The Beer Bandini Won't Drink: John Fante's Comic Timing
Discusses scenes from chapters 4–6 of Ask the Dust and chapter 1 of Wait Until Spring, Bandini, without discussing either ending.
Among the injuries that Arturo Bandini records in Ask the Dust is the generosity of Camilla Lopez. Having learned from him that he cannot afford a beer, she takes a few coins from her smock and buys him one; he reports the transaction with the brevity of someone who considers its cruelty evident. “It hurt me,” he says. The disproportion is comic, though it becomes less easy to dismiss when we consider what he had wanted from this woman. He had hoped for admiration, and she had discovered a man who needed a drink. The beer is useful to the man she has found and offensive to the man he had hoped she would find.
Earlier that day he had been weeping in his room, weary of the oranges on which he lived and of the reassuring lies he had written to his mother. He composed a letter admitting the lies and his failure, and asking for the money to come home. A neighbor then repaid fifteen cents; Bandini ate cookies, reserved enough for coffee, tore up the letter and remained in Los Angeles. It would be difficult to assign the change to a newly acquired conviction about his literary future. Fante has specified the smaller, bodily inducement, and has thereby made Camilla’s later generosity reasonable to everyone except its recipient. She offers relief to a poverty which, a little earlier, had nearly sent him home; he is offended to have that poverty noticed by her.
Her approach to his table had already subjected his imagination to a similar inconvenience. At a distance she had conferred holiness on the Columbia Buffet’s furniture, its sawdust, even its cleaning rag, and he had imagined falling asleep with her torn sandals against his chest. Upon arriving, she looked at his freckles and bitten fingernails. His hands went into his pockets, and the woman whom he had been adoring became a woman against whom he had to defend himself. We need suppose no extraordinary change in Camilla to explain this reversal. Crossing the saloon, she had been available to his invention; at the table she could examine him, speak to him and pay for something he could not afford. Fante permits her these ordinary activities before Bandini has secured her agreement to the part he has assigned her.
He tells her to take the beer away. A call from the back of the saloon interrupts the exchange, and she leaves to collect empty mugs; meanwhile, he discovers a spittoon beneath the table and conceives a reply which requires her presence. He waits until she is looking, then pours the beer into it. The interval interests me as much as the waste. Refusing to drink would have deprived him of the beer, but could have left her uncertain of his meaning; by obtaining her attention first, he ensures that the rejection reaches the person for whom it is intended. His narration includes this precaution with a candor that allows us to observe his vanity at work rather than merely be informed that he possesses it.
Camilla’s answer has preparations of its own. She disappears behind the kitchen partition and returns with something concealed, followed by a grinning old man. The object is the magazine containing Bandini’s first published story, The Little Dog Laughed. He had revised its inscription before settling on a tribute to her ragged shoes and an invitation to recognize a masterpiece; he had also interrupted the old man’s mopping to insist on a personal delivery. Now the messenger has returned as a spectator. Camilla locates the pages, tears them out, holds them up and tears them into smaller pieces, while the old man nods his approval. An editor, J. C. Hackmuth, has accepted the story, but that judgment has acquired no binding force in the Columbia Buffet. Bandini watches a woman and an old man dispose of the evidence on which he had relied.
Two destroyed texts occur in this part of the novel, and their opposition is exact enough to deserve attention. The letter to his mother admitted defeat; after eating, he could destroy it himself and stay in the city. The printed story certified a success, and its destruction is undertaken by somebody else, in front of him. His narration gathers its phrases and scraps of poetry into “all that was good in me.” His estimate of the story is as extravagant as his hurt over the beer, yet the publication exists, and the hunger exists, and neither need be forgotten in order to find him ridiculous. Camilla is tearing up something on which a young man has expended both his labor and a considerable portion of his hope.
Vanity would explain much of his behavior, though it would leave unexplained the duration Fante gives to these retaliations. Each could be stated in a few words; each is instead allowed its preliminaries, its waiting, its assurance that the other person will see. The old man’s passage from messenger to approving spectator prolongs the second humiliation still further. We have time to laugh at Bandini’s precautions and to feel the hurt for which those precautions have prepared him. His absurdity does not make his suffering imaginary, any more than his suffering makes Camilla’s purchased beer an act of malice.
Their next encounter nearly repairs the exchange. Camilla runs after him when he leaves, apologizes and asks him to return tomorrow, glancing toward the saloon, where she has work to do and risks being fired. When he calls her back, both run to meet halfway. He looks at the sandals he had wished to hold against his chest and speaks slowly, using her Mexican identity to insult her. The different speeds are worth preserving in any account of the scene: she is hurrying between an apology and her employment, while he takes time over the words that will send her away. The sandals have remained the same. His earlier adoration offers no protection to the woman wearing them.
Racial contempt enlarges the cruelty beyond their personal quarrel. An American birth enables him to claim a superiority which the woman, the story and the beer have failed to procure for him. Outside, celebrating his country and its civilization, he smokes a cigarette butt retrieved from the gutter. Later, alone in his room, he remembers the abuse he suffered as an Italian boy in Colorado, and the patriotic exaltation subsides into shame. His appeal to the absent Camilla is tender and eloquent. As his own narrator he can preserve that eloquence beside the insult, and can ask us to consider the childhood misery which she has not been given the opportunity to hear. The reader’s knowledge of him has become more extensive than hers; whether it should also make our judgment more indulgent remains a question the sequence makes difficult to evade.
One might infer from these incidents that the Bandinis require a favorable opinion of themselves. A bedroom conversation in Wait Until Spring, Bandini, where Arturo is still a child, obliges us to amend the proposition. His father, Svevo, is offended by his wife Maria’s belief that he is good. He has lost ten dollars at poker and, lying beside her, wishes she possessed some defect large enough to excuse his own. Other women, remembered with their faults, would have made the lost money easier to contemplate. Maria’s goodness leaves him without this consolation; her good opinion of him will shortly become a further grievance.
She tells him that Arturo has pushed his brother’s head through the kitchen window. Having treated the cut, she is ready to defend the boy, whereas Svevo wants to know what punishment she has administered. His objection to her parenting leads her to remind him of his own childhood, and he protests that he never put a brother’s head through a window. Her reply is exact: “You didn’t have any brothers, Svevo. But you pushed your father down the steps and broke his arm.” The innocence he has claimed depends, in part, on a relative who did not exist. He begins to explain, then tells her to forget it. Maria continues to find grounds for defending Arturo: her husband’s misconduct has not, after all, prevented him from turning out well.
This verdict provokes an appeal to more qualified judges. Women had called him vicious, selfish and dangerous, and one of them had attended the University of Colorado; Maria had failed even to finish high school. Her brother and sister had the qualifications she lacked. The missing diploma recurs in Svevo’s thoughts until a question about his character has become an inquiry into his wife’s education. Here the third-person prose adopts the persistence of his grievance, allowing the credentials to accumulate well beyond any reasonable need to mention them. Maria remembers enough to spoil his claim to an innocent childhood, yet admires him too much to grant him the reputation of a scoundrel. Her errors, as he conceives them, have an inconvenient consistency.
The resemblance to Arturo now seems closer, although a simple wish for praise will no longer describe it. The son asks a woman to admire a published writer; the father prefers the recollection of an educated woman who thought him dangerous. Camilla tears up the evidence of Arturo’s merit, and Maria remembers the evidence of Svevo’s misconduct without drawing the conclusion he would prefer. Each man has chosen a reputation which another person declines to confirm. Their complaints give the other person a peculiar importance: having already pronounced upon themselves, they still need to hear the desired verdict from a voice they do not control.
There is, however, an earlier movement in the bedroom conversation which prevents Svevo’s reasoning from becoming an exhaustive description of him. After Maria’s reminder about his father, before the dispute over goodness and education, he draws closer and presses his face into her hair. He thinks he can still smell the chloroform she brought home after the birth of their third child, ten years before. Maria denies the odor; nobody else can detect it. To him it recalls the hospital night when, after she had nearly died, he bent to kiss her. Fante leaves the smell disputed and the remembered tenderness intact. Neither requires a conclusion about the quality of Maria’s judgment or the standing of her education.
I would hesitate to treat this recollection as the discovery of a truer Svevo concealed beneath the ridiculous one. Its place in the conversation makes such a preference unnecessary: the man who remembers the hospital will resume defending his childhood and will proceed to the diploma his wife never earned. Nor has Arturo’s eloquence in solitude removed the words he spoke in the street. Fante has allowed us to know these men beyond the occasions on which they seek to be admired or feared, without suppressing the occasions themselves; in the bedroom, the last question belongs to Maria, who wants to know whether her husband is warm enough.
Sources
John Fante, Ask the Dust. Canongate digital edition, 2008, ISBN 9781847673657. Chapters 4–6, especially the complete Columbia Buffet encounter in chapter 5.
John Fante, Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Ecco e-book, 2010, ISBN 9780062013170. Chapter 1, Svevo and Maria's conversation about Arturo, in the publisher's preview.
Brian McHale, Speech Representation, The Living Handbook of Narratology, revised April 8, 2014. Definition of free indirect discourse.
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