110
PARTISAN REVIEW
might well think of them as the intellectuals' own fonn of popular
culture. These lucubrations have been self-conscious or condescending
or inspired by a mawkish concern over the fate of culture. In nearly
every case, the writer has been disinclined or unable to participate in the
life he was talking about. Hollywood, radio, television, detective stories,
the comic strips, etc., are no place for the alienated; you either like
this sort of thing or you leave it alone. The only man who, in my
opinion,
really knew what he was
doing
was Nathanael West, and this is
because of his theme-it runs through both
Miss Lonelyhearts
and
The
Day of the Locust,
and it makes him
unique
among American novelists–
the secret inner life of the masses.
West's credentials for writing
The Day of the Locust
were pain–
fully earned. He came to Hollywood to write for the movies, when
th~
three novels he had already published, including
Miss Lonelyhearts,
failed to sell. But there
isn't
a streak of self-pity in
T he Day of tht3
Locust,
though it is derived from an experience of Hollywood that must
have been up to his ears. He went beyond the personal irritation; in
fact, Hollywood didn't seem to have irritated him at all. There is so
much gusto in his satire, so much taste for the very thing he was destroy–
ing, that he achieved in this book a kind of
serenity,
as a man will when
his love and his hate work together.
Though West did not want to be considered a surrealist, it is a
fairly accurate classification; there is the same compression of meaning
in his images, often several layers thick, and the compression achieves
for
him
a similar effect, incandescent and explosive. Now this is by no
means an estrangement from the popular, the surrealists themselves
having made ex tensive use of devices from popular culture. In West's
use of this imagery he straddles the two worlds of his own sensibility,
the poetic and the popular, and the grotesques who fill his work, the
dwarf bookie, the girl with a hole in her face instead of a nose ("no
boy will take me out ... although I am a good dancer and have a
nice shape and ... pretty clothes"), the family of performing Eskimos,
etc., are derived from this juxtaposition. This not only gave West ac–
cess to an existence usually closed to intellectuals; it worked both ways,
showing him the limitations of the intellectuals' ordinary position. His
conscious characters are by the measure of their own elevation above the
mass cut off from the necessary contact with common life. The result
is neither an apology for nor a condemnation of the popular. It has in–
dependent status, the nearest thing to a new art fonn ever to be
derived from the materials of a mass culture.
It
is a
pity
that he had
not fully brought it off at the time of his early death, for with West
