Ask the Dust (17 page)

My book came out a week later. For a while it was fun. I could walk into department stores and see it among thousands of others, my book, my words, my name, the reason why I was alive. But it was not the kind of fun I got from seeing
The Little Dog Laughed
in Hackmuth's magazine.

That was all gone too. And no word from Camilla, no telegram. I had left her fifteen dollars. I knew it couldn't last more than ten days. I felt she would wire as soon as she was penniless. Camilla and Willie—what had happened to them?

A postcard from Sammy. It was in my box when I got home that afternoon. It read:

The postcard was two days old. I filled the tank with gasoline, threw a copy of my book in the front seat, and started for Sammy's abode in the Mojave Desert.

I got there after midnight. A light shone in the single window of his hut. I knocked and he opened the door. Before speaking, I looked around. He went back to a chair beside a coal-oil lamp, where he picked up a pulp western magazine and went on reading. He did not speak. There was no sign of Camilla.

“Where is she?” I said.

“Damned if I know. She left.”

“You mean you kicked her out.”

“I can't have her around here. I'm a sick man.”

“Where'd she go?”

He jerked his thumb toward the southeast.

“That way, somewhere.”

“You mean out in the desert?”

He shook his head. “With the pup,” he said. “A little dog. Cute as hell.”

“When did she leave?”

“Sunday night,” he said.

“Sunday!” I said. “Jesus Christ, man! That was three days ago! Did she have anything to eat with her? Anything to drink.”

“Milk,” he said. “She had a bottle of milk for the dog.”

I went out beyond the clearing of his hut and looked toward the southwest. It was very cold and the moon was high, the stars in lush clusters across the blue dome of the sky. West and south and east spread a desolation of brush, somber Joshua trees, and stumpy hills. I hurried back to the hut. “Come out and show me which way she went,” I said. He put down his magazine and pointed to the southeast. “That way,” he said.

I tore the magazine out of his hand, grabbed him by the neck and pushed him outside into the night. He was thin and light, and he stumbled about before balancing himself. “Show me,” I said. We went to the edge of the clearing and he grumbled that he was a sick man, and that I had no right to push him around. He stood there, straightening his shirt, tugging at his belt. “Show me where she was when you saw her last,” I said. He pointed.

“She was just going over that ridge.”

I left him standing there and walked out a quarter of a mile to the top of the ridge. It was so cold I pulled my coat around my throat. Under my feet the earth was churning of coarse dark sand and little stones, the basin of some prehistoric sea. Beyond the ridge were other ridges like it, hundreds of them stretching infinitely away. The sandy earth revealed no footstep, no sign that it had ever been trod. I walked on, struggling through the miserable soil that gave slightly and then covered itself with crumbs of grey sand.

After what seemed two miles, I sat on a round white stone and rested. I was perspiring, and yet it was bitterly cold. The moon was
dipping toward the north. It must have been after three. I had been walking steadily but slowly in a rambling fashion, still the ridges and mounds continued, stretching away without end, with only cactus and sage and ugly plants I didn't know marking it from the dark horizon.

I remembered road maps of the district. There were no roads, no towns, no human life between here and the other side of the desert, nothing but wasteland for almost a hundred miles. I got up and walked on. I was numb with cold, and yet the sweat poured from me. The greying east brightened, metamorphosed to pink, then red, and then the giant ball of fire rose out of the blackened hills. Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold.

It was no use. How could I search for her? Why should I search for her? What could I bring her but a return to the brutal wilderness that had broken her? I walked back in the dawn, sadly in the dawn. The hills had her now. Let these hills hide her! Let her go back to the loneliness of the intimate hills. Let her live with stones and sky, with the wind blowing her hair to the end. Let her go that way.

The sun was high when I got back to the clearing. Already it was hot. In the doorway of his hut stood Sammy. “Find her?” he asked.

I didn't answer him. I was tired. He watched me a moment, and then he disappeared into the shack. I heard the door being bolted. Far out across the Mojave there arose the shimmer of heat. I made my way up the path to the Ford. In the seat was a copy of my book, my first book. I found a pencil, opened the book to the fly leaf, and wrote:

I carried the book a hundred yards into the desolation, toward the southeast. With all my might I threw it far out in the direction she had gone. Then I got into the car, started the engine, and drove back to Los Angeles.

 

 

Photo:
Los Angeles Times

About the author

Meet John Fante

About the book

Letters: John Fante on
Ask the Dust

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

Read on

“Fante,” a Poem by Charles Bukowski

Related Reading (and Viewing)

Have You Read? More by John Fante

 

 

About the author

Meet John Fante

J
OHN
F
ANTE
was born in Colorado in 1909. He attended parochial school in Boulder and a Jesuit boarding school (Regis High School) in Denver. He also attended the University of Colorado and Long Beach City College.

Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in
The American Mercury
in 1932. He published numerous stories in the
Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Esquire
, and
Harper's Bazaar
. His first novel,
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
, was published in 1938. The following year
Ask the Dust
appeared. In 1940 a collection of his short stories,
Dago Red
, was published (now collected in
The Wine of Youth
).

Meanwhile, Fante remained steadily employed as a screenwriter. Some of his credits include
Full of Life, Jeanne Eagels, My Man and I, The Reluctant Saint, Something for a Lonely Man, My Six Loves
, and
Walk on the Wild Side
.

He was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Its complications brought about his blindness in 1978 and (within two years) the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictating to his wife, Joyce, and published
Dreams from Bunker Hill
in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.

 

 

About the book

Letters John Fante on
Ask the Dust

T
HE FOLLOWING LETTERS
, written between 1938 and 1979, detail John Fante's thoughts about
Ask the Dust—
both its creation and reception. Preceding each letter are explanatory notes relating to names and references.

Stackpole Sons published
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
—Fante's second completed but first published novel—in October 1938. Within a year another book
, Ask the Dust,
had been finished and published
.

The following is the only letter written by Fante known to date from the time of its composition. Unfortunately, the publisher's plans to “back the book heavily” were upset by heavy financial losses consequent upon losing a copyright infringement case brought on behalf of Adolf Hitler (whose
Mein Kampf
Stackpole had published in an unauthorized edition). By 1941 Stackpole Sons was out of business. During this time the Fantes were living in Los Angeles, where Joyce was working on the WPA Federal Writers' Project
.

John Fante, Roseville, California, 1937

The “review in the News” would have been in a local Denver newspaper. John Chamberlain's review in
Scribner's
compares Fante with James T. Farrell: “Each author writes about an
underprivileged Catholic immigrant group […]. Each brings a searing, disenchanted understanding to his subject. But Fante believes in the quintessentializing, ‘poetic' technique, while Farrell uses a mixture of the naturalistic and the grotesque.” It concludes, “All the Bandinis swing between the polar extremes. Arturo, the oldest boy, hates himself for being a wop, hates his freckles, hates the ugly chickens in the back yard, hates himself when Rosa Pinelli deigns to ignore him. But Arturo has a deeply hidden family and race loyalty. He understands his father when the tormented artisan goes off with the widow Hildegarde, and he proves that he understands his mother also when he refuses to tell her of it. In the end it is Arturo—Arturo with his dog—who brings the family together again. The end would have been sentimental in anyone's telling but Mr. Fante's, but he makes it just right.”

[To his cousin Jo Campiglia]

206 No. New Hampshire,

Los Angeles

Nov. 29, 1938

Dearest Jo—

Thanks so much for clinching the review in the News. As you say, it is a good one and it should be of some use during the Christmas season. It was awfully generous of you to work so hard getting that review—and Edward too: thank him for me. I thought the review a very shrewd one, coming as it did from a strong Catholic: she did a nice job.

The book is going to print this week in London. Routledge, a very fine and very old English firm, cabled their acceptance last week. I don't know what the English edition will be like, but I imagine no changes will be made. I should like to have substituted English hockey or golf for the baseball stuff in the American, but they were in a rush to get the book ready for Christmas.

Joyce and I are quite broke but otherwise
very well and happy. Money is coming, and I hope to start my new novel by the first of the year. Right now I'm writing an outline, and it's a big exasperating job. New book will be called “Ask the Dust on the Road,” and the story is in a Los Angeles background (no Hollywood stuff). Story of a girl I once loved who loved someone else, who in turn despised her. Strange story of a beautiful Mexican girl who somehow didn't fit into modern life, took to marijuana, lost her mind, and wandered into the Mojave desert with a little Pekinese dog. It [is] a book like
Human Bondage
, but with humor and wistfulness. I have to have it ready by October next year, which means the writing has to be finished by July.

We are going home for Christmas, and after that our plans are to move somewhere in a place where it is quiet and inexpensive: possibly Monterey.

Love to everyone,
Johnnie

Awfully good review in December
Scribner's
by John Chamberlain, considered best American critic.

The
Atlantic Monthly
review that Fante mentions to his mother in the next letter was by Ellery Sedgwick. (See the following section of this P.S. for an excerpt of the review.)

The collaboration with Lynn Root and Frank Fenton that he was hopeful of selling to MGM was in fact made (from a screenplay not by Fante but by S. J. and Laura Perlman) into a movie
(The Golden Fleecing)
released in 1940
.

Regarding Fante's statement to his mother that “Joyce and I have been going to mass regularly,” Joyce Fante comments simply, “Not true.”

826 South Berendo,

Los Angeles

November 8, 1939

Dearest Mother,

My new book is out today. From reports I get it has every chance of making a lot of money. I say this in view of the letters I have had from my publisher, and from the first reviews, one of which appears in the December issue of the
Atlantic Monthly
. Last Friday my publisher wired me that he was going to back the book heavily, and I know that the advance sale is already bigger than my first book. It is—this new book—a very fine job of printing and binding, and it looks much better than the first book. It is displayed in a window in Beverly Hills, and it is one of the most attractive jackets I've ever seen. I am sending you a copy of the book very soon now.

My first book will pick up from this point too. I know several bookstores have reordered copies of Bandini, and there is a chance it will also make some important money….

On the whole everything looks rosy for the future. A story I wrote with Frank Fenton and Lynn Root is being considered at Metro. I think we have a very good chance of selling it for around six thousand, or two thousand apiece. We won't have any definite news about this for a week, but if we do sell the story Joyce and I will of course come home for Thanksgiving, and maybe sooner. Another story of mine is under consideration at Warner Brothers, and still a third, which is not finished, will be distributed within a few days. Something is bound to happen before Christmas, and perhaps sooner. We hope for a definite break to the good from now on. I am in a good position in the publishing world from now on. I can demand and get big advances, when I decide to write another
book. In fact, I am sure I can get $2500 advance anytime I ask for it. The success of my new book will naturally open up opportunities for me here in Hollywood, but I shall have to discuss all of that with my agent.

Joyce is well. Today she was down with a bad headache, but that was the first time she has been sick in months. She sent out a batch of poetry to the
Atlantic Monthly
, and it was such good stuff that I'm sure she'll sell a couple of them at least.

I suggest you listen to the radio Sunday night for Joseph Henry Jackson's program from San Francisco. I think he'll review my new book this coming Sunday. If not, he'll cover it the Sunday afterward. The program is either at 6 or 6:30 in the evening. It's a coast-to-coast network program and it should help a great deal, provided he likes the book. I haven't heard from Jackson, and it may be he doesn't like the book, but I think he'll praise it. I enclose a clipping from the
Boulder Camera
. It was sent by Milton Folawn, who is now back in Boulder.

It has begun to rain down here. Today was the first rain of the season, light and cold. I had a letter I like the change. It has been too hot lately. I am working on a beautiful short story which I know I'm going to sell. Joyce and I have been going to mass regularly these past Sundays. 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. I shall send him one in a few days.

That's all for this time. Love to everyone—

Johnnie

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.