and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.
I had a library card. I checked the book out, took it to my room, climbed into my bed and read it, and I knew long before I had finished that here was a man who had evolved a distinct way of writing. The book was Ask the Dust and the author was John Fante. He was to be a lifetime influence on my writing. I finished Ask the Dust and looked for other books of Fante’s in the library. I found two: Dago Red and Wait Until Spring, Bandini. They were of the same order, written of and from the gut and the heart.
Yes, Fante had a mighty effect upon me. Not long after reading these books I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was and we had some violent arguments, and often I would scream at her, ‘Don’t call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!’
Fante was my god and I knew that the gods should be left alone, one didn’t bang at their door. Yet I liked to guess about where he had lived on Angel’s Flight and I imagined it possible that he still lived there. Almost every day I walked by and I thought, is that the window Camilla crawled through? And, is that the hotel door? Is that the lobby? I never knew.
Thirty-nine years later I reread Ask the Dust. That is to say, I reread it this year and it still stands, as do Fante’s other works, but this one is my favourite because it was my first discovery of the magic. There are other books beside Dago Red and Wait Until Spring, Bandini. They are Full of Life and The Brotherhood of the Grape. And, at the moment, Fante has a novel in progress, A Dream of Bunker Hill.
Through other circumstances, I finally met the author this year [1979]. There is much more to the story of John Fante. It is a story of terrible luck and a terrible fate and of a rare and natural courage. Some day it will be told but I feel that he doesn’t want me to tell it here. But let me say that the way of his words and the way of his way are the same: strong and good and warm.
That’s enough. Now this book is yours.
Charles Bukowski
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
