THE DECLINE OF WEST

On Friday the 13th of December 1940, E Scott Fitzgerald attended a dinner party at the home of Nathanael West, who was rapidly becoming his best friend in Hollywood. It was the last time the two writers ever saw each other. Eight days later, Fitzgerald leapt up from the sofa where he was reading the sports section and fell down dead of a heart attack into the fireplace. The following afternoon, West, most likely having heard of Fitzgerald’s death, was rushing home to Los Angeles after cutting short a hunting trip to Mexico. West drove through a stop sign in El Centro, California, and hit a vegetable truck. He and his wife died on the spot. West was 37.

Fitzgerald was mourned as a giant of the Lost Generation even if obituarists opined that his critical star still stood a bit artificially high. West’s death passed almost unnoticed. But starting in the late 1940s, when all his novels were brought back into print, West’s following grew steadily, and he came to be seen as an unsung satirical genius. By now, his anonymity has been more than remedied: West is so firmly fixed in critical favor that he has beaten Fitzgerald into the Library of America, the gorgeous uniform- edition series that is today’s clearest physical benchmark of what constitutes the American literary canon.

The collection has been chosen — and capped with a splendid chronology and notes by — Harvard English professor Sacvan Bercovitch. It includes all four of West’s novels, which together do not quite reach 400 pages; one film adaptation of someone else’s novel; a play that ran for two nights and has not been revived; various scraps of ad copy, letters, outlines, and grant proposals; and one poem. This doesn’t sound like much of a career, and it’s not. Sometime in the past generation, West has gone from being a fetish of the discerning into perhaps the most overrated writer in the American tradition.

West was born Nathan Weinstein in 1903 to a family of thoroughly assimilated New York Jewish immigrants — not perhaps thoroughly enough for West, who changed his name in 1926. That was the only concession he ever made to bourgeois mores as he understood them. It would be easier to credit the sincerity of West’s rebellion if his unconventionality had not so often served his own bourgeois interests. He was a rotten student, habitually truant, at DeWitt Clinton High School, where he was enrolled with Mortimer Adler and Lionel Trilling (neither of whom remembered ever seeing him in class). With no hope of graduating, he nonetheless got admitted to Tufts by stealing his transcript and altering it to give him enough credits to graduate. When West didn’t bother to attend classes at Tufts either, he was asked to withdraw at Thanksgiving of his freshman year. Undaunted, he got from a girlfriend in the admissions office the transcript of another Nathan Weinstein — this one from Dorchester, Mass. — and used it to transfer into Brown, where he passed himself off until graduation as a demobbed Navy veteran.

At Brown he acquired a reputation as a clothes-horse, a deep interest in Christian theology and French belles-lettres that would inform most of his novels, a lifelong best friend in S. J. Perelman (who would marry West’s sister Laura in 1929), and a troublesome case of gonorrhea, the first of several that would cause him intermittent agony for the rest of his life. His was not a happy love life. The Depression and his mother’s disapproval kept him from joining a first fiancee in France. A second, the fashion model Alice Shepard, ditched him when she learned he had been seduced by a young friend of hers (Lillian Hellman, Bercovitch informs us; her identity had hitherto been suppressed by biographers). Only in the last two years of his life did he find a woman he was wholly in sympathy with, Eileen McKenney, whose sister Ruth McKenney had made her the subject of an enormously popular series of New Yorker stories that were collected as My Sister Eileen.

West met McKenney in Los Angeles, where he’d moved in 1935 to work as a scenarist. In the year he died, he sold two film treatments for $ 35,000, or ” a thousand dollars a page,” as he excitedly put it. But that was the first sign of an especially productive professional life. (At summer camp, in fact, he had earned the nickname “Pep” for his inability — or unwillingness — to get out of bed.) West was dependent for his income on his father’s development business, booming for decades but largely wiped out in the New York real-estate slump that ran from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. During those poor years, West served as manager of two of his father’s failing hotel properties: the Kenmore Hall (on East 23rd st.) and the Sutton Club (on East 56th). The latter he would turn into a free doss-house for his favorite Depression-strapped writers, among them Dashiell Hammett, Erskine Caldwell, Edmund Wilson, and James T. Farrell. It was a consideration that would be amply repaid: Many of his tenants would blurb his books, including Wilson, who praised Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust as “more finished and complete as works of art than almost anything else produced by his generation.”

West is often looked at as a quinessentially American writer, the great importer of Tin Pan Alleytype gag-writing, slapstick, and deadpan into serious fiction. And yet, although he can indeed be funny in a broad way — there’s the Aw-Kum-On Garage in A Cool Million, the Indian chief Kiss-My- Towkas in The Day of the Locust — that funniness is always at war with an irrepressible pomposity and didacticism. What’s more, the structure of all of his novels comes directly from France, specifically from a fascination with Dada and French surrealism picked up on a three-month trip to Paris in 1926.

West’s first work, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), less a novel than a 40-page riff about voyaging up the anus of the Trojan Horse, is too slight to detain us, but his first serious novel, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) , has the basic West problem: trying to support a deadly serious thesis with slapstick routines and cartoon-deep stock characters. The novel tells the story of a writer of an agony-aunt column who is driven insane by the letters he gets. As the protagonist explains his predicament to his girlfriend:

“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.”

That’s a promising treatment (in the Hollywood sense), but when West tries to put meat on it, the resulting novel is disjointed and implausible. There is some beautifully desperate set-piece writing in the letters. But the character of Miss Lonelyhearts himself — ridiculously hard-boiled and heartless — is at odds with the anguish West attributes to him.

Imprisoned in the same deadpan comic tone, West simply cannot make him convincing as one who’d be upset with these sob stories. (He can’t even distinguish him from the other male characters in the book.) Nor is Miss Lonelyhearts the kind of person who’d go through the religious conversion that forms the centerpiece of the last few chapters — about the only psychologically convincing moment in the book. Miss Lonelyhearts has been torn from his youthful Christianity by the mockery of his friends, and West is always on the verge of taking this conversion very seriously. But to the extent that he does, he undermines the absurdism of the book’s final page, in which a jealous husband shoots Miss Lonelyhearts dead.

Defenders of West on modernist grounds would say that it’s unfair to look for character development in his work, that these people aren’t meant to be verisimilar in the human-interest, slice-of-life sense. Of course they’re not, but West can’t even keep them well enough under control to make them plausible bearers of his points about the meaninglessness of life.

This narrative glibness keeps West’s characters from living or reflecting in any very profound way, a problem that becomes more severe in his third novel, A Cool Million, which puts West’s politics on show. These politics were radical, although mostly of the standing-in-picket-lines, signing- petitions variety. Under the influence of his wife, he was drifting into fairly close contact with the Communist party, even contemplating a meeting with CPUSA head Earl Browder in the months before his death. Yet he was neither sophisticated nor passionate as a political animal; he was bored stiff at the one CP meeting he attended, and complained loudly when editors of Contact, a magazine with which he was involved in the 1930s, wanted to devote an issue to Communist fiction.

In A Cool Million’s plot, slavishly dependent on (more francophilia) Candide, the ingenuous Lemuel Pitkin of Vermont tries to earn the money to save his mother from foreclosure threatened by rapacious local bankers. Setting out for New York with fifteen dollars in his pocket, he is repeatedly robbed, arrested, and maimed. He has his teeth pulled by a prison doctor, his eye destroyed in a horse accident, and his leg amputated after a car crash, and even gets scalped during a misunderstanding with some Indian chiefs. The Cunegonde character, Lemuel’s childhood sweetheart Betty Prail, gets raped in every other chapter.

But this is a roman a these, and these Grand Guignol gags are badly mismatched with West’s dead-serious subtext: that the Depression portended the rise of fascism in America unless measures were taken. Lemuel falls in with a riot-inciting ex-president named Mr. Whipple, who seeks to galvanize the American middle class behind his National Revolutionary Party, a nascent fascist movement. Mr. Whipple’s paranoia about international bankers and ” Bolsheviks” is derided throughout, but West is so unable to avoid an easy joke that he peoples the book with actual banking conspirators (Lemuel is beaten bloody by one of them, called Operative 6384XM), Bolsheviks (Lemuel is kidnapped by the Third International), the fellow-traveling poet Snodgrasse (whose revolutionary desire “was really a desire for revenge . . . having lost faith in himself, he thought it his duty to undermine the nation’s faith in itself”), and actual secret agents (one of whom, wearing a “false beard,” shoots Lem dead, at which point he becomes a Horst Wessel-type martyr of American fascism).

This is not irony; it’s the price paid for a slapdash architecture too heavily dependent on its model. Leibnizian optimism is not fascism, for one thing; Candide’s experience is enough to refute Pangloss, but why should Lemuel give Mr. Whipple’s fascism a second thought? Especially since the enemies of fascism are the book’s worst villains. And West has no control over his tone: There’s a uniformity of pitch to the whole book, the same sneering wiseacre scorning, that applies to everyone. The reader leaves the novel with the feeling of a society so corrupt that no one should particularly care if fascism triumphs — clearly far from West’s intent.

The same problem besets The Day of the Locust (1939). Even in his last, best novel, West can’t reconcile the portentousness of his thesis with the shallowness of his characters. The painter Tod Hackett, West’s alter ego, has to navigate a surrealist world of whores, clowns, folk-remedy salesmen, drugstore cowboys, religious extremists, Mexican con men, and a malign dwarf who speaks in snippets out of the Three Stooges (“So you’re a wise guy, hah, a know-it-all?”). The narrative voice reminds one of the clown-cum-door-to- door-salesman introduced in the first few pages, of whom West writes, “Now he clowned continuously. It was his sole method of defense.”

All these characters congregate in a seedy apartment building. Tod falls in love with a gorgeous but talentless starlet who’ll sleep with anyone in Hollywood except him, and is doomed to fail at any career she might choose, save prostitution. None of her various amatory adventures amounts to anything. Nor does the cockfighting enterprise of her cowboy boyfriend and his Mexican sidekick. Nor does the fretting of the valetudinarian hayseed who takes her into his home. For like A Cool Million, The Day of the Locust grafts its cast of cartoon characters onto a ponderously presented sociopolitical thesis: that the mental landscape of Hollywood leads to mass violence. Next to that apocalyptic proposition, West’s characters look flimsy and frivolous.

That Hollywood is one large fantasy industry is neatly evoked, as when Tod wanders through a back lot:

From the steps of the temple, he could see in the distance a road lined with Lombardy poplars. It was the one on which he had lost the cuirassiers. He pushed his way through a tangle of briars, old fiats and iron junk, skirting the skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of Troy, a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak, part of the Fourteenth Street elevated station, a Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimac, a corner of a Mayan temple, until he finally reached the road.

This is a crazy world in which people seek crazy consolations. The Hollywood masses, with their bizarre houses in every kind of style, their isolated, automobile-based existence, their insane religious cults, loom as vaguely threatening. Tod thinks he might paint them:

He spent his nights at the different Hollywood churches, drawing the worshipers. He visited the “Church of Christ, Physical” where holiness was attained through the constant use of chestweights and spring grips; the ” Church Invisible” where fortunes were told and the dead made to find lost objects; the “Tabernacle of the Third Coming” where a woman in male clothing preached the “Crusade Against Salt”; and the “Temple Moderne” under whose glass and chromium roof “Brain-Breathing, the Secret of the Aztecs” was taught. . . . He would paint their fury with respect, appreciating [their] awful, anarchic power and aware that they had it in them to destroy civilization.

Which, eventually, they do. The novel ends with a riot at a movie premiere, in which Tod is nearly killed and one of the characters is mistaken for a child molester and trampled to death. It’s a vividly drawn scene, but it has nothing to do with the minutiae of the individuals who have clustered around Tod for 200 pages, even if they share a bit of the rioters’ rootlessness.

The riot is not a well-plotted deus ex machina, not the daring strategy of a novelist with a deep political understanding of how private fantasy leads to public violence; it’s the desperate act of a writer who’s bored with his characters and can’t think of ending the book any other way.

West’s writing is never as funny as it thinks it is, and always annoying in doses of more than a dozen pages. Little of it deserves even to be remembered, let alone collected and exalted as classic. The esteem in which it’s currently held owes to several factors: First, West’s engaging personality, which led to a generous, forgivable confusion between the quality of the man and the quality of the work. Second, his early death, which made West’s potential seem actual and allowed his fans to assume, against all evidence, that hypothetical great works had been on their way.

But finally, and disturbingly, West benefits from his very adolescent shallowness and simplicity, which makes it possible for high-school students to “get” his novels in the way they won’t get George Eliot’s. His work is pitched to a television-bred attention span. It is didactic enough for a reading public that has almost all of its engagement with “serious literature” in high school and college, when minds are most amenable to propaganda.

Novels such as West’s get taught because they are parodic picaresques that can be fitted into the schema of a Candide-to-Catch-22 satire course taught to high-school seniors. It’s not that they’re good, it’s just that they’re extremely amenable the flog-you-over-the-head-with-it pedagogy that’s been fashionable for so long now that it can safely be called the American model for teaching literature.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.