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Shanghaied in Tinseltown | page 1, 2, 3
And still, Fante the novelist was not done. Despite it all, somehow, in 1975, he manages to pull off that miraculous act of which so many screenwriters dream: He manages to write and sell "Brotherhood of the Grape," a novel about the death of a screenwriter's mad, alcoholic, diabetic father. The feat did not go unappreciated: Larry McMurtry in the Washington Post offered comparisons to "King Lear" and "The Brothers Karamazov." The superstar screenwriter Robert Towne -- who had encountered "Ask the Dust" while researching "Chinatown" -- optioned the book and interested Francis Ford Coppola in producing it. Was, at last, the recognition Fante had so long deserved going to come to him? If so, it was coming too late. Having suffered from diabetes since the '50s, John Fante lost his eyesight in 1978 and began a steady descent into the cruel last stages of this disease that would end in the amputation of both his legs. And, at last, came the rediscovery of his books, thanks to Bukowski. "Out of respect for his idol," writes Cooper, "Bukowski had never dared approach Fante." Fante was blind when "Ask the Dust" was republished in 1980. And still he managed to close the Bandini tetralogy by dictating "Dreams From Bunker Hill" to his wife, in 1982. He died in 1983 at 77, following which both the unpublished work and the entire life's work were brought out again by Black Sparrow, and the Fante story came to be, as we know it today, a literary morality play quoted when the conversation turns, as it inevitably does, to the serendipity of literary life -- a writer whose story, somehow, has become better known than his stories. So what, in the end, is the meaning of the John Fante story? Is it really a story of a great writer denied his audience? Is it really a tale of talent finally triumphing? Yes and no. Sure, great art should have an easy path in the world. But the fact is that in writing, as in music, there is more talent out there than there is room in the machinery of publishing or in the public's attention. This being the case, the inherent difficulty of being an artist will always carry the ancillary frustrations of finding an audience. And sure, there is always luck involved. What if, for example, Bukowski had seen fit to acknowledge his debt to Fante in, say, the mid-'60s rather than the late '70s? There would have been a good 17 years of writing time available to Fante -- had he wanted to take advantage of it. But would he have? In the end, Stephen Cooper's fine biography makes it hard not to feel that the opportunities were always there for John Fante -- many more opportunities, in fact, than he knew quite what to do with. And it's hard not to feel that more than a story about the fickleness of audiences or publishers, the story of John Fante is of a writer who, in a key period of his life, failed to wrestle his talent to the table. He failed because of whatever it was in his mind that kept him suicidally drinking, gambling and fighting his way through his life. My night with Bukowski and his wife started at 8 p.m. in a San Pedro restaurant and ended in their living room sometime just before dawn. A portion of the night's talk is on tape, and that part I can refer to today: [What caught me in Fante was] when he was alone and starving and trying to be a writer in a tiny room ... Starving for your art for Christ's sake. That isn't done much nowadays. Seems like more in centuries past, guys would starve for their art. They'd go mad for it, throw everything up to be able to create ... People won't give up their comforts, they won't take the big risks. People want [the] name, they want fame, but they won't lay down their blood for it, they won't go mad for it, they don't have the passion for it. They want the reward, but they don't really have the inner drive to really do the thing that they want to be famous for. Now, listening to the late poet's flat Californian voice sounding on my stereo, I wonder about that. It's striking that, for all Fante's calculation and attempts to engineer a writing career, the real fiction came by itself and survived by itself, and had he, like Bukowski, never done anything but pursue his art, he would likely have been the famous writer he dreamed of becoming. When I think of it, I can nearly get angry. I can nearly feel that, like a farmer holding land in trust for a generation, Fante held a gift bigger than himself, the ability to make some little sense of the enigma of existence, the chance to capture the country he witnessed riding freights down the West Coast in the '30s, in California in the '40s, in the rich sounds of his Italian parents and in the sights of their immigrant world. Artists face incredible odds -- think of fellow Californian John Sanford, who has pursued his talent in the face of nearly universal rejection over nine decades, and he's at it still. But perhaps, in the end, none of that matters. What matters is that there are 10 volumes of Fante's writing on my shelf, and two volumes of his letters: always in print, always there to be rediscovered, as I discovered them. And perhaps it is not such a terrible thing to say of Fante that his readers will always close his books, not only grateful for the strange luck that allowed these books to survive, but also regretful that this angry and wonderful man never quite had what it took -- call it courage; call it luck; call it faith -- to follow his vast talent, like Bukowski did, all the way to the end.
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