The Road to Los Angeles

"Fante had a mighty effect upon me. Fante was my god."

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

"Tender and lyrical ... its humour is wry and forgiving and its stylistic energy compelling."

THE GUARDIAN

"John Fante knew how to make words sing. When he was on form, he could write sentences that stopped time, deliver descriptions that stank of impossible truths and create word paintings that deserved to be framed and hung."

UNCUT

The Road to Los Angeles was John Fante's first novel, written in 1933, where he introduced readers to the brash young Arturo Bandini. Bandini is a self-proclaimed genius, a Nietzchean superman, knocking on the door of literary fame and fortune, surrounded by ignorance and fools. Or so he likes to believe, as he flits from menial job to job, despising all whose views are beneath him.

In this savage, uncompromising debut novel Fante has written a coming-of-age classic which easily compares with The Catcher in the Rye but predates it by several decades. This is the first in the four-book Arturo Bandini cycle of novels and was discovered posthumously among his papers in 1983.

Introduced by JOHN KING

Born in Denver on 8 April 1909, John Fante migrated to Los Angeles in his early twenties. Classically out of place in a town built on celluloid dreams, Fante's literary fiction was full of torn grace and redemptive vengeance. His first published novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini appeared in 1938, followed in 1939 by Ask the Dust. Fante also wrote several collections of short stories and numerous screenplays, including Full of Life and Walk on the Wild Side. He was posthumously recognised in 1987 with a Lifetime Achievement Award by PEN, Los Angeles, four years after his death from diabetes-related complications.

EDITORIAL NOTE

In 1933, John Fante was living in an attic apartment in Long Beach and working on his first novel,
The Road to Los Angeles
. "I have seven months and 450 bucks to write my novel with. This is pretty swell in my opinion," Fante wrote in a letter to Carey McWilliams dated February 23,1933. Fante had signed a contract with Knopf and received an advance. However, Fante didn't finish the novel in seven months. Sometime during 1936, he reworked the first 100 pages, shortening the book somewhat, and completed the novel. In an undated letter (c. 1936) to McWilliams, Fante writes, "
The Road to Los Angeles
is finished and boy! I'm pleased ... I hope to mail it on Friday. Some of the stuff will singe the hair off a wolf's rear. It may be too strong; i.e., lacking in 'good' taste. But that doesn't bother me." The novel was never published, probably because the subject matter was considered too provocative in the mid-1930s.

This novel introduces Fante's alter ego Arturo Bandini who reappears in Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Ask the Dust (1939), and Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982). The manuscript was discovered among John Fante's papers after his death in May, 1983, by his widow Joyce, and now may be included in that short, distinguished list of important first novels by American authors.

Introduction

Not long ago I was in a London book shop where several authors were busy talking about their craft. These people groaned and moaned and generally did their best to show everyone how important they were, their faces stern as they spelt out the sheer hard graft involved in creating Great Literature. I wished they'd go get a proper job, and went for a drink with my old friend Kevin, who a year before had introduced me to the writing of John Fante. Now if Fante had been sitting with these authors things would have been different. He would've headed for a bar as well, but first he'd have sorted them out. Would the author of Dago Red and The Brotherhood Of The Grape have been able to stand the whining of these sober, self-important people? I doubt it. He'd have recommended a stint in the fish cannery where Arturo Bandini works in
The Road to Los Angeles
. Like Bandini, the sweltering heat of the production line and the stench of fish guts would show these dears what hard graft really means. More than fifty years after Fante wrote this novel, one of its themes was being played out in 21st-century London — the relevance of literature to ordinary people.

Books about writers are the same as films about film-makers. Generally dull and self-indulgent, they show the author has little to say about life, that what should be a vocation has become an occupation, passion crushed by an obsession with structure. It is the difference between wanting to be a writer and wanting to write. Apart from Fante, the only author I've ever read and respected whose characters admit to an interest in writing is Charles Bukowski, and then it is in the background, something that will happen one day, maybe, because right now there's too much going on, who wants to sit in front of a typewriter, and if it doesn't happen, then so what? It is well known that Bukowski was heavily influenced by Fante, that the older man's books gave him the confidence he needed, showed that literature doesn't have to belong to academics.

The Road to Los Angeles
is a swirling mass of emotion. Fante has style, but his fictional character Arturo Bandini does not. A snivelling youth who kills animals for fun, robs his own mother and beats up his sister, he is a poor boy who shows little solidarity with those around him. He accepts that the rich man's world is bitter and masks his insecurities with insults. He trades on his own experience of being called a dago to hurt his Filipino and Mexican fellow workers, telling them he is a writer and therefore superior. He is a weakling. But Fante is clever. He gives Bandini humour, and this pulls the character back from the brink. You start to like him again, at least until the next outburst. He imagines he is a superman, and when he speaks he uses complicated words that nobody understands, mimicking the way he thinks authors should talk. He is pompous and arrogant, and people laugh at him.

Through Bandini, Fante makes strong points about poverty, race, literature. While Bandini rambles, Fante writes in a simple style, each word surrounded by ten that are left unwritten. It is a sharp contrast. He tortures Bandini, makes the boy sweat, at the same time playing with the reader. In a careless moment, Bandini admits he has read the 'masters' but finds them boring, that he doesn't understand what they're talking about. I've done it myself. We're told we're too stupid to understand these so-called geniuses, when in reality there is little to understand. Fante comes screaming through the text, showing the way. The Road to Los Angeles is American literature at its best, ignoring the rules, full of diversity and imagination. It isn't labelled with a college-boy Beat tag either, but belongs to the more gritty writing of Bukowski, Woody Guthrie, Hubert Selby Jnr. It captures the soul of its subject matter, the world of the second-generation Italian who loves America but is seen as a second class citizen, a dago. You can feel the heat of Southern California, the struggle to survive, the dreams, the constant presence of religion.

The Road to Los Angeles will leave you wondering. Good novels should. Fante has mixed fantasy with reality, which is right, because reality is half fantasy anyway. This is a complicated book, even if the style is not, and is worth reading again and again. Each time it throws up more questions. It is hard, soft, funny, sad. It will make you angry and it will make you glad. More than anything, it is an honest book, and that is a rarity, even more so these days. The characters aren't perfect and there are no heroes. It is such an honest novel that the manuscript was rejected in the 1930s and remained unpublished until 1985, two years after the author's death. The Road to Los Angeles is a lost classic, now found and republished, the content as relevant today as when it was first written.

John King, April 2000

Chapter One

I HAD A lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn't sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an excavation in an empty lot, there wasn't any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who dug with a love for it, always laughing and telling jokes, laughing and smoking bitter tobacco.

I started with a fury and they laughed and said I'd learn a thing or two after a while. Then the pick and shovel got heavy. I sucked broken blisters and hated those men. One noon I was tired and sat down and looked at my hands. I said to myself, why don't you quit this job before it kills you?

I got up and speared my shovel into the ground.

"Boys," I said. "I'm through. I've decided to accept a job with the Harbor Commission."

Next I was a dishwasher. Every day I looked out a hole of a window, and through it I saw heaps of garbage day after day, with flies droning, and I was like a housewife over a pile of dishes, my hands revolting when I looked down at them swimming like dead fish in the bluish water. The fat cook was the boss. He banged pans and made me work. It made me happy when a fly landed on his big cheek and refused to leave. I had that job four weeks. Arturo, I said, the future of this job is very limited; why don't you quit tonight? Why don't you tell that cook to screw himself?

I couldn't wait until night. In the middle of that August afternoon, with a mountain of unwashed dishes before me, I took off my apron. I had to smile.

"What's funny?" the cook said.

"I'm through. Finished. That's what's funny."

I went out the back door, a bell tinkling. He stood scratching his head in the midst of garbage and dirty dishes. When I thought of all those dishes I laughed, it always seemed so funny.

I became a flunkie on a truck. All we did was move boxes of toilet tissue from the warehouse to the harbor grocery stores in San Pedro and Wilmington. Big boxes, three feet square and weighing fifty pounds apiece. At night I lay in bed thinking about it and tossing.

My boss drove the truck. His arms were tattooed. He wore tight yellow polo shirts. His muscles bulged. He caressed them like a girl's hair. I wanted to say things that would make him writhe. The boxes were piled in the warehouse, fifty feet to the ceiling. The boss folded his arms and had me bring boxes down to the truck. He stacked them. Arturo, I said, you've got to make a decision; he looks tough, but what do you care?

That day I fell down and a box bashed me in the stomach. The boss grunted and shook his head. He made me think of a college football player, and lying on the ground I wondered why he didn't wear a monogram on his chest. I got up smiling. At noon I ate lunch slowly, with a pain where the box bashed me. It was cool under the trailer and I was lying there. The lunch hour passed quickly. The boss came out of the warehouse and saw my teeth inside a sandwich, the peach for dessert untouched at my side.

"I ain't paying you to sit in the shade," he said.

I crawled out and stood up. The words were there, ready.

"I'm quitting," I said. "You and your stupid muscles can go to hell. I'm through."

"Good," he said. "I hope so."

"I'm through."

"Thank God for that."

"There's one other thing."

"What?"

"In my opinion you're an overgrown sonofabitch."

He didn't catch me.

After that I wondered what had happened to the peach. I wondered if he had stepped on it with his heel. Three days passed and I went down to find out. The peach lay untouched at the side of the road, a hundred ants feasting upon it.

Then I got a job as a grocery clerk. The man who ran the store was an Italian with a belly like a bushel basket. When Tony Romero was not busy he stood over the cheese bin breaking off little pieces with his fingers. He had a good business. The harbor people traded at his store when they wanted imported food.

One morning he waddled in and saw me with a pad and pencil. I was taking inventory.

"Inventory," he said. "What's that?" I told him, but he didn't like it. He looked around. "Get to work," he said. "I thought I told you to sweep the floor the first thing every morning."

"You mean you don't want me to take inventory?"

"No. Get to work. No inventory."

Every day at three there was a great rush of customers. It was too much work for one man. Tony Romero worked hard but he waddled, his neck floated in sweat, and people went away because they couldn't waste time waiting. Tony couldn't find me. He hurried to the rear of the store and pounded the bathroom door. I was reading Nietzsche, memorizing a long passage about voluptuousness. I heard the banging on the door but ignored it. Tony Romero put an egg crate in front of the door and stood on it. His big jaw pushed over the top and looking down he saw me on the other side. "Mannaggia Jesu Christif" he yelled. "Come out!" I told him I'd come out immediately. He went away roaring. But I wasn't fired for that.

One night he was checking the day's receipts at the cash register. It was late, almost nine o'clock. I wanted to get to the library before it closed. He cursed under his breath and called me. I walked over. "I'm short ten dollars."