Point Dume

On the Trail of Henry Miller and John Fante

“I love everything that flows,” Henry Miller once wrote, before turning to a graphic and ultimately misogynist metaphor to drive his point home. Among things that flow we must surely count the writing of Belgian novelist Daphné Tamage (see, notably, her Le retour de Saturne, which we love). By her own account Daphné’s literary sensibility was significantly shaped by Miller, alongside John Fante and other of those mid-century American purveyors of what is sometimes called “dirty realism”. What is it like to commune with these bad boys, or with the ghosts of these bad boys, as a European, as a woman, as the daughter of a supremely gentle father? Why chase after them, after all this time, across all this distance, geographical and temperamental? Let’s let Daphne explain, in this poignant reflection on her recent literary pilgrimage in California, dad perched in the passenger seat like Steinbeck’s own Charley. —The Editors

“One day I’ll be a legend of crustacean mythology” —John Fante, The Road to Los Angeles (1936)

Just before the reelection of T., I dragged my poor father from San Francisco to Los Angeles by way of Carmel, Big Sur, and Cambria. The idea was to drive down Highway 1 over the course of ten days and to tick off all the must-sees. Wanting to spare my father, a beekeeper, the sight of any of that urban violence for which he was constitutionally unprepared, I decided that once we reached LA we would sleep up in the hills of Topanga Canyon. More honestly, my aim was to place myself halfway between Pacific Palisades and Point Dume, where my two unassailable heroes of youth had settled: Henry Miller and John Fante. Heroes? In fact —and in a sense this was worse— they were my models, mentors who would later, through an improbable lineage, give my writing a kind of pre-chewed shape and my drive a direction. I owed a great deal, then, to those two ambivalent, self-absorbed, megalomaniacal, and questionable authors. Men, at that.

When we reached the Point Dume promontory, our bellies distended with clam chowder from Malibu Seafood, my father panicked at the sight of the “Armed Security” signs —black pistols on white backgrounds— planted in every close-cropped lawn along Cliffside Drive.

“Chérichou, I don’t feel very comfortable,” my father said as he slowed down, while I scanned the street for a parking space.

“This isn’t a private neighborhood, Dad. We’re allowed to be here.”

“I don’t like it. And I thought your writer was poor,” he said, pointing at some stately property.

“He was poor, but he worked for Hollywood and became rich. That’s the American Dream: starting from nothing and ending up here.”

After a moment’s thought, my father asked, “But why do you want to see his house?”

“Because he’s a genius.”

“His genius is in his books, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I need for him to know that I came all this way to see him. Maybe his soul stayed at Point Dume.”

A small voice inside me said that John Fante’s soul was more likely hanging around on the neighboring golf course, at Musso & Frank, or at the casino.

“And you think he cares that you’re looking for his soul?”

“Affirmative.”

My father, for whom writers are deeply unsettling people, yet who had nonetheless been promising me this trip for fifteen years while endlessly postponing it, didn’t say a word and went along with my wish to circle the neighborhood. After driving around Point Dume three times in search of a parking spot, he seriously began to fear that we’d be taken for thieves and that some overzealous homeowner would end up calling upon his expensive private security. I motioned for him to let it go, nor did I insist that we stop by Joan Didion’s place, which would have finished him off for good. Before heading back toward the birds and wildness of Topanga, I did at least ask for a detour past 444 Ocampo Drive, as a tribute to Henry Miller. It was just before the fires; the neighborhood was bland and immaculate, but I was moved to see that the two trees recognizable from old photographs were still flourishing against the façade. Dad took a picture of me in front of the house and we got back on the road.

My plan at the beginning had been far more ambitious than mere passage through two terribly dull neighborhoods: it had been to drag my poor father all the way to the port of Long Beach, in hope of finding the beach from the so-called “crab scene” in The Road to Los Angeles. But the night before he had been outraged to see people sleeping on the ground between Marina del Rey and Venice. He couldn’t understand “how it was possible that nobody did anything for them,” “how people could be left to die on the beach,” “how it was possible to live in those outrageously expensive houses lining the fake canals knowing that broken people were losing their lives just a few yards from their automated sprinkler systems,” and so on. I told him I didn’t know, that the United States had its own way of sorting human beings and that the sorting was done according to the size of their wallets, but that we weren’t necessarily any better back home — even if, it had to be admitted, the contrast between luxury and misery in Los Angeles was particularly jarring.

So I scaled back my plans for the evening and we headed toward Topanga. My father perked up instantly, and in my head I said goodbye to the idea of climbing up to Bunker Hill the next morning. We’d go see the old Hollywoodland stairs and the Observatory. Out there, everything would be fine. In the meantime, we were stuck in traffic.

“Why did you want to see this particular port?” my father suddenly asked.

“A mythical scene takes place there. John Fante’s literary double, Arturo Bandini, massacres crabs on a rocky beach.”

My father, who loved animals, went pale.

“You wanted to go to the site of a massacre?”

“An imaginary massacre, Dad. He didn’t actually kill those crabs.”

“So you want to see a place where someone wrote that he killed crabs but where, in reality, he didn’t kill any crabs?”

I nodded.

“And why is that important? I mean, Hearst Castle — I get why you wanted to visit that, even if… well, I’m not saying anything, the place is impressive, the guy lived there and all that, then Rosebud, blah blah. But an imaginary slaughter, Chérichou — seriously?”

My father didn’t press the point. We stayed silent — he telling himself that he was clearly having trouble understanding the daughter he had brought into the world, I asking myself a more fundamental question: why, throughout history, have writers made pilgrimages in the footsteps of other writers? Where did this tradition we were perpetuating despite ourselves come from? And above all, why did we perpetuate it in vain? Had Fante’s soul come to speak to mine at Point Dume? Miller’s at Pacific Palisades? No — neither had come. The only thing reaching me at that moment were the exhaust fumes from the car in front of us.

“I think,” I finally said, “that the delirious anger of that scene lives in all of us. Fante was 21 when he wrote it; he wanted to become the greatest American writer of his generation, and he let himself go in that violence. He’d read Nietzsche, we’re in the turmoil of the interwar years — he’s completely unhinged. And even if it’s all rather problematic, when you’re that age and you read something like that…”

“You feel like massacring crabs?”

“Like becoming a writer. Because the freedom he allows himself is so unheard-of, the excess so thunderous inside you, that you sense writing offers a kind of intoxication unattainable by any other means — and that it can only be transmitted through reading.”

“And did you reach it, that famous intoxication, by becoming a novelist?”

I shook my head no as we zigzagged through the canyon.

“But I can feel it, a sort of anticipation,” I added.

“And that’s enough to build a body of work? A presentiment?”

“Those seven pages of pure anger were powerful enough for me to remember them exactly ten years later. I tell myself that if I work hard enough, that presentiment —or that foreknowledge of a certain form of joy— can be passed on like a lantern and light up anyone, anywhere in the world. That’s the power of literature, and of translation.”

My father shrugged.

“I still don’t understand how you can take pleasure in reading a guy who shoots crustaceans with a rifle.”

“It’s the power of his imagination that I admire, Dad, not the act itself. You do understand that Van Gogh’s distorted self-portrait is the painter’s vision of himself, not reality, right?”

“Of course, Chérichou, I’m not an idiot. What I’m trying to understand is why you want to go to a place where nothing happened except in that book.”

“Because Bandini blowing away crabs is mythical. Why do people spend fortunes on cruises that drop them off on the island of Ithaca, where there’s nothing, Dad? Because they want to see where Ulysses would have landed! Ulysses!”

“Sure, but it’s still not the same thing. People visit the Colosseum because there really were gladiator fights there. They can imagine them.”

I understood what my father was arguing, but there was something else he needed to take into account:

“At the end of his life,” I continued, “Fante could no longer see, and he’d had a leg amputated. And then —boom— Bukowski pulls him out of obscurity in the late seventies, and an entire generation rediscovers him almost forty years later! He ends up becoming, after having been that snarling, cruel, angry, hysterical man, the writer he had imagined himself to be when he wrote that scene. A dream that turns into reality — that’s the myth. And getting close to that myth, symbolically, means something. I can’t tell you what, but I know it matters.”

“And what if it’s just a phantasm?”

Dad parked the car and we walked over to the rental cabin. He pulled a Chimay Red from the fridge, picked up at the local hippie supermarket and, by sheer coincidence, brewed just a few miles from his home on the other side of the world.

The sun was setting behind the deck.

“Do you think there are coyotes?” my father asked, as I was jotting down the details of the day in a notebook.

“No, but I can decide there are, if you want,” I said, teasing him. “It was late, father and daughter had settled near the garden to admire the last rays over the Pacific, when…”

“You really think you’re all-powerful with your stories, don’t you? You know that outside people who read books, no one could care less about writers and dead-but-not-really-dead crabs? You know the world of finance doesn’t give a damn? You know the luxury world doesn’t give a damn? You know politics doesn’t give a damn? You know that…”

I nodded. I knew.

“I think,” he went on, “that you live in a parallel world because you refuse to look reality in the face, and because you’re incapable of accepting it.”

“We do look at it. But it isn’t enough for us. And in that insufficiency, only the status of the writer protects us. It’s our salvation. Well — that’s what we think. You know, like kids who want to become firefighters before they’ve ever climbed into a truck, or learned how to master fire. Writing is the same. For most of us, the dream of becoming a writer comes before the desire to write.”

My father rolled his eyes.

“As for me, I liked fishing from the moment I caught my first trout. Not before.”

“But the fact that you went fishing at all means that something in you suspected you might enjoy it.”

“Mmh.”

“So you did have a kind of vision. Or else your unconscious…”

“Chérichou.”

The conversation was drawing to a close. My father was saturated. I still got up to fetch the copy of My Dog Stupid that I had insisted on rereading on the plane, and I remained standing to read him the underlined passage:

I knew why I wanted that dog. It was shamelessly clear, but I could not tell the boy. It would have embarrassed me. But I could tell myself and it did not matter. I was tired of defeat and failure. I hungered for victory. I was fifty-five and there were no victories in sight, nor even a battle. Even my enemies were no longer interested in combat. Stupid was victory, the books I had not written, the places I had not seen, the Maserati I had never owned, the women I hungered for, Danielle Darrieux and Gina Lollobrigida and Nadia Grey. He was triumph over ex-pants manufacturers who had slashed my screenplays until blood oozed. He was my dream of great offspring with fine minds in famous universities, scholars with rich gifts for the world.

After a while, my father raised his head.

“Danielle Darrieux?”

To him, this was a woman from his grandfather’s generation. Apart from that incongruity, which had caught his attention, I didn’t know whether my father grasped the breath that ran through that passage, its vitality. Did he sense the delirious hope that this man was suddenly placing in his dog? The power to change not only his future, but also his past? Did my father understand how literature, here, was transfiguring life?

“Dad,” I began, trying to explain — but he cut me off with a wave of his hand and got up to pace through the undergrowth. “Dad?” I repeated.

My father simply put a finger to his lips. As the sun had already set, I watched him disappear and waited, in silence, for him to come back and tell me what on earth had got into him, and by what right he was sabotaging this brilliant passage from the book I was holding in my hands.

“Look, Chérichou,” he murmured in the darkness.

I raised my eyes toward the thicket. Two eyes, reflecting the light from the porch, were staring at me, motionless, some thirty meters away.

My father snapped a branch as he tried to move closer; the coyote fled.

“You see,” he said, pouring the last of his beer into the glass. “You didn’t need to write it down—it was already there.”