Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust, and Other Brilliant Nathanael West Moments
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Posted by Meg Nola Nov 13, 2008 |
American author Nathanael West (1903-1940) not only died before his time, but he also wrote before his time and never quite received the literary attention that he deserved. He was born Nathan Weinstein in New York and more or less bluffed his way into Brown University, then after graduation unfortunately found his writer’s dreams grounded by financial troubles. West worked the nightshift at a Manhattan hotel and used quiet hours on the job to produce his 1931 novel The Dream Life of Balso Snell. West then started Miss Lonelyhearts, another short novel about the downward spiral of a reporter assigned to the task of answering his newspaper's advice letters.
West first made his way to Hollywood by selling the movie rights to Miss Lonelyhearts, and through his screenwriting and experiences there came up with the material for his last published novel, The Day of the Locust. The Day of the Locust involves the strange odyssey of Tod Hackett, a young artist hired by a Hollywood studio to design sets and costumes. Tod hopes to paint a great masterwork called “The Burning of Los Angeles,” while he otherwise encounters the surreal visual and moral landscape of 1930s Tinseltown and its surrounding areas. The Day of the Locust is brilliantly twisted like Miss Lonelyhearts, but Miss Lonelyhearts has a more gray urban mood and not as many colorfully warped characters (they‘re definitely warped, but not as vividly so) as The Day of the Locust. West described the reception of The Day of the Locust in a 1939 letter to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald as “Good reviews -- fifteen per cent, bad reviews -- twenty-five per cent, brutal personal attacks -- sixty per cent. Sales: practically none.” Fitzgerald was also in a less than celebrated place at that point in his life and could surely understand.
News of Fitzgerald’s death of a heart attack in December 1940 was reportedly troubling Nathanael West as West was driving back to California from a weekend in Mexico. West sped through a stop sign and crashed into another vehicle, killing himself and his wife Eileen. If West were alive and writing today, his dark, quirky Coen Brothers-like style would surely find a more commercially successful place in fiction or scripting movies and cable TV. Click here for a short biography of Nathanael West, to find out more about the film adaptations of his novels, and to connect Homer Simpson of the epic cartoon family with a character of the same name in The Day of the Locust. West’s collected works were published by The Library of America in 1997, and reading through the volume is a good way to acquaint or reacquaint one’s self with his writing, along with excerpts of letters and a brief biographical chronology.
"Except for his hands, which belonged on a piece of monumental sculpture, and his small head, [Homer] was well proportioned. His muscles were large and round and he had a full, heavy chest. Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he looked neither strong nor fertile. He was like one of Picasso's great sterile athletes, who brood hopelessly on pink sand, staring at veined marble waves." (The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West)