THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, 3 stars and a bumfuzzled headscratch

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST
NATHANAEL WEST
New Directions (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathaniel West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some desparing, all twisted by their by their own desires—from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.

My Review: First, read this:

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.

Sad. Yes, that's it, I feel sad. This is a classic of Hollywood literature, I can even sort of see that, but it's as bleak as they come and it's all told, very little shown, at very crucial points. If this is a novel, I'm at a loss to see how; it's some biting character studies glued together by accidents of geography. To me it reads more like a treatment that had to be abandoned, was too dear to West's heart-shaped ice cube, and instead got its B12 shots, 50,000 volts, and liiiiiived.

So Tod (Death in German, get it?) HACKett (movie hanger-on, usu. a writer, get it?) falls for the vapidity that is bleached-blonde Faye Greener, as does poor rube-a-licious Homer Simpson (!!), as does no-bit extra Earle Shoop...I suspect, from some of Faye's father's mannerisms, that he and Faye got up to the badger game a time or two. What in the name of common sense is the appeal?! She's hard as nails, not terribly bright, and unbelievably self-centered. I couldn't abide her from the moment West put this in her mouth:

“I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her.

"I'm sure you..."

"It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want."

"It's good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,
but..."

"If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

That wasn't fresh and new in 1939, either. I agree that this person exists in her legions at every doorway to stardom, but Faye doesn't rise above that generic feel at any turn. After each encounter with Faye, particularly the après-cockfight cocktail party and its aftermath, I want to ask West, "...AND?! What is it, why are these men so hot-to-trot for this trollop?" He's dead these eighty-plus years, so he won't answer even if I shout, so I'm left bewildered.

Homer Simpson, apparently the lovable loser who gave cartoonist Matt Groening the name for his well-over-a-quarter-century old cartoon oaf, is the most realistic and fully drawn character in the piece. In creating Homer, West has fully focused our attention on him and relegated narrator Tod to the Nick Carraway position as he focuses on Homer and his back-story, his sad and empty existence (the part about the deck chair and the view is one of the best an most telling character tics West ladles on to Homer), and his doom (in the original Celtic meaning of Bha so an dàn duit, this was destined for thee). Homer tries and misses, tries and misses again, tries.... He's never, ever the fun guy or the sweet guy, he's the useful but horrendously annoying guy with the car and the cards.

Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can’t help crying.

His passion for the cipher Faye comes to its absolutely clearly telegraphed and inevitable conclusion, Tod twitters and flails ineffectually to interfere with it, and in the end it drives both Tod and Homer into the climactic ending of the book:

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. 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. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

And this at last wove the book together for me, made the preceding ~200pp make some sense to me. This is West's cri de coueur and shout to the gods that Prometheus is back to make trouble again.

A year later he was dead. Hm.

There is no smallest question that West can craft some lovely sentences and some incisive character sketches. He can hang all them on a plot of sorts and make your readerly curiousity bump itch so bad you have to scratch it with his tyrannosaurus-armed stories, even at the risk of running afoul of the brute's severing teeth. But here, in this book, the alchemy that elevates Miss Lonelyhearts to the cold and glittering glory of Everest's heights settles instead into the weirder, less pristine shape of Kilimanjaro: Feet in the humid heat, midsection arid and weirdly populated with things not seen elsewhere, and then the transcendent snowy glory of the ending.

Some years back, my real-life book circle read What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg. Sammy Glick, he of the title, is a character I can't forget and find myself thinking about. Sammy's is a story of hustle and flow, make and do and create...Tod never does one damned thing in this book except chase Faye and wander around. Yet which of these two books has been made into a movie? Not the solid, excellent What Makes Sammy Run?, no sirree, but this collection of grotesques gets made. In a weird sort of way, The Day of the Locust feels to me like a precursor to the viciously cuttingly unfunny humor of A Confederacy of Dunces. Both are utterly of a place, can't be told against the backdrop of any other place, and are pitilessly clear of vision. Both are the best-remembered works by their early-dead authors. And each is, taken on its own merits, marvelous parts in search of a gestalt to animate into more than some wonderful, memorable set-pieces embedded in perfunctory plotlike matrices.

LONELYHEARTS, a dual bio of a Depression-era golden couple

LONELYHEARTS: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney
MARION MEADE
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$22.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: Reviewing this book, I am more grateful than ever to the innovator who thought up the decimal-star system. No way could I rate this four stars, and three-and-a-half is a little mingy, so I really give it 3.8 stars.

The Publisher Says: NATHANAEL WEST—novelist, screenwriter, playwright, devoted outdoorsman—was one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939). Seventy years later, The Day of the Locust remains the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood.

EILEEN MCKENNEY—accidental muse, literary heroine—was the inspiration for her sister Ruth’s humorous stories, My Sister Eileen, which led to stage, film, and television adaptations, including Leonard Bernstein’s 1953 musical Wonderful Town. She grew up in Cleveland and moved to Manhattan at 21 in search of romance and adventure. She and her sister lived in a basement apartment in the Village with a street-level window into which men frequently peered.

Husband and wife were intimate with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katharine White, S.J. Perelman, Bennett Cerf, and many of the literary, theatrical, and movie notables of their era. With Lonelyhearts, biographer Marion Meade, whose Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin earned accolades from the Washington Post Book World ("Wonderful") to the San Francisco Chronicle ("Like looking at a photo album while listening to a witty insider reminisce about the images"), restores West and McKenney to their rightful places in the rich cultural tapestry of interwar America.

My Review: It's a good story...hot young honey who's famous for being famous marries screwed-up weirdo writer of unsalable novels, they end up dead. Kinda like the Joe Orton story, only no one here's a real man.

Nathanael West comes out worst in this dual bio. He sounds like a self-loathing closet queer and anti-Semitic Jew, with a talent for cruelty and impeccable, phony manners. (Sure could write, though.) Eileen McKenney sounds like someone we all know today, the fifteen-minutes' wonder...Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin...who would've spent the rest of her life trying to cash in on her fleeting moment of celebrity.

Dreadful people, actually, ones I'd pay not to know, and I am double glad that I didn't buy this book. Meade does a solid job reporting the facts, and even goes so far as to avoid calling West a closet case...but really, ma'am, you reported that the trog had gonorrhea of the ANUS, now does that not suggest something to you? Google the phrase "lucky Pierre" and stand back.

One of the bitterest ironies of the whole book is that Eileen's sister Ruth, the author of My Sister Eileen, became a very wealthy woman starting four days after Eileen's death...the Broadway show "My Sister Eileen" was a huge, huge hit, and spawned numerous revivals and reworkings, supporting its author all the rest of her life. I wonder if she'd've shared the gelt with Eileen. We'll never know, of course, but I suspect not. Ruth is not a likable character at all, per Meade, inclined to manic depressive episodes and a Communist True Believer (how tedious).

So why rate the book so highly? Because...these are REAL people, not airbrushed whitewashed celebrified people. They come across as, well, fascinating in their very, very, very flawed selves. Meade's made some dim corners of American celebrity life quite a lot brighter, and I suspect the likes of Kato Kaelin are busily dusting the corners of their lives.

I don't think I'll recommend this book to anyone not fascinated by Nathanael West. Really, it's just too far to go for someone just browsing around, and probably too tedious for anyone not already familiar with the time-period (1900-1940) in BOTH New York and Hollywood.

WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN?, a super read and a genuinely good classic Hollywood novel

WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN?
BUDD SCHULBERG
Random House
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symptoms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that makes these people tick. What makes them run?

This is the question Schulberg has asked himself, and the answer is the first novel written with the indignation that only a young writer with talent and ideals could concentrate into a manuscript. It is the story of Sammy Glick, the man with a positive genius for being a heel, who runs through New York’s East Side, through newspaper ranks and finally through Hollywood, leaving in his wake the wrecked careers of his associates; for this is his tragedy and his chief characteristic—his congenital incapacity for friendship.

An older and more experienced novelist might have tempered his story and, in so doing, destroyed one of its outstanding qualities. Compromise would mar the portrait of Sammy Glick. Schulberg has etched it in pure vitriol, and dissected his victim with a precision that is almost frightening.

When a fragment of this book appeared as a short story in a national magazine, Schulberg was surprised at the number of letters he received from people convinced they knew Sammy Glick’s real name. But speculation as to his real identity would be utterly fruitless, for Sammy is a composite picture of a loud and spectacular minority bitterly resented by the many decent and sincere artists who are trying honestly to realize the measureless potentialities of motion pictures. To this group belongs Schulberg himself, who has not only worked as a screen writer since his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1936, but has spent his life, literally, in the heart of the motion-picture colony. In the course of finding out what makes Sammy run (an operation in which the reader is spared none of the grue-some details) Schulberg has poured out everything he has felt about that place. The result is a book which the publishers not only believe to be the most honest ever written about Hollywood, but a penetrating study of one kind of twentieth-century success that is peculiar to no single race of people or walk of life.

My Review: Budd Schulberg got a lot of grief for writing this "anti-Semitic" shriek of outrage at the backstabbing, grasping, greedy, hollow culture of Hollywood. Well, how else could he tell the story? The moguls of the time were almost all Jewish, and they weren't nice little yeshiva boys but street toughs with chips on their shoulders hell bent for leather to make it to the top.

Today it is a lot less true of Hollywood's power elite. Not the behavior, the Jewishness. The behavior is intact! Of this I assure you from personal experience. And people of both genders and all religious and cultural affiliations enact it there. Awful place. As one would expect from any place where there is that much money floating around. *Breathtaking* amounts of money. The greed of these people is utterly beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. "Enough" is what you say to the chauffeur you're firing who complains it's unjust.

Reading this book was a bitter and painful reliving of my education in how "no good deed goes unpunished" and I will never re-read it for that reason. But dayum! What a glorious excoriation of the moral midgets who make our movies, TV shows, and music! I am in *awe* that Schulberg got away with writing it and stayed in Hollywood! Steven Spielberg, that maker of iconically positive movies, said the book should never be made into a movie because it's too anti-movie-biz.

Guess what: It never has been. Even Ben Stiller, who wanted to star and direct, couldn't get it done when he was at his peak of fame and power.

Shows you just how true it was, is, and will remain. *shudder*


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