Miss Lonelyhearts : & the day of the locust

181 Pages·2009·0.96 MB·English

by  Nathanael West

Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust
NATHANAEL WEST
Introduction by Jonathan Lethem
Afterword by John Sanford
A New Directions Book
Copyright © 1933 by Nathanael West
Copyright © 1939 by The Estate of Nathanael West
Copyright © 1962 by New Directions Publishing Corporation
Copyright © 1997 by John Sanford
Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Lethem
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine,
radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the Publisher.
John Sanford’s afterword appeared originally in the Los Angeles Times Book
Review, August 3, 1997.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (N D P125) in 1962. Reset edition
1969
Reissued “with a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem and an afterword by
John Sanford” as a New Directions Paperbook (N D P1151) in 2009
Miss Lonelyhearts was first published by New Directions in the New Classics
series, 1946.
The Day of the Locust was first published by New Directions in the New Classic
series, 1950.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
West, Nathanael, 1903–1940.
[Miss Lonelyhearts]
Miss Lonelyhearts & The day of the locust / Nathanael West;
Introduction by Jonathan Lethem; afterword by John Sanford
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-81121822-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. West, Nathanael, 1903-1940. Day of the locust. II. Title.
PS3545.E8334M5 2009
813'.52—dc22
2009010505
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
CONTENTS
“The American Vicarious: An Introduction to Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day
of the Locust” by Jonathan Lethem
Miss Lonelyhearts
The Day of the Locust
Afterword by John Sanford
“The American Vicarious: An Introduction to Miss Lonelyhearts
& The Day of the Locust”
by Jonathan Lethem
1.
Halfway through Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West’s eponymous protagonist
blurts out: “Perhaps I can make you understand. Let’s start from the beginning.
A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a
circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for
it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He
too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to
escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas
for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine
suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the
first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This
examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.”
The passage, so disconcertingly clean and direct that it could remind you of
a Hollywood “treatment” (the mercenary form in which West would come to
specialize, a few years later), perhaps represents the book West suspects he
ought to have written, or the book he suspects his reader thinks he ought to have
written. That’s to say, a coherently tragic narrative grounded, under an urbane,
lightly hard-boiled surface, in comprehensible “values.” The story is the sort that
might have been nicely handled by a novelist like Horace McCoy, whose They
Shoot Horses, Don’t They? might be considered a temperamental cousin to
West’s, with its metaphor of the dance marathon forming a lucid indictment of
the failure of popular imagination to encompass the Great Depression’s
dismantling of the American Dream.
Certainly this embodies a part of West’s intention. Lonelyhearts was
inspired by access West was given to real letters written to a real advice
columnist, and its setting, a persuasively scoured and desperate early-’30’s
Manhattan, is rendered with the scalpel-precision that was West’s prose
standard. No doubt, one measure of Nathanael West’s singular value is as a
uniquely placed historical witness, a bridge between literary eras. His was a
sensibility that extended the Paris-expatriate, Dada-drunk sophistication of ’20’s
literary culture to the material and milieu of Steinbeck, Tom Kromer, Edward
Dahlberg, Daniel Fuchs, and other 1930’s writers (some explicitly tagged as
“proletarian”)—that is, to poverty’s social depredations, with all the
accompanying lowered sights, deluded daydreams, and susceptibility to cults,
fads, and games of chance.
Yet hardly anything in this context prepares us as readers for the plunge into
the nihilistic, hysterical, grotesque-poetic frieze that is the fifty-eight-page
“novel” we know as Miss Lonelyhearts. For what that inadequate synopsis
implies (“for the first time in his life he is forced to examine the values…”) is an
approach to depicting fictional characters that West couldn’t ratify:
psychologically rounded, and capable of making and recognizing a traditional
“mistake,” of making a hero’s progress through a typical plot, even if it is to be a
tragic one. This isn’t West’s way. The journalist known to us only as “Miss
Lonelyhearts,” like his antagonist-editor Shrike, indeed, like every human
creature he encounters (including those “profoundly humble” authors of the
advice-seeking letters) is a species of chimera, in many ways a mystery to him-
or herself. If West’s characters are human, it is only unfortunately so: trapped in
a grossly prominent physical form, a creature lusting and suffering in
bewildering simultaneity. As far as their “values,” or personalities, these are
glimpsed only fleetingly against a screaming sky full of borrowed and
inadequate languages and attitudes—commercial, religious, existentialist,
therapeutic, criminal.
West’s characters mostly don’t engage in conversation. In its place they toss
blocks of rhetoric, of elegant mockery or despair, at one another like George
Herriman’s Ignatz Mouse chucking a brick at Krazy Kat’s head. The comparison
of Lonelyhearts’ form to a comic strip isn’t mine, but West’s, who intuited that
for all his grounding in Dostoyevsky and T.S. Eliot he needed to find some
version of vernacular form to embody his insight that “violence in America is
idiomatic.” The novel’s short, sardonically titled chapters persistently end in
morbid slapstick and cumulatively take on a slanted, compacted quality, like
crashed cars exhibited bumper-to-bumper. Dislodged on the very first page from
traditional identification with the travails of Lonelyhearts’ protagonist—in one
ear by the horrific chorus of the advice-seeking letters themselves, in the other
by the preemptive mockery of Shrike—the reader finds any possibility of
redemptive self-pity brilliantly undermined. (A critic explained—or complained:
“Violence is not only West’s subject, it is his method.”) Nathanael West’s
masterpiece is a mercilessly unsympathetic novel on the theme of sympathy.
2.
New York is vertical, Los Angeles horizontal, as well as three thousand miles
further from any grounding in European historical consciousness. The difference
between West’s New York novel and The Day of the Locust, his Hollywood
apocalypse, mimics these contrasts of cultural geography and form. Lonelyhearts
is defined by stairwells and elevator shafts and basement speakeasies, Locust by
the littering of a desert landscape with arbitrary architectural monstrosities, with
random and flimsy quotations of varied building styles, whether for use as
temporary movie sets or (barely more permanent) dwellings. Lizards scurry
across this baked ground. In place of Lonelyhearts’ claustrophobic compression,
in Locust West’s savage attention flits from character to character, leaving more
oxygen and sunlight between the tragicomically lumpen human operators—
though eventually they’ll crowd together and swarm this landscape like
lemmings. Acutely conscious of the double-edged myths of Progress and
Manifest Destiny (the diffident Jew Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein converted
himself to the imperially urbane “Nathanael West” because, he joked, he’d heard
Horace Greeley’s call to “go West, young man”), West explicitly defines Los
Angeles as the place where the American (Egalitarian) Dream has ended up, first
to replicate itself in the synesthetic cartoons of the motion picture industry, and
then, under the exposing glare of sunlight, to die.
Of course it is also six years deeper into the Depression, and no one in
Locust would bother, as does Shrike in Lonelyhearts, to puncture unattainable
fantasies of luxurious Bohemian escape. The inadvertent Californians in Locust
have made their last, weary migration, and in this zone of shoddy historical
facsimiles history itself seems to have ground to an end. The aspiring painter
Tod Hackett, the book’s best hope for reader-surrogate (and West’s best shot at
such a thing, in any of his four books), a protagonist-watcher who dares both to
dream of love and to attempt an artistic encapsulation of what’s before him, can
only plan a canvas depicting the gleeful burning of Los Angeles by its cheated
residents: in destruction, they might make it their own.
West depicts the film industry from its margins, the lame cast-off
vaudevillians and extras, the aspirants and show-biz parents, grasping intuitively
that these figures articulate the brief continuum between manufacturing and
merchandising bogus dreams, and lining up to buy them. The pathetically
wishful movie scenarios dreamed up by the wannabe-starlet Faye Greener, Tod
Hackett’s tormenting love-object, are hardly less viable than the sorts of films
that West himself ended up dashing off during his stints as a studio writer—the
point seems to be not simply that anyone could dream such stuff up, but that
everyone did, simultaneously. Most were buyers, not sellers.
everyone did, simultaneously. Most were buyers, not sellers.
West’s diagnosis of The American Vicarious anticipates both reality
television (where Andy Warhol’s quip about everyone gaining fifteen minutes of
fame became a drab processional) and the overturning of the “Death Tax”
(where politicians aroused a righteous populist indignation in favor of the
inheritance of fortunes, just on the chance every American would acquire their
rightful own). West wouldn’t have wondered what’s the matter with Kansas; he
knew the problem wasn’t limited to Kansas, or Los Angeles, or the 1930’s. In a
1967 article on West, Gilbert Sorrentino discerned that The Day of The Locust
predicted Ronald Reagan’s future presidency, and this book, a sun-blazed
Polaroid of its moment, seems permanently oracular.
3.
West’s ultimate subject is the challenge (the low odds, he might insist) of
negotiating between, on the one hand, the ground-zero imperatives and agonies
of the body and, on the other, the commoditized rhetorics of persuasion, fear,
envy, guilt, acquisition, and sacrifice (those voices that George Saunders has
nicknamed “The Braindead Megaphone” of Late Capitalism), in hopes of
locating an intimate ground of operation from which an authentic loving gesture
might be launched. That he identified this as a baseline twentieth-century
American dilemma as early as he did granted West a superb relevance to the
future of American literature—its ongoing future, I’d say.
In the weeks while I’ve been rereading his novels, the unfolding of a global
financial collapse has many speaking of a “second Great Depression,” the public
mechanics of which will certainly be subject to the same forces of transference,
denial, and fantasy that West made his obsessive motifs. Last month in suburban
Long Island, on the day nicknamed “Black Friday” for its hopes of pushing retail
accounts into the black of profit, a tide of bargain-fevered shoppers trampled to
death a retail clerk attempting to manage their entry into his store. The
newspaper business has almost dissolved beneath a willful tide of “authentic”
voices demanding to be heard; its response is nearly as neurotic as Miss
Lonelyhearts’. Which of West’s contemporaries can we imagine weighing in
intelligibly on blogging, or American Idol? (Picture Ernest Hemingway’s
thousand-yard stare—and he lived a quarter-century longer than West—or F.
Scott Fitzgerald in a fetal position.) By applying the magpie aesthetics of
Surrealism and T.S. Eliot to the “American Grain,” by delving into the popular
culture and emerging not with surrender or refusal but a razor-cool critique,
West became the great precursor to Heller, Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, George
Saunders, and so much else, likely including Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”