University of Amsterdam!
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John Fante’s Social Protest!
The Politics of his Los Angeles Stories!
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Master’s Thesis Chris Veldhuis!
Thesis Supervisor: Dr. G.H. Blaustein!
Second Reader: Prof. Dr. R.V.A. Janssens!
11 July 2014
Contents
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Introduction page 2.
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Chapter One: Fante’s Los Angeles page 11.
Fante and Los Angeles literature page 12.
The city and its inhabitants page 16.
Ask the Dust’s and Los Angeles’ two-facedness page 18.
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Chapter Two: Fante and the Melting Pot page 23.
The melting pot Page 24.
Carey McWilliams’ melting pot Page 26.
The melting pot of Ask the Dust Page 29.
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Chapter Three: Fante’s Revival Page 38.
White ethnic revival Page 39.
The revival of Ask the Dust Page 41.
A new version of Ask the Dust Page 43.
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Conclusion Page 45.
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Introduction
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In 1932 John Fante arrived in Los Angeles. He had come from Colorado with one story published in the American Mercury, and dreaming of becoming a great writer. He took a room in Bunker Hill, downtown Los Angeles and spent hours behind his typewriter writing letters to his idol H.L. Mencken, a very prominent literary critic, who was also the editor of the American Mercury and the first to recognize Fante’s talent, years before he would publish his first novel. After several short stories and some rejections during these first lean years, Fante published his debut novel Wait Until Spring, Bandini! in 1938. The book dealt with Arturo Bandini’s childhood in Colorado. This would be Fante’s alter ego’s first appearance. Arturo would serve as the protagonist in Fante’s several largely autobiographical stories. Only a year later Fante had not only written but also published Ask the Dust (1939). This novel, set in 1933, reflected Fante’s time in a cheap hotel in Bunker Hill.
At Mencken’s suggestion, Fante met with Carey McWilliams shortly after arriving in Los Angeles. Like Fante, McWilliams was one of Mencken’s protege’s, a lawyer and
promising writer. The two became friends instantly and would remain close friends until McWilliams’ death in 1980. In the 1930s McWilliams developed into a radical activist, writing about the fate of migrant farmworkers. His Factories in the Field, first published in 1939, dealt extensively with the injustice done to farm laborers, exposing the “sordid business of race exploitation” (McWilliams, Factories 134). The book would gain a large audience, partly because it could be read as the non-fictional background for John Steinbeck’s immensely popular The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which was published almost simultaneously.
Thanks to his convincing work on the problems of migratory farm labor, McWilliams was appointed Chief of the Division of Immigration and Housing in the California state government. From then on he directed his attention even more towards the problems of racism and exclusion. “From the early 1930s on I had been interested in the racial and ethnic minorities that figured prominently in the history of migratory farm labor in California. But it was not until I was named to head the Division of Immigration and Housing that I became interested in “the racial problem” as such.” (McWilliams, Education 100)
Whereas McWilliams grew more radical in the course of the 1930s, Fante tried to refrain from engaging in politics. The emerging leftist movement of the 1930s, did never
truly convince him. Neither did any other political movement. In a letter to McWilliams, for example, he writes: “The only menace I find in poverty is that I can’t fuck enough. I am not in favor of Capitalism or Communism, but Clitorism” (Fante Selected Letters 362). When he showed interest in Communism, it would only be to further his individual purposes. In one cynical letter, he writes: “I almost long for the Communist millennium, with writers being published because they have something to say and not because Palmer wants this and Gingrich wants that” (Fante, Selected Letters 358). His main interests in communism, he states in the same letter, are the freedom to write whatever he wants and the notion of free love, “The idea of love in a Communist Society always appeals to me. The women of Capitalistic America (I mean the great middle class, where the beauties are) prefer football heroes and Esquire readers to devils like me” (Fante, Selected Letters 359). These remarks are of typical of Fante’s humor. Yet through other letters and diary entrances we learn that Fante truly disliked established politics and great ideologies. Still, he displayed a great sympathy towards the ethnic working classes, a sympathy that is reflected in his fiction.
Through McWilliams Fante also became part of a group of writers, which is associated with the left, for example by Michael Denning, who considers these writers the Hollywood Popular Front. They gathered in Stanley Rose’s Bookshop, in which McWilliams owned half the interest. Rose had been a friend of McWilliams since the 1920s. During his stay in a mental facility near Stanford University, having feigned psychiatrical disorders in order to avoid having to fight in the First World War, Rose had developed a love for books. When he came to Los Angeles in the early 1920s, McWilliams lent him a hand in organizing two bookshops, one on Vine Street and later one on Hollywood boulevard. As McWilliams recalls, the bookshop “were favorite meeting places for writers: Bill Saroyan (…), Louis Adamic, William Faulkner, Nathanael West (…), John Fante (…) and also for actors and directors. Both shops were hangouts for Hollywood writers and artists (many painters) - “intellectuals,” if you will (McWilliams, Education 48). Other names associated with the bookshop are famous noir writers like James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and Raymond Chandler.
The publication of Fante's Ask the Dust in 1939 occurred in what is often regarded an “Annus Mirabilis” for Los Angeles literature. In the same year West wrote his famous The Day of the Locust, Chandler introduced his famous detective hero Philip Marlowe in The Big
Sleep and Aldous Huxley published his Los Angeles novel After Many a Summer dies the Swan. Moreover, The Grapes of Wrath, another California novel, appeared in the same year, alongside McWilliams’ Factories in the Field. Unfortunately, Ask the Dust was overlooked in this profusion of publications. Although the novel had been received well by the critics, its sales were very disappointing. An explanation for this is the fact that Fante’s publisher was unable to invest any money or time in the promotion of the novel, due to an absurd lawsuit against Hitler about the copyrights of Mein Kampf (1925), which the company had illegally published. The insufficient proceeds from Ask the Dust forced Fante to quickly start working again. Now he had his eyes on a heart-breaking portrait of the Filipino in Los Angeles, which he would have called The Little Brown Brothers.
On the fifth of January 1940 Fante wrote in his diary: “C. [McWilliams] inspired me with magnificent idea for sociological novel based on the life of Filipino in
California” (Fante, Selected Letters 923). He immediately went to work, immersed himself into Filipino culture through his Filipino colleague and friend Carlos Bulosan. Later in January he went to Fresno with McWilliams to visit Filipino camps near the enormous farms. Eventually, the only results of these efforts were several short stories, among which “Helen, Thy Beauty is to Me” (1941), a short story Fante wrote about Julio Sal, the would-be protagonist of the novel, received much praise. Yet, the manuscript of the novel itself, which Fante delivered in 1944, was rejected.
As Stephen Cooper reports in his expansive biography of Fante, “he [Fante]
immediately stopped working on it, abandoning a project he had cherished for years. A more crucial moment in his career would be difficult to pinpoint, for it marked the end of his concentration on prose fiction for a long, long time” (Cooper, Full 214). For the years to follow Fante focused all his energies on gambling, drinking, golfing and writing screenplays. Then, in the late 1970s Fante could finally enjoy well-deserved praise for his work. Ask the Dust had resurfaced, after having been out of print for many years, and Fante would become increasingly popular. Reinvigorated by this attention, Fante, now nearing the end of his life, dictated a new novel to his wife Joyce. This novel, Dreams from Bunker Hill (1984), the last Bandini novel, was published posthumously.
Since its revival of the late 1970, Fante’s fiction has also received some academic attention, mainly through the tireless efforts of Stephen Cooper, who devoted all his time
securing Fante’s rightful place in the literary canon. In 1995, for example, he organized the John Fante Conference, together with David Fine. Those who contributed to this conference belonged to a select group of Fante critics and the arguments they made were mainly aimed at proving Fante’s importance and the need for further serious research into his work. They did so convincingly. Fine, for example, made a compelling argument about Fante’s position within Los Angeles literature, stressing his unicity.
Cooper’s mission has mainly been to gather as much material on Fante as he possibly could. After Fante’s death he established contact with the family, interviewed Joyce Fante, gained access to all his letters and writings, still well-preserved in his Malibu home. , he wrote Full of Life (2000), a wonderful and comprehensive biography on Fante, and edited John Fante: a Critical Gathering (1999), which collected all contributions to the John Fante Conference, The John Fante Reader (2002) and The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959 (2000), a collection of Fante’s short stories and some previously unpublished writings.
Apart from Richard Collins’ John Fante: A Literary Portrait (2000), which is part biography, part literary criticism, critical considerations of Fante’s work have consisted of brief articles, which are sometimes incomplete. Although, there have been some interesting arguments in the handful of articles that have been published on Fante’s work, the cultural context in which Fante’s work was published and subsequently rediscovered is still largely underexposed. I will attempt to fill this gap in research, by developing arguments about Fante’s contributions to American culture. First, I will provide inclusive cultural contexts for these works using Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front (1996), and Matthew Frye
Jacobson’s Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2008). For this thesis, I will focus on Fante’s fiction set in downtown Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s, which includes Ask the Dust and the remains of the failed Filipino novel, The Little Brown Brothers. Despite the remarkable connection to Ask the Dust and the downtown Los Angeles setting, there has virtually been no criticism on the works linked to The Little Brown Brothers. My research into these works and their cultural contexts, will enable me to answer the following questions: How does Fante’s work reflect thinking on ethnicity in the context of 1930s and 1940s Los Angeles, and how does it contribute to, or influence this thinking?
In the first chapter I will discuss Fante’s place within Los Angeles literature. David Fine, who has written about this in his comprehensive anthology of Los Angeles literature, Imagining Los Angeles (2008) considers Fante a unique writer. A considerable part of the chapter “down-and-out in Los Angeles” is devoted to Fante, who had come down to Los Angeles in the 1930s to become a novelist instead of a screenwriter, and settled in the Downtown instead of Hollywood. As Fine points out, this rarely happened. Fante, thus, has a unique starting point, which is reflected by his writing.
In “John Fante and the Los Angeles novel of the 1930s” Fine shows how Los Angeles writers of the 1930s had portrayed the city as a dark apocalyptic place where all dreams are crushed. This, he writes, was typical of “the dream factory laborers who felt a mandate to cut through the Golden Land hype and offer visions of the dream’s end” (Fine, “John Fante” 114). These writers attacked the booster myth, the imagery that had been constructed of Southern California for its promotion. Fante, Fine claims, “had no such agenda” (“John Fante” 110). For him Los Angeles was home; “the place [where] the young Bandini encounters the world. It is the arena of his desires, his yearnings to be both writer and
lover” (Fine “John Fante” 112). Consequently, Fine’s main argument is that Fante is unique, a voice “filled with emotion and feeling of every kind - not only pain and sadness, but joy and a zest for living and loving, humor and pure zaniness - (…) like no other California
voice” (“John Fante” 115).
Mark Laurila, in “The Los Angeles Booster Myth, the Anti-Myth, and John Fante’s Ask the Dust”, similarly argues that Fante’s fiction does not offer a purely dark image of Los Angeles, although he shows that Fante occasionally followed his contemporaries in their destruction of the booster myths. As Laurila notes, Ask the Dust “offers an often profound critique of the racism within 1930s Los Angeles society” (105). In his conclusion Laurila writes: “as much as the novel insists on the truth of the anti-myth, Ask the Dust betrays flashes of real affection for Arturo’s ‘sad flower in the sand’ [Los Angeles]” (106). Laurila asserts that Ask the Dust (1939) both glorifies and vilifies the city, endorsing both the myth and the anti-myth.
I contend, however, that Fante’s Los Angeles is predominantly nightmarish, and that his apocalyptic portrait of the city offers a powerful background for social protest. This protest, then, is best read in the context of what Michael Denning has called “the laboring of
American culture”, with which is meant “a struggle to rework American culture” (xvii). In his expansive study The Cultural Front (1996) Denning reviews the cultural influence of the Popular Front, a leftist movement coming into existence during the years of the Great Depression. Denning argues that the cultural motor behind this Popular Front, which he denotes the Cultural Front, has had a lasting impact on American culture, has been able to reshape American culture, even after America’s turn to the right during the cold war.
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For the first time in the history of the United States, a working-class culture had made a significant imprint on the dominant cultural institutions. Both high culture and mass culture took on a distinctively plebeian accent. Black and ethnic writers, descendants of the proletarian avant-garde, dominated twentieth-century American literature. Vernacular musics like jazz, blues, and country resonated around the world. Gangster movies and films noir had founded the “American” look in film. The cultural front had begun a laboring of American culture. (Denning xx)
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As Denning demonstrates, the Los Angeles Popular Front consisted of the writers associated with the literary scene gathering in Stanley Rose’s Bookshop. Fante was a part of this scene, and meeting all Denning’s qualifications, being the child of ethnic working-class parents (Denning 7). These leftist writers gathering in Hollywood, had invented this noir look, Denning mentions, through their redefinition of Los Angeles, distorting the images the booster myths had provided. As their main format the writers of this fiction used detective and mystery stories, which introduced detectives as proletarian heroes unmasking the corruption of the rich.
Although Fante did not write detective stories, he used the same motifs detective-writers like James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and other Los Angeles detective-writers used, to unmask his city. Fante’s work was a social protest, uniquely focussed on exposing racism, and displaying its damaging consequences. As Laurila has noted, “the novel displays a deep awareness of how racism victimizes, how it becomes entrenched in a society” (105). In Los Angeles fiction Fante stands alone in his quest to expose the racism underlying the booster myths. In non-fiction he is of one mind with his good friend Carey McWilliams, who
Denning identifies as “perhaps the leading intellectual of the California Popular Front” (35) and “one of the leading voices of Popular Front anti-racism” (449).
In the second chapter I will discuss Fante’s social protest. Many literary critics have dealt with Fante in isolation of the politics of his time. This is probably partly because Fante himself repeatedly claimed to be uninterested in politics. Jean Béranger, who does claim that there are echoes of social protest to be found in Fante’s first novel The Road to Los Angeles (1984), which was published posthumously, still contends that there is no place for social protest in Ask the Dust (Béranger 71).
Alessandra Senzani, commenting on Béranger’s research, states that Fante’s work indeed seems to be largely apolitical, but that it nevertheless “can be read
counter-hegemonically” (74). Although Fante might indeed have refrained from political
commitments, his texts “allow for politicized readings”, “thanks to his emotional attachment to a working-class and ethnic milieu he knew all to well” (Senzani 87). Senzani concludes her argument by stating that Fante’s work questions “the myth of an American classless melting pot” (87).
Likewise, Matthew Elliot argues that Ask the Dust “seeks to illuminate the role that race plays in the classic melting-pot story of assimilation” (531). Elliot shows how Arturo becomes white in the course of the novel. Others, he points out, had mainly viewed Ask the Dust as a maturation tale in which Arturo eventually returns to his ethnic background. Contrastingly, Elliot states that “Ask the Dust is less the story of Arturo’s ethnic rediscovery than of his racial refashioning” (531), and is therefore “compelling illustration of (…) the ‘racial alchemy’ of the melting pot” (531) Elliot reads Arturo’s attempts at reconnecting with his ethnic backgrounds, at the end of the novel, as a form of self-deception “protecting him from the knowledge that he has indeed become ‘one of them [part of white American culture]’” (531).
I will further develop Senzani’s remark that Fante questions the American myth of the melting pot, by putting it into the context of McWilliams’ radical activism. I agree with Elliot that Ask the Dust displays the melting pot at work. However, Elliot’s remark that the novel is a reflection on “the classic melting-pot story” (531), is somewhat problematic. As Werner Sollors has demonstrated in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986), the term has a complicated genealogy and, consequently, several different
interpretations. I will argue that Ask the Dust is not just an illustration of the melting pot, but protests a particular interpretation, and more importantly, proposes a different melting pot, in line with what McWilliams has argued.
In The Cultural Front, Denning discusses McWilliams in the context of the formation of a new thinking on ethnicity, starting with Louis Adamic, who was also based in Los Angeles in the 1920s, and befriended McWilliams there. Denning points out that Adamic worked successfully at a “new conception of America” (448), which included different ethnic groups, who he referred to as “new Americans” (448). The pluralist society he preached stood in sharp contrast with the prevailing notion of America as Anglo-Saxon and protestant.
McWilliams built on Adamic’s work. His thinking on ethnicity culminates in his Brothers under the Skin (1942), in which American attitudes towards race and assimilation are discussed. McWilliams pleads for a radical change in these attitudes. Unlike Adamic, McWilliams focussed his work not on the European immigrant, but instead on various people of color. He motivates this focus by arguing that white ethnics, European immigrants who could pass for white. Each chapter of the books discusses a different ethnic minority. In these different discussions
Written during the Second World War, Brothers under the Skin declares that racism is untenable and dangerous for a country that is fighting against the nazi ideology of race superiority. McWilliams urges to revise the ideal of the melting pot. In opposition to viewing the melting pot as an exclusive process in which the immigrant becomes white, McWilliams proposes to view it as an inclusive process, allowing every group in the United States to contribute to American culture. “Preservation, enrichment, and stimulation of native cultures holds great promise of enriching our entire cultural heritage” (Brothers 77).
In the third, and final chapter I will discuss the remarkable revival of Fante’s work, only a couple of years before his death in 1983. Ask the Dust had been received well by the critics, but its sales had been disappointing. Yet, the fact that Fante suddenly obtained a large and enthusiastic audience in the late 1970s, will tell us something about the significance of his work in the culture of that day. I will argue that Fante’s work contributed to what Matthew Frye Jacobson has discussed in Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2008). In this study, Jacobson considers the ethnic revival, starting in the 1960s, in a new light. Instead of viewing the emergence of people’s interest in the ethnic backgrounds as an
individual matter, he argues that it was largely inspired and enforced by “cultural,
institutional and political forces” (Jacobson 45). The descendants of European immigrants, white ethnics, are the protagonists in this history. Jacobson demonstrates how American culture reshaped itself, by moving away from the notion of the melting pot towards a more pluralist conception of America. In this process, the notion of America as a nation of immigrants came to dominate American culture.
Literature and film played an important part in the processes described by Jacobson. I will demonstrate how Ask the Dust lends itself well for a reading in the context Jacobson’s work. Fante’s alternative melting pot, which I will have demonstrated in chapter two, fits perfectly into new ideas related to the revival. After examining the novel in this context, I will also briefly look at Robert Towne’s film adaptation of Ask the Dust. As I will show, the film reflects some interesting modern-day interpretations of the novel, which will tell us
something about the tastes of the public, and provides an example of Fante’s cultural significance.
Chapter One: Fante's Los Angeles
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As David Fine points out in Imagining Los Angeles, Fante is a unique writer. Drawing on many of the themes and motifs typical of the literature of his time, he calls into existence a world that had hardly existed in fiction before; downtown Los Angeles. As most of Fante’s contemporaries had come to the city to make easy money in Hollywood, this was where their stories were mostly situated, thus in “Hollywood and the affluent Westside” (Fine, Imagining 181). If they did write about “the vast inland territory (…), they did so as outsiders,
observers” (Fine, Imagining 182). For Fante, by contrast, downtown, Bunker Hill, was home. He had come to the city to become a great novelist. This neglected part of the city thus has a prominent part in Ask the Dust.
Fante himself was very aware of his unique starting point. In a prologue to Ask the Dust he wrote “Do I speak of Hollywood with its tinsel blah? of the movies? do I speak of Bel Air and Lakeside? do I speak of Pasadena and the hot spots hereabouts? - no and no a thousand times” (Fante, Prologue 148). Instead, he announced that he would paint a portrait of the “real” Los Angeles as he depicted the lives of the people of “a different
civilization” (Fante, Prologue 148). This meant a city “teeming with people” of many different ethnic backgrounds. By writing his version of the city, he consciously worked against several of Los Angeles’ most persistent myths.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the city had been constructed upon several myths brought to life by boosters, mostly members of the chamber of commerce, real-estate moguls and railroad magnates and their writers. Los Angeles, in their writings, was a new mediterranean, a sunny paradise. Trains boasting Southern California’s riches were sent around the country luring people to this city of angels. And they came. During the first real-estate boom of the 1880s thousands of people, mostly pensioners from the midwest, moved to Southern California. Orange groves sprung up everywhere, endless varieties of palm trees were planted and beach resorts were built. Los Angeles fashioned a powerful image for itself. The region would often be compared to Italy. At the same time, however, it was also
promoted as the fulfillment of Aryan destiny. Los Angeles was a “white spot” in America, being the last pure city without the ethnic contamination of Southern or Eastern European immigrants.
Fante, like many novelists of his time, works at destructing these myths by providing dark alternatives. Mike Davis wonderfully defines this 1930s Los Angeles literature he calls noir as “a transformational grammar turning each charming ingredient of the boosters' arcadia into a sinister equivalent” (8). This new cynical literature was protesting “the fable of El Dorado, they [the noir novelists] replaced it with a counter-fable: that of the dream running out along the California shore” (Fine, Imagining 82). The writers of this “counter-fable” mainly used the crime story, the hard-boiled detective novel, as their platform. Fante did not use the detective. Neither was his focus, like theirs, on the deceptions of Hollywood, the unreality of the city’s landscapes, or the unmasking of corruption among the rich. Fante, instead, used the themes and motifs of his contemporaries and friends to expose the lives of the ethnic working classes in inner-city Los Angeles.
In his comprehensive history of California Americans and the California Dream Kevin Starr notes that “Ask the Dust presents a map of Los Angeles, Bunker Hill and the Downtown especially, which is at once a real and an imagined city” (295). This map Fante provides is a rare one. That being so, Fante’s Los Angeles should be explored. What does his city look like? Who are its inhabitants? For answering these questions, I will first discuss Fante’s place within Los Angeles literature, as he used the techniques of his contemporaries and friends. After this I will explore his city and its inhabitants, as Fante specifically attacks the racism underlying several booster myths.
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Fante and Los Angeles literature
In the 1930s Stanley Rose’s Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard would become the central hangout for a new generation of writers. Writers like Louis Adamic, Carey McWilliams, Nathanael West, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Raymond Chandler, William Saroyan and William Faulkner gathered in the famous back room of the shop to enjoy the endless flow of orange wine and good conversation, which ranged from art to politics to everyday events. Meanwhile they would enjoy Rose’s superb stories, for which he found inspiration in his turbulent past. In the words of Carey McWilliams Rose was “Hollywood’s unrivaled
entertainer and easiest touch until his death in 1954” (Education, 49). Carey McWilliams, the pivot of the Los Angeles literary scene, had befriended Rose years before and cofounded the shop with him.
It was through McWilliams that Fante became part of this group of writers and with them he created a new, darker image of Los Angeles. Fante replaced or transformed several famous booster icons. In Ask the Dust, for example, the symbol of mediterranean Los Angeles, the orange, becomes something despicable when it is the only food Arturo can afford. The “sun juice” now leaves him nauseous: “They were miserable oranges. Sitting on the bed I dug my nails into their thin skins. My own flesh puckered, my mouth was filled with saliva, and I squinted at the thought of them. When I bit into the yellow pulp it shocked me like a cold shower” (Fante, Ask, 33). Furthermore, Fante destroys the other symbol of America’s mediterranean, the palm tree. The very first palm tree Arturo sees is just outside his hotel room window. First, he reflects on its booster qualities by associating it with Palm Sunday and the mighty Egypt, whereupon he immediately ruins the image by stating that “the palm tree was blackish at its branches, stained by carbon monoxide coming out of the Third Street Tunnel, its crusted trunk choked with dust and sand that blew in from the Mojave and Santa Ana deserts” (Fante, Ask 16).
Fine points to the the coast as the central motif of this destructive literature. Once a compelling booster icon and one of the main tourist attractions of the region, it had now become a powerful symbol of the end of the road, the end of the dream. In Chandler’s crime fiction, for example, the ocean is the scene for gruesome deaths. In The Big Sleep a car is driven of the pier; “A nice new Buick sedan all messed up with sand and sea water.... Oh, I almost forgot. There's a guy inside it” (Chandler 43). In Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) one character is murdered on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Someone else dies in a fatal car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway. Also, in McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) a murder is committed on the end of a pier.
Likewise, Fante’s ocean is horrifying. It presents a threatening wilderness sending fog banks “towards the land, an army of ghosts crawling on their bellies” (Fante, Ask 69). The sea roars violently, flaying the land “with white fists” (Fante, Ask 69). As the breakers retreat “the shoreline [breaks] into an ever-widening grin” (Fante, Ask 69). Arturo almost drowns when he goes swimming. Lastly, the oceanside is also where Arturo undergoes the nightmarish Long Beach earthquake. Vera Rivken, with whom Arturo has just shared the bed, dies when her seaside apartment collapses.
With his portrayal of the ocean, the earthquake, and the wilderness on the other side of the city, the desert, Fante creates an apocalyptic image for Los Angeles. After the
earthquake, for example, Arturo wanders the city he deems doomed, “the streets lurked with danger. The tall buildings forming black canyons were traps to kill you when the earth shook. The pavement might open. The street cars might topple” (Fante, Ask 109). To Arturo, this is “a city with a curse upon it. This particular earthquake had not destroyed it, but any day now another would raze it to the ground” (Fante, Ask 110). From the desert sand blows into the city. It is everywhere, between the keys of Arturo’s typewriter and between his bedsheets. “Sand from the Mojave had blown across the city. Tiny brown grains of sand clung to my fingertips whenever I touched anything” (Fante, Ask 43). A nightmare which seems to have become reality, for Fante’s desert is “indifferent to the great city” (Fante, Ask 127). He writes: “here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more (…) The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness” (Fante, Ask 127). In Fante’s fantasy the same desert is “ever reaching out to claim its captured child” (Fante, Ask 161).
The unlucky people who crowd this doomed city are the same people who wander the streets of Hollywood in West’s The Day of The Locust (1939), the uprooted people from the Middle West. They had worked all their lives and saved just enough to live of a small pension in the land of sunshine. West writes:
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Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado, pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don't know what to do with their time. They haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? (West 120)
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Adamic had written in similar fashion about the same people in an article called “Los
Angeles, There She Blows!” (1930), stating that these middle westerners had come “to Sunny California, to rest, regain their vigor, enjoy the Climate, look at pretty scenery, live in a tiny
bungalow with a palm in front (…). They are unwell, vacuous, biologically finished men and women, neurotic, incapable of new ideas” (Adamic 594).
In fact, it was true that many of the city’s inhabitants were middle aged or old people from the Middle Western or Eastern countryside. These were the people that had been responsible for the great boom of the 1880s. They had been lured into Southern California by the boosters. Its climate, for example, had been fanatically promoted as healthy by lecturers sent into the country and lyrical booster magazines. Also, “California on Wheels”, a special train visiting every city of significance in the South and Middle West, displayed “agricultural exhibits, scenic photographs, models of California homes, and statistical
charts” (McWilliams, Southern 129). In his pioneering work on Southern California history Southern California Country, Carey McWilliams reveals the composition of Los Angeles’ population with the help of hard facts. In 1920 the majority of the city’s residents had been born in Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Iowa.
These same people are essential to the Los Angeles of Ask the Dust. Fante depiction of these people is very similar to Adamic’s:
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The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles (49).
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Then there is Heilman, who hates Southern California, but has to stay there for his health. There is the restless Memphis kid. There is Miss Hargraves, Fante’s landlady and sad
widower from Connecticut. Lastly, there is Hellfrick, always drunk and homesick. These are the uprooted souls, with “faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colors draining
fast” (Fante, Ask 171). Like West’s crowds they are cheated by the dream.
The city and its inhabitants
Bunker Hill is the main setting for Ask the Dust. In “The Dreamer”, a short story about a Filipino, Fante writes: “Bunker Hill used to be a fashionable neighborhood, but not
today” (“Dreamer” 237). He was right. In the late 19th century Bunker Hill had been built on with stately Victorian houses. However, at the time Fante registered for a room in the Alta Vista Hotel in 1932, these houses were in a bad shape and the neighborhood had become a refuge for the poor and ethnic minorities, who settled in one of the many cheap hotels.
When Arturo comes down into the city he takes Angels flight, a small train running up and down Bunker Hill. He walks Olive Street with its “horrible frame houses reeking with murder stories” (Fante, Ask 19), and Main Street at midnight; “neon tubes and a light fog, honky tonks and all night picture houses. Secondhand stores and Filipino dance halls, cocktails 15c, continuous entertainment, but I had seen them all, so many times, spent so much Colorado money in them.(Fante, Ask 123).” Arturo strolls along to Fifth Street “where the big street cars chewed your ears with their noise, and the smell of gasoline made the sight of the palm trees seem sad, and the black pavement still wet from the fog of the night
before” (Fante, Ask 34), Central Avenue and Temple Street, which are dark and sinister, the “Black Belt (…), night clubs, abandoned apartment houses, broken-down business houses, the forlorn street of poverty for the Negro and swank for the whites.”
These streets are filled those who do not have “enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles” (Fante, Ask 45). These are not West’s or Adamic’s uprooted people, these are “the tens of thousands of others; they couldn’t afford sunglasses or a four-bit polo shirt and they hid in the alleys by day and slunk off to flop houses by night” (Fante, Ask 50).
Arturo sympathizes with these people and identifies with them, because he regards himself one of them, unable to fulfill the California dream. In a powerful chapter Arturo visits many of the downtown bars and puts many of these “others” on display:
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So down to Main Street and to Fifth Street, to the long dark bars, to the King Edward Cellar, and there a girl with yellow hair and sickness in her smile. Her name was Jean, she was thin and tubercular (…) And here was another place and another girl. Oh, how lonely she was, from away back in
Minnesota. A good family too. Sure, honey. Tell my tired ears about your good family. They owned a lot of property, and then the depression came. Well, how sad, how tragic. And now you work down here in a Fifth Street dive (Fante, Ask 80).
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Among these thousands of others are also the ethnic groups; Mexicans, African Americans, Filipino’s and Japanese. In “Mary Osaka, I Love You” (1942), the Filipino protagonist lives on Bunker Hill, which Fante then describes as “that high island of Mexicans and Filipinos not far from City Hall” (“Mary” 195). In Ask the Dust the streets and
Chinatown are full of Mexican girls, Arturo remarks. On Central Avenue, Arturo buys
Marihuana from a “big Negro” with his Mexican friend Camilla. As McWilliams shows in his Southern California Country, the numbers of ethnic minorities had been growing since the 1930s. Mexicans and African Americans had arrived in large numbers throughout the 1930s to work on the enormous farms of California. The Japanese population had also grown considerably “only 58 Japanese in 1880, but, after 1900, the number steadily increased: from 481 in 1900 to 13,068 in 1910; from 25,597 in 1920 to 44,554 in 1940” (McWilliams, Southern 321).
With his depiction of Los Angeles as a poor multi-ethnic city, Fante breaks down a very persistent booster myth; the myth of Los Angeles as a “white spot” in America. This term, championed by Harry Chandler, a powerful and fanatic booster, presented the city as the last purely American place on the continent. On the one hand the term “white spot” referred to the city’s anti-leftist policies. Los Angeles, according to the myth, was a city without communists or labor problems. On the other hand, the term suggested that Los Angeles was a white city, which had been populated by white Americans and was, unlike the cities in the East, unstained by ethnic minorities. Reverend Bob Schuler, an influential evangelical preacher in the 1920s, had expressed a similar view more explicitly, as he stated
“Los Angeles (…) is the only Anglo-Saxon city of a million population left in America. It is the only such city that is not dominated by foreigners. It remains in a class itself as the one city of the nation in which white, American, Christian idealism still predominates” (qtd. in Starr, Material 152).
In line with these notions of Los Angeles as a pure “white spot”, the region had been regarded as the fulfillment of the Aryan destiny. As late as 1935, while Fante’s
contemporaries had already constructed a powerful anti-myth, Harry Carr wrote: “Los Angeles is an epic - one of the greatest and most significant migrations in the long saga of the Aryan race”, adding, taking up the comments of critics like Adamic, “whether we were sun worshippers coming here to thaw out, real estate subdividers seeking to coax the innocent in our clutches, is a detail without significance. The point is, Los Angeles was a mile-post of destiny. It happened because it could not help itself” (Carr, 5).
James Pomeroy Widney, a physician who had retired after acquiring quick wealth in real estate speculation, made a similar argument in relation to the regions climate. Widney believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was destined to go to southern California, which would be the ultimate destination for the Aryan people. The westward migration that had been commenced by the “proto-Aryans of the highlands of Mid-Asia” in ancient times would finally halt in southern California. There the Aryans would find a physically and spiritually healthful home. As Starr points out; “Joseph Pomeroy Widney took to extremes a notion implicit in much of Southern California’s turn-of-the-century self-reflection: the notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority and its special relationship to the Southland” (Starr, Material 230).
Fante cuts the ground from beneath these racist booster myths of Los Angeles. Instead, he thus portrays an ethnically diverse city, which is no “white spot” and hardly a glorious Aryan destiny, when we look at the disillusioned masses Fante describes. Fante’s Los Angeles is mostly dark and hopeless, and the middle westerners who have reached this supposed Aryan destination are deceived, depressed and waiting “to die in the sun” (Fante, Ask 49).
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Ask the Dust’s and Los Angeles’ two-facedness
Ask the Dust tells the story of starving and struggling writer Arturo Bandini, who wanders the streets of Los Angeles in search of a story. Los Angeles holds a dream for him; he will
become a great American writer there. When Arturo meets Camilla, a Mexican waitress, he immediately falls in love. A bizarre and complicated love story, which literary critic David Wyatt has called “the strangest love affair in American fiction” (Wyatt, 67), commences and with it Fante offers a critique of yet another booster myth; the myth of a glorious Spanish/ Mexican past. As I will show Arturo’s contradictory character represents Los Angeles, as he is just as paradoxical and confusing in his attitude towards Camilla, as the city is in its attitude towards Mexicans in general.
The boosters had constructed a romantic past populated by Spanish missionaries, explorers, and obedient natives, against the backdrop of a picturesque Southern California. This past paradise, however, contrasts sharply with the treatment of its descendants. Los Angeles, while dreaming of its glorious Spanish/Mexican past, displayed harsh racism towards its descendant, the Mexican. As McWilliams demonstrates in his writings, Mexicans in California suffered harsh racial prejudice, and were excluded from society. In “Getting Rid of the Mexican” (1936), for example, McWilliams discusses a repatriation program for Mexicans living in Southern California. Thousands of Mexicans were deported.
The romantic myth of a Spanish heritage of Southern California was based on Ramona (1884). Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona is often regarded the first novel of
significance to be set in Southern California. Jackson motivation for writing was the horrible fate of the Californian Native. To reach a wider audience than she had been able to reach with her non-fiction, she decided to write a novel of which she hoped it would do for the natives what Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for the African Americans. Ramona tells the story of a Scots-Native American orphan living at the ranch of Señora Gonzaga Moreno. The ranch is one of the last remains of Mexican culture, after the land has been annexed by the Americans. To Señora Moreno’s discontent Ramona falls in love with Alessandro, a native American, and elopes. As outcasts they travel around Southern California enduring many hardships from the Americans who have just taken over the land. Alessandro’s home village is burnt to the ground and the couple loses their first daughter because an American doctor refuses to visit them. Eventually Alessandro is killed by an American. Ramona returns to the ranch.
After publication, the novel immediately became immensely popular. To Jackson’s disappointment, however, people refused to see the evil American, and were mostly
coincided with the first extensive developments of the Southern California, railroad and real-estate magnates quickly capitalized on this romantic vision, using it to lure tourists to the region. Charles Fletcher Lummis, one of the myth’s champions, quotes the president of the chamber of commerce to illustrate that this romantic history had become a marketable commodity: “we businessmen had been slow to understand; but we now fully realize that the old Missions are our greatest asset; worth more in dollars and cents to Southern California than our oranges, or oil – even our Climate!” (Lummis, California Missions 299).
Lummis himself had written tirelessly about Los Angeles’ Spanish/Mexican roots. He developed these images in his magazine Out West and published many books. For instance, The Spanish Pioneers and The California Missions, which had praised the true heroism of Cabrillo and Cortez. These men were true American heroes and their pioneering had been a display of manhood. In The Spanish Pioneers Lummis states that “Pizarro, Cortez, Valdivia, and Quesada are entitled to be called the Caesars of the New World; and no other conquests in the history of America are at all comparable to theirs” (Lummis, The Spanish 50-51). This myth would provide a sense of authenticity “true heroism” (Lummis, The Spanish 1) to this “land hyped for its future promise” (Fine, 29).
“La Fiesta de Los Angeles”, held in 1894 is a revealing example of the capitalization of Spanish history. This festival had been concocted by the Merchants Association, a congregation of Los Angeles businessmen, and should attract and impress thousands of tourists. On the first day of the festival the Queen of the “fiesta” would graciously ascend her throne. This would be the beginning of several days of festivities. In the afternoon, the spectators would be treated to an exuberant parade of floats depicting historical events like the Landing of Cabrillo, the first European to explore California’s coast. There would even be a float accompanied by fifty Yuma Indians, hired for the occasion to walk and dance around. A powerful image had been created. The Missions, and places connected to Ramona’s narrative attracted thousands of tourists every year. Additionally, Spanish Missions were renovated throughout the region and new adobe houses sprung up everywhere. The central booster myth, Spanish Mission myth, was born.
The friction between the glorification of a Spanish/Mexican past and the horrible treatment of Mexicans in Los Angeles, is a theme Ask the Dust explores extensively. It is what complicates the relationship between Arturo and Camilla. In his appreciation of
Mexicans, Arturo is as conflicted as the city itself. Like the city he engages in the romantic dream, with visions of a glorious history. Repeatedly he fantasizes over Camilla’s deep-rootedness. On the other hand he will often assume Los Angeles’ attitude towards its Mexican population, blurting out harsh racial epithets. Fante uses the love-story of Arturo and Camilla to express his criticism of the Spanish Mission myth, by revealing its contradictions and ultimately its destructiveness.
As soon as the story starts, Arturo exclaims “Oh for a Mexican girl! I used to think of her all the time, my Mexican girl. I didn't have one, but the streets were full of them, the Plaza and Chinatown were afire with them” (Fante, Ask 14). Camilla, in his eyes, is and will always be a “Mayan princess” (Fante, Ask 41). Even as he grows more sympathetic towards her in the course of the novel he can never get rid of his romantic perceptions, which are obviously founded in the Mission myth. Camilla belongs to the land, she is the beautiful and the forbidden Indian from Ramona. Fante intently connects his novel to Ramona in his “Prologue to Ask the Dust”, by stating that this “is the Ramona theme” (Prologue 146) and that Ask the Dust is “Ramona in reverse” (Prologue 148).
Throughout the novel Arturo engages in these romantic fantasies several times. The most compelling display of Arturo’s fantasy is the scene in which he shares the bed with Vera Rivken, a strongly depressed Jewish woman. At Arturo’s request they engage in a his
Mexican fantasy during intercourse, as he assumes the role of Cortez and Vera Rivken the role of Camilla Lopez:
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‘My name is Camilla,’ she [Vera] said.
‘You’re beautiful,’ I said. ‘You’re a Mayan princess.’ ‘I am princess Camilla.’
‘All of this land and this sea belongs to you. All of California. There is no California, no Los Angeles, no dusty streets, no cheap hotels, no stinking newspapers, no broken, uprooted people from the East, no fancy boulevards. This is your beautiful land with the desert and the mountains and the sea. You’re a princess, and you reign over it all’ (Fante, Ask 100).
A little later Arturo exclaims that he is a conquerer: “I’m like Cortés, only I’m an
Italian” (Fante, Ask 101). Camilla, in this scene, has become the queen of a paradisiacal past, of which Arturo is part as the powerful Spanish hero from Lummis’ histories.
Reflecting the paradox of promoting a glorious Mexican past and simultaneously discriminating Mexicans, Arturo hovers between dreamy adoration and harsh racism. For example, when he sees a Mexican returning from a visit to a white prostitute he remarks that “women like that should draw the colour line”, continuing by saying “I hated him, the Spick, the Greaser” (24). He uses the same language for Camilla. Their first conversation, for example, is rough: “‘You call this stuff coffee?’, I said. (…) I looked at her feet again. I could feel something inside her retreating. I wanted to hurt her. ‘Maybe this isn’t coffee at all,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s just water after they boiled your filthy shoes in it.’” (Fante, Ask 39). Camilla is wearing huaraches, Mexican sandals. At their second encounter he asks: “‘Those huaraches - do you have to wear them, Camilla? Do you have to emphasize the fact that you always were and always will be a filthy little Greaser?’ (Fante, Ask 48).
Camilla is either considered a “filthy little Greaser” or a Mayan Princess.
Consequently, she is never really taken seriously, although she tries hard to present herself as a regular American. Even when she wanders into the desert, never to return, Arturo remarks that “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 the sky, with the wind blowing her hair to the end” (Fante, Ask 174). With this romantic imagery Fante exposes the myth’s persistency and its destructive power.
Chapter Two: Fante and the Melting Pot
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Most of the scholarship on Fante’s fiction since its reappearance in the late 1970s has focused on its treatment of racism and assimilation, and justifiably so, for these themes have a
prominent place in Fante’s fiction. The narrative of Ask the Dust, for example, centers on Arturo’s assimilation into white American culture and Camilla’s exclusion from this process. In his “Prologue to Ask the Dust” Fante himself summarizes the story as follows:
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She [Camilla] was (…) in love with Sammy the bartender. He couldn’t bear her. He couldn’t bear her because she was simply a Mexican to him and he was an American and she was beneath him, and that is the story - that is the Ramona theme, only this time it is an Italian-American telling it, and he, Bandini, is sympathetic with the girl because he understands how it is with the business of social prejudice. (Fante, Prologue 146)
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After the publication of Ask the Dust Fante started working on a new novel, which he would have titled The Little Brown Brothers. This new novel would again have dealt with the themes of racism and exclusion, this time of Filipinos. Despite the fact that the novel never reached publication, the short stories and chapters that remained offer a good impression of the project. In “Helen, Thy Beauty Is to Me” (1941), intended as the first chapter, Filipino cannery worker Julio Sal does his utmost to realize the quintessential American Dream by marrying a blonde white girl, but ends up broke and disillusioned. Similarly, the Filipino protagonist of “The Dreamer” (1947) pursues an American girl, but finally realizes that this is a ridiculous pursuit and answers the love of his Mexican landlady. Additionally, there is “Bus Ride”, which was intended as the second chapter of The Little Brown Brothers, and “Mary Osaka, I Love You” (1942), which Fante wished to rework into a final chapter.
In this chapter I will provide new insights into the discussion of ethnicity in Fante’s fiction. This discussion has mainly focused on Ask the Dust and Arturo’s position in Los Angeles society. In line with what Matthew Elliot has argued in “Ask the Dust and fictions of whiteness” (2010), I will argue that Ask the Dust is the story of Arturo’s assimilation into white American culture. However, Arturo’s continuous reconnection with the margins, is not
just a form of “self-deception” in response to “the failed promises of whiteness”, as Elliot argues (538). I contend that Arturo’s reconnection with the margins is part of his struggle to fulfill his dream, not of becoming white, but of assimilating while retaining certain essential elements from this ethnic background. This dream fails as Arturo is eventually assimilated into uniform white Anglo-Saxon America. I will thus argue that Ask the Dust is not just a “compelling illustration of the melting pot” (Elliot 531), but is a protest; a protest of what Elliot calls the “classic melting-pot story of assimilation” (531), assimilation into white Anglo-Saxon culture, through the complete erasure of one’s past.
In fact this “classic melting-pot story” (531), Elliot refers to, is founded on just one interpretation of the melting pot, as Werner Sollors points out in Beyond Ethnicity; Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986). Thus, before developing any argument about Fante in relation to the melting pot, I will present a cultural context, based on Sollors’ helpful study of ethnicity in American culture. Additionally, I will study Carey McWilliams’ writings, as I zoom in on the Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s. In these decades, McWilliams developed into a prominent social activist and wrote extensively on the fate of the different ethnic working classes. He was one of Fante’s best friends and of major importance for the literary scene. After studying Sollors and McWilliams, I will reveal how Ask the Dust and the Filipino stories relate to these different discussions of the melting pot.
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The Melting Pot
Sollors commences his discussion of the melting pot with a critique of Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting-Pot (1908), which he identifies as the play that “popularized the term and made it the key word for discussions of American immigration and minorities” (Sollors 74). The Melting-Pot centers on the complicated love between Jewish composer David Quixano and Vera Revendal, daughter of an anti-semitic aristocrat from the same city David had come from. Their love becomes even more complicated when David discovers that Vera’s father was responsible for the death of his parents back in Moldova. “Yet, with the help of his American symphony [which he is composing] and the persistent vision of America as God’s melting pot, he overcomes even this obstacle” (Sollors 68).
Melting, in this play, is a transformational process, moving away from “old world hardness” (Sollors 68) to be renewed in the new world that is America. This melting imagery,
with its cauldron, has strong alchemical connotations, which are evidently reflected by David’s observation that in this “divine chemistry the very garbage turns to roses” (Sollors 92). This idyllic conception is then put into sharp contrast with “‘hardness’, which is thereby associated with an icy lack of love and with unoriginal artlessness (…) Hardness is related to the past and the boundaries of descent” (Sollors 69), to the old world.
Love is the most powerful image of melting in the play. Love and intermarriage are essential to The Melting-Pot. The love between David and Vera, moves “across boundaries that are considered significant, (…) in defiance of parental desires and old descent
antagonisms” (Sollors 72) and is therefore a powerful illustration of the what the melting pot is able to do. The Melting-Pot, as Sollors points out, “sacralizes loving consent as the abolition of prejudices of descent. (…) Loyal love serves as a marker that separates the chosen melters from hard-hearted hypocrites” (Sollors 72).
Zangwill’s melting pot seems to have been founded on the ideal of what Sollors denotes “universal regeneration” (Sollors 87), an interpretation with strong religious
overtones, which departs from “consent” rather than “descent” (Sollors 86). As Sollors points out, the melting pot could be viewed as an anti-type for christ. “Not only did Christ represent the new order based on love, or consent, rather than on circumcision as the token of descent, but he also incorporated and merged opposites” (Sollors 81). Christ regenerates all. All must be reborn and renewed, and descent has no part as Sollors wonderfully illustrates by quoting a sermon delivered by Ephraim Chamberlain Cummings in 1873:
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Jesus made no distinction between the Jew and the Gentile. ... In the person of Christ, through the gospel, the kingdom of God knocks at the door of every heart. To Jews and Gentiles, to Greeks and barbarians, to free and bond, to rich and poor, to wise and unwise, this impartial kingdom comes (qtd. in Sollors 86).
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This, of course, could be easily related to discussions on ethnicity. From here it is only a small step towards universal regeneration, independent of descent.
A descent-oriented interpretation of the melting pot, however, would, as Sollors shows, eventually come to dominate the debates on the melting pot. In this interpretation
native-born Americans are exempt of regeneration. American identity, then, is something “native-born Americans themselves (…) have safely and easily received by birth and
descent” (Sollors 88). Contrastingly it is “something that foreign-born workers would have to strive long and hard to achieve” (Sollors 88). This stance is best illustrated by the theatrical rituals of the “Ford Motor Company School Melting Pot”, in which Foreign-born workers were sent into a large melting pot in their foreign clothing only to come out of it dressed in American clothes. The company’s newspaper Ford Times offers a wonderful account of the ritual: “Any spectator (…) saw the pride which shone on the former aliens’ faces as they waved little flags on their way down the steps tom the huge cauldron, symbolic of the fusing process which makes raw immigrants into loyal Americans” (qtd. in Sollors 91).
This is the melting pot ethnic pluralists have attacked. Rightly so, as this melting pot advocates the erasure of any tradition or cultural trait to conform to Anglo-Saxon America. Yet, this is not the “‘pure’ melting pot’, which was closer to universal regeneration (Sollors 91). In fact, many protesters have used images and language that strongly evoke Zangwill’s melting pot. Cultural pluralist Horace Kallen, for example, asserted the permanence of ethnic groups and directly attacked Zangwill, in “Democracy versus the Melting Pot” (1915). His argument concluded, however, “with an image of harmonious musical fusion which was presented as a radical alternative to the melting pot, while it resembles the struggles of Zangwill's protagonist David Quixano to compose an American symphony” (Sollors 97). The Melting-Pot did not plead for a complete erasure of ethnic identity. Neither did it support uniformity. Instead, Zangwill’s concept of the melting pot offered a “strong ‘centrist’ image” (Sollors 99). According to Sollors, “it provided an imaginative, though immensely pliable, middle ground between ethnic believers in the immutability of descent, radical culture critics, and American opponents of immigration, all of whom it drew into the newly popularized melting imagery, even if they seemed to resent it” (Sollors 74).
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Carey McWilliams’ Melting Pot
The cultural pluralism Kallen had propagated in opposition of the melting pot gained ground as it was adopted by the left. In The Cultural Front Michael Denning points out that the Popular Front, which for a large part consisted of ethnic working classes, actively advocated pluralism. Prominent Popular Front writer, Louis Adamic, for example, had written
extensively on the diversity of American culture in works like My America (1938) and From Many Lands (1940). For years he had been working on his “nation of nations” project, which Denning describes as a “vast counterencyclopedia of America ” (Denning 448). His journal Common Ground served a similar purpose and offered a platform for ethnic writers.
In Los Angeles Carey McWilliams, very much inspired by his friend Adamic, started working on similar projects, and would eventually even become “one of the leading voices of Popular Front anti-racism” (Denning 449). However, his focus would be on wrote
extensively on the fates of Mexicans, Jews, African-Americans, Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese. Additionally he represented these groups as a lawyer, commanding a fair treatment. Meanwhile, he had a profound influence on Los Angeles literary life, by co-founding two bookshops and “bringing together a group of young West Coast ethnic writers” (Denning 449), among whom was John Fante.
In his wonderful history on California, Southern California Country: an Island on the Land (1946) McWilliams reserves a chapter to discuss the different ethnic groups of Los Angeles. He imagines the city as an archipelago, arguing that the diverse groups exist complete isolation of each other. McWilliams discusses the unfair treatment of Mexicans, Japanese and African-Americans, and pleads for a “basic modification of the social
pattern” (McWilliams, Southern 315) to enable the assimilation of these groups. McWilliams points out that, with all these groups, Los Angeles represents a model of the national melting pot: “In the population of Los Angeles today are represented important elements of every racial strain that has gone into the making of the American people. The city has become, therefore, one of the most interesting racial melting pots in the nation” (326).
McWilliams’ melting pot does not automatically reject cultural diversity. Instead, he wishes for all the groups he discusses to participate in “the making of the American
people” (Southern 326). In the Mexican section of the chapter McWilliams proposes something he characterizes as “bi-culturality” (Southern 321). Tensions will persist, he argues, “until the dominant group is prepared to accept the concept of bi-culturality, that is, until it is willing to let the Mexican alone, to treat him with respect, to recognize his equality, and to sanction the free use of the Spanish language and whatever other cultural traits may survive” (McWilliams, Southern 321).
A similar argument emerges from Brothers Under the Skin (1943), which is dedicated to Louis Adamic and John Fante. Brothers Under the Skin provides an overview of the treatment of ethnic minorities in America. McWilliams announces to only discuss those who are visibly different and therefore unable to assimilate, assuming that white ethnics have been or soon will be assimilated. The book was written during the Second World War, and
envisions the United States at a crossroads. McWilliams stresses that this war is an ideological war, and that ideas “weaken, enforce, and sometimes are even substitutes for armies” (Brothers 5). “It is for this reason”, he argues, “that we cannot ignore the
consequences which arise by reason of our being a nation of nations” (McWilliams, Brothers 5). The nation must choose whether it will settles on race superiority or race equality. This question is the nation’s weakest point, McWilliams explains by quoting Goebbels: “nothing will be easier that to produce a bloody revolution in America. No other country has so many social and racial tensions. We shall be able to play on many strings there. North America is a medley of races” (qtd in. Brothers 4).
From this conviction McWilliams develops his argument. In the first chapter, “The Non-Vanishing Indian”, McWilliams immediately pleads for diversity. He wonders: “Just what is meant by assimilation?” (Brothers 74). He answers this question by stating that “assimilation does not necessarily imply cultural uniformity”, ending by quoting Adamic that America “has always welcomed diversity, verity, differences” (McWilliams, Brothers 74). The “new Indian policy”, McWilliams argues, could be a model for “the newer approach to the whole question of cultural diversity” (76). The essence of this new policy “is to restore the Indian to mental, physical, social and economic health; and to guide them, in friendly fashion, toward liberating their rich and abundant energies for their own salvation and for their own unique contributions to the civilization of America” (72), McWilliams quotes the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. One of McWilliams’ general conclusions, inspired by this new policy, is that the
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preservation, enrichment, and stimulation of native cultures holds great promise of enriching our entire cultural heritage; (…) there is nothing undemocratic or invidious about regarding minorities, for administrative purposes , as special groups. (Brothers 77)
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As we have seen, McWilliams thus pleads for equality and assimilation, with the preservation of diversity. McWilliams does not shun the image of the melting pot like famous pluralists like Kallen. On the contrary, he believes that the melting pot should include people who are visibly different, to enrich American culture. With this image his conception of the melting pot is close to what Sollors has discussed a the idea of “universal regeneration”.
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The melting pot of Ask the Dust
As I have shown in the first chapter Fante’s Los Angeles is crowded with people from many different backgrounds. Like McWilliams’ “The Los Angeles Archipelago”, Ask the Dust by no means presents Los Angeles as a white spot. Instead, the streets are filled with Mexicans, Japanese, Filipinos, African-Americans. Like McWilliams has shown in Southern California Country, these groups are excluded and face strong prejudice. In practice this means, for example, the Mexicans’ concentration in isolated settlements. They are welcomed as migratory workers, but are expected to go back to Mexico as soon as the work is done. Because of their darker skins, McWilliams points out, their children are “set apart from other second-generation groups” (Southern 318). “To the usual disadvantages experienced by second-generation immigrant groups (…) is added (…) the deep-seated anti-Mexican prejudice of the region which the Mexican-Americans have inherited” (Southern 318). Camilla’s fate, in Ask the Dust, is, as I will show, eventually determined by this “deep-seated anti-Mexican prejudice”.
In Ask the Dust, Fante displays the fixed ethnic hierarchy of Los Angeles, in which his alter-ego takes a somewhat confusing position. On top of the ladder is the white Anglo-Saxon American, in Ask the Dust represented by Samuel “Sammy” Wiggins, the bartender of the café where Camilla works. He asserts his superiority over Camilla, by abusing her. His attitude towards her emerges clearest from his letter of advice to Arturo:
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How was I getting along with the Little Spick? She wasn’t a bad dame, not bad at all when the lights were out, but the trouble with you, Mr. Bandini, is that you don’t know how to handle her. You’re too nice to that girl. You don’t
understand Mexican women. They don’t like to be treated like human beings. If you’re nice to them, they walk all over you. (Fante, Ask 129)
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Camilla’s position in the hierarchy is best illustrated by her servitude to Sammy, when she and Arturo visit him in his home in the desert. He orders her around, when she is finally admitted into his house. “‘You,’ Sammy said to her. ‘Go get some wood, you.’”, and “‘You,’ he said. ‘Make some coffee.’” (Fante, Ask 146). Without any resistance she follows his orders, makes breakfast, cleans his house and clothes and does the dishes. In this way, Camilla and Sammy reflect on a very small scale what McWilliams notes about Mexican labor. Camilla is not welcome in the Anglo-Saxon home, if she is admitted she must work.
Fante wonderfully illustrates the permanence of Camilla’s position by using a powerful, typically Los Angeles motif; the automobile. As Fine has shown the car has been used as a metaphor for social mobility in Los Angeles fiction of Fante’s day (Fante, Ask 44). In this light, Camilla’s 1929 Ford becomes interesting. Firstly, because the car is registered to Camilla Lombard instead of Camilla Lopez, clearly reflecting her wish to assimilate, to be American. Furthermore, the Ford is an old car. The upholstery is worn out, the fender is battered and while driving the car rattles. Camilla drives recklessly, and once on the highway, the symbol of freedom and mobility, she is unable to keep up with the other cars. Her car is unable to reach the minimum speed, an indication of her inability to truly participate in American life. Her position within society is fixed. Camilla is excluded from assimilation.
The contrast with Arturo is significant. His car is also a 1929 Ford, though his “sped like the wind” (Fante, Ask 161). For Arturo, his car means ultimate freedom.
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Day and night I lived in my Ford, pausing only long enough to order a
hamburger and a cup of coffee at strange roadside cafes. This was the life for a man, to wander and stop and then go on, ever following the white line along the rambling coast, a time to relax at the wheel, light another cigaret, and grope stupidly for the meanings in that perplexing desert sky. (Fante, Ask 162)
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Arturo here, towards the end of the novel, has been fully assimilated into white American culture. His car symbolizes his greater social mobility, his ability to climb the social ladder,
