Los Angeles still has bookstores. Not a lot of them, mind you, but they exist. On a recent visit home, I met a friend at The Last Bookstore in downtown L.A. (Yes, Los Angeles has a downtown, too) and spent some time browsing the shelves of new and used books about the city. I found some treasures—John Gregory Dunne’s Monster, Carey McWilliams’s Southern California: An Island on the Land and a novel celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, one I still own from when I bought it in my 20s: John Fante’s Ask The Dust.
You have perhaps come across a memorable line from that book that has been paraphrased more than once in stories about California:
Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!
These are the words of Arturo Bandini, Fante’s most famous alter ego and, as his diction might indicate, a dead ringer at times for Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise (though Fante wrote Ask The Dust 18 years before On The Road appeared). Like Fante and plenty of other Californians of the era, the fictional Bandini was a transplant from elsewhere; like Fante, he was an Italian-American writer with serious talent intermixed with perhaps some delusions of grandeur.
Fante was born in Denver, Colo., in 1909, the son of an Italian immigrant father and an Italian-American mother. He attended Regis High School in Denver (then a boarding school), where he worked as a waiter in the dining hall to cover his tuition. According to Stephen Cooper, the author of the Fante biography Full of Life, he considered becoming a priest as a young man (though the Jesuits in Fante’s recollections tend to be gruff and glum). After a brief stint at the University of Colorado, Fante dropped out of school and moved to California.
Through the assistance of H. L. Mencken, who became a lifelong friend and correspondent, Fante published his first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, in 1938. Ask The Dust, which finds an ambitious and vainglorious Bandini in Los Angeles during the Great Depression, was published a year later. The two books were the beginning of Fante’s chronicles of life in Southern California.
“In Fante’s hands, the landscape of greater Los Angeles—from Pershing Square to the Santa Monica beach to Long Beach to the San Fernando Valley to Central Avenue and finally to the Mojave—became a three-dimensional character,” wrote Stephen Cooper in the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “Never before had the city been seen with such a penetrating, panoramic eye.”
1939 was a banner year for books about Los Angeles, including Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Another novel with a California angle was also published that year: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. With Ask The Dust, Fante seemed ready to vault into those storied ranks of writers and become the literary voice of Los Angeles.
It didn’t happen. At least, it didn’t happen then.
Fante’s publisher, Stackpole Sons, was embroiled in a legal battle at the time with (wait for it…) Adolf Hitler over the unauthorized publication of an unexpurgated version of Mein Kampf. The financial drain on the publisher hampered distribution of Ask The Dust. While Fante put out a short story collection, Dago Red, in 1940, more than a decade would pass before another Bandini novel.
Fante spent many years working in Los Angeles as a scriptwriter for the big studios. He had a few successes on the big screen, writing “The Reluctant Saint,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Jeanne Eagels” and an adaptation of his own 1952 novel, Full of Life, but most of his projects never made it past the script stage. Many a Tinseltown wordsmith owns that same story, of course, but it rankled Fante even as he enjoyed material prosperity. “I am now a complete and ungarnished hack,” he once wrote to the writer William Saroyan.
After several decades of relative obscurity, Fante’s reemergence on the literary landscape was largely due to an unlikely champion: the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski. “Fante was my god,” the famous “laureate of American lowlife” wrote in his foreword to a new edition of Ask The Dust in 1980. Bukowski had stumbled across the book while reading in the Los Angeles Central Library and fell in love with Fante’s prose. Years later, long after Ask The Dust had gone out of print, Bukowski convinced his publisher to reissue it.
Suddenly Ask The Dust owned the most L.A. story ever: Here, have a second chance. The novel found an audience it had missed 40 years before on book club reading lists, college syllabi and lists of "the classics." Fante was recognized as a forefather of the Beats and an important California scribe. In 2012, The Guardian included Fante among the final 32 contestants in its "The Great American Novelist tournament." Ask The Dust was also made into a 2006 movie starring Colin Farrell and Selma Hayek; the writer/director, Robert Towne, said he used Fante’s writing as a primer for his dialogue when he wrote the screenplay for “Chinatown.”
John Fante died in 1983 after years of declining health due to diabetes. He was survived by his wife Joyce and their four children. Blind by the end of his life, he retained his sardonic sense of humor, suggesting he might dictate a final book to be titled Fante’s Inferno.
In 2010, the city of Los Angeles named the intersection of 5th and Grand (outside the Los Angeles Central Library, where Bukowski had first read Ask The Dust) “John Fante Square.”
Among Fante’s many themes—in addition to Arturo Bandini’s exploits and anguish—were economic and geographic transience, the Italian-American experience, poverty, race relations and, despite his alienation from the faith of his childhood, Catholicism. Arturo Bandini rails against the church and rejects its moral strictures, but he does it with a passion that suggests his faith never really left Fante or his fictional alter ego. To paraphrase Elie Wiesel, the opposite of love isn’t hate: It’s indifference. No one can read Ask The Dust or The Road to Los Angeles (published after Fante’s death) and call John Fante indifferent about religion.
In his 1952 novel, Full of Life (the protagonist is named, I kid you not, John Fante), he describes why he cannot return to the faith despite the way it haunts him, despite the way it might bring him peace, even as his own wife converts:
Born a Catholic, I could not bring myself to return. Perhaps I expected too much; a shudder of joyful recognition, the dazzling splendor of faith reborn. Whatever it was, I could not return. There before me was the road, the signposts clearly marking the direction to peace of the soul. I could not take the road. I could not believe that it was so easy.
•••
Our poetry selection for this week is “Swift Witness,” by Jim Richards. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
- The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
- What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
- Poet, feminist and nun: Sister Madeleva Wolff
- Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
- Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
- Who’s in hell? Hans Urs von Balthasar had thoughts.
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
