Ask The Dust

“There’s a place for me, too, and it begins with B, in the B shelf, Arturo Bandini, make way for Arturo Bandini, his slot for his book, and I sat at the table and just looked at the place where my book would be, right there close to Arnold Bennett; not much that Arnold Bennett, but I’d be there to sort of bolster up the B’s, old Arturo Bandini, one of the boys, until some girl came along, some scent of perfume, through the fiction room, some click of high heels to break up the monotony of my fame. Gala day, gala dream!”

Arturo thinks this to himself while he is in the library and imagining the day when he will be a famous writer. He envisions his books as next to the books of Arnold Bennett, a respected British author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than another Arnold Bennett, Arturo hopes to be a great American writer. This quote is typical of Arturo’s tendency to daydream about a time when he has become a famous author. It also points toward his fascination with women and his hope that fame will allow him to win more female attention than he currently does.

“The lean days of determination. That was the word for it, determination: Arturo Bandini in front of his typewriter two full days in succession, determined to succeed; but it didn’t work, the longest siege of hard and fast determination in his life, and not one line done, only two words written over and over across the page, up and down, the same words: palm tree, palm tree, palm tree, a battle to the death between the palm tree and me, and the palm tree one: see it out there swaying in the blue air, creaking sweetly in the blue air. The palm tree won after two fighting days, and I crawled out of the window and sat at the foot of the tree.”

This quote provides a vivid description of Arturo’s experiences with writer’s block as he tries to resist his desire to stop writing and go experience life and the outdoors, instead of simply writing about it. At the beginning of the novel, Arturo finds himself without creative inspiration and struggling to write new stories, even though he desperately needs the income.

“How can he write about women, when he’s never had a woman? Oh you lousy fake, you phony, no wonder you can’t write! No wonder there wasn’t a woman in The Little Dog Laughed. No wonder it wasn’t a love story, you fool, you dirty little schoolboy.”

The quote reflects Arturo’s insecurity about the fact that he is still a virgin. He worries that his inexperience with women will keep him from becoming a famous author because he does not have the experience to write about sex, love, or women in general.

“A prayer. Sure, one prayer: for sentimental reasons. Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book! Almighty God, I will play fair on this. I will make you a proposition. Make a great writer out of me, and I will return to the Church. And please, dear God, one more favor: make my mother happy. I don’t care about the Old Man; he’s got his wine and his health, but my mother worries so. Amen.”

While out in the Los Angeles streets at night, Arturo decides to go into the Church of Our Lady “for sentimental reasons.” Although he now considers himself too intellectual to be religious after having read philosophers like Nietzsche, he cannot escape the spell of Catholicism, the faith in which he grew up. In this scene, he finds himself attracted to the idea of prayer, especially as a solution to his current problems with writing. The novel also suggests that Arturo’s enduring attachment to Catholicism is because of his love for his mother, who is a devoted Catholic and worries about him in the big city.  

“Hail Mary full of grace, walking up the stairs, I can’t go through with it. I’ve got to get out of it.”

When Arturo goes into the brothel with the blond prostitute that he encounters in the streets of Los Angeles, he finds himself once again inhibited by the guilt that he feels about his sexuality because of his Catholic upbringing. Just as he was unable to “go through with it” with the prostitute in Denver, he loses interest in sleeping with the prostitute in Los Angeles as he remembers how the church taught them about “the joys of denial” and sees how filthy the brothel is.

“Those shoes, they were huaraches, the leather thongs wrapped several times around her ankles. They were desperately ragged huaraches; the woven leather had become unraveled. When I saw them I was grateful, for it was a defect about her that deserved criticism. She was tall and straight-shouldered, a girl of perhaps twenty, faultless in her way, except for her tattered huaraches.”

From the moment that he first glimpses Camilla, Arturo fixates on her huaraches, traditional leather sandals thought to have originated among the people indigenous to the American. Her shoes become a symbol for Arturo of her Mexican heritage.

“Those huaraches–do you have to wear them, Camilla? Do you have to emphasize that you always were and always will be a filthy little Greaser?” 

Arturo makes this cruel remark to Camilla after she rips up the copy of his story and then follows him out into the street to apologize. By criticizing her huaraches and using the derogatory word “greaser” toward Camilla, Arturo is trying to relieve his own feelings of inferiority and insecurity as the son of Italian immigrants by condemning Camilla for her race and her failure to fit into (white) American society. 

“But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father’s father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.” 

Arturo admits to himself that the real reason that he called Camilla a greaser is because of the prejudice he faced growing up as the son of Italian immigrants. Growing up in Colorado, he too was made fun for being foreign. He knows that he called Camilla a greaser because of his own painful associations with being considered different and un-American; he wants to use the word to hurt her because of all the times he has been hurt by racial and ethnic slurs.

“‘Do you like your name?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you wish it was Johnson, or Williams, or something?’”

After Arturo asks Camilla why her car is under the name of Lombard, rather than Lopez, she explains that she sometimes uses the name Lombard “professionally,” presumably to escape the marginalization that often comes with having a Hispanic last name. She then asks Arturo if he ever wishes his last name was not so obviously Italian. Although Arturo denies having a problem with his last name, the reader knows that he has encountered prejudice because his last name “ends in a soft vowel.”

“I have forgot much, Camilla! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

But I was desolate and sick with an old passion,

Yes, all the time, because the dance was long;

I have been faithful to thee, Camilla, in my fashion.

Arturo Bandini.”

After sending Camilla a telegram professing his love for her and asking her to marry him, Arturo decides that he wants to write her a poem but cannot think of anything. Finally, he recalls a verse from Ernest Dowson’s poem “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae,” in which the speaker addresses a lost love named Cyanara. Arturo copies the verse directly, substituting “Camilla” for “Cyanara,” and sends it as a telegram to Camilla. Dowson’s poem encapsulates the darker side of love, particularly the potential of romantic feeling to turn into an unhealthy and all-consuming obsession. This obsessive quality of love is demonstrated in Arturo’s feelings for Camilla, Camilla’s feelings for Sam, and Vera’s desire for Arturo.

“‘Forgive my body![…] Think of my soul! […] My soul is so beautiful, it can bring you so much! It is not ugly like my flesh!’” 

After suddenly appearing at Arturo’s room and demanding that he love her, Vera reveals to Arturo that her body is disfigured by “wounds” and that she fears that no man will ever be able to find her attractive. Arturo is confused by her insistence on her deformity until she removes all her clothes and reveals that she is badly scarred at the waist. Like Arturo, Vera is seeking validation through sex; just as Arturo wants proof that he can feel desire, Vera needs proof that she can still inspire desire in others.

“All 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 stinking newspapers, 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.” 

When Arturo goes to Long Beach to sleep with Vera, he tells her that he wants to imagine that she is Camilla, the woman he truly loves. In his fantasy, Camilla (Vera) is a “Mayan princess” who belongs to the pre-Columbian Californian landscape. He describes himself as a world-famous writer and as a European conqueror, like Cortez. The way in which Arturo imagines himself as a European conqueror triumphing over a Mayan princess highlights Arturo’s obsession with possessing and triumphing over Camilla and his tendency to see their relationship in racialized terms.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. A mortal sin, Arturo. Thou shalt not commit adultery. There it was, persistent to the end, assuring me that there was no escape from what I had done. I was a Catholic. This was a mortal sin against Vera Rivken.”

After having sex with Vera, Arturo is stricken with religious guilt. Even though he no longer believes in the tenets of the Catholic Church, he cannot escape the feeling that he has committed “a mortal sin” by having sex with Vera, a woman he does not love or intend to marry. He thinks of the Latin lines from the traditional Catholic prayer of confession, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, which are used to admit wrongdoing.

“The world was dust, and dust it would become. I began going to Mass in the mornings. I went to Confession. I received Holy Communion. I picked out a little frame church, squat and solid, down near the Mexican quarter. Here I prayed. The new Bandini. Ah life! Thou sweet bitter tragedy, thou dazzling whore that leadeth me to destruction! I gave up [smoking] for a few days. I bought a new rosary. I poured nickels and dimes into the Poor Box. I pitied the world.”

Arturo briefly attempts to return to Catholicism after he is consumed with guilt because of his sexual encounter with Vera. However, his religious fervor only lasts until he realizes he can transform his guilt into art by writing a story about Vera. 

“That’s how they did it in the Lone Star State where men were men and the women didn’t mind cooking for hard-riding, straight-shooting people like Coldwater Gatling, the toughest man in leather they had down there.” 

These lines are from the opening of Sammy Wiggins’s short story, which Arturo reads after Camilla begs him to help the dying man with his writing. Arturo immediately recognizes that Sammy has little talent as an author. Hewrites cliché westerns in halting prose that emphasize guns, violence, masculine bravado, and rigid gender roles. Sammy’s writing therefore reflects his own character and values.

“She did not hate Arturo Bandini, not really. She hated the fact that he did not meet her standard. She wanted to love him, but she couldn’t. She wanted him like Sammy: quiet, taciturn, grim, a good shot with a rifle, who accepted her as a waitress and nothing else.”

Arturo recognizes that Camilla cannot love him because he does not meet the standard she has set for the men in her life. She is attracted to Sammy’s masculine bravado and even his tendency to treat her as a subordinate because of how much she has internalized the racism and misogyny ingrained in the American society to which she–like Arturo–desperately wishes to belong. 

“So this was where she lived! I smelled it, touched it with my fingers, walked through it with my feet. It was as I had imagined. This was her home. Blindfolded I could have acknowledged the place, for her odor possessed it, her fevered, lost existence proclaimed it as part of a hopeless scheme. An apartment on Temple Street, an apartment in Los Angeles. She belonged to the rolling hills, the wide deserts, the high mountains, she would ruin any apartment, she would lay havoc upon any such little prison as this. It was so, ever in my imagination, ever a part of my scheming and thinking about her. This was her home, her ruin, her scattered dream.” 

When Arturo goes to Camilla’s apartment for the first time, he sees its filth and crowdedness as evidence that someone like her cannot be contained in urban spaces. He sees the city and its cramped apartments asthe wrong place for Camilla, whobelongs to “the rolling hills, wide deserts, the high mountains.” This quote demonstrates Arturo’s tendency to associate Camilla with the Edenic California landscape before it was settled and built up by European Americans. In this quote, however, he acknowledges that this is a version of Camilla that he has created in his imagination through “scheming and thinking about her.”

“To hell with that Hitler; this is more important than Hitler, this is about my book. It won’t shake the world, it won’t kill a soul, it won’t fire a gun, ah, but you’ll remember it to the day you die, you’ll lie there breathing your last, and you’ll smile as you remember the book. The story of Vera Rivken, a slice out of life.” 

After the publication of his first novel, Arturo thinks that everyone should be reading and talking about his book instead of about current events. Although he is being hyperbolic in suggesting that his book is “more important than Hitler” and the impending world war, Arturo could also be seen as making a valid point about the value of literature; while a book will never kill anyone or change social circumstances directly, its contents can remain with a reader for a lifetime and offer insight into the lives of ordinary people by translating reality into fiction. 

“Over the city spread a white murkiness like fog. But it was not the fog: it was the desert heat, the great blasts from the Mojave and Santa Ana, the pale white fingers of the wasteland, ever reaching out to claim its captured child.”

After Camilla is institutionalized, Arturo describes the deserts as reacting to her imprisonment in the hospital. Since he associates Camilla with the California landscape, he imagines that the “white murkiness like fog” that spreads over the city from a dust storm is the deserts “reaching out to claim” Camilla, their “captive child.” 

“She couldn’t stay in Los Angeles. She needed rest, a chance to eat and sleep, drink a lot of milk and take long walks. All at once I was full of plans. Laguna Beach!”

After Camilla escapes from the mental asylum, Arturo longs to be able to give her the care and nourishment that she needs to recover from her ordeal. This desire leads him to come up with a plan to rent them a house in Laguna Beach where they can live an idyllic life by the sea far away from the chaos of the city. 

“The house I liked was a twin-gabled place, with a white picket fence around it, not fifty yards from the shore. The backyard was a bed of white sand. It was well furnished, full of bright curtains and water-colors. I liked it best because of that one room upstairs. It faced the sea. I could put my typewriter at the window, and I could work. Ah man, I could do a lot of work at that window. I could just look out beyond that window and it would come, and merely looking at that room I was restless, and I saw sentence after sentence marching across the page.”

The house that Arturo rents in Laguna Beach becomes a physical manifestation of his desire to be at home and belong in America and with Camilla. The seaside house with its “white picket fence” represents an inviting domestic space onto which Arturo projects his fantasies about a life with Camilla where he works at his writing and she takes care of Willie, their dog and surrogate child. Arturo’s final attempt to care for Camilla reveals his desire to domesticate her and build the perfect American home and family.

“I looked at the faces around me, and I knew mine was like theirs. 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. I had to get away from that town.”

After Camilla runs away from the house in Laguna Beach, Arturo returns to Los Angeles. He associates his bitterness and disillusionment with the effects that the city has on himself and others. By using the metaphor of “flowers torn from their roots” to describe the faces of the people around him, Arturo calls attention to the way in which the city is full of people who have left their homes and been cut off from their families; he sees Los Angeles as made up of rootless misfits like himself and Camilla.  

“It was no use. How could I search for her? Why should I search for her? What could I bring her but a return to the brutal wilderness that had broken her?” 

When Arturo learns that Camilla wandered into the desert with Willie a few days before, he tries to search for her but soon realizes that it would be nearly impossible to find her. Furthermore, herecognizes that even if he were to find Camilla, he would only be bringing her back to a life of pain and misery. Significantly, he refers to modern civilization as the “brutal wilderness” that has “broken” Camilla rather than the desert itself.