by John Fante
That’s all for this time. Love to everyone—
Johnnie
“I had a letter from Paul Reinart asking for a copy of my new book. Priests take a poverty vow and are not permitted to buy such things as books.”
The one or two thousand dollars reported in the next letter to his cousin (for the story The Golden Fleecing sold to MGM), the successful publication of two novels within thirteen months, and flattering inquiries from publishers about his next project all combined to make the end of 1939 a moment of financial comfort and exultant self-confidence in Fante’s career. But some of the hopes enumerated above and in the next letter would be unfulfilled. No cheap Mercury Books edition appeared—doubtless because of Stackpole’s legal troubles. The “dago story” is unidentified, but no further stories by Fante appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. By May 1940 he would be reporting himself “worse off than ever in my life before.”
John Fante at his Malibu ranch, mid-1950s
[To his cousin Jo Campiglia]
Nov 23, 1939
Dear Jo,
I am grateful for your letter, and not surprised or disappointed that you like Bandini better than Ask the Dust, I think the writing in Ask the Dust is superior to that in Bandini, but that the story in Bandini was much closer to me than that in Ask the Dust. For that reason I couldn’t possibly make this new book sing with the lyrical tone of Bandini. The first book came from my heart; the second from my head and my—(it starts with p and ends with k).
The reviews are contradictory. Some damn the book as obscene; others wildly praise it. The best review—and it’s really a wonderfully satisfying one—appears in the December Atlantic Monthly. Read it, if you’re interested in my work. That critic really understood my book, and he has done more for its sale than any other. The book has already gone into a second printing, and we expect a good sale between now and Christmas. Gene Fowler has gone crazy about the book, and is whooping it up everywhere. So too Bill Saroyan, Carey McWilliams, Louis Adamic, and dozens of others.
“I think the writing in Ask the Dust is superior to that in Bandini, but that the story in Bandini was much closer to me than that in Ask the Dust.”
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.
“Things are looking better for me. I can just about write my own ticket at $300 a month for a year or 18 months.”
…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
“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.”
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.
Ask the Dust was written in 1938.
It was published in 1939.
I wrote it in an apartment in the 800 block south on Berendo Street.
I was living in Los Angeles when it was published.
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
“Your French director who stands over your shoulder measuring the screenplay at one minute per page sounds like a kook to me.”
“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
“‘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.’”
“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 i
s a man of mark. But meanwhile the reader in search of sweetness and light is warned.”
—Books
“Any one who could write as he does here of the earthquake is a man of mark.”
Read on
“Fante,” a Poem by Charles Bukowski
from Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories
John Fante, late 1960s
every now and then it comes back to me,
him in bed there, blind,
being slowly chopped away,
the little bulldog.
the nurses passing through, pulling
at curtains, blinds, sheets.
seeing if he was still alive.
the Colorado Kid.
the courage of the American
Mercury.
Mencken’s Catholic bad boy.
gone Hollywood.
and tossed up on shore.
being chopped away.
chop, chop, chop.
until he was gone.
he never knew he would be famous.
i wonder if he would have given a damn.
i think he would have.
John, you’re big time now.
you’ve entered the Books of Forever
right there with Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy, and your boy
Sherwood Anderson
I told you.
and you said, “you wouldn’t shit an old blind man, would you?”
ah, no need for that,
bulldog.
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….
“[Fante’s] last work…a mordantly funny look at life as a ‘Hollywood whore.’”
—The Guardian (London)
THE ROAD TO LOS ANGELES
I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn’t sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an excavation in an empty lot, there wasn’t any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who dug with a love for it, always laughing and telling jokes, laughing and smoking bitter tobacco.
“[The Road to Los Angeles] wasn’t published until 1985 when it was found among the author’s papers, two years after his death. It has come to be regarded as something of a lost classic.”
—The Observer (London)
Other Works and Collections
THE JOHN FANTE READER,
edited by Stephen Cooper
The John Fante Reader includes excerpts from Fante’s novels and stories along with never-before-published letters.
“Either the work of John Fante…is unknown to you or it is unforgettable. He was not the kind of writer to leave room in between…. The John Fante Reader is poised to win him a well-deserved place in the mainstream.”
—Janet Maslin, New York Times
JOHN FANTE: SELECTED LETTERS 1932–1981,
edited by Seamus Cooney
Fante’s captivating letters trace his emergence from poverty to life as a Hollywood screenwriter. Complemented by many photos and interesting appendices, the book is most distinguished by Fante’s letters to his mother—letters in which he is just as apt to lie about church attendance as he is to describe, with peculiar candor, skinny-dipping with a girlfriend.
THE BIG HUNGER: STORIES 1932–1959<
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Here are eighteen stories collected for the first time, among them a number of “intelligent and meaningful tales of the immigrant experience”
(Publishers Weekly).
“Each story seems a chiseled jewel, sharply glittering, and without a speck of excess. Fante’s gift for dialogue becomes immediately apparent in his opening story, ‘Horselaugh on Dibber Lannon,’ but shines with something close to perfection in his later story ‘Mary Osaka, I Love You.’ Set during the outbreak of World War II, it tells of love between a Japanese woman and a Filipino man.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
WEST OF ROME: TWO NOVELLAS
West of Rome’s two novellas, “My Dog Stupid” and “The Orgy,” fulfill the promise of their rousing titles. The latter novella opens with virtuoso description: “His name was Frank Gagliano, and he did not believe in God. He was that most singular and startling craftsman of the building trade—a left-handed bricklayer. Like my father, Frank came from Torcella Peligna, a cliff-hugging town in the Abruzzi. Lean as a spider, he wore a leather cap and puttees the year around, and he was so bowlegged a dog could lope between his knees without touching them.”
THE WINE OF YOUTH: SELECTED STORIES
This new edition of the legendary Dago Red, first published in 1940, contains seven new stories, including “A Nun No More” and “My Father’s God.”
“Here is a book where the author’s talent lies over each page bright as sunlight on a fresh green lawn.”
—New York Times (reviewing Dago Red)
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About the Author
John Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in 1932. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938 and was the first of his Arturo Bandini series of novels, which also includes The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust. He was a prolific screenwriter who was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Complications from the disease brought about his blindness in 1978 and, within two years, the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and published Dreams from Bunker Hill, the final installment of the Arturo Bandini series, in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.