If there’s one thing I think all writers have in common it’s that they are full of themselves. Every writer you’ll encounter has the answer for you, whatever your question might be, because they are an authority on the subject at hand. This comes from long hours spent reading books on esoteric subjects, studying whatever has grabbed their interest that particular day, and the fact that writers, on the most basic level, are hungry for any information that could prove to be inspirational to them. In our modern times, we are lucky to have a repository like Wikipedia. What writer out there hasn’t spent hours reading articles on Wikipedia, clicking through links to take them to related subjects, sometimes ending a far leap in topic from where they began. Sometimes, I’ll look up to the Wikipedia searchbar in my browser and have no recollection of searching for the topic that still resides there. But ultimately, all this information we absorb is because we are striving to become an authority on everything. Ask my friends: I always have the answer for any question presented. Whether that answer is the correct one is another story, but I will always have something to say.

I mention this idea of the Writer’s Ego having just finished reading John Fante’s Ask The Dusk. Our protagonist in this novel is Arturo Bandini, an aspiring writer who has moved to Los Angeles to find his fame. What struck me as real, and very funny, is how full of himself Bandini is. In the preface to the edition I read (pictured above), Charles Bukowski, a writer obviously and admittedly inspired by Fante, states this very same amusement. When having a fight with his wife, Bukowski would summon Fante’s egotistical writer and scream, “Don’t call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!” Throughout the novel, Bandini speaks to himself of his own genius and talent, often referring to the one story he has published and how fantastic it is. “I wonder if he’s handsome, that Bandini fellow, author of that brilliant Little Dog Laughed.”

Bandini wavers at times, allowing his self-esteem to plummet when things don’t go precisely the way he hopes. But he always returns to a booming ego, talking himself up, praising himself to himself. It’s Bandini this, Bandini that… how could you treat Bandini like this, the Arturo Bandini, author of the Little Dog Laughed and the Long Lost Hills? At one point in the novel, after beating himself up over soiling the good morals of a woman (in his own mind at least) by sleeping with her, it happens that an earthquake strikes the city. In a lesser work, a character might simply take the earthquake as some sort of portent and reflect on life. But to Arturo Bandini, he himself is solely responsible for the earthquake and any death it causes.

Now there were screams. Then dust. Then crumbling and roaring. I turned round and round in a circle. I had done this. I had done this. I stood with my mouth open, paralyzed, looking about me. I ran a few steps toward the sea. Then I ran back.

You did it, Arturo. This is the wrath of God. You did it.

Fante has distilled the Writer’s Ego down to an extremely comical, yet entirely believable character with Arturo Bandini. While Bandini’s story is not without its sadness, throughout Ask The Dust we are shown the writer as center of the universe, the writer as arrogance personified. Even when Bandini puts himself down, or purports modesty or temperance, it is to feed the wild ego that exists at his very core. “How wonderful I really was! A great, soft-spoken, gentle man, a lover of all things, men and beast alike.”

The writer develops such an ego, I believe, because writing itself is such a solitary exercise. When one spends so much time searching one’s own mind for clues about life’s truths, it’s only natural that they will start to believe all their answers are golden. And really, anybody who thinks that people will hungrily devour any words they put to a page must be suffused with ego. Why you? Why your words and not somebody else’s? It’s because you are Arturo Bandini, author of the Little Dog Laughed, great genius of our time, a writer for the ages! Being writers, we’ve all got a little bit of Arturo Bandini in us and there’s nothing wrong with that… you’ve got to be a little crazy, a little wild with ego, to succumb to being an artist of any stripe. A writer would suffer, I think, without such an ego; if you can’t stand behind your work, if you try to please everyone else over yourself, you’ll never find your voice. And maybe that’s what we’re really talking about when we talk about a writer’s voice, the voice of their ego, and when we find it we have finally allowed our ego to surface with all the good and bad it brings. A writer’s true charge is to harness that ego, to allow it to flourish without thinking our actions caused a natural disaster, to know what it is that we do not know… and to find those answers. “Bandini, the idiot, the dog, the skunk, the fool. But I couldn’t help it.“

Tags: arturo bandini, ask the dust, charles bukowski, ego, john fante, literature, voice, wikipedia, writer's ego, writer's voice