Wait Until Spring Bandini

MANY YEARS AGO an old friend of my father’s told me the following story …

It was 1930. A twenty-one-year-old John Fante was broke, new in California, scratching out a buck by working on the docks and fish canaries in Wilmington, forty miles south of Los Angeles. The income from whatever jobs my old man could pick up went to support his mother, sister, and brothers.

But this John Fante was a ballsy kid. He began writing letters to H.L. Mencken, the editor of the famous literary magazine, the
American Mercury
, strenuously suggesting to Mencken that he publish his stuff. According to young Fante, the
Mercury
was missing out on the new Sherwood Anderson. The next Knut Hamsun.

Mencken’s replies were tolerant. He wrote back encouraging my father to send him his stories. But that created a problem for John Fante. He had no stories, only ideas for stories. But he had the absolute conviction that he could produce brilliant fiction, by the goddamn ream and truckload, if only someone would pay him. There was this other sticky problem too, my father couldn’t type.

Undaunted, a pack of Lucky Strikes in his shirt pocket, flashing his indestructible grin, John Fante bounced up the steps of a local newspaper office late one afternoon. In the
pressroom he inquired of a staff reporter if he’d mind permitting the use of an idle typewriter for the evening. Fante explained that he had a story to write. A great story. A brilliant story. A yarn of such dimension and profundity that the very nature of American literature might be metamorphosed by sun-up. The reporter, as my father’s friend tells it, scratched his head, pointed the kid toward an empty desk and said, ‘Knock yourself out.’

By the following morning not only had John Fante become a two-finger typist, but the pages he’d written were in an airmail envelope on their way to the
American Mercury
in Baltimore.

As a young writer my father was a blowtorch of energy. In the early days if you’d asked him who the best writer in America was, in a heartbeat he’d bark, ‘Jesus me, John Fante, who else?’

So what happened to the literary career of John Fante? How is it that one of the finest writers of his generation faded into anonymity, only to be rediscovered fifty years later, months before his death?

Time passed. My father became a regular contributor to Mencken’s
Mercury
and other magazines. He gained a decent literary reputation. But these were the days of the Great Depression and times were tough. Damn tough.

One night in 1934 at Musso/Frank’s Restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, John Fante’s drinking buddy and fellow pinball addict, Frank Fenton, came up with a moneymaking scheme – a gangster rip-off of a John Dillinger theme. The two of them could write it and sell it to the movies. Fenton knew a guy at one of the studios. A story editor named Ross Wills. My father was broke, as usual, and so was willing to try anything to hustle a buck.

In a few days the two finished the nonsense and submitted it to Warner Brothers. Schazaam! By the end of the week John Fante had his first job as a screenwriter. Two hundred and fifty bucks a week. A fortune! From then on, for the remainder of his best writing years, my father would squeeze the udders of this fat financial sow for every buck he could get. The book you’re holding,
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
, was written after a flush screenwriting period at one of the major Hollywood studios.

It has been taken for granted by many that John Fante ‘sold out’ his talent for the big money of the film business, that his literary career ended in the parking lot of Paramount Studios. In my own fiction work, I’ve contributed to this notion. But, in truth, this is only half right. Bad luck is the real reason my father became a forgotten writer. Hideous – fucked – bad luck!

Today in America, more than sixteen years after his death, John Fante’s
Ask the Dust
is regarded as a minor masterpiece. In fact, recently, one American magazine said John Fante should be numbered among the great writers of the twentieth century.

So why is it that when
Ask the Dust
was originally released in 1939, it sold less than three thousand copies? The book received excellent reviews. John Fante rightly hoped it would establish him as a major author of his time. Even Stackpole & Sons, the publisher, thought so.

So why?

I can recall half a dozen stories of my old man’s preposterously lousy luck as a writer but this is the one that most stands out at the moment. As it happens, in 1939 Stackpole published (without permission by the author) a book called
Mein Kampf
. The author was a literary amateur at best. His syntax was confusing. Goofy. His paragraphs rambled and he had a tendency to endlessly rant about minutiae and shit. And of course Adolf Hitler was pissed off at everybody. So it was the Führer’s decision to sue Stackpole& Sons for not properly asking permission to publish his jailhouse manifesto. So, the money that would have gone to promote
Ask the Dust
in 1939 and give John Fante the literary recognition he deserved, was spent on attorneys to settle a legal battle.

Until Charles Bukowski mentioned to John Martin at Black Sparrow Press that he had pulled a copy of
Ask the Dust
off the musty shelves of the L. A. Public Library, my father’s book was forgotten.

Such was John Fante’s literary luck.

But here’s the up side; my father lived a fun, reckless lifestyle. His favourite hobbies were playing stud poker at the Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, boozing with his writer pals, and whacking a golf ball four days a week at Rancho Park golf course. My father’s prose was brilliant. He could have, should have, had the literary reputation of a Hemingway or a Steinbeck, or a Saroyan, but fate conspired to deal him a pair of deuces – not a fistful of kings.

So here then is
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
, John Fante’s first novel. It is the beginning of the literary saga of Arturo Bandini. The book stands by itself for its excellence. To quote my main man: ‘… so long as lips can read, and eyes can see, so long lives this and this gives life to thee’.

Enjoy.

Dan Fante

Los Angeles

July, 1999

He came along, kicking the deep snow. Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardboard from a macaroni box. The macaroni in that box was not paid for. He had thought of that as he placed the cardboard inside of his shoes.

He hated the snow. He was a bricklayer, and the snow froze the mortar between the brick he laid. He was on his way home, but what was the sense in going home? When he was a boy in Italy, in Abruzzi, he hated the snow too. No sunshine, no work. He was in America now, in the town of Rocklin, Colorado. He had just been in the Imperial Poolhall. In Italy there were mountains, too, like those white mountains a few miles west of him. The mountains were a huge white dress dropped plumb-like to the earth. Twenty years before, when he was twenty years old, he had starved for a full week in the folds of that savage white dress. He had been building a fireplace in a mountain lodge. It was dangerous up there in the winter. He had said the devil with the danger, because he was only twenty then, and he had a girl in Rocklin, and he needed money. But the roof of the lodge had caved beneath the suffocating snow.

It harassed him always, that beautiful snow. He could never understand why he didn’t go to California. Yet he stayed in Colorado, in the deep snow, because it was too late now. The beautiful white snow was like the beautiful white wife of Svevo Bandini, so white, so fertile, lying in a white bed in a house up the street. 456 Walnut Street, Rocklin, Colorado.

Svevo Bandini’s eyes watered in the cold air. They were brown, they were soft, they were a woman’s eyes. At birth he had stolen them from his mother – for after the birth of Svevo Bandini, his mother was never quite the same, always ill, always with sickly eyes after his birth, and then she died and it was Svevo’s turn to carry soft brown eyes.

A hundred and fifty pounds was the weight of Svevo Bandini, and he had a son named Arturo who loved to touch his round shoulders and feel for the snakes inside. He was a fine man, Svevo Bandini, all muscles, and he had a wife named Maria who had only to think of the muscle in his loins and her body and her mind melted like the spring snows. She was so white, that Maria, and looking at her was seeing her through a film of olive oil.

Dio cane. Dio cane
. It means God is a dog, and Svevo Bandini was saying it to the snow. Why did Svevo lose ten dollars in a poker game tonight at the Imperial Poolhall? He was such a poor man, and he had three children, and the macaroni was not paid, nor was the house in which the three children and the macaroni were kept. God is a dog.

Svevo Bandini had a wife who never said: give me money for food for the children, but he had a wife with large black eyes, sickly bright from love, and those eyes had a way about them, a sly way of peering into his mouth, into his ears, into his stomach, and into his pockets. Those eyes were so clever
in a sad way, for they always knew when the Imperial Poolhall had done a good business. Such eyes for a wife! They saw all he was and all he hoped to be, but they never saw his soul.

That was an odd thing, because 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.

He had a white bed waiting for him, in which his wife lay, warm and waiting, and he was kicking the snow and thinking of something he was going to invent some day. Just an idea he had in his head: a snow plow. He had made a miniature of it out of cigar boxes. He had an idea there. And then he shuddered as you do when cold metal touches your flank, and he was suddenly remembering the many times he had got into the warm bed beside Maria, and the tiny cold cross on her rosary touched his flesh on winter nights like a tittering little cold serpent, and how he withdrew quickly to an even colder part of the bed, and then he thought of the bedroom, of the house that was not paid for, of the white wife endlessly waiting for passion, and he could not endure it, and straightway in his fury he plunged into deeper snow off the sidewalk, letting his anger fight it out with the snow.
Dio cane. Dio cane
.

He had a son named Arturo, and Arturo was fourteen and owned a sled. As he turned into the yard of his house that was not paid for, his feet suddenly raced for the tops of the trees, and he was lying on his back, and Arturo’s sled was still in motion, sliding into a clump of snow-weary lilac bushes.
Dio cane!
He had told that boy, that little bastard, to keep his sled out of the front walk. Svevo Bandini felt the snow’s cold attacking his hands like frantic ants. He got to his feet, raised his eyes to the sky, shook his fist at God, and nearly collapsed with fury. That Arturo. That little bastard! He dragged the sled from beneath the lilac bush and with systematic fiendishness tore the runners off. Only when the destruction was complete did he remember that the sled had cost seven-fifty. He stood brushing the snow from his clothes, that strange hot feeling in his ankles, where the snow had entered from the tops of his shoes. Seven dollars and fifty cents torn to pieces.
Diavolo!
Let the boy buy another sled. He preferred a new one anyway.

The house was not paid for. It was his enemy, that house. It had a voice, and it was always talking to him, parrot-like, forever chattering the same thing. Whenever his feet made the porch floor creak, the house said insolently: you do not own me, Svevo Bandini, and I will never belong to you. Whenever he touched the front doorknob it was the same. For fifteen years that house had heckled him and exasperated him with its idiotic independence. There were times when he wanted to set dynamite under it, and blow it to pieces. Once it had been a challenge, that house so like a woman, taunting him to possess her. But in thirteen years he had wearied and
weakened, and the house had gained in its arrogance. Svevo Bandini no longer cared.

The banker who owned that house was one of his worst enemies. The mental image of that banker’s face made his heart pound with a hunger to consume itself in violence. Helmer, the banker. The dirt of the earth. Time and again he had been forced to stand before Helmer and say that he had not enough money to feed his family. Helmer, with the neatly parted gray hair, with the soft hands, the banker eyes that looked like oysters when Svevo Bandini said he had no money to pay the installment on his house. He had had to do that many times, and the soft hands of Helmer unnerved him. He could not talk to that kind of a man. He hated Helmer. He would like to break Helmer’s neck, to tear out Helmer’s heart and jump on it with both feet. Of Helmer he would think and mutter: the day is coming! the day is coming! It was not his house, and he had but to touch the knob to remember it did not belong to him.

Her name was Maria, and the darkness was light before her black eyes. He tiptoed to the corner and a chair there, near the window with the green shade down. When he seated himself both knees clicked. It was like the tinkling of two bells to Maria, and he thought how foolish for a wife to love a man so much. The room was so cold. Funnels of vapor tumbled from his breathing lips. He grunted like a wrestler with his shoe laces. Always trouble with his shoe laces.
Diavolo!
Would he be an old man on his death bed before he ever learned to tie his shoe laces like other men?

‘Svevo?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t break them, Svevo. Turn on the light and I’ll untie them. Don’t get mad and break them.’

God in heaven! Sweet Mother Mary! Wasn’t that just like a woman? Get mad? What was there to get mad about? Oh God, he felt like smashing his fist through that window! He gnawed with his fingernails at the knot of his shoe laces. Shoe laces! Why did there have to be shoe laces? Unnh. Unnh. Unnh.

‘Svevo.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll do it. Turn on the light.’

When the cold has hypnotized your fingers, a knotted thread is as obstinate as barbed wire. With the might of his arm and shoulder he vented his impatience. The lace broke with a cluck sound, and Svevo Bandini almost fell out of the chair. He sighed, and so did his wife.

‘Ah, Svevo. You’ve broken them again.’

‘Bah,’ he said. ‘Do you expect me to go to bed with my shoes on?’

He slept naked, he despised underclothing, but once a year, with the first flurry of snow, he always found long underwear laid out for him on the chair in the corner. Once he had sneered at this protection: that was the year he had almost died of influenza and pneumonia; that was the winter when he had risen from a death bed, delirious with fever, disgusted with pills and syrups, and staggered to the pantry, choked down his throat a half dozen garlic bulbs, and returned to bed to sweat it out with death. Maria believed her prayers had cured him, and thereafter his religion of cures was garlic, but Maria maintained that garlic came from God, and that was too pointless for Svevo Bandini to dispute.

He was a man, and he hated the sight of himself in long underwear. She was Maria, and every blemish on his underwear, every button and every thread, every odor and every touch, made the points of her breasts ache with a joy that came out of the middle of the earth. They had been married fifteen years, and he had a tongue and spoke well and often of this and that, but rarely had he ever said, I love you. She was his wife, and she spoke rarely, but she tired him often with her constant, I love you.

He walked to the bedside, pushed his hands beneath the covers, and groped for that wandering rosary. Then he slipped between the blankets and seized her frantically, his arms pinioned around hers, his legs locked around hers. It was not passion, it was only the cold of a winter night, and she was a small stove of a woman whose sadness and warmth had attracted him from the first. Fifteen winters, night upon night, and a woman warm and welcoming to her body feet like ice, hands and arms like ice; he thought of such love and sighed.

And a little while ago the Imperial Poolhall had taken his last ten dollars. If only this woman had some fault to cast a hiding shadow upon his own weaknesses. Take Teresa DeRenzo. He would have married Teresa DeRenzo, except that she was extravagant, she talked too much, and her breath smelled like a sewer, and she – a strong, muscular woman – liked to pretend watery weakness in his arms: to think of it! And Teresa DeRenzo was taller than he! Well, with a wife like Teresa he could enjoy giving the Imperial Poolhall ten dollars in a poker game. He could think of that breath, that chattering mouth, and he could thank God for a chance to waste his hard-earned money. But not Maria.

‘Arturo broke the kitchen window,’ she said.

‘Broke it? How?’

‘He pushed Federico’s head through it.’

‘The son of a bitch.’

‘He didn’t mean it. He was only playing.’

‘And what did you do? Nothing, I suppose.’

‘I put iodine on Federico’s head. A little cut. Nothing serious.’

‘Nothing serious! Whaddya mean, nothing serious! What’d you do to Arturo?’

‘He was mad. He wanted to go to the show.’

‘And he went.’

‘Kids like shows.’

‘The dirty little son of a bitch.’

‘Svevo, why talk like that? Your own son.’

‘You’ve spoiled him. You’ve spoiled them all.’

‘He’s like you, Svevo. You were a bad boy too.’

‘I was – like hell! You didn’t catch me pushing my brother’s head through a window.’

‘You didn’t have any brothers, Svevo. But you pushed your father down the steps and broke his arm.’

‘Could I help it if my father … Oh, forget it.’

He wriggled closer and pushed his face into her braided hair. Ever since the birth of August, their second son, his wife’s right ear had an odor of chloroform. She had brought it home from the hospital with her ten years ago: or was it his imagination? He had quarreled with her about this for years, for she always denied there was a chloroform odor in her right ear. Even the children had experimented, and they had failed to smell it. Yet it was there, always there, just as it was that night in the ward, when he bent down
to kiss her, after she had come out of it, so near death, yet alive.

‘What if I did push my father down the steps? What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Did it spoil you? Are you spoiled?’

‘How do I know?’

‘You’re not spoiled.’

What the hell kind of thinking was that? Of course he was spoiled! Teresa DeRenzo had always told him he was vicious and selfish and spoiled. It used to delight him. And that girl – what was her name – Carmela, Carmela Ricci, the friend of Rocco Saccone, she thought he was a devil, and she was wise, she had been through college, the University of Colorado, a college graduate, and she had said he was a wonderful scoundrel, cruel, dangerous, a menace to young women. But Maria – oh Maria, she thought he was an angel, pure as bread. Bah. What did Maria know about it? She had had no college education, why she had not even finished high school.

Not even high school. Her name was Maria Bandini, but before she married him her name was Maria Toscana, and she never finished high school. She was the youngest daughter in a family of two girls and a boy. Tony and Teresa – both high school graduates. But Maria? The family curse was upon her, this lowest of all the Toscanas, this girl who wanted things her own way and refused to graduate from high school. The ignorant Toscana. The one without a high school diploma – almost a diploma, three and one-half years, but still, no diploma. Tony and Teresa had them, and Carmela Ricci, the friend of Rocco, had even gone to the University of Colorado. God was against him. Of them all, why had he fallen in love with
this woman at his side, this woman without a high school diploma?