Nathaniel West Stranded Between "Art" and "Life"

LAST SPRING Norman Mailer gave a reading from a work in progress. Afterwards a student asked why, amidst our intolerable political problems, he was writing about moonships and skin-head technicians. Mailer said because they interested him. It was not a popular answer, he had side-stepped a political question with a non-political answer. But the appropriate literary response was not to become a seedier Vonnegut. Questions of the political justifications of art, particularly in a highly politicized time, become the only questions, and writers are left stranded between their literary impulses and political sympathies.

During the thirties, Nathanael West was similarly stranded. Though the material for his four novels was drawn from the face of the Great Depression, his political intentions were never immediately explicit. To a public looking for easily digestible explanations, he was hopelessly off the ideological mark. Few writers of the thirties were as concerned with intellectual integrity, but West feared his inability to sell his books to a wide audience was an index of his failure as an artist. A socialist (for a time a communist) the polities of his writing were imbedded in the fabric of his style, but it was infrequently recognized.

West saw the economic collapse in -1929 as the outward sign of a long overdue spiritual decay, conceiving his characters not as microcosms of material injustices, but human beings cut adrift in an empty world. The bleakness of Miss Lonely-hearts and The Day of the Locust reflect West's own isolation. He was always very shy, had few friends and never attended school regularly. After graduating from college he left immediately for Paris and from a dark corner in Sylvia Beach's bookshop watched Joyce and Hemingway browse through the stacks.

For several years West tried to live like Natasha, "in the radiance of cultural truth," and he avariciously gulped down the most fashionable aesthet-ics-dadalsm. expressionism and futurism. But the stock market disaster that put nearly forty million men out of work made hoh-nobbing with other literary radicals on manicured Connecticut lawns grotesque sham. West's attention turned to the victims of the crisis and the calibrate fantasy worlds which mitigated their tragedies. The subject of his first novel. The Dream Life of Balso Snell, was West's own dreams. But the progress of his writing traces his broadened increst in peculiarly American myths and their frenetic residues.

The political climate of the thirties denuded the last of the Horatio Algers and radicalized intellectuals, but the middle class reached for alternative ways out. Holywood became their one-dimen-sional Mecca, dance marathons and polesitting were popularized, and newspapers began running columns of advice for lost souls. West's last three novels, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million and The Day of the Locust, use these vaudvillian antics not satirically, but with an eye to the deep pain that necessitated them.

He resisted the contemporary trends to class portrayals and clear ideological perspectives in favor of examining more fundamental spiritual maladies, defined by the banality of everday existence. Tod Hackett of The Day of the Locust, recently graduated from Yale, is no less caught up in the Hollywood dream factory than his pan-handler and pimp friends. West grew to condemn not Americans but American ways and manners, evident in the leathery rationalizations of business leaders, as well as the radical polities of many of his friends.

Jay Martin's new biography of Nathaniel West misses the nature of this struggle between his ideals and existential pressures. Too long ignored, West's life however is impeccably documented. He graduated from college after passing only three courses. Falsifying his high school transcript to get into Tufts, he flunked out after one semester without passing a course. Hoping to transfer, he requested his records and was mistakenly sent another student's with the same name. He was accepted by Brown with a B+ average and junior standing on the luck of his shuffled transcripts, finally graduating with a minimal average.

He also contracted gonorrhea twice, which indicates Martin has done a thorough, factual job, but the reader is left short of seeing the heated interface of West's artistic ambitions and the political exigencies of his era. Part of Martin's problem lies in his understanding of the political atmosphere of the thirties. Liberal, Trotskyite, Socialist and Stalinist are used interchangeably, or with the most superficial transitions. But West's relation to the different political groups is never satisfactorily explained, consequently abandoning an important interpretive tool. The work is an invaluable source book, but "The Art of His Life" as the subtitle hints, would be better examined by a more pointed, intimate study.

Regardless, Martin's biography has done much to stimulate a revival of interest in West. It would be difficult to place him as a major artist of the first half of the twentieth century, but his contribution to literature is significant. Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, probably his best novels, are both short, compressed and episodic, anticipating forms only now being elaborated by Brautigan and Barthelme. West's use of artifacts from mass culture and delicate caricatures during a time concerned with the purity of literature evidences his versatile and original talent. However, he made very little money from his novels and was forced to work in California as a screen writer, cranking out weekly scripts and treatments of novels for film. In December, 1940, the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald died, West, only 38, was killed in a traffic accident. Jay Martin's biography will do a great deal to reconstruct the importance of his loss.