Nathanael West: A Novelist Apart

by RICHARD B. GERMAN

1

NATHANAEL WEST, who died in 1940 at the age of thirty-six, published four curious, highly original novels during the thirties, of which the second, Miss Lonelyhearts, and the fourth, The Day of the Locust (both in the New Directions New Classics series), are generally considered the most likely to survive. The others, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (the first) and A Cool Million, are no longer in print, but they command some attention if only because the body of West’s work was so unlike that of any other important American writing of that period. Like some of his friends — James T. Farrell, Erskine Caldwell, Edward Newhouse, Josephine Herbst — West wrote tough-minded novels of social protest, but he stood a little apart from them in philosophy and in the climate and character of his novels. He too deplored the emptiness of twentieth-century life in the United States, but he chose to depict that life in terms not of people who were consciously involved in a struggle, but of those who were unconsciously trapped — people who were, in their blindness, so tragic as to be true comic figures.

West’s contemporaries were realists; he was a kind of superrealist, He often used enormous incongruities to make his points, which gave him a kinship with French writers of the school of Rimbaud and with the later surréalistes; but instead of documenting his perceptions with magnifyingglass clarity, he preferred to distill them into images and situations painfully barren of minutiae. He was an extreme pessimist, which may have been the reason why he never reached a wide audience while he was alive. His publishing history was a bitter farce such as he might have dreamed up. The Dream Life of Balso Snell, printed by a small avant-garde firm, was noticed only in the little magazines; Miss Lonelyhearts was published by Liveright only a few weeks before the firm went out of business; A Cool Million, introduced by

Covici-Friede, went rapidly to the remainder tables; and The Day of the Locust (Random House) sold only about 1480 copies.

Critics seemed unable to be objective when reviewing West’s work; they were either wildly enthusiastic or scathing in their scorn, and many went out of their way to chastise him for his “bad taste.” In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald written shortly after publication of The Day of the Locust, West said, “So far the box score stands: Good reviews— fifteen per cent, bad reviews — twentyfive per cent, brutal personal attacks — sixty per cent.” That was not self-pity; it was the remark of a man who knew he was apart, a crystallized recognition of his place in the literary world of his day.

West began cultivating ins detachment at an early age. Possibly it isn’t significant that one of his sisters recalls that as a boy he trained his bull terrier to bite anyone who came into the room while the young master was reading; but it is informative to consider that of all the people who knew him well — and his circle encompassed some of the most sensitive, active literary minds of the time — none, with the exception of members of his immediate family and S. J. Perelman (his college classmate and later his brother-in-law), claim to have understood him fully.

In The Day of the Locust West described Tod Hackett as “a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes,” and so the author himself seemed to those around him. No one could satisfactorily explain the many clashing elements in his nature and interests. He despised military men, yet was an authority on armies and strategies from the time of Caesar on (“When he took out a girl, he sometimes spent the evening telling her about some battle of Napoleon’s,” one friend remembers); he regarded organized religion as a hoax, but was on intimate terms with the structure, organization, and financial condition of the Catholic Church, He was tall, awkward, and disarming in appearance, but he dressed with excessive propriety in Brooks Brothers clothes and traveled with an incredible collection of trick luggage, He had an acute feeling for words, but couldn’t spell; he hated business and workaday occupations, but was successful as a hotel clerk for several years.

Copyright, 1950, by Richard B. Gehman

Next to writing, hunting was his main interest, so much so that it constantly impinged upon his work, as evinced by his liberal use of references and metaphors in The Day of the Locust. Even in his poverty-stricken days in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, while working on his third book and trying unsuccessfully to support himself by selling short stories, he spent inordinate amounts on dogs and hunting equipment; later, in Hollywood, he and his friend Stanley Rose, the bookseller, went hunting regularly in a station wagon equipped with every conceivable device for a huntsman’s convenience, including secret compartments for illegal game. Josephine Herbst, who knew him well, has suggested that hunting assumed such importance in his life because it was a way of finding an uncomplicated kinship with rural people — he got on very well with his neighbors in Bucks County — who were not afflicted with the frustrated desires and guilts indigenous to the sophisticated world in which he customarily traveled.

2

WEST was born in New York in 1904, the son of a prosperous building contractor. He went to public schools and upon graduation from DeWitt Clinton High matriculated at Tufts, stayed a year, then transferred to Brown, where he fell in with a group of young literary aspirants that included I. J. Kapstein, Quentin Reynolds, and S. J. Perelman (the last was perhaps his closest friend and strongest contemporary influence; his shadow can be detected in A Cool Million in particular).

West’s literary efforts at Brown were confined to satirical verse in a school literary magazine. Upon graduation the yearbook said of him, He seems a bit eccentric at times, a characteristic of all geniuses.” Late in 1924, he joined the crowds of young American would-be Bohemians drifting to Paris, but he evidently didn’t share the wide-eyed wonder of that hopeful horde; he was, as usual, a little detached. Years later, in a partly autobiographical short story, first called The Fake and later L’ Affaire Beano, he wrote: —

“‘In order to be an artist one has to live like one.’ We know now that this is nonsense, but in Paris in ‘25 and ‘26 we didn’t know it. Artists are crazy’ is another statement from the same credo. Of course all these ideas were foisted on us by the non-artists, but we didn’t realize it then.

“By the time I got to Paris, the business of being an artist had grown quite difficult. Aside from the fact that you were actually expected to create, the jury had been changed. It no longer consisted of the tourists and the folks back home, but of your fellow artists. They were the ones who decided on the authenticity of your madness. Long hair and a rapt look wouldn’t get you to first base. You had to have something new on the ball. Even dirt and sandals and calling Sargent a lousy painter was not enough. You had to be an original, Things were a good deal less innocent than they had been, and much more desperate.

“When I got to Montparnasse, all the obvious roles had either been dropped or were being played by experts. But I made a lucky hit. Instead of trying for strangeness, I formalized and exaggerated the costume of a bond salesman. I wore carefully pressed Brooks Brothers clothing, sober but rich ties, and carried gloves and a tightly-rolled umbrella. Mv manners were elaborate and I professed great horror at the slightest breach of the conventional. It was a success. I was asked to all the parties.”

West’s parents began pleading with him to return, but he ignored them and stayed on even after his money ran out. He later told a friend, the screen writer Wells Root, that at one time his only presentable garment was a tremendous plaid overcoat. “He grew a flowing red beard and became,” Root later reported, “something of a character in the Latin Quarter, striding up and down in the red beard and the long plaid coat which, of necessity, he never removed indoors or out.”

West remained in Paris nearly two years, and managed to finish most of Balso Snell there, but finally succumbed to his parents’ entreaties. He took a job as manager of Kenmore Hall, an East 23rd Street hotel owned then by one of his uncles, and after a year or so moved uptown to the Sutton, a rather more elaborate residential establishment on East 56th Street. Balso did not attract much attention when it was published, but West immediately set to work in his spare time on Miss Lonelyhearts. Parts of its first draft were published in 1932 in the second series of William Carlos Williams’s magazine, Contact; West and Robert McAlmon appeared on the masthead as associate editors.

If it hadn’t been for two friends, West might have remained a hotel clerk indefinitely; although he was not fond of the job, it at least offered a steady income, and there wasn’t much else he could do at a comparable salary. But he was continually fretting over his slow progress on Miss Lonelyhearts: by 1932 he had torn up five different versions and was patiently going into a sixth. It was clear that he might never finish it unless he could devote all his time to writing — and that seemed impossible until Josephine Herbst and John Herrmann, who had been the first New York writers to settle in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, suggested that he might be able to live less expensively there in the country, He took what little money he had saved, quit the Sutton, and went to stay at Warford House, a tiny hotel in Frenchtown, New Jersey, just across the river from the Pennsylvania land on which the exiled New Yorkers wen’ beginning to establish their small colony. He finished his book there within a few months.

The unfavorable reviews of Miss Lonelyhearts were vituperative in the extreme. Fortunately, they were faroutnumbered by the favorable notices, so much so that West decided to take up permanent residence in Bucks County and devote all his time to writing. That was when he began A Cool Million, interrupting it from time to time to work on the ill-fated short stories, none of which ever saw print. A Cool Million finally appeared and, almost simultaneously, died. His monev ran lower and lower, and when Miss Lonelyhearts was bought as a film property by 20th-Centuary Fox, West followed his book to Hollywood. (He never worked on the script. When it finally appeared as a picture, its title had been changed to Advice to the Lovelorn, and it had been made into a cops-and-robbers film starring Lee Tracy. The producers declared, truthfully, “The pictorial narrative has only the basic idea of the book.”)

In Hollywood, he worked first on “B” western and gangster pictures, and later graduated, so to speak, To larger studios, notably RKO. He collaborated on a number of screen originals with Boris Ingster, who had worked with Eisenstein, and was given screen credit on several pictures which were fairly successful at the box office, among them I Stole a Million and Fire Came Back,

In 1939 he met Eileen McKenney, who was working in the Walt Disney studios (she will be remembered as the heroine of My Sinter Eileen, by Ruth McKenney, a book which achieved wide popularity as a play and a motion picture). They were married in April, 1940, and went on a threemonth trip to the Oregon woods, where West blocked out plans for a fifth novel, which he hoped to begin upon iheir return to California (if he ever put any of this book on paper, he never mentioned it to friends; apparently he never got further than the planning stage). Late in December of that year he and his bride went to Mexico on a hunting trip. On the 22nd, as they were driving back to Hollywood, their staion wagon collided with an automobile at a crossroads near El Centro, California. Eileen was killed instantly, and West died on the way to the hospital.

3

EVER since the rise of the motion picture industry, it has become fashionable in some circles to contend that as soon as a writer begins working for the studios, his “serious” output suffers or somehow becomes suspect. Literary history is well populated with writers of real stature who hacked for a living, but for some obscure reason some of the more fastidious — or jealous critics have continued to insist that film writing is more “harmful” and less respectable than, say, working for the pulps or slicks.

West inevitably came in for criticism of this kind. The closest he came to answering it was in this extract from a letter to Edmund Wilson: “I once tried to work seriousy at my craft but was absolutely unable to make even the beginning of a living. At the end of three years and two books I had made the total of $780 gross. So it wasn’t a matter of making a sacrifice, which I was willing enough to make and will still be willing, but just a clear cut impossibility.... I haven’t given up, however, by a long shot, and although it may sound strange, am not even discouraged. I have a new book blocked out and have managed to save a little money so that about Christmas time I think I may be able to knock off again and make another attempt. It is for this reason that I am grateful rather than angry at the nice deep mud-lined rut in which I find myself at the moment. The world outside doesn’t make it possible for me to even hope to earn a living writing, while here the pay is large (it isn’t as large as people think, however) enough for me to have three or four months otf every year. . .”

The Day of the Locust was completed between studio assignments. If iT was less perfect in form and structure than Miss Lonelyhearts, it was also more ambitious and showed marked progress in West’s thinking and in his approach toward maturity as a writer. Balso was an inverled book, a young man’s intellectual parlor trick performed chiefly for his own amusement and that of those inner-circle friends he permitted to watch. Miss Lonelyhearts and, to a lesser extent, A Cool Million were highly colored by West’s personal feelings of despair for his characters and his pessimistic conviction that life is one hell of a mess.

Five years clapsed between the third and fourth novels, and when The Day of the Locust finally came out, it was apparent that West had learned to let his characters and scenes make their own points without his intrusion: the angry crusader’s sword became the brush of an artist, without losing its original sharpness. For this reason alone he stands apart from most of the other Americans who were writing in the thirties, and for this reason his writing is far more likely to stick with us. The Day of the Locust has been called “the best book to come out of Hollywood,” but while it certainly is that, it is not primarily a novel about that stucco haven of the queer and diseased. West used Hollywood as a microcosm. It was peculiarly fitted to his needs because, as other writers since have discovered, everything that is wrong with life in the United States is to he found there in rare purity, and because the unreality of ihe business of making pictures seemed a most proper selling for his “halfworld.”

Some Hollywood film people who have read the book claim angrily that it does not depict the real Hollywood; West never intended thal it should. The people who live in its pages are not those who are foisting the mammoth Hollywood hoax on the public; only one “successful” person is shown (the writer. Claude Estee), and he is discovered to be as unhappy, basically, as the poor souls who captured West’s attention.

West’s first thought when planning the novel was to base it on the true story of a California soldier of fortune who had been implicated in a locally famous murder case. With this man as a model, he created a character of his own, a renegade who proposed to get rich by taking parties of sensationstarved, bored, and hopeless Angelenos on private cruises. The book was to tell of the adventures of an oddly assorted group who went on one of these trips: a family of Eskimos, a child actor and his mother, a dwarf bookie, a seven-fool Lesbian who had to shave every day, a broken-down vaudeville clown and his talentless daughter who aspired to screen stardom, a woman whose hobby was funeral arrangements, and a film writer who kept a lifesized rubber horse at the bottom of his swimming pool — the sort of people, it is not in the least exaggerating to say, that one might encounter in from of Schwab’s on any given day.

As West’s thinking progressed, he either lost interesl in the impresario or decided that he was not fitted for his purposes; at any rate, he shifted the emphasis to Homer Simpson, the inarticulate hotel bookkeeper from Wayneville, Lowa, and Tod Haekett, the young man from the Yale School of Fine Arts. Much of the story is seen through Tod’s eyes, but Homer is unquestionably the central character, for n is he who illustrates West’s principal theme.

When first submitted to a publisher, the story was partially told in the first person by Claude Estee, but upon the advice of his editors West made changes so that it is now entirely in the third. It is episodic in structure but panoramic in form: appropriated enough, it in some ways resembles a motion picture — the early scenes are leisurely, fading in and out as though the writer were turning his mind upon them like it camera, and then, as the characters come more and more into focus, becoming tighter, faster, and more merciless.

West first called the manuscript “The Cheated,”and the atmosphere of cheating and prelense rises from the pages like a stench. None of the people, enslaved in lives they loathe, can safely resign themselves to reality; all must pretend to be someone else (Faye Greener imagines herself a great star; Claude Estee likes to believe he has a round belly like it Southern colonel, when in reality he is “a dried up little man with the rubbed features and stooped shoulders of a postal clerk”). To equip their illusions further, they resort to artificial luxury in their dwellings, and for emotional satisfaction they turn to movies (where boy and girl live and love ideally, chastely) the richer, sated ones to pornography or to cockfights.

At one point West speaks of his people as “masqueraders.” This is the key to the book. “All their lives,” he says, “they had slaved al some dull labor . . . saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough” — hut the trouble was that once they reached the promised land, California, they realized that the never ending, enorvating sunshine wasn’t enough; that it was possible to get too much orange juice; that one wave at the seashore wnsn t any bigger or more violent than the next; that the planes at the Glendale airport never did anything but take off and land. Finally “they realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment.”They know at last, West is saying, that life is nothing but a cheap Mardi Gras devised by the devil, and that they are pitiful amateurs in an unfunny comic opera. They can only find solace, justification, even ecstasy, in the kind of mob violence that ends this upsetting book.

West’s message is clear: the human tinder that he writes about is best suited to kindle authoritarianism or wild mob rule. It should have been evident when he first wrote the book that he was a reflector as well as a prophet, but the ironical part was that nobody seemed particularly frightened or even interested enough to pause for objective reflection. Although first-rate writers and critics praised his work highly, West remained for a long time a writer without an audience.

In 1939 he wrote George Milburn, “. . . all my books always fall between the different schools of writing. The radical press, although I consider myself on their side, doesn’t like my particular kind of joking, and think it even fascist sometimes, and the literature boys, whom I detest, delest me in turn. The highbrow press finds that I avoid the big, significant things and the lending library touts in the daily press think me shocking and what, in the novels of Michael Arlen, is called ‘bad hat.’ The proof of all this is that I’ve never had the same publisher twice — once bitten, etc. — because there is nothing to root for in my work and what is even worse, no rooters.”

Today West is at last getting just recognition fur his special, remarkable talent; more and more rooters, ten years after his death, are helping his reputation to come into its own. Ten years after his death: that is the final ironic, tragic, Westian joke.