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Shanghaied in Tinseltown | page 1, 2, 3
Full of Life : A Biography of John Fante By Stephen Cooper If, therefore, the enormously painstaking biographical research that Cooper -- a professor at California State University, editor of Fante's short stories and a reader whose competence in Fante predates the writer's rediscovery -- brings to Fante's childhood and early manhood didn't much enrich the fiction for me, I still found it irresistible. This early part of the biography brims with Cooper's affection and admiration for his subject, and yet never obscures the fact that, his brilliance and talent notwithstanding, in many ways Fante was a pretty awful person: flighty, combative, manipulative and capable of real cruelty. Cooper allows us to understand that it was not just the Depression, and not just the cruelty of literary destiny, but the man's difficult character that was evident during his long period of penury and half-crazed writing in Los Angeles throughout the '30s -- the time fictionalized in the third novel of the Bandini tetralogy, considered by many to be Fante's masterpiece, "Ask the Dust." But despite his starvation, his mania and his constant efforts to derail his own career, Fante, like Bandini, found his way. Fueled by the encouragement from afar of H.L. Mencken, his first publisher and mentor, he placed short stories in such venues as the American Mercury, Atlantic Monthly and Scribner's Magazine. Equally important as his first publication was Mencken's encouragement to Fante to enter into the sometimes-lucrative, often dreary profession of screenwriting -- "the most disgusting job," as Fante described it to Mencken, "in Christ's kingdom." A few years after arriving in Los Angeles, we find Fante signed with Elizabeth Nowell, agent to Thomas Wolfe and Alvah Bessie, with a novel under contract to Mr. Knopf himself, and fast on his way to becoming an established writer. But nearly none of this early success panned out. Knopf rejected Fante's first manuscript; Nowell dumped him. Then, in 1936, Knopf rejected Fante's shockingly accomplished coming-of-age novel, "The Road to Los Angeles." Vulgar, antic, challenging and unfailingly beautiful, this novel about Arturo Bandini's insanely energized climb out of the working classes toward his art would be rejected again and again, with David Zablodowsky of Viking finally recommending that Fante abandon "this vicious little satire on adolescence." Indeed, the book wouldn't be published until after Fante's death. Throughout all this hardship, though, Cooper allows us to see that there is also a success story being told -- and not the screenwriting story. In 1938, at last, came the publication of the first Bandini novel by Stackpole Sons, "Wait Until Spring, Bandini," the volume that tells of Bandini's impoverished childhood in Colorado, struggling under the triple weights of poverty, father and church, aching to escape. Its reception was not bad at all: Praised by James Farrell and compared to Saroyan, "Bandini" was twice selected by regional papers for best book of the year. A short year later Fante published his second novel, "Ask the Dust," and if Stackpole's strange legal problems -- it was sued for an unauthorized publication of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" -- hurt the promotion of "Bandini," it is nonetheless true that, another year later, Pascal Covici at Viking published Fante's first story collection, "Dago Red," to wide praise. It sounds, when you think of it, like a pretty promising debut. But again and again, throughout the '30s and '40s, Cooper shows us Fante snatching failure from the jaws of promise. A heroic drinker and a driven gambler, consumed by dreams of fame and ever hungry for money, Fante seems determined to dive into the exploitative depths of B-movie projects rather than pursuing the critical reputation that was, literally, within his reach. Documenting this dimension of Fante's life, Cooper is at his best, with a fine understanding of the ins and outs of the cryptic world of Hollywood deal making. And, by all accounts, Fante wrote some very fine screenplays. But his entire filmography in the end amounted to 12 titles, of which exactly three have unshared credit. His best film work, in all likelihood, was never produced. And the 12 credits, no matter how lucrative, came at a high price. Between "Dago Red" in 1940 and "The Brotherhood of the Grape" in 1977, Fante published only a single work of fiction, and two manuscripts written during this period were rejected until after Fante's death, including "My Dog Stupid," his brilliant novella about an aging and compromised screenwriter. It was the time of the diagnosis of Fante's diabetes, during which he suicidally declined to stop drinking. It was the time when, to name one example of his stormy temper, he sent his wife by taxi to the hospital to give birth to their fourth child. It is, Cooper makes clear, the key period in Fante's life when his greatest work should have been done, and the time when his career's back was broken.
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