VARIETIES OF SATIRE
IN THE ART OF NATHANAEL WEST

Since the death of Nathanael West in 1939 his work has gone from relative obscurity to ever increasing interpretation and evaluation. Various of his works, under the impetus of increasing enthusiasm, have been praised as "superbly written," as "a minor classic [Miss Lonelyhearts] ," as works [Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust] "that deserve a place among the best twentieth century novels," and as "four novels" which are "permanent and true explorations into the Siberia of the human spirit."¹ The major sources for West’s art, such as James Joyce and the French surrealists, have been analyzed in detail, and even the most minute influences, such as Lynd Ward and Gilbert Seldes, have been tracked down with sedulous care.² Victor Comerchero, in Nathanael West: The Ironic Prophet, has theorized that West used a "mythic lens through which to view his age," so that Miss Lonelyhearts "is a moving modernization of the Grail legend," and the totality of West’s work is one vast, oblique revelation of West—or "Westian man"—himself: "Individually, each of West’s characters remains a caricature; cumulatively, they create an engrossing picture of a ‘type,’ of a ‘collective man’ who has been created in West’s own image."³ Stanley Hyman, in his monograph Nathanael West, finds Miss Lonelyhearts one of the three greatest novels of the twentieth century and claims that West converted the "sickness and fears" of modern existence into "convincing present-day forms of the great myths: The Quest, The Scapegoat, The Holy Fool, The Dance of Death."⁴ Jay Martin, in his enthusiasm, finds that West, in his work as a whole, completed "a series of anti-novels in which is summarized the history of the twentieth century poetic imagination, from symbolism through surrealism and super-reahsm."⁵

Nathanael West is obviously well on the way to becoming canonized—even the literary anthologies are now including his work—and as if to place the ultimate seal of approval upon his art, the movies Lonelyhearts (1959) and The Day of the Locust (1975) have insisted even more reverently than have the academic critics upon the fact that West’s art is both profound and prophetic. The movie The Day of the Locust, for instance, captures, with considerable fidelity, a number of the more memorable images of the novel, and then depicts, with lengthy and pretentious fire, thunder, and brimstone, the apocalyptic vision on which the novel ends. In an epilogue, the movie adds another scene and another image, neither of which West had the foresight to include in the novel, in

which Faye Greener returns to Tod Hackett’s apartment to gaze sentimentally upon a rose which she had earlier seen blooming from a crack in one of the apartment walls. The pretentiousness of that symbolic rose, with its implications of beauty, fertility, and religion so totally in contrast to West’s vision, suggests another falsification. That is that West’s art itself is being distorted by the pretentiousness with which it is being treated by some of his admirers. Before it is too late, perhaps it is justifiable to suggest that even though West is both a serious and profound artist, he is first and foremost a satirist who felt in his bones "the necessity for laughing at everything—love, death, ambition, etc."⁶ What West thought of as "my particular kind of joking"—in which "there is nothing to root for . . . and what is even worse, no rooters"⁷—is the joking with which West had the greatest success, but it should not be forgotten that West attempted a variety of satire in his work. That diversity expressed itself in individual works, as well as in the body of West’s work, and it ranged from folk humor, most especially in the tall tale tradition, to the dominant surrealistic humor in The Dream Life of Balso Snell, to the prevailing black humor in Miss Lonelyhearts, to the essential parody and burlesque in A Cool Million, to the dominant apocalyptic humor in The Day of the Locust; to the allusive humor which runs as a recurring strain throughout West’s work.

West’s interest in folk humor is apparent in his first published work. Called A Barefaced Lie, it appeared in 1929 in Overland Monthly and was obviously indebted to such tall tales as Mark Twain’s "Jim Baker’s Bluejay Yarn" and T. B. Thorpe’s "The Big Bear of Arkansas." In West’s tale, the narrator seeks out a stagecoach driver named Boulder Bill because, as he notes in a passage reminiscent of the opening of Twain’s "The Celebrated Jumping-Frog of Calaveras County," "I had been advised by my friend, Red Patterson, the gum booter, to ride only with Boulder Bill—and to listen politely to all he had to say."⁸ When the narrator finds Boulder Bill, he turns out to he a huge man with a voice that even in a "whisper . . . was audible a block away."⁹ Boulder Bill invites the narrator to sit in front with him on the stagecoach ride, but insists that another passenger ride in the rear. The reason for this, Boulder Bill explains, is that the second passenger is a "low-down ornery skunk . . . the most bare-faced, mean, siwash liar that ever hit the country, and I can prove it to you."¹⁰ To make his point, Boulder Bill tells of how, a few days earlier, he had been visiting with his friends in a saloon and had told them of an experience he had had while putting packsaddles in the dark on a number of mules. Among the mules, according to Boulder Bill, was a bear, and Bill had cinched a packsaddle on him without knowing that he was a bear. Boulder Bill’s friends "listened decently" to the story and "then talked it over,"

but in the midst of the discussion a "big-mouthed Yahoo"—the passenger whom Boulder Bill had earlier insisted sit in the rear of the stagecoach— "started on a regular hyena laugh" and said "That explains it."¹¹ When invited to elaborate, the "Yahoo" tells of how, on the same day that Boulder Bill had cinched the bear and only a few hours later, he had seen

an old bear standing on a stump grunting and jabbering away like he was the boss of things, and there was two more bears down on the bar a-packing a load of salmon on another bear what had a packsaddle on, and two more bears still was catching salmon and carrying them up to the packyard. . . .

This tale sets everyone in the saloon to laughing, pounding each other on the back, and then to looking at Boulder Bill and snickering. For that reason Boulder Bill no longer feels free to show his face in the saloon, all because of that "Yahoo" who had told nothing but "bare-faced bear lies, pardner—bare-faced bear lies. .

Hardly a masterpiece, A Barefaced Lie proclaims the theme with which West’s entire art is obsessed—lies and their exposure—and is a progenitor of the use of tall talk and tall tales in West’s later work. An example of West’s later use of tall talk occurs in A Cool Million in the character of the "rip-tail roarer" from Pike County who claims, "I kin whip my weight in wildcats, am a match for a dozen Injins to oncet, and can tackle a lion without flinchin’."¹⁴ Typical of West’s exotic variations of the tall tale is the howler told by Miss McGeeney in The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Miss McGeeney is writing a biography, entitled Samuel Perkins: Smeller, of the man who wrote the biography of E. F. Fitzgerald, who wrote the biography of D. H. Hobson, who wrote the biography of James Boswell, who wrote the biography of Samuel Johnson; and it is Miss McGeeney’s fond hope that in time someone "must surely take the hint" and write her own biography, so that "we will all go rattling down the halls of time . . . a tin can on the tail of Dr. Johnson" (p. 33). In her research, Miss McGeeney has been most especially impressed with the fact that all the veins and wrinkles of Perkins’ body flowed directly toward his nose, and that fact implied the marvelous quality of his nose. Almost blind, totally deaf, and practically devoid of other sensory apparatus, Perkins had compensated for these defects by developing the capacities of his nose until he "could smell a chord in D Minor. . . . It has been said of him that he could smell an isosceles triangle. . ."p. 35). As an artist, dedicated to fullness of experience, Perkins had married, and from the variety of the odors of his wife’s body "he had built . . . an architecture and an aesthetic, a music and a mathematic. . . . He had even discovered a politic, a hierarchy of odors: self-government direct. . ."(p. 36). In Miss MeGeeney’s tale, West is undeniably satirizing the preciousness of some artists¹⁵ and the folly of

some academic critics, but it is clear that the method of his satire is exaggeration, and the inspiration, at least in part, is the tall tale.

A second artistic form which West used for satiric effects is surrealism. Like satire itself, surrealism depends for its effects upon distortion (though the aim of surrealism—as, for instance, in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—is not necessarily humorous), and the purpose of the sincere surrealist is, through multiple kinds of distortion, to mock "rational" perceptions and to intimate the higher reality—the surreal—of the subconscious, illogical inward world of man. What West did in The Dream Life of Balso Snell was to use the forms of surrealism to satirize the spiritual pretensions of the surrealist a fact which helps to explain West’s irritation at Clifton Fadiman’s claim that he was "The ablest of our surrealist authors."¹⁶ In fulfilling this aim, West constructed a novel which dramatizes the chaotic ramblings of a wet dream. The dream-like illogic of the novel, less eerie than absurd, begins when the dream-hero, Balso Snell, while wandering around the ancient city of Troy, comes upon the famous Trojan Horse and enters it through the "Anus Mirabilis" (p. 3). The removal from reality is intensified in such episodes as that in which the hero, Balso Snell, reads a pair of letters within a dream within a dream, while the letters themselves narrate the speculations of a character named Beagle Hamlet Darwin over what might have happened if he had taken his mistress, Janey Davenport, to Paris with him. Throughout the novel West also uses shocking conceits to mock "rational" ideas and attitudes. The artistic creations of the male artist become comparable to the house of flowers built by the Amblyorris Inornata, a homely bird, in an effort to compare with the brilliant feathers of the Bird of Paradise, and the attempt "to exteriorize internal feathers" (p. 26) for both the Inornato and the human artist is the same: to attract the female. In another conceit the sexual urge becomes a chauffeur, dressed in ugly clothing and wearing a derby hat, that drives the automobile called man. In yet another conceit, man’s dreams of eternal life become comparable to a race of men, the Phoenix Excrementi, who "eat themselves, digest themselves, and give birth to themselves by evacuating their bowels" (p. 5).

The characters of the novel, united only in the fact that they are all frustrated writers in search of an audience, are absurdly distorted creatures who force their opinions and their manuscripts upon Balso. Among them are a naked man, wearing only a derby hat with thorns protruding from it, who is "Attempting to crucify himself with thumbtacks" (p. 10) and who tells the tale of the martyrdom of a flea, St. Puce, upon the body of Christ; a boy in short pants who writes a Dostoevskyan journal about the murder of an idiot; a nude girl bathing her charms in an outdoor fountain who miraculously is transformed, when Balso kisses her, into a

middle-aged woman in mannish tweeds; and a beautiful hunchback with one-hundred and forty-four teeth in rows of four who asks Balso to prove his love for her by murdering Beagle Hamlet Darwin, the man who has seduced and then abandoned her.

The narrative, the conceits, and the characters of The Dream Life are obviously inspired by the distortions of surrealism, but the implications of the pretentiousness of each of the tales that Balso hears is that art is not the "divine excrement" romanticized by George Moore but is instead closer to the balls, the physical reality, of Snell. When he enters the "Anus Mirabilis" of the Trojan Horse, Balso does so by reciting an invocation inspired by James Joyce,¹⁷ and seeking, like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus at the conclusion of The Portrait of the Artist, "To encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience," Balso finds that reality in sex. For West, however, the reality which is the animal sexual instinct must be preceded in man by the falsity which is the romantic sexual game. In the last chapter of The Dream Life, therefore, Balso Snell argues the case for sexual intercourse to his indifferent beloved. In hilarious parody, Balso asserts the political argument (intercourse is an expression of freedom), the philosophical argument (pleasure is desirable), the argument from art (the artist "must know what all the shooting is about" [p. 58] , and the argument from time ("The seconds, how they fly" [p. 59] ). On her back, with her knees spread invitingly apart, Miss McGeeney listens patiently until Balso throws himself down beside her, at which point she coyly resists and then ultimately yields: "Moooompitcher yaaaah. . . . Drag me down into the mire, drag. Yes! And with your hair the lust from my eyes brush. Yes . . . Yes . . . Oph! Ah" (p. 61)! In such intercourse is the real "Yes" to the universe, the "Yes" that Joyce’s Molly Blum recognized in her soliloquy at the end of Ulysses and which West parodies through Miss McGeeney’s "Yes." In this union comes the release of the little death, and in it is "the mystic doctrine, the purification, the syllable ’Om. . ." (p. 61). This is the truth revealed by the climax of Balso’s wet dream, and the surrealistic conception that through dreams and fantasies one might transcend the physical and find some supreme union with the universe is nonsense. West’s advice to surrealists who believe such foolishness—or to anyone deluded by the pretensions of art, religion, or thought—is implied in his creature John Raskolnikov Gilson, who tries to retain his hold on reality by writing in his Journal "while smelling the moistened forefinger of my left hand" (p. 14). For fakers who would not heed such advice, West, like his creator Gilson, would have "the ceiling of the theatre . . . open and cover the occupants with tons of loose excrement" (p. 31).

A third kind of humor in West’s work is the prevailing black humor of Miss Lonelyhearts.¹⁸ Such humor, or at least "grotesque black humor"

rather than "absurd black humor,"¹⁹ is rooted in total despair, sees the universe as absurd, and often uses violent and shocking images or surrealistic images yoking disparate concepts to destroy the complacency of its audience. Of such humor one critic writes:

Black humor often reveals life’s shabbiness and criticizes in the manner of satire. But unlike satire, it does not assume a set of norms, implicit or explicit, against which one may contrast the mad world depicted by the author. It relies neither on "common sense" as a guide to proposition and decorum, nor on social, religious, or moral convention. This is not to say that the reader of black humor is without norms. He has them, and the writer of black humor exploits them. The reader’s sense of decency allows the writer to shock, the reader’s humanity allows him to horrify, the reader’s sense of verisimilitude enables him to outrage, and the reader’s familiarity with dramatic and fictional conventions allows him to parody.... Moreover, black humor challenges not only the standards of judgment on which the satirist relies, but also the very faculties of judgment.²⁰

The plot structure of Miss Lonelyhearts, yoking the concept of the martyrdom of Christ to the agony of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist, and implying a parallel between the myth of Christ’s journey to the cross and the pilgrimage of Miss Lonelyhearts to his death, is not only a far fetched conceit but also a narrative calculated to shock conventionally religious minds. In an earlier time this kind of humor, or humour, would have been attributed to the black bile produced by the brain and responsible for human melancholy, but the ironic contrast implied in the central conceit of the novel brings, or is intended to bring, a thin and bitter smile to the modern reader. That vein of humor is apparent on the first page of the novel when the feature editor of the newspaper on which Miss Lonelyhearts works parodies the "Anima Christi":

Soul of Miss L, glorify me
Body of Miss L, nourish me
Blood of Miss L, intoxicate me. (p. 65)

And it is evident in the countless letters of the helpless of the universe—Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Broad Shoulders—that recount what life is like if one has, for instance, been born without a nose and must "sit and look at myself all day and cry. . . . My mother loves me but she crys terrible when she looks at me" (p. 67). The humor of the letters, however, turns inward upon Miss Lonelyhearts and, as he explains to his fiancé, "shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator" (p. 106). The consequent examination of the values on which his life is based leads to an even blacker joke:. Miss Lonelyhearts desires to succor

with love the helpless cripples of the universe, and his attempt to do so leads to his sickness, his hallucinations, and ultimately his death at the hands of one of those whom he would save. His "martyrdom" parodies that of Christ and by implication mocks the meaningfulness of either.

The universe in which West’s indictment of Christian mythology takes place is typical of the creations of the writers of black humor. Violence is everywhere, especially exemplified in the sexual violence so common in the letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives, and order is non-existent. At one time in his quest for order in an irrational world, Miss Lonelyhearts remembers his sister dancing gravely and precisely to the patterned music of Mozart. So musing, he turns from the bar, accidentally jostles another man, and before he can beg pardon, receives a punch in the mouth. In this disordered wasteland, water, love, and fertility are missing; none of the flowers of spring are in the park, and even the year before, as Miss Lonelyhearts remembers it, "It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted earth" (p. 70).

One character especially embodies the tone of black literary humor in Miss Lonelyhearts. He is the feature editor of the newspaper for which Miss Lonelyhearts works, and is named Shrike, after the bird which impales its prey upon a cross of thorns. A complete nihilist, he is a joke machine capable of such blasphemy as "I am a great saint. . . . I can walk on my own water. Haven’t you heard of Shrike’s passion in the luncheonette, or the Agony in the Soda Fountain?" (p. 74). Like all black humorists, Shrike is the foe of sentimentality, so that he can parody the most moving of the letters to Miss Lonelyhearts, as, for instance, when he creates a situation in which a young boy wants a violin but unfortunately is paralyzed and must be doomed only to clutch a toy violin to his chest while he makes the sounds of his music with his mouth. But, ends Shrike, "one can learn much from this parable. Label the boy Labor, the violin Capital, and so on. . ." (p. 134). For Shrike, the dreams of man, in all their infinite variety, are material for ridicule. In the chapter "Miss Lonelyhearts in the Dismal Swamp," a perfect example of the fusion of wit and despair in black humor, Shrike parodies such escapes as the sail, the South seas, hedonism, and religion. The escape to Art he ridicules to Miss Lonelyhearts:

"When you are cold, warm yourself before the flaming tints of Titian, when you are hungry, nourish yourself with great spiritual food . . . smoke a 3 B pipe, and remember these immortal lines: When to the suddenness of melody the echo parting falls the failing day. What a rhythm! Tell them to keep their society whores and pressed duck with oranges. For you l’art vivant, the living art, as you call it. Tell them that you know that your shoes are broken and that there are

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pimples on your face, yes, and that you have buck teeth and a club foot, but that you don’t care, for tomorrow they are playing Beethoven’s last quartets . . . and at home you have Shakespeare’s plays in one volume." (p. 109)

Of all the dreams, the one that for Shrike is most absurd is the myth of Christ, the Miss Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts, and Shrike’s sharpest gibes are directed at that Fantasy. Mocking the aspirations of Miss Lonelyhearts, Shrike composes a biography—"The gospel according to Shrike"—in which Miss Lonelyhearts "wends his weary way" from the "University of Hard Knocks" to the "bed of his first whore," always "struggling valiantly to realize a high ideal," always climbing ever upward, "rung by weary rung . . . breathless with hallowed fire" (p. 135). What Shrike omits is the most bitter joke of all: Miss Lonelyhearts’ accidental, meaningless death.

Yet another form of satire that West used in his art is the dominant parody and farce of A Cool Million. Indebted to the exaggerations of the tall tale and anticipating the pursuit of logic to insane conclusions exemplified in such novelists of the absurd as Joseph Heller, A Cool Million or The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin takes its narrative inspiration primarily from Voltaire—West thought of his novel as a twentieth-century Candide—so that the innocent hero of West’s novel, like Voltaire’s hero, sets out from home to seek his fortune. The adventures of both Lemuel Pitkin and Candide reveal a world of violence and greed—all of its dramatized farcically—and in it Lemuel loses his teeth, his eye, a thumb, a leg, his scalp, and ultimately his life. Where Candide ultimately learns something—and thus rejects the optimism of his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds—the ever gullible Lemuel remains faithful to the simplicities of the American dream preached by Lemuel’s tutor Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple. Like Abe Lincoln, whose life exemplifies for "Shagpoke" Whipple the fulfillment of the American dream, Lemuel dies in a theatre by an assassin’s bullet, and his birthday is commemorated as a national holiday. Both holidays, West implies, have identical purposes: to preach the virtues of the American dream, by which every American boy can go into the world and by hard work, honesty, and probity make his fortune and win The Girl, and in so doing to delude and exploit the gullibles of America. Through the manipulation of such fools, dictators come to power, and Lincoln’s faith that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time is irrelevant, for West, to that truth.

In his mockery of optimistic faith in both the American dream and the American people, West’s most obvious parody is that of such novels of Horatio Alger as Onward and Upward, Bound to Rise, and Sink or Swim.

Such Alger novels as these told, in plodding prose directed to the "dear reader," the story of "our hero" as he rose from low estate, most often as a newsboy or shoeshine boy, to wealth and fame. West not only parodied the language of Alger, but at times lifted phrases and sentences directly,²¹ so that A Cool Million, most especially in the first half of the novel, is laden with such clichés as "a veil of tears" (p. 178); such archaisms as "our hero was loath to lie" (p. 157); such heavy or unnaturally colloquial dialogue as "In these effete times, it is rare indeed for one to witness a hero in action" (p. 182), or "Me lad, the jig is up" (p. 164); such moral asides as "justice will out" (p. 171); and such authorial intrusions as, "As it will only delay my narrative . . . I will skip to his last sentence" (p. 148). Like Alger, West ends numerous chapters with melodramatic cliffhangers, and then shifts to another thread of his narrative; at the end of chapter three, for instance, Tom Baxter is left admiring the prostrate form of Lemuel’s girl friend Betty Prail—"His little pig-like eyes shone with bestiality" (p. 154)—while the author begins the ensuing chapter, in Algerian prudery, with, "It is with reluctance that I leave Miss Prail . . . but I cannot with propriety continue my narrative beyond the point at which the bully undressed this unfortunate young lady" (p. 155).

In addition to the parody of Alger’s prose, West mocks the rise of Alger’s heroes by the dismantling of his own, and he does so in the typical coincidences and situations of the Algerian Novel. Such a coincidence occurs when Lemuel visits New York’s Chinatown, and Betty Prail, who is being held by Chinese White-slavers, throws a bottle with a note at his feet; but instead of rescuing Betty, Lemuel himself is captured by the white slavers and dressed in a sailor suit to appease the sexual appetite of the Maharajah of Kanurani. Such an Algerian situation arises when Lemuel rescues a rich man and his pretty daughter from the path of frightened, onrushing horses; but West’s world is not Alger’s, so that Lemuel, instead of receiving the just rewards he deserves in an equitable world, loses his false teeth, is reprimanded as a careless groom by the rich man he has saved, cannot respond because his teeth are gone, and is injured by a flying stone so that ultimately he loses his eye.

A second object of parody is the leader, the beliefs, the forms, and the human materials of German fascism. The clown named Adolf Hitler, who was in the mid-thirties often conceived of as a ridiculous house painter with an absurd mustache, West molded into the native American type that West felt was embodied in the former American President Calvin Coolidge. To that dangerous clown, West gave the name Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple. Out of his nationalist beliefs, his faith in the supremacy of white, Protestant Americans, and his memories of the German National Socialist Party, Whipple creates the platform for the National Revolutionary Party,

popularly known as the Leather Shirts, and from his soapbox he preaches:

"We must drive the Jewish international bankers out of Wall Street! We must destroy the Bolshevik labor unions! We must purge our country of all the alien elements and ideas that now interest her!" (p. 188). For his "storm troops" Whipple creates a native uniform—a coonskin cap, a deerskin shirt, and mocassins—and in the Southern heartland of America, where Whipple’s rhetoric functions most effectively, he so arouses his supporters that

They ran up the Confederate flag on the courthouse pole, and prepared to die in its defense.
    Other, more practical-minded citizens proceeded to rob the bank and loot the principal stores, and to free all their relatives who had the misfortune to be in jail.
    As time went on, the riot grew more general in character. . . . The heads of Negroes were paraded on poles. A Jewish drummer was nailed to the door of his hotel room. The housekeeper of the local Catholic priest was raped. (p. 246)

Beyond these major stylistic and thematic parodies, two others deserve mention. One is West’s derision of radical writers and the propagandistic art they create. The author of such nonsense in A Cool Million is the poet Sylvanus Snodgrasse, who turns to communism because the American public does not buy his work. The same lack of talent that impedes his popular success, however, pervades his propaganda, so that his playlet about a "sleek salesman" (p. 240) who deceives widows and orphans into buying worthless bonds is filled with the sentiment and images—three children who cry "Goo, goo" (p. 241), two millionaires who laugh as they step over the dead bodies of those they’ve defrauded—reminiscent of such proletarian literature of the thirties as Clifford Odet’s Waiting for Lefty. Finally, one must note West’s parody of the "Buy American" campaign inspired by the Hearst chain of newspapers and for a while in the thirties a significant force in the market place. In A Cool Million a Chinese businessman whose trade is white slavery adopts, for commercial reasons, the Hearst credo, and transforms his bordello from a "House of All Nations" to a hundred percent American establishment. In his enthusiasm Wu Fong insists on artistic consistency, so that the food, the furnishings, and the costumes of his establishment are appropriate to the milieu of each of the girls. For instance, the room of Princess Roan Fawn is "papered with birch bark to make it look like a wigwam"; she does her "business on the floor"; her native costume is total nudity save for a wolf s tooth necklace and a bull’s eye blanket; and her customers are served "baked dog and firewater" (p. 204) for dinner. This artistic attention to detail is so great that West observes, in a moral, Algerian parenthesis, that Wu Fong might have used his talents honestly, and "made even more

money without having to carry the stigma of being a brothel-keeper. Alas!" (p. 170).

Yet another aspect of the humor of A Cool Million seems less inspired by Voltaire, Alger, and German fascism than it does by the pure farce of Punch and Judy and the Keystone Cops. One example of this kind of burlesque occurs when Lemuel is duped into participating in a confidence game by pretending to lose his glass eye in a jewelry store and then to offer a thousand dollar reward for its return. Even more of a travesty is the job he takes in which, as a member of a comedy team, he is beaten violently so that his teeth, eye, wig, and leg are clubbed from his body. The extremes of this kind of humor, and of the humor of A Cool Million, generally are more appropriate to the talent of S. J. Perelman, to whom A Cool Million, is dedicated, than to the genius of Nathanael West, and perhaps for this reason A Cool Million is less successful artistically than any of West’s other novels.

Nathanael West’s last novel, The Day of the Locust, is not very funny, and West knew it well. Thinking of The Day, and apparently forgetting such works as The Dream Life and A Cool Million, West could write, "I do consider myself a comic writer, perhaps in an older and a much different tradition than Benchley or Sullivan. Humor is another thing. I am not a humorous writer I must admit and have no desire to be one."²² Even the reason for the lack of laughter in The Day, West expressed in his comment in the novel, "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous" (p. 262).

In dramatizing The Day, West emphasized the experiences of two newcomers, Tod Hackett and Homer Simpson, in the promised land—one character claims "it’s a paradise on earth" (p. 300)—of the Angelinos. Los Angeles, however, is an ironic paradise, and its citizens are more grotesque than angelic. Violence, corruption, and perversity infest the city, from bloody and illegal cockfights, to pornographic movies in brothels which are triumphs "of industrial design," where the refined madame "makes vice attractive by skillful packaging" (p. 276), to children singing blues songs with sexual groans and suggestive gestures. Eros, the God of love, lies face downward on a forgotten movie set overrun with bottles and newspapers, and love itself is mocked by comic rhetoric: "Love is like a vending machine, eh? . . . You insert a coin and press down the lever. There’s some mechanical activity inside the bowels of the device. You receive a small sweet . . . and walk away, trying to look as though nothing had happened. It’s good, but it’s not for pictures" (p. 276). Dissolution and death are omnipresent, from the concern of one character with the formal arrangements of funerals to the obsession of Tod Hackett with such

painters of decay as Salvator Rosa and Francesco Guardi. The meaning of death is continually mocked by such images as that of the clown, Harry Greener, in his coffin ("He looked like the interlocutor in a minstrel show" [p. 344]), to the conversation piece that one couple puts in their swimming pool (a rubber imitation of a dead horse, with an "enormous distended belly" and a mouth, from which a black tongue hangs, set in an "agonized grin" [p. 274]), to a movie scene of the Battle of Waterloo (which diminishes the heroism and the agony of the actual battle to the trivial farce of a movie set that collapses and leaves the producer with the problem of resolving the insurance claims of the wounded). In this angelic world, deceit, more than anything else, is the fundamental reality: houses are made of "plaster, lath, and paper" (p. 262) and have no architectural stability or human dignity; the natural colors of food are intensified by artificial lighting that makes oranges red, lemons yellow, and steaks rose; the dress of people bears no relation to their occupation or their nature; and above all, the movies made in the land of the angels bear no more relation to reality than do the props—picnickers on a fiber lawn, for instance, eat "cardboard food in front of a cellophane waterfall" (p. 351)—that are created to give the illusion of truth.

Save for Tod Hackett, the artist-observer, the people that inhabit this city are grotesques, some of them deceivers who are, for the most part, peripherally associated with the world of dreams called Hollywood, others of them the deceived who have slaved all their lives and then, in search of Paradise, have come to Los Angeles to die. In the latter there exists an inarticulate frustration and rage, stemming from their inward sterility of spirit, that nothing, not even violence, can permanently appease. It is these pathetic and frightening creatures, whom Homer Simpson embodies, that attend the services of such bizarre churches as the "Tabernacle of the Third Coming," where Tod hears one angry parishioner bring the message that he had "seen the Tiger of Wrath stalking the walls of the citadel and the Jackal of Lust skulking in the shrubbery" (p. 366), and it is out of the rage of these that there arises the inspiration for Tod Hackett’s painting "The Burning of Los Angeles" and the apocalyptic violence on which the novel ends.

The central, bitter apocalyptic humor of the novel lies in the contrast between the Biblical revelation of St. John the divine and the revelation of Tod Hackett expressed in his painting of "The Burning of Los Angeles." Where St. John foresaw God’s destruction of Rome, the Whore of Babylon, because of the materialism of the city and its violations of God’s laws, Tod sees only a meaningless destruction of the city of the angels by a mass of human locusts. Possibly inspired by a messiah similar to the "super Dr. Know-All Pierce-All" (p. 420) who had come to power in Germany,

these creatures must soon become uncontrollable because they have found, in their search for the promised land, that "the sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed" (p. 412). For such as these, life itself is a small-minded joke played by an ignorant child like the monster Adore, who tries to lure Homer Simpson to pick up a purse tied to a string and then, when Homer won’t play, flings a stone in his face. For such as these, life itself is a stone in the face, full only of boredom and bitterness that can never be resolved, just as Homer’s sobs have neither accent nor progress and "would never reach a climax" (p. 398). For such as these, the only solution to their lives is death. It is that which they seek in the darkened churches where they worship the celluloid stars of the silver screen. It is that which Homer subconsciously seeks in his pursuit of the movie extra, Faye Greener, a creature whose invitation, even in the movies in which she appears as a seductive temptress, is "closet to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper" (p. 271). In his rampaging violence at the end of the novel, Homer invites his own death, and in it he achieves the only victory of his life. In the same way, the violence of the mob at the movie premiere has as its aim not only the conscious destruction of those who have cheated and betrayed them but also the subconscious destruction of self. In violence is momentary joy and in death is final victory—that assertion is West’s answer to St. John’s vision of the New Jerusalem and his invitation (Revelation 22:17) to "Come, let him who desires take the water of life without price." In the irony of that answer lies the essence of West’s apocalyptic humor in The Day.

In his first novel, West conceived a character named Beagle Hamlet Darwin who commented in a letter to his mistress: "You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own color" (p. 47). What Darwin says about himself is true also of Darwin’s creator, and the evidence of this is in the innumerable allusions in West’s novels. These range from the purely private, such as West’s veiled allusion in A Cool Million to Alice Shepard, a former girl friend, as the Southern whore, Alice Sweethorne; to the very obvious, such as the Algerian language and situations in A Cool Million; to the extremely complicated, such as the echoes of Eliot’s Waste Land and Christian mythology in Miss Lonelyhearts, which inspired Victor Comerchero to assent that "The world of Miss Lonelyhearts is the fallen world of myth";²³ to the allusive pastiches, such as the parodies on the philosophic and poetic arguments justifying sexual intercourse on which The Dream Life of Balso Snell ends.

Perhaps no allusion in West’s work, however, is more meaningful to his art as a whole, more frightening in its implications, or more witty in its expression than Beagle Hamlet Darwin’s references in The Dream Life to Christ, Dionysus, and Gargantua. Calling on Dionysus to assist him in explaining "The tragedy of all of us" (p. 54), Darwin asserts the concept of spiritual Darwinism. Beagle Hamlet Darwin’s theory states that each of us, from birth onward, is doomed to dream of being more than animal and thus to compete with the likes of Dionysus, born three times, or Christ, born of a virgin. The conception of common men, however, is more humorous than remarkable, for the human lover does not approach his beloved "in the shape of a swan, a bull, or a shower of gold" but rather he comes "with his pants unsupported by braces. . . from the bath-room" (p. 53). Similar is the reality of normal birth, where there are no kings, no doves, no stars of Bethlehem, but "only old Doctor Haasenchweitz who wore rubber gloves and carried a towel over his arm like a waiter" (p. 55). Thinking of this contrast, Darwin realizes the tragedy of the competition in which men must spend their lives, "a competition that demanded their being more than animals" (p. 55). Because of this inward need, men must forever dream, and to support their dreams they pathetically juggle the paraphernalia that they have created to justify their foolishness: "an Ivory Tower, a Still White Bird, The Holy Grail, The Nails, The Scourge, The Thorns, and a piece of The True Cross" (p. 56). Throughout his art West mocked this folly by satirizing, in a variety of forms, the dreams of man, but since he also comprehended that to live without dreams was worse than to exist with no dreams at all, he had no answer to this dilemma, and his art expresses none. Because of this lack of any ultimate answer, West’s satire seems most successful when it is most irreverent, most scatological, most despairing, and most complex, but these qualities should never obscure the fact that it is laughter that is at the center of West’s art.

HERBERT K LEHMAN COLLEGE—CUNY

NOTES

    ¹For the sources of these quotations see F. H. Britten, Books (May 21, 1939), p. 7; James F. Light, "Miss Lonelyhearts: The Imagery of Nightmare," American Quarterly (Winter, 1956), p. 316; Victor Comerchero, Nathanael West The Ironic Prophet (Syracuse, New York, 1964), p. xii; and Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York, 1970), p. 10.
   ²The most thorough study of the major sources of West’s novels is Randall Reid, The Fiction of Nathanael West: No Redeemer. No Promised Land (Chicago & London, 1967).
   ³Comerchero, p. 86 and p. 8.
   ⁴Stanley Edgar Hyman, Nathanael West (University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, 21, 1962), p. 46.
   ⁵Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York, 1970), p. 392.
   ⁶Nathanael West’s Guggenheim proposal for an autobiographical novel as quoted in Martin, p.253.

   ⁷Letter of Nathanael West to George Milburn. Quoted in Richard Gehman’s Introduction to Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, New Directions’ New Classics Series (New York, 1950), p. xii.
   ⁸Nathanael West, "A Barefaced Lie," Overland Monthly (July 1929), p. 210.
   ⁹Ibid.
   ¹⁰Ibid.
   ¹¹Ibid.
   ¹²Ibid., p. 219.
   ¹³lbid.
   ¹⁴Nathanael West, A Cool Million, in The Complete Works of Nathanael West (New York, 1957), p. 223. Subsequent references to the novels of West are from this edition and are indicated within parentheses in the text.
   ¹⁵Randall Reid clearly shows West’s satire of Joris Karl Huysman’s novel Against the Grain by quoting such passages from that French master of the symbolist-decadent tradition as "To reach this end, he had, first of all, been obliged to master the grammar, to understand the syntax of odours. . . . See Reid, p. 30.
   ¹⁶Clifton Fadiman’s comment appeared in his review, "The Day of the Locust," The New Yorker (May 20, 1939), p. 79. Jay Martin quotes West’s complaint of Fadiman and the review: "He is an extremely intelligent guy and knows what surrealism is and therefore also knows that I am not a surrealist author." See Martin, p. 338.
   ¹⁷Joyce’s invocation to The Mythological Dedalus, "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead," is parodied by Balso’s invocation "0 Beer! O Meyerbeer! ... stand me now as ever in good stead" (p. 4).
   ¹⁸Though black humor is prevalent in Miss Lonelyhearts, I do not mean so imply it is the only kind of humor in that novel. In Nathanael West: an Interpretative Study, second edition (Evanston, Illinois, 1971) I have especially noted the influence of surrealistic humor in Miss Lonelyhearts. See especially pp. 102–194.
   ¹⁹For a distinction between these two kinds of black humor see Mathew Winston, "Humor Noir and Black Humor," in Veins of Humor, ed. by Harry Levin (Harvard English Studies, 3, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972), p. 277.
   ²⁰Winston, p. 274.
   ²¹For examples of the exact language which West took from Alger, see Douglas H. Shepard, "Nathanael West Rewrites Horatio Alger," Satire Newsletter (Fall 1965), pp. 13–28.
   ²²Letter of Nathanael West to George Milburn, April 6, 1939.
   ²³Comerchero, p. 86.