A Great Despiser

By Brad Darrach

NATHANAEL WEST: THE ART OF HIS LIFE by Jay Martin. 435 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $10.

Nathanael West habitually wore what he called "the smile of an anarchist . . . with a bomb in his pocket." He also carried the bomb. During the '30s, West flipped two high-explosive satires (Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust) at Middle America. Hardly anybody noticed. His four novels, which took 14 years to write (1924-1938), earned him exactly $1,280 in royalties. Twenty years after his shocking death he was recognized as the finest and blackest American humorist since Mark Twain went to his bitter end. Now, a young California English professor has at last accorded West his first full-length biography. Awed by his subject's brilliance and self-sealing reserve, Martin is too chary with his insights and interpretations. But he offers a thousand facts never printed before, and he places West just right as an apocalyptic passerby--one of the first in his crowded century to sense the secret life of the faceless crowd and to chronicle its pain and baffled rage.

Nathan Weinstein was West's real name. His father was a wealthy New York building contractor and the boy was spoiled rotten. He cut school several days a week and lounged around, soaking his head in delusions of athletic grandeur and working up torture projects in the style of Poe. In ninth grade he flunked everything, after the tenth he dropped out of high school. He entered Tufts College on a forged transcript, and when he was busted out a couple of months later he forged another and was admitted to Brown as a second-term sophomore.

Ortolans and Failure. For the next 2 1/2 years it was girls, flasks and sis-boom-bah. But the public image concealed an all-night reader who forged through Flaubert, Rimbaud, Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Pound, Cummings, Stein, Hemingway. In the fall of 1926, with a wad in his wallet and a life of leisure in view, he changed his name to Nathanael West and sailed off to Paris to join the Lost Generation. It was going to be ortolans all the way. But that winter the family fortune showed signs of imminent collapse. Early in 1927, West found himself working as night manager in a seedy little Manhattan hotel on 23rd Street called Kenmore Hall; later, he moved uptown as manager of the shabby-genteel Sutton Club Hotel.

In disaster, it would seem, West found his will to write. In the hotels, he found his subject. He saw them as zoos of failure, terminal wards filled with "dismantled innocents" who had lost the battle for survival in a machine civilization. With the skinned eyes of poverty, he saw that he too might someday lose the battle and wind up on the other side of the desk. Horrified, fascinated, wrung with love, he watched his tenants like a man watching himself die in a mirror. He chatted with them endlessly: he steamed open their letters and read their secrets; and through long, lonely nights in hotel offices, he braided their stories into books.

Mussolini of the Soul. West's first novel, a fiercely funny series of skits and snits called The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), states his intricate satiric credo: "I must laugh at myself, and if the laugh is 'bitter,' I must laugh at the laugh. I always find it necessary to burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source." West's second book, a tiny, blasphemous masterpiece called Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), is an almost insanely intense travesty of Christ's ministry and passion that describes the Calvary of a male reporter who writes the agony column in a metropolitan daily. Pierced to the heart by the letters he receives ("I am 16 years old . . . but no boy will take me out because I was born without a nose"), he finds himself earnestly telling his readers to come unto him and he will give them rest.

The more he acts like Christ, the more cruelly he is razzed by his diabolical editor ("Leper licker," Shrike calls him. "Still more swollen Mussolini of the soul"). Thinking to help, Miss Lonelyhearts arranges to meet one of his correspondents, a woman with a crippled husband. She rapes him. In the last scene, "his identification with God complete," Miss Lonelyhearts tries to envelop in cosmic pity the crippled husband--who seems to stand for long-suffering humanity. Terrified, the cripple shoots him dead.

Nothing else in American fiction radiates the compacted fury of this little parable. Some critics were stunned and said so--Miss Lonelyhearts seemed certain of a big sale. But just before copies could be shipped to the bookstores, West's publisher went bankrupt. West fled to Hollywood, where with occasional interruptions he spent the rest of his life composing movie scripts he considered "unadulterated bubameiser."

Eros and Violence. During the first of these interruptions, West wrote a capitalist Candide called A Cool Million (1934). Political in intent, the book puts a cute left spin on the old Horatio Alger story and burlesques the American Dream as a horribly funny fascist nightmare. West was never a Communist but in 1935 his radical sympathies were strengthened by the experience of being down and out on the seamy side of Hollywood. Supported by S.J. Perelman, who had married his sister, West lived in the Pa-Va-Sed, a scabby little apartment hotel in the lower depths of movieland. The experience hurt his pride and damaged his health, but it gave him the boiling background for the best novel ever written about Hollywood.

Like West's other books, The Day of the Locust (1939) is essentially a loose society of sketches that enlarge a theme. The World's Illusion is objectified as Hollywood, and Hollywood is personified in Faye Greener, a bitch every man in the book is after. There are no full-fleshed characters, but the book is scaled like a snake with glittering little momentary selves: studio Eskimos, horseparlor dwarfs, rentable Texans and a legion of sad-eyed nobodies who have "come to California to die." Eros is their ethos, violence their pastime. They drift toward a climax in which a holy idiot stomps a depraved child actor and in turn is torn to pieces by a giggling mob.

"To Hurt the Pain." The Day of the Locust sold only 1,464 copies, but in 1940 West made up to $600 a week as a scriptwriter; that same year he married Eileen McKenney, the real-life model for the heroine of My Sister Eileen. Now at last he could buy time to write a big novel. But West's time was used up. In December 1940, he ran a stop sign and smashed into another car, killing his wife and himself. He was 37.

The one great weakness of this biography is Jay Martin's failure to find the obscure hurt that made Nathanael West scream literature. In such a man hurt lies deeper than anger, and West knew it. In Miss Lonelyhearts he hinted that he wrote "for the same reason that an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain." What crushed his heart, he acknowledged, was the difference between what life is and what it ought to be. I am, he said, "one of those 'great despisers' whom Nietzsche loved because 'they are the great adorers; they are arrows of longing for the other shore.' "

. Brad Darrach

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