Abstract
Written in the first person, The Road to Los Angeles is a posthumous novel in which John Fante addresses the topos of literary vocation for the first time through Arturo Bandini, the hero of the saga. The novel's salient aspect concerns 17-year-old Arturo who, completely captivated by his heterogeneous readings, feels an irresistible desire to become like his favourite writers. Thus, he continually envisages the scene of writing that will lead to his literary glory. This overwhelming compulsion to write induces in him a deep-set attitude of rebellion against his Catholic family and society at large. Along with his literary ambition, Bandini is obsessed by an eroticism that stimulates the most perverted fantasies in him. This article argues that Arturo's combined worship of literature and women's bodies defines a hazy territory whose effects are paralysing for his juvenile, albeit authentic, talent. Tellingly, his first attempt to write a novel culminates in an absolute failure which makes him understand that the scene of writing in which he illusorily imagines himself has no real connection with the practical organization of day-to-day life required by creative writing. Hence his abrupt decision to leave behind his family, his work at the cannery and everything else and to move to Los Angeles.
Written in 1933, The Road to Los Angeles was published posthumously in 1985 by Black Sparrow Press. The ‘Editorial Note’ of the first edition informs the reader that John Fante's widow had discovered the manuscript among some papers left behind by her husband. In actual fact, this was not really a discovery. When he met his future wife, Joyce Smart, on 30 January 1937, the young author did not miss the opportunity to ask her to read the manuscript of The Road to Los Angeles. As a typical wealthy American middle-class family with xenophobic tendencies, the Smarts regarded Italians with suspicion. Joyce's mother, a widow who exerted a strong control over her daughters’ lives, demanded to see the manuscript and was immediately outraged. For her, this was not a novel but the result of a depraved mind and the man who wrote it did not deserve to set foot in her home. Fante's biographer, Stephen Cooper, describes the episode in these terms: ‘The offending author was promptly banished from the Smart house; Joyce was told what would happen if she tried to circumvent the interdiction; and a clandestine affair was born’ (Cooper, 2000: 143). Prohibition rhymes with attraction. The manuscript of The Road to Los Angeles sparked a clandestine relationship that made the bond between the two young people even more intense. Like the happy ending to a novel, their secret love story, a few months later, culminated in their marriage which lasted happily until the writer's death. 1
Apart from this biographical element, it must also be added that most of Fante's critics have not hesitated to point out that Knut Hamsun – the author of the cult book Hunger (original Norwegian title Sult, 1890) – was the inspirational force for Arturo Bandini, a 17-year-old incapable of coming to terms with others, who behaves as a rebel holding the world in defiance, despising everything and everyone, his widowed mother and sister Mona included. However, during the years in which Fante was writing and rewriting his first novel, for which he received an advanced payment of 450 dollars from the New York publisher Alfred A Knopf, 2 he knew nothing of the existence of Knut Hamsun. It was the literary agent Elizabeth Nowell who, unconvinced by the manuscript, in 1936 advised him to read Hunger with the intention of offering the young author a literary model upon which he could base his substantial revision of the novel in its overall tone as well as its theme and plot structure. It is certainly true that Hamsun's works had an inspiringly powerful impact on Fante's literary imagination, indicating a new way of representing the malaise of an existence devoid of an axiological horizon. Yet, considering that he read Hunger after the first draft of The Road to Los Angeles, the effects of this discovery are only indirectly apparent in his novel, which remains a work that is stylistically confused and incapable of surprising the reader, as will happen with his subsequent fiction. Briefly, in light of Fante's canon, The Road to Los Angeles may be regarded as an integral part of his literary apprenticeship which would lead to more mature and challenging works.
Hence, it comes as no surprise that Alfred Knopf refused to publish a novel that, according to him, was not a novel; his rejection was so drastic as to leave no room for further negotiation. Actually, the publisher was fully aware that The Road to Los Angeles was ‘[n]ot a novel for the squeamish’ (Kordich, 2000: 57). 3 For her part, Elizabeth Nowell decided that it was inappropriate to continue working for a writer who was stubbornly attached to his ideas and always resistant to any suggestions. Accordingly, she deserted him, even though she did not fail to reaffirm her admiration for him: ‘You really are one of the most talented writers I’ve seen’ (cited in Cooper, 2000: 132). This was on 29 July 1936: at the age of 29, Fante found himself without an agent and without a clear idea of what to do. In his loneliness and disappointment, he wrote several letters to Nowell to make her withdraw her decision, but her mind was made up and nothing could change it. Probably, all things considered, Fante convinced himself that the novel had been a false start and, consequently, he decided to abandon the manuscript altogether. He would never pick it up again.
However, precisely because The Road to Los Angeles is a posthumous novel, it requires some reflection aimed at identifying its literary genealogy and philosophical resonances. In his densely written monograph Dopo la fine, Giulio Ferroni makes a point about the significance of posthumous works: ‘In our century, many of the works which remained unpublished during the authors’ lives have quickly assumed a relevance and prominence once published’ (Ferroni, 1996: 59; translation mine). 4 Without the John Fante of Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Ask the Dusk (1939) and Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982), we would have no reason to talk of The Road to Los Angeles. The latter, tellingly, becomes an important link in the Saga of Arturo Bandini, not only because it throws light on the artist's development and vocation but also because it features a full representation of the scene of his writing as the ritual space of Arturo's creativity. In this sense, the novel may be regarded both as an attempt to create a portrait of the artist as a young man and as a Bildungsroman left half-finished, only a draft of a work of great literary ambition. The only gesture that the protagonist manages to make in his effort to define his artistic self is to go against the hell represented by others. In other words, his opposition against the whole world reflects his romantic desire to feel that he is far above a social context characterized by closed-mindedness, bigotry and a total lack of culture. At the same time, underlying Arturo's inner turmoil is also an awareness of his own faults and miseries, along with a self-destructive reaction which may be interpreted as a form of atonement.
It is undoubtedly true that Fante's literary genealogy is symptomatic of a search for answers capable of resolving both his ontological and artistic conflicts. As revealed in The Road to Los Angeles, the protagonist tries to orientate himself through a tangle of ideas and suggestions borrowed from his many readings which mostly oscillate between literature and philosophy. This is John Fante's first phase in which his writing is never completely oblivious to the hypotext. While eager to assert the originality of his stories and style, the young writer shows how his readings and the great models that occupy his mind are always lurking, ready to exert their influence. If the works of his maturity are inscribed within the literary system with the persuasive force of someone who has much to say about the interstitial condition of those who live two profoundly different ethnic-cultural realities, the author of The Road to Los Angeles, on the other hand, is not immune to the most varied forms of contamination. In fact, his memory is conditioned by a dense intertextual web from which, despite every effort, he fails to fashion his own poetics and even his own worldview.
In Moby-Dick (1851), precisely at the beginning of the chapter ‘Cetology’, Melville confesses: ‘I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans’ (Melville, 1967: 118). Melville intends to remind us that before becoming a good writer one must have been an assiduous reader. It is a rule that cannot be circumvented, even if eventually this reading stage is thoroughly assimilated and metabolized in the construction of the self as an artist. John Fante is no exception. Arturo Bandini also swims through libraries. From this point of view, The Road to Los Angeles is also the story of Arturo's many readings and his pertinacious commitment to establishing a dialogue with the writers he idolized.
His earliest self-affirmation comes with Nietzsche. It is a worship which prompts Arturo Bandini to obsessively read Nietzsche's works and to memorize entire passages so as to establish a stable identification that, on a social level, will define the distance between himself and the others. Immersed in his books and in his rapture over his favourite authors, Bandini becomes convinced that he is a writer before he has even written a single line. He sketches his stories with the imagination of a boy who, in his rebelliousness, acknowledges a strategy of ontological differentiation: a way of being unique, and of distinguishing himself from the vulgar and ignorant mass around him. And he is happy that people know nothing about his personal universe, which, though made up only of quotations and stolen words, is more concrete for him than the society in which, against his will, he lives, and with which he is forced to deal on a daily basis.
Narrated in the first person, The Road to Los Angeles is also the story of the circular movement of a protagonist-narrator who cannot transform the energy of his vocation into a unified and coherent project. His only certainties seem to be his transgressive desires, his anti-Catholic spirit and his bragging that he is a writer exactly like his philosophical and literary idols: I got my Nietzsche book from under the counter and started for the door. Nietzsche! What did he know about Friedrich Nietzsche? He wadded the ten dollar bill and threw it at me. ‘Your wages for three days, you thief!’ I shrugged. Nietzsche in a place like this! (Fante, 1996: 12)
Arturo firmly believes that anyone who reads Nietzsche does not deserve to be simply a clerk in a miserable grocery store. The only rules for him are those dictated by his contempt for others. Therefore, without the slightest moral qualm, he feels entitled to steal ten dollars from the cash register of the store where he works as a clerk. For the umpteenth time he loses his job, but this is more of a liberation for him than a problem. Indeed, he is almost happy at the idea that the road awaits him. From a topological perspective, in Arturo's mind, open spaces are in opposition to closed spaces which, in many ways, suggest the confinement of his desires: As soon as I touched the door knob I felt low. Home always did that to me. Even when my father was alive and we lived in a real house I didn’t like it. I always wanted to get away from it, or change it. (Fante, 1996: 16)
This is not simply the dissatisfaction of an over-imaginative teenager. In these phrases of revolt, it is possible to discern the tension of someone who, for sociocultural reasons, wants to leave the periphery and reach the centre, that is, Los Angeles. In effect, Arturo is convinced that in Los Angeles he will be able to meet people with whom he can converse on the same wavelength, with the same aspirations and in the same language.
After all, the thirst for reading which characterizes the protagonist throughout the novel calls into question his need to be elsewhere. One does not achieve success by remaining on the fringes of cultural debates and aesthetic innovations. As an alternative to escape, there remains the library where Arturo manages to find some form of fulfilment, not only in his role as a compulsive reader, but also as an eager voyeur: I stopped running when I reached the library. It was a branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. Miss Hopkins was on duty. Her blond hair was long and combed tightly. I always thought of putting my face in it for the scent. I wanted to feel it in my fists. But she was so beautiful I could hardly talk to her. She smiled. I was out of breath and glanced at the clock. ‘I didn’t think I’d make it’, I said. She told me I had still a few minutes. I glanced over the desk and was glad she wore a loose dress. […] I always wondered what her legs were like under glistening hose. (Fante, 1996: 13)
In parallel with his literary vocation, the narrating ‘I’ also describes his irrepressible sexual obsessions with the female body. In his mind, women are always transformed into objects to be dominated and bent to his sexual desires. All this is not to be separated from a tautological fetishism that prompts him to eroticize anything that has been in contact with a female body. Thus, when he discovers that Miss Hopkins is reading a biography of Catherine of Aragon, Arturo cannot curb his fetishistic impulse: ‘In her right hand swung that book, brushing against her dress as she walked, in her very hands, pressed against the warm white softness of her clinging fingers’ (Fante, 1996: 51). The scene triggers a single thought: to pick up the same book and touch it, to clutch it to his chest and indulge in an uncontrollable arousal. The library becomes the scenery of a double erotic exhibition: the book and the female body. To Arturo's aberrant sensibility, possessing the contents of a book is equivalent to possessing a woman's body and vice versa: What a book! I’ve got to have that book! Lord, I wanted it, to hold it, to kiss it, to crush it to my chest, that book fresh from her fingers, the very imprint of her warm fingers still upon it perhaps. (Fante, 1996: 51)
This erotic elaboration never concerns the sphere of reality, for the protagonist's excitement is always verbal and his recurrent fantasizing exists only on a theoretical plane. In the pages that follow, Arturo indulges in an erotic frenzy that appears all the more significant because his love of books is combined with his sexual pleasure, derived from the belief that Miss Hopkins also became aroused by reading the sad story of Henry VIII's first wife who was repudiated by the king so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. And the conviction also prevails in him that Miss Hopkins has felt ‘a mysterious stirring somewhere within her, the call of womanhood. Yes indeed, no doubt about it all. And wonderful too. A thing of great beauty’ (Fante, 1996: 52). His imagination invites him to construct a scene of pure Keatsian eroticism in which the book becomes the sinful medium of such sensual love: We would be lying stark naked in bed and I would kiss her on the lips and laugh softly and triumphantly and tell her that the real beginning of my love was on a day I saw her reading a certain book. (Fante, 1996: 52)
Apart from the fact that the association between books and erotic love would seem to indirectly refer to the Fifth Canto of Dante's Hell (i.e. the tragic story of Paolo and Francesca), the whole of the eighth chapter thematizes this obsession, which, in its psychic intransitivity, and repeated self-representation as a figure of literature and eroticism, portrays a split personality that needs this sort of meaning-generating dream, based on a perverted sexuality, to fuel itself to make an otherwise bleak, empty life doomed to marginalization and insignificance bearable.
It is no accident that Arturo Bandini represents himself as a hero born to live on a stage made of glory and success. Narration, sex and self-affirmation converge in his self-referential heroism. The definition of his identity depends on a construction of himself as the main character of his own fantasies: ‘I was a hero, and my deed was not to be sneered at. I stood up and looked at them before I pulled the plug. Little pieces of departed love’ (Fante, 1996: 83). In the 12th chapter, Arturo locks himself in his bathroom with a collection of pin-up girls he has clipped from magazines as an essential stimulus for his erotic imaginings. After a long morbid phase of a masturbatory relationship with them, he has decided to do away with these women and proceeds to execute them one at a time: ‘There they lay huddled, all my women, my favourite, thirty women chosen from the pages of art magazines’ (Fante, 1996: 77). As he systematically tears up the photos and, one clipping after another, lets them float in the water in which he is having a bath, he summons each of these half-naked girls as if they were his devoted slaves. For each ‘victim’ of his perverse imagination, Arturo invents a story that is narrated as an epilogue: each pin-up who has had an intense love affair with him has a name and a personal history. The same sentence applies to each woman: ‘I tore the picture and floated them on the water’ (Fante, 1996: 78). None are missing: after Helen it is Hazel's turn. Of this girl, too, we learn about her life, her temperament and his bond with her: ‘And I tore that picture to pieces too, and watched the pieces absorb the water’ (Fante, 1996: 79). The entire chapter, with its circular structure, is the story of what the self-narrator calls ‘executions’. Having decided to make a radical change in his life, the young erotomaniac resolves to leave behind the realm of his fantasies and lies.
It is, however, a resolution that soon flounders because of his way of being. Arturo Bandini – the devourer of books, the great masturbator, the fetishist without restraint, the writer of triumphant masculinity – cannot help but build a world made up of one central object: the female body which is his sole obsession and his lingering pathology. This is Arturo's way of conceiving his relationship with reality and the psychic vector that drives him out of the house, to seek the erotic stimulation he needs in the street. At the same time, he always imagines himself in his study intent on following the voice of his vocation: ‘I’m writing all the time. My head swims in a transvaluated phantasmagoria of phrases’ (Fante, 1996: 99). Partly echoing Nietzsche's language, Arthur throws these words in the face of a poor Mexican who works with him in the same cannery, ‘a man who without doubt had never read a book in his life, who had never heard of the transvaluation of values’ (Fante, 1996: 100).
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Yet all his readings – and foremost among them are those on philosophy – fail to convey real ideas to him; they are only a chain of words. As, for example, the term Weltanschauung which he uses to attack the workers in the workplace as a kind of expletive intended to mock their ignorance. The truth is that in Arturo's autotelic universe books become something else; they are carefully sieved in order to extract from them what he already has in his mind. Given his artistic vocation, he does not want to be like everyone else, a small fragment of an anonymous mass, nor does not he want to end up in the great nothingness of everyday existence: No, there was no work for Arturo Bandini. I left feeling better, glad of it. I walked back wishing I had an aeroplane, a million dollars, wishing the sea shells were diamonds. I will go to the park. I am not yet a sheep. Read Nietzsche. Be a superman. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Oh that Nietzsche! Don’t be a sheep, Bandini. Preserve the sanctity of your mind. Go to the park and read the master under the eucalyptus trees. (Fante, 1996: 46) It was always the park. I read a hundred books. There was Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Kant and Spengler and Strachey and others. Oh Spengler! What a book! What weight! Like the Los Angeles Telephone Directory. Day after day I read it, never understanding it, never caring either, but reading it because I liked one growling word after another marching across the pages with somber mysterious rumblings. (Fante, 1996: 47)
Bandini's eroticism founded on the female sex overlaps with the eroticism of words to form an iconoclastic and explosive combination. In a way, for him, a book and the world are one and the same thing. To read a book is to read the world – his beloved philosophers are everything, regardless of whether or not he can understand their lesson. As an authentic deity of his philosophical pantheon, in the protagonist's view, Nietzsche must be accepted for what he is, without any critical objection. The sheer idea of an Übermensch is enough to satisfy Arturo's imagination. In this way, in his moments of rapture, all his readings are transformed into a jumble of sentences and entanglements of polysyllabic words that, aggressive yet devoid of logical meaning, seem to be his only weapons against the banality of life: ‘Well Bandini; what will you do now? […] Did you know that I was a writer? Yes indeed! I write for Posterity. Let us walk down to the water's edge while I tell you of my work, of the prose for Posterity’ (Fante, 1996: 124). Significantly, Arturo Bandini is conversing with himself. His personal history becomes the narration of a reader who, exactly as Melville writes in Moby-Dick, swims through libraries without being a swimmer. He cannot swim and yet he does not drown because, somehow, he manages to cling to a textual fragment that helps him stay afloat.
After having evoked the scene of his writing many times, and after having spoken of himself as an author destined for artistic immortality,
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Arturo finally puts himself to the test and begins a story. In his characteristic manner, he becomes more and more exultant as he progresses, convinced that his storytelling has all the marks of greatness: ‘Wonderful stuff! Superb! I had never read anything like it before in my life’ (Fante, 1996: 132). All of Bandini is in these words: while he writes he feels that he possesses the whole world thanks to the perfection of his writing, which, in his naivety, he feels to be very close to immortality. And thus, the combined image of the written word and the hand that writes stands out in his excited mind as an integral part of his sacred mission as an artist: And my hand. There it is. My hand. The hand that wrote. Lord, a hand. Such a hand, too. The hand that wrote. Me and you and my hand and Keats. John Keats and Arturo Bandini and my hand, the hand of John Keats Bandini. Wonderful. Oh hand land band stand grand land. (Fante, 1996: 133)
The rhetorical strategy in which the final words all rhyme with hand reveals the protagonist's passion for sound patterns as an effect of his growing poetic excitement. This creative dizziness, founded on a paragrammatic use of words, and dominated by logical and morphosyntactic reiteration, is the clearest indication of a mind that wraps itself around itself. As Henri Focillon ([1943] 2021: 125) suggested in an essay on the hand, ‘the mind makes the hand, and the hand makes the mind’.
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In assigning a precise correlation between hand and mind, the narrating ‘I’ bestows a romantic dimension on Arturo Bandini's sudden and overwhelming inspiration as he clutches his pen to tell his story. In performing this gesture, he becomes something else – he portrays himself as a shaper of language and an absolute master of speech: I sat down and wrote again. The pencil crawled across the page. The page filled. I turned it over. The pencil moved down. Another page. Up one side and down the other. The pages mounted. Through the window came the fog, bashful and cool. Soon the room filled. I wrote on. Page eleven. Page twelve. I looked up. It was daylight. Fog choked the room. The gas was out. My hands were numb. A blister showed on my pencil finger. My eyes burned. My back ached. I could barely move from the cold. But never in my life had I felt better. (Fante, 1996: 134)
Here the scene of his writing is narrated live, in its becoming a unique and unrepeatable artistic moment. The iteration of the individual words foregrounds the triad page, pencil and hand, thereby conveying the materiality of his creative gesture. Indeed, time is obliterated, while Arthur is immersed body and soul in writing his story, which, as it gradually unfolds, seems to him an absolute masterpiece, the highest expression of a literary tension that will bring him fame and immortality. His thinking, obsessively circular and monological, configures the portrait of a young writer who will finally be compensated for the social indignities he has suffered with success and prosperity. However, this state of elation lasts only a few hours. After touching the sky and comparing himself with the greats of world literature, and after writing some 70,000 words about Arthur Banning's exploits and putting the finishing touches to the manuscript, Bandini is forced to come to terms with reality. Again, the success/failure dichotomy arises, in a most traumatic way in that it involves a psychic and behavioural shift from self-exaltation to the darkest despair. In fact, his mother and sister Mona read the manuscript without finding anything exceptional in it. While Arturo's mother remains reticent, the sister has the courage to tell him that the story is just indecent, pure madness and nothing that could be considered worthy of a true author. Once his first reaction of resentment and proud defence of his work has evaporated, the moment of a deeply ingrained awareness arrives and imposes its truth. As soon as Arturo realizes that what he has written is worth very little, the image of a literary genius is immediately shattered: ‘I opened my eyes and tried to read it. No good. It didn’t work. I couldn’t read it. […] It missed. It was quite bad. It was worse than that. It was a lousy book. It was a stinking book. It was the goddamnedest book I ever saw’ (Fante, 1996: 149).
In light of his new awareness regarding the limits of his literary vocation, Arturo comes to a drastic conclusion that implies a rejection of the space of writing: The clamor was driving me crazy. I couldn’t live in a place like this and write. […] This was an impossible place to write. No wonder. No wonder – what? Well, no wonder it was an impossible place to write. […] This kitchen was a detriment. This neighborhood was a detriment. This town was a detriment. (Fante, 1996: 148–149)
And again, with the same obsessive verbal circularity: ‘No writing could be done in this asylum. No art could come from this chaos of stupidity. Beautiful prose demanded quiet, peaceful surroundings. Perhaps even soft music. No wonder! No wonder!’ (Fante, 1996: 149). His only salvation is the road. In his view, the idea of the road intended as movement that goes forward represents the only chance to break the psychological that limits his mind and body. But this time it is not just any road. Arthur's is a road that will mean a life choice. Ultimately, the need to change his stifling sociocultural context and create a radically different space prevails in him.
Thus, towards the end of the novel, Arturo Bandini understands that there is only one possibility for him: the road to Los Angeles. ‘In the street I didn’t know where to go. The town had two worthwhile directions: East and West. East lay Los Angeles. West for a half-mile lay the sea’ (Fante, 1996: 152). The novel ends with a letter to his mother in which he confesses that he has made his ultimate choice, reminding her, in the excitement of his determination, that he is destined for greatness: ‘[…] I repeat to you in no uncertain terms that I am an artist, a creator beyond question!’ (Fante, 1996: 163). At last, the circle of repetition has been broken and the tautological thinking that had paralysed his talent no longer persists. As he waits for the train to the metropolis, he feels that something is radically changing in his life: ‘I sat down and began to think about the new novel’ (Fante, 1996: 164). It is with these words that the novel concludes. Once again Arturo Bandini pictures himself in the scene of writing, which however is no longer that of his recent past. The goal has yet to be reached, but he knows that his future is inscribed on the road to Los Angeles. In his ingenuousness he still does not imagine that, for someone like him – penniless, friendless and without letters of recommendation – even in the city of dreams the streets are made of dust.