Ask The Dust

"Bandini is a magnificent creation, and his rediscovery is not before time."

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

"A tough and beautifully realised tale ... affecting, powerful and poignant stuff. Fante was capable of expressing thought and experience with an honesty that was as intimate as it was evocative, and as magical as it was true."
TIME OUT

JOHN FANTE ASK THE DUST

Introduced by CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Arturo Bandini is a struggling writer lodging in a seedy LA hotel. While basking in the glory of having had a single short story published in a small magazine, he meets local waitress Camilla Lopez and they embark on a strange and strained love-hate relationship. Slowly, but inexorably, it descends into the realms of madness.

Ask the Dust
is one of the truly great, yet unsung, American novels of the twentieth century. A tough and unsentimental story with a soft and tender heart, it remains as fresh and affecting as the day it was written.

ISBN 0-86241-987-5

£6.99

Design: Angus Hyland @ Pentagram Photography: Peter Ross.© 1998

A REBEL INC CLASSIC

Rebel Inc Classics

Born in Denver on 8 April 1909, John Fante migrated to Los Angeles in his early twenties.

Classically out of place in a town built on celluloid dreams, Fante's literary fiction was full of torn grace and redemptive vengeance.
Ask the Dust
was his second novel in a life that spanned seventy-four years and which included numerous works of fiction and film sceenplays. He was posthumously recognised in 1987 with a Lifetime Achievement Award by PEN, Los Angeles four years after his death from diabetes-related complications.

Praise for
Ask the Dust

'One of the lost souls of American letters, an author whose work has an almost legendary stature among writers and critics but remains curiously unknown to the public at large.'
Los Angeles Times

'The humour and the pain are intermixed with a superb simplicity ... A wild and enormous miracle.'

Charles Bukowski

'A criminally neglected American writer.'
Time Out

'An absolutely brilliant piece of work . . . this book is spot on.'
Drooghi

'This novel still has "the magic" . . . and just another fantastic re-issue by those people at Rebel Inc.'

The Crack

'Fante's engagingly odd novel, published in 1939. influenced Charles Bukowski; its ironic tone and bizarre touches are reminiscent of Gogol or Hamsun.'
Scotland on
Sunday

'The universe of John Fante's fiction is so immediately moving, so poetically vivid, that it's hard to decide which is the greater quandary: that it went so long unrecognised, or that in the factitious worlds of publishing and Hollywood it's receiving such enormous recognition today.'
The Boston Review

'If there's a better piece of fiction written about LA I don't know about it.' Robert Towne, Scriptwriter for
Chinatown

'One of the premier American writers of the century. Extraordinary.' Bob Shacochis,
Vogue

Ask the Dust

John Fante

First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Rebel Inc, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 ITE

This edition first published in 1999 10 987654321

Copyright © John Fante, 1939, 1980 Introduction Copyright © Charles Bukowski, 1980

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on

request from the British Library

ISBN 0 86241 987 5

Rebel Inc series editor: Kevin Williamson www.rebelinc.net Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production, Polmont, Stirlingshire Printed and bound in Scotland by Caledonian International Book Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow

For Joyce, with love

I was a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer. I did most of my reading at the downtown L.A. Public Library, and nothing that I read related to me or to the streets or to the people about me. It seemed as if everybody was playing word-tricks, that those who said almost nothing at all were considered excellent writers. Their writing was an admixture of subtlety, craft and form, and it was read and it was taught and it was ingested and it was passed on. It was a comfortable contrivance, a very slick and careful Word-Culture. One had to go back to the pre-Revolution writers of Russia to find any gamble, any passion.

There were exceptions but those exceptions were so few that reading them was quickly done, and you were left staring at rows and rows of exceedingly dull books. With centuries to look back on, with all their advantages, the moderns just weren't very good.

I pulled book after book from the shelves. Why didn't anybody say something?

Why didn't anybody scream out?

I tried other rooms in the library. The section on Religion was just a vast bog - to me. I got into Philosophy. I found a couple of bitter Germans who cheered me for a while, then that was over. I tried Mathematics but upper Maths was just like Religion: it ran right off me. What / needed seemed to be absent everywhere.

I tried Geology and found it curious but, finally, non-sustaining.

I found some books on Surgery and I liked the books on Surgery: the words were new and the illustrations were wonderful. I particularly liked and memorized the operation on the mesocolon.

Then I dropped out of Surgery and I was back in the big room with the novelists and short story writers. (When I had enough cheap wine to drink I never went to the library. A library was a good place to be when you had nothing to drink or to eat, and the landlady was looking for you and for the back rent money. In the library at least you had the use of the toilet facilities.) I saw quite a number of other bums in there, most of them asleep on top of their books.

I kept on walking around the big room, pulling the books off the shelves, reading a few lines, a few pages, then putting them back.

Then one day I pulled a book down 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. The lines rolled easily 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. 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.

I had a library card. I checked the book out, took it to my room, climbed into my bed and read it, and I knew long before I had finished that here was a man who had evolved a distinct way of writing. The book was
Ask the Dust
and the author was John Fante. He was to be a lifetime influence on my writing. I finished
Ask
the Dust
and looked for other books of Fante's in the library. I found two:
Dago
Red
and
Wait Until Spring, Bandini.
They were of the same order, written of and from the gut and the heart.

Yes, Fante had a mighty effect upon me. Not long after reading these books I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was and we had some violent arguments, and often I would scream at her, 'Don't call me a son of a bitch!
I
am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!

Fante was my god and I knew that the gods should be left alone, one didn't bang at their door. Yet I liked to guess about where he had lived on Angel's Flight and I imagined it possible that he still lived there. Almost every day I walked by and I thought, is that the window Camilla crawled through? And, is that the hotel door? Is that the lobby? I never knew.

Thirty-nine years later I reread
Ask the Dust.
That is to say, I reread it this year and it still stands, as do Fante's other works, but this one is my favourite because it was my first discovery of the
magic.
There are other books beside
Dago Red
and
Wait Until Spring, Bandini.
They are
Full of Life
and
The
Brotherhood of the Grape.
And, at the moment, Fante has a novel in progress,
A Dream of Bunker Hill.

Through other circumstances, I finally met the author this year [1979]. There is much more to the story of John Fante. It is a story of terrible luck and a terrible fate and of a rare and natural courage. Some day it will be told but I feel that he doesn't want me to tell it here. But let me say that the way of his words and the way of his way are the same: strong and good and warm.

That's enough. Now this book is yours.

Charles Bukowski

Chapter One

One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under the door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

In the morning I awoke, decided that I should do more physical exercise, and began at once. I did several bending exercises. Then I washed my teeth, tasted blood, saw pink on the toothbrush, remembered the advertisements, and decided to go out and get some coffee.

I went to the restaurant where I always went to the restaurant and I sat down on the stool before the long counter and ordered coffee. It tasted pretty much like coffee, but it wasn't worth the nickel. Sitting there I smoked a couple of cigarettes, read the box scores of the American League games, scrupulously avoided the box scores of National League games, and noted with satisfaction that Joe DiMaggio was still a credit to the Italian people, because he was leading the league in batting.

A great hitter, that DiMaggio. I walked out of the restaurant, stood before an imaginary pitcher, and swatted a home run over the fence. Then I walked down the street towards Angel's Flight, wondering what I would do that day. But there was nothing to do, and so I decided to walk around the town.

I walked down Olive Street past a dirty yellow apartment house that was still wet like a blotter from last night's fog, and I thought of my friends Ethie and Carl, who were from Detroit and had lived there, and I remembered the night Carl hit Ethie because she was going to have a baby, and he didn't want a baby. But they had the baby and that's all there was to that. And I remembered the inside of that apartment, how it smelled of mice and dust, and the old women who sat in the lobby on hot afternoons, and the old woman with the pretty legs. Then there was the elevator man, a broken man from Milwaukee, who seemed to sneer every time you called your floor, as though you were such a fool for choosing that particular floor, the elevator man who always had a tray of sandwiches in the elevator, and a pulp magazine.

Then I went down the hill on Olive Street, past the horrible frame houses reeking with murder stories, and on down Olive to the Philharmonic Auditorium, and I remembered how I'd gone there with Helen to listen to the Don Cossack Choral Group, and how I got bored and we had a fight because of it, and I remembered what Helen wore that day — a white dress, and how it made me sing at the loins when I touched it. Oh that Helen - but not here.

And so I was down on Fifth and Olive, where the big street cars chewed your ears with their noise, and the smell of gasoline made the sight of the palm trees seem sad, and the black pavement still wet from the fog of the night before.

So now I was in front of the Biltmore Hotel, walking along the line of yellow cabs, with all the cab drivers asleep except the driver near the main door, and I wondered about these fellows and their fund of information, and I remembered the time Ross and I got an address from one of them, how he leered salaciously and then took us to Temple Street, of all places, and whom did we see but two very unattractive ones, and Ross went all the way, but I sat in the parlour and played the phonograph and was scared and lonely.

I was passing the doorman of the Biltmore, and I hated him at once, with his yellow braids and six feet of height and all that dignity, and now a black automobile drove to the kerb and a man got out. He looked rich; and then a woman got out, and she was beautiful, her fur was silver fox, and she was a song across the sidewalk and inside the swinging doors, and I thought oh boy for a little of that, just a day and a night of that, and she was a dream as I walked along, her perfume still in the wet morning air.

Then a great deal of time passed as I stood in front of a pipe shop and looked, and the whole world faded except that window and I stood and smoked them all, and saw myself a great author with that natty Italian briar, and a cane, stepping out of a big black car, and she was there too, proud as hell of me, the lady in the silver fox fur. We registered and then we had cocktails and then we danced a while, and then we had another cocktail and I recited some lines from Sanskrit, and the world was so wonderful, because every two minutes some gorgeous one gazed at me, the great author, and nothing would do but I had to autograph her menu, and the silver fox girl was very jealous.