ReReadings: Max Apple on Nathanael West

By Max Apple

Nathanael West wrote four short novels and two of them were, like so much of his life and career, extended jokes. He attended Brown University because the admissions office thought he was another applicant, a Nathanael Weinstein who was a far better student. Later, he changed his name to West, taking literally and ironically Horatio Alger’s advice to striving young American males to “go West.” He had no taste for theorizing but he believed that sentences ought to “explode,” and he said that “case studies were the modern myths.” The hero of his first novel considered all writing an attempt to “seduce fat girls,” and entered history by walking through the anus of the Trojan horse. St. Puce is a minor character, a flea who “lived beneath the armpit of Christ.”

It’s easy to see that West couldn’t resist a  bad joke, and his two great novels, Miss Lonelyhearts, and The Day of the Locust zeroed in on  what he considered the worst jokes of all:  redemption and escape. Miss Lonelyhearts is a newspaper advice columnist overwhelmed by the misery that arrives in his daily mail. “Dear miss lonely hearts, I have a sister and she has no nose...” His boss, Shrike, constantly ridicules his attempts to alleviate suffering. And there is no solace outside of work either. When miss lonely hearts seeks nature, the grass smells “like feet,” and there are “Yids” in the woods. Finally, the columnist allows himself to be seduced by the overweight wife of a murderous cripple, which leads to his own violent death. Miss Lonely Hearts is as bleak and as darkly comic as any novel of West’s era or of ours. 

His final work, The Day of the Locust, is set in Hollywood among those who have emigrated to the fantasy capital. West’s failed hero, Todd — like miss lonely hearts, a would-be dogooder — is overwhelmed by his own naiveté as well as the greed, cunning, and viciousness of almost everyone around him.

Contemporary readers had recognized and appreciated Hemingway’s new, right-to-the-point style, but there were no accolades for West’s barely known novels even though they are more stylistically packed and far more nuanced than Hemingway’s well-known innovations in brevity. And it was about 20 years after his death in 1940 that literary critics began to recognize and praise as black humor what to West had always been lifeblood.

Decades ahead of his contemporaries in style and tone, West leapfrogged the realists, the southern Gothics, the Jewish novelists, and other immigrant writers, to land squarely among the postmodern absurdists. There’s nothing particularly Jewish about his work —except, of course, its core, which is a kind of manic version of Kafka’s equally nonsectarian trapped and confused heroes.

By the time of his death at 37, West had migrated to Hollywood and taken up screenwriting where he was beginning to succeed in collaborative enterprises among those not much concerned about his literary masterpieces. His life and career were too brief for him to have fathered any schools or methods, but on his way to Hollywood, almost unnoticed, the crumbs that he scattered from his pockets have provided wild seeds of style and imagination that continue to feed American writing.