Explore the Fearless Writer at the Heart of Unique LA

From golden glory to its filthy underbelly, Los Angeles has it all. If you think of Modern Los Angeles, would it be for you synonymous with Hollywood, sunsets and the Southern California dream? Or could it be something a little more sinister? Interestingly, this unique metropolis is filled with a complex history, enriched with stories, secrets and untold experiences that have shaped its social and cultural development. LA, like all cities, has constantly evolved and has been described as both full of opportunity and chaos. Its promises of fame and fortune have proven futile to many, leaving a trail of individuals behind with nothing but pennies and withering dreams. Amplified during The Great American Depression, 1929- 39; a bleak period in America’s history. It took LA-based writer John Fante to write the book ‘Ask the Dusk’; one of the first writers to depict this period through his exploration of themes of poverty, love and identity. Find out more here in Explore the Fearless Writer at the Heart of Unique LA

John Fante

The American novelist and screenwriter, John Fante, 1909-83, was born in Colorado in 1909 to a devout Catholic mother and abusive alcoholic father from Italy. His work is semi-autobiographical and draws on elements from his early life such as his Catholic upbringing, poverty, abuse and his move to LA in 1929 as an aspiring writer. Throughout his life in LA, Fante wrote 8 novels; 4 of which are included in the ‘Bandini Quartet’ featuring his alter ego Arturo Bandini, who leaves Colorado for LA during the Great Depression as did many other Americans fleeing the Dust Bowl. A poverty-stricken area in the High Plains of America due to the destruction of topsoil and prolonged droughts, which left more than 500,000 Americans homeless. Despite his struggles, his fearlessness and determination to succeed in his writing resulted in work that brought authenticity and emotional experiences that breathed life into his characters to create works that are deeply personal and pay homage to his love for LA.

1930’s American Depression

In life, we find that highs are often followed by a drastic fall. America previously enjoyed the glitz and glam of the Roaring Twenties, which eventually spiralled down into the Wall Street Crash in 1929, leading to the unemployment rate rising to 25% and widespread poverty. Fante’s novels reflect the fame and fortune that LA promised to many people who fled to LA because of the Dust Bowl, a severe environmental and agricultural disaster due to prolonged drought, that led to massive dust storms that destroyed farms and left thousands homeless. To escape the realities of the Depression, many fled to LA in hopes of achieving their fame and fortune. It still holds the same reputation as a beacon of hope today. This article is in the printed issue of .Cent from ss/2011 titled ‘Seeing Stories Telling Pictures’, explores the writer John Fante and was guest edited by photographer and filmmaker Minnie Weisz. This article was commissioned and originally written by Stephen Cooper and Allen Barra, who wrote biographies and culturally re-evaluated his work to continue his legacy.

City of London

‘I came across John Fante when I photographed a building that was about to be demolished. Someone had written ‘Ask the Dust’ on the wall, which I discovered was one of his novels. I love the way he captures the rawness of LA. Here the writers Stephen Cooper and Allen Barra look at his ability to beautifully document the city, followed by an illustration of books that are deeply rooted in cities’

Minnie Weisz

Ranchers

Stephen Cooper The Road to John Fante’s Los Angeles: The year I first read ‘Ask the Dust’, I was riding bulls in dusty Southern California ranch arenas, anteing up five dollars a turn for the all-comers jackpot. My brother and I would hit the road driving south from LA to Murietta Hot Springs to take our lumps with jarheads on weekend passes from Camp Pendleton, trained killers who thought risking their necks for eight seconds of adrenaline was a good idea after Vietnam: or north to Ojai with studio stuntmen, action junkies who craved the off-set juice of it.

Mexico

This was 1974. It was the summer I also read ‘Under the Volcano’, then caught a train to Guadalajara and a death-trap bus to Mexico City to climb Popocatepetl, the snow-maned Senoking Mountain that to this day, any second, might erupt in fiery glory.

When the girl I loved had left for good, I took up briefly with a self-taught ballet dancer who worked professionally at the Kit Kat Club, in Inglewood. I broke my arm; moved to a grim mid-city bachelor’s apartment with a hotplate and a landlady given slipping origami-like warnings in the mailbox about the active neighbourhood strangler, and stood in line for food stamps at the downtown Unattached Men’s Centre with the city’s lost souls and mad dreamers.

All of which is to say that the greater Los Angeles roamed at the impressionable age of 24 could be a dizzying crossroads of daredevilry, romantic longing, and loss. But I was living with my pores open, dying to write, ready for anything.

In Murietta I had met this guy. Jeff Ramsey was closer to 40 than 30 but still crazy about the bulls. In his younger days, he had fought as a novillero along the flyblown border towns of the Southwest before being confirmed as a full-fledged matador and working his way up to the grand ring in Mexico City. You can read about his bullfighting days in a curiosity called ‘Yankees in the Afternoon’ (Yankees’ substituting spookily for the Death in Hemingway’s title). There you will learn that after sustaining a near-fatal cornada, Jeff turned to the safer expedient of Hollywood stunt work.

We were perched on a corral fence at Murietta watching the bulls twitch and lunge when Jeff mentioned an uncredited bit he had in a new movie. The movie was Chinatown, and the bit was that he had of Roman Polanski’s thugs, the silent one who picks up Jack Nicholson’s Jake off the boat at Catalina Island, and who later shoots at Jake and Faye Dunaway’s doomed Evelyn as they escape the brutal fight at the retirement home.

I had just seen and been mesmerised by ‘Chinatown’. Around this time, the movie’s writer, Robert Towne, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying that he had learned how people talked in 1930s L.A. from a forgotten novel, ‘Ask the Dust’, by the forgotten writer John Fante. Ignorant of both, I made swift to find a used copy of the book, then out of print since 1939. Back at my apartment, I read it straight through, beaming at the laugh-out-loud tragedy of Arturo Bandini, self-styled world’s greatest starving writer, and the beautiful Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez, all set in the city I recognised as home.

But what was it that made this novel such a revelation? The plot was simple enough, a variation on the ancient boy-meets-girl setup but with jarring amounts of race hatred, animal cruelty, abject poverty, brazen lies, and oversexed self-delusion to counterbalance Fante’s poetic hammer-and-tongs prose and the in-the-skin immediacy of his characters’ needs. Plus, the soul of the city where I had been born and raised, its air of undying potential and desire, somehow permeated every line. The book gripped me like no other I had ever read.

Twenty years later, I was still reciting it. By then Charles Bukowski had introduced Fante to the world by helping to get ‘Ask the Dust’ back into print. ‘Fante was my God,’ Bukowski testified, and word was starting to spread. About that time I grew tired of waiting for somebody to write the biography of John Fante and decided to take a stab. Digging into the enigma of his life over the next several years, I uncovered a cache of manuscripts left behind after Fante’s long and agonising death in 1983; and thus began my edition of The Big Hunger.

None of this is meant to draw too fine a point of the fact that in the wake of ‘Ask the Dust’ John Fante found himself writing a script for Orson Welles’ legendary unfinished film ‘Its all True’ about a Mexican boy and a blooded bull destined for the bullring, much less that within a year of discovering ‘Ask the Dust’ I would find myself pounding nails on the set of Welles’s last unfinished legend, The ‘Other Side of the Wind.’ This was, after all, Los Angeles, where sooner or later things often do seem to connect.

In hindsight, it is now clear that my life had been calling me on a long, strange adventure, though who among us truly knows where such journeys may lead? To wit, the spring 2011 exhibit at UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library of selected items from the John Fante Collection, twenty-plus linear feet of original manuscripts, screenplays, diaries, letters, photographs, and other evidence of the author’s life and emblematic career. So, John Fante is no longer forgotten. On the contrary, in April 2010, the historic intersection of Fifth Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles was proclaimed John Fante Square, replete with official speeches and the ceremonial unveiling of permanent signage, and making you wonder what Fante might have added had he materialised.

Still and all, each in its way, Ask the Dust and Chinatown catch the nerve and heart of Los Angeles. In the tales they weave, the tones they strike, and the emotional guts they expose, they are necessary L.A. fictions, key to any understanding of how it feels to live in the city alive to its centre-less swerve, its manifold darknesses, and the paradise light that bathes good days in tints of possibility. As such, they spoke to one wayward son of the city no less at 24 than they continue doing today. Arturo Bandini and Jake Gittes traverse intersecting fault lines of the same Los Angeles. Like Popocatepetl – think of the bull-riding scene in Malcolm Lowry’s great novel, the violent comic seriousness of it all – the city could always erupt at any second. In the meantime, per Arturo: “Los Angeles, give me some of you! 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.” How many cities are going to do that to you?

Allen Barra: Capturing Los Angeles. John Fante – the name rhymes with Dante, which surely must have been a source of private amusement to someone whose best-known character, Arturo Bandini, loudly proclaimed his desire to be ‘the world’s greatest writer’ – is one of the true bad boys of 20th-century American literature and the first great poet of Los Angeles. Born in 1909 and raised in an Italian-American ghetto in Boulder, Colorado, Fante’s first books were published in the late 1930s but were out of print for decades until black Sparrow Press republished his work in the late 1970s.

Fante fits into practically no other literary niche but ‘LA novelist’. Italian-Americans have never quite known what to do with him; second-generation Italians, such as my father, might display a copy of Pietro Di Donato’s ‘Christ in Concrete’ on their bookshelves, though Di Donato was a Communist because, after all, he had achieved some measure of respect in the literary world as precious few of his countrymen had. John Fante, on the other hand, was notorious. I know my father knew about Fante because he once warned me not to read him. But he never admitted to having read him himself, which is a shame because, in many ways, he was the writer who most embodied the hopes, dreams and insecurities of the children of immigrants.

This is why it is so logical that Fante would have sent Arturo Bandini to Los Angeles, where everyone can go to start over. Of course, being called the ‘quintessential L.A novelist’ isn’t exactly the most glowing of recommendations, but it is one that takes in Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West, whose ‘Day of The Locust’ was published in 1939, the same year as ‘Ask The Dust’, the novel many regard as Fante’s best. (Michael Tolkin told the Los Angeles Times a few years ago that if the L.A. school system was serious about its curriculum, it would make ‘Ask The Dust’ ‘mandatory reading’).

West, it must be noted, set only one book, ‘Day of The Locust’, in Los Angeles, so that leaves it to Fante and Chandler to duke it out for the title. It’s not one that Chandler would have wanted anyway; he once remarked that Los Angeles ‘had all the personality of a paper cup’. The two writers saw L.A. in a different way: Fante saw it as a city ripe for conquest, while Chandler saw it as a font of corruption. (As Clive James once remarked: ‘Chandler could not describe a gas station without terms fraught with dread and menace.) Anyone who has spent considerable time in Los Angeles might conclude that they were both right. But then, for the most part, they spent their time in different parts of the city, with Chandler’s character Philip Marlowe spending more time in places like Santa Monica, or in the mansions of people like the Sternwoods, while Bandini frequented the outlying neighbourhoods that were more ethnic, more Catholic (and also more catholic). The streets Bandini walked were meaner than the ones Marlowe knew but also louder and more teeming with life – and the food was better.

Compare this passage in ‘The Road To Los Angeles’ (written in 1933 and published posthumously in 1986) with almost any from Chandler: At the window I watched the stream of traffic down Avalon Boulevard. Never had I heard such noise. Never had I felt such pain … pain and noise. All the horns in the world were out in that street. The clamour was driving me crazy. I couldn’t live in a place like this and write. Downstairs came the zzzzzzzzz of a bath-spigot. Who was taking a bath at this hour? What fiend?’

You know very well that Fante doesn’t share his hero’s loathing of the noisy, crowded street. It was precisely the sounds and smells on Avalon that inspired him to write in the first place. Marlowe was contemptuous of such parts of Los Angeles, sentimentalising them while, at the same time, pretending they didn’t exist anymore. Los Angeles, Chandler wrote in ‘The Little Sister,’ published in 1949, ‘was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either. ‘

But if Chandler had looked, he surely would have found some streets or people who fell asleep out on porches; he might have even found Arturo Bandini there. The so-called neon-lit slums were on the outskirts of Hollywood and along the far ends of Wilshire Boulevard. When Chandler first came to L.A, the downtown streets were only partially paved, and it wasn’t uncommon to see horses and buggies instead of the Packards and Pontiacs which we look on so nostalgically today. If Marlowe had honestly been looking for something in suburban Los Angeles, besides a murder witness, he might have stopped off at some really terrific Mexican or Italian or Greek place with Arturo.

No matter how scorned Arturo felt about L.A, he wanted so badly to conquer it; you know he was expressing John Fante’s true feelings in ‘Ask The Dust’ when he told us, I was an American, and goddamned proud of it. This great city, these mighty pavements and proud buildings, they were the voice of my America. It’s voice you can still find today if you’re willing to get off the tourist bus.

John Fante Novels

‘The Road to Los Angeles’ 1936; introduces Arturo Bandini, an angry, rebellious and fairly egotistical teenager who navigates the start of the Great Depression, racism and adolescence. ‘Wait Until Spring, Bandini’ 1938; follows Bandini and his dysfunctional family as they struggle through the Great Depression, whilst ‘Ask the Dust’ 1939; sees Bandini struggle in LA to achieve his dreams of being a writer, while experiencing Catholic guilt and a love-hate relationship with Camilla Lopez, a waitress.

Following on came ‘Full of Life’ (1952); which explores a family dynamic where John manages his pregnant wife’s mood swings and interests in Catholicism while dealing with his critical father. Bravo, Burro!’ 1970; about Juan and his donkey, El Valiente, embark on a journey to protect his father’s reputation. ‘The Brotherhood of the Grape’ 1977; sees big shot Henry Molise return home when confronted with his parents’ divorce. ‘Dreams from Bunker Hill’ 1982‘; The final novel in the Bandini Quartet highlighting Arturo’s faltering writing ambitions in Depression Era LA. ‘1933 Was a Bad Year’ 1985; explores the relations between immigrant parents and their American children through Dominic Molise and his life during the Great Depression.

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. He is a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches creative writing, literature, and film

Allen Barra is an American author and biographer who has published numerous books.

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Illustration of left-hand side Matt Roden

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