Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1909, of an Italian immigrant father and an Italian-American mother, John Fante is an unsung hero of the Italian-American literary scene. Moving to Los Angeles after dropping out of college in 1929, Fante found work as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. This allowed him to simultaneously pursue a career as a novelist and short story writer. Regarded as the quintessential Los Angeles chronicler, Fante is recognized today as a precursor of the Beat writers. He died in Los Angeles in 1983 at the age of 74.
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Literary biographies are the product of many influences, from the subject’s social context and family, if still living, to the intersection of the subject’s life and works. None of the three biographies of Chicago writer Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929) published before 1974 that preceded my biography, A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (1987), were able to broach the most important aspect of his life, his homosexuality. I discussed openly his homosexuality in his published and unpublished works. His gay novel, Bertram Cope’s Year (1919), was suppressed until Fuller self-published it. But even in the 1980s I had trouble overcoming the era’s homophobia before University of Pittsburg Press had the courage to publish A Varied Harvest.
So far, John Fante has suffered a similar fate, but for somewhat different reasons. In 2006 in an article entitled Where Father Ends and Son Begins (Los Angeles Times), journalist, J.R. Moehringer exposed for the first time John Fante’s alcoholism and its effect upon his family, namely upon his son, Dan. To the chagrin of his surviving family, especially siblings, Dan spoke openly about his father’s alcoholism and alcoholic induced rages that terrified him as a youngster.
However, as Moehringer reported, Fante’s alcoholism was suppressed by his wife, Joyce. As Dan claimed, Joyce exercised editorial control over her husband’s biography Full of Life (2000) by Steven Cooper. Dan claimed that his father’s biography was little more than Joyce’s construction of his father, reflected in the biography’s erroneous title. At a conference in Los Angeles where we read together on a panel, Dan said as much to me when I asked him about the biography. To make matters worse, Dan’s two siblings rode to their mother’s defense and attempted to validate their father’s image in the biography. However, despite his unsettling revelations about his father, during his reading at our conference, Dan expressed a sincere, emotional attachment to John. He would later write his own memoir.
As a result of my research for my work, Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and The Italian American Novel (2007), I interviewed the daughter of screenwriter Jo Pagano, whose novel Golden Wedding (1943) is featured in my work. He was among Fante’s colleagues in the movie industry. Jo Jean Pagano confirmed that Fante’s excessive drinking was widely known among his colleagues. But what is curious about the erasure of his alcoholism and the controversy that followed the publication of Full of Life is that in his diary, published in John Fante: Selected Letters 1932-1981, edited by Seamus Cooney, John admits to his excessive drinking and its effects on his mental and physical health.
Alcoholism has tragic results for the individual and family. It is not a subject for the tabloids or a lurid media exposé. A competent biographer handles the subject with sensitivity and understanding. As Jo Jean informed me, John’s excessive drinking sometimes left him not only inebriated but without funds to return home from downtown Los Angeles. Even Fante writes in his diary that he drank too much at times and could not return home. He mentions that he would often have to confront Joyce’s wrath upon his arrival. There is a curious incident in one of Fante’s later stories where his protagonist admits to losing his way home often and must call his wife to pick him up. What does Fante’s drinking and his relationship with his father tell us about the meaning of The Brotherhood of the Grape? In that novel the main character, Henry Molise, and his stone-mason father drink for days on end and become so completely inebriated that the stone structure that they are building collapses in a storm due to its unstable walls. At one point Henry complains that his drinking causes him to hallucinate. Fante reports the same condition in his diary. Fante’s readers know how his life intersects with his fiction. In the right hands, biography is a valuable tool. How has the new and scandalous information, for example, about Canadian writer Alice Munro’s family life change our reading of her fiction?
Another California writer, William Saroyan, suffered a similar posthumous fate. Saroyan’s literary fans wished to construct him as the happy, “full-of-life” writer whose works expressed only the joyfulness of Armenian immigrant life in small-town Fresno. However, a careful reading of his narratives reveals that his works’ seeming cheerfulness was a way of coping with the tragic legacy of the Armenian Holocaust and its effects on the Armenian diasporic experience. Moreover, he, like Fante, had a troubled family life, above all with his son Aram. When Aram published his memoir after his father’s death and revealed his troubled relationship with his father, Saroyan’s friends were irate over Aram’s revelations. One day, after I had invited Aram to speak at my university, I was in Fresno where a relative introduced me to one of Saroyan’s long-time friends and told him that I had just met Aram. I nearly had to duck for cover as Saroyan’s irate friend hurled a rash of invectives at me, the closest he could hope to get to Aram.
But in the misleading title of the biography, Full of Life, there is yet another egregious erasure that hides a profound social and historical insight into Fante’s complex personality. The title of the biography is of course taken from Fante’s completely misunderstood novel, Full of Life (1952). Fante’s critics have dismissed the novel as little more than a shallow, autobiographical, domestic comedy. In his otherwise insightful work, Richard Collins, in John Fante: A Literary Portrait (Guernica Editions, 2000), also misses Fante’s dangerous political message in the novel. Fortunately, if his contemporary readers in the early 1950s had not been fooled, all that he had worked for in Hollywood could have been dashed and his career ended.
The novel is in fact an adroit, clandestine mockery of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating Hollywood at the time the novel appeared. Even more important, Full of Life is a stinging but equally covert attack upon his colleagues who caved in, confessed to their Communist Party associations, and worst of all, threw their leftist colleagues under the bus, ruining their careers and lives. But he also cleverly extends a compliment to those who resisted. It is shrewdly written in that cryptic style that characterizes so many of Hollywood’s best scripts that treat divorce, sexuality, liberated women, and homosexuality in the wake of the 1934 Motion Picture Production Code established to censure “immoral” films. Although the intent of the novel eluded the political watchdogs of the era, there is some evidence that some of his colleagues in Hollywood knew what he was up to, but kept their mouths shut. Whom could they trust in Hollywood?
What happened in Hollywood under Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist hysteria in America still reverberates today, especially in an era when human rights are under assault everywhere. Southern California writer John Sanford’s wife, scriptwriter Marguerite Roberts (1905-1989), was fired for her left-wing associations. In one of his memoirs, Sanford writes that after Marguerite died, one of her former colleagues, who was too afraid to support her when she was fired, wrote to Sanford attempting to offer his condolences. Too little too late is all that Sanford could spit at the cowardly man. Where was he when Marguerite needed his support?
Hollywood writers’ and directors’ response to the HUAC’s investigation is the indelible ink in Hollywood’s history that will never be erased. A year after Fante’s Full of Life appeared, Arthur Miller wrote the now classic, The Crucible, a scathing attack on the era’s anti-Communist hysteria. Miller’s friend, the renowned Elia Kazan, testified before the committee and has been forever branded for betraying his colleagues. But in spite of his colleagues’ attacks, Kazan stood his ground. Two years after Full of Life appeared, he made On the Waterfront (1954) in response to his political enemies. In that never-to-be-forgotten scene in the film, Kazan hurls a stinging rebuke to his critics when the bloodied Terry Malloy (Brando) yells at the thugs who beat him to a pulp for testifying against them: “I’m glad what I done.”
As late as 1999 when Hollywood announced it would honor Kazan with Hollywood’s Special Life-Time Achievement Oscar, many opposed honoring him with the coveted award. When he received the Oscar at the ceremony, many of Hollywood’s elite refused to applaud and stood silently. Efforts are ongoing in the industry to restore credit to fired scriptwriters who wrote under pseudonyms to earn a few extra bucks. Although unrecognized, Fante holds a special place in Hollywood history with his misunderstood Full of Life.
The genesis of Full of Life begins with Fante’s friendship with Carey McWilliams and his work, Witch Hunt: The Revival of Heresy (1950). In his book McWilliams courageously defends the First Amendment rights of Hollywood writers, directors, and professors wrongly accused of sedition by the HUAC.
As I explain in Queen Calafia’s Paradise, Full of Life begins as a quaint domestic narrative. Complicating the fictional narrative, under orders from his publisher, Fante passes off the novel as an autobiography by changing the main character’s name from Arturo Bandini to John Fante and includes his wife’s name, Joyce. This change threw Fante’s critics off the scent. John, the character, has made it as a successful script writer and lives in a swanky Los Angeles neighborhood with Joyce. But the kitchen sub-flooring has rotted, and he must call in his beloved, Italian immigrant father, Nick, from the north to repair it. We have to wonder if Fante intended the rotten flooring as a trope for the rot that was eroding the foundation of American democracy at the time. When the he arrives, Nick complicates the plot by creating a distracting chaos in the household when he decides on another rebuilding project. In addition, Fante knew well the stereotypic image of the Italian immigrant in American literature and popular culture. His characterization of his father as the stereotypic, gregarious, and affable Italian peasant is a comedic diversion from the serious political content of the novel. The ruse is on.
Suddenly in the midst of the household chaos, Joyce decides to become a Catholic and wants to consecrate her marriage to John and re-marry in the Catholic Church. She demands that John and Nick go to communion. However, according to Catholic Canon Law, that would require both to go to confession.
Underlying it all is Fante’s attack on the HUAC and his cowardly colleagues who not only “confessed,” but to save their own skins, named other Communists or fellow travelers. Before the committee they were forced to confess: “Are you a Communist, have you ever been a Communist, and do you know anyone who is a Communist?” The questions were the litmus test to assess everyone’s commitment to an anti-Communist orthodoxy, the political canon law of the era.
John refuses to cave in to Catholic Canon Law, which he does not believe in anymore. In the only overtly political statement in the novel, Joyce says to him, just do it: you are “liberal.” Joyce implies that he is open minded, not a left-wing radical. However, Fante intends otherwise.
But in a tribute to his friend, McWilliams, and in an obvious allusion to McWilliams’ title, Fante conceals a “heresy” in his plot. Joyce’s confessor, Fr. Gondalfo, counsels Nick in an attempt to convince him to go to confession. But Nick resists. His vociferous counter arguments are nothing short of a heretical resistance to all forms of the priest’s orthodox Catholic reasoning. At the last moment, John tells Joyce, “I can’t. It’s hypocrisy”: a rebuke of his colleagues who “confessed” before the Senate committee.
But surprisingly, or so it seems, Nick concedes and goes into the confessional. But Fante has more up his sleeve. His confession is more of the same, a raucous argument with Fr. Gondalfo rather than anything resembling an orthodox confession. Because of his early Catholic education, Fante knew well that it was one thing to question Catholic doctrine, but quite another for dear old Papa Nick to rebel during the Sacrament of Confession. Alluding to the word “Heresy” in McWilliam’s title, Nick’s dissent was indeed heretical. Nicks’s squabble with Fr. Gondalfo is Fante’s veiled tribute to those who did in fact appear before the HUAC committee, but only to attack the senators’ reactionary orthodoxy and condemn them for violating their First Amendment rights. As a result, many of these courageous people were held in contempt and jailed.
But to be clear, Fante was not a political ideologue. As I explain in Queen Calafia’s Paradise, in later stories Fante parodied the Black Panther movement and mocked his fictional wife’s racism. Is this supposed to be an expose of the real Joyce’s politics? The stories are, after all, fiction, however much they are autobiographical. In addition, he is well aware of Italians’ subaltern position in American society. In one story, “My Dog Stupid,” a stray dog soils the DNA of the offspring of the pure-bred dogs in the family’s upper-class neighborhood. The story is Fante’s response to the racist Tom Buchanan’s pro-eugenics rant for the benefit of that “stray” man from nowhere, “immigrant” Jay Gatsby. He threatens to soil East Egg’s social if not biological DNA. In another, Fante’s Italian-American protagonist is beaten and humiliated by anti-Italian, upper-class boys in Colorado. In other stories Bandini goes on a racist rant against the immigrants that surround him in downtown Los Angeles, only to reverse himself suddenly and express his sincere regret for his verbal assault on his fellow Angelenos, whom he realizes are like himself, an alien in a hostile society. In another, he mocks the “peaceniks” of the era. An aged hippie is the owner of a junkyard, a trope for the failure of “All you need is love” culture. Above the doorway of his shack is a tilted, weather-beaten sign, “Peace.”
While Fante was on a Hollywood assignment in East Germany, he wrote to a friend and asked rhetorically how could anyone support a Communist ideology that has so destroyed the countries it has colonized? In his diary, while attending a Conference for Democratic Action in Fresno in 1940, Fante wrote “. . . of course the Communists were there, some openly so, and others that way by assumption. A disgruntled lot, as bad as the Democrats; a smug bunch of intellectuals, coldblooded and seditious.” Fante admits to being a democrat, but not a Democrat.
The real John Fante remains yet behind a veil. Upon my reading of the biography Full of Life, I found it detailed and informative. But further research and revelations have eroded the biography’s one-dimensional portrait of Fante. Absent is a sympathetic, in-depth exploration of his complex personality and a lucid exploration of his political and social beliefs. How can a future Fante biographer locate sympathetically and insightfully his alcoholism in the context of his life and writing that even surviving family members might find agreeable? What fictional characterizations and incidents in Fante’s narratives are derived from biographical fact? We will not have the answer to these questions until an enterprising scholar writes a new Fante biography based on a rereading of the Fante archives and a reexamination of his works in the context of his political and personal life.
Ken Scambray’s most recent work is Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870-1940 (University of Nevada Press, 2021).
