When I was a child it was common for parents to tell their
children to eat everything on their plate because there were
"starving children in Africa." Aside from the obvious moral
warning against wasteful living, the comment also served the
valuable purpose of subconsciously hardening a sensitive and
impressionable child against the many cruelties in the world,
especially the ones that are a comfortable distance
away.
But what if all that pain and suffering was suddenly paraded
before a person's eyes? What if one's daily existence
consisted of the unceasing whisper of those in anguish and
distress? Could a person live with the constant knowledge of
all that sorrow and desperation? Enter Miss
Lonelyhearts.
Miss Lonelyhearts is a guy. He gets his name from the byline
of a newspaper column he writes which gives advice to people
who write in about their problems. He hates the job, but he
keeps it because it keeps him from his former job of street
reporter, where he actually came in contact with the people.
Although the column is considered an insider joke at the
paper, the burden of reading and answering the many letters
of pain and misery begin to obsess Miss Lonelyhearts, and he
slowly realizes that, far from being able to offer any help,
the column is just another way these sad people are
exploited. Heaping irony on irony, Miss Lonelyhearts turns
his wrath on his unfortunate readers.
West satirized the American Dream, portraying the nightmare
it is for many. A recurrent West theme is despair and
hopelessness painted against a brutally indifferent
background, with tension churning through the novel to an
inevitably violent climax. W.H. Auden described the theme as
"West's Disease." West follows this pattern closely in MISS
LONELYHEARTS.
Despite his apparent concerns for the great unwashed masses,
there is something insensate and cold in his writing. His
compassion appears more clinical than heartfelt. Graham
Greene's description of a female reporter in ORIENT EXPRESS
comes to mind: "There wasn't a suicide, a murdered woman, a
raped child who had stirred her to the smallest emotion; she
was an artist to examine critically, to watch, to listen; the
tears were for the paper."
Nathanael West was born in New York in 1903, the son of
immigrant German Jews. His father gave him the popular
Horatio Alger novels to read, but the rag-to-riches theme had
little effect on him, and he entered Brown University with
little enthusiasm. When he graduated in 1924, he moved to
Paris for a couple years and joined the many expatriate
authors and artists of the Lost Generation.
When he returned to the United States he managed small hotels
from 1927 to 1933. An amazing amount of writers sought him
out for a free place to stay, including James Farrell,
Erskine Caldwell, and Dashiell Hammett. In 1931 he published
a set of short surrealistic sketches called THE DREAM LIFE OF
BALSO SNELL. Selling only 500 copies, it was not a success.
Distancing himself somewhat from the avant-garde school's
love for the absurdly absurd, he did better with MISS
LONELYHEARTS in 1933. A COOL MILLION followed in 1934.
In 1935 he moved to Hollywood where he lived for the short
remainder of his life. He wrote for small studios when he
could, and when he was out of work he spent time with the
failed outcasts of Hollywood society. Both these experiences
provided material for his final, and probably most critically
acclaimed, novel, DAY OF THE LOCUST, which came out in 1939.
West never saw much fame or fortune from his work, and the
critics were often harsh in their reviews. Fitzgerald, author
of THE GREAT GATSBY, was one of the few who publicly praised
him, and the two became friends. The day after Fitzgerald
died, on December 22, 1940, West ran a stop sign and crashed
his car, killing himself and his wife.
miker
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