Schave has also invited fans to celebrate Fante on Wednesday (his actual birthday) in down-on-his-heels Bandini style at 8 p.m. at the King Eddy Saloon, at 131 E. 5th St. in downtown Los Angeles.
Raising a glass to Fante is not without irony. "We have a family curse that's called alcoholism," says Dan Fante, John's second son, speaking from his home in Arizona. For 20 years, Dan drank to excess, and his father had alcohol problems.
Like his father, Dan is an author. "86'd" will be out in Septemberfrom HarperPerennial, followed by a December reissue of three previous novels. Like his father, he writes in the voice of an alter ego, Bruno Dante.
"The things Bruno said and did and Arturo said and did were feelings that were not easily communicated in conversation," Fante says. "Both of them were vehicles for expressing emotion."
Fante found a lot of that emotion when he recently returned to "Ask the Dust," which reinforced for him the connection between his father and Bandini. "Beneath that character lurks the personality of the author," he says. "Boy, it's there." His father, Fante says, "was pretty much Arturo Bandini, only more intense."
"There was a compulsion and a passion and a drivenness and an ambition about my father that exceeded all his other characteristics," Fante adds. "My dad had two overriding moods. One was angry and the other was angrier." Now at work on a memoir about himself and his father, Fante explains that "what began as a very difficult relationship ended as an extremely loving relationship."
When he was 8 or 10, Dan brought him stories he'd written. John Fante, who hand-penned stories in the 1930s and later wrote screenplays before dawn, sitting in his shower stall and typing with two fingers, did not intend to make writing the family vocation. The feedback he gave his young son, Dan says, was "not good."
"Ask the Dust" was written before Dan was born, and his father was sidetracked by a Hollywood career through the 1950s. When he returned to the page, his efforts went unrewarded. "The great sadness for me," Dan Fante says, is that "he just couldn't get them published." The rejections dismissed Fante as "a writer out of his time," and "missing the beat of current literature."
This is the legend: that he is a writer ignored or underappreciated. Reality is a little more complicated.
The original run of "Ask the Dust" was 2,200 copies. It became popular enough to be issued in paperback by Bantam in 1954. Then it went out of print, and would have stayed that way if Charles Bukowski had not spearheaded its 1980 reissue by his publisher, Black Sparrow Press.
Arturo Bandini would be shocked, horrified and eminently pleased to find that a first edition can now be found for $9,000.
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