VARIETY
fish on account of millions are
starving for a bite of herring").
But the tension of the novel comes,
as in West's other books, from his
recognition of the ineluctable dis–
content of the masses. In
Miss
Lonelyhearts
he lifted up the board
to show grubby things writhing
in
urban darkness; he described a
people devoured by personal an–
guish.
The Day of the Locust
is
also a season
in
hell which erupts
at the end with a middle-class riot
precipitated by a movie premiere.
West sees in the Hollywood mob
a people brutalized by leisure,
cheated by phony illusions. And like
his painter-hero (later to catch the
spirit of this thwarted host of side–
line lookers in his canvas, "The
Burning of Los Angeles") he dram–
atizes "the contrast between their
drained-out, feeble bodies and their
wild, disordered minds." Lured to
California by sunlight and orange
juice and stupefied by a madden–
ingly bland climate , these Iowa
picnickers are "stirred only by the
promise of miracles and then only
to violence." They suffer from a
cosmic ennui which only lynchings
and love-nests can mitigate.
"It
is
hard to laugh at the need for beau–
ty and romance," West observes,
"no matter pow tasteless, even hor–
rible, the results of that need are.
But it is easy to sigh. Few things
are sadder than the truly mon–
strous."
Any moral conclusions about
New York or Hollywood or Amer–
ican life in general are never stated
explicitly in West's novels, and his
103
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