Customer Reviews

Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante

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Lest anyone believe the dribble of the last reviewer who gave Cooper's biography one star, I thought I'd send in a review that at least strives for honesty, to say nothing of accuracy, which that other reviewer made no attempt to show. Stephen Cooper's biography of John Fante is a thoroughly enjoyable if occasionally painful read. Enjoyable because he presents a well-rounded picture of the man who penned such American classics as: Ask The Dust, The Brotherhood of the Grape, My Dog Stupid, Dreams From Bunker Hill, and others, including a number of very fine and moving short stories. Painful, because John Fante certainly was a flawed human being, as this biography clearly shows. To complain that Fante drank, or was lazy, or abused his wife, etc. is silly. What, we can or should only read books by people who are saints? If that's the criteria for what writers we read then there'd be nothing to read on the fiction shelves by either men or women. Should I refrain from reading Claire Boothe Luce or Dorothy Parker because they were less than perfect people? Should I dump my Dostoyevsky books simply because he treated everyone monstrously, or my Dickens, because he was a lousy father and husband? I'm sorry to destroy the illusions of the simpleton who wrote that review, but writers are sometimes petty, self-centered, back-biting, bores, many of whom drink to excess or gamble, or cheat, or womanize, etc., etc. If you want nice problem-free people to emulate go for film stars or musicians, or jocks, right? Maybe certain people shouldn't read biographies, but can instead continue to march along the primrose path believing idiocies like the writers they admire are as perfect as the works they create.

For this person to state something like: "There is nothing new or interesting here, not even a great work of art to point to and wonder. Cooper looks behind the curtain of Fante's existence, finding that whatever wizard we had imagined there had long ago crumbled to dust." --I'm sorry, but that's not even half intelligent, it's sheer wanton stupidity. Yeah, that's why John Fante has admirers from John Fowles all the way down.

Cooper's book gives us the externals that formed John Fante the writer. If that is uninteresting to the previous reviewer, that's sad. That he or she doesn't appreciate Fante work, and feels the need to attack it is pathetic. Fante will long outlast you, and I'd sure hate to see what lies on your bookshelves. Fante's books continue to sell and be reprinted, here in the U.S and in Europe. While there's no accounting for taste, there's no accounting for its absence in this case. Set Fante beside anyone who wrote in the 1930s or 1940s-Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.-and you will see that Fante's writing is not dated, but is incredibly fresh. And while he writes a clean simple prose, at the same time there is poetry there, too. How many writers can you name who are capable of accomplishing that? Add Fante's humor, and you have writing that is a miracle. Sure there are passages that are cruel-life was very cruel for Mexicans, Italians, Philipinos, and others living in the U.S. all vying to fit in as Americans, to survive. And that was the world John Fante worked to depict in his writing. If that a failure of a life, then give me more failures!

Fante's writing is brilliant, but of course you have to have some taste to realize this. And if you've got any sense, you'll find it hilarious; it will make you laugh out loud, and yes, wince on occasion. It will move you, because there's an emotional content in his writing that is sorely lacking in 95% of the writers out there.

Stephen Cooper's biography is not adulatory. Instead, it's honest, as Fante's writing is honest. Cooper writes of the whole man, not a part of him. To the other reviewer who complained that Fante's fictions were so frequently full of fabrication, well, that's why they call it fiction, silly. People do themselves and Fante a huge disservice by assuming what he wrote was autobiographical. Fante clearly infused his character, his alter ego, Arturo Bandini, into a framework wherein he used bits and pieces of real life, but his writing is not a mirror of his life. John Fante the person is not the same as John Fante's writing. Again, for those of you who are troubled by the definitions of `novel' and `fiction,' he made it up.

I say hats off to Stephen Cooper for writing a good solid biography of a man who deserves a much wider audience. Perhaps when the film Ask The Dust comes out in December, and Robert Towne doesn't blow it, that will happen.

Stephen Cooper discovered "Ask the Dust" when he was 25 and like most who have encountered the novel, was profoundly effected. A quarter century later, he lays some thorny roses at the grave of John Fante with a clear eyed look at the man who's bifurcated personality produced some of the most raw and beautiful prose of the 20th. Century, as well as countless drunken, destructive rages. Cooper has studied his subject exaustively and with the assistance of Fante's widow Joyce, he gives us our first look at a life and a talent that spun away from it's early, hungry promise to the deadly distractions of Hollywood, the links and the drinks. Fante's life, in many ways, is full of more rugged pathos and sour beauty than that of the Bandini persona that he wove through his too few novels. Cooper has done a magnificent job as the first biographer of John Fante but it is a testament to this uniquely complicated man that it should not suffice as the only volume on the shelf.

I hope the interest in "Ask the Dust" (reprint and Hollywood film) will send many readers to this excellent biography. If you want to learn more about Fante and the Los Angeles literary and screenwriting scene of his era, this book is a gold mine. Recognition came late for Fante, and it wouldn't have come at all without Charles Bukowski's advocacy, but this biography, Robert Towne's feature film, and the Independent Lens documentary that aired recently on PBS ("A Sad Flower in the Sand") are helping to rectify the critical neglect. Two comments on the other reviews. Yes, it will be useful in the classroom. I just taught "Ask the Dust" in a course at San Francisco State University, and this work was a huge help. And to those who could do without the endnotes, they were indispensable for me as I researched the life of Fante's friend Carey McWilliams.

Cooper is an elegant writer in his own right. He brings new light to Fante's life and work. After reading his stimulating biography, any readers unfamiliar with Fante will immediately be drawn to his novels and readers already familiar with Fante will get the urge to re-read and re-think an author who, with the help of Cooper, will eventually find his way into the classroom.

"Full of Life,: Stephen Cooper's biography of John Fante, is excellent in many ways. It's also, like its subject, flawed. It gets off to a great start, with sympathetic understanding and some brilliantly written passages. But as the book goes on, the author tends to succumb to Biographeritis: dislike of his subject.

It's the biographer's mission to present an honest picture of his subject, warts and all. A book that did nothing but gush over its subject's good qualities wouldn't be worth much. But it's just as uimportant not to get carried away in the other direction, and present the subject in as bad a light as possible, lovingly nurturing every bad thing that everyone has to say bout him (or her), now that the subject is safely dead. It's what J.B. Priestly described as the posthumous assassin, "running out to plunge another knife into the corpse." This is done without trying to ascertain whether or not the charges are actually true, and certainly without taking a look at the not always admirable motives involved. It's not possible to check out every denunciation, of course; but when the accusation is a serious one - cruelty, for instance - the biographer owes it to the person he's writing about to at least make an effort to see if it really happened. In my opinion Cooper lets Fante down in this respect.

By far the worst thing about the book is that there's one episode which I strongly suspect isn't true: the drowning of the kittens. This is a serious charge of cruelty against a dead man who can't defend himself. Given, over, and over, and over again (his acceptance of a rat for a present - when he was drunk, by the way - having his friend pull over to rescue a cat, buying a pig to keep his dog happy, almost breaking up his marriage because he wanted to keep a dog his wife wanted him to get rid of, refusing to get rid of another dog that almost everyone else in the family hated - someone even volunteered to shoot it), how much he loved animals, I find it very hard to believe that Fante could have done this. It was simply out of character, whatever his faults were. At the very least it strains credulity. Yet Cooper reports it as an accepted fact. He should have checked out this alleged incident very carefully, instead of simply taking the word of ex-neighbors who didn't like him, and who still held a grudge (after fifty years!) over a failed joint movie venture. It's fine for Cooper to assert unequivocally that Fante drank too much, stayed out all night, and neglected his wife, because that's the way Fante habitually behaved. He did NOT habitually murder animals. And the usual explanation for aberrant behavior - "Well, he was drunk" - won't wash here, because Fante also behaved tenderly toward animals when he was drunk. In his writing, as well as in his life, Fante had not only love but pity for helpless animals. Cooper must not have read the chapter in "Ask the Dust" where the narrator is sickened by the murder (and he calls it murder) of the calf, and is tormented by pity for the calf's grieving mother. This episode was described with so much revulsion that it hardly seems like the attitude of someone who would drown kittens. I have an alternate theory: I think one or more of the neighborhood boys killed the kittens, and then blamed it on their unpopular neighbor.

Where was Joyce while this was going on? It's hard to believe that this spirited lady would have just stood by passively while Fante the Fiend carried out his murderous action. For that matter, where were his own kids? There's no corroboration by them. How convenient, that everyone in the family was absent that day (which almost never happened), except the Strobel kid. If there's a future edition of this book, I hope Cooper will at least really check out this attack on Fante. At the very least, he owes it to Fante's memory to point out that this seems to be uncharacteristic behavior for someone who was known for his lifelong love of animals.

Cooper's appreciation of Fante's work is much better. I have to say, though, that, like several of the reviewers, he missed the point of "Ask the Dust." He harps on the name-calling and the racial epithets. That's an important component of the book, certainly. But it's not what the book is about, any more than "Vanity Fair" is solely about Becky Sharp, Thackeray's great anti-heroine. "Ask the Dust," like "Vanity Fair" and "Of Human Bondage," examines a basic problem of human existence: why do we love the people who don't love us?

Cooper has a warm appreciation for Fante's writing. As he notes, "Ask the Dust," in addition to being a great Los Angeles book - the city itself, its streets and cafes and boarding houses and skid row, is one of the major characters in the book - has one of the most lyrical and haunting - and saddest - endings ever written. Cooper may not be a fan of Fante the man, but he loves Fante the writer.

Overall, a good first biography of John Fante. Fante's extensive screenwriting efforts are documented in detail here, and there are interesting insights into the writing of Ask the Dust. I found some portions a bit dry, like the delving at length into Fante's family tree at the beginning. Likewise, the fifty pages of scholarly Notes at the end are tedious reading and seem superfluous. Invaluable are facts surrounding incidents such as Fante's car accident later in life (Stephen Cooper hinting that perhaps it was an attempt at autocide), and Fante's purchase of a revolver (the biographer suggesting that Fante may have been planning to kill himself). Inexcusable, however, are omissions like the failure to note the recent writing achievements of Fante's son, Dan, whose books are big business in Europe. Dan may have his father's gift of braggadocio, and the curse of ten times the old man's bitterness, but the oversight (?) is bizarre in the context of such an obviously well-researched bio. The few glossed-over gaps in Full of Life are almost to be expected since John Fante's own letters and fictions were so frequently full of fabrication themselves.

For a book called "Full of Life," this work is surprisingly flat and boring. Not much happens in the life of John Fante. He drinks a lot, writes a little, drinks some more, abuses his wife, drinks even more, and saves just enough time to drown a sack of kittens in the kitchen sink while his children cry horrified. That's it for the drama, though. There isn't much life here, just a sad example of a generation of gruff and abusive alcoholic men slowly fading into memory. "Life" in these terms seems defined by random violent outbursts, failure and the bottle. Even Cooper's prose, fashioned to echo his idol, falls flat on the page with sentences like, "He was full of piss and vinegar." This isn't a biography as much as a eulogy to a time and a man better left forgotten. Fante's literary achievements were limited in his lifetime at best, perhaps in no small part due to his heavy alcoholism. There is nothing new or interesting here, not even a great work of art to point to and wonder. Cooper looks behind the curtain of Fante's existence, finding that whatever wizard we had imagined there had long ago crumbled to dust. There is no life here, full or otherwise...