FAULKNER AND CONTEMPORARIES
III
went one of our few real chances to salvage something from com–
mercialization; and we are not likely to have another writer so gifted
and so well situated.
But this puts it all too placidly. West's art was closer to nightmare.
He saw, as everybody has seen, the starvation latent in the popular
media, but he stayed clear of the platitudes and condolences over the
death of culture. He showed the death of everything with the walls
tumbling down. The starvation is not only for good books and fine
music; it is a starvation for all of life, for sexual fulfillment, for decent
work, for pleasure and happiness and relief from the desolation that
drives people insane. (West had a religious sense of this need, which must
have worked in him as it does in the mass, making him peculiarly sen–
sitive to the symbols of holy violence.
The Day of the Locust
is foaming
with prophecy.) Out of this starvation swarm the locusts, the mobs gone
mad and descending on the cities to revenge themselves on the make–
believe of effortless satisfaction that inflamed their hunger. Nathanael
West was in touch with the popular culture over its whole range, and
he has so far remained the only one who has drawn the whole conclusion.
Because the writing of the first few chapters is so poor, it is tempting
to put down
The Disenchanted
by Budd Schulberg as the usual Holly–
wood story. But this is really not the case, for the writing improves
somewhat toward the middle of the book, and the motive of the novel,
it soon becomes clear, is an excellent one. I have come to feel about
novels such as this very much as I do about the movies themselves.
An
honest B production is the safest bet, and I will take it any day in
preference to the artistic jobs with a purpose that are supposed to ap–
peal to my advanced taste.
The Disenchanted
is a straight B job, and
a rather unpretentious one, considering the opportunities for exploita–
tion in its theme-a dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald's declining
days. Schulberg does not have the necessary sensibility to get into the
character of so highly sensitive a writer as Fitzgerald; but he does as well
as he can, and his love and loyalty to him are most of the time touching
in their sincerity. The several moments of failure are caused by his
extreme veneration for the figure of the novelist. Like his producer,
Victor Milgrim (a character which he handles very well ) he is often
unable to do more with Halliday than to put him on display. He ex–
hibits his ruin, piling on the humiliations (his only dramatic way of
showing how much better Fitzgerald deserved) until the whole effect
is
lost. But he makes up for this in the passages which compare the
twenties with the present, and seriously try to catch and analyze the
qualities of Fitzgerald's style.
