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Miss Lonelyhearts: And the Day of the Locust

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Largely unknown during his brief lifetime, Nathanael West is now regarded as one of the finest authors of the 1930s--a writer whose slashing satires of American decay are so dead-on accurate that they are often painful to read. This is particularly true of his two best works, MISS LONELYHEARTS and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST. Both novels are short and intense, and both present horrific visions of American society choking to death on its own mass-media fantasies.

Probably West's most powerful work, MISS LONELYHEARTS concerns a nameless man assigned to produce a newspaper advice column--but as time passes he begins to break under the endless misery of those who write to him for advice. Unable to find answers, and with his shaky Christianity ridiculed into destruction by his poisonous editor, he tumbles into a madness fueled by his own spiritual emptiness. First published in 1933, MISS LONELYHEARTS remains one of the most shocking works of 20th Century American literature, as unnerving as a glob of black bile vomited up at a church social, empty, blasphemous, and horrific.

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST is the best known of West's works, and presents the story of a Hollywood art designer as he drifts through the California dream factory--a place in which reality exists only as something to subvert into a saleable commodity: an addictive series of dreams that won't come true for the increasing numbers of malcontents that crowd Los Angeles in search of the fantasies seen on the movie screen. And their seething disillusionment proves more deadly than even Hollywood could ever imagine. First published in 1939, THE DAY OF THE LOCUST is still considered the single most scathing novel ever written about Hollywood.

Like much of West's work, these two novels are written in a comic style that the author deliberately and quickly sours: laughter quickly gives way to despair, despair to surreal horror, and all of it condensed into tightly written, noir-ish, and double-gritty prose that has the impact of a wrecking ball. West is not a writer for every one, not by a long shot, but his power is undeniable, and these two works are his best, essentials in American literature. But brace yourself: they offer one-way tickets going straight down all the way.

Just before his tragically young death, Nathanael West wrote a friend that he was confident his best work was in front of him. The genius and brilliance of these two remarkable short novels make that prospect seem unspeakably tragic. As it is, these two works have been sufficient to cement Wests reputation as one of Americas great literary talents of the 1930s. MISS LONELYHEARTS is perhaps the more highly acclaimed of the two, though many find THE DAY OF THE LOCUST perhaps even more entertaining. Either way, this volume contains two of the most remarkable short novels in American literary history.

Nathanael West was an exceptionally dense writer, in that his pages contain no wasted words, no needless characters, and no pointless characters. Every sentence, every word, every comma plays an essential role in his work. Both works are distilled to their most concentrated form. As a result, although they are highly readable and brief, they contain far more content than even much longer books.

Both of the books are littered with moments of devastating power. In MISS LONELYHEARTS, these are more intimate, deeply personal, miniature scenes. The same is true of THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, though it ends with one of the greatest crowd scenes this side of Tolstoys WAR AND PEACE. The riot scene ending the novel is so vivid, so clearly presented, so terrifying that one might legitimately argue that it is the greatest crowd scene in literature. On the other extreme, the opening letters at the beginning of MISS LONELYHEARTS are as heartbreaking as anything in literature. They are worthy of comparison with the most horrific examples of suffering that Ivan in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (a book that Miss Lonelyhearts reads and West loved) comes up with when talking with his brother Alyosha.

These are not happy books. West was one of the foremost spokesmen for pessimism of the early 20th century. At the time of his death, however, he was working on a novel that, he claimed, was far less negative and dealt with the Milk of Human Kindness. But in these two, the misery of individual lives and the ultimate meaningless of the lives of all the characters can depress some readers. There are no admirable characters, no one that we can pull for sympathetically. There are, however, some astonishingly vivid charactersMiss Lonelyhearts, his editor Shrike, Tod Hackett, Faye Greener, or Homer Simpson (Matt Groening has indicated awareness of that character). But if one can handle the unrelieved tragedy and the hopelessness that pervade Wests pages, one will find these to be two gloriously original and unique masterpieces.

Nathanael West had a brief, barely noticed career before his sudden death in 1940. These two novellas, MISS LONELYHEARTS and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, stand as his best-known contributions to literature, classics that are now widely taught in American high schools and universities. MISS LONELYHEARTS is the more bitter of the two: a newspaper columnist (a man, but always referred to as Miss Lonelyhearts) suffers a crisis of conscience and spirit under the emotional weight of the mail he receives. His colleagues make fun of the correspondents, who are mostly women, but Miss Lonelyhearts sees the pathetic futility in their seeking help to escape their bleak lives. His editor, Shrike, tries to energize Miss Lonelyhearts with long-winded diatribes satirizing religious beliefs, but their shrillness pushes Miss Lonelyhearts toward the edge. Using Christian imagery as well as irony, West evokes a world of alienation, futility, and human failings.

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST comes across as more satiric than shrill, perhaps because there is no Shrike here, although West's trademark themes of alienation and futility are fully evident. Tod Hackett is new to Hollywood; he is lazy but ambitious, a painter who hopes to earn a living as a set designer. Tod finds himself drawn to the outsiders of Hollywood, the lower classes, those for whom success is always out of reach. The characters are almost surreal in their quirkiness. Aspiring actress Faye Greener lives in the same building as Tod; by introducing Tod to the vapid decadence of Hollywood, she awakens Tod's violent impulses. Iowan Homer Simpson is a listless, repressed man who has come to California not for show business but for health reasons and to forget what little sexuality he has. West is not a writer to grant the wishes of his characters, but, like Harry Greener, many of the characters "seemed to enjoy their suffering [. . .] the sort that was self-inflicted."

West's philosophy in these two novellas seems to fit into a single line in THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, "Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous." These works display a dark, almost desperate humor that exposes the human condition as West saw it. If you don't think you can take an abundance of hopelessness, you should select another book to read. Still, these are important works, especially for those interested in modern American literature.

This conveniently thrifty Nathanael West collection sat on my bookshelf for a few weeks, and I kept taking peeks at it. It just kept looking at me. I gave in to this seduction eventually and read Miss Lonelyhearts (this was a few weeks ago, and I still haven't read Day of the Locust). Most New Directions paperbacks are pretty ugly (sue me, I'm a jacket admirer), and this one is too, but in a very compelling way. But the novel is a million times more so. I'd read a bit about it before, and knew that both Flannery O'Connor and F. Scott Fitzgerald were admirers of West's, and the premise sounded like my kind of book, so I couldn't help working myself into a fit about it. This was a rare instance for me -- generally when I'm excited about reading a book beforehand, it's a let down, usually not because it's a poor book, but because my expectations were too high. But nope, not with Miss Lonelyhearts. Yes, okay, so it's a black comedy, yes it's an "absurdist" work of art, but not in a juvenile or self-conscious way (ahem, ahem, Salvador Dali). It works better than others because it doesn't occur to you that it's dead serious until you're thinking about it later in the middle of the night fighting insomnia. While reading, you're too busy snortin' and guffawin' to give a good god damn about its "relevance" or its "theme". But it is a novel to be taken seriously, even if it is laugh-out-loud hilarious and if it's as accessible as a glass of milk. I'm tempted to give away some of the more dreadful or ridiculous parts, but I won't, just anticipate reading some over the top Dear Abby letters and a brilliant and horrifying book wrapped around them.

Gin-soaked Christ for the Lovelorn:

The 'Miss Lonelyhearts' of Nathanael West's 1933 novella is a male reporter for the New York Post-Dispatch, whose cynical, boozy, manic editor Shrike has assigned him the task of responding with advice to myriads of heartsick/soulsick letter-writers. Bozzy and bipolar himself, Miss L - no other name is given him - at first takes his role as a huge joke, until the heartsickness he discovers begins to resonate with his own religious despair. In the first sentence, we readers find him at his desk, painfully unable to produce the necessary hypocritical pap to meet his copy deadline. West writes:

""When Miss Lonelyhearts quit work, he found that the weather had turned warm and that the air smelt as if it had been artificially heated. He decided to walk to Delehanty's speakeasy for a drink. In order to get there, it was necessary to cross a little park.
He entered the park park at the North Gate and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained its arch. he walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear.
As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.
What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and all the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet.""

That, I submit, is awfully fine writing, imaginatively equal to the best of Nabokov, and fine writing is the fundamental reason for reading fiction, isn't it? But it's also awfully focused, concentrated writing. The spear metaphor, for instance, hints ever so subtly of the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the Cross, especially since Christ had already been alluded to, semi-jocularly, a page earlier. Slowly and slyly, West lets us sense that this short tale of world-weary absurdity is a Passion play, and that the foolish pleas and plaints of the maimed, grotesque, hapless correspondents are the sum of human woe. And for the Cynic, to empathize even scornfully with the woes of humanity is fatal.

Readers familiar with the stories and novellas of Flannery O'Connor will surely notice an affinity, possibly even a transmission of influence from West in the 1930s to O'Connor in the late 1940s and 1950s. West's characters, however, are both less grotesque and more intriguing - being more accessible to sympathy - than O'Connor's. Likewise, West's Christ-hunger is less inhumane, less anti-humanist, than O'Connor's hate-soaked hopelessness. One could imagine a benign God feeling pity for West's sad sinners.

I read this book in college, decades ago, and immediately recommended it to my high-school-aged sister, who wrote a 'book report' on it. Neither of us remember what she wrote, or what we thought then that the book was about, but my sister's English teacher - a former local beauty queen - gave the paper an F. "You were supposed to read a classic," she jeered, "not something you picked up from the rack at the bus station!"

I've got news for her; this is a classic. I'm profoundly glad that I picked it up again.

****

Apocalypse with Palm Trees:

Too bad Nathanael West didn't live long enough to work with the Coen Brothers! Instead he wrote screenplays for B-grade films in a Hollywood that considered language an obstacle to art. Luckily he also found scraps of time to write five novellas and a couple of stories, and two of those novellas - Day of the Locust & Miss Lonelyhearts - are in a class by themselves, the most original and incisive American fiction of the 1930s.

Day of the Locust is a wild and willful satire of Hollywood and the film industry, a Coen Brothers film in very well-crafted prose, killingly funny and at the same time fearfully sad. The focus character is an artist who has come to Hollywood to escape the art-school banality of painting red barns and lily-pads. Now he's working on a single apocalyptic painting -- "Hollywood in Flames" -- depicting the desperate anomie of "those who have come to California to die." In the foreground of his painting will be all the bizarre hapless cast of people in his own grungy screenplay life. The painting is the novella, and the novella is the painting, a point that many readers seem to have missed. It's a quick read, friends, and a tightly assembled script, and I don't really want to mute the excitement of reading it by blabbing too much of the action.

As a depiction of Southern California as it was in the 1930s, it's worth a thousand books of sociology, rich with sketches of "...the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers - all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence... marching behind his banner in a great unified front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land." Not even Raymond Chandler ever captured the tawdry menace and lurid intoxication of Los Angeles as well as West. Hollywood was truly the Potemkin Village of desires, where everyone was his own leading lady and the next person's 'extra'.

And it's bigger and better-dressed today - Los Angeles, I mean - with the Getty Museum and the Disney Center for the Arts, but anyone who has lived or worked there will know that 'The Day of the Locust' is still a true picture of its permanent impermanence and ever-impending transience.

****

The two novellas are not as similar as their verbal style makes them seem. The lust for Christian securities that West exposed in himself in Miss Lonelyhearts is not sustained in Day of the Locust. The latter novel resolves West's religious quest in total apocalyptic nihilism. The poignant pitiful individuals whose letters tormented Miss L have become the insensate raging mob of 'modern' life.

Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. Highly recommended.

Miss Lonelyhearts, set on the East Coast in New York City, and The Day of the Locust, set on the West Coast in Hollywood, are the two grim but brilliant gems of Nathanael West's too-brief writing career.

In Miss Lonelyhearts, the title character-who has no other name to either the reader or the book's characters-is an advice columnist subsumed by the countless letters of despair he reads every day. His editor is named Shrike, appropriately, for the species of bird that impale their victims on thorns. While he seeks escape from "Desperate, Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband": in the idealism of Religion, Art, Sex, and Nature, Shrike is always there to puncture his every attempt.

Miss Lonelyhearts' trouble precedes his career, however. During his college years, he tries to participate in a ritual sacrifice of a symbolic lamb (Religion) that is transformed into a cruel butchery and finally into a mercy killing. Later, Miss Lonelyhearts returns again and again to the image and idea of Christ, "the answer," whose figure he has removed from its cross and nailed to the wall at the foot of his bed (taking over the sacrifice from Romans and history and making it his own).

For sex, he tries (unsuccessfully) to subdue the "virginity" of Shrike's wife (named Mary); takes on the offering of "an admirer," Fay Doyle, "unhappily married [sacrificed] to a cripple"; and finally sacrifices the real virginity of Betty, whose order and sureness were "based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily." Until she encounters him, she is not a candidate for a Miss Lonelyhearts column, but he and his "sickness" make her likely to become one. Throughout, Shrike is there to tell him, "Soul of Miss L., glorify me. Body of Miss L., save me . . ." In the end, Miss Lonelyhearts finds humility and calls on Christ, not in his illness, "but in the shape of his joy." When he is happy "and the rock had been thoroughly tested and been found perfect," when he gives up his humanity for Christ-like beatitude and detachment, he sacrifices himself.

In The Day of the Locust, set designer Tod Hackett has entered the world of Hollywood, where nothing is real, where even everyday clothes consist of personality-altering costumes ("the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office"). Here, the slopes of the canyon are lined with "Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles." Two types of people populate this set: the "masquerades" and those who "had come to California to die," whose "eyes filled with hatred."

Tod himself leads an unreal life as an unwanted extra in the love life of Faye [fairy-unreal] Greener, daughter of Harry Greener, who manages to make his own death seem no more than an act-and not always a good one.

After Harry's death, Tod and Faye's lives connect through two men who can be considered "masquerades": Earl the cowboy with his two-dimensional face and Miguel the Mexican, as well as Homer Simpson, a man who thinks he has come to California to recover his health and who doesn't realise he has come here to die.

Faye teases Earl, lusts after Miguel, and holds Tod at bay while living with Homer in a nonsexual business arrangement designed to keep her clothed, fed, and living well until she gets her big acting break, which, like all else in Hollywood, is an act and an illusion).

As Homer falls for Faye, she resents both his simplicity and his sincerity. Only when Homer finds her with Miguel (after mistaking her moaning for sickness) does he realise the truth of what Tod has told him: "She's a whore!" Like the Hollywood she wants to be part of, she is empty and bored-an illusion that cannot last. Even when Earl fights Miguel over her, the conflict is less real than that between two of Miguel's cocks, during which the weaker bird dies a harrowing, bloody, and genuine death that evokes compassion and sympathy than Harry's final act.

Throughout, Tod sees the masses finally turning to apocalyptic violence, which he portrays in his painting-in-progress, "The Burning of Los Angeles." Faye, naked and smiling, chased by the mob, is a bird released and in flight.

The violence comes, however, when a nearly catatonic Homer attempts to leave this never-never land and to return to Wayneville, Iowa, on a night when the crowd has gathered for a movie premiere. Finding himself under attack by a bored neighbor child, he finally strikes back in a murderous rage, giving the crowd the impetus it seeks.

It is not "The Burning of Los Angeles," but rather a fusion of Art, Sex, Religion, and Violence. Here, West returns to Miss Lonelyhearts and the attempted ideals of Art, Sex, and Religion ending in violence; he says of the womb: "Better by far than Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands"-an exact parallel to the idealist scenarios Shrike creates for Miss Lonelyhearts, only to puncture them with the fury of his cold, emotional violence.

Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust are short, beautifully crafted masterpieces in which nothing is wasted. West captures Hollywood perfectly, where, in 1939, there were already New Age cults like that of the "raw-foodists": "We eat only raw [vegetables]. Death comes from eating dead things." In today's world, where millions turn to the Dear Abby columns and to Oprah, and where the cult of the celebrity is built on movies featuring easy sex and special-effects violence, Nathanael West might feel right at home-in time and place.

Diane L. Schirf, 5 October 2003.

Nerds or Nazis -- the mob rules. They all want blood -- and they're looking for ANY excuse to draw it. That's the point Nathaniel West drives home: for better or worse, the deep ugliness in man, the heart of darkness.

In the book, the author writes how people in Hollywood would just hang out at the airport just hoping for a plane crash, praying for it, praying for any disaster that would color to their meaningless lives. The book ends with a mob scene at a film premiere where the protagonist is torn to shreds.

Are we supposed to sympathize with Homer? Pity him, despise him? Nathaniel West seems to point out that no one is deserving of pity. Boy, that's hard! The author really understood the darkness in people, though.

This is one tough book, which should not be read by anyone under 18. This reader is 40, and only now am I starting to glimpse at the point Nathaniel West was trying to make. This book is a true classic. Disturbing and unforgetable as all great books should be.

Also recommended: The Losers' Club by Richard Perez

Perhaps one of the greatest novels ever written, Miss Lonleyhearts hurts the mind and soul with its uncompromising intensity and overwhelming authenticity. West's reflections on life and human relationships are simultaniously philosophical and absurd, and in the end leave the reader shell-shocked. It would be difficult to summarize in any way this novel's message or describe its impact on modern fiction.

A car accident took the life of Nathanael West when he was 37 years old, cutting off the career of a most original, talented writer, who might have been one of our venerated 20th century literary heroes if he had lived. These two short novels are perhaps the best of his tragically brief opus. They have to be reviewed separately, even if this book combines both of them.

"God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son !" I'm not puttin' you on, though, MISS LONELYHEARTS has got to be one of the best American novels ever written and it's only 58 pages long. The language is so electric that it reminds you of the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. The style is so simple that it recalls Richard Brautigan. And the theme is so universal that you'll recall William Faulkner, another Nobelist. This all in the space of a few pages. If West had lived in the 80s or 90s, he would have been an instant wonder of literature. Or maybe he still would have sunk like a stone in the sea of junk. Never mind punditry. If you ever liked amazing tales of dreams, fights, sex, bold symbolic imagery, confusion, and despair, this novel is for you ! Miss Lonelyhearts is an alcoholic man who writes the "lonely hearts" column in a New York newspaper. He wishes to alleviate the pain in the mass of people "out there", but he cannot stop from causing pain to all those around him, nor most of all, to himself. Do not fail to read this book !

"Dream Factory Produces Mostly Nightmares" Every dog must have his day, but that day would be positively industrious compared to those that fill the lives of dronish hangers-on in Hollywood that populate THE DAY OF THE LOCUST. Tilt 1930s America on its side and every loose cannon bounces its way down to Los Angeles in search of X. Most books on Hollywood or the film industry concentrate on glamor, power, and money, not to mention sex and perversions thereof. West's short novel takes a look at all those who didn't realize their dreams, who didn't even know what exactly their dreams were, or who were too stupid, naive, or drunk to do anything about them. Then there are all those who lived off the dreamers, the people for whom a quick buck or a quick encounter were everything. The book ends in total nightmare; no end to the scream. Life without substance is not much of a life. West never stoops so low as to lecture us about "family values". Another powerful novel in a small-size package. Dynamite.

Nathanael West died young and left little behind, but what he left is enough to place him among the ranks of great writers. These two classic short novels hit their marks like bullets. They take as their subjects two places where the better aspects of humanity are seldom on display: a tabloid newspaper ("Miss Lonelyhearts") and Hollywood ("The Day of the Locust").

West writes like an entomologist. He treats his (human) characters as if they were insects. His descriptions are cold and dispassionate, and register the mechanical, instinctual side of human beings with perfect precision. There's no hope in his world, but he doesn't rub your face in the hopelessness; rather, the quietly merciless style of his writing calls your attention to it. What he shows is repulsive and ridiculous, but it's so well rendered that you can't turn away from it. "Locust" in particular is full of scenes I come back to again and again, just to see how he does it.

In short, this is great writing. It's pitiless, precise, and utterly above the subject matter with which it engages.