Oh for a Mexican Girl! The Limits of Literature in John Fante’s Ask the Dust

Abstract

“O h f o r a M e x ic a n G i r l ! ”: T h e L im its o f L i t e r a t u r e in J o h n F a n t e s A s k t h e D u s t C h a r l e s S c r u g g s John Fante never met H. L. M encken. T heir correspondence began in 1930 and lasted until M encken’s stroke in 1948. In 1930, Mencken was still enjoying his immense literary reputation, but his fame was restricted mostly to the East. Indeed, Mencken didn’t care much for the West or the Southwest, calling the landscape from New Orleans to Los Angeles ‘“ghastly wilds’” and Los Angeles itself ‘“ the one true and original arse-hole of creation’” (in Hobson 270, 272). A t first glance, then, it seems odd that Mencken would befriend a young Italian American writer from the small town of Boulder, Colorado, who would set his masterpiece, Ask the Dust (1939), in that very “arse-hole” Mencken despised. However, Mencken’s reputation did not rest entirely upon his role as a satirist. He was also considered America’s premier Stephanie Sanchez. ACROSS THE STREET, PALM TREES. 1993. Oil on panel. 8 1/2" x 14". Courtesy of Terrence Rogers Fine Art, Santa Monica. C h a r l e s S c r u g g s 2 2 9 literary critic, and as such he wanted American writers to remake the literary landscape, to free it from the prison house of the Genteel Tradition. One reason Mencken was attracted to Fante as a writer was that Fante was in a position to explore California, something Mencken encouraged him to do instead of pursuing his usual obsession about his family (Moreau 37). M encken’s literary friendship with Fante was not an isolated phenomenon . Despite his eastern prejudices, Mencken had also encour­ aged Nebraska’s Willa Cather, Oregon’s H. L. Davis, and California’s Carey M cW illiam s to “do” the hinterlands, even though he often hoped that the focus upon these “ghastly wilds” would be satiric. A s we know, Fante’s Los Angeles in Ask the Dust spills over the boundaries of satire to include the tragic, but that, too, reflected a side of Mencken that Fante admired. In 1917, Mencken had written one of the most influential critical studies of his day, A Book of Prefaces, and its ideas about the tragic nature of human existence would find a home in the conclusion to Ask the Dust. Thus Mencken appears in Fante’s novel in more than one guise. A t its most elemental level, the dictator of New York’s literary establishment, H. L. Mencken disguised as J. C. Hackmuth , is the patron saint of Arturo Bandini, who, at age twenty, has gone to the big city to make his fame and fortune. The question is, what does Fante do with his hero in this autobiographical novel in which there are no heroes except the desert and the dust?1 The relationship between Fante and Mencken— one ambitious to make his mark, the other an established author— is somewhat similar to another famous literary pair in eighteenth-century England. When James Boswell thrust himself upon Samuel Johnson in 1763, Boswell was twenty-two, Johnson fifty-three. Fante was twenty-three (though he lied about his age, telling Mencken and others he was twenty) when the fifty-two-year-old Mencken published his first story in The American Mercury. Moreover, both Johnson and Mencken were lexicographers. Johnson’s landmark Dictionary of the English Language (1755) dignified English by locating its strength in an etymological and literary history. Mencken’s The American Language (1919) dignified American English by tracing its extraordinary vitality to a vernacular source. The American Language, the fourth edition of which appeared in 1936 as Fante was beginning to think about Ask the Dust, was one of Fante’s most trea­ sured Mencken books (Moreau 101-2), and it is easy to see why. The virtues of the vernacular that...