Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day Of The Locust (1969) - Plot & Excerpts
To be honest, I was expecting something lighter. Here was the hook: Miss Lonelyhearts, an advice columnist in the early 30’s, is really a man. Sounds like a role for Jimmy Stewart at his gosh-darned chirpiest, doesn’t it? But the first few pages put a different image in mind – it was Pottersville without benefit of George Bailey. The letters in to Miss Lonelyhearts were just so bleak. Of course, it was a time when deprivations were de rigueur. Those lacking money, health, or wedded bliss had very little recourse. The joke, if there ever was one, was on him. (Note: he was only ever referred to as Miss Lonelyhearts, which makes me think we’re meant to know him as a 2-dimensional everyman.) His editor knew how hopeless these advice-seekers were, so it was a cruel act on his part to assign Miss L, a man with shaky mettle and faith as it was, to the task. Once I replaced my rose-colored glasses with a much darker shade, I got attuned to the mood West was going for and the dystopia he envisioned. There was certainly a noir feel to it all. The book was interesting to view as an 80 year old time capsule, too. Lots of the interactions between Miss L, his editor, and various women took place in speakeasies. Fat lips were a common occurrence, and distinctions between lovemaking and rape weren’t as clear as they should have been. It was also a time when the word “gay” was used often and differently.We’ve all seen reviews where the place is identified as a character. In this case, it seems more appropriate to say that the zeitgeist was. West, whose real name was Nathan Weinstein, was no doubt aware of the growing anti-Semitism. These were meaner times, in general, and it was easy to see how Miss Lonelyhearts, who had above-average levels of compassion and Christian good intent to begin with could become disaffected. Miss L went several rounds against the aforementioned zeitgeist, but you’ll just have to read the novella to find out how he fared.The Day of the Locust shares a sense of alienation. The central character was Tod (the German word for dead) and the story follows him to Hollywood where his artistic ambitions are brought down a few notches as a painter of movie sets. This one was set in the Depression era, too. He falls for an aspiring actress, Faye Greener, who tells him upfront they’ll only ever be just friends because he had no pull in the movie biz. They meet an unfortunate but financially secure schlub from Iowa who was told to go West for health reasons. The guy lets Faye stay at his place which made things complicated since one of his reasons for leaving Iowa was to suppress sexual impulses. (Did West get his directions mixed up?) Anyway, this guy’s name, Homer Simpson, sent me straight to Google. As it turns out, Matt Groenig has given two answers to the obvious question, one being that it was from this character, the other being that his dad was the source. These characters and a memorable set of others including Faye’s dad (a former vaudevillian), a hard-drinking, quick-tempered midget, a cowboy extra in movies and the cowboy’s Mexican friend (an expert in cock-fighting) existed at the margins of Hollywood. West got to know this world as a screenwriter so it seemed to ring true. It was truth at its darkest, though. Love was a sham, glamour-seekers were deluded, and the American dream failed both for its spirit and promise of riches. West died in a car accident along with his wife the year after this was published. He was 37 years old. There’s no way we can know if a country lifted from The Great Depression would have lifted him, too. He would have at least been gratified to learn that this poignant latter work made the Modern Library Top 100 list as well as the one Time Magazine compiled.
"Violence in America is idiomatic." Nathanael West (Nathan Weinstein)Reading West is to be struck, as in the face, again and again by his visceral sexual violence. It's frustrating but not surprising that the main literary legacy of West is a more generic brutality -- without acknowledgment that much of that violence is sexual in nature and theme. This shines brightest in Day of the Locust, where the very West-ian Homer Simpson (could it be a coincidence????) struggles hourly as though sex was a virus in him, struggles to keep it dormant, plagued with a chronic worry that it might break out and crush the wholeness of a girl "like an egg in the palm of his hand." Elsewhere, our narrator Tod fantasizes about rape while eating a steak dinner, musing over "A feeling, already, of what it would be like to push her down." This violence and obsession is foreshadowed in Miss Lonelyhearts, who "buries his face like a hatchet into her neck," but it's a more subdued thing in that novella. It blossoms in full force in Day of the Locust as a steady, ugly compulsion - the will to injure women, to rape, molest -- it becomes clear in Day of the Locust that it was something more than an occasionally ugly turn of phrase. I understand, of course, that there really was a legitimate metaphor in this obsession -- Los Angeles, and particularly Hollywood, invites dishonor in that way; its inhabitants feel a compulsion to seek its attention by any means necessary. But to discuss West without acknowledging the obvious dimension of gender politics is to do a disservice to history and to his work. It wasn't just a metaphor -- and even if it was, we might as well unpack it.The other stars of these books are their cities -- New York in Miss Lonelyhearts and Los Angeles in Day of the Locust. New York is a frantic maze of stairs and skyscrapers; but Los Angeles stretches out lazily across the desert. West writes of Los Angeles at a time when there was a real symbiosis between the city itself and Hollywood - both were lawless and lovely then, coarse and brutal; they shared an easy economy between mechanical lenses and streets; to see one was to see the other. Things have changed -- the two have not quite grown together. A bitterness, yes, an ennui has come to overshadow the luster. But it's something more -- perhaps it's just that the city has gotten too big to be congruent with Hollywood. Too big, too diverse. The lawlessness is disconnected, or more diffuse. You can still catch the light just right sometimes, in the corners of the Hollywood Hills or downtown. But the two have outgrown each other; nothing left but memories and innuendo. I love reading about Old Los Angeles - and there's just no one who wrote about it better than West.
What do You think about Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day Of The Locust (1969)?
i've always loved a black comedy. and this one always has the ability to make me want to burst out into cackles and cry for three days at the same time.whenever i meet someone who hasn't read this yet, i'm shocked. it seems like it should be required reading for life. some of this is hard to take - the plight of miss lonelyhearts and his conflicts with the human condition, misery and religion would be unbearable to read if he had a real name. miss lonelyhearts isn't a likable man. nothing pretty happens here. but as pathetic and sad as he is, there is value in exploring just how shitty the human condition can be and just how bad things can get.the way west deftly turns sex, violence and misery on their heads - since they are viewed through the lens of this sort of paralyzed man - isn't just admirable. it's something i notice in books that followed for years after - a strain of blackness that seems to start with this book and then wind through countless other authors.
—Sarah Etter
According to the back cover: "Nathanael West died almost unknown in 1940" - fairly young in a car crash. "Miss Lonelyhearts" is about a newspaper columnist who gets emotionally sucked into the dilemmas of the people who write in to him. A novel of conscience, set in an often conscienceless profession. "The Day of the Locust" is a critique of Hollywood - later made into a Hollywood movie. I'm 'reviewing' his 4 novels here out of my usual alphabetical order that I'm working thru my lit section in b/c I just read this in Lewis Yablosky's great bk "Robopaths" last nite: Literary works abound with descriptive appraisals of the condition of "common people," their proclivity for ahuman acts, and their general simmering hostility. One perceptive literary analyst of this genre of the "silent majority" of robopaths was the brilliant novelist, Nathanael West, who revealed some dimensions of the problem. In the late thirties he came to Hollywood and trained his literary camera not on the movie studios or the stars, but on the "common people" who, as West's central character in The Day of the Locust states, "came to California to die." West, through this character, wrote: "All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. . . . Where else could they go but to California, the land of sunshine and oranges? "Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. . . . Nothing happens. They don't know what to do with their time. . . . Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. . . . Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and slaved for nothing." In The Day of the Locust a central character is Tod Hackett, a young painter who is planning a painting called "The burning of Los Angeles." (Interestingly, this artisitic and literary speculation is already a reality.) [Yablonsky's bk was published in 1972 so he's presumably referring to the Watts riots of 1968(?) here] The book ends with the "living dead" masses venting their frustration and hostility in a mad riot of fire that sets off the burning of other cities throughout the country. West, like Moreno, Capek, Huxley, and Orwell, has turned out to be a seer of an incipient apocalypse nurtured by robopathic leaders and followers in contemporary social machine societies.
—tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE
Miss Lonelyhearts, a novella that made the 1001 Books You Must Read list, is a companion piece to Salinger's maudlin, crude, symbolic works. It is about an advice columnist who thinks he is a demi god, who ignores the troubles of everyone around him to the point of satire, who makes fun of the people he should save. Think: a lazy, lost, heartless Frasier Crane. His co workers are assholes as well. The plot takes an unexpected turn at the climax... the antihero's fate is sealed; he gets what he deserves.The irreverent "Day of the Locust" is about the moral decay of Hollywood. Los Angeles is a place where "people come to die." It is with this attitude, infused in the 5 or so interrelated vignettes, that we discover that the lost souls are selfish, indulgent, materialistic. Tod is a set designer who is in love with Faye Greener, a Fitzgeraldesque vixen, who pretty much beds all of his friends, works hard only for her professional advancement. But the reader knows that these girls, despite their enviable and covetable beauty, are dime a dozen. There is the tragic figure of Homer, the 40 year old prepared to get healthy eating California oranges and living a lax lifestyle. There are cock fights and visits to Zelsnick-like sets, there are dreamers and immigrants, there is even a climax at, very fittingly, a movie premiere. Almost as if something came full circle...West only wrote these two, and I am glad to have heard his singular voice. Though "Locust" (oddly named) is a masterpiece, "Lonelyhearts" seems unfulfilled and too trite. They are eye-opening and remind me of why I loathe Los Angeles in the first place.
—Fabian
