At the Corner of West 5th Street and South Grand in Downtown L.A.

It’s just outside the Central Library, a square (actually, just an intersection) dedicated to the Los Angeles writer John Fante (1909-1983). He is not well known outside of Los Angeles, In fact, he is not well known in Los Angeles either. Fortunately, Charles Bukowski made sure he was not forgotten:

I was a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer. I did most of my reading at the downtown L.A. Public Library, and nothing that I read related to me or to the streets or to the people about me.”

Then one day I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.

This was in Bukowski’s introduction to the book he describes, John Fante’s Ask the Dust.

Having read four of Fante’s novels, I have to agree. I have just finished Dreams from Bunker Hill, the last of the novels featuring Arturo Bandini, the author’s stand-in for himself. Toward the end of his life, Fante became blind from diabetes; and he dictated the novel to his wife, Joyce.

As I find myself at the Central Library fairly often, I take some pleasure crossing John Fante square and remembering the writer who gave us an inimitable portrait of Los Angeles in his novels.