Word: nathanael
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though he was born in Brooklyn, the city of Perelman's childhood and youth was Providence. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. At Brown University one of his best friends was Nathanael West, the future author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, and a future brother...
Dardis' telling of this poignant tale is serviceable. He knows the early days of Hollywood; his previous book Some Time in the Sun was a good account of how writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West functioned at the dream factory. Yet too many sentences creep along under the crustacean weight of adjectives: "The staggering impact of the immense success of these shows on the entire entertainment world . . ." Worse, Dardis too often strains after bogus significance: "Like Ernest Hemingway, who also spent childhood summers on a lake in Michigan, Buster early became an extremely proficient duck hunter." Such...
...despair in a paradise can be even deeper than in places where there are more concrete enemies or elements to fight. Walt Whitman ended his poem Facing West from California 's Shores: "But where is what I started for so long ago?/ And why is it yet unfound?" Nathanael West's classic portrayal of California madness, the mob scene in The Day of the Locust, shows the rage of those who fled the ordinariness of their lives. "Where else could they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?" he wrote. "Once there, they discovered that sunshine...
...misery of their lives. Though none of the characters can find either happiness or justice, God ultimately passes his own judgment on their plight. Days of Heaven climaxes with a cleansing, Old Testament plague of locusts-a nighttime Apocalypse so damning that it makes the similar finale of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust seem tame by comparison...
...like "The Maltese Falcon," "To Have and Have Not" and "The Big Sleep," go largely unappreciated by either the movie people or Dardis. Aldous Huxley, more successful in Dardis's terms because he made more money than Faulkner, spent his last years in Hollywood meditating on his own limitations. Nathanael West, forgotten in the basement of a second-rate studio where he slaved night and day to write cheap gangster flicks, had his vengeance in The Day of the Locust; where all of America was portrayed as a Hollywood burlesque. And James Agee, who left lucrative positions as film critic...