Word: nathanael
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...When I described my thesis topic to the History and Lit people, I said that there was nothing left but the dead plastic horse at the bottom of the swimming pool. The dead plastic horse comes from Nathanael West, but the History and Lit people didn't like the image. For one thing, it seemed frivolous. And dead and plastic are, after all redundant. Where will you be next Locust...
...NATHANAEL WEST: THE ART OF HIS LIFE by Jay Martin. 435 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Nathanael West habitually wore what he called "the smile of an anarchist . . . with a bomb in his pocket." He also carried the bomb. During the '30s, West flipped two high-explosive satires (Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust) at Middle America. Hardly anybody noticed. His four novels, which took 14 years to write (1924-1938), earned him exactly $1,280 in royalties. Twenty years after his shocking death he was recognized as the finest and blackest American humorist since Mark Twain went to his bitter end. Now, a young California English professor has at last accorded West...
...flasks and sis-boom-bah. But the public image concealed an all-night reader who forged through Flaubert, Rimbaud, Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Pound, Cummings, Stein, Hemingway. In the fall of 1926, with a wad in his wallet and a life of leisure in view, he changed his name to Nathanael West and sailed off to Paris to join the Lost Generation. It was going to be ortolans all the way. But that winter the family fortune showed signs of imminent collapse. Early in 1927, West found himself working as night manager in a seedy little Manhattan hotel on 23rd Street...
...great weakness of this biography is Jay Martin's failure to find the obscure hurt that made Nathanael West scream literature. In such a man hurt lies deeper than anger, and West knew it. In Miss Lonelyhearts he hinted that he wrote "for the same reason that an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain." What crushed his heart, he acknowledged, was the difference between what life is and what it ought to be. I am, he said, "one of those 'great despisers' whom Nietzsche loved because 'they are the great adorers; they...