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Story /// John Fante’s Ask the Dust is widely considered the quintessential Los Angeles novel. Published in 1939, the same year as The Big Sleep, The Day of the Locust, and The Grapes of Wrath, Fante’s semi-autobiographical book follows Arturo Bandini, an aspiring writer in LA’s Bunker Hill who deals with poverty, ambition, and romance during the Great Depression.
Author Héctor Tobar has named Ask the Dust his favorite LA novel. And when a 2006 film adaptation came out starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, written and directed by legendary Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne, J.R. Moehringer wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Many consider [Fante] the best novelist Los Angeles has ever produced. In spare, gleaming prose, John painted a city that was nasty and harsh, but also shot through with magic—part land mine, part gold mine.”
As a new book out July 24 explains, Ask the Dust likely would have been forgotten if not for another celebrated LA novelist, Charles Bukowski. In John Fante Tapes, Italian researcher Alessio De Stefano accounts how Bukowski and journalist Ben Pleasants resurrected Ask the Dust. De Stefano told Zephyr about Fante, “He was writing so well, in a way that it was so effective, ironic, sympathetic, and brilliant.”
Fante was born in Colorado in 1909. His father emigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy, where De Stefano lives now. De Stefano created the Piccola Biblioteca Marsicana, a project that preserves stories of the region. “I found that there are so many stories about our hometown, about Abruzzo, but really a lot of stories changed to the stories of people that went abroad,” like Fante’s father, De Stefano said. The novelist remains big in Abruzzo; the annual John Fante Festival has been taking place there for 20 years. The celebration every August includes multiple days of literary talks and other events.
Ask the Dust was neglected when it first came out partly because the publisher was busy with a legal battle over the reprinting rights to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto. “Because of the Mein Kampf, Ask the Dust didn’t have any republishing, didn’t have any promotion, didn’t have anything,” De Stefano said. “Ask the Dust just fades away.”
That is, until the book wound up in the hands of Bukowski, a poet, novelist, and screenwriter whom the New York Times described as “a bard of the barroom and the brothel.” Years before Bukowski published his debut novel, 1971’s Post Office, he discovered Ask the Dust in the non-circulating section of the LA Public Library. He began to idolize Fante.
Bukowski talked about Fante to journalist Ben Pleasants, who tracked down the older writer, then in his 70s, and who had moved on to screenwriting and was blind and dealing with health issues. While Bukowski’s thought had been, “you don’t mess with the gods,” De Stefano said, Pleasants looked up Fante in the Malibu phone book. “He just called him and John Fante answered,” De Stefano said. Pleasants and Fante ended up doing a series of interviews between 1978 and 1981. Pleasants made the recordings public and they became known as the “John Fante tapes.”
Bukowski went on to spend time with Fante, too. He documented aspects of a meal they shared in a short story titled “I Meet the Master.” “For him, it was his master,” De Stefano said. “Bukowski had precious memories of this meeting, and for that moment and for all his life, he [wrote] a lot of poems dedicated to John Fante or [about] John Fante.” The increased attention eventually led to a 1980 republishing of Ask the Dust and the resurrection of Fante’s literary career.
De Stefano first learned about this story around 2013. He later traveled to the U.S. to search the archives of people involved. At the University of Arizona he found Pleasants’ photocopied version of Ask the Dust, with Fante’s phone number scrawled on the front page.
Kim Cooper, who with husband Richard Schave runs quirky tours of LA through Esotouric's Secret Los Angeles and spoke with De Stefano as he worked on the book, said John Fante Tapes tells an important story about the novelist who had been “writing these stories of real LA people, strivers,” but then “had to set his artistic ambitions aside.”
Now De Stefano is “telling the story of how Fante is given an opportunity at the end of his life to know that it wasn’t for nothing, that people still remember and care and want to know who he is,” said Cooper, who with Schave got LA to name a square for Fante in 2010 outside the Central Library downtown.
Fante died in 1983 at age 74. He was living at the Motion Picture & Television Fund Country House in Woodland Hills. Bukowski died in 1994 at 73. “Even [in] one of his last poems, he speaks about John Fante, saying that the moment when he met him was one of the best moments in his life,” De Stefano said. “He was very bound to the John Fante writer and human being.”
John Fante Tapes is available through Radici Edizioni, currently only in Italian.
Dispatch /// On Monday, Canter’s Deli on Fairfax Ave. in LA was offering its famous pastrami sandwiches for just 95 cents to celebrate its 95th anniversary. The deal also included coleslaw, a pickle, and chocolate chip rugelach. People began lining up around 3 p.m., some of them with chairs, ahead of the dine-in deal’s 6 p.m. start time.
When one thinks of LA institutions, Canter’s comes to mind for many people. Even as the Fairfax District where the 24-hour deli moved in 1948 has changed from a center of Jewish establishments to a strip of streetwear shops and empty storefronts, and Guns N’ Roses comes by less often, Canter’s continues to draw locals and tourists alike.
Both types turned out on Monday. There appeared to be longtime regulars and also first-time customers. Some people said they came for the deal, while others seemed excited to be part of what felt like a celebration.
Once the doors opened, the staff kept every table and most of the counter space full, but the atmosphere wasn’t hectic. One server said, “No rush. Take as much time as you want here. You waited in line long enough.” By 7 p.m., the line wrapped around a side street and all the way down Hayworth Ave., behind the restaurant.
“Canter’s is a place where grandkids grow up and bring their grandkids,” third-generation owner Marc Canter, who hosts tours of the deli, told Zephyr by email. “It’s a lot of hard work to keep this institution going with 125 employees running 24 hours a day, but worth it, and [I’m] very proud to keep it going. It feels like a giant family, and we’re all doing our part to make people happy.”
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