The John Fante Reader

by John Fante

  Harriet joined me and we escorted Mama away through the sycamores. Then, from a distance, we heard it: a voice, mechanical, electronic, pulsing across the land and through the trees as if to make every leaf tremble, a cry of battle, growing louder. We stopped to listen. It was a radio voice, a sportscaster, tense, explosive, profaning the holy cemetery with alien vibrations.

  “Bottom of the ninth!” the voice proclaimed. “Two out. Bonds at second, Rader at third, Kingman the batter. The count: two balls and two strikes. Capra in a full windup. Here’s the pitch: a ball!”

  Through the trees lurched Mario’s battered truck, nuts and bolts jangling, the voice strident as it swept down upon us. Joy brightened my mother’s face.

  “It’s Mario!” she exulted. “Oh, Mario! He came after all. I knew he would, I knew it! Oh, thanks be to God!”

  The truck skidded around a curve and braked to a stop before us, throwing gravel. The radio’s irreverent hysteria seemed to jeer at the peaceful dead, rude, flouting their eternal sleep.

  Kingman had struck out. The Giants had lost. Momentarily Mario caved in upon the steering wheel. He snapped off the radio and returned to reality, looking at us.

  “Am I too late?”

  “No, Mario,” Mama said. “There’s still time. Hurry, before they cover him up!”

  He jumped from the truck and walked quickly toward the grave where two men with shovels were preparing to fill the plot. We watched him look down upon the casket, covering his face with both hands as he began to cry. Then we walked to the car.

  My mother got between Harriet and me. She took off her veil, leaned back and sighed. Her face was beautiful, her eyes were warm with a sense of peace. She took my hand.

  “I’m so happy,” she said.

  “He died quickly,” I said. “He didn’t suffer at all.”

  She sighed.

  “He worried me so, all the time, from the day we were married. I never knew where he was, what he was doing, or who he was with. He wouldn’t tell me anything. Every night I wondered if he’d come home again. Now it’s over. I don’t have to worry anymore. I know where he is. That he’s all right.” She uttered a little moan. “Oh, God. The things I used to find in his pockets!”

  I started the car.

  “Let’s go home.”

  “I bought a leg of lamb,” she said. “We’ll have a nice dinner. The whole family. With new potatoes.”

  —The Brotherhood of the Grape

  Part Five

  LETTERS

  The following letters, several published here for the first time, trace Fante’s personal and artistic development over the course of half a century. In the earliest Fante is twenty-three years old, living in Long Beach during the depths of the Depression, and struggling to make a way for himself as a writer. During this time and later Fante wrote often to his mother, who after a two-year estrangement had recently reconciled with Fante’s father in Roseville, California. In these letters we get a vivid sense of Fante’s youthful ambitions as a writer, as well as of his strong attachments to family. Letters to cherished mentor H. L. Mencken, to friends and fellow writers Carey McWilliams and William Saroyan, and to his editor Pascal Covici reveal both the seriousness and the humor with which the young Fante pressed those ambitions. Fante’s ambivalent experiences as a Hollywood scenarist come up in a number of letters from the 1930s and ‘40s. By the late 1950s Fante was a well-paid screenwriter living in Italy and France, where he wrote marvelously evocative letters home to his wife, Joyce, and their children. Even in the latest letters selected here, in which an aging, ill, and often discouraged John Fante faces obscurity and death, a brimming life spirit can still be felt.

  JUNE 24, 1932

  Dear Mother:

  I haven’t heard from the publishers in the east for over a week now, and I’m getting anxious and worried, for I’m broke again. There is no great cause for you to worry, though. I can always manage somehow, and I want you to be confident in me.

  At present I’m staying at the house of Sam Boyd, one of the workers with Ralph at the tango joint. He and his wife have gone on their vacation for the last two weeks. They will return Monday. We’ll have to move then, of course. Where to, I can’t say. I may move to the apartment of a friend on Obispo Street, which is a pretty good distance from town, but it’s very quiet there, and I think I shall like it. If I get a check in the mail from The American Mercury I’ll move to a reasonable hotel.

  This is a bad season for tourists. The local wiseacres say that it’s the worst in the town’s history, and I’m not surprised either. From what I see, there are many people on the Pike every day and night, but like everyone they meet, they’re simply walking around and not spending a dime. The tango joints have started to cut one another’s throats, and the boys in the jernt where Ralph works tell me that their boss may be forced out of the racket. Ralph’s sister Genevieve will be out here by July 1st or later. She has been doing some dancing in a chorus on the east coast, from New York to Havana, Cuba, but the show was a flop, most of her money she never got, and now she’s in Boulder. Ralph has written her to come out and try Hollywood, where the Fanchon-Maroc vaudeville circuit has its studios. Personally, I think it’s damned foolish for the girl to [come] here without any professional contacts whatsoever, especially in the hectic and changing show business, but there, more than anywhere else, is the profession where Lady Luck has much to do with a person’s success, and I hope Genevieve the best of it.

  My things are scattered about in such a terrible mess that I can’t find Josephine’s picture. Will look for it later.

  Love to all,

  Johnnie

  {1932: undated}

  Dear Mr. Mencken,

  This person at the typewriter once wrote you some letters from Wilmington, California, last year. I had to. Maybe you’ll understand the compulsion when I say that, and it’s absolutely true, I was turned from Catholicism and the novitiate a week after I decided to be a priest by reading your Treatise On The Gods.

  I wrote you. The letter described different mental agonies. I was nineteen, without the gods on my side whom I had got used to, and I floundered about in a sad way. Such floundering is amusing in people past forty, but in me, it was pain. Then your answer came. Courteous and pleasing, it said nothing.

  A month later you got and returned a story from me. It was a filthy tale. I was ashamed of my mind.

  Then I read in “What I Believe” that each morning you saw in your mail that there were worse asses than yourself in the world, and I thought: Well, Mencken, you scummy, hypocritical son of a so-and-so, that’s your reaction to my letter, is it? Well, you’re a goddam, cheap word-monger. I was crazy with poverty and worry, I wrote to the man who replaced the God Almighty in my heart, and then he uses my feelings for copy in a paragraph in his credo.

  Anyway, what I read taught me blandness. If I’m mistaken about it all, won’t you please take my deepest apologies?

  Futilely, a man must have a god. You’re still mine. Maybe the masochism the Catholics gave me makes me admire you, even after what has transpired. In many ways you’re a mighty man.

  I’d like you to read the enclosed manuscript. You of all people. It’s not great or phenomenal, but it’s true to me. I write for a living, though I’ve never sold in my life. If you buy it, will you send the equivalent by telegraph to John Fante, c/o Helen Purcell, 212 Quincy St., Long Beach. I’ve asked the same of another editor on another ms., simply because I’m in severe need, practically starving. If it is not worthy of publication, there is return postage, and I will have gotten the happiness of knowing that you read it, which to me is a very great deal.

  Thank you, I’m

  John Fante

  TUESDAY, JULY 26, 1932

  Dear Mr. Mencken,

  Many thanks for your judgement on that last story. I respect it, and I am grateful for it. I suppose one is supposed to get discouraged. I’m not.

  The enclosed is a last fling before I take a freigh
t for home. In my estimation it is so perfect that it will be rejected. I mean that I’m not conscious of a single flaw, and that means I have missed again.

  Will you answer a question for me? In the past thirty days I have written 150,000 words. I know a writer with a reputation does not do that many, but is a man just starting supposed to do that much? I certainly feel the effects, for, being broke throughout, I ate very little and lost a pound a day, or thirty pounds. I try not to be careless, for I write a thing twice in longhand and finally type it; moreover, to test my immunity to other writers who are often imitated, I read all of Hemingway, Dos Passos, and De Maupassant, besides great stacks of H.G. Wells and a chronic dose of Mencken. This is a lot of reading that ceases to become a pleasure, but a task. It means ten hours of the day and night, including the writing. I’m not bragging here. I just want to know whether a man just beginning to write must necessarily work that hard. I want to know whether you did as much in a similar period of your life. I would like to know from you because you’re the only person whom I know whose acumen I respect. I get endless unsolicited advice from people who read a lot and plan to write, but never do it. They give me a pain in the neck.

  It is my plan to edit The American Mercury some day. By forty or thereabouts I think I shall be qualified. This means a lot of hard work, so I am going about it very systematically, and barring death or blindness a man can get whole warehouses of work done in twenty years, and I know no earthly reason why the job should not be mine at the end of that time. It amuses me very much to think that the magazine I shall edit regularly rejects my stuff, nor am I suffering from any delusions of grandness. The only hitch in the plan is that should you ever decide to quit the job, the magazine is liable to go on the rocks, so for God’s sake stick around for a while longer. Put your rubbers on and button up your overcoat.

  Yours with great admiration,

  John Fante

  423 Lincoln Street

  Roseville, Calif.

  I have no more stamps, but they will follow. Many thanks for your generosity in the stamp act.

  I saw my story [“Altar Boy”] in The American Mercury for this August. Pretty hot stuff. My author’s note is incorrect. You will inevitably get letters of protest from Denver Jesuits for it. I never did study for the priesthood, nor did I say so in the note I submitted with reference to my past. But I did plan to study at Florissant, Mo., under the Jesuits. That was a temporary vocation which endured for two years. Various things, however, such as skepticism and too much Voltaire and his counterparts, and a sense of injustice over the ruination of my mother’s life (too much rel. [religion]) killed the desire for the cloth.

  Otherwise, the note is correct.

  AUG. 7, 1932

  Dear Mr. Mencken,

  Ten trillion thanks for your advice concerning working hours and writing output. I respect it absolutely, and I shall follow it. I am very happy that you like the story, and it would be goofy to quibble over the title you have given it. “Home Sweet Home” is all right. The truth is though, that I didn’t really sing that song. I can hum the melody, and I know the lyrics, but together, for me they make a cacophonous concatenation, which is eight syllables, anyhow.

  You may do as you please with the following:

  I was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1911, in a macaroni factory, which is just the right place for a man of my genealogy to get his first slap, for my people were from the peasantry of Italy. My mother was born in Chicago, so that makes me just as much of an American as is necessary. My father was very happy at my birth. He was so happy that he got drunk and stayed that way for a week. On and off for the last twenty-one years he has continued to celebrate my coming.

  I have two younger brothers and a sister. Our family moved to Boulder, Colo., when I was still a little squirt, and I began my schooling there, under the nuns. I returned to Denver for high school, attending Regis College, a Jesuit house. Then I went to the University of Colorado for a year. I quit that place because I was just about to flunk out. I couldn’t study there. You see, I’d been four years in a Jesuit boarding school, and you can’t imagine the overpowering voluptuousness of everything feminine after four years of confinement. I even fell in love with my English teacher at Colorado, and the hell of it is that she knew it. I made an ass out of myself for real, because I wrote her love letters, unsigned, and she knew their asinine source. One night I thought I’d spill her chastity. I got hold of Sherwood Anderson’s “I Want to Know Why,” and I went up to her apartment to find out what the kid in that story was puzzled about. Well, sir, that teacher didn’t know what the [kid] was puzzled about. No ma’am, she didn’t. But I know, of course. That was [the] Jesuitical technique of making love. I was sure a flop with her, but I’m a lot better today, and I’ll go back to see her sometime.

  My family went to smithereens a couple of years ago, my father beating it in one direction, and my ma and we kids to California. It was awful. We didn’t have a kopek when we got there, and I’m not implying here that we ever had any to spare. I had to go to work. Ye gods, how I hated it. The only work I ever did previous to that was play all sorts of ball. But I got a job, and did a pretty swell job of keeping alive my ma and the kids. I had more than one job, I had twenty-four of them, from hotel clerk to stevedore.

  Then my father came back, and the folks went north with him, and I went to Long Beach. I went to the junior college in that town until my money gave out. Money has always been my problem, and the thing I’m trying to do is get enough of it to stop starving. I’ve done a lot of that, believe me. I’m fundamentally a clever fellow, and I’ve learned the serenity of honesty. I’m going to do my best to appreciate it the more, but I have a shallow side of me, in the estimate of my friends. I have strong prejudices which I feed. For example, I will not read books written by women or Catholic priests. Though I’m young, I’ve done a lot of harm. I’m revengeful, and I shall never reach a maximum of tranquility until the injuries and humiliations I’ve suffered have been compensated. Maybe this is conceited rationalization, but who of human flesh and blood can prove beyond adjectives that I’m right or wrong? Thanks, but I’d rather teach myself, and worship the cherished gods of my own choosing. I have but three, and these’ll change soon enough. It’s my belief that I can be and do exactly what I want to be and do. Hence, my conviction that I’ll edit The American Mercury some day. Yet it’s all an elaborately dirty trick, for I might slump over this machine, a corpse, within the next two hours. I have a girl, and I love her, and she loves me, and we both are little pigs for the immense music of Richard Wagner, and so the day is long and good, but tomorrow the sunshine will make me perspire and the bark of a dog will drive me nuts, and sticky flies will drone and land on my face.

  I began to write a year or so ago. Altar Boy, in the August issue, is the only worthwhile piece I’ve ever done. I have read extensively, and I know contemporary literature pretty well. When Gamaliel Bradford died, it nearly broke my heart. When Lytton Strachey died, I went around all that day with a smile on my face. On Nietzsche’s anniversary, which is my Christmas, I always get stewed. I would rather write than anything else.

  I have other tastes. I’m a pretty good pug, and I can handle my dukes. I could have been a professional baseball player. My biggest diversion though, and the one which I’ll have to give up because it’s polluting me, is my Pimp’s Anthology: A Collection of Pornography Gathered From Lavatories and Behind the Barns of the United States. I have contributors all over the Pacific Coast. I have some swell poetry here, but I’ll have to throw it all away. It’s a kind of pigsty Americana, and now my collection has so begun to annoy me that I wash my hands with soap and water every time I pick up the book. I think this idea came from my reading of Krafft-Ebing and his pals. I know abnormal psychology thoroughly, too thoroughly for a layman. My ken of the stuff often comes upon me with a rush, nauseating me. This is bad, but it’s good schooling. When I was a kid I ate too many walnuts one Christmas. I’ve never been able to c
rack one since. So with erotic literature. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m fed up.

  I want to begin a novel, but I can’t, for I must live. My novel will be written though, and it’ll be one to make me proud.

  Thanks again for all the grand things you have done. I hope I can continue to write things that please you, and above all, I’m grateful for your suggestions as to work hours and output.

  With Admiration,

  John Fante

  423 Lincoln St.

  Roseville, Calif.

  DECEMBER 12, 1932

  Dear Mother,

  I suppose that as this is being written a letter from you is on its way here. I shall be very glad to get it. I haven’t heard from home for nearly two weeks now, and I am anxious to know how all is with the family,

  Winter has come at last to Southern California. The rain has been coming down in terrific sheets for the last two days and nights. It has just begun, too, The weather man predicts heavy rains for a long time to come. The rain has brought a very cold wind with it. To be out in this kind of weather for even ten minutes leaves you freezing from stem to stern.

  I am well situated here in my new apartment. There is plenty of gas heat, and my bed has plenty of extra blankets. It is the first winter in three years that I don’ t have to be annoyed by the cold when I am asleep.

  I suppose you people in Roseville are in for cold weather too. That snow which covered San Francisco has probably gone inland as far as Roseville. I hope to God all of you are well and warm. I know there is a shortage of blankets there at the house, and I hope you have taken care of that need now, before still colder weather comes.