VARIETY
an intensely personal world, a
wasteland, where, as far as Miss L.
could discover, "there were no
signs of spring. The decay that cov–
ered the surface of matted ground
was not the kind which life gen–
erates. Last year, he remembered,
May had failed to quicken these
soiled fields. It had taken all the
brutality of July to torture a few
green spikes through the exhausted
dirt." Here too in New York,
"crowds of people moved through–
out the street with a dreamlike
violence," and "the gray sky looked
as if it had been rubbed with a
soiled eraser. It held no angels,
flaming crosses, olive-bearing doves,
wheels within wheels. Only a news–
paper struggled in the air like a
kite with a broken spine." No fruc–
tifying rains relieve the drought,
and at the end of the novel, the
Fisher King still sits desolate by a
dry canal.
Miss Lonelyhearts
must
be read against a background of
crashing banks, breadlines, and the
WPA; it is symptomatic of eco–
nomic as well as of moral stagna–
tion. George Grosz-if he did not
help to inspire it--might have
drawn the illustrations.
That West himself was thinking
about social portents and latent
revolution is made clear in his third
novel,
A Cool Million
or
The Dis–
mantling of Lemuel Pitkin,
a kind
of inverted mock-heroic
It Can't
Happen Here.
The American suc–
cess code had lost some of its magic
by 1934, and the prestige of the
businessman, enormously inflated
during the twenties, had come
down a little with the Market.
101
THE INTERPRETATION
OF HISTORY
J. SALWYN SCHAPffiO
JosEPH
T.
SHIPLEY,
Chairmen
9 Lectures - Tuesday eves. at 8:15
Feb. 4th
Reason, Fact and Fetish in History
Sidney Hook,
Professor of Philoso–
phy, New York University
Feb. 11th
Condorcet's History of Progress
J. Salwyn Schapiro,
Professor of His–
tory, The City College, New York
Feb. 18th
Buckle's Civilization In England
Ralph E. Turner,
Professor of His–
tory, Yale University
Feb. 25th
Carlyle's Oliver Cromwell
David S. Muzzey,
Professor Emeritus,
Columbia University
Mar. 4th
Marx's Critique of Political Economy
(Author's Preface)
Algernon Lee,
Editor, "Essentials of
Marx"
Mar. 11th
Spengler's Decline of the West
(Speaker to be announced)
Mar. 18th
Toynbee's Study of History
Allan Nevins,
Professor of History,
Columbia University
Mar. 25th
Beard's Rise of American Civilization
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
Professor
of History, Harvard University
Apr. 1st
St. Augustine's City of God
Francis Downing,
Former Professor
of History, Fordham University
Course Fee $6.50. Single Admission $1.
Register now by mail or in person
RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
7 East 15 Street, N. Y. 3
ALgonquin 4-3094-5-6
