, cutting back on his drinking and paying relatively more attention to Vickie and Jim than he had to Nick and Dan.

Oddly enough, despite all the antagonism between John Fante and his father, in the end the most powerful shared feeling was love. The connection between family and writing was always a tight one for Fante. As Henry Molise realizes, “To write one must love, and to love one must understand.” That is what finally most permeates My Dog Stupid, a love for family earned through the compassionate understanding of all the laughable foibles that make any family its own greatest source of heartache.

John Fante wrote other excellent things on Point Dume, including the novels The Brotherhood of the Grape (a paean to his father serialized in Francis Ford Coppola’s short-lived City magazine, with a preface by Robert Towne), and Dreams from Bunker Hill. By the time of this last book, diabetes had robbed Fante of his legs, his eyesight and, intermittently, his sanity; but in a final burst of clarity, he dictated the novel to Joyce on the patio overlooking the back yard where in earlier days he had often gone to swing a 9-iron and think.

Dictating the novel that he saw inside his mind’s eye, John was once again the young Arturo Bandini, living on Bunker Hill, drawing a scenarist’s wages at Columbia Pictures and striving to rise above the absurdities of Hollywood. As eldest son Nick told me of his parents’ collaboration, “It was a beautiful thing to see.”

And yet John Fante and his works were nearly forgotten. Eclipsed by decades of out-of-print obscurity, Ask the Dust was brought back to light only when poet and novelist Charles Bukowski persuaded his publisher at Black Sparrow Press to reissue the novel in 1980. “Fante was my god,” Bukowski declared. In time, all the other books followed — more than a dozen — and today John Fante is known not only locally as the patron saint of L.A. writing but also internationally as an important figure in 20th century world literature. What is more, his works are deeply loved by his readers.

Not long ago I had a phone call from a well-known Italian artist. We had never met, but he wanted to ask a favor: Per favore, as John Fante’s biographer, would I consider driving him to Malibu so he could see the house where the great writer once lived? The request was unexpected but also so endearing that I found myself saying yes. We took the Coast Highway north and turned left onto Point Dume.

“There it is,” I said as we approached.

It was late afternoon. Fog was tumbling in off the ocean. For a moment, I watched my guest as he tried to peer through the bougainvillea and over the gray cinderblock wall. A light was on inside the house. We both got out of the car and stood there gazing.

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Stephen Cooper is the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante and editor of Fante’s last book, The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959.

AN ESSAY |  BY SECOND SON DAN FANTE

Our family arrived at Point Dume in Malibu in September of 1951. I was just starting grammar school. At that time, my father was a contract screenwriter for the studios and detested the movie business except, of course, for his fat paychecks. John Fante would go to any lengths to live as far from Hollywood as his shiny Chrysler would take him. Point Dume was 10 minutes beyond that.

Malibu in those days was not the celebrity who’s who it is today, dotted with 70-grand-a-month recovery homes and gazillion-dollar palazzos with views of the Pacific. That high-end immigration was still several years away.

Point Dume itself was named by George Vanclouver to honor his pal, Father Francesco Dumetz. It was once a lookout point for the Chumash Indians. Then its head was lopped off in the 1940s by some real estate genius who planned to put a hotel and lighthouse up after giving the hill its crew cut. He soon sobered up and changed his mind. The “tz” in Dumetz went away about that time, too.

During WWII, fear of the “yellow menace” from the east ran high, and Point Dume was used as an observation point to spot a Japanese armada that never arrived.

The acreage around The Point for half a mile was an overgrown, windblown plateau above the ocean. The sprawling Fante house was a quarter-mile away down Cliffside Drive.

As a boy fetching a stray baseball off our roof, I could turn my head and look 360 degrees around and not see another house. And because there were no trees and homes on the landscape, an afternoon gust off the Pacific could knock a kid off his feet.           

John and Joyce Fante bought their 18-month-old hacienda at a bargain-basement price. The owner/builders of the one-plus-acre rancho were a middle-aged couple named Frank and Adele Kasala. They had already bought another home in Arizona, so the Kasalas were motivated sellers. My old man had been shown the property a year before and considered it expensive at $31,500, and the couple stuffy. Then Mrs. Kasala contracted tuberculosis just as Pop was hitting the lotto with his MGM movie deal and the screenplay for his novel Full of Life. The price had been reduced to $29,500. Sold! 

The lot had a high cinderblock wall surrounding it with 200 newly planted fern trees just inside. Thirty years later, these tree runts would rise to 60 feet, and, at least from the outside, the place would take on the look of a fortress.

Inside the walls there were three large green lawns and a half a dozen flower gardens. Eventually, annoyed by plants that invariably died from his inattention and lousy karma (except for the geraniums), my father would develop a passion for cactus that mirrored his personality nicely. Today, the best word to describe the saguaros my dad planted, while rooting around in our yard a couple of afternoons a week, cursing Orson Welles and Harry Cohn and Jack Warner and every Hollywood agent he’d ever met, is scary.

As kids, my older brother Nick, with me in tow, would walk the one-mile paved road from Cliffside Drive to the Pacific Coast Highway and then catch the school bus to John L. Webster Elementary School above the Malibu Colony. A few years later we attended Lincoln Junior High in Santa Monica, traveling there by school bus.

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