Sunday, November 09, 2003

By Roger K. Miller

In the middle and rear ranks of respected American authors are several who produced a small body of mostly short works that were strong enough to establish a lasting reputation -- Sarah Orne Jewett and her "The Country of the Pointed Firs," for one.

A more modern example is that of an author whose centenary is being marked this year: Nathanael West.

West's life, like his collected works, was short. He was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City Oct. 17, 1903. He changed his name, he told William Carlos Williams, because "Horace Greeley said, 'Go West, young man.' So I did."

Indeed he did, literally as well as nominally. After a checkered early career in New York, he went to Hollywood and eventually found work as a screenwriter for minor studios such as Monogram Pictures.

He died there in an auto crash on Dec. 22, 1940; he was 37. He had cut short his Mexican vacation to rush back to attend the funeral of his friend and fellow screenwriter, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In that brief span, West managed to write four short novels that collectively amount to a bitter indictment of what we vaguely but not inappositely have come to call the American Dream.

Two of them probably will continue to be read as long as anything in American literature: "The Day of the Locust" and "Miss Lonelyhearts."

Both are collected in a Library of America volume, along with the other two, "The Dream Life of Balso Snell" and "A Cool Million," and various other writings and letters.

"The Day of the Locust" is widely judged as West's masterpiece, and, together with Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon," as one of the great novels about Hollywood.

The judgment is probably accurate, though I always have preferred "Miss Lonelyhearts." It expresses West's basic theme -- the loneliness and hopelessness of the individual in a brutally uncaring society -- through the story of a writer of an advice-to-the-lovelorn newspaper column.

The columnist, a man known only as Miss Lonelyhearts, is a tortured soul. The column is only a circulation-building device, and he and it are mercilessly mocked by his editor, a Mephistophelian figure called Shrike.

Miss Lonelyhearts cares deeply for the writers of the pathetic letters he receives, but he cannot stand to bear their pain, which he alternately evades and confronts. Obsessed with Christ, he attempts a Christ-like act, which of course gets him killed. It is a dark and disturbing fable of a modern wasteland.

West was also a highly skilled precursor of black comedy. In "A Cool Million," he showed what a grotesque nightmare the American Dream can be by standing it on its head.

"A Cool Million," with its hapless hero, Lemuel Pitkin, is a parody of the Horatio Alger story that borders on brilliance. Done in the inflated, wide-eyed style of earnest books of the turn of the century ("Our hero's eyes shone with a light that bespoke a high heart"), it wickedly tweaks everything that we then held, and to a large extent still hold, dear.

Honest, innocent small-town boy Lem sets out to earn his fame and fortune by following the precepts of trust, hard work and loyalty. He reaps, instead, only insult, ignominy and injury.

The subtitle, "The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin," sums it up. In the course of his misadventures, he literally comes apart: He loses his teeth, an eye, a thumb, a leg and his scalp.

Lem is relentlessly plucky. He halts a team of runaway horses -- hesitating "only long enough to take a firm purchase on his store teeth" -- but it avails him naught.

He becomes the foil or tool, or both, of everyone he encounters, including American Indians. (There is a funny, chauvinistic speech by a Harvard-educated Indian who tempers his exhortation of his people with, "Don't mistake me, Indians. I'm no Rousseauistic philosopher.")

In the end, Lem is not merely dismantled, but dead. Shot by a fake-bearded communist, he becomes a martyr to the fascists. Everyone takes something from poor old Lem.

Comic or tragic, West's vision was a dark one. And despite its fantastic elements, it is, like Kafka's, convincing.

Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer who lives in Wisconsin.

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