Posts Tagged ‘John Fante’

Stephen Cooper, the world’s leading John Fante expert, has a few more words to say about the author whose novel, Ask the Dust, will be featured at an Another Look discussion on Tuesday, September 19. We wrote about the event here, and we wrote about Joel Williams, the convict whose life was turned around by Fante’s book here. (Author Alan Rifkin has a few words to say here, too.)

But who knew Fante wrote a short story with Stanford on his mind? Says Cooper about the wistful Stanford references included in the pages above from his short story, ‘To Be a Monstrous Clever Fellow’: “Fante may have helped usher in The Book Haven’s first prison stabbing but something tells me his delirious ‘To Be a Monstrous Clever Fellow’ won’t fly. It’s awfully good for a laugh though …”

Stanford was more than on his mind, and more significant than a laugh. He was the son of lower-class Italian immigrants, and fell for Joyce Smart of Placer County, “the Stanford-bred daughter of one of Roseville’s first families,” Cooper wrote in his biography, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (North Point Press, 2000). Her mother’s reaction? “He looks so Italian,” she complained. “I can’t even pretend that he isn’t.”

“To Joyce, still fresh from Stanford, where ‘the winds of freedom blow,’ the whole dilemma smacked of another another century.” On July 31, 1937, they crossed the state line to Nevada and secretly married.

Rob Spillman, writing in The Boston Review on the occasion of the publication of The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959, edited by Steve Cooper and published in 2000: “With ‘To Be a Monstrous Clever Fellow’ we enter Bandini territory, the place where Fante’s legacy does and should rest. The clever narrator works on the docks, has rough, calloused hands, yet also quotes Nietzsche and tells himself that he is going home to write his ‘thousand words’ – but can’t help getting caught up in the chase for women at the local dance hall. It is classic Fante that the narrator lusts after the well-bred yet idiotic girl, passing himself off as a professor until she notices his horrible hands.”

“These smooth, neat stories are mainly interesting for the information they contain, like the episode in ‘Mama’s Dream’ when the aging, hard-drinking father tears apart the Fante character’s novel, which portrayed the writer’s father as a philandering drunkard. But mostly these later stories work to illuminate how good the early Bandini material is, how singular, how Romantically passionate his writing was, why John Fante so deserves to be read and placed among the great American voices of the twentieth century.” In short, he deserves “Another Look.” Come by on Tuesday, or in person or by zoom.

Spillman writes: “If only we could go back to the late-1930s and force Fante to turn his back on Hollywood, to keep going with Bandini, to keep pushing, one can only imagine the brilliant novels that the hard-working Fante would have produced. Or not. As Fante writes in “Prologue to Ask the Dust: ‘Do I speak like a lunatic? Then give me lunacy, give me those days again.'”

Back to Stanford. According to Steve Cooper: “Nearly a hundred years after writing that long-unpublished story—and ‘Washed in the Rain,’ likewise Stanford-inflected, whereby Stanford stands in for everything his alter-ego narrator wants but can’t have: talk about desire—Fante is finally being admitted!”

Come join us in welcoming Fante to Stanford, forty years after his death.

REGISTER ON THE LINK HERE

Our Tuesday, Sept. 19, hybrid event on John Fante‘s 1939 novel Ask the Dust  is coming up fast. Join us at 7 p.m. (PST) in Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. REGISTER FOR THE EVENT ON THE LINK HERE! The event is free and open to the public. Walk-ins are welcome, but registration is encouraged whether you plan to attend virtually or in person. Read more about the event here.

This event is co-sponsored by the Continuing Studies Program and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford, and also the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco.

Two weeks ago, we published a story how Joel Williams’s life as a convict turned around when he read Fante’s 1939 novel. “There were no creative writing classes in prison,” he wrote, but with the help of Fante scholar Stephen Cooper, he became a writer. Read about it here. But meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from another successful author, Alan Rifkin. According to NPR: “One of the true L.A. originals, Alan Rifkin is easy to catch in the act of being brilliant.” Here’s another chance to do so, as he discusses Ask the Dust.

Every Los Angeles writer at the outskirts of vision feels a connection to Ask the Dust, the 1939 novel that, more than any other, seems to weep over this city’s corpse in the ecstasy of possessing it. (“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 you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”ⁱ We all are sufferers. We’re not sure, exactly, if the intimacy of our suffering will survive the novel’s journey to the big screen, to the masses, to the world. But on the page, it’s strictly ours.

Stephen Cooper’s history with Ask the Dust is even more personal. “I was seeking to fill that absence that I didn’t even consciously know defined me,” he says. “And that was the loss of my father. So I would spend my days just mooning around, moving about, like most young writers, haunted by characters, trying to compose them and failing, failing, failing, failing, failing. . . . And then when I came upon Ask the Dust, it was a time in my life when I was living with every pore open to possibility.” (Citations are from Rikfin’s interviews with Cooper.)

Living, in other words, like Bandini himself, who finally writes his look-at-me novel, only to hurl it to the sands where his goddess went mad. “He’s gotten what he wanted, in terms of having written the book … to be on the shelf next to the big guys. But desire is such that it outlives its fulfillment. And so he must desire something else. … It turns to dust, doesn’t it, the fulfillment of desire. So getting what you want is, if you will, just a beginning of the eternal and unattainable story of desire.”
***

Stephen Cooper was my graduate professor at Cal State Long Beach, and as I was writing this essay, he coined a name for this school of writing: Southern California Dream Realism. Maybe Southern California Dream Realism is just the ultimate extension of anybody else’s literary mode—a way of seeing life stripped of time’s pretense. It’s a manner of always seeing the terminal desert from the depths of the paradise dream, or paradise from the stretches of life’s dry march.

I do know that in our past, in the dark of that pantry, I see the East Coast. Some remnant of ancestry, a quaint hope of continuity, a proper burial gone wrong—Waugh’s mortuary. I see how fooled my childhood was by every architectural simulation of history.

But I don’t know what happens to a civilization, and a literature, that grows up alongside the constant vision of dust. Does the rest of the country even make sense to us here? Was all this aftermath built in from the start? Even the apocalypse, in Los Angeles, feels like history now, the erasures of paradise barely detectable, the age of visions five minutes from over.

That is one scenario for where L.A. literature is heading. Then there is Francesca Lia Block’s view, which she offers in an unpunctuated e-mail: “life/death magic/reality young/old spirit/body masculine/feminine the walls seem to be dissolving and the worlds blending” (from correspondence to Block). In other words, “Paradise Next.”

*Claremont McKenna professor Jay Martin has pointed out that what W. H. Auden called “West’s Disease” — an L.A. collision of foolishness, desire, and illusion named after Nathanael West — could just as well have been named after Fante.

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT ON THE LINK HERE! 

Please join us at Stanford on for a discussion of John Fante‘s 1939 novel Ask the Dust at 7 p.m. (PST) on Tuesday, Sept. 19, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. It’s a hybrid event, so come virtually or in person. REGISTER FOR THE EVENT ON THE LINK HERE! The event is free and open to the public. Walk-ins are welcome, but registration is encouraged, whether you plan to attend virtually or in person. Read more about the event here.

Another Look takes on authors and books that we think deserve more attention.  Fante’s Ask the Dust was forgotten for decades after first appearing in 1939. Since being rediscovered in the 1980s, the novel has gained an enthusiastic international audience and influenced many writers. How much of an influence did Fante’s Ask the Dust have? Read the story below, from a Shoshone-Paiute American Indian prisoner whose life was changed by an encounter with Fante’s remarkable novel. Author Joel Williams’s story, republished from Fordham University Press’s John Fante’s ASK THE DUST: A Joining of Voices and Views (2020) with his permission, comes to us courtesy Stephen Cooper, English Professor at California State University, Long Beach. He is perhaps the world’s leading expert on John Fante.

In addition to the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, this event is co-sponsored by the Continuing Studies Program and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford.

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard about the Los Angeles writer, John Fante. The year was 2008 and the place was Mule Creek State Prison, a maximum-security California penitentiary where I was dragging in my twenty-second year on a twenty-seven-to-life sentence.

I was on the yard, hanging out with a couple of other skins near the pull-up bars, when we heard the gunshot. Men everywhere dropped. It was the guard tower’s mini-14, a totally different sound from the usual 40mm “Big Bertha” riot-control block gun. I had suspected something was about to go down ever since another skin — the term we Natives used for each other — had warned me to keep on my toes. Somebody was going to get moved on.

Stretched out prone in the dirt I lifted my head an inch to eyeball the yard. Guards with batons out and keys jangling on their utility belts ran past with medical staff trailing behind. Cordite filled the air as one man was hoisted onto a gurney and another was led off in handcuffs. Beside me Bear, a skin nicknamed for his size, rested his chin on a paperback.

“What book you got?” I asked.

“You don’t wanna read this.”

“Why’s that?”

“Cause you won’t give it back!”

I smiled and he tossed it over, something to while away the next several days when the whole prison would be on lockdown. Hours later, when we were told to get up and go back to our cells, I stuffed the book in my back pocket.

My neighbor, Norm, later told me through the vent that the guy who got stabbed on the yard was my cellmate, a Maidu Indian named Lance. I was stunned. Sure, Lance had a gambling jones and was always in debt. Sure, he smoked too much herb. But hell, he was a nice enough guy and for me that counted, what with most everyone else out to pick your pocket and cut your throat. So sure, the news hit me hard.

To get my mind off things I picked up Bear’s book. It didn’t look like much — no flashy cover, no promise of action or sleaze. The title was an odd one, Ask the Dust, by a guy from my stomping grounds in Los Angeles. His name was John Fante and I’d never heard of him but as I flipped through the first few pages I saw Bukowski’s name. I knew who he was so I read his introduction. And Bukowski revered John Fante. My literary hero, Bukowski, had a hero himself. I stirred up a cup of instant coffee, climbed into my bunk, and set off on a long night of reading.

And what a night it turned out to be. Fante’s character Arturo Bandini pulled me into a Los Angeles I’d never experienced, an earlier world colored with subtle shades of poetry and streaks of vivid emotion. Bandini was exuberant, alive, searching. I reread sentences, whole passages, soaking in the beauty of Fante’s words, wringing every nuance of meaning from his prose. And as always happened when I savored another writer’s work, I felt the tug of jealousy. I too wanted to create beautiful works and move people, and once again I’d been beaten to the punch.

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Please join us at Stanford on for a discussion of John Fante‘s 1939 novel Ask the Dust at 7 p.m. (PST) on Tuesday, Sept. 19, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. It’s a hybrid event, so come virtually or in person. Registration here or below.

Something you may not have known about Fante. He was the son of Italian immigrants, born in 1909 (he died in 1983). Hence, Italy considers him one of its own. So we’re partnering with the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco for the event!

Poet Charles Bukowski (not Italian) said the book had a lifetime influence on his own writing, and that the works of Fante, a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, were “written of and from the gut and the heart.”

“One day I pulled Ask the Dust down from the library book shelf and stood for a moment, reading.  Then like a man who had found gold in a city dump, I carried the book to a table.  The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle for me….Fante became my god.” 

The book was adapted into a 2006 film starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek.

Panelists will include Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Novelist Terry Gamble will round out the panel. Many will remember her from the Another Look discussion of Alfred Hayes‘s My Face for the World to See in 2019.

Copies are available as in Kindle and paperback. (In a pinch, the book is even available in a less user-friendly pdf format online.)

In addition to the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, this event is co-sponsored by the Continuing Studies Program and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford.

REGISTER ON THE LINK HERE

Postscript: There’s more! Read about how Fante’s Ask the Dust turned around the life of a convict: here. What happens to a civilization that grows up alongside the constant vision of dust? Read novelist Alan Rifkin’s take on that here.