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The End of Arturo Bandini

In 1979, my father, John Fante, suddenly went blind from the complications of diabetes. The year before that both of his legs were amputated and, as a result, he became marooned in a stinking wheel-chair and dependent entirely upon my mother. Disease was killing Pops off an inch at a time. It was a brutal, unforgiving journey to the boneyard.

At that time my father was virtually unknown as a writer. All of his books were out of print and his last novel, Brotherhood of the Grape (1977), had sold a scant 3,000 copies in America. His once-promising career as an author had been replaced by forty years of cranking out fix-it hack screenplays for an industry that cared more about the price of popcorn than a line of prose. Hollywood had changed my Dad, then broken his heart and his spirit. Years of boozing and fast-money success gave way to failed health and bleak cynicism. Now, even his best friends kept their distance, lest they should feel the sting of John Fante’s notoriously unkind tongue.

By all rights the story should have ended there: Forgotten writer sells his soul to the Hollywood movie machine then dies, embittered and alone.

Everyone, it seemed, had given up on John Fante. His ability to earn a living was gone. The family bank accounts had been drained by his long illness and the expense of five terrible surgeries. His doctors, depending on which dogmatic sawbones was pontificating that day, now calculated my Pop’s lifespan on one calendar page. For those of us left waiting there was little to be optimistic about. Soon we would walk together single file out his front door, across the road to the high Malibu cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, then fling his ashes to the winds.

Everyone had given up except John Fante. On his own this stubborn, angry artist, whose roots came from the hard cold mountains of Abruzzi in Italy, had come to a decision: He would not die. Not yet. Instead he would write one more book.

In fact, the rest of what you will read here will have the echo of a cheap Hollywood script, like a World War II tear-jerker starring Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner. Even my old man himself would have turned down the insipid re-write, or at least asked Jack Warner for more fix-it money.

But each morning for the next year John Fante would get himself up, and with the help of my mother, shave and get dressed. Mom would wheel the old man into the dining room where he would smoke his cigarettes and drink his coffee and listen to the news and sports scores on the radio, never missing an opportunity to heap curses on the luckless L.A. Dodgers for failing him again on the baseball field.

Then my mother would roll the old man into his den, beneath his tall wall of books, where the morning sun filled the room and warmed his skin.

Once there and comfortable, something inexplicable began to take place. A transformation. It was as if my father had consumed an artist’s potion instead of five cups of black espresso and half a pack of cigarettes. Maybe it was his stubborn courage or maybe it was a visitation from the Blessed Virgin of his childhood, but in those days John Fante became possessed by magic. He was himself. A writer of books. The result was dazzling.

My father would turn in the direction of his wife and say, ‘Okay, where are we?’ And Mom would read aloud the last paragraph or page of what he had dictated to her the day before. The story would later be named Dreams from Bunker Hill, the last installment in the saga of Arturo Bandini.

That entire novel was spoken to my mother line for line, written down by her on yellow notebooks exactly as dictated. Not a comma or a phrase of what came from my father was changed. John Fante was able to see an entire book in his mind, word-for-word. He knew he was dying. He knew his career was over. The years of grudges and battles with agents and a thousand film-business antagonists no longer mattered. My Dad’s unrelenting, ruminative mind was finally silent. The ghosts were gone. His skill as an artist was now, remarkably, better than ever. All that remained for my father was his passion for words.

During the months that my Dad wrote the last of the Arturo Bandini books I was unemployed from my phone sales career. Unemployable is more the truth. I was a drunk, a failed poet, and no credit to the capitalist work ethic that had possessed my father for half a century. Yet, twice a week, I made myself get behind the wheel of my sputtering old Pontiac, leaving a dingy one-room apartment in Venice to drive twenty miles up the Coast Highway to his home above the sea.

We didn’t like each other very much and the only reason I made those trips was because of my mother and because he’d asked me to come. I told myself it was for the free whiskey. My phone would ring and wake me up and it would be him, demanding my presence.

Several years of more boozing and insanity passed for me before I came to understand the meaning of those hours and days we’d spent together. John Fante had chosen me as his witness. My father was teaching me his trade. I was his son and he was showing me how to write the way his own father from Torricella Peligna had shown him, as a boy, how to work a wall of stone or lay a row of brick. I was learning how to build books. Watching a master at work. Those would be the most important days of my life.

John Fante’s gift to the world was his pure writer’s heart. Christ, what a writer! What an honor to have been his son.

For the record, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, my father’s second novel, was actually his first published novel – the year was 1938. Here we meet the Bandini family from Abruzzi Italy and young Arturo himself, a kid of fourteen. A year later came Ask the Dust, where Arturo is ‘a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer’.

Several years after my father’s death, while looking through a filing cabinet, my mother and I discovered The Road to Los Angeles in a box among some early forgotten screenplays. This is John Fante’s first book in the saga of Arturo Bandini. It took an accident and over fifty years for The Road to Los Angeles to find its way to a publisher. At the time it was written (1935) no one would touch it.

Of the four Bandini books, The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust are certainly the most autobiographical. Was Arturo Bandini John Fante’s alter-ego in those two novels? You decide.

I recommend that you read any of the novels in this anthology in the order you wish. Each book stands by itself and does not rely on another.

Now the saga of Arturo Bandini is yours.

Dan Fante

Los Angeles

December, 2003