[In the following essay, Collins addresses the reasons for the recent critical and popular rediscovery of John Fante's work, investigates the influence his work has had on other writers, and places him within the tradition of Italian American writers.]

To feel that you have a destiny is a nuisance.

—John Fante

In 1932 H. L. Mencken published the first story of an unknown writer living in obscurity in Los Angeles named John Fante, the son of a bricklayer from the Abruzzi. Half a century later the author of “Altar Boy” had to be rediscovered by Charles Bukowski. Bukowski's preface to the 1980 reissue of Ask the Dust deserves credit for kick-starting the Fante revival. Recalling his own anonymous days in Los Angeles, Bukowski felt dissatisfied with the “very slick and careful Word-Culture” of the modern writers. “One had to go back to the pre-Revolution writers of Russia to find any gamble, any passion” (AD [Ask the Dust] 5). Then he found a few volumes by John Fante gathering dust on the shelves of the L. A. Public Library, just where Arturo Bandini had imagined his works being someday, “to sort of bolster up the B's” (AD 13). The author of these books, said Bukowski, became “my god” and exerted “a lifetime influence on my writing.”

As Bukowski pressed the book into the hands of a new generation of readers, he offered a more personal recommendation: “I finally met the author this year. 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 way of his way are the same: strong and good and warm. That's enough. Now this book is yours” (AD 6-7).

John Fante may be one of the few writers for whom the cliché “before his time” can be used without exaggeration. By 1940 Fante had three books—Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Ask the Dust and Dago Red—and a promising future. The problem was, the future would take a little longer to arrive than he thought. John Fante couldn't afford to wait. He cashed in on his reputation as a short story writer by going to Hollywood, where he hoped to make enough money to support his true calling as a novelist. His reputation as a novelist would have to wait a little longer. Word-of-mouth publicity and the support of a few readers with long memories kept him going.

At his death in 1983, with only a handful of books back in print, the Fante revival had just begun. But more novels were on the way: reissues of books thirty and forty years old, a new one he had dictated to his wife when he was blind and bed-ridden just before his death, and newly discovered manuscripts twenty and fifty years old that were found only after his death along with their rejection slips. The reviews were better than ever. His audience was more responsive than ever, more devoted, and ever growing. By the end of the 1980s, all eight novels were available, in addition to a collected and expanded edition of his short stories. These were followed by two volumes of letters, the first devoted to his twenty-two year correspondence with Mencken, the second to the discontinuous first-person narrative of his life as told to Carey McWilliams, his mother, and a host of other friends, supporters and family members. Never one to keep up the self-absorbed reflection of a journal, Fante preferred to unburden himself in letters to an audience of a single reader at a time who was bound to be more sympathetic to his fate than he was to himself. The letters provide an invaluable record of his life—and his voice.

Appreciations began to appear in places like Rolling Stone, Life, Vogue, Esquire and the Times Literary Supplement, with titles like “John Fante Finally Famous,” “Fante Fever,” “Forgotten Son of the Lost Generation,” and “The Hottest Dead Man in Hollywood.” Even Hollywood had come round again, this time to pay tribute to his art by optioning his novels for the movies. By 1990 The Road to Los Angeles, Fante's first novel to be rejected by New York publishers, was the only one not yet optioned by Hollywood. In 1940 Fante had tried, briefly and unsuccessfully, to adapt his story, “A Wife for Dino Rossi,” for the stage. In 1984 the Mark Taper Forum near Bunker Hill, where Fante had spent some of his most productive and least prosperous years, produced Peter Alum's stage adaptation of Dreams from Bunker Hill, and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts bought the rights to its native son's 1933 Was a Bad Year. Other theater companies followed suit. In 1987 Fante was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by PEN, Los Angeles Center.

John Fante's time had come. The author who had been written off as a relic of the 1930s had become a writer to be reckoned with in the 1980s and 1990s.

A new readership had been waiting in the wings of postmodernity. Since much of postmodern literature has been defined by an extension of what Bukowski called the “very slick and careful Word-Culture” of modernism, the taste for Fante might seem a nostalgic throwback to simpler times, less complicated narratives. But Bukowski speaks for the other face of postmodernism when he invokes Fante as his mentor—not the safe abstraction of academic experimentalism influenced by a self-consciousness encouraged by various schools of critical theory in and out of vogue (which Fante might have called “hokum”), nor the minimalist withdrawal inculcated in the creative writing factories throbbing dully from Iowa, the heartland of American corn, but the rude authenticity of an honest voice.

Fante's influence on contemporary writers other than Bukowski has been largely unrecognized. In France, Fante has been called the father of the Los Angeles School of fiction writers, Bukowski being its most famous son. In America, Bukowski is perhaps better known as the main exponent of Los Angeles “Gab Poetry,” along with Gerald Locklin, and the influence of Fante is unmistakable in these writers, if somewhat ironic, considering Fante's lack of interest in poetry.¹ Writers of “the other California,” such as Gerald Haslam and Gary Soto, have also acknowledged their interest in Fante, as have a number of Italian-American authors.² As a whole, though, contemporary writers have not been quick to cite Fante's work as an influence. This has led some reviewers to assume that Fante has not been influential and to overstate the contrast between Fante's work and what has been currently in fashion.³

Bob Shacochis, however, writing in Vogue, sees a number of similarities not only between Fante and his own contemporaries, but an equal number of uncited Fante influences in a variety of our contemporary writers. Echoing Bukowski's opinion that the “slick and careful Word-Culture” of the modern writers left a gap that Fante's passion fills, Shacochis writes: “By comparison, the writing of Faulkner and other luminaries in the modern pantheon seems blunted, sanitized, encased in glass, while Fante's seems immediate, active, and alive.” Along with that of Chandler and Saroyan, Fante's work “deserves to be preserved among the voices of the day—for the singular flavor of the lives it speaks for, his vision of a bygone world, and that vision's influence on the here and now.” Shacochis goes further, suggesting that Fante is “the bridge between the emotional recklessness of the lost generation and our currently cool, if embattled, American spirit”:

His sentences spurted with riffs of energy and lyrical passion, predating the Beats; or bit with the satirical wryness that the black humorists—Terry Southern, J. P. Donleavy, the Philip Roth of Portnoy's Complaint—would later adopt. Indeed, the embryo of much that we mislabel original and startling in contemporary fiction is there in Fante's work, and his legacy vibrates throughout the literature of the 1980s (Carver, Ford, Janowitz, Boyle, Mason, McInerney, Ellis, et al.), though you won't find his beneficiaries lining up to make a claim.⁴

Compared to the modernist writers, not to mention the ironists of postmodernism, Fante's often naked sentiment seems to verge perilously on the brink of sentimentality. (The typical Fante ending dissolves in tears.) But this is precisely what Fante's postmodern audience, the “other” postmodern audience, embraces, and it is exactly what Mencken recognized in the series of impassioned letters and stories that came to him from a twenty-three year old Italian American in California: a distinctive American voice unafraid of speaking directly from the heart about his experience, unafraid of cynicism, irony and vulgarity, and equally unafraid of sentiment. Hemingway defined courage as “grace under pressure,” but Fante shows that courage is also being willing to admit to cracking under pressure, to confess what is most absurd in ourselves, and to appear ridiculous when we are ridiculous. Fante doesn't flinch from such confessions. Nor does he flinch from expressing emotion. He can draw the nihilist conclusion that life may be just “a waste of wishes” (WY [The Wine of Youth] 40), or assert that the “road to each of us is love” (AD 81).

Despite all the sweet nostalgia of Fante's voice, or perhaps because of it, his work strikes a chord in our era of postmodern cynicism and emotional uprootedness. His voice is, after all, a nostalgia born of brutal candor about his own failings and a spirited attack on the shams of the culture of narcissism, which was bred, if not born, in Hollywood. Because Fante's observations are ruthless, his language plain, and his conclusions so often bleak, it is difficult to begrudge him his saving graces, his fiats of love and understanding and hope. In our time, when intellectuals and artists are as powerless as priests and politicians to give us hope, what could be more refreshing and necessary than to hear one clear and honest voice expressing what in ourselves we most fear and desire: viciousness and grace.

The neglect of Fante in America—his reputation in Europe has long been established—can be blamed only in part on the publishing and academic establishments. While the vagaries of the book market have allowed other writers of Fante's stature to fall through the cracks, thanks to the rise in small press publishing and the long memories of a few admirers Fante now has good distribution and has been well reviewed. The lack of critical attention is more difficult to understand, but this too is now being rectified, thanks in part to the rise in regional, especially Western and West Coast, and multi-ethnic studies in American literature. Thus only recently has Fante begun to get the critical attention he deserves. Fante holds a special place in the history of ethnic literature in the West, and some credit must go to the journals like The Redneck Review of Literature, Italian Americana, Voices in Italian Americana, and MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United States) for bringing Fante to the attention of a wider range of critics and granting him his rightful place as one of the few Italian-American novelists to deal with immigrant culture without once mentioning the Mafia.

Fante's only competition in this line seems to be Pietro Di Donato, whose novel Christ in Concrete appeared in 1939, the same year as Ask the Dust. After these books, both writers fell into an almost complete silence. Di Donato was basically a one-shot novelist, though he did publish two inferior sequels to Christ in Concrete and several non-fiction studies on Italian-American issues. Fante, on the other hand, continued to write fiction that was at least as good as Ask the Dust, though little of it was published during his lifetime, while devoting much of his time to a career in screen writing. While Di Donato has enjoyed more critical attention, it now seems clear that Fante was the greater artist, and the one more likely to stand the test of time.

There are several reasons for Di Donato's status as the leading example of Italian-American writing in Fante's generation, including the academic and publishing establishments. Unlike Fante, Di Donato is both tantalizingly interpretable for academic critics and an “east coast regionalist” (if such a term could exist). The polemics of Di Donato's sociology, along with a heavy-handed superstructure of myth that verges on allegory, put Christ in Concrete squarely in the camp of Depression-era novelists with an ideological agenda. Powerful as Di Donato's novel is emotionally, however, the book is marred artistically by being so easily dated. In contrast, Fante has no program for social change and no interest in revealing the scaffolding of religious motifs that do nevertheless inform his work. The poverty and religion in Fante's work are not specific to an era. Fante's creations are compact structures, strong and simple, like the stone hearths and smoke-houses his father built, whereas Di Donato's are more ambitious public structures, like the concrete that swallows his Christ-like protagonist.

It helps, of course, that Di Donato's work is set in New York, whereas all of Fante's works take place in Colorado or California. No one would call Di Donato a “regionalist” because of the specificity of his locale. Terms like “new regionalist” and “new ethnicist” annoyed Fante because they tend to ghettoize an artist's work according an author's background or a work's setting. Even sympathetic critics, especially Californians, still tend to read Fante's works almost entirely in the context of their setting. Naturally, this can be helpful. Gerald Locklin, for example, goes beyond comparing Fante with the usual cast of Hollywood writers (West, Chandler, Cain and Fitzgerald), to point out the often overlooked similarities between Fante and Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and John Gregory Dunne, as the outstanding fictional chroniclers of “the country's second most populous megalopolis.”⁵ But the emphasis is still on second.

Unlike so many would-be Bandinis, Bukowski included, Fante did not cultivate a pose as an alternative, counter-culture or cult writer. His ideals and ambitions for himself and for his work were all-American, sometimes embarrassingly so. He resented being kept out of the mainstream by reviewers who categorized him ethnically or located his work regionally, and he would probably have had a few choice words of irony at being made a curiosity of critical fashion today. Fante wrote to his friend Carey McWilliams, author of The New Regionalism (1931): “if Cooper and Washington Irving were in their own times new Regionalists, so were Thoreau and Mark Twain and every writer, in the order of their appearance in any history of literature” (SL [Selected Letters] 50). Fante recognized, however, that authors fashionably ethnic or regional today may become the American classics of tomorrow. This may, in fact, be Fante's own fate.

East Coast parochialism, as Fante came to view the New York publishing establishment, failed to prejudice foreign publishers against him. He had no trouble finding an admiring public in Europe and South America, where his books in translation still sell more copies than in the United States. Italian translations were naturally among the first to appear, but it was in France that he was first considered a peer of Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck, and dubbed by Le Monde “un maître américain.” Like Bukowski, whose fame in America was in part a boomerang effect from Germany, Fante found his real champions in Europe.

Fante is particularly popular in the land of Knut Hamsun, where his work has been chosen for the Norwegian Book-of-the-Month Club. When we consider Fante's enormous and acknowledged debt to Hamsun, the writer he most resembles, this makes perfect sense. The starving scribbler in Hamsun's Hunger is, after all, the direct literary ancestor of Arturo Bandini, who is, like Hamsun's hungry narrator (here described by Isaac Bashevis Singer), “frivolous in word and deed” and “speaks to people as he would to a dog or to himself.”⁶ Like Hamsun, Fante is the novelist of all that is odd and lyrical and contradictory in our human responses to the most familiar situations. “His heroes are all children,” writes Singer of Hamsun, “as romantic as children, as irrational, and often as savage,”⁷ and the same could be said of Fante. The novelist and film critic David Thomson writes: “Fante never wrote a sentence you couldn't sing, or two in a row that don't confuse your urges to laugh and cry,”⁸ and the same could be said of Hamsun.

The very different regional and ethnic identities of these like-minded writers argue against relying too much on such accidentals as where they come from. And the fact that both writers translate so well, in so many languages and over such a long period of time, attests to the universality of their literary art.⁹ Hamsun's settings in Christiania (Oslo) or Fante's in Los Angeles, like the authors' Scandinavian or Mediterranean heritages, merely supply the experienced particulars of events and emotions that are, essentially, neither Norwegian nor Italian-American; they are, above all, human. Carey McWilliams, in response to a student's inquiry about the importance of Fante's ethnicity to his work, wrote: “I am aware of course that ethnicity, particularly ‘the new ethnicity’ which will soon become the ‘new, new ethnicity,’ is the current intellectual fad. All sort of problems are now being interpreted in the light of the new canon. But I have some doubts that ethnic differences and ethnic backgrounds are as important as the current fashion makes them out to be” (SL 291). McWilliams's comment, written in 1972, which certainly reflects Fante's own views on the matter, seems to have been prophetic.

What is essential to Fante's work is his voice and vision: his poignant portrayal of the hope of imagination that leads to the despair of thwarted ambition, and of the pleasures and small victories that are the only rewards for the agonizing compromises of everyday life. The ancient Greek dramatists, like Fante, realized that tragedy is only another form of comedy: both cut us down to size. They also realized that the weight of tragedy needs to be punctuated by comic barbs for us to recognize the full range of our emotional and intellectual reactions to our fate. The failure of our superhuman ambitions forces us to admit the ridiculous nature of our humanity, to confront and so appreciate the flawed particulars in ourselves and others that make us what we are: more mistaken than vicious, in Kenneth Burke's phrase,¹⁰ or “not so ugly as comical,” in Fante's (SL 236). Failure becomes an epiphany of incompetence, a revelation of the value of human life. The simplest human pleasure is also its greatest virtue, love. Self-love, romantic love, familial love, and the more general and spontaneous outpouring of sympathy with humanity that made Arturo Bandini a “lover of man and beast alike” (AD 76)—these are Fante's central subjects and the points of his compass in mapping out the community of which he felt himself to be a part. It is the beauty of Fante's achievement, and perhaps the lesson of the odyssey of his life, that a chronicle of the birth and death of dreams is worth the telling, and worth a life of work to capture in an art that preserves the identity of one human voice.

Notes

1. See Robert Peters, “Gab Poetry, Duck vs. Nightingale Music: Charles Bukowski,” Margins 16 (January 1975), pp. 24-8. Reprinted in The Great American Poetry Bake-Off (Metuchen, NJ & London: Scarecrow Press, 1979; see also 2nd series, 1982); and in Where the Bee Sucks: Workers, Drones and Queens of Contemporary American Poetry (Santa Maria: Asylum Arts, 1994).

2. Jerre Mangione was one of the first Italian-American authors to recognize Fante in print as one of the “Italian-American Novelists” in an article of the same title in The New Republic 104 (6 January 1941). Others have been Helen Barolini, Felix Stefanile, Kenneth Gangemi and Pasquale Verdicchio. See the controversy over Gay Talese's New York Times Book Review article, “Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?” (14 March 1993) in Italian Americana 12:1 (Fall/Winter 1993), 7-37, and in Voices in Italian Americana 4:1 (1993), 235-7. It should be noted that Talese delivered the Headline Address at the John Fante Conference in 1995, in which he admitted that he was a late-comer to the works of Fante, but an enthusiastic late-comer.

3. Lem Coley, for example, in a review of the reissued Full of Life and The Brotherhood of the Grape, calls Fante's work “vivid and open, in contrast to today's attenuated fiction” and finds comparison of Fante's slapstick and passion only in the films of Federico Fellini. See “California: No Remorse,” American Book Review 11:1 (March-April 1989), p. 8.

4. Shacochis (1987). Bret Easton Ellis quotes the first paragraph of Ask the Dust as the epigraph to his novel The Informers (New York: Knopf, 1994).

5. Gerald Locklin, “Dreams from Bunker Hill: John Fante,” American Book Review 5:2.

6. Singer, p. ix.

7. Singer, p. ix.

8. Thomson (1986).

9. Translation is especially important to writers who have small audiences, either because they write in a “minor” language, or because they appeal to a limited or non-mainstream audience. As the Czech writer Arnold Lustig has said, “All writers are international, universal. We are citizens of the world, if we are really writers. And these translations … are an extension of the writer.” Miroslav Holub elaborates: “It's the best definition I can imagine. The implication of this definition is: it's not a copy. The translation, in the existential sense of the word, is the transfer of the writer to other people.” See “A Conversation with Arnold Lustig and Miroslav Holub,” Trafika: An International Literary Review 1 (Prague: August 1993), p. 160.

10. “The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that EVERY insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.” Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1937), pp. 41-2.

Catherine J. Kordich (excerpt date 2000)

[In the following excerpt from her full-length study of Fante's fiction, Kordich offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of The Orgy and My Dog Stupid.]

A final version of Colorado boyhood is given in The Orgy. Like 1933 Was a Bad Year, the novella was found among Fante's papers and then published with My Dog Stupid under the title West of Rome. His collected letters do not evidence Fante discussing the work outright and the existence of the story must have come as a surprise to his survivors. In a 1933 letter to his mother, however, Fante does mention memories that parallel the events in The Orgy including one trip he took with his father in the mountains outside Boulder where a friend had a gold mine (Letters, [Selected Letters] 42-43). As in The Orgy, that trip to a mine saw a lot of drinking and some fishing, but no actual mining.

The Orgy reworks the anecdote related in the letter home and turns it into a fable of debauchery. Told by a 10-year-old Catholic boy, the action has all the trappings of a mock-epic battle between good and evil. It is 1925, before the Great Depression, and though the child's family is not wealthy, they are comfortable and well fed. His father is the bricklayer Fante describes in other novels but—here is a twist—it is summer and Papa is working; he is in charge of a three-man crew that is building the J. C. Penney store downtown. Papa's friend and fellow bricklayer, Frank Gagliano, is an atheist. As a consequence, Mama detests him. One day when Frank comes home with Papa, Mama bars his entrance to the house with a broom, “like a spear-bearing angel guarding the tomb of Our Lord” (Orgy, 147) [The Orgy]. The family dog also hates Frank Gagliano, greeting the man with bared teeth and a deep growl. After Frank leaves the front walk, Mama sprinkles holy water where he stood to cleanse the area of the atheist's contaminating presence.

One of Fante's most curious characters appears in this story: Farley Vincent (Pat) Blivins, called Speed by his fellow workers, a black hod carrier who has worked with Papa for 10 years (Orgy, 159). An impeccable dresser (he comes to work in a suit and tie before changing into his work clothes) and model employee, Speed arrives at work before the bricklayers to prepare the mortar that they will use for the day. The son, working as a waterboy at the site, describes Speed's mornings: “By eight o'clock he had snaked up and down the ladder to the scaffolding a dozen times, artfully balancing hodfuls of mortar and brick to the masons' work area” (Orgy, 157). Financially savvy and hopeful, Speed speculates in penny mining stocks and considers temporary his days as a hod carrier: “No money in packing a hod … It's just a way of killin' time till I hit pay dirt” (Orgy, 157). Speed, indeed, hits paydirt, and when his “Shasta Glory” stock goes up, he sells his stock and quits carrying hod. As a gift, Speed gives Papa the deed to a gold mine. Papa is reluctant to accept any gift from the hod carrier he is loath to lose.

“I got something for you,” Speed said to Papa.

“You don't owe me nothing.”

Speed laughed. “Maybe that's what I got for you.”

(Orgy, 163)

When Papa sees his name on the transfer of ownership title, however, his reluctance is forgotten, and he thanks Speed for the gift. Speed advises Papa on how to find gold: dig and pray.

Though he knows it will cause strife at home, Papa has to invite Frank Gagliano to be his partner. Frank, after all, has a truck to take them to the mine, and he even has mining experience. As a partner, Frank's first act is to change the mine's name from “Yellow Belly” to “Red Devil.” The mine's name and the company Papa is keeping do not promise wholesome activities. Sure enough, weeks go by and all Papa brings home from his mountain junkets are filthy clothes and brutal hangovers. Mama, furious that Papa, a “good Christian,” is spending his weekends with an “evil atheist,” also suspects immoral activity, possibly involving women. The son remarks: “Shaking out the soiled blankets Papa brought back, she sniffed them with loathing, holding them at arm's length like dead cats as she dropped them into the washing machine. They were filthy things, wine-stained, damp and disgusting” (Orgy, 174). Finally fed up, Mama enlists the son as her envoy. To the men's great dismay, the boy is sent to join them on a weekend at the mine.

The mine itself turns out to be nothing but a watery 15-foot hole in the mountainside: “Rusted picks and shovels lay on the muddy floor, long disused and so rotten the handle of a shovel collapsed like a mushroom when … stepped on. …” (Orgy, 179). Papa and Frank, it is clear, have not been doing any mining. Nor have they been doing any housecleaning; the cabin is a stinking mess. This disorder is unusual for Papa, who, the son explains, was a poor man, “and that for sure, but I only knew him as a clean poor man … Yet there he was, on his knees amidst all that squalor, as cheerful as a rat in a sewer” (Orgy, 178). Proof of carnal immorality soon arrives in the form of Rhoda, a run-down woman in a beat-up Cadillac. When the son returns from a walk, Papa and the woman are gone. The boy wants to know where the woman and his father have gone, but when he asks Frank, the man puts the boy on the wrong trail. Eventually the boy finds Rhoda sitting on a rock at the mine entrance, and he thinks his father must be with her: “suddenly I knew that my father was somewhere close by. I could almost smell him behind one of the trees, or the cluster of boulders beyond the mine, or concealed in the thick manzanita” (Orgy, 182). All day the men and woman take turns hiding, while the confused boy seeks them. Finally, in the late afternoon, the boy returns to the cabin where Papa sits, drinking wine, and boldly lies that he has been there the whole day. Exhausted by all his searching and worrying, the boy falls asleep on a couch. He awakens at midnight to a dead fire and a dark, quiet, empty cabin.

Outside the atmosphere is the opposite: bright with moonlight and fire, populated, noisy with Frank Gagliano's “drunken gravel laughter,” the voice of the woman, and the “roar” of Papa (Orgy, 187). The boy ventures up the trail toward the mine, “enchanted by the sense of evil” (Orgy, 186). In the shallow mine shaft, the boy observes Papa, Frank, and Rhoda in the midst of the titular orgy: “cleaving together, grunting and sucking and squirming in the naked heavy slithering of arms and legs, caught up like a ball of squirming white snakes, bodywhite under the moon, grinding on a blanket all knotted together with them, clawing, gasping, groaning” (Orgy, 186). The boy interprets the orgy as diabolically inhuman: arms and legs slither, bodies knot together, the participants grunt and squirm like beasts. While on one level the boy is aware that he has not stumbled onto actual evil, he nevertheless administers an exorcism. Like the envoy of his religious mother that he is, he returns to the orgy bearing the bottle of holy water that his mother had packed among the sandwiches (she labeled it: “Holy water. Use as needed.”). Though the boy feels like a fool, he runs up the trail and into the mine shaft—giving fair warning of what he intends to do, shouting: “Holy water on its way!” (Orgy, 187). The three adults are surprised and transfixed by the boy's appearance and are “there on the ground still, white and naked and paralyzed, rigid like white dead people” (Orgy, 187). The boy continues his invocations—“Look out for the holy water! Here comes the man with the holy water! It's powerful stuff!!” The boy douses the adults with the blessed liquid: “I whipped it around, spewing it from the bottle, splashing their dead white bodies. ‘It's holy water, folks! It's powerful stuff!’ On their faces, their chests, their hairy parts, throw the holy water, drive the devil out, kill the devil, save my father, free my father!” (Orgy, 187). Now in a frenzy himself, the boy runs away from the scene and into the woods.

Later Papa finds the boy beside a tree and takes him by the hand back to the cabin, assuring him that “Everything's going to be fine” (Orgy, 187). His father's partner, the boy reasons, is the cause of this: “my father … could not have done that, for he was my father and some things were not possible” (Orgy, 187). Later Frank returns and the boy exacts his revenge by repeatedly hitting the man with a stick, drawing blood, until Frank says “That's enough” (Orgy, 188). The story ends with an understated declarative sentence: “It was daybreak when we drove home” (Orgy, 188).

The story fulfills every definition of the word “orgy”; we see in the story generous amounts of drunken revelry and sexual abandon. The god in question in the “secret ceremonial rites in honor of a god,” another aspect of “orgy,” is undoubtedly Satan, whose devilish visage is on the mine's sign, and who takes over the father's face during the orgy itself. With the climactic scene taking place in the wilderness, one is reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne's similarly enigmatic story, “Young Goodman Brown.”

The Orgy has so much symbolism that it seems like a fable. Speed's gift of the gold mine bestows on Papa what seems like false hope and, ultimately, disappointment. As noted before, initially reluctant to accept the gift, Papa says: “You don't owe me nothing.” Speed's response seems, in hindsight, cryptic: “Maybe that's what I got for you” (Orgy, 163). Speed's final advice to Papa on how to make the mine work is identical to what Speed just spent 10 years doing in Papa's employ: “You dig … And you keep diggin' … Something else you do, is pray. You pray and you dig, but you dig more'n you pray” (Orgy, 164). The narrator describes only amicability between Speed and Papa, but the outcome of the story—and knowing how hopeless the mine appears—makes one wonder if telling Papa to “dig and pray” is ironic retribution for some offstage offense. That Papa and Frank Gagliano neither dig nor pray can be read as a reason for their failure and, in the eyes of the boy, their possible damnation. Ultimately, Speed's gift must be read as morally neutral, though the story's inaudible message seems to whisper on every page.

Characteristic of Fante's later work, The Orgy is tightly arranged and sparks with energetic characters and dialogue. Author and critic Bob Shacochis called it an “outright classic” and the story that “converted [him] forever into the Fante fold” (Shacochis, 203). …

In contrast to The Brotherhood of the Grape, where an assimilated son is largely distanced from his Italian past, in My Dog Stupid the assimilated son identifies strongly with his Italian background. For Henry Molise (note the same name as in Brotherhood [The Brotherhood of the Grape]) in My Dog Stupid, Italian culture captivates and anchors the assimilated protagonist.

Fante wrote My Dog Stupid in the midst of a particularly chaotic era in U. S. history, and the novella (which is set in the late 1960s) incorporates the period's dramas into the narrative. It brings the Vietnam War, racial tension, and recreational drug use into a domestic setting. In the midst of these conflicts a jaded Italian American screenwriter and father thinks he would happily trade his bourgeois disappointments for a pensione in Rome and a brunette, “for a change” (Dog [My Dog Stupid], 11). Of course, the pull of family proves strong and ultimately overpowers Henry's fantasies. The overall tone of the novella reflects the story's delicate balance of serious themes and their parodic representations.

When the novella was published in 1986 (along with The Orgy in West of Rome) it received mixed reviews. The New Yorker thought it the weaker of the two novellas, but the Los Angeles Times considered My Dog Stupid the “real gem here.”¹ The San Francisco Review of Books saw in the novella characteristic Fante traits including “wild humor” and a realistic portrayal of life “at once sensitive and brutal.”²

On the most basic level, My Dog Stupid is a tale of a family in transition. Henry Molise and his wife, Harriet, are watching their children (three sons and a daughter, all in their late teens to mid-20s) leave their Malibu home and start lives of their own. The relationship between husband and wife is very amusing and very familiar: a quiet dinner conflagrates into a fight when one or the other reignites, without warning, a long-standing argument. But the anger expressed in their arguments is balanced by their love life, which remains passionate. The Molise situation might be standard “empty nest” fare except for these mitigating factors: rampant marijuana smoking, making peace with racial miscegenation, the looming Vietnam War draft, and an unmanageable and highly sexed Akita, “Stupid,” that takes up residence in the Molise household. Stupid has a kind of cartoonish aggressive homosexuality: he attempts to mount often, and only with male dogs and men. While all these changes are taking place, Henry muses on his life. His career has died, his wife is not as amusing as she once was, and his children, at first glance, are hardly a proud legacy.

The children are, by and large, an unappealing lot. Denny, the actor son, insists on his mother writing his college essays. Harriet does such a good job on a George Bernard Shaw paper that Denny gets an “A” and Harriet gets a letter from the professor congratulating her on a job well done. Daughter Tina, still throwing temper tantrums at age 20, uses their house as a home base for her and her surfer boyfriend (just back from Vietnam); they tool up and down the coast in his van, traveling to surf spots and parties, living their own Beach Boys song (leaving father Henry more envious than angry). Eldest son Dominic, the “family's prime screwball” (Dog, 11), wallpapers his room with pornography and dates only black women, which, as Henry says, “tries his mother sorely” (Dog, 15). The youngest son, Jamie, is the quiet one, whom his father hardly notices until Jamie is drafted. At that point Henry realizes that his youngest son's innate sweetness and unconditional love is the life lesson Henry has yet to learn.

Jamie is saintly. He secretly quits his job at the supermarket to volunteer at a children's clinic, teaching crafts and sports. His affection for children and animals is beatific, and after the Akita arrives, it is to Jamie's room that the dog goes for the night and in the morning Henry finds them together: “They were both asleep, each on his right side, Jamie's arm around the dog's neck, both snoring. I liked what I saw. I liked boys sleeping with dogs. It was as close to God as they ever got” (Dog, 33). In the weeks leading up to Jamie's induction into the military, Stupid (whose affection for Jamie alone is strictly platonic) follows the 19-year-old from room to room. Jamie entrusts his father with the good care of Stupid, and Henry promises to abide, though the day after Jamie's induction, a depressed Stupid runs away.

After all the children move out (in fits and starts and amid emotional pyrotechnics) Henry and his wife fill the void with parties. The social events turn into depressing affairs where husbands and wives get potted beyond recognition, television and movie screenwriters take opposite sides in fistfights, and the police must be summoned to break it all up. Soon Harriet develops an interest in pottery and studies the occult, even doing a tarot reading for Henry. Henry's dream to leave everything behind for a simpler life in Italy beckons. More attractive to him than the Italian landscape is the idea of flying away sans Harriet. For her part, the idea of being on her own is not without its appeal.

HENRY

Henry imagines being described by someone else, and the image chastens him: “Reputed to be insane, suffering from ulcers, no longer attending Writers' Guild meetings, regularly observed at the liquor store and the State Department of Employment. Or walking the beach with a large, idiotic and dangerous dog. Tedious bore at parties, talking of the good old days … Quarreled with agent and currently unrepresented. Talks obsessively of Rome … Scorned by his four children … Loyal wife tends his personal needs, preparing wholesome meals of custards and soft-boiled eggs, frequently assists him to bathroom” (Dog, 75). One reviewer read Henry's many complaints as symptomatic of a bad case of Weltschmerz (Crotta, 4).

When the book begins Henry is coming back from meeting a director who wants him to write “a film about the Tate Murders; in ‘the manner of Bonnie and Clyde, with wit and style’” (Dog, 9). Like the repugnant story idea, the financial terms of the job repel Henry. The director offers him no money, but a split of the movie's proceeds. Henry thinks: “It was the third offer of that kind I'd had in six months, a very discouraging sign of the times” (Dog, 9). Those “times” refer to the film industry in general, as well as Henry's current inability to get an assignment of any kind. His car is three payments past due, and though the house is paid for, it antagonizes him to think that it looks like “what it was not—the domicile of a successful writer” (Dog, 11). The quality of his fiction is also in a state of decline. When he reads a novel he is 15,000 words into he is shocked to see that it reads like a screenplay: “One chapter began: ‘Full Establishing Shot—Apartment House—Day’” (Dog, 75).

With unpleasant children and a career on the skids, Henry is in grievous need of inspiration and understanding. He remembers fondly his dog Rocco, a bull terrier who, Henry thinks, understood him better than any person ever had, but who was so belligerent that Harriet shudders at the mere articulation of the words “pit bull terrier.” When the Akita shows up at his house (wearing a tag that reads: “You'll be sorry”) Henry is initially averse to adopting him. Dogs had brought discord to Henry and Harriet's marriage in the past and on the two occasions when Harriet left him, it was over a pet (Dog, 45).

Henry decides that the dog must stay after a morning when Stupid is attacked by the sovereign dog of the neighborhood, a German shepherd named “Rommel” (Dog, 39). Stupid fights back and then retaliates by mounting his male adversary (Stupid never manages here or elsewhere to connect, as it were, with any of his victims). Henry admires Stupid's unconventional battle tactics and identifies with the dog since they are both fighters as well as outsiders in this upscale, Anglo-Saxon neighborhood. Henry thinks: “He was a misfit and I was a misfit. I would fight and lose, and he would fight and win. The haughty Great Danes, the proud German shepherds, he would kick the shit out of them all, and fuck them too, and I would have my kicks” (Dog, 43). Stupid is Henry's perverse doppelgänger, conjured from hell to take his owner's revenge on the world.

That Henry reserves a large portion of his bitterness for his children is understandable: they are, with the exception of Jamie, an aggravating group. But an unreasonable part of his gripe with them is that they are so decidedly Anglo American: “Why weren't they short and stumpy like their father? Why did they resemble store clerks and not stone-masons? Where was the peasant ruggedness of my father and the innocence of my mother, the warm brown Italian eyes? Why didn't they talk with their hands, instead of leaving them hanging dead at their sides during conversations?” (Dog, 66). He blames his Anglo wife for these Anglo symptoms. He also ruminates on the prejudice he suffered at the hands of her family; Harriet's relatives still refer to Henry as “that Eyetalian boy” (Dog, 47).

Henry has trouble understanding his children (surely a universal experience). When he tries to rely on the parenting methods his father used—principally violence and ridicule—they seem both outmoded and totally ineffective. In one scene, Henry becomes fed up with Denny's presumptuousness (he thinks his mother should write his college essays), and Henry challenges his son to a fight: “Let's go, Buster.” Henry walks out the front door and waits, planning to ambush his son: “My plan was to bash him in the mouth as he stepped through the door. I knew he could take me, and all I wanted was that first punch” (Dog, 31). Henry halfheartedly waits for five minutes, but when the door finally opens it is Harriet telling him that Denny has gone to bed and to please lock all the doors when he comes back inside. His children simply side-step his vitriol, while Henry's own father (assuming it is the Nick Molise of Brotherhood) had managed to ensnare his sons in actual combat.

Assuming strong connections exist between this Henry Molise and the Henry Molise of The Brotherhood of the Grape, it is safe to call this American offspring the logical manifestation of Henry's journey across the tracks to the “better” side of town. Having worked so hard to escape the world of his Italian stonemason father and to ascend the socioeconomic ladder and become an accomplished mainstream writer, Henry now finds himself looking at what he wrought in the process—children assimilated beyond apparent Italian trait. His dream has come to life, but Henry wonders at what cost. Part of his anxiety is clearly connected to his having chosen the American path of assimilation over his Italian peasantry.

The questions raised by the balancing act of assimilation and ethnic tradition (an ongoing theme in Fante novels) is brought to the fore with Katy Dann, Dominic's African American girlfriend. Harriet is outraged at the liaison (and fears the Black Panthers will react violently to Dominic fooling around with “one of their women” [Dog, 88]). Henry, in his inimitable style, tries to talk to his son about his proclivities for black lovers, and he asks Dominic if he has no sense of “race pride.” Dominic lampoons his father's bigotry: “‘Race pride! Say, that's a hell of a phrase, Dad. I'll bet you dreamed it up yourself. It's uncanny. No wonder you're such a great writer.’ He crossed to the desk and picked up a pencil and wrote on an envelope. ‘Race pride.’ I want to write that down so I won't forget it.’” (Dog, 17). Katy seems to play deliberately on what she knows will be Harriet's stereotype of the highly sexed other by wearing black leather pants and leopard print body suits. The novel highlights, and then ridicules, Henry and Harriet's bigotry. Their children's impatience and dismissal of their parents' racial prejudice ensures that the miscegenation that Henry and Harriet unreasonably fear will win out. In fact, Dominic and Katy have been secretly married for months. When Henry is given the job of telling his wife about the marriage and also that Katy is pregnant, he first connives to make Harriet smoke marijuana (reasoning that a youth culture drug will soften the shock of youth culture's actions). When Harriet initially balks, Henry feigns outrage: “What a marriage, what a mockery! A man asks to smoke a little pot with his wife, and she chickens out. My God, I'm not asking you to shoot heroin. All I want is for the two of us—man and wife—to join hands in a journey to happyland, where the miseries of life are cast off for a little while” (Dog, 102-3). Harriet acquiesces.

Henry responds to the changes around him by relying on his strong pride in his Italian background. Unlike any other Fante protagonist, Henry unabashedly longs for Italy. Most of Fante's protagonists are prone to nostalgia and a whiff of Romano cheese can send them into a tailspin of memories of home and their mother's cooking. It is significant that these memories are located in the United States. Henry's nostalgia for Italy, however, is of a different variety: he is homesick for a home that was never his. Further, Henry's father—who is wistfully recalled as a “rugged peasant”—was not even from Rome, but the mountainous Abruzzi region. In My Dog Stupid Henry's links to his Italian background highlight the synthetic utilization of ethnic tropes. This does not make Italy any less real for Henry, or Henry any less entitled to it, but it is noteworthy for its overt constructedness.

An example of his connection to Italy is shown when Henry prays to the patron saint of Naples, San Gennaro, to deliver him from his American nightmare, soundtrack by Frank Zappa: from Dominic's room came “the mindless rhythms of the Mothers of Invention. I had come to hate the unspeakable illiteracy of that sound, and I lifted my eyes to San Gennaro, and I said to him, how long, O Gennaro, must I suffer?” (Dog, 14). Henry also prays to San Gennaro to smite his enemies (unpleasant neighbors and a television producer). As noted, his dreams of escape to Rome pepper the novella.

Finally, after Jamie is drafted, Tina married to her surfer, Dominic to the pregnant Katy, and Denny is in New York pursuing acting, Henry decides to sell his belongings and set out for Rome. To raise funds, he sells his car, his tractor, his chainsaw, and his golf clubs, not getting nearly the amount of money he thought he would.³ He tells the fed up Harriet the reasons for his trip to Rome: “Back to my origins, back to the cradle of civilization, back to the meaning of meaning, the alpha and omega” (Dog, 133).

After selling his belongings, Henry realizes that he does not really want to go to Rome, but feels that, as a matter of honor (since he made such a production out of it all), he is going to have to go through with the trip. Now having painted himself into a corner he realizes Rome does not sound that appealing at all: “Those cold marble floors sent a chill through my feet. The Romans made bad American coffee. The streets smelled of stale Gorgonzola. … I'd miss the World Series” (Dog, 134). Aside from the discomforts of Rome, Henry is most chilled to think of the reception he would get there as an Italian American writer: “The lowest form of human life was the Italian writer. He walked around with unsold scripts under his arm, his ass showing through thread-bare pants. He despised Italian-Americans, putting them down as cowards who had fled the beautiful national poverty while he, the true patriot, had remained in the fatherland surviving the tragedy of two wars. If you protested that you had no choice in the country of your birth he insulted your father or your grandfather for seeking a better life in another land” (Dog, 134).

Henry's honor is saved when Stupid, lost for the five weeks since Jamie's military induction, is found. The man who finds the Akita demands a hefty reward and Henry, knowing Harriet will be impressed if he agrees to it, announces his decision to use his Rome funds to get the dog back. Not above playing up his sacrifice, Henry announces: “What's Rome if you have to live with the betrayal of your own son? What's Paris, or New York, or any place in the world? My duty is clear. God knows I have my faults, but I won't stand accused of disloyalty to my children” (Dog, 135). Harriet (who has shown herself wise enough to see through his charades, no reason to think she cannot see through this one) sighs in admiration at her husband's selflessness. Henry looks into her eyes and sees that they have “bypassed Rome for the moment” (Dog, 135).

Stupid had made his way to a junkyard in a canyon (it is the junkyard's owner who called him in). When Henry arrives, he sees Stupid happily cavorting with a sweet-natured, smiling pig: “The pig crossed the enclosure to a faucet dripping water into a washtub, Stupid following. She drank and so did he. Then she trotted back to us, staring upward longingly at me, while Stupid licked bits of straw from her sleek back. He admired her tremendously” (Dog, 138). The junkyard owner offers that Stupid seems to think that the pig is his mother (which fits into Henry's theory of the cause of Stupid's aggressive homosexuality, that the dog was rejected by his mother). Henry learns that the pig is soon to be butchered and while he is negotiating the reward for Stupid, a name pops into his mind: “Mary.” It was his mother's name and he thinks of her because she, like the pig, was always smiling. Another ＄300 later and Henry is driving the station wagon home with an ecstatic Stupid and a smiling Mary.

Notes

1. Review of West of Rome, by John Fante, New Yorker, 22 December 1986, 92; Carol A. Crotta, review of West of Rome, by John Fante, Los Angeles Times, 30 November 1986, Book section, p. 4; hereafter cited in text.

2. Tony D'Arpino, review of West of Rome, by John Fante, San Francisco Review of Books 11, no. 4 (Spring 1987): 14.

3. The tools and sporting equipment all seem like possessions of the successful American male. Here we see another Fante character who has to sell symbols of the domestic before embarking on a journey away from home. In The Road to Los Angeles it was the protagonist's mother's jewelry; in 1933 Was a Bad Year it was his father's concrete mixer; in My Dog Stupid it is the Porsche.