Making It New: 1900–1945 515Odets, Cain and McCoy, Benchley and Parker were among those lured west to write
film scripts. And, while they were there or afterwards, some writers at least felt
compelled to write about the experience. Fitzgerald did so, of course, in The Last
Tycoon. McCoy did so in I Should Have Stayed Home (1938), the title of which
suggests just how much this was a novel about failure in the dream factory. Even
Faulkner, who despised a place where he said “they worship death,” had to write
about it: “Hollywood which is no longer Hollywood,” the narrator observes in The
Wild Palms (originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem), “but is stippled by a billion
feet of burning colored gas across the face of the American earth.” Of those who
came to Hollywood, however, and registered the impact of popular culture generally
in their writing, no writer was more perceptive than Nathanael West (1903–1940).
Born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein in New York City, West lived in Paris for two
years, where he completed his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931).
A surrealist fantasy about the wanderings of its eponymous hero within the Trojan
horse – where, among others, he meets a naked man in a bowler hat who is writing
a history of Saint Puce, a flea who lived in Christ’s armpit – it was completely ignored.
It did, however, prove useful for its author: West’s apprenticeship to surrealism
undoubtedly freed him from the constraints of Naturalism. His later work presents
and is preoccupied with a border territory, situated somewhere between the actual
and the absurd, the naturalistic and nightmare. This is, West intimates, the world in
which we live now: mediated for us by the strange dreams, the visions of ourselves
that our culture throws up for us and marked by excess, a seemingly endless surfeit
of commodities. The subsequent fiction of West, written after he returned to the
United States in the early 1930s, sprang from his confrontation with America at its
most meaningless. Something of that is registered in his third book, A Cool Million:
The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934), a brutally comic attack on the American
myth of success, the rise of the self-made man from rags to riches. But the works in
which West explored and exploited the absurd – as the essential narrative of life and
entire story of America – were his second and fourth and final ones: Miss Lonelyhearts
(1933), written just after he returned from Europe, and The Day of the Locust (1939),
written while he was working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood – and published just a
year before his sudden death.
The hero of Miss Lonelyhearts is – Miss Lonelyhearts. The reader never learns
his real name. He is the agony aunt on the New York Post-Dispatch, which tells
its customers: “Are-you-in-trouble? – Do-you-need-advice? – Write-to-Miss-
Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you.” The trouble is, the people who write to Miss
Lonelyhearts really do need help. He is appalled and obsessed by their sufferings.
“For the first time in his life,” as he explains to his girlfriend Betty, he is forced “to
examine the values by which he lives.” And, finding nothing, he realizes that his
taking on of the agony column as a kind of joke has backfired: “he is the victim of
the joke and not its perpetrator.” The nothingness Miss Lonelyhearts finds can,
however, be described, and is. Life, Miss Lonelyhearts knows, has always been
meaningless. “Man has a tropism for order,” he reflects, “the physical world has
a tropism for disorder, entropy.” “Every order has within it the germ of destruction.GGray_c04.indd 515ray_c 04 .indd 515 8 8/1/2011 7:54:07 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 07 AM