I discovered John Fante when I was in college. I would bet most of you don’t know John Fante and I have reason to believe he’s not in fashion anymore. I never met him, but I imagine him as an irascible drunk who wrote how I felt. He made me think that writing was possible.
Many of his characters were unlikable in a likable sort of way. They were narcissistic with an edge of self-doubt. They were ambitious and self-deprecating. They were bar-fight tough and emotionally fragile. They were me in my twenties.
In 1938, Fante’s first book, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, introduced the largely self-inspired character of Los Angeleno Arturo Bandini, who would appear in most of his subsequent books. His publisher, Stackpole and Sons, gave him an $800 advance (around $14,000 today) for his second novel, Ask the Dust. According to the internet, Fante, not yet thirty and with a lifetime of poverty behind him, was developing a reputation as a sort of West Coast Fitzgerald. His editor told him his future was bright. He was so close to having his dream of being a successful author come true. Then, of all people, Hitler intervened.
Hitler’s 1925 autobiography/Nazi manifesto, Mein Kampf, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1933. Though it was a best seller in Germany, the American market for a book by a rising Austrian politician was small during the Great Depression, and sales were poor. By late 1938, though, Hitler’s growing domination of Europe spiked interest in the book. Houghton Mifflin put out a mass-market edition and promoted it heavily.
Meanwhile, Hitler had renounced his Austrian citizenship and called himself a “stateless German.” This, according to one interpretation of U.S. copyright law, put Mein Kampf into the public domain, and prompted Stackpole and Sons to publish its own version, with the tagline, “This Edition Pays No Royalty to Adolf Hitler.” (The New Yorker objected to this.)
Both versions sold well, but from 1939-1941 the copyright case was in the courts. In the end, Houghton Mifflin (and Hitler) won, and Stackpole ended up paying a great deal of court fees and damages. Despite their having gotten Fante’s hopes up about the prospects for Ask the Dust, they had no time or money to spend promoting it, and its fate was collateral damage. Its initial print run of 2,200 copies made no cultural impression, and Fante turned to screenwriting to make a dependable living.
As legend has it, Charles Bukowski discovered Ask the Dust in the late ’70s. He set about reading all the novels in the Los Angeles public library. When he got to “F” he read Ask the Dust and loved it. He brought it to his publisher, Black Sparrow Press, and John Fante was rediscovered.
I don’t think we can really blame the publisher or even Hitler (as much as I want to) for the initial failure of Ask the Dust. When writers feel that their publisher has failed them – an all-too-common complaint – they need to consider that publishers are often thinking about other things and they don't have time to think about you. It's nothing personal.
The truth is, Fante was probably decades ahead of his time. As Bukowski said, "I never said it was important to rescue Fante. I only know of the effect he had on me, even my chances to go on living. He was the spiritual shot in the arm to me where the churches, the accepted writers, and all else had failed. I'm not saying I would have sunk without him. But he was a force. He gave me some heart. He made me smile a bit. I even liked the name: FANTE. What the hell, I was very lucky when I picked his first book out of the shelves of the downtown L.A. Public Library. Couldn't have been a better place to do it.”
My point is that you deserve a creative voice and someone needs to hear it. I want to help you. It’s just at the early stages, but take a look at TheWriteKit and let me know if we can be of service to you.
I think the last word is best left to John Fante. “I think the one thing that a writer must avoid is bitterness,” he said in a 1979 interview. “I think it’s the one fault that can destroy him. It can shrivel him up… I’ve fought it all my life.”