Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust

by Nathanael West

  In this part of the mob no one was hysterical. In fact, most of the people seemed to be enjoying themselves. Near him was a stout woman with a man pressing hard against her from in front. His chin was on her shoulder, and his arms were around her. She paid no attention to him and went on talking to the woman at her side.

  “The first thing I knew,” Tod heard her say, “there was a rush and I was in the middle.”

  “Yeah. Somebody hollered, ‘Here comes Gary Cooper,’ and then wham!”

  “That ain’t it,” said a little man wearing a cloth cap and pullover sweater. “This is a riot you’re in.”

  “Yeah,” said a third woman, whose snaky gray hair was hanging over her face and shoulders. “A pervert attacked a child.”

  “He ought to be lynched.”

  Everybody agreed vehemently.

  “I come from St. Louis,” announced the stout woman, “and we had one of them pervert fellers in our neighborhood once. He ripped up a girl with a pair of scissors.”

  “He must have been crazy,” said the man in the cap. “What kind of fun is that?”

  Everybody laughed. The stout woman spoke to the man who was hugging her.

  “Hey, you,” she said. “I ain’t no pillow.”

  The man smiled beatifically but didn’t move. She laughed, making no effort to get out of his embrace.

  “A fresh guy,” she said.

  The other woman laughed.

  “Yeah,” she said, “this is a regular free-for-all.”

  The man in the cap and sweater thought there was another laugh in his comment about the pervert.

  “Ripping up a girl with scissors. That’s the wrong tool.”

  He was right. They laughed even louder than the first time.

  “You’d a done it different, eh, kid?” said a young man with a kidney-shaped head and waxed mustaches.

  The two women laughed. This encouraged the man in the cap and he reached over and pinched the stout woman’s friend. She squealed.

  “Lay off that,” she said good-naturedly.

  “I was shoved,” he said.

  An ambulance siren screamed in the street. Its wailing moan started the crowd moving again and Tod was carried along in a slow, steady push. He closed his eyes and tried to protect his throbbing leg. This time, when the movement ended, he found himself with his back to the theatre wall. He kept his eyes closed and stood on his good leg. After what seemed like hours, the pack began to loosen and move again with a churning motion. It gathered momentum and rushed. He rode it until he was slammed against the base of an iron rail which fenced the driveway of the theatre from the street. He had the wind knocked out of him by the impact, but managed to cling to the rail. He held on desperately, fighting to keep from being sucked back. A woman caught him around the waist and tried to hang on. She was sobbing rhythmically. Tod felt his fingers slipping from the rail and kicked backwards as hard as he could. The woman let go.

  Despite the agony in his leg, he was able to think clearly about his picture, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” After his quarrel with Faye, he had worked on it continually to escape tormenting himself, and the way to it in his mind had become almost automatic.

  As he stood on his good leg, clinging desperately to the iron rail, he could see all the rough charcoal strokes with which he had blocked it out on the big canvas. Across the top, parallel with the frame, he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. For the faces of its members, he was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die; 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. A super “Dr. Know-All Pierce-All” had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.

  In the lower foreground, men and women fled wildly before the vanguard of the crusading mob. Among them were Faye, Harry, Homer, Claude and himself. Faye ran proudly, throwing her knees high. Harry stumbled along behind her, holding on to his beloved derby hat with both hands. Homer seemed to be falling out of the canvas, his face half-asleep, his big hands clawing the air in anguished pantomime. Claude turned his head as he ran to thumb his nose at his pursuers. Tod himself picked up a small stone to throw before continuing his flight.

  He had almost forgotten both his leg and his predicament, and to make his escape still more complete he stood on a chair and worked at the flames in an upper corner of the canvas, modeling the tongues of fire so that they licked even more avidly at a corinthian column that held up the palmleaf roof of a nutburger stand.

  He had finished one flame and was starting on another when he was brought back by someone shouting in his ear. He opened his eyes and saw a policeman trying to reach him from behind the rail to which he was clinging. He let go with his left hand and raised his arm. The policeman caught him by the wrist, but couldn’t lift him. Tod was afraid to let go until another man came to aid the policeman and caught him by the back of his jacket. He let go of the rail and they hauled him up and over it.

  When they saw that he couldn’t stand, they let him down easily to the ground. He was in the theatre driveway. On the curb next to him sat a woman crying into her skirt. Along the wall were groups of other disheveled people. At the end of the driveway was an ambulance. A policeman asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital. He shook his head no. He then offered him a lift home. Tod had the presence of mind to give Claude’s address.

  He was carried through the exit to the back street and lifted into a police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could.

  Afterword

  by John Sanford

  Nathanael West and I were friends once, but the friendship had ended long before his death. I’ve written elsewhere of the breach, but only for the few who read my books. Never have I spoken of it in the press, and I don’t intend to speak of it here. But resentment is hard to control, and fearing that it would color, discolor, whatever I might say of West and his work, I tried to beg off this assignment. I wasn’t permitted to beg off.

  I have small regard for myself as a critic, and as to West’s writings, I feel competent to say only that in his cut-short life, West produced four novels, two of which have great distinction. Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust earn him a high place in American letters. They’re deft and lean (two of his favorite qualifiers), and I pay them my best compliment: I wish I’d written them.

  As to West himself, I feel better able to comment. We were Harlem boys when we met in 1914, he eleven and I a year younger. He wasn’t Nathanael West then, nor was I John Sanford; he was still Nathan Weinstein, and I was still Julian Shapiro. His family lived on Seventh Avenue at 119th Street in a block of flats called the de Peyster. Out front, between the sidewalk and the gutter, lay a broad strip of earth planted with elms, and on that strip, my mindless chums and mindless I shot immes out of a circle, and on that sidewalk, we pitched buttons at a crack. These scientific pursuits were well beyond the abilities of the tall, skinny, flap-armed kid who often watched our skills from the stoop. Plain to see, he was badly made, a composition of parts that didn’t fit and that obviously didn’t work. Worse, the signals he sent to those parts were seldom the ones they received, and his movements were spasmodic and misdirected: he was ungainly, he was simply out of sync. One day, a garbled message would kill him. He’d put his foot on the gas instead of the brake, and he’d die o
f a broken skull. But that day was still thirty years off.

  This was 1914, and there he stood, an ill-favored kid we didn’t trouble ourselves to give more than a glance: He couldn’t run, he couldn’t skate, he couldn’t throw or catch a ball, and we only had to see those trembling hands to know that he couldn’t hit an imme with a fire hose. We were so busy ignoring him that we failed to notice that he never spoke to us. All we ever saw was a long kid in short pants, hoping for an invitation that he wasn’t going to get. It’s been many a year since then, and I still can’t say what it was that made me break the ice—pity, it may have been, or curiosity, or maybe none of my lackwit cronies happened to be around. Whatever it was, it led to the first words between us…and my birthday!

  This misfit, as I’d thought, this spastic slap-up—he was no dumbbell yearning to join us at pitching buttons. Once he opened his face, he showed that he dwelt not in the dirt with an agate; even then, he flew. He knew things, that ungainly kid—books I’d never heard of, places I couldn’t spell, people, events, quotations, anecdotes, jokes and the make of every car from as far as a block away. He knew things, that rickety kid, and I’d’ve known a few more than I did if his family hadn’t moved to another part of Manhattan, leaving me with my marbles, buttons and cards that came with a pack of cigarettes. I stayed stupid.

  It was a dozen years before I saw him again, this time on a golf course in Asbury Park. Overtaking him at a tee, I said Natchie Weinstein! only to be informed that he was now Nathanael West, lately of Brown University. We made a twosome of it then, he displaying much of his old-time difficulty with hands, feet and paraphernalia. During the round, he asked me what I’d been up to, and I told him, a little pridefully, that I was studying law at Fordham. And he, I asked, what was he doing these days? The rest of the round is missing from memory; he expunged it with his reply. I’m writing a book, he said. I can still hear the words. Seventy years have passed since he put them on the air, but they’re there for me yet, undiminished and stunning. I’m writing a book, he said.

  I couldn’t have known it at the time, but that meeting in Asbury determined the course of my life. For a period of several years afterward, West and I consorted with some regularity. Sad to say, though—sad for me, that is—I found myself further outdistanced than ever. Our conversations while walking the streets of the city were really monologues, lectures, oral essays on authors, poetry (verse, he called it), painting and painters, writers to read, particularly a comer named Hemingway. I heard of Apollinaire too, of Gaudier, Pound, Perse, Carco, Jarry, Cummings, Joyce and the etcher Meryon—and with each of them, knowledge of my ignorance grew. Without end, lore poured from West—Pep now to all—and I marveled. Where had he been and whom had he known—and where and with whom had I? It was as if I were still shooting marbles.

  The more we talked—say, rather, the more I listened—the more dimmed the luster of the law, and it was while reading proof with West on The Dream Life of Balso Snell that I realized what dazzled me now: the word, the printed word. I began to write; with an apprenticeship served at pitching buttons, I began to write. That took gall, but West had set an example I found it impossible not to follow: I’d just been reading his printed word, and the world I saw through it glittered. In the spring of 1931, when West was writing his second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, I was working on The Water Wheel, my first.

  Neither of us was progressing with speed or satisfaction, and when West proposed that we get away from the city, I turned up the right place to go. I’d met an upstate game-warden, and through him we obtained, for $25 a month, a seven-room cabin in the Adirondacks, together with a forest preserve of 1,200 acres and a 50-acre pond—Viele Pond, it was called. There in that private realm, we wrote, fished, swam, and shot away the summer.

  With everything but words, West was the clenchfist and slewfoot of old. His writing stayed as translucent as ever, but he had trouble tying his shoelaces; he needed both hands to light a cigarette; and as for driving a car, it was a living thing, a beast he was never able to master. Carrying a gun, he was the friend of game and the enemy of man. No one more dangerous ever took the field; witness his passing me a loaded and cocked shotgun by prodding my belly with the muzzle. It was a good summer, though; we did much writing, and I managed to stay alive. On the return-trip to New York, he took the wheel out of Albany while I read him the book reviews in the Sunday Times. He missed the road, of course; before I knew it, we weren’t far from Hartford.

  Soon afterward, he invited me to live rent free at the Sutton, an east-side hotel that he was managing, and for a period of some months I did. Save comings and goings and an occasional breakfast together, we saw little of each other during my stay. While there, I completed The Water Wheel, wrote a series of short stories and began a second novel, The Old Man’s Place. That novel ultimately took me to Hollywood and Paramount Pictures. One of those stories ended my friendship with West.

  A magazine called “Contact,” edited in Paris by Robert McAlmon, had been taken over by Moss & Kamin, the booksellers who published Balso Snell. The editors now were William Carlos Williams and West, and a story I’d submitted was accepted. Later, because of its suggestive title, it was rejected and returned. My fellowship with West was never the same after that and in time it dwindled to nothing. We encountered each other on the coast, and we exchanged a few civilities, but the Harlem and Adirondack days were over—forever, as it proved. I wish I hadn’t been so unrelenting, so unable to endure a disappointment. I wish I’d known what was only two years away.

  In 1940, I was working at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in collaboration with my wife, the screenwriter Marguerite Roberts. Away on an errand, I returned to our room to find her glancing through the pages of the daily paper. Almost at once, she cried, Johnny! Johnny! Pep West is dead!

  Dazed, I took up the paper and read:

  CRASH NEAR EL CENTRO

  Nathanael West, 36, prominent scenario writer and novelist, and his wife, Eileen, 27, were killed in an automobile accident three miles east of El Centro yesterday. Their station wagon collided with a car driven by Joe Dowless of Somerton, Ariz….

  and dazed still, I read the lines again, as if by rereading them, I could undo the accident, steer the cars, and send them safely on their separate ways. But the cars kept on going toward each other, and when they met, Nathanael, Nathan, Natchie, Pep, was gone from the world.

  I’m so sorry, Johnny, said Marguerite, but unable to respond, I drifted out of the room and into the Thalberg hallway. A throng of memories floated with me: Pep’s brag that he could improve Dostoevsky with a pair of shears; his gentle, soft-spoken, sickly father, whom he greatly loved; his five-foot safari-bag, too heavy to carry even when empty; his trick of speaking a cliché in italics; his fitful driving, as if the car were driving him; his way of walking, like a man with shackled feet. And I remembered that he was always tripping over something, always fumbling, always ill-related to the world’s furniture. Only in his writing did he seem to be at home, and there he handled language with the ease and grace that he could never muster for the lighting of a cigarette. In one of his passages, he writes of Miss Lonelyhearts in a park: “He walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear.” Deft and lean, those two sentences; they meet his own criteria.

  Most keenly, though (most piercingly), was I aware of my monumental obligation to him. I’d become a writer because of a chance meeting with him on a golf course, and writing had brought me to my Marguerite—and not to have known her would’ve meant not to have lived. My debt could never be extinguished; it could only be acknowledged. The first book I wrote after his death contains this dedication:

  To Nathanael West

  1903–1940

  Had it not been for that story, that trifle, Pep and I might’ve been…but we weren’t, it grieves me to say. We weren’t friends when he was driving a car that day three miles east of El Centro.

  />   Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust