Lectures

Lecture 7

Nathanael West

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City on October 17, 1903. His family were Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father was a well-to-do builder; the family spent their summers in the country and wanted Nathan to be well-educated and then follow his father into the construction business. Nathan had other ideas. He read constantly as a boy, and although he could lay a brick, he was not interested in construction. He was not interested in school, either, reading in class rather than doing the work and generally resisting any attempt to help him raise his grades. He left high school before his last year. He didn't really want to go to college, but he wanted to have the college experience. So he forged a transcript for himself and applied to Tufts University. He was admitted, and later transferred to Brown University.

As he had expected, few of the classes in college interested West. He had a good time there, but felt that most of his real education came from his voracious reading. He read Eliot, Stevens, Hemingway, Pound--all the contemporary luminaries.

Being Jewish, he was not allowed into any of the fraternities, and this bothered him a lot: he said that he didn't want so much to belong as to be asked to belong. In 1924, he graduated from Brown with a Ph.B. and legally changed his name to Nathanael West; this may have been partly to avoid anti-Semitic prejudice, but it was mainly a symbolic way of establishing a new sense of identity.

In 1926, West went to Paris. He wanted to stay there, but his family called him home: the family business was collapsing--an early victim of what would become the Great Depression--and they could no longer afford to support him. His father managed to get him a job as the night manager of a second-rate hotel, the Kenmore Hall; later he worked at the Sutton Club Hotel. This was not the life he'd have chosen for himself, but it allowed him three important things: first, he could write all night--he finished The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) and wrote Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) while working there. Second, the people who migrated in and out of these hotels provided him with material for his novels and stories: the lost, the grotesque, the trapped, the people on the fringes became the central characters in his work. And third, it allowed him to help other writers who were poor and needed housing. Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, among others, lived there cheaply, sometimes for free. Hellman recalls that Hammett wrote The Thin Man there, and they named the dog in the book "Asta," after West's sister's dog.

As little as he liked his job, West was at least working; all around him, people were begging in the streets. The American Dream was a hoax, as his next novel made clear. It was called A Cool Million, (1934) and was a parody of the rags-to-riches Horatio Alger stories.

In 1933, West was offered a job writing screenplays for Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. He jumped at the chance. He didn't go west with the idea that he'd be writing great art, though. He knew this was hack work, and although he could spew out story ideas and scripts very quickly, he never took this work seriously. This was what he did so that he could get money to write novels.

He returned to New York, but went back to Hollywood in 1935. He lived in a cheap hotel, the Pa-Va-Sed, on Ivar Boulevard just north of Hollywood Boulevard. The hotel is no longer there, having been torn down to make room for the Hollywood Freeway. But the neighborhood hasn't changed that much, and there are dozens of hotels like it in the area. These are where the dreamers live. Most of them will never "make it" in "The Business." They hang on for years, working menial jobs, going to auditions or interviews and trying to "break in." A few give up the dream and move on to other careers; on very, very rare occasions, one achieves success. But most of them, in the end, go back where they came from; or they grow old and bitter, but are still unable to give up hope; or they die.

The Day of the Locust, West's last novel, was inspired by the people he met living in the Pa-Va-Sed. West was very poor at this time, often sick and unable to work. The prostitutes who lived in the building brought him soup; he loaned them his car in return. He knew the extras, the ex-vaudevillians, the midgets--the hotel was full of those who had been and those who wanted to be. He finally got a job at Republic Productions, a small studio, and that saved him. He wrote for the studio during the day and worked on his own novel at night. At first this book was called The Cheated, since all of the characters had come to Hollywood hoping for fame, glory, and wealth. But like the inhabitants of the Pa-Va-Sed, they didn't what they were looking for. The Dream Factories kept churning out rags-to-riches stories, but behind the glittering facade was a very ugly, inhuman machine which used people up and spit them out. Other writers, such as Fitzgerald, wrote of the bigwigs at the studios and of their moral corruption; West wrote, instead, of the tiny people who are invisible to the bigwigs, those on the periphery of the movie industry, those who go to movie previews and crowd closer to the celebrities, loving them and hating them at the same time. And one day, when they comprehend that they've been cheated, their adoration evaporates and their envy and hatred emerge, and they destroy everything.

In the canyons of Los Angeles, where the heat is stifling and fires rage out of control, apocalypse doesn't seem that far away. And indeed, in West's novel, it is not. "There is no optimism in the book; its city and people are ravaged by the locusts of their fantasies" (Martin 315).

The sales of The Day of the Locust were crushingly disappointing to West--less than 1500 copies sold. He had hoped that this novel would free him from the studios, but that didn't happen. He went back to work.

West had never had much luck with women, but in October 1939, he met Eileen McKenney. She had a small son from a previous marriage, and West fell in love with them both. He and Eileen were married on April 19, 1940. They bought a house in North Hollywood and began furnishing it. They were both completely happy. They were planning to have more children. They took a short trip to Mexico in December 1940. On December 22, 1940, they were driving back to Los Angeles to prepare for a party they were planning to have on Christmas Eve. But in El Centro, West ran a stop sign at a highway intersection and they were struck by another car. West and Eileen were both killed. Nathanael West was 37.

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Some of the information in this lecture derives from:

1. Eds. George and Barbara Perkins. The American Tradition in Literature. 11th ed., Vol. 2. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.
2. Eds. Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008.
3. Eds. George McMichael, et al. Anthology of American Literature, 9th ed., Vol. 2. New Jersey: Pearson, 2007.
4. Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. New York: Penguin, 1991.
5. Alfred Kazin. "Introduction." The Day of the Locust. New York: Signet, 1983.
6. Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of his Life. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1970.

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