BOO KS
447
whose connection with the '30s appears purely chronological. His chief
function is to stand in perpetual need of being rediscovered.
The Li–
terature of the American People
knows him not; to
The Literary History
of the United States
he is the author of a "fantastic" book which caught
the fancy of the French.
This new volume will at least have the effect of making West's
admirers seem less like a secret squadron; no longer will there be any
distinction in knowing how to come by a copy of his surrealist fantasy
The Dream Life of Balso Snell
or his Horatio Alger parody
A Cool
Million.
But West's admirers will take a curiously Westian pleasure in
noting that an inevitable residue of injustice still prevails.
The Com–
plete Works
is incomplete, since it omits West's fugitive prose, including
"Some Notes on Violence"; it is typographically deficient, in that it
omits the line of American flags West used for asterisks near the end of
A Cool Million ;
and the publisher, having made an odd choice of a
preface, has neglected to mention its previous appearance, in almost
identical form, in
Horizon
in 1948. Alan Ross has revised his essay
mainly with an eye to toning down a few disparaging statements. For
instance,
&lso Snell
is no longer West's one book which "has nothing
to say"; instead, it is the only one "in which private despair is not re–
lated to a social condition." Ross covers the ground well enough, con–
sidering that he is working in a vacuum; his meager references to the
passing of the Jazz Age mark his only recognition of West's environ–
ment-America of the '30s. He takes no note of the now abundant
material on West's connections with the "social writers" of his time;
or he takes note of it by cutting out this sentence from his
Horizon
text: "About West's private life little appears to be known." As might
be expected, Ross's answers to the big question about West-his failure
to win recognition-are entirely inadequate. First, we are told that the
American audience had "a guilty conscience." (But that guilty con–
science was continually being aired in the most characteristic fiction of
West's time.) Second, the publisher of
Balso Snell
went out of business.
(I can't believe anyone expected longevity from Contact Editions; per–
haps Ross is thinking of Liveright, which published
Miss Lonelyhearts.
However, West's last novel was published by Random House; Mr.
Cerf's success should therefore have made West a household word.)
Third, "the shadow of an imminent war" distracted readers. (This same
shadow did not prevent people from reading John Steinbeck and Mar–
garet Mitchell.) The question remains- why were West's books ignored?
West failed to find an audience in his own time because' he had
an acute vision of irreducible evil-that evil which his reformist con–
temporaries considered unreal or curable. He lived in a world of broken
