Ask the Dust (18 page)

Incidentally, the Mercury Books (25¢) will shortly bring out a paperbound edition of Bandini. I'm very glad of this, for it will mean close to a million readers. Oh yes—next year Bandini will appear on the New York Stage. Last week I signed papers authorizing a playwright to do it for the stage. Abbott will probably produce it, with Leo Carillo playing the part of Svevo Bandini. Of course all of this is conditioned by a suitable adaptation, but I have a strong hunch it will succeed.

Things are looking better for me. I really think my money problems are finished. The Viking Press has offered me $4000 advance on my new book, which is very tempting, but there are other offers too. I can just about write my own ticket at $300 a month for a year or 18 months. My next book should be the money-maker, which is not important, but critically a big, full book from me that succeeds will put me smacko among writers like Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Tom Wolfe. I am a bit worried about doing all of this so soon. What will happen when I'm 40—45—50? I'd rather take it easy.

…I'm doing a helluva nice little dago piece for the
Atlantic Monthly
. I'll keep you posted about it. The magazines are crying for my stuff, but they won't give me any guarantee….

Ask the Dust
is being considered at Metro and Paramount but I don't think it has a chance. However I may get a job out of it somewhere in town, if I want one. And frankly, I don't. You have no idea how envious and bitter some of the local $2000 per week
“writers” feel toward a man who actually does write and produce a good book. If they'll give me $500 a week and a guarantee of ten weeks I'll take a job. If not, screw them with a bicycle pump.

Tell Grace I'll have money for her soon. I am glad you like Joyce. Of course she love[s] all of us very much. Love to Ralph and your mother and everyone.

johnnie

Poet/novelist Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) wrote to Fante requesting information for the introduction Bukowski was writing for a new edition of
Ask the Dust.
In the letter Bukowski also sought advice about his screenplay for the autobiographical
Barfly,
which would be made into a 1987 film starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway
.

Fante addressed his response to “Hank” (Bukowski's nickname)
.

[To Charles Bukowski]

February 6, 1979

Dear Hank:

I usually charge a standard rate of $100 per page for questionnaire letters such as yours, but in view of your responsibility for a good preface I am canceling the usual fee and answering all questions free of charge.

1. Ask the Dust
   was written in 1938.
   
2. It was published in 1939.
   
3. I wrote it in an apartment in the 800 block south on Berendo Street.
   
4. I was living in Los Angeles when it was published.
   
5. I lived in the Alta Vista Hotel on Bunker Hill in 1934–35. I wrote only fragments during that time—short stories for
   The American Mercury
   . I never had the leisure to involve myself in a novel due to the pressure of paying rent, which was $6 a week—a crushing burden. My back is still bent beneath the weight of that dreadful chore.
   

Your French director who stands over your shoulder measuring the screenplay at one minute per page sounds like a kook to me. It seems to me that subject matter determines style and time. Maybe you might want to break some rules, maybe write a flashback within the scene. How the hell can you reduce something that lengthy within the confines of the Frenchman's strictures? No. You need limitless horizons and distances. You cannot be bound to the Frenchman's rules. You are the writer, so write a unique, an unorthodox screenplay.

Regards

 

 

“Sordid Pictures of Immorality”
Contemporary Takes on
Ask the Dust

“
Ask the Dust
realizes to the full the quizzical wonder inherent in Saroyan's fragmentary writings, and recognizes the cruelty of man's lot besides…. The love of Camilla for Sammy and her disintegration when it is not accepted would start tears from a stone. Fante must have lived this out at some time. And now that he has written his Werther, let us hope fervently he can get on to another Faust.”

—Atlantic Monthly

“This is a strange novel, one which is most emphatically
not
recommended for reading by the young, or even by the old who dislike sordid pictures of immorality…. Yet in many ways it is quite an extraordinary piece of work, and a very Catholic piece of work at that.”

—Commonweal

“
Ask the Dust
is a sharp and perceptive study of the mind of a boy trying to grow older, a young chap with talent exposed to the conflicting currents of today's society, upset by his own still not-quite-Americanism and his wish that he was a part of the great world he still doesn't quite understand. Arturo will give you a sharp pain in the neck more than once, but if you can remember your own youth at all you'll understand him. And you'll like him, in spite of himself, and be sorry for him. It is hard to see how Mr. Fante could have accomplished more than that.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“[T]his new book carries considerable impact and, despite so much that is painful,
contemptible, ugly in its subject matter, it leaves the reader in a state of speculation and interest. What will this young author's next book be like? He has a quite unexpected sense of humor and any one who could write as he does here of the earthquake or of Camilla with her new dog or of Vera's visit to the hero's room is a man of mark. But meanwhile the reader in search of sweetness and light is warned.”

—Books

 

 

Read on

“Fante,” a Poem by Charles Bukowski

from
Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories

John Fante, late 1960s

 

 

Related Reading
(and Viewing)

FULL OF LIFE: A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN FANTE
,
by Stephen Cooper

“By bringing together his life and work for the first time with such clarity of purpose, Stephen Cooper presents a remarkable gift to innumerable fans of Fante's work.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Fante would have loved this book, unless of course people wind up reading it instead of his fiction, in which case he'd have decked somebody.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

A SAD FLOWER IN THE SAND
,
a film documentary by Jan Louter

Available from Viewpoint Productions, Amsterdam. Contact Valerie Schuit at [email protected] or go to www.viewpointdocs.com.

JOHN FANTE: OUTLINE OF A WRITER
,
a film documentary by Giovanna DiLello

Available from Cooperativa Rosabella, Pescara, Italy. Contact Cooperativa Rosabella at [email protected].

 

 

Have You Read?
More by John Fante

Excerpts from His Novels

WAIT UNTIL SPRING, BANDINI

He came along, kicking the snow. Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardboard from a macaroni box. The macaroni in that box was not paid for. He had thought of that as he placed the cardboard inside his shoes
.

“Excellent portraiture and a story that holds one's interest to the last page distinguish this novel.”

—New York Times

1933
WAS A BAD YEAR

It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my eyes on fire, the snow swirling around me like a flock of angry nuns, I stopped dead in my tracks. The time had come to take stock. Fair weather or foul, certain forces in the world were at work trying to destroy me
.

“1933…is stunningly realistic and fuelled by rage at the social inequalities of life in America. It is short, precise, and unforgettable.”

—Time Out

THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE GRAPE

One night last September my brother phoned from San Elmo to report that Mama and Papa were again talking about divorce
.

“So what else is new?”

“This time it's for real,” Mario said
.

Nicholas and Maria Molise had been married for fifty-one years, and though it had been a wretched relationship from the beginning, held together by the relentless Catholicism of my mother who punished her husband with exasperating tolerance of his selfishness and contempt, it now seemed utter madness for these old people to leave each other at such a late time in their lives, for my mother was seventy-four and my father two years older
.

“In my view, [Fante] wrote better of the Italians of California than Saroyan did of the Armenians, but without the folksy sentimentality that eventually made Saroyan popular…. In
The Brotherhood of the Grape
he…gives us a wonderful picture of small-town Italian life.”

—Larry McMurtry,
Washington Post

FULL OF LIFE

It was a large house because we were people with big plans. The first was already there, a mound at her waist, a thing of lambent movement, slithering and squirming like a ball of serpents. In the quiet hours before midnight I lay with my ear to the place and heard the trickling as from a spring, the gurgles and sucks and splashings
.

I said, “It certainly behaves like the male of the species.”

“Not necessarily.”

“No female kicks that much.”

“[A] witty and charming account of a man's adjustment to his wife's pregnancy.”

—New York Herald Tribune Book Review

“
Full of Life
is touching as well as funny, neither wise-cracking nor ponderous. Not everybody could live on that level of emotional velocity, but the Fantes seem built for it.”

—New York Times

DREAMS FROM BUNKER HILL

My first collision with fame was hardly memorable. I was a busboy at Marx's Deli. The year was 1934. The place was Third and Hill, Los Angeles. I was twenty-one years old, living in a world bounded on the west by Bunker Hill, on the east by Los Angeles Street, on the south by Pershing Square, and on the north by Civic Center. I was a busboy nonpareil, with great verve and style for the profession, and though I was dreadfully underpaid (one dollar a day plus meals) I attracted considerable attention as I whirled from table to table, balancing a tray on one hand, and eliciting smiles from my customers. I had something else beside a waiter's skill to offer my patrons, for I was also a writer….