Imagine this. You’ve worked for years on this novel—one that is indisputably the best thing you’ve ever done. You manage to get a publisher to buy it. You start to get rave reviews. You sell out your first printing. Then suddenly, all the momentum evaporates. You talk to the clerk at a bookstore and he tells you the publisher has just stopped resupplying them. Within months, what should have been a beloved bestseller, slips into obscurity.
Why? Well, according to your editor it’s because they’ve been sued by Hitler over the rights to Mein Kampf...and a US Federal Court sided with the Nazis. And that is basically the end of your career as an author—at least it was for John Fante.
“I think the one thing that a writer must avoid is bitterness,” John Fante told the writer Ben Pleasants in an interview in 1979. “I think it’s the one fault that can destroy him. It can shrivel him up… I’ve fought it all my life.” His son, many years later, would reflect on how his father dealt with this incredibly unlucky and ill-timed setback.
I’m not naive enough to think good work always wins out in the end. There are plenty of painters who died in Auschwitz. I don’t necessarily think there is justice in the world, it’s that he had the strength of character not to let it break him.
No one would say John Fante was Stoic. He was often egotistical and vain and could hardly be called self-disciplined. But John Fante did respond to that those strokes of misfortune in his life with a poise that Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus couldn’t have helped but admired. It’s a good lesson for the rest of us: We can work really really hard on something. We can do everything right and more. And we can still get royally screwed. But we have to resist the temptation to see things that way, we can’t nurse a sense of aggrievement or bitterness. Because it will shrivel us up. That is what will break us.
