Ask the Dust, by John Fante
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. It seemed as if everybody was playing word-tricks, that those who said almost nothing at all were considered excellent writers. Their writing was an admixture of subtlety, craft and form, and it was read and it was taught and it was ingested and it was passed on. It was a comfortable contrivance, a very slick and careful Word-Culture.
That’s Charles Bukowski. This is the book he discovered in that library, the one that excited him as nothing else had managed. He was right to be excited.
Ask the Dust is the third in John Fante’s Bandini quartet; the second though to be published. I read the first, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, back in 2009. In my review at the time I talked about Wait’s emotional intensity and called it a triumph, and I was particularly impressed with its depiction of the fetid inner experience of adolescence (something the Adrian Mole books got terribly, terribly wrong and that my current read, Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything, also captures well).
As a rule I’m not a fan of coming-of-age stories. It’s one reason I don’t read any YA fiction. I’m even less of a fan though of stories about the difficulty of being a writer. Yes, being a writer is hard. So is being a checkout assistant at Tesco.
If there’s any rule I do believe about fiction though it’s that with enough talent the topic doesn’t really matter. Danilo Kiš wrote a superb book about being a young writer – so well written that I didn’t just forgive the hackneyed subject matter, I embraced it. John Fante does the same thing with Ask the Dust.
Arturo Bandini is living dirt poor in Los Angeles. He survives by eating oranges, so cheap he buys them by the sackful and eats almost nothing else. He knows he’s a great writer – he’s had a short story published and he keeps a suitcase full of copies of the magazine it was published in so that he can hand them out when needed.
Fante captures the sheer exhilaration of youth – your whole future before you, laid out and glittering. Arturo veers between grandiose hope and utter despair, wracked by hunger and unfulfilled lust. His head is filled with fantasies of his name on the library shelves next to Dreiser and Mencken, of his future fame and the respect it will bring:
Bandini (being interviewed prior to departure for Sweden): “My advice to all young writers is quite simple. I would caution them never to evade a new experience. I would urge them to live life in the raw, to grapple with it bravely, to attack it with naked fists.” Reporter: “Mr. Bandini, how did you come to write this book which won you the Nobel Award?” Bandini: “The book is based on a true experience which happened to me one night in Los Angeles. Every word of that book is true. I lived that book, I experienced it.”
Right now though, right now he’s a nobody and copies of his story gather dust on the desks and tables of the people he gives them to, unasked for and unwanted. He has his face pressed against the glass of the window of the world, hungry and intent.
I was passing the doorman of the Biltmore, and I hated him at once, with his yellow braids and six feet of height and all that dignity, and now a black automobile drove to the curb, and a man got out. He looked rich; and then a woman got out, and she was beautiful, her fur was silver fox, and she was a song across the sidewalk and inside the swinging doors, and I thought oh boy for a little of that, just a day and a night of that, and she was a dream as I walked along, her perfume still in the wet morning air.
Later:
Yes, it’s true: but I have seen houses in Bel-Air with cool lawns and green swimming pools. I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed. I have seen golf clubs on Sixth Street in the Spalding window that make me hungry just to grip them. I have grieved for a necktie like a holy man for indulgences. I have admired hats in Robinson’s the way critics gasp at Michelangelo.
Isn’t that beautiful? In his foreword Bukowski talks about how with Fante each line has its own energy, each page a feeling of something carved into it. That’s what I see in that prose too. Sentence after sentence laid down like careful brickwork, or like a drystone wall where a single badly placed piece could bring down the whole. I read this book and I almost feel love for it.
Arturo finds himself attracted to a Mexican-American waitress. He’s drawn to her, but she brings out his own self-loathing and his shame at being Italian-American. He thinks of her as not really American, not like he is, drowning his doubts about his own status by showing his disdain for hers.
She’s more experienced than he is and more confident, all of which makes it vital that he shows his own superiority. He courts her with copies of his story, with poetry plagiarised from another writer. He’s crushed when she laughs about it with her workmates. Desire and incomprehension wash between them.
Meanwhile, back at his apartments, his neighbor borrows money from him and then grills steaks the smell of which makes Arturo drool but which the neighbor won’t share. It’s life in other words – messy, selfish, strange and compromised.
It’s perhaps not a surprise that Bukowski loved Fante. Both of them write about ordinary things with extraordinary passion. Both of them write without blinking, showing the glory and ugliness in what they see. There’s an interesting chain of influence here. Ask the Dust is hugely influenced by Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (not that I noticed until Emma of bookaroundthecorner pointed it out to me, it is pretty obvious though once you think about it). Fante in turn influences Bukowski. Hunger. Ask the Dust. Post Office. It’s a triptych of excellence.
I’m going to wrap up by bringing out one last focus of the book, and that’s LA itself. I can’t actually improve on what Emma wrote about this part of the novel on her own blog, here, so I urge you to read her review if you haven’t already. Fante’s California is a physical place. I could smell it; feel its heat, the dampness of its fog and the grit of the sand blown in off the desert.
Kevin of kevinfromcanada first introduced me to John Fante, with his overview post of the Bandini quartet here. I owe Kevin thanks for quite a few literary introductions over the years, as do most readers of his blog. That’s part of course of what these blogs are for. Mostly they’re a conversation that bloggers and commenters have with each other, a leisurely discussion of what works for us, what doesn’t. They’re also though sometimes a chance to say hey, here it is, this is the good stuff. This is what you were looking for. Fante is the good stuff.
Filed under: California, Fante, John, US Literature Tagged: Arturo Bandini, John Fante
