The Big Hunger

by John Fante

  She turned and looked at me, her eyes very small and crinkled up, and tears as big as raindrops running down in the heat of the evening. I said, Please, Madame, you no cry no more, I help you, you want a doctor, you want some food, some wine, anything your heart desires, and I pulled out some sheets of huge money made out of paper, and I said you take, pour vous, merci, if you please, gracias, my pleasure. She shook her head and seemed to say oh you idiot, and cried all the more.

  I got the panic then, lost control, and I grabbed this gent, he carried an umbrella and wore a checkered vest and could have been the French Ambassador, and I said, for God’s sake find out what’s wrong with her, and he looked surprised and turned and spoke to her in a low melodious and intimate way, gentle as her son, and she spoke back in a low and intimate way, gentle as his mother.

  He turned to me and said, “She wishes nothing, except to be alone with her pain.” He bowed like the French Ambassador and walked away.

  I sighed in the heat of evening and walked back to the hotel, past the kids waiting for The Presley, and I ordered a drink, and there was a moment when I choked up at the dignity of man, and suddenly Paris was a great town.

  Editor’s Notes

  THE NOTES THAT FOLLOW provide basic information about the stories in this book. Readers interested in learning more may wish to read my Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante.

  Fante wrote “Horselaugh on Dibber Lannon” in late 1936 or early 1937 when he was still unmarried and living with his parents in Roseville at 211 Pleasant Street. The narrator’s reference to Pope Pius is to Pius XI (Achille Ratti), who was pontiff from 1922 to 1939. Pageants were religious plays, often allegorical, staged in Catholic primary and secondary schools at Christmas and Easter time.

  Fante was living in a Long Beach apartment with Helen Purcell at 926 East Fourth Street when he wrote “Jakie’s Mother” in early 1933. The manner of Petey’s death in the story recalls the death of Fante’s favorite cousin Mario Campiglia, run down by a car in East Denver when he was a young boy. The parlor mourning scene, with Petey laid out in his coffin, prefigures “One of Us,” the story Fante would later write based more closely on his cousin’s death.

  “The Still Small Voices” is an even earlier story, written in early 1932 when Fante was living in Long Beach and receiving his mail via General Delivery. The title page of the manuscript indicates that this was the first of six brief sketches; the other five do not survive.

  “Charge It,” published in the April, 1937 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, is an early treatment of what would become the following year Chapter 4 of Wait Until Spring, Bandini.

  Although the manuscripts of both “The Criminal” and “A Bad Woman” are without dates or addresses, each shows signs of being written in the late 1940s, in the aftermath of the chaotic war years.

  The anonymous narrator of “To Be a Monstrous Clever Fellow” prefigures the Arturo Bandini of The Road to Los Angeles, which was finished in 1936 but not published until 1985. Like Arturo, this story’s narrator is a self-obsessed young writer who plays fast and furious with his literary references, some of which today may be obscure. Aside from readily recognizable figures like Voltaire, Nietzsche, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he invokes the names of James Gibbons Huneker (1860–1921), the American musician and literary critic; George Jean Nathan (1882–1958), the American drama critic who worked with Mencken on The American Mercury; E. Boyd Barrett (1883-?), the Dublin-born psychologist and author of The Jesuit Enigma (1927) and Ex-Jesuit (1931); James Branch Cabell (1878–1959), the prolific American writer whose novel Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice (1919) became a literary cause célèbre when it was banned and then acquitted of obscenity charges; Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941), American social psychologist and author of The Behavior of Crowds (1920) and The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926); and William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), the American orator and perennial Democratic presidential candidate. In this story Fante also used the names of several people whom he knew in his personal life. Sister Mary Ethelbert was one of his teachers at Sacred Heart of Jesus grammar school in Boulder. A Father Benson was a prefect at Regis High School in Denver at the time of Fante’s attendance, and Paul Reinert and Dan Campbell were fellow students and teammates on the Regis baseball team, the Clovers. Reinert went on to become a Jesuit priest and the President of St. Louis University.

  “Washed in the Rain” appeared in the October, 1934 issue of Westways. Here again Fante indulges his penchant for blending fact and fiction—and playfully confusing the two. “When I told you I took a girl named Helen Purcell to the Santa Barbara Biltmore, it was the truth,” the narrator confesses, using the name of Fante’s actual girlfriend of the time—only to contradict himself by going on to say, “but there isn’t any Helen Purcell that I know about.”

  Fante wrote “I Am a Writer of Truth” on MGM stationery in early 1936, when he was a client of the New York literary agent Elizabeth Nowell. In a remarkable correspondence which lasted the better part of that year, Nowell got Fante to read Knut Hamsun’s great novel Hunger, which in turn exerted a decisive influence on Fante’s style in The Road to Los Angeles, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, and Ask the Dust.

  When “Prologue to Ask the Dust” was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1990, the last page of Fante’s untitled manuscript was missing. That page has here been restored. It was early 1939 when Fante wrote this remarkable précis of the story which would become Ask the Dust. Page one of the manuscript indicates that Fante originally addressed the piece to William Soskin, his editor at Stackpole Sons. Before he ever sent the pages to Soskin, however, Fante showed them to his neighbor Daniel Mainwaring, a former newspaperman turned movie publicist who would go on to a successful career as a novelist (under the pen name Geoffrey Homes) and a screenwriter (Out of the Past, The Body Snatchers). Mainwaring urged Fante to rethink the strategy of telling the end of his romance at the beginning, with Camilla’s desert disappearance featured in the story’s first paragraph. After initially resisting Mainwaring’s advice Fante relented, and the result was Ask the Dust.

  The story published here as “Bus Ride” was written as Chapter 2 of Fante’s unfinished novel about Filipino migrant farm workers in California, The Little Brown Brothers. The story picks up with its protagonist Julio Sal where the action leaves off in the short story “Helen, Thy Beauty Is to Me——,” which was to have served as the novel’s first chapter. Fante worked on this novel with high hopes through the early to mid-1940s, finally abandoning the project in 1946.

  Although the protagonist of “Mary Osaka, I Love you” is named Mingo Mateo, Fante planned to use a revision of this story, in which Mingo’s name would be changed to Julio Sal, for the conclusion of The Little Brown Brothers. That plan was never realized. “Mary Osaka, I Love You” appeared in the October, 1942 issue of Good Housekeeping, preceded by the following “Editor’s Note”:

  This, we think, is one of the fine stories of the year. For obvious reasons it was submitted to the Executive Office of the President, Office of Emergency Management, Washington, D.C. The Government’s viewpoint is that it can have no objectionable propaganda effect. Said the Office of War Information, in part: “The Government recognizes that there is a large number of loyal Japanese-Americans, and has considered the difficulties they face during this war period…The War Relocation Authority in establishing its Relocation Centers has acted for the protection of loyal Japanese-Americans. These Centers are not internment camps; American citizens in them retain all their rights of voting, access to courts, etc.”

  Mary’s paean to America over which Mingo swoons is a catalogue of all-American personalities and phenomena: among others Artie Shaw and his big band, Joe DiMaggio and his baseball artistry, Cab Calloway and his jazz, President Roosevelt, ladies’ slacks, and so on. Against all that is good about America the story pits a single villain, “a man named Yamamoto.” Commander of the Imperial Japanese Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto
(1884–1943) masterminded the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, Yamamoto’s cold-blooded sneak attack was “the act of a mad dog, a gangster’s parody of every principle of international honor.” Despite his initial success, by the end of the war Japan was defeated and Yamamoto was dead.

  “The Taming of Valenti” appeared in the April, 1941 issue of Esquire.

  Fante wrote both “The Case of the Haunted Writer” and “Mama’s Dream” in the late 1940s when, after wasting the latter half of the decade on golf and alcohol, he was struggling to regain his novelist’s focus.

  “The Sins of the Mother” was originally published in the December, 1948 issue of Woman’s Home Companion as “The Wine of Youth.”

  In “The Big Hunger” (Collier’s, August 2, 1952), Fante returned to mixing fact with fiction. Although the protagonist’s family name is Crane and not Fante, young Dan has the same name as did Fante’s own son Dan, and likewise Dan’s brother Nick and sister Vicky.

  Fante wrote “The First Time I Saw Paris” in the summer of 1959, while he was living in Paris and writing a screenplay for producer Darryl F. Zanuck. Elvis Presley stayed for a time at Fante’s hotel, the Hotel Prince de Galles on Avenue George V. When writer and rocker were introduced, they shook hands affably, Fante afterwards referring to Presley as “quite a nice kid.” “The First Time I Saw Paris” is concerned with an even more numinous encounter, which crystallizes when the narrator reaches out to touch the withered skin of the old weeping lady, “my hand softly upon the gargoyle, and [I] wondered suddenly frightfully could she be a saint, because it was possible because saints can be the strangest of people in the damndest of places.”

  John Fante, pray for us.

  About the Author and the Editor

  JOHN FANTE was born in Colorado in 1909. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938. The following year Ask the Dust appeared, followed by Dago Red, a collection of stories, in 1940.

  Meanwhile, Fante had been occupied extensively in screen-writing. Some of his credits include Full of Life, Jeanne Eagels, My Man and I, The Reluctant Saint, Something for a Lonely Man, My Six Loves and Walk on the Wild Side.

  Fante was stricken with diabetes in 1955 and its complications brought about his blindness in 1978, but he continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce. He died at the age of 74 on May 8, 1983.

  Fante’s selected stories, The Wine of Youth, and two early novels, The Road to Los Angeles and 1933 Was a Bad Year, were among the works published after his death. The John Fante Reader (Ecco, 2003), a collection combining excerpts from his novels and stories, as well as previously unpublished letters, is the most recent addition to the posthumous body of work and a long-awaited tribute to an extraordinary career.

  STEPHEN COOPER is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante and the editor of The John Fante Reader. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their two children.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  BY JOHN FANTE AVAILABLE FROM ECCO

  The Saga of Arturo Bandini:

  Wait Until Spring, Bandini

  The Road to Los Angeles

  Ask the Dust

  Dreams from Bunker Hill

  Full of Life

  The Brotherhood of the Grape

  The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories of John Fante

  1933 Was a Bad Year

  West of Rome

  John Fante: Selected Letters

  The Big Hunger: Stories, 1932–1959

  The John Fante Reader

  Copyright

  THE BIG HUNGER: STORIES 1932–1959. Copyright © 2000 by Joyce Fante. PREFACE, EDITING & NOTES. Copyright © 2000 by Stephen Cooper. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  First Ecco edition published 2002.

  Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition as:

  Fante, John, 1909–1983

  The big hunger : stories, 1932–1959 / John Fante ; edited by Stephen Cooper.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-57423-120-0 (paperback)-

  ISBN 1-57423-121-9 (cloth trade)

  ISBN 1-57423-122-7 (deluxe signed)

  1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. I. Cooper, Stephen, 1949- II. Title.

  PS3511.A594 B54 2000 99-88227

  813’.52—dc21 CIP

  EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201302-6

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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