“Fante was my God,” so wrote Charles Bukowski in the preface for the 1980 edition of Ask The Dust. “One day I pulled a book downed and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table… And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me,” Bukowski says describing the glimmer of light he found in a Los Angeles library.
Bukowski was so enamoured that he was known to scream in bouts of drunkenness, “I am Bandini,” in tribute to Fante’s creation; the highly strung, ebullient Arturo Bandini.
Indeed, if it wasn’t for Bukowski, a cult writer and poet in his own right, the works of John Fante may of been lost forever.
Published 70 years ago in 1939 Ask The Dust tells the story of Arturo Bandini, a young Italian-American from Boulder, Colrado who moves to LA to become a writer. One moment insanely confident, dreaming of the day when his immense talent will be recognised, and the next wracked by self-doubt and shame as he chastises himself as a charlatan. It is the ultimate portrait of the artist as a young man.
The novel itself tackles the great themes of literature but does so with crisp, spare writing of short, punchy sentences with not a word going to waste. It is a novel about identity and the absurdity of existence, about love and loneliness, about religion and death, about poverty and ambition.
At the heart of it is Bandini’s relationship with a Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez. She forces him to confront his own ethnicity, a source of much pain for him, and he hates her for it. The resentment and bitterness of the exchanges between the pair is still shocking seventy years on. He craves real experiences from which he can draw upon when writing ‘the great American novel’. But confronted by the naked beauty of Camilla on the beach at night he desperately searches for his passion, but finds it lacking.
Fante presents the penniless artist striving towards recognition as a noble struggle. But it is life itself that is the ultimate struggle for Bandini. He is a young man in search of himself. He is well read, pompous and a raving misanthrope. He feels above people, touched by greatness he sees them as contemptible morons. He considers himself, “a freak, an outcast from the world of man, neither fish nor fowl, nor good red herring”.
God is a major character in the book. “Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have you read Nietzche? Ah, such a book,” he says in prayer. Later on he castigates the creator for the ugliness in the world. “You miserable, unpardonable prankster…a contemptible skunk,” he screams.
He is a complex character of questionable morals and is at times a callous neurotic brute. But the books most poignant moment comes when in the height of his cruelness he realises on the empty streets of LA, during the wee, small hours, that all living things are tied to the same fate; death.
At the time of its release Ask The Dust received mixed reviews, and suffering from poor sales quickly fell out of print. Fante's career as a novelist was largely over and he was forced to become a hack churning out screenplays for the Hollywood ‘dream factory’.
He died in 1983 aged 74 but lived long enough to see the book reprinted and gain respectable acclaim, following Bukowski’s proclamations of the book’s greatness.
It is a book to be read, ideally, whilst you are young enough to appreciate Bandini’s kicking against the pricks. But age need not be a barrier to prevent any reader from identifying with his inner turmoil, and his growing sense of the absurdity of life. And, like Bukowski, if you let Fante into your life, he may very well end up as the only higher power you need.
*For any of you who enjoy reading books online (God knows why anyone would) here is a link to Fante's books on Google
First published in The Trip magazine.
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