John Biscello

(John Fante, April 8th, 1909-May 8th, 1983)

Inferiority might have been your first memory. Though you were born on American soil, stubbornly planted there, the chinked chains of immigration clanked and rattled, Marley-style, tightening round your throat, as you butted your head against the scabby base of a totem pole. You, the little wop, the fenced-in dago, red in the face, trying to dig his way to China, or the moon, or to any form of greatness that would eclipse your undermining complexes. Out of shame and want, out of fevered desire, you created Bandini, or he you. Arturo Bandini, rising star and literary godsend of John Fante’s complicated inner world, soon to be exported and appraised and adored by thousands, maybe more. Arturo Bandini would draw blood from your history and chagrin—your philandering, boozing, gambling father … your mother, begging credit to keep the family fed … your fear and loathing of Jesus and love-hate relationship with the saints. All of it would fuel Bandini’s quest to transcend your blues, your gnawing sense of lesser-than. You would become the Joe DiMaggio of the literary world, the gold-plated pride and joy of your people, or at least go down swinging. There he is, Bandini, fire-bellied, lean days of determination and hunger, a starved mongrel digesting the pits and seeds and citrus rinds and sun-tendered fronds of palm trees in 1930s L.A., an ox-driven young man, stalking fury and sound, full of himself and the words that he prayed to God would not let him down. He, John Fante, the great Arturo Bandini, gave us pages, a score of scorched pages, not enough according to him (he would go on to become a Hollywood screenwriter and malign himself as the worst kind of traitor to his soul and calling), but he left behind the Bandini Quartet, four novels, with his grit-infused masterpiece, Ask the Dust, forming its apex. Some young men mellow with age. Fante, it seems, raged until the end. His legs and sight claimed by diabetes, Fante, a blind amputee, bed-ridden, took one last spirited dive and salutary fling into the necessary world of Bandini, dictating his final novel, Dreams from Bunker Hill, to his wife, Joyce. Charles Bukowski, who had fatefully stumbled upon Fante’s work, considered him a god. The two became friends, and Bukowski would do his part to resurrect Fante for a new generation. It seems, after all, that Bandini upon a cross, grinning, scowling, dreaming of words and how to arrange them according to innate gospel, had amounted to a scarring glint upon so much favored dust.