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Nathanael West (1903-1940) - original name Nathan Weinstein (until 1926) |
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American writer who died in a car crash at thirty-seven. Nathanael West published four novels. It was in France, posthumously after World War II, that he first attracted attention. In his works West examined the reverse side of liberty and freedom – dreams turned into nightmare, or what he called "the secret inner life of masses". At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men. (from Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West, with an introduction by Robert M. Coates, New Directions, 1946, p. 35) Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York, N.Y., the son
of immigrant German Jews from Lithuania. West himself did not wish to
be Jewish in any way at all. His mother was Anna (Wallenstein)
Weinstein, and father, Max Weinstein, a construction contractor. As a
young man West showed little ambition. Forging a false transcript, he
entered Brown University, Providence, where he befriended the writer
and humorist S.J. Perelman, who married West's sister. During these years West began to draw cartoons and write short surrealistic sketches, which he later collected as the novel The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931). West did not take his studies seriously. He borrowed his cousin's work and presented it as his own and failed a crucial course in modern drama. West graduated in 1924 with a Ph.B. degree. At the age of twenty-three he changed his name legally to Nathanael West, later referring to Horace Greely who said, "Go West young man." He lived a couple of years in Paris, and wrote there Balso Snell. The fantasy, some fifty pages, was set in the innards of the Trojan horse. After discovering the Saint-Denis red-light district, West spent much time in brothels, and boasted once that he could have compiled a glossary of the slang used by French prostitutes. The really hot prostitutes, he said, were Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, and Filipino. Back in the United States, West managed small hotels, Kenmore Hall from 1927 to 1930 and the Sutton Club Hotel from 1930 to 1933. In these jobs West was able to assist other writers offering them free housing. Among his visitors were Dashiell Hammett, James T. Farrell, and Erskine Caldwell. "We all lived there half-free, sometimes all-free," recalled Lillian Hellman. "Dash wrote The Thin Man at the Sutton Hotel. Pep West's uncle or cousin owned it, I think. . . . Dash had the Royal Suite—three very small rooms. And we had to eat there most of the time because we didn't have enough money to eat any place else. It was awful food, almost spoiled. I think Pep brought it extra cheap. But it was the depression and I couldn't get a job. I remember reading the manuscript of Balso Snell in the hotel. And I think he was also writing Lonelyhearts at that time." (Conversations with Lillian Hellman, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, University Press of Mississippi, 1986, p. 63) While working at Kenmore Hall, a redbrick residence hotel, West used to eat at Siegel's, a deli under the Sixth Avenue tracks with his friends Quentin Reynolds and Sidney Perelman. At that time Reynolds was employed by the Brooklyn Daily Times, where he covered the sports but also for a period took care of an advice column, 'Susan Chester Heart-to-Heart Letters.' The letter writers intrigued West. He began to write a story about a columnist named Thomas. Later in Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) he plagiarized real letters submitted to an advice columnist. In A Cool Million (1934) he plagiarized passages from Horatio Alger's prose. Hotel life provided West with numerous anecdotes which he used
in his works. In the early 1930s he worked as a journalist and was
involved with a couple of literary magazines. These experiences gave
him material for his masterful second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933),
an allegory of America as it struggled through the Depression. The
tragic farce was published when West was just thirty. It depicts a male
newspaper columnist, whose correspondence pen name is Miss
Lonelyhearts. He writes his agony column in the New York Post-Dispatch
daily newspaper. Shrike, the editor, is a kind of Satan and torments
Miss Lonelyhearts, who has developed a Christ complex. Shrike says to
him: "Miss Lonelyhearts, my friend, I advise you to give your readers
stones. When they ask for bread don't give them crackers as does the
Church, and don't, like the State, tell them to eat cce. Explain that
man cannot live by bread alone and give them
stones." (Ibid., p. 10) Miss Lonelyhearts is a therapist, priest and messiah to those
alienated and in pain, such as a sixteen-year-old girl who was born
without a nose: "I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big
hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I can't
blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but
she cries terrible when she looks at me." Eventually Miss Lonelyhearts
becomes involved with one of his correspondents, but he realises that
he is himself unable to live by the help he offers others in this world
of decay and emptiness. In the final section the crippled Peter Doyle,
married to the ungratified Fay, arrives with a gun. "He pulled his hand out. The gun inside the
package exploded and Miss Lonelyhearts fell, dragging the cripple with
him. They both rolled part of the way down the stairs." (Ibid., p. 142) In the movie
version of the book from 1958, directed by Vincent J. Donahue,
Montgomery Clift played Miss Lonelyhearts, renamed Adam White. The
screenplay was written by Dore Schary, who turns the protagonist into a
decent boy-next door, who doesn't get killed by the cripple. The
director Vincent Donahue explained: "Dore didn't believe the Christ
figure needed to be crucified." (Montgomery Clift: A Biography by Patricia Bosworth, 1979, p. 331) Despite critical success the book sold poorly. West continued with a similar theme of good aims gone wrong in his next novel, A Cool Million, an attack on the optimistic rags-to riches ideal. His hero is robbed, his life is full of trials, he loses parts of his body, and eventually he is shot. The story reflected West's childhood memories, when his father gave him several popular Horatio Alger novels to read – hoping that he would enter the family business. West moved for the first time to Hollywood in 1933, to work on a film version of Miss Lonelyhearts. From 1935 he lived in a cheap hotel called the Pa-Va-Sed,
on North Ivar Street, near Hollywood Boulevard. A director at Republic
told him to think of the audience, to produce new ideas in his scripts:
"It isn't funny enough to make them piss in their seats – it isn't
sad enough to make them snuffle." (Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney by Marion Meade, 2011, p. 236) In the years before he found
employment, West spent time among the outcasts of Los Angeles. He
remained in Hollywood for the rest of his life, working as a
scriptwriter for smaller studios like Monogram. With Jerry Cody and Dalton Trumbo, West wrote Five Came Back (1939), directed by John Farrow and starring Chester Morris, Lucille Ball, C. Aubrey Smith. The story, originally by Richard Carroll, concerned a planeload of twelve passengers forced down in head-hunter infested Amazon jungle. In this threatening situation the varied characters of the passengers come to the surface. When the plane is repaired, it is found that it can carry back only five survivors, and head-hunters are coming closer. The script was assigned from Jerry Cady, former radio writer, to Dalton Trumbo. He kept most of West's work but made the character of Vasquez, an anarchist, show courage at the end (against the conventions of Hollywood). "The bromide that too many cooks spoil the broth did not prove true this time.Characteriations were finely drawn and the situations suspensefully constructed." (B Movies by Don Miller, Ballantine Books, 1988, p. 128) Five Came Back established John Farrow as a director. The film was a critical success and achieved gradually a cult status. Later the story was remade as Back to Eternity (1956) and became a starting point for many variations, among them The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), directed by Robert Aldrich and based on Elleston Trevor's novel. During his years in Hollywood West wrote The Day of the Locust (1939), a study of the fragility of illusion. Many critics consider it with F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished masterpiece The Last Tycoon (1941) among the best novels written about Hollywood. The narrator, Tod Hackett, comes to California in the hope of a career as a scenic artist but soon joins the disenchanted second-rate actors, technicians, laborers and other characters living on the fringes of the movie industry. Tod tries to seduce Faye Greener; she is seventeen. Her protector is an old man named Homer Simpson. Tod finds work on a film called prophetically 'The Burning of Los Angeles', and the dark comic tale ends in an apocalyptic mob riot outside a Hollywood première, as the system runs out of control. Paradoxically West himself, for the first time, had in Hollywood high hopes for the future and a stable financial situation. By a bizarre coincidence, Fitzgerald and West died on the same weekend in December 1940. West was killed in an automobile accident on December 22, near El Centro, California, with his wife Eileen McKenney. There was also a liver-colored pointer in the Woody station wagon; the dog survived. West was recently married, with better-paid script work coming in, and returning from a hunting trip in Mexico. A notoriously bad driver, he collided with the Dowless' white Pontiac after ignoring a stop sign. Mrs. Dowless suffered a broken leg and a shattered pelvis, Mr. Dowless severed an artery, but their daughter was unharmed. (Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West by Joe Woodward, 2011, pp. 9-10) Eileen McKenney become the subject of a book, My Sister Eileen (1938), written by Ruth McKenney, her sister. For further reading: Nathanael West by S.E. Hyman (1962); The Fiction of Nathanael West by R. Reid (1967); Nathanael West by J. Martin (1970); Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays by J.F. Light (1971, rev. ed.); Nathanael West's Novels by I Malin (1972); Nathanael West, edited by D. Madden (1973); Nathanael West by K. Widmer (1982); Nathanael West by R.E. Long (1985); Nathanael West, edited by H. Bloom (1986); Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, edited by H. Bloom (1987); The Writings of Nathanael West by A. Wisker (1990); Critical Essays on Nathanael West, edited by Ben Siegel (1994); The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance by Rita Barnard (1995); American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s by Jonathan Veitch (1997); Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, edited by Harold Bloom (2005); 'The American Vicarious: An Introduction to Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust' by Jonathan Lethem, in Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (2009); Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel up to the Second World War by David Seed (2009); Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West by Joe Woodward (2011); Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject by Adam Meehan (2020); Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers by Nancy Bombaci (second edition, 2024) - American writers in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s: James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Daniel Fuchs, Horace McCoy, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Dorothy Parker, John Don Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Selected bibliography:
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