The urban tragedy is set in Los Angeles in the 1930s depression. A young writer, Arturo Bandini, has moved to this Bohemian Utopia ‘with $150 in my pocket and big plans in my head’. The hapless and idealistic Bandini endures poverty and hardship, struggling to survive on his writing. Eventually he is sucked into a bizarre love-hate relationship with a Columbian waitress, Camilla Lopez, who runs deluded into the desert never to return as Bandini finally publishes his first book.

Ask the Dust has been written about by many critics, mostly concerning its relevance as a novel of place. It has been compared to Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust in its encapsulation of what Southern California was really like.

Ask the Dust was primarily marketed as a love story. Indeed, its first publication on November 8, 1939 from Stackpole Sons was presented with a dust jacket depicting ‘the figures of a man and a woman, obviously together but tensely apart.’ [i] However, it is the character of Arturo Bandini and his development from Fante’s previous two novels involving him that has earned Ask the Dust its title as Fante’s best work.

Unlike the previous two components of the Bandini saga (Wait Until Spring, Bandini and The Road to Los Angeles, the latter unpublished until 1986, three years after Fante’s death), the story begins without giving itself away in advance. The opening is a short, sharp piece about Bandini’s decision to solve his rent problem by going to bed – no wonder therefore that Fante was such an influence on Bukowski! The lowlife writer indeed quotes that ‘The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me’[ii].

Stephen Cooper, in his biography of Fante, presents three fascinating theories about the etymology of Bandini. Firstly that Fante took the name Bandini from a brand of California fertiliser: ‘Fante would certainly have been aware of, and appreciated, the ironic juxtaposition of the word art in Arturo and the implied shit in the Bandini bag’. The second is that Fante mockingly used the words ‘author’ and ‘Banning’: the artist juxtaposed with the successes of Phineas Banning. Lastly, Fante could have taken the name from Don Arturo Bandini, a misfit beatnik from a prominent family in nineteenth century California. Either theory shows the mocking superiority Fante has over Bandini within the text.

Bandini is an exponent of the character that Philip H. Melling notes in his analysis of writing of the period: ‘The novel of the 1930s is dominated by the itinerant traveller who lives on the periphery of society and is forever seeking new adventures.’[iii]. As a young, disillusioned rebel, Fante made the journey from an unhappy childhood in Boulder, Colorado to Los Angeles to write. Bandini is widely recognised as a heavily autobiographical character: he is a young man, and has had a rough childhood, eventually escaping to Los Angeles. However, the strife in Bandini’s life has been centred on his life in one location. Thus when Bandini leaves for Los Angeles, his idealism shows itself in how he perceives himself in his more arrogant moments; a young genius; a new and exciting man carving his name in the hall of literary greatness, toiling and experiencing what he does to better his work.

Fante has thus given Bandini a mix of conflicting Bohemian and Nietzschean ideas. Whilst escaping in a conquest to find happiness, Bandini is driven by a resentment and hatred spawned from his race and his creed. Bandini was, like Fante, raised as a Catholic in an Italian-American family, and is escaping what he sees as an inept ethos. Fante was influenced greatly by the writing of Nietzsche and his living disciples, such as H.L. Mencken. Fante, like Nietzsche, renounced religion and spent his time experiencing life, as he saw it, reading, drinking, fighting and driving. Many of Fante’s early short stories and The Road to Los Angeles show a passionate and vengeful resentment towards the religion he was brought up with.

Bandini therefore displays a fiery, almost pathological, determination to make it big as a writer. He is volatile and reactionary, though perhaps not as much as in the previous two Bandini novels. His dream of recognition as a writer, and the fame, wealth and of course women who lie within it is his Utopian desire. Bandini frequently fantasises about these within the narrative. These fantasies toward his future success are all hopelessly satirical and arguably the largest components of the humour in the novel. Bandini imagines his work will be ‘in the library with the big boys on the shelves, old Dreiser, old Mencken, all the boys down there, and I went to see them, Hya Dreiser, Hya Mencken’. Even when he is about to steal milk in a petty criminal scheme, he glorifies his guilt with regard to his imagined fame. ‘Headlines in the papers, promising writer caught stealing milk, famous protégé of J.C. Hackmuth hauled into court on petty thief charge, reporters swarming round me, flashlights popping, give us a statement Bandini, how did it happen?’. He then goes on to cover up his poverty even in this deluded fantasy in his explanation to reporters; ‘I’ve really got plenty of money, big sales of manuscripts and all that, but I was doing a yarn about a fellow who steals a quart of milk, and I wanted to write from experience’!

Fante could thus be argued to be attacking and satirising the application of human idealism. Bandini has rejected Christianity, yet through his immature and inept nature, he is simply replacing tenets of Catholicism with materialism. The sacred texts of this new materialism are Nietzsche and the great writers, and the written word replacing the beads of the rosary. Bandini’s ‘God’ is undoubtedly ‘the great Hackmuth’, a thinly disguised fictional embodiment of Fante’s hero H.L. Mencken. Mencken was a great writer, who among his numerous works translated Nietzsche, and edited The Atlantic Monthly, which published Fante’s first stories. Fante had remarked in his early correspondence with Mencken that he was indeed Fante’s God now, having renounced religion. Hackmuth is thus the editor of the magazine who publishes Bandini’s two short stories The Little Dog Laughed and his accidental story, The Long Lost Hills. The latter is a ‘miracle’: Bandini, in the depths of his torment, writes a long letter to Hackmuth, who replies enclosing a cheque, suggesting he might publish it. Bandini’s response is to worship his deity: ‘I started to cry. Oh God, Hackmuth! How can you be such a wonderful man! How is it possible?’

Nevertheless, Bandini does enter the Church of Our Lady when he is undergoing a crisis in his work. He claims this is for ‘sentimental reasons’. Richard Collins notes in his literary portrait ‘the Bandini of The Road to Los Angeles would never be caught dead in a church’. This shows a vulnerable side to the character, and perhaps proof that his idealism is his most fundamental flaw. He cannot shake off this concept that if he tries hard enough he will succeed, and is incapable of diluting this vision with any realism. Therefore when obstacles face him he is in worse shape to cope with them than he otherwise would be. This will often expose another facet of his youth, and result in a frantic tantrum, heightening the problems facing him. This tool is used by Fante again and again: when he suffers a writer’s block; when he finds Los Angeles not all he expected; when he is faced with situations involving Camilla; and more.

Jay Martin cites Ask the Dust as a novel of desire: ‘Yearning appears on nearly every page’[iv]. Bandini can never be satisfied; such is his tragic and masculine nature. Even when his first book is published at the end of the novel, Fante does not give it nearly as much page space as he did to when The Long Lost Hills was published. Instead, he focuses on Bandini losing Camilla, and his dream of becoming a recognised writer, now realised, is all but discarded.

Bandini is a very masculine character. Fante admitted ‘The first book (Wait Until Spring, Bandini) came from my heart; the second (Ask the Dust) from my head and my prick”[v]. Bandini even uses his writing as a tool to express this, referring to his heroism with phrases as nauseating as ‘pen like sword’. His dogged determination and his reluctance not to be set in his ways pay testament to Bandini’s machismo. He is convinced that he, Arturo Bandini will make it as a writer and undermine the Catholic and human conditioning he has been put through with literature and fame.

A key facet to Arturo Bandini is his racial background. From Italian stock, he has suffered taunts all his life; names like ‘Wop’ or ‘Dago’ being commonplace in his interaction with others. However, Bandini is absolutely determined that he is American, that he fits in. His fantasy to be in the library with Dreiser and Mencken as well as a comic satire shows a desire from Bandini to be an American writer. Bandini’s idealism is thus linked to the American Dream.

His renouncing of Catholicism could be interpreted as him renouncing his race to feel more American. He will badmouth all other races to compensate for his insecurities. When he sees a Mexican man going with the prostitute who he turns down, he is filled with rage and bitterness. His reaction shows his masculine as well as his racial insecurity ‘Go ahead and smile. You stinking Greaser – what have you got to smile about? You come from a bashed and busted race, and just because you went to a room with one of our white girls, you smile. Do you think you would have had a chance had I accepted on the Church steps?’.

Bandini is ruthless in his pursuit of Camilla Lopez, despite his racial jibes at her. She is infatuated with Sammy, a dying author and bar owner, who lives like a hermit in the Mojave Desert. Bandini is scathing about Sammy’s ‘inability to write’. This depicts his mannish jealousy and determination. However, Bandini’s racial attitude leads to the crux of his relationship with Camilla. Bandini and Lopez are kindred in their lack of Aryan purity, yet the competitive and proud nature of Bandini forces the relationship into conflict. He will call Camilla a ‘Mayan princess’ or alternatively a ‘Spick’ or ‘Greaser’ in the same chapter! Even as Bandini acknowledges his weakness and expresses his sorrow, quoting ‘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’, he continues doing it. This is because his racial insecurity and masculine shortcomings are both heavily ingrained and thus constant.

However, the admittance of weakness shows a more mature side to Bandini than the reckless, proud figure from the previous two novels. Stephen Cooper believes that this may be due to Fante’s re-reading of Nietzsche one year before Ask the Dust’s publication. Fante was less affected second time around, and Bandini is therefore sculpted into a more compassionate figure, less authoritarian and ruthless in his arrogance than in The Road to Los Angeles.

Richard Collins also notices the change: ‘He is still brash and full of himself, and his head is still full of wild schemes for unwritten books and ungarnered glories, but he is also full of sympathy’[vi]. Thus he argues Bandini’s tragedy becomes one which we may sympathise with.

One of the foremost influences on the character of Bandini is the nameless narrator of Norweigan Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel, Hunger. Fante was known to be a devout fan of Hamsun’s, whose aforementioned novel won him the Nobel Prize.

The two characters are therefore similar in a number of ways. Both are writers living in squalor, often resorting to dishonest behaviour in order to survive and paying the consequences of a guilty conscience afterwards. The narrator of Hunger is ‘arrogant, he is infuritating, he has a cruel sense of humour; he is egotistical… he is obsessed with his own suffering, yet unsympathetic to others in difficult situations’[vii]. Hamsun’s character is the more extreme side of Bandini, being as he was influenced not only by Nietzcheism but Nazism – Hamsun was an outspoken Nazi supporter, and in later life went so far as to meet and converse with Hitler himself!

Despite Fante’s more humane characterisation, both characters are, at times, arrogant to the point of being ridiculous. Both men will be assured of their own talents at one moment, yet as soon as they are tested by a harsh reality of some description will renounce their confidence, despairing in a petulant, immature and melodramatic fashion – their hubris, if that is indeed the correct term to use.

Both characters have little or no experience with women. As a result, they each embark upon unconventional, bizarre relationships with unusual women, which deteriorate partly due to their own character; Bandini with Camilla Lopez, and the unnamed Hamsun anti hero with the timid and eccentric Ylajali. This shows a youthful, masculine frailty in their characters, Fante perhaps drawing on Hamsun’s failure to really expand upon this concept, writing long and drawn out streams of consciousness, particularly in Chapter 2 of Ask the Dust, where Bandini encounters a prostitute.

A second anti hero bearing a resemblance to Bandini comes from an author influenced by Fante, rather than an influence upon him. Legendary American lowlife writer Charles Bukowski is cited as the author whose references to Fante saved his idol’s work from almost total obscurity. Indeed, Bukowski went so far as to write the introduction in 1979 to an edition of Ask the Dust, crediting it as the first novel which truly inspired him. Bukowski recites a touching story of how he discovered a dog-eared copy of the book as a drunk in the downtown LA Public Library, likening the experience as being ‘like a man who had found gold in the city dump’! Thus it is no surprise that the central character for some of Bukowski’s most accomplished novels, the drunk, older author Henry Chinaski bears more than a passing resemblance to Fante’s alter ego.

Chinaski is the perfect illustration of Fante’s influence on the beat generation. Bandini is a young writer, who has left home to undertake a youthful, idyllic, Bohemian quest to write. Such an ethos would stand the character quite comfortably in novels such as Kerouac’s On the Road, due to his youthful ‘get up and go’, or in Brautigan’s A Confederate General From Big Sur, due to his passionate and idyllic escapism. Likewise, the ongoing internal turmoil within Bandini as he struggles to come to terms with the grim and often unforgiving realities of warped, downtown Los Angeles, if developed, would not look entirely out of place in a bizarre, drugged satire from the pen of William Burroughs, such as those in his masterpiece, Naked Lunch.

Against this template, Bukowski has added the typical elements of his own work, which have carved his reputation as one of the most brutal, frank and controversial writers of his generation – nihilism, alcohol and sex. Bukowski’s character, despite a Bohemian nature, deals with his shortcomings not with passionate rants, but with overt, alcohol induced nonchalance. However, flashes of Bandini are often apparent. My favourite appears near the end of Women, where Chinaski gives some Mexican beggars fifty cents. Centre justified, block capitals and bold across the page, Bukowski scrawls the mock headline ‘IMMORTAL WRITER COMES TO AID OF STREET URCHINS’.

Chinaski, before Women, also has relative inexperience with the opposite sex, yet more in a sense that he has been with women, but not in as many senses or varieties as he would wish to have experienced. Chinaski thus embarks upon a debauched, drunken escapade in his middle ages to satisfy this. The results are documented in Women, and show perhaps a seedier, more mature version of Bandini’s idyllic desires in Ask the Dust. Chinaski acknowledges that he wants women, and his quest for sensation drives his freedom to admit that he desires women ‘constantly, the lower, the better’. Similarly, Fante’s son Dan’s anti-hero Bruno Dante, from his novels Chump Change and Mooch displays a reckless indifference, whilst drawing upon the Hamsun template.

However, whereas Hamsun and Bukowski are remembered as ‘two writers who trawl the desperate parts of town, who experience the seedy, the downtrodden, the alienated, the shunned’[viii], Fante’s humane, humorous and often touching treatment of Bandini stops the novel from completely carrying this ethos. Bandini’s utter haplessness in his perception of his surroundings and events, combined with Fante’s style and tone, leave a decidedly less sour taste than Hamsun or Bukowski’s work, however similar the three writers’ characterisation and focus may be. In his brilliant introduction to Rebel Inc’s reprint of The Road to Los Angeles, John King remarks that “Fante is clever. He gives Bandini humour, and this pulls him from the brink. You start to like him again, at least until his next outburst’.

I feel that it is worth pointing out that this is not in any way meant to demean or devalue either writer, or indeed Dan Fante. All three have produced independent characters, with many facets to each. I am merely assessing exclusively their similarities to Fante’s.

Fante harnesses Bandini’s romanticism and inexperience to produce a touching and somewhat satirical tone. Fante was a feverishly dedicated writer. He commented to a newspaper in 1933 ‘I don’t think I’m a genius. I’m just a hard working craftsman. I’m seeing a lot of life, trying to write simply and graphically’[ix]. The frantic, stream of consciousness tone is no carefully planned component. Fante wrote Ask the Dust very quickly indeed, and did virtually no revision, recalling ‘It was an easy book to write…it just poured out of me’.[x] Ask the Dust is therefore not a novel which was carefully and accurately planned and executed – its craft lies in the bodies of work before it, which built both the angst and frustration within Fante and the writing experience with which to express this angst within the story quickly and expertly.

Therefore it is this craftsmanship which, ironically, I feel singles Fante out as a great writer. Bukowski describes it: ‘The lines rolled across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy, and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it… The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity’. Fante’s disciple affectionately dubs it ‘the magic’. In Jay Martin’s Essay, John Fante: The Burden of Modernism and the Life of His Mind, he points to Fante’s train of thought moving within subconscious voices, linking them to literary meditation, as defined by writers such as Eliot and Martz, claiming: ‘If Eliot and Stevens are our major American meditative poets, Fante is our major meditative novelist.’

Grant Hier notes Fante’s poetic franticness, writing a study entitled Written Like Mad Sonnets. This tone has produced what many critics and fans alike have generally regarded as his best paragraph. From Chapter 1 of Ask the Dust, the young Bandini personifies Los Angeles; romantically, frantically and hopelessly imploring ‘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 so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.’

Will Balliet believed that Los Angeles was in fact a projection of Bandini’s own self: idyllic yet with a harsh and unforgiving edge. Richard Collins, in his remarkably accomplished essay on Ask the Dust, admits that ‘it could be argued that Bandini would not have been conceived in any other city’. It is a touching point that, at the end of the novel, after losing Camilla, Bandini drives straight back to Los Angeles.

Ask the Dust shows Fante’s extraordinary ability to mix the raw sentiment of his character in a poignant and touching manner, yet combined with a total control of the character. As John King comments, ‘He [Fante] tortures Bandini, makes the boy sweat, at the same time playing with the reader. While Bandini rambles, Fante writes in a simple style, each word surrounded by ten left unwritten; ‘Fante has style, but…Bandini has not’. Fante exposes Bandini’s faults casually and simply, whilst using a clear, simple style, similar to the modernist characteristic of reader interpretation.

These skills combine to produce an end result that has kept John Fante and Ask the Dust a cult literary phenomenon. It is what makes Fante unique from his contemporaries and successors alike, and why Ask the Dust has been described as ‘a brilliant book [and it has] changed countless lives’[xi] and ‘on a par with The Great Gatsby for pure originality [and] clarity of vision’[xii].

NOTES

[i] Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante by Stephen Cooper

[ii] Preface to Ask the Dust by Charles Bukowski

[iii] Nothing Else to Fear: New perspectives on America in the Thirties by Philip H Melling

[iv] John Fante: The Burden of Modernism and the Life of His Mind by Jay Martin

[v] A letter to Jo Campiglia

[vi] John Fante: A Literary Portrait by Richard Collins

[vii] Preface to Lyngstad Translation of Hunger by Duncan MacLean

[viii] Brian Dalton, Beat Scene Magazine #35

[ix] Los Angeles Examiner, Aug 7, 1933

[x] Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante by Stephen Cooper

[xi] Dan Fante, interviewed in 2000

[xii] Sin and Redemption Italian Style by Gerald Nicosia

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Bibliography and Background Reading

Bloom, Clive and Docherty, Brian – American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal (Macmillan, 1995)

Brauner, Asher – Interview with Catherine J.Kordich (The John Fante Website, 2000)

Brautigan, Richard – A Confederate General From Big Sur (Canongate, 1999 introduced by Duncan McClean) (originally published in1964)

Bukowski, Charles and others Penguin Modern Poets 13 (Penguin, 1969)

Bukowski, Charles – Post Office (Virgin, 1992) (originally published in 1971)

Burroughs, William – Naked Lunch (Flamingo, 1993) (originally published in 1959)

Collins, Richard - John Fante: A Literary Portrait (Guernica, 2000)

Cooper, Stephen – Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (Canongate, 2000)

de Palma, Ilaria and Bolognini, Lorenzo - Interview with Dan Fante (The John Fante Website, 2000)

Fante, John – Wait Until Spring, Bandini (Canongate, 1999, introduced by Dan Fante) (originally published in 1938)

Fante, John – Ask the Dust (Canongate, 1998, introduced by Charles Bukowski) (originally published in 1939)

Fante, John – The Road to Los Angeles (Canongate, 2000, introduced by John King) (originally published in 1985)

Ford, Boris – The New Pelican Guide to American Literature (Penguin 1998)

Gordon, Neil – Shanghai’d in Tinseltown (Boston Review, 2000)

Hamsun, Knut – Hunger (Canongate, 1999, translated by Sverre Lyngstad and introduced by Duncan McLean)

Kerouac, Jack – On the Road (Penguin, 1972) (originally published in 1957)

Nicosia, Gerald – Sin and Redemption Italian Style (New Times Media, 2000)

Roca, Russ – John Fante (JCO, 2000)

Ruland, Richard and Bradbury Malcolm – A History of American Literature (Routeledge, 1991)

Winterstein, Paul – Character Analysis of Arturo Bandini (The John Fante Website, 2000)