Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day Of The Locust – Nathanael West, 1933 & 1939 ★★★½

Bleak and Bleaker

Misery, it is said, loves company, but the reverse is certainly not as true.

Take the case of Nathanael West, who made human misery the centerpiece of his work. Beloved among the American intelligentsia, he is pretty much ignored by everyone else. 

Reading this, a paperback that brings together his two most famous works, I understand why. There’s dark fiction; this is coal-black.

The message of Miss Lonelyhearts boils down to that line from the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”: “No one was saved.” In The Day Of The Locust, it’s more like this: “They don’t deserve to be saved anyway, because they are all so awful!”

A New Directions paperback edition combining the two short novellas puts Miss Lonelyhearts first, probably because it is shorter and because it was published first, in 1933. But I think this edition works much better backwards, by reading The Day Of The Locust first. It’s a more involving story, more accessible, and brings the reader in more slowly and thus more effectively to the hopeless realm of human existence West made his home.

Published in 1939, The Day Of The Locust is set in Los Angeles’s bustling movie industry. Our protagonist, Tod Hackett, works as a scenic designer for a major film studio. Hackett lives a largely shiftless life hobnobbing with his more successful colleagues and visiting bordellos. Then he meets 17-year-old Faye Greener, trying to make it as a screen starlet despite the absence of any discernable acting talent. As he pursues this nymph with hopes of sexual congress, either consensual or otherwise, he submerges himself deeper into a demimonde of Hollywood lowlifes, con artists, bookies, and prostitutes. Los Angeles is an ugly town, Hackett finds, full of fakery and flim-flam, and about to get uglier:

Scattered among these masquerades were people of a different type. Their clothing was somber and badly cut, brought from mail-order houses. While the others moved rapidly, darting into stores and cocktail bars, they loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred. At this time Tod knew very little about them except that they had come to California to die.

Tod eventually befriends one of them, a sickly middle-aged fellow named Homer Simpson. Homer is from the Midwest, has big hands, a small head, and an ungainly manner. He also has a crush on Faye, which brings him into Tod’s orbit. As Faye plays with Homer’s affections, Tod’s bitterness toward both of them grows.

The Day Of The Locust is a book of freak passions and sudden violence. West, a successful Hollywood screenwriter while he wrote this, presents his characters as not only dangerous and deluded but downright dislikable.

Even West’s description of fantasy-girl Faye renders her ugly somehow:

She was a tall girl with wide, straight shoulders and long, swordlike legs. Her neck was long, too, and columnar. Her face was much fuller than the rest of her body would lead you to expect and much larger. It was a moon face, wide at the cheek bones and narrow at chin and brow.

One secondary character who brings out best this theme of ugliness in people is Faye’s father, Harry. He once worked as a pratfall artist in vaudeville and burlesque shows. Now he sells silver polish door-to-door, dubious merchandise he makes himself but claims to be “used by all the movie stars.” When he shows up at Homer’s door, he starts to have an apparent heart attack. As Homer tries to help him, Harry, in between gaspings for breath, ponders how to best take advantage of his new mark. Then he realizes he really can't stand up. Harry has been playacting so long, he doesn’t even know himself when he’s really sick or just hamming it up.

When Harry had first begun his stage career, he had probably restricted his clowning to the boards, but now he clowned continuously. It was his sole method of defense. Most people, he had discovered, won’t go out of their way to punish a clown.

Faye and Harry have a punishing relationship all the same. When they quarrel, Harry employs a sharp, piercing laugh calculated to upset Faye. For her part, Faye has registered her father’s hatred [shared by me] of a pop song, “Jeepers Creepers,” and sings it at him when she is upset. Watching the two quarrel is a perplexing experience for Tod, and produces one of The Day Of The Locust’s few genuine laughs.

I also got a chuckle out of this sequence, when Homer and Faye first meet after she comes inside Homer’s house to help her ill father:

“My father isn’t really a peddler,” she said, abruptly. “He’s an actor. I’m an actress. My mother was also an actress, a dancer. The theater is in our blood.”

“I haven’t seen many shows. I…”

He broke off because he saw that she wasn’t interested.

“I’m going to be a star someday,” she announced as though daring him to contradict her.

“I’m sure you…”

“It’s my life. It’s the only thing in the whole world that I want.”

“It’s good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel, but…”

“If I’m not, I’ll commit suicide.”

She stood up and put her hands to her hair, opened her eyes wide and frowned.

“I don’t go to shows very often,” he apologized, pushing the gingersnaps toward her. “The lights hurt my eyes.”

By and large, comedy is a distant concern in The Day Of The Locust. More central is the notion of people as machine parts. Homer, formerly a bookkeeper and unable to sustain a human relationship, fails to control his hands. When he rises from his bed, we see him get up “in sections, like a poorly made automaton.” Harry’s seizure at Homer’s house makes him suddenly whip through his whole peddler routine “like a mechanical toy that had been overwound.” In a fight over Faye during an outdoor dance, a Mexican keeps dancing even after being struck on the head with a stick, “his body unwilling or unable to acknowledge the interruption.”

The only notes of sympathy for living things found in The Day Of The Locust are for animals, such as a brave red rooster put in a ring against an experienced fighting cock so his death can amuse some of the characters. As far as the people are concerned, Homer is the closest West allows us to care for anyone, with the caveat that such sympathy is wasted no matter how sad his life may be.

“Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears,” West tells us. “When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, like Homer, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can’t help crying.”

Nathanael West near the end of his life, reportedly a happy time for him as he had married and was starting work on a novel he reportedly said was more optimistic than his other works. West and his wife were killed in a car accident returning home from a vacation on December 22, 1940. [Image from http://www.popmatters.com/column/125935-the-screwball-world-of-nathanael-west-and-eileen-mckenney-a-suspicio/]

West has been called a nihilist, but I’m not sure after reading The Day Of The Locust whether this covers it. He seems even bleaker, convinced not only of the non-existence of Heaven but the certainty of Hell as lived-in reality for all. His characters are less products of conscious thoughts than of primitive impulses that drive them headlong to hurt others and themselves.

Their names suggest the agenda at work. “Tod Hackett” conjures the idea of a spiritually-dead hack artist, as the German word for death is tod. Homer Simpson, the name people know best today for reasons other than this novel, likewise seems West-code for homely simpleton, which Homer is in spades. [By the way, the jury is still out on whether West's character prompted the naming of the iconic dopey father from “The Simpsons;” series creator Matt Groening has said both yes and no in various interviews.]

Clearly this informs The Day Of The Locust’s final chapter, where West abandons any sense of realism for an all-out rampage of sustained physical assault, rape, and murder. This is where West loses me, as he overdoes the apocalyptic denouement he has been teasing since the novel’s beginning. Why it happens the way it happens is hard to explain; we haven’t really seen anything before of what Tod calls these “mail-order” people making the sort of trouble that would hint at anything like what we get at the end.

The closest to a hint we get is a quote not from The Day Of The Locust but Miss Lonelyhearts: “Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst.”

Miss Lonelyhearts is set in New York City and features a male newspaper-advice columnist who is referred to elliptically in the third-person narration as “Miss Lonelyhearts,” the name of his column. Here we meet more of those “mail-order” people abandoned and betrayed by their dreams. With no Hollywood to lash out at, they write to the newspaper instead. The stories they tell of themselves are both ghastly and hopeless. The son of a Baptist minister, Miss Lonelyhearts sees in their struggles a refutation of his Christian faith, of nobility through pain. Everybody hurts, but no one is being ennobled by it.

“You are plunging into a world of misery and suffering, peopled by creatures who are strangers to everything but disease and policemen,” Miss Lonelyhearts is told by his newspaper editor, a mocking authority figure named Shrike. “Harried by one, they are hurried by the other…”

The dialogues between Miss Lonelyhearts and Shrike pass for what there is of a plot in this frustrating novel. Shrike mocks the pain Miss Lonelyhearts finds in the letters which flood onto his desk, as well as Miss Lonelyhearts’ notion of a loving God. Miss Lonelyhearts is going mad from his duty as the New York Post-Dispatch’s agony columnist, but Shrike is the ultimate boss from hell: He won’t fire Miss Lonelyhearts – not for failing to come in for work, nor for showing up at work drunk, not even for trying to sleep with Shrike’s wife.

Plot points include various episodes of misery and squalor, many of a sexual nature. One involves Miss Lonelyhearts and a friend beating up an aged homosexual they find loitering in a public toilet, apparently because they are drunk and it’s something to do. The scenarios become more lurid, more bizarre, and finally culminate in the sort of violence you expect from the future author of The Day Of The Locust.

Nathanael West did not get a chance to write much fiction; he died at 37 just 19 months after publishing The Day Of The Locust, his final novel. You can see in its pain-worn passages something that might provide an epitaph of despair: “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”