John Fante and the art of laceration

Arturo Bandini exists at the intersection of several wide boulevards of self-loathing. The self-loathing Dago, the self-loathing dickhead, the self-loathing artist. Mixed in is a glorious egotism, a love of self and belief in his own ability struggling to burst free; all the while, sentimentality butts heads with a tempered viciousness. Arturo Bandini is John Fante’s creation, the anti-hero of his novel Ask The Dust, and he is a creation who could only have been dreamt up in mid-century Los Angeles.

Ask The Dust appears the same year as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, but where the latter turns a caustic eye toward the outer world, and pours scorn on everyone who inhabits the day-to-day of contempoarary dream factories, Fante stares inward. His Klieg lights illuminate his soul, not the murky goings on in the studio back lot, and he meets the world with viciousness that is coiled into a sentence, not a fist. The only stars mentioned here are the real ones, in the faraway night sky, and this is not a city of freeways, but one that lives, tenuously at best, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Sand is flying westward, ever threatening to bury this dreambirth city and all who claim to live in it.

But Bandini’s life is the artist’s life, constantly mocked by the fact of its own self-consciousness. His moments of triumph are accompanied by the inner dialogue that these will be used, transformed, put eventually into words; as readers, who are reading those words, we become intimate with a young man’s despearation for life, for immortality, for art, for self-creation, for self-destruction, and for love, and all of this simultaneously, as if watching him with Argos eyes. Fante’s art, his artist Bandini, is the art of laceration and while Nathanael West takes us on a journey that at times feels mythic, that could almost have been plotted by the picaresque storytellers of ancient Irish epics, Fante’s inward journey sears the blood out of his own veins and leaves the body, as if cut up after an autopsy, as little more than a wretched reminder on a coroner’s steel examination table.

West seeks to wound others, Fante aims the knife at his own heart.

One of John Fante’s literary heros was Knut Hamsun. He was also an artist of self-laceration, but unlike Fante, he ended life as a fascist and an open supporter of Adolf Hitler. As a token of his loyalty, Hamsun sends to Goebbels the Nobel Prize medal he was awarded in 1920. Such a fate could not have met Fante. Unlike the hero of Hamsun’s classic Hunger, Fante’s Arturo Bandini is drawn with a desperate tenderness; his blood is our blood, his rage is our rage, his need breathes through every pore of his skin and sings like a song of a thousand silent hearts. Hamsun’s journey was the nihilist’s trek, shot through with disgust, as was, years later, Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s. Both writers met similar ends as supporters of fascism and artists of nihilism. Fante remains the optimist, for what he sees when he peels back the final layer is a human being in the fullness of his humanity, which is a frail creature indeed who stands on the edge of a vast and unknowable desert.