In many ways, it is impossible to fully comprehend John Fante's novels without taking into consideration the question of religion, which in his literary imagination is represented in terms of an isomorphous convergence between Catholicism and Italianness. From the point of view of the multi-ethnic network of American society itself, his representation of the Italian community implies the automatic evocation of Catholicism in all its force. What emerges is the idea of a militant religion which assists the families of Italian immigrants in order to give them the idea of a sociocultural continuity with the land of their origins. Above all, for those unable to integrate in American society, religion becomes a stronghold which, at least in the early stages, does not seem to belong to the New World which is so different from Italy, from the unfamiliarity of its language to the idea of the family and its daily rituals (which, for Italians, means sumptuous dinners, prayers, Sunday mass, religious festivities etc.).
In Fante's novels, the culture and the language of one's origins represent a link with the past and, at the same time, a sense of cohesion of the family group that finds its most complete expression in religion. Thus, the Italian language becomes the only language to express their devotion to Catholicism and its rites.
However, this sense of cohesion is clearly not perceived in the same way by Fante who, as a second-generation Italian-American tries in every way to become an integral part of American culture and goes through the same ethnic and cultural dilemmas and tensions as the writers of his generation such as Pietro Di Donato and Jerre Mangione. In this respect, Francesco Mulas (1995: 31) rightly observes: ‘On the one hand, they were the ‘new’ generation born in America who felt the urge to ‘belong’ to their nation, to their America, and on the other, they were bound, if not quite driven, to preserve the culture of their forefathers.’ As regards a necessary ethnic and cultural mediation on the part of writers of Italian origin, what Fred L Gardaphé writes on the well-known novel Christ in Concrete (1939) by Di Donato could, in many ways, apply to all of Fante's fictional works:
Di Donato's italianita [sic] becomes most obvious through the novel's diction. As mediator between the Italian culture of his parents and the American culture he was born into, di Donato masterfully effects our understanding of both through his unique linguistic representation of both. His word choice and word order recreate the rhythms and sonority of the Italian language. (Gardaphé, 1993: xii)
Although not with the same intensity that we find in Christ in Concrete (1939), it is easy to see that in Fante's novels and short stories the language of the characters constitutes a particular idiolect that reproduces certain cadences of Italian culture. One element which contributes to this linguistic phenomenon is undoubtedly the Catholic religion which, through prayers recited always in Italian, characterizes the persistence of a language that is conceived as the language of one's faith, thus establishing an inseparable link between the rituals of the Catholic Church and the Italian language. In this sense, for the first generation of immigrants, the mere idea of abandoning their native language for American is seen as a choice that implies a betrayal of the Catholic faith. The centrality of religion is evident on virtually every page of Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), in which the entire Bandini family makes sense of daily life by adopting Catholicism as the cornerstone of their relationship with the American way of life. Not surprisingly, at the beginning of the novel the narrator immediately highlights that Maria Bandini makes the observance of her Catholic faith a cornerstone of her daily life. As the mother of three children and the wife of Svevo Bandini, she prays constantly in the hope of redeeming a husband who, in addition to his recurrent drunkenness, cheats on her without a hint of shame:
[…] Maria Bandini was a woman who looked upon all the living and the dead as souls. Maria knew what a soul was. A soul was an immortal thing she knew about. A soul was an immortal thing she would not argue about. A soul was an immortal thing. Well, whatever it was, a soul was immortal.
Maria had a white rosary, so white you could drop it in the snow and lose it forever, and she prayed for the soul of Svevo Bandini and her children. And because there was no time, she hoped that somewhere in this world someone, a nun in some quiet convent, someone, anyone, found time to pray for the soul of Maria Bandini. (Fante, 1983: 13–14)
These words turn out to be very pertinent. The world in which Arturo Bandini – who, in many ways, can be considered Fante's alter ego – lives seems to be constructed with the salvation of the soul in mind, based on the catechesis of the Catholic religion. Maria Bandini is obsessed with adhering to the basic tenets of her faith because she wants to save her soul and gain immortality for herself and her family. From such knowledge she derives encouragement and comfort and, moreover, is able to find the strength to cope with all the inconstancies of Svevo Bandini's who, unlike his devoted wife, possesses no spiritual dimension. As Katherine J Kordich (2000: 30) has observed, ‘Svevo lives in a world of materiality. His profession is of the most concrete kind: he builds structures with stone and brick. […] His physicality is the outward symbol of his personality, particularly when he is angry.’ When Arturo is 12 years old, therefore, he finds himself going through his childhood between two parents who express opposite ideas of the Catholic church. As is explicitly stated at the beginning of the novel, Arturo is on the side of his father, who exerts a certain fascination for him as an expression of masculinity coupled with a certain Italian dongiovannism:
He was Arturo and he loved his father, but he lived in the dread of the day when he would grow up and be able to lick his father. He worshipped his father, but he thought his mother was a sissy and a fool. (Fante, 1983: 34)
However, it should be mentioned here that his mother represents the reference point for her children in terms of both behaviour and their relationship with religion. In fact, Arturo derives the firm belief from his mother that confession is the way to bring salvation of the soul, the precondition of the Eucharist, that is, the moment when the believer establishes a union with Christ: ‘Arturo Bandini was pretty sure that he wouldn’t go to hell when he died. The way to hell was the committing of mortal sin. He had committed many, he believed, but the Confessional had saved him’
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(Fante, 1983: 107). As a testimony to their mother's militant faith, Arturo and August serve as altar boys in the local church. However, while Arturo endures this role without ever fully believing in it, little August, on the other hand, displays a zeal and participation that does not belong to his older brother, who, like his father, has a rebellious and restless spirit.
In the later stages of his life, Arturo increasingly distances himself from the Catholic religion, which he interprets as an obstacle to his full integration into the American culture to which he is very attracted in spite of his ethnic roots. For this reason, even though he is aware of having had a very strict Catholic upbringing in which respect for all the sacraments is imperative, Arturo cannot bear the weight of the family tradition that, as has been seen, places religion and participation in parish life at the centre as confirmation of his Italian identity. In this way, in the novel The Road to Los Angeles (published in 1985), we are given to read that Arturo Bandini, while trying to publicly represent his vocation as a writer, never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Catholic religion, convinced as he is that all religions are big lies. It is no accident that, in a soliloquy centred on his anti-Catholic revolt, Arturo firmly declares: ‘I reject in no uncertain terms the hypothesis of God. Religion is the opium of the people. The churches should be converted to hospitals and public works’ (Fante, 1996: 39). Adopting Karl Marx's well-known definition, 17-year-old Arturo shows that he has left behind the altar boy who believed in confession as the privileged path to the salvation of his soul and who had learned from his mother that the immortality of the soul is the most important thing in the life of every human being.
Undoubtedly, the pervasive presence of the Catholic religion is an integral part of Fante's literary imagination. In evoking his Italian roots, he never fails to foreground the close connection between Italianness and the Catholic faith. In particular, the theme of confession is at the centre of the short story ‘My Father's God’, which, with good reason, can be considered one of his most successful stories, both for the coherence of its semantic structure and the narrative method adopted (Collins, 1999: 95–103).1 In fact, Jay Martin justly observes that ‘My Father's God’ has ‘a perfect meditative structure. It concerns the reflections of an adult narrator's remembrance of his childhood – an incident that was crucial for his own spiritual development’ (Martin, 1997: 27). In other words, as Martin suggests, the father's story is also the son's story and his understanding of Catholicism. It cannot be overlooked that the opening emphasizes a change that is not simply about the arrival of a new pastor, but is more precisely about a generational change:
Upon the death of old Father Ambrose, the Bishop of Denver assigned a new priest to St Catherine's parish. He was Father Bruno Ramponi, a young Dominican from Boston. Father Ramponi's picture appeared on the front page of the Boulder Herald. Actually there were two pictures – one of a swarthy, short-necked prelate bulging inside a black suit and reversed collar, the other an action shot of Father Ramponi in football gear leaping with outstretched hands for a forward pass. Our new pastor was famous. He had been a football star, an All-American halfback from Boston College.
My father studied the pictures at the supper table. (Fante, 1997: 185)
The opening of the story highlights a change that, albeit obliquely, suggests that, after Father Ambrose's death, the appointment of a new parish priest will represent a real turning point. If the old parish priest still had some ethnic ties to his origins, here it is immediately clear that Father Bruno Ramponi is an expression of an American Catholicism that apparently no longer has a connection to the historical memory of the immigrant community. Father Ramponi is an energetic and physically imposing individual, and in his activism he almost comes across as an allegorical version of America itself.
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In general, for a community of believers, the arrival of a new minister of worship would be nothing exceptional. But the change becomes an exceptional event for Italian immigrant families precisely because, for them, religion is an intrinsic part of their cultural identity. The first opposition is generational, for kindly old Father Ambrose is succeeded by ‘a young Dominican from Boston’ who, moreover, has already gained some popularity for his sporting exploits: ‘Father Ramponi's picture appeared on the front page of the Boulder Herald’. The rumours about him terrify the children of the Catholic School, including the narrator: ‘It was said that Father Ramponi was so powerful that he could bring down a bull with one punch, that he was structured like a gorilla […]. After the gentle Father Ambrose, the thought of being hauled before Father Ramponi for discipline was too ghastly to contemplate’ (Fante, 1997: 186). Such an image of the parish priest, from the perspective of Nick – the narrator's father – is an additional destabilizing element in a context that does not bode well for a pater familias who wants nothing to do with religion:
‘I don’t care where he was born. I know a Sicilian when I see one.’
His brows quivered like caterpillars as he studied the face of Father Ramponi. ‘I don’t want any trouble with this priest,’ he brooded.
It was an ominous reminder of the many futile years Father Ambrose had tried to bring my father back to the church. ‘The glorious return to divine grace,’ Father Ambrose had called it. ‘The prodigal son falling into the arms of his heavenly father.’ On the job or in the street, at band concerts and in the pool hall, the old pastor constantly swooped down on my father with these pious objurations which only served to drive him deeper among the heathens, so that the priest's death brought a gasp of relief. (Fante, 1997: 185)
From the viewpoint of the narrative strategies, Nick's reaction to the two photographs of the new pastor serves to inform the reader about the relationship between the man and his religious practice. Indeed, the retrospective gaze reveals that he had engaged in a kind of permanent war with Father Ambrose which, fortunately for him, had ended to his advantage with the clergyman's death. In Nick's mind, the past (represented by the dead priest) is projected into the future in a few succinct words that, in many ways, are already the indirect anticipation of what will effectively come to pass: ‘I don’t want any trouble with this priest’. On the contrary, the denial of this statement, thanks to Father Ramponi's cunning, will turn into an affirmation as he soon has to contend with a parish priest who wants to lead him back to the church like any good Catholic. After all, as the narrative voice tells us, Nick senses all too well what awaits him and, for that reason, regards the new parish priest with concern:
But in Father Ramponi he sensed a renewal of the tedious struggle for his soul, for it was only a question of time before the new priest discovered that my father never attended Mass. Not that my mother and we four kids didn’t make up for his absences. (Fante, 1997: 185–186; emphasis mine)
In short, Father Ramponi becomes the protagonist of the small Catholic community because, purely in terms of his body image, he seems to embody the figure of a tremendous scourger of the community's sinners. Moreover, even if the point of view is that of the Catholic schoolchildren, he comes across as an exceptional figure, very unlike Father Ambrose. The description given by the narrative voice seems to be more that of a bear that is all hair and jaws, than of a zealous and helpful representative of the Catholic Church:
He moved forward to stand before us with massive hands clasped at his waist, a grin kneading his broken face. All the rumors about him were true – a bull of a man with dark skin and wide, crushed nostrils out of which black hairs flared. His jaw was as square as a brickbat, his short neck like a creosoted telephone pole. From out of his coat sleeves small bouquets of black hair burst over his wrists. (Fante, 1997: 186–187)
By now Father Ambrose has become only a pale memory, as the terrified children find themselves facing an individual with the physical frame of a boxer or a dock worker. However, what is not described in this portrait is the voice of the new parish priest which, to everyone's surprise, appears in contrast to his body and, in many ways, humanizes his physiognomy. Thus, we learn that ‘his voice was small and sibilant, surprisingly sweet and uncertain, a mighty lion with the roar of a kitten. The whole class breathed a sigh of deliverance as we sat down’ (Fante, 1997: 187). Here, all of a sudden, the image of Father Ramponi is almost turned upside down: the sweet, hesitant tone of his voice makes him more like ordinary mortals, and this peculiarity, instead of being a point to his disadvantage, becomes an element in his favour in his work as pastor of the Church.
‘Tell your folks I’ll be around to meet them soon’ (Fante, 1997: 187): this phrase that Father Ramponi utters to Nick's son (i.e. the narrative voice) creates a turmoil in the family, which, following the communication of an upcoming visit from the parish priest, lives in a state of anticipation that appears increasingly unnerving, especially for the devoted mother who:
upon hearing that Father Ramponi was coming, lifted her eyes to heaven and moaned. ‘Oh, my God’, she said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell your father. We might lose him for good’. It was our secret, my mother's and mine. (Fante, 1997: 187)
The need to show the best side of the Italian immigrant family only further exacerbates the conflict between husband and wife. The former becomes increasingly irritable, among other things, because the coming of winter means the end of work: ‘The snow was my father's deadly enemy […]. He became a prisoner in his own house (Fante, 1997: 188). While his wife tries to convince him to return to church at least for Sunday Mass, Nick has his own theory of religiosity:
‘God's everywhere, so why do I have to see Him in a church? He's right here too, in this house, this room. He's in my hand. Look’. He opened and closed his fist. ‘He's right in there. In my eyes, my mouth, my ears, my blood. So what's the sense of walking eight blocks through the snow, when all I got to do is sit right here with God in my own house’. (Fante, 1997: 189–190)
Significantly, the experiential self (the child at the time) proves his father right by recalling that in catechism one of the first things he was taught was precisely this: ‘Papa's right […] God is everywhere’ (Fante, 1997: 190). On balance, the mother is a woman who puts the preservation of Italianness at the centre of life, while Nick has another approach to life. In him, America and Italy meet in a sort of constant mediation process. On closer inspection, his God, who is everywhere, is much more modern than that of his wife, who sees Sunday Mass as the best way of manifesting her faith. In his analysis of Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Marinaccio focuses on the husband–wife relationship in the domestic sphere: ‘The Bandini family, certainly, reflects the dominant trends in the Italian American family during the immigration era, in which the most Italian, least assimilated members of the households were women’ (Marinaccio, 2009: 48). Of course, the same analysis can apply to the family picture of ‘My Father's God’ in which the contrast between husband and wife also emerges in their different conceptions of what it means to be faithful. In fact, after a period of crisis marked by a few meetings with the pastor in the rectory, Nick manages to convince Father Ramponi to let him give his confession in writing, thus avoiding kneeling in a confessional as his wife, who places the church, which she sees as a house of worship, at the centre of her faith, would like. To everyone's amazement, therefore, the man turns into a writer who, not unlike St Augustine or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to name but a few, reviews his sins. Subtracting their exposure from being given orally, Nick the sinner prefers the arduous task of putting into writing what his conscience dictates to him:
Moving furtively in the background, my mother and grandmother watched him with sympathetic, adoring eyes. The man of the house was in crisis, grappling with the devil, and the decision was in doubt. Every night at bedtime we left him alone in the dining room, seated under the light, sipping wine and writing on a jumbo school tablet with a stubby pencil. (Fante, 1997: 194)
A written confession entails a long process of time, unlike oral confession. Not only that, but the written word also needs constant verification for authenticity. As Peter Brooks has noted, ‘confession is considered to bear a special stamp of authenticity. From the thirteenth century, when the Roman Church began to require annual confession from the faithful, it has become in Western culture a crucial mode of self-examination’ (Brooks, 2000: 9). As recounted by the narrative voice, the father writes his confession by following a painful path that, from the son's point of view, shows no respect whatsoever for orthodoxy. Therefore, when Nick entrusts his son with the written confession to deliver to the parish priest, he senses that he is holding something that is against the sacred rules of the Catholic faith:
All of this wickedness, every human being he had injured, every sin against God's commandments were congealed in a block of ice burning against my stomach as I crossed town, under dripping maple trees, around grey mounds of mud-splattered snow, my toes picking their way with the delicacy of bird's feet, across the town, the awful responsibility of my burden hurting my flesh, too sacred, too heavy for my life. (Fante, 1997: 195)
The son's image of his father is that of an inveterate sinner who, by entrusting him with the manuscript, has already committed a further sin since, as he has boldly told his father, he knows well as an altar boy that it is not possible to confess in writing: the only true confession possible is before the priest who, in that case, has the power to absolve or not absolve the sinner. In his religious orthodoxy, therefore, the son suffers painfully the role of bearer of his father's message. Hence the very eloquent expressions intended to characterize his mission: ‘a block of ice burning against my stomach’, or ‘my burden hurting my flesh’. These images give the measure of the boy's awareness that the manuscript relates the sins committed by his father in the many decades he has been estranged from holy communion, without ever showing any form of repentance. All the tension dissolves the moment Father Ramponi goes to Nick's home to tell him that it is impossible for him to read the long, detailed and sincere confession:
The priest sank deeper in his chair and covered one eye. ‘It simply
never entered my mind that you’d make your confession in Italian’.
‘The pope speaks Italian’, my father said. ‘The cardinals, they speak Italian. The saints speak Italian. Even God speaks Italian. But you, Father Bruno Ramponi, don’t speak Italian’.
A moan from the priest. He pushed the envelope toward my father. ‘Burn it’.
‘Burn it?’
‘Burn it. Now’. (Fante, 1997: 197)
Faced with the priest's exhortation, Nick goes to the kitchen and burns the manuscript in the stove. Although Father Ramponi has not been able to read the confession, he recognizes its value and therefore, after assigning him the prayers of penance, proceeds to absolve him without knowing anything about the man's past sins: ‘It pleased my father and he lowered his eyes. Father Ramponi absolved and blessed him, and the little ceremony was concluded. My father got to his feet’ (Fante, 1997: 198). Ultimately, the God who stands out in this narrative is really Nick's God. By staying away from the church, inside his house with his glass of wine, the penitent father has demonstrated to the entire family that, even without being an orthodox Catholic, he has obtained absolution. What is more, Collins rightly observes, ‘[i]t is the father's triumph that no one reads his confession’ (Collins, 1999: 103). However, in spite of this, the image that is imposed on the reader's imagination is that of Nick intent on writing his story, because the systematic listing of his sins is not the intimate story of his personality. In this sense, the son's narrative seems to be grafted onto the story that no one was able to read but which, on closer inspection, is the true subtext of ‘My Father's God’. Once burnt, no one will be able to read the manuscript of the confession, yet by placing this particular episode of the father's religious life at the centre of the narrative, the narrator merely conveys to the reader the man's heterodox temperament, his sins large and small and – albeit indirectly – his confession poetically grafted onto ‘My Father's God’, which reveals a metanarrative tension that sheds no small light on John Fante's artistic awareness. Ultimately, the story is a text about the making and unmaking of another text by an adult writer who imagines himself in the role of a boy totally immersed in the myth of his father.
