John Fante’s Ask the Dust

1,573 words

John Fante’s Ask the Dust is one of my favorite stories, although it feels like a bit of a guilty pleasure. I rarely reread books, usually favoring something new instead, but have made an exception for what has been referred to as the Los Angeles novel. Though the tale takes place during the Great Depression, there’s something about it that exemplifies urban California living, and certain aspects of it feels like it could have been written merely a decade ago. Fante’s alter ego, Arturo Bandini, encounters several instances of racial strife throughout the story that serve as an eerie template for the future of Los Angeles, the United States, and Western civilization as a whole.

Ask the Dust, first published in 1939, is the third installment of what has been called the Bandini quartet, a roman-à-clef saga that traces Arturo’s life from his Italian-American upbringing in a small, snow-swept Colorado town to LA, where dreams of becoming a great writer of novels and screenplays are laid bare. The narrative begins with the young Arturo already published — only one short story to his name — by the great writer and publisher J. C. Hackmuth, a fictional version of H. L. Mencken. Arturo’s luck quickly runs dry, however, and he finds himself with mere pennies to his name, living off oranges from a Japanese grocer and filling his days wandering around the city and lusting after women. Most of the story focuses on his obsession with Camilla Lopez, a waitress at a local bar who he refers to as his Mayan Princess. Her demeanor seems typical of a Latinized Meso-American: kind of dumb and aloof yet filled with attitude, and like everyone else in the world, she harbors dreams of escaping her current station in life. I’ll leave the story’s ending unrevealed for potential readers, but there’s certainly no cliffhanger; it ends in a now-typical, cerebral novel fashion.

The setting of the tale is Bunker Hill. You’ve probably never heard of this part of Downtown LA, but I guarantee you’ve seen it: It’s the metropolis’ underwhelming skyscraper skyline, depicted in almost every movie that takes place in the City of Angels. If the urban core isn’t in the background of a shot, it’s often a foreground setting, giving the false impression that the entire LA basin — from the ocean to the desert — is built up to the degree of New York City. Downtown is actually located 15 miles from the city’s Pacific Ocean beaches, and the inhabitants of those communities probably like it that way. What lies between is a gray urban sprawl that, when approaching Los Angeles airport in a jetliner, resembles the surface of the Death Star.

Before Bunker Hill became the zero point for corporate obelisks of glass and steel, it was a largely blue-collar neighborhood of live-in hotels and cheap apartments that housed the city’s working class. In the 1930s, Los Angeles was still more of a rag-tag Western town as opposed to some sort of Pacific rim capitol. Another major Bunker Hill demographic of the era was a plethora of living-on-the-cheap retirees. What was new information to me was that LA or California more generally was once a place that people retired to, which is difficult to imagine given its current cost of living, which has the exact opposite effect on senior citizens. Fante describes the situation of the times:

The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to others; Smith and Jones and Parker . . .

Fante’s use of Anglo surnames is key, for he hints — not at all lightly — that these people are a dying breed; they’re literally moving out to California to die. He elaborates:

When I was a kid back home in Colorado it was Smith and Parker and Jones who hurt me with their hideous names, called me Wop and Dago and Greaser . . . I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father’s father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope . . .

Though Arturo’s hostility towards his country’s founding stock is not without merit, he does not realize it is a two-way street. Were the Smiths and Joneses and Parkers ever asked if they wanted newcomers in their genial little Colorado towns? He admits to being mesmerized by the beauty of their art and women and, elsewhere in the novel, their cities and civilizational triumphs — but does he or any subsequent group of people add to it in any tangible way? The passage ends with him quite literally gloating at the erasure of this kind and their replacement by new people.

The novel has several other instances of racial confusion. Arturo scoffs at a white woman walking with a Mexican man, abhorred at her crossing of the “color-line,” but has no problem sleeping with a Jewess or chasing Camilla. It becomes clear why the book has stood up so well in the eyes of today’s depraved culture-generators — after Arturo offends Camilla, he says, “. . . and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.” The story was adapted for the screen in 2006 by Jewish Hollywood writer Robert Towne (famous for writing the film Chinatown); unsurprisingly, anti-Mexican racism appears to be the film’s central theme.

You can buy Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right here.

Regardless, there is still much to like about the book. Fante has no problem writing about writing, which is fun for anyone interested in the craft. Today, this almost feels like something of a trope, of which many examples can be given: referencing anachronisms such as agents, editors, advances, and hard-copy manuscripts; the concept of a writer having to go somewhere — anywhere — to concentrate (as Arturo does); New York as some literature mecca; alcoholism, addiction, and drug use; and, of course, depicting a man of letters in the modern age using a typewriter or, God forbid, pen and paper. In the setting of Ask the Dust, however, these don’t feel like faux pas because, at the time, they were the norm.

What also makes this book and its author an interesting subject are certain influences. One of Fante’s main inspirations was Knut Hamsun. In Artists of the Right, Kerry Bolton remarks on one of Hamsun’s primary characters in Growth of the Soil:

Eleseus represents that type which becomes predominant in the ‘Winter’ phase of a civilization, when the city and money form the axis of living; where the peasant and the artisan emigrate from the country to the city and become either part of the rootless, alienated proletarian mass or a part of the equally rootless bourgeois.

This description is fitting for Arturo Bandini’s journey as well.

Fante’s works would directly influence people such as Charles Bukowski, and some literary critics see him as a sort of proto-beatnik writer. It’s worth noting that Bukowski and many of the beatniks were writing before everything was mashed into the extremes of the Left-Right paradigm, and the originality of their output potentially has much to offer. Though I personally do not like what little I’ve read of Bukowski, he certainly wasn’t writing what passes for literature today: thinly-veiled political propaganda. Even at the time it was first published, Ask the Dust was something unique — accessible by the layman, but still well-written. In his Introduction to a reprint of the novel, Bukowski describes the usual writing of the era:

It seemed as if everybody was playing word-tricks . . . Their writing was an admixture of subtlety, craft and form . . . a very slick and careful Word-Culture.

This was unlike Fante’s prose, which was “humour and the pain . . . intermixed with a superb simplicity.”

In the current year, the ghosts of Ask the Dust can still be felt walking around Los Angeles. There’s even a John Fante Square downtown, although this amounts to nothing more than a sign posted on a lamppost between the Biltmore Hotel and the Los Angeles Public Library. The steps and Angel’s Flight railway, which ascend to the top of Bunker Hill, still remain, although the hotels and apartments he described have been long since bulldozed and replaced with skyscrapers.

Most upsetting, however, is the replacement of the people. Most of downtown proper has been engulfed by swarms of the city’s mutant-class, spilling over from Skid Row, as well as what seems like all of Central America. There are certainly no more Smiths and Joneses and Parkers; there aren’t even any Fantes or Bandinis — but there are certainly a lot of Lopezes. Unsurprisingly, the city no longer resembles a place built by white people.

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