448
PARTISAN REVIEW
eggs but no omelets. Far from being models for social reform, his key
characters incline to pessimism, masochism, sadism, and skepticism to–
ward the familiar attitudes, mottoes, and causes. Flight and death are
the only feasible solutions to their problems.
If
Miss Lonelyhearts feels
pity, it is accompanied by an awareness of guilt and inadequacy; he still
stands outside the human scene: "Like a dead man, only friction could
make him warm or violence make him mobile." His editor, Shrike, ticks
off the various escapes which might be possible: the simple life, the
South Seas, hedonism, art, suicide, and drugs; the elimination of all
these leaves only God, whose image haunts Miss Lonelyhearts. Another
list turns up in
The
Dcry
of the Locust:
"What a perfect escape the
return to the womb was. Better by far than Religion or Art or the
South Sea Islands." Observe the omission of social revolution from both
lists. Whatever West believed privately, the underground man of
his
novels could never be moved by any social creed.
The main symptoms of West's underground tendencies are violence,
grotesquerie, xenophobia, and, most of all, a comic view of serious
matters. His comic sense of life made him an artist, but it disqualified
him as a "social novelist." He admired the left-wing writers and even
joined them on the picket lines, but
if
he ever tried to write like them,
he was overpowered by a sense of the ludicrous. Consequently, he sel–
dom mentions the social movement that dominated the serious fiction
of his time. He expressed his problem in a letter to Malcolm Cowley:
"I'm a comic writer and it seems impossible for me to handle any
of the 'big things' without seeming to laugh or at least smile.... Take
the 'mother' in Steinbeck's swell novel-I want to believe in her and
yet inside myself I honestly can't." A socially-conscious writer who saw
Ma Joad's silly side obviously had too fine a comic sense to do any
preaching. And so,
Balsa Snell
is more solipsistic than social; in
Miss
Lonelyhearts,
the only Savior is Christ, not Marx.
A Cool Million
is
conventionally regarded as West's one contribution to the class struggle;
West satirizes native fascism, but, when he briefly represents a Com–
munist propagandist, the humor is two-edged: "Laughing heartily, the
two millionaires move along the street. In their way lie the four dead
bodies and they almost trip over them. They exit cursing the street
cleaning department for its negligence." Perhaps West thought he was
burlesquing the fascist conception of Communist propaganda, but he
is also commenting directly on the prolet-play. In his last book,
The
Day
of the Locust,
he wanted to describe a meeting of the Hollywood
Anti-Nazi League, but his comic sense got the better of him and his
account was "libelous." He substituted "a whore-house and a dirty
film."
