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Once you’re a writer you have to write –  Dan Fante (1944-2015)

Interview by  Jan Nasrullah Rylewicz.

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3:AM: Have you had breakfast, have you had your coffee yet?

DF: Yes, I have, and I’m sitting down and writing a piece for a book, a French book that I’m working on with a French photographer about places in Los Angeles where I’ve lived and been, so I’m just writing one more chapter in that book.

3:AM: Do you know when that book is coming out?

DF: Apparently we have an interested publisher. They are not willing to pay very much so we are kind of shopping it around, but my guess would be early next year.

3:AM: Great. Los Angeles has been very influential in your work.

DF: Oh sure, yes. And I have done 6 or 7 or 8 books in France.

3:AM: You just came back from Italy. Your granddad Nicola, the original storyteller of the Fante family, left Torricella for the US. Is going back to Italy going back to your roots?

DF: You know, it really is. I’ve gone back every year now, for at least 15 years, and it may be longer. But to that particular town I’ve gone back every year for 15 years . Italy is my ancestral home, so I go back to the village (laughs) of my grandfather, and it’s a shitty little village, about 1200 people, it’s wonderful, on the top of the mountain, and the inbreeding is obvious, before paved roads everybody was everybody else’s cousin..

3:AM: Do you get opportunities to read your work there?

DF: Oh yeah, I do. As a matter of fact RAI  (TV station) in Italy this Friday (5.9.2014) are supposed to air an interview I did just before I left that should be very good publicity-wise. I assume one of my friends there will send it to me. This last trip I did a tour. I did five cities but the most fun (I had) was when I did a reading with a fellow called Vinicio Cappesola who is extremely popular over there and we did it (reading) at a defunct railway station and it was at a festival and it was charming, possibly a couple of thousand people there, it was really great. Then I did four more readings around Italy, driving my wife and child around…

3:AM: They must have enjoyed that…

DF: It was a lot of fun. Then I have a couple of more books coming out over there in the next year so that should be great. My memoir hasn’t appeared yet in Italy, apparently just because of who Harper Collins is in America they want a high price for the rights. But once that memoir is out that should be very good.

3:AM: Do you feel your books are received better in Italy because of your ‘Italian connection’?

DF: I don’t know, I don’t pay attention to that. Yes, I sell better in France than anywhere else, and I sell pretty well in the UK, and also in Italy.

3:AM: Not enough in Germany though.

DF: If you’ve done your homework you know that I’ve had a German publisher and he went out of business.

3:AM: They published  Chump Change.

DF: Yeah, that’s right. It’s too bad because that is a great book but it did not get the kind of publicity I was hoping it would get. So I’m delighted to do this interview.

3:AM: You should have a larger publisher (in Germany) who can give you the kind of backing Harper Collins are giving you.

DF: It’s an odd thing when you are with a large publisher; it’s like working for a huge corporation. You just have to jump through certain hoops and there seems to be a lot of bureaucracy. So we are trying to get this straightened out, especially (for my) memoir in Italy.

3:AM: Not that your books shouldn’t have a merit in their own rights, but with you writing about your dad (John Fante) who is more popular in Germany with his Bandini saga being available in a Goldmann paperback I can see that readers have a starting point there to get into your work.

DF: How does my dad sell in Germany, does he sell well?

3:AM: Most of the large bookshops I visit seem to stock a copy of the ‘Bandini Quartett’ but I have no sell-through figures. I know people in Germany who are passionate fans of your dad’s work, and it annoys me that they don’t know you. And it’s hard to back a recommendation up without a local book because their English isn’t always great.

DF: Yeah.

3:AM: Could you talk about Point Doom your mystery novel. Do you feel it did what it should have done for you. In the US?

DF: No. The short answer is no. The state of the publishing business as you probably know is in flux and the money they could have put into Point Doom to publicise it (they didn’t)… It got excellent reviews as did my memoir. My memoir got a full page review in the Los Angeles Times. And a great review and sold a staggering 10,000 copies.

3:AM: That’s fantastic. Do you have plans for further mystery novels or was this a one off?

DF: I’m actually writing a sequel to Point Doom now. And in fact I’m 90% sure that it will be a TV series as well.

3:AM: You have experience of that world through your work as a private eye in New York. Is that what influences your mystery writing?

DF: Through painful personal experience. I’ve written several screenplays based on my work. There is a screenplay for instance. And they intend to do a film based on Chump Change called (Les ???). And then here the TV series based on Point Doom is in works and then the movie actor Kiefer Sutherland has signed a contract to play Bruno in my second novel Mooch, and so we are looking for a lead actress for that. So we are hopeful that there should be some films based on my work, for sure in France, and most definitely in America.

3:AM: Your prose would lend itself so naturally to film, because it creates images in the mind of the reader, really strong images all the time. Mooch  especially did that for me. I still can’t forget that character Jimi.

DF: Yeah, that’s a great character. And I was fortunate enough to write the screenplay for that, and it’s probably unavoidable that the power of those characters will translate to film, but one never knows. Once you’ve signed the papers and written the screenplay it’s not up to you anymore, you’re paid and they do what they want to do.

3:AM: Your artistic control is not the same as you have over a book you author from start to finish. Something else I wanted to touch on is that your books are often described as hard-hitting, take- no-prisoners. But one thing for me is that they are also quite funny. And I wonder whether that is out of the sheer bleakness of many of the moments, or whether comedy is part of your style, something you are conscious of during writing?

DF: You know, I’ve read what you and I would call ‘bleak authors’, C éline and several more. When one is writing about conflict and sadness and very personal degradation, then if there is not humor in it doesn’t (work), you just can’t bludgeon the reader for 300 pages with bleakness, you lose the reader, so always it’s a balance for me of humor and the declaration of the issues of my character.  You know: I have to have humour otherwise I just put people to sleep or just make them miserable. That’s not my intent.

3:AM: And I don’t think that’s how your books come across. Because of how unflinching your books are there is this cathartic feeling. I want to talk about your dad now, if you don’t mind. When you first started to write Chump Change  your first foray into fiction, did you feel you were going into your dad’s territory and was he an inner critic for you?

DF: That particular book, which is still my favourite, was written at a time of great personal upheaval, and I guess madness is probably the best word for it. I was suicidal and very crazy and unemployable, and emotionally just at the end of my rope. I began to write that book simply as therapy, so I wouldn’t blow my brains out. That book is just about as raw as literature comes, at least from my point of view, because writing it helped save my life, saved my sanity.

3:AM: And I was wondering , when you discovered that writing has this power to clear your mind, to take your thoughts out of that negative self-punishing cycle, what did that feel like, that writing can save you like that?

DF: It’s really interesting, it was not conscious, the cycle of madness and depression was so pervasive, that when I found my father’s typewriter, and some of his typing paper, I did it just to shut the screaming up in my mind, and as I began to write it I didn’t feel relieved, I felt something opening up for me, something I could do rather than think about. It was therapy. Rather than think about the shithole that my life had become. I wrote it fairly quickly, but you know it took a couple of drafts. I also wasn’t a good typist.

3:AM: And your mother, she was an accomplished academic, very well read, read more voraciously than your father…

DF: Read more than anyone I ever met. They used to say that Jack Kennedy, the former president, could read 1200 words a minute. If you just turned pages, slipped them slowly, that’s how fast she could read. She just turned a page, then paused, then flipped, so she just devoured words. And she happened to have been a very decent editor and she helped to edit a lot of my father’s work and she was also a much better typist than I, so she edited my first book and typed the manuscript for me and that’s how it all began. She was very interesting, she was very enthusiastic on Thursday, a week later she’d say “I refuse to have another writer in my life, I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

3:AM: That’s strong stuff…

DF:  We had that tug-o-war mother and son (relationship).

3:AM: Was her approval important to you? From her well read, academic perspective?

DF: No, it wasn’t. But she was furious with me for sending it to someone else. I sent it to a friend of my father’s, who was in the movie business and she said “he is an imbecile and how dare you do that when I’m sitting here in the same house with you.” She said “I’ll edit the book.” My mother was a very strong willed person.

3:AM: I guess she had to be a strong person to hold her own next to your father, as you describe, in your biography?

DF: She had to have infinite patience and forbearance because he was an unusual guy.

3:AM: Did you take anything else from her? In your biography you mention how your dad paid you $5 to read Jack London. But your mom’s constant reading, did that play its part in getting you into books?

DF: They were both in love with literature but for different reasons. It’s an interesting dichotomy because Joyce, she was just an avid reader and would consume almost anything. She’d just read a book, if there was a book lying around she’d pick it up and read it. My father was much more selective. And so my sense of literature and my appreciation for literature comes from my father but my propensity for books comes from my mother. I was not as a young man or as a boy particularly interested in books but then I became interested and that changed everything for me. My mother was very encouraging, but it was my father’s example as a writer, his sensibility (that taught me to appreciate writing). You can’t of course teach anybody how to write but their sensibilities towards literature is something that can be communicated and my father was unavoidable, his passion with words and the way they were put down on paper was very important to him. He was very articulate and aggressive about his appreciation…. Or (my) lack of appreciation (for good literature)… I once brought a book in by some American writer whose name escapes me, one of these guys with 60 books, you know, pulp mysteries, and my father saw me come in with the book and he wouldn’t allow the book in the house, he said “get that shit out of my house!” I know who it was – it was Sydney Sheldon!

3:AM: Sydney Sheldon, can’t blame him!

DF: “Get that shit out of my house! Don’t ever bring that back! Put it in the garage! Read it in your car!”

3:AM: That’s the kind of stuff my parents used to read. Robert Ludlum.

DF: It’s like watching sitcoms, it’s kind of mindless. I won’t say like Stephen King… It’s a step down from Stephen King.

3:AM: Back to your dad. His passion for writing. You said you took from him that he was just a writer. He didn’t write for anything else except for that he had to. He was a writer, he kept writing, even if he got no recognition for it, got rejected.

DF: Think of him as a wonderful violinist or piano player. He had to play his instrument, and that’s what he did. And that’s what I do. Once you’re a writer… You have to write. That’s what I do. People build houses and design aircraft. I have to design books. I have to put my thoughts on paper and it’s something that, thank God, over time has become a wonderful gift. It’s my life’s work. It’s a gift for anyone, if we all have a purpose on this planet, certainly one of the top one or two (tasks) is to find the thing we’re supposed to do in this life and dedicate ourselves to that. I, like my father, am gifted in the sense that I discovered what I should do. He had a harder time with it than I did. But we both come from the same place. When you are an artist and you can sustain yourself at it it’s gosh, you know it’s wonderful.

3:AM: Yeah it must be. And I thought about a parallel between you and your dad in the sense that he couldn’t write for years or decades because he was screenwriting and he needed it for his lifestyle, or to make a living. And you couldn’t, because you were struggling with your demons, your addiction, your jobs. So both of you were very much unlike other typical writers who start very young and have 40 or 50 or 60 years of just being productive. But it seems to me both of you were productive when it mattered. And you are now, of course. Being productive at the right time. Did you know at some point that your time as a writer had come, after living through all your shit?

DF: No, I didn’t. I came to writing through the process of painful elimination of other careers. I used to own a limousine company in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, very successful company, I drank away. And I was one of the heads, vice presidents, of a big telemarketing firm in the 80s and made a lot of money and I drank that away. So I had at least three careers that didn’t survive my booze problem and I stumbled on writing because there was nowhere else to go, no more doors to open and I had nothing to do, I was unemployable, owned an awful old car and all I could do was walk to my 12-step meetings, and I stumbled on writing, and I found my father’s typewriter in in a garage and some paper and I just started typing. And the stuff started to pour out. And rather than blow my brains out I became a writer.

3:AM: That was your destiny, your spiritual way. You had three careers and another one now – your most important one as a  writer Other  people don’t have one career like the ones you had. Did you feel that you had to destroy these three careers to get to where you were  meant to be, is that your spiritual way, perhaps your way to God?

DF: I think so. I think that certainly in my own spiritual awareness I came to understand after the fact that all these other things had to be eliminated in order for me to find what I could do. I don’t recommend that kind of a process to anyone – in the next room was a loaded gun. But you know that was a long time ago, that was 28 years ago.

3:AM: You say that you wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but maybe if they wanted to be the writer that you are you should recommend it.

DF: The people I know who had the problem with substance abuse and madness that I had, those people aren’t walking around. I mean it was just the grace of spirits that I found this because my brother drank himself to death. This is a deadly and pernicious disease that runs through my family. I just somehow survived it.

3:AM: I want to touch on German writing. You recommend some of the writers that were influential in your life at the back of your Harper Collins editions and there were two German language originals, one Hesse’s Demian which I believe a girlfriend gave you in New York, the other Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Were there any others? Did you pick anything else up from your mother who is of part German ancestry and taught herself to speak German.

DF: I’m not sure of that. She was self-taught. She was half-German. Her mother’s maiden name was Runkel (Germanic: Runckel)… Might have been von Runkel, I’m not sure. She taught herself in the middle of her life. My mother would take up stamp collecting or she would just acquire on a whim she would begin to do things, and so she was walking around the house speaking German (laughs), and she was quite good at it. And I didn’t know what she was saying but clearly the inflection of German is inescapable when someone is annoyed and speaking German (laughs) she delighted me in that way! But I think, who wrote Perfume?

3:AM: Patrick Süskind.

DF: I love that book. And of course Kafka had a huge influence on me. I can’t think of anybody else off the top of my head but I’m sure there are more.

3:AM: Do you feel that there are any contemporary writers that are worth going into a bookshop for? Or not really?

DF: You know I have a friend, not sure if he is published in German, Mark Safranko (spells it out) who wrote a book called Hating Olivia and he’s a good friend and I really enjoy his work. Oh, and I’ve been reading Thomas Harris of the Hannibal books, just for my own research for my character in Point Doom. He’s quite a fine writer Thomas Harris, very nice. And it’s not my metier but in fact in researching Point Doom I read a lot of detective books of which I think (John) Connolly is probably the best in terms of maintaining the quality of his work. Dean Koontz, there are a couple of his books that are quite good, and Dean is either quite good or awful, that’s the problem with Dean Koontz. I’m just talking about writers who motivated me recently. I’m reading Thomas Harris now because I find him to be a remarkably good writer for somebody who writes in genre fiction.

3:AM: Do you look at literary fiction that is celebrated and think that doesn’t deserve to be celebrated the way it does?

DF: I don’t. I started Thomas Harris 20 years after he was celebrated. I think what’s selling well on the book stands is really… I’m searching for a word… The publishing industry is just pulp fiction… My wife just finished reading that Middle Eastern writer… Khaled Hossaini… She set the book down and I pick it up and some of it is quite good. I found him to be a fine writer but he doesn’t sustain his narrative and he goes off on different paths and loses the momentum of the book… My wife said it was arduous… The key, the one ingredient in all my work is that my narrative doesn’t slack off, it continues, and it builds, and there is no flashing forward or flashing back and so it’s a first person narrative and one of the things that I didn’t even realise, but that I find a wonderful by-product of that, is that people tell me they read my books in one sitting and that’s how a book could be and should be read. That I like very much. God bless people who are making money off pulp fiction. I’m in favour of writers and I hope they all sell books. It’s just not my style.

3:AM: It’s certainly harder to read Franzen’s Corrections or a book by Salman Rushdie in one sitting. You’d certainly need a much more comfortable chair.

DF: It depends on as a writer what you are trying to achieve. Rushdie is a good writer but he can’t sustain my interest for more than 20 minutes at a time. I can’t read him. Unfortunately, I’m a very intolerant reader. If a book doesn’t capture my interest and sustain it then I just put it down. I have probably read 10 pages of 20,000 books.

3:AM: I know what you mean. I started off reading as a teenager, long books by Thomas Mann for example. When I moved to England and was introduced to a different kind of fiction, English and American fiction, and then got introduced by an editor and friend in London to your dad and then to you, it spoilt my appetite for long-winded sentence authors like Rushdie. Or Franzen. After reading Chump Change I tried to read Midnight’s Children  and didn’t get past the first two pages.

DF: Especially a guy like Franzen who is certainly a capable writer but I… Gosh… Can’t help but think.. And I don’t want to be unkind but I think his books are 200 pages too long.

3:AM: I find it frustrating that literary fiction establishments celebrate a certain type of heady fiction that comes from the brain rather than the guts.

DF: Now you are in a very interesting area. The ‘literary establishment’ in the United States comes from Eastern universities and people who have their roots there, and there is a kind of a literary ethic that’s propounded by those people, the intelligentsia in universities, people who by the way are not fucking writers – they teach literature or they comment on it and guys like Franzen are the darlings of these people because it’s a kind of an intellectual exercise that is somehow gratifying. I don’t want to say it’s elitist; I think it probably is elitist.  It’s not the literature of the people, it doesn’t sustain itself and yet it gets a wonderful reception and God bless him, God bless Franzen, I hope he buys another sports car.

3:AM: I’m sure he will (both laugh)! Do you feel that the American reader is fundamentally different to a European reader? A lot of German fiction still lacks action, plot, there are lots of descriptions so it wouldn’t translate even to the UK market because there is nothing happening in those sort of books, other than someone looking at a chair.

DF: There is a similarity in French literature as well. Contemporary French literature is often academic in the sense that it’s kind of a self-study or a self-evolution in words and that has its place. I think because America is so crazy that is had lead itself to the aberration of writers who are more edgy. Also I’m not as popular in Italy as more classic writers so I’m not sure. Although Bukowski does quite well in Italy… I’m not sure about that market. I’m an edgy writer:  my stuff either appeals to you or it doesn’t and that’s ok with me. But the people who it appeals to are devoted. And I’m gratified of that.

3:AM: Recently Philip Roth gave a long interview with the BBC which he said would be his last. In it he said that after living in England for a period of time he missed, what you just described of the madness of American life. Do you miss that when outside of the US? Can you work outside social conflict?

DF: For several years my wife and I moved from Los Angeles to Sedona, Arizona, which is a stunningly beautiful place, but you know filled with retirees and I wrote a book or two books there. I think because of the nature of my work, and the experiential nature of it, I don’t have a problem wherever I am, writing. But now we are speaking about where literature is fostered and the climate and America is a crazy place and it allows for such a broad swathe of interest in literature and there is room for people like Bukowski and myself and my father and guys like Jerry Stahl. Jerry is a wonderful writer. It’s the unrest of America, it’s the dissatisfaction, the continuing kind of personal revolution that is somehow fostered in America by the change… All this affluence breeds a lot of discontent, and a lot of decadence. I think that America has cornered the market on decadence.

3:AM: While on the socio-political side of the interview, what’s your opinion of Obama? What has he done for you?

DF: I’m a big fan of Obama. And that’s becoming a rarer and rarer point of view. Obama, sadly, he is a black man and racism in America has turned on him. The congress in his first term, the political spectrum just turned on Obama. I think he’s a thoughtful effective guy, slightly indecisive, but my God: he’s had such issues to deal with, but for the given task he’s done a really excellent job. I’m a big fan of Obama.

3:AM: What about apathy? Is it prevalent in voters in the same way that people are disinterested in literary fiction?

DF: There is a religious component, a radical, almost fundamentalist as is ISIS, is the right wing in American politics – it’s very scary. I see America as kind of torn into two halves and people are either really righteous or intolerant or they are open and expectant and optimistic. And we’ve got very difficult situations that we involve ourselves in. The last president got us into the Middle East and now we are up to the top of our boots in the 12th century and I think ISIS’ point of view is to make America spend all its money on fighting them. I really believe that they wanna goad us into the expenditure of effort and energy I think literally that’s their goal to get America involved there and keep us involved there for whatever fundamentalist jihadist advocacy. I don’t understand it but there it is: a terrible economic problem for this country.

3:AM: Here in the UK I see people going to fight in Iraq or Syria, of Pakistani origin for example, who have grown up surrounded by British western values all their lives and suddenly turn radical and go off to fight for these crazy motherfuckers.

DF: Yes and it is almost inscrutable. How people could be exposed to education and art and literature and a free-flowing society and use the option of fundamentalism and anger and rage… As I said it’s real 12th century stuff. It’s the new world. When the Russians were in Afghanistan someone said they will never win, and the blood will be drained from their bodies, and that’s what’s going on with the US, we will never win there, we‘ll spend billions for the righteousness of whatever, in the name of whatever rather than leave people alone, so there we are. Fortunately I don’t go there, I really try to be as apolitical as I can. I try not to watch the news because it’s upsetting, and I have my own work and my own life.

3:AM: Going back from the world stage to your home. You live outside of Los Angeles now?

DF: My wife and son and I live in West Los Angeles.

3:AM: To you is Los Angeles a sad flower in the sand, as it was for your dad? Does it still instill longing in you?

DF: I love the perspective of 1931 with my father, who used to talk about Los Angeles and it was this thriving community that just kept spreading into the desert, with more shopping centers and more little towns. And now it’s a megalopolis with 13 million people here. It really is quite crowded and quite scary. But the saving grace for me is that I live near the ocean and I walk near the ocean. I keep it real simple. My life thank God is quite simple. I associate with artistic people; Los Angeles, fortunately many artists live here, there are no pockets of it like in Rome and Paris but it’s very spread out, and my friends are artists and I really enjoy my life near the ocean.

3:AM: Your beaches and ocean are wonderful.

DF: The weather is nice and I try to stay off the freeway and I no longer carry a gun. So I am just a kind of a peaceful guy meandering around the craziest city in the world. But as long as I can get to the water and as long as my wife doesn’t change the locks on the front door I’m a happy guy.

3:AM: I understand that. You have your family and your gift as a writer and are a blessed man.

DF: Listen, this is a good life. And I don’t come from that. I come from if it’s not bleeding or breaking there is something wrong. That’s a long time behind me. I have my work and family and my health, thank God,  and that’s the most important.

3:AM: Your Bruno Dante novels… You said were what you had to say. And Point Doom is kind of you playing around with…

DF:… With a form. I’m entertained by that. I don’t know if I’ll write another Bruno Dante book. I may. I’ve been thinking about it off and on for a year or so. I may write another one. I’ve written the important books I want to write and now I love to write just good entertaining fiction just because I enjoy it  – I enjoy the process.

3:AM: So you are writing the books you’d like to read?

DF: Yeah, exactly.

3:AM: Is it slightly different now…  Is there less at stake now when you write as compared to your earlier writing?

DF: Yeah, I think so. I think I do it less as a testimonial and more as something that’s fun to do. I enjoy reading good books that aren’t necessarily cathartic, I’m doing some of that now. And that may bore me and I may go back to another Bruno book, there is one more, now that you brought it up and we are discussing it, there is one more Bruno book.

3:AM: That would be fantastic. I don’t even want to think about that, that would be so amazing for a fan.

DF: Jan, I must go.

3:AM: Lovely to talk to you. Bye.

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ABOUT THE  INTERVIEWER

Jan Nasrullah Rylewicz grew up in Northern Germany. He has worked in academic publishing servicing customers in the Middle East for over ten years. In his spare time he is singer/ songwriter in the two-piece folk punk-cum-comedy band Pioneers of Green, however at the center of his life is his 6-year old daughter. He lives in Reading, Berkshire.

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