Going West

For most of 1988 I moved about London, from house-sit to house-sit, transporting all the essentials of my life and trade in a 2CV: typewriter, reference books, minimal wardrobe. At some point during that nomadic interlude, a friend of someone I hardly knew asked me pointedly whether I had read the works of Nathanael West, hinting that if I hadn’t I ought to. Perhaps he judged West’s acerbic satire of disillusion and forlorn hope peculiarly apt to the mild chaos of my existence.

So I bought a copy of Nathanael West’s complete works and read them, straight through. (My record of response to such recommendations had not always been so pliant. A close friend whose judgement and taste I absolutely trusted once pressed on me a copy of Lolita. I kept it unopened for months, even through a stay in hospital. When, finally, I did open it, the seduction was total, intoxicating, from the first page.) I’d heard of West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and the title of The Day of the Locust ruffled memory – perhaps of the 1974 film adaptation, directed by John Schlesinger – but that was all I knew of the writer born Nathan Weinstein, of German Lithuanian immigrants, in 1903. He studied, lackadaisically, at Brown University, Rhode Island, passed off his cousin’s coursework as his own, scraped a degree, and meantime drew bizarre cartoons and wrote weird scraps of fantastical narrative. In 1926 he changed his name to Nathanael West, claiming inspiration from the nineteenth-century American reformer Horace Greeley’s injunction to ‘Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.’ His immediate destination was eastwards, however, to Paris, cultural hotbed of post-war Europe – jazz cafés, experimental art and literature, surrealism, Dadaism. Here he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a strange, subversive, scatological confection set inside the Trojan Horse, wherein Balso Snell encounters a series of Bosch-like grotesques in surreal circumstances. These nightmarish visions, surely triggered by the cataclysm of the First World War and the mad aftermath in a society torn between frantic hedonism and acrid Weltschmerz, explore the nature of Self, and of Reality.

Reality! If I could only discover the Real . . . A Real that would wait for me to inspect it as a dog inspects a dead rabbit. But, alas, when searching for the Real I throw a stone into a pool whose ripples become of advancing less importance until they are too large for connection with, or even memory of, the stone agent.

Back in America, West managed a succession of small hotels. Another Nathaniel (Hawthorne) said that hotel desk clerking was the perfect subsidy for a writer, and in these cheap joints West enjoyed the company of other threadbare writers who arrived to live ‘half-free, sometimes all-free’ as Lillian Hellman recalled, eating dreadful food and chronicling the America of the Depression. ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’, the eponymous hero of his second novel, is a columnist purveying saccharine advice to ‘Broken-Hearted, Sick-of-it-All’, whose letters, ‘all of them alike [were] stamped from the dough of suffering with the heart-shaped cookie knife’. His editor, the hard-headed Shrike (named for the Butcher-bird), recommends Art – ‘When you are cold, warm yourself before the flaming tints of Titian’ – then, if that doesn’t work, nothing for it but to resort to drugs and suicide. West mocks Weltschmerz with an almost ribald glee, as if to say ‘what’s wrong with the veneer of hope, the false cheeriness, the glib advice, the untried recipe for happiness? It’s what they want. So, serve it up to them, lashings of it.’ The columnist’s own (putative) heart-throb, Betty, urges him to give up the job that sickens him, the peddling of baseless optimism, and ‘work in an advertising agency, or something’ where the moral dilemma – either telling the unwelcome truth or sugaring it – doesn’t impinge. West’s black comedy, rooted in compassion not mockery, hits the solar plexus and lays down no featherbed of sentiment to cushion a fall. ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ reads the letters sent to him by people desperate to be told that they are not alone in their plight ‘for the same reason as an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain’. The Day of the Locust (1939), set in the Hollywood of the 1930s and written when West had spent three years in Tinseltown, is peopled by sad-sacks nursing vague dreams of stardom, ill-paid extras on the pallid fringe of the limelight, craving a central role on life’s big screen. This is the Dream Factory painted in the garish, unnatural tints of Technicolor, where actors pretend to eat cardboard picnics beside Cellophane waterfalls, and canvas ocean liners embark on voyages to nowhere, not even over the rainbow. Faye Greener, platinum blonde, tinpot talent, expresses the fantasy of ‘the dream dump’ that fascinates and destroys: ‘“I’m going to be a star some day,” she announced, as though daring to contradict him . . . “If I’m not, I’ll commit suicide.”’ Then she adds that she doesn’t go to shows very often because ‘the lights hurt my eyes’. West, a gentle loner and misfit himself, delivers sharp comedy with deadpan seriousness and a cynicism that’s right on target. His style is studiedly offhand, deftly crafted – ‘She was smiling, a subtle half-smile uncontaminated by thought. She looked just born, everything moist and fresh, volatile and perfumed . . .’ Faye Greener takes a gingersnap and says ‘I’ll get fat . . . They say fat women are going to be popular next year. Do you think so? I don’t. It’s just publicity for Mae West.’ Of the oddballs and suckers who populate The Day of the Locust like the cast of a Coen movie – a Mexican cock-fighter, a cowboy from Arizona who poses as a live tailor’s dummy when he isn’t playing bit parts in horse operas, the retired clerk Homer Simpson (one wonders if . . .), a dwarf bookmaker – West’s narrator Tod says he ‘knew very little about them except that they had come to California to die’. In dismal, grey Thirties America, California offers its denizens sunshine and oranges, but for them ‘the sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies.’ The Day of the Locust is a brilliant, ad absurdum exploration of maundering desperation. Though Hollywood, the city of fool’s gold pavements, has swindled the beaten and bereft of the soured dream, making them burn with resentment, they have no fight left; they are ‘probably not desperate enough to set a single city on fire’. In A Cool Million (1934), modelled on Voltaire’s Candide (meaning ‘naive’, but often mistranslated as ‘optimist’), a country bumpkin, Lemuel Pitkin, going out into the world to seek his fortune, asks advice from ex-President Shagpoke Whipple (Lemuel: first name of Swift’s Gulliver; Shagpoke: a double screw). ‘America’, says Shagpoke, ‘is the land of opportunity. She takes care of the honest and industrious and never fails them as long as they are both.’ Thus insulated from worldly wisdom and horse sense, the hapless dupe Pitkin is robbed, cheated and wrongfully imprisoned, witnesses violence, rape and riot. Meeting him in prison, Shagpoke, now leader of a National Revolutionary Party, warns that the two arch-enemies of the American spirit are ‘Wall Street and the Communists’. Pitkin himself ends up minus teeth, eyes, scalp and a leg, having been manipulated by both Communist and Fascist organizations. The book closes with Shagpoke’s funerary oration for Pitkin, the ultimate fall guy, the martyr in the glossy American dream:

What made Lemuel Pitkin great? Let us examine his life. First we see him as a small boy, light of foot, fishing for bullheads in the Rat River of Vermont. Later, he attends the Ottsville High School, where he is captain of the nine and an excellent outfielder. Then he leaves for the big city to make his fortune. All this is in the honorable tradition of his country and its people and he has the right to expect certain rewards. Jail is his first reward. Poverty his second. Violence is his third. Death is his last. But he did not live in vain. Through his martyrdom, the National Revolutionary Party triumphed . . . [the American people] were purged of alien diseases and America became again American. Hail, Lemuel Pitkin! All Hail, the American Boy!

West may not have gone to California to die, but he chronicled Movieland’s death wish and empty aspirations with merciless insight, and perished in a classic tearjerker end-of-movie sequence himself. His reputation – and earnings – as a writer, particularly for the big screen, were on the rise; he had married; life seemed sweet. But in December 1940, only a few months after his marriage, distraught at the news of his friend Scott Fitzgerald’s death the previous day, West mand his wife drove their big-finned automobile through a ‘Stop’ sign in El Centro, close to the Mexican border, and into a fatal collision.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 10 © Graeme Fife 2006