100
that reappear in his later writing.
It is savage, iconoclastic, uterine
(it begins in the anus of the Wood–
en Horse and ends with the dream–
er's orgasm) -and most typical of
all it illustrates West's predilection
for the perverse and the grotesque.
We meet in these pages the first of
the monstrosities who are to be
more artistically and credibly pre–
sented in the later books. West is
obviously experimenting in style
and technique as well as subject
matter. The book is a composite
of satirical rhapsodies, lewdly pe–
dantic speculations, and parodies
reminiscent of S.
J.
Perelman in his
less subtle moments. Scatological
and pretentiously wise, the book is
novel without being original.
Somewhere in
Balsa Snell
ap–
pears the following reflection:
An intelligent man finds it easy
to laugh at himself, but his laughter
is not sincere if it is thorough.
If
I
could be Hamlet, or even a clown
with a breaking heart 'neath his
jester's motley, the role would be
tolerable. But I always find it neces–
sary to burlesque the mystery of
feeling at its source; I must laugh
at myself, and if the laugh is "bit–
ter," I must laugh at the laugh. The
ritual of feeling demands burlesque
and, whether the burlesque is suc–
cessful or not, a laugh. .. .
In
Miss Lonelyhearts
West bur–
lesques "the mystery of feeling at
its source." The hero, a newspaper
reporter conducting a Beatrix Fair–
fax column for "Sick-of-it-all,"
"Desperate," and "Disillusioned–
with-tubercular-husband" begins to
take seriously what he undertook as
a joke. He is inundated with mis–
ery, develops a Christ complex
PARTISAN REVIEW
(thereby becoming a
grotesque
in
the Sherwood Anderson sense) and
dies after experiencing the full
measure of frustration which West
invariably reserves for his bedeviled
protagonists. ·All of Miss L.'s mis–
adventures are carried on in a sur–
realist atmosphere of newspaper of–
fices, speakeasies, and bedrooms,
and we are never permitted to for–
get the ineffectualness of this neu–
rotic Charlie Chaplin, this two-bit
Dostoevsky.
One of the spokesmen for West's
Mephistophelian commentary on
man's desperation is Miss L.'s boss,
Shrike, who first appeared as Bea–
gle Darwin in
Balso Snell.
Shrike,
another damned soul, is
a.
grotesque
parallel of Mallachi Mulligan or
one of Aldous Huxley's articulate
cynics, but he stifles his despair
with furious humor and destructive
rhetoric. It is the satanic Shrike
who mockingly holds up the possi–
bilities of escape to Miss L.-the
rural life, the South Sea idyll, the
cultivation of the senses, art-and
then rejects them. No, Shrike con–
cludes, "God alone is our escape.
The church is our only hope, the
First Church of Christ Dentist,
where He is worshipped as Preventer
of Decay. The church whose sym–
bol is the trinity new-style: Father,
Son, and Wire-haired Fox Ter–
rier. . . . " Robert Cantwell was
right when he called
Miss Lonely–
hearts
a "modernized, faithless,
Pil–
grim's Progress."
The world of
Miss Lonelyhearts
is less fantastic than the insides of
the Trojan Horse, for West became
increasingly objective, but it is still
