My Mentor, Mr. Mencken : L.A. Writer John Fante Carried on a 20-Year Correspondence With the Sage of Baltimore

Sincerely yours,

John Fante

June 16, 1934

Dear Mr. Mencken,

In these treacherous days I fortify myself with heavy doses of Nietzsche who, for all his little errors, is the best medicine in the world. It takes a terrific amount of it to write the stuff I'm now writing, and still go on living from day to day. The hell of it is, I'm writing for the studios, and it's the most disgusting job in Christ's kingdom.

I wouldn't be scribbling this motion picture slop except that I've had very bad luck in the past three months, and a scenario writer makes fifty times as much money as James Branch Cabell and Sherwood Anderson put together. This famous first novel of mine ("The Road to Los Angeles"), which I have been boasting about, was really a pretty lousy novel. Mr. Knopf was bitterly disappointed in it and insists that I go to work on another one to satisfy the demands of the contract.

Sincerely,

J. Fante

June 29, 1934

Dear Mr. Fante,

I find your letter of June 16 on my return to Baltimore. It is too bad that you couldn't come to terms with Knopf. But inasmuch as you agree with him that the novel was probably not what it should have been, I suppose there is nothing to be done about it. I always advise young authors to scrap their first two or three book manuscripts. Many a man has been ruined by being published prematurely.

H. L. Mencken

July 12, 1934

Dear Mr. Mencken,

You see by now what has happened since you retired from the American Mercury. Once more the country is infested with literary and political quacks who have been hibernating for ten years. I may be stupidly prejudiced, but my conviction is that never in my life have I seen a greater exhibition of imbecilities and frauds. All over the land the mob is roaring for blood, the politicians are resorting to their basest tricks, and organized religion is showing the intrinsic gutlessness of its tenets. The last straw would be a newspaper notice of the fact that H. L. Mencken is running for the governorship of Maryland. I would take poison or finish like Nietzsche.

Very sincerely,

J. Fante

July 17, 1934

Dear Mr. Fante,

The over-production of quacks that you notice is always visible in times of public difficulties. The American people are firmly convinced that every imaginable disease is curable, and when the regular doctors fail to relieve them they turn at once to quacks. My belief is that all of the members of the Brain Trust belong to this category. I can see nothing whatever in them save the desire to line up at the public trough--in brief, they are job holders precisely like any others. The notion that they are altruists is sheer insanity, and the notion that they are master minds is almost as crazy.

Sincerely yours,

H. L. Mencken

Aug. 15, 1934

(on Warner Bros. letterhead)

Dear Mr. Mencken,

Here I sit, laughing and laughing. I have a secretary and a great big office and a lot of people bow low when I pass, all of them hating my Dago guts.

I not only made these folks swallow that bilge water but I did it to the tune of $1,500, plus $250 a week for an indefinite period. I never had so much money in the offing in my life; moreover, if my luck holds good I shall certainly bed Del Rio inside of four weeks. Once I sent her twenty-five cents for her picture. Now today, ten years later, I see her daily, eat in the same room with her, ogle her big Rolls Royce, and having concluded that she's unquestionably the world's worst actress, I am all set to tell her so the very instant I meet her.

What a movie! I wrote it for Frankie Darro. They didn't like that. They said Kay Francis. So I wrote it for Kay Francis. Then they said change it to Barbara Stanwyck. The yarn used to be a kid story. Now it's a prison story. Some day it will be King Kong. And all I do is write and laugh and laugh and think of Dolores Del Rio.

Mr. Mencken, you should come out here and get rich. What about "The American Language?" Don't lie to me, Mr. Mencken, I \o7 know\f7 you had Jean Harlow in mind when you wrote it!

Cordially, and begging your pardon,

J. Fante

Nov. 11, 1936

Dear Mr. Mencken

Last night I finished the new "American Language." It is such a marvelous thing, so full of laughter and wisdom.