Catching Up With Victoria Fante Cohen, Daughter of a Literary Legend

The last half-decade has been something of an abundance of riches for fans of the late John Fante. For many years after the author’s 1983 death, the cult of Fante was set on simmer. Suddenly, as of the mid-2000s, it's boiling hot, as the novelist and screenwriter has been the subject of a panel at the Hammer Museum and articles in the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, and Malibu magazine. And although not well received, a movie adaptation of Fante’s crowning masterpiece, Ask the Dust, reached movie screens, written and directed by a talent of the highest pedigree: Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne. Cherry on the sundae: Exactly a year ago, a street in downtown L.A. was named “John Fante Square.”

This week, marking the anniversary of April 8, 1909, Fante’s date of birth, an exhibit at UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library, featuring a plethora of Fante artifacts, continues through late June (after which various items will be catalogued online by UCLA library archivists) while a bus tour of John Fante’s Los Angeles is scheduled for this Saturday at noon, courtesy of historic tour company Esotouric.

Smiling upon all of this activity are the custodians of Fante’s legacy: his surviving sons Jim Fante and author Dan Fante (the eldest son, Nick, died of alcoholism in 1997), and Victoria Fante Cohen, who will be present for the April 9 bus tour, entitled John Fante’s Dreams from Bunker Hill.

“I’m very excited,” Fante Cohen told Patch. “When Dad was alive, I think people in the industry probably felt he was a very good writer…Since his death, his books are being read…his papers have gone to UCLA, and I think there’s a resurgence of Fante chatter…I’m contacted by people once a week.”

In the year 2009, which marked Fante’s 100^th birthday anniversary, Fante Cohen, Jim Fante, Esotouric founder Richard Schave and Fante biographer Stephen Cooper participated in a panel at the that was followed by a gathering of Fante fans at King Edward’s Saloon downtown. The venerable Skid Row pub, still standing today, was mentioned in 1939's Ask the Dust and was frequented at one point by a young John Fante. Also in '09,  acquired the collection of original manuscripts, screenplays, letters, diaries, and personal and professional documents from the Fante estate as family members sorted through heirlooms after selling the Malibu family home, occupied by Fante’s widow, Joyce Fante, until her death in 2005.

“I enjoyed seeing my father’s scrapbook…from when he was a young man in school at St. Regis,” Fante Cohen said of her favorite items in the UCLA exhibit. “I think that was fascinating, he collected all the pictures of the baseball stars…Many of the family letters as well.”

She added that Schave, who with wife Kim Cooper runs Esotouric, was the motivating force behind getting L.A. City Councilwoman Jan Perry to declare "John Fante Day" in L.A. on April 8, 2010, at the John Fante Square dedication ceremony at the corner of 5th Street and Grand Avenue, near downtown’s central library (the famed spot where Charles Bukowski discovered his literary hero with a battered, dog-eared copy of Ask the Dust) .

(Fante himself worshipped at the altar of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. Fante found the title for his most acclaimed novel from a line of dialogue from Hamsun’s 1894 novel Pan that read: “Ask the dust on the road…”)

"Los Angeles, give me some of you!” the writer character Arturo Bandini cries out in Ask the Dust. “...Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town."

Fante poured his passion for various parts of Los Angeles (from downtown to Wilmington and Long Beach) into his novels. Yet he was all but ashamed that he had to forego focusing on writing books to craft screenplays for Hollywood, which at least paid him handsomely. In the mid-1950s, the Fante family lived at the Malibu estate, where, in addition to writing scripts under his own name for films such as Full of Life (based on his book), for some unknown period, Fante ghosted drinking buddy William Faulkner’s screenplays.

According to Fante's daughter, the author's biggest heartbreak was not being able to write as many novels as he could have.

“That’s all he really wanted to do,” Fante Cohen said. “He felt he was selling out writing a screenplay.” She added that he wrote those scripts out of necessity to support his wife and four children.

The gruff Fante was not one to make a big fuss over his birthdays, but they were not ignored either.

“In our family, birthdays were generally celebrated at home," Fante Cohen said. "Mom always had a cake, we always sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ and we had a big meal."

At 49, Fante announced to his family that he was a diabetic, calmed down on the drinking, and turned increasingly to golf and other therapeutic leisure activities. The fallout from diabetes worsened his health through the 1970s and early ‘80s, when he lost his vision and his legs. His last major work, Dreams From Bunker Hill, was verbally dictated to wife Joyce, who scribbled down his words on yellow legal pads.

To what extent Fante's novels are autobiographical has been disputed. While the “facts” depicted in Fante’s seminal novels of a writer's life in Los Angeles may be embellished and exaggerated for comic effect, the voice of character Bandini reflected the author’s real-life acerbic, lovable curmudgeon persona.

“I think it’s one and the same person, it’s a little bit stylized…but he was more fiery, if anything, than Arturo Bandini,” Jim Fante said during the 2009 Hammer panel.

“My goal––and I’m sure my brothers feel the same way––is for my father’s books to be read 50 years from now…and to be part of a curriculum at schools,” Fante Cohen said.

So with museum programs and bus tours formulating around the author's legend, what would the scrappy, macho John Fante have thought of all the hullabaloo in his name?

“I think he would have been secretly very pleased,” Fante Cohen said, smiling.

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