BOO KS
West combined an encyclopedic knowledge of the misery of the
'30s with a hyperactive sense of humor. He bears out the classic defini–
tion that associates comedy with a consciousness of superiority; West
sees the grotesque, the maimed, the unfortunate, the failures, and, in
spite of himself, he laughs. As early as
Balso Snell,
he writes: "I always
find it necessary to burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source; I
must laugh at myself, and if the laugh is 'bitter,' I must laugh at the
laugh. The ritual of feeling demands burlesque and, whether the bur–
lesque is successful or not, a laugh. . . ." He is the unlucky man who
giggles at a funeral; he is Beagle Darwin in
Balso Snell,
who hopes he
will seem serious enough when he is told his mistress has killed herself.
He is John Raskolnikov Gilson in the same book, who has enjoyed
the thought of his mistress' surprise at her death. When serious situa–
tions occur in
Balso Snell,
West guiltily backs away and uses the dream
form to reduce them to frivolity. Accordingly, the Dostoevskian Crime
Journal has been written by a schoolboy bent on seducing his teacher
and the story of the suicide
is
written by a husky schoolmarm who wants
to revive the epistolary novel.
Comedy keeps breaking into
Miss Lonelyhearts,
although the ad–
vice-to-the-Iovelorn columnist staggers under a heavy burden of other
people's sorrow. His editor's shrill jests and his own misadventures on
the road to martyrdom impair Miss Lonelyhearts' perfect anguish; we
are told he is trying to get to a state of humility that is "below self–
laughter." It requires no great leap of the imagination to see West him–
self striving vainly to overcome his own inability to respond properly
to serious. social issues, to do the "big things." This tension is the sub–
stance of the book and the source of its singularly authentic anguish.
With
A Cool Million,
the pendulum swings all the way back, and
West fully indulges his comic talents. For once he unleashes his gift
for .cliche and his passion for violence-qualities which are curbed,
masked, or censored in the other books. All the misfortunes which might
ov:ertake Miss Lonelyhearts' many correspondents here befall Lemuel
Pitkin, a simpleton of invincible optimism. Everything happens to him,
from scalping to political assassination. This time, we don't feel a
thing. West's dead-pan extravagance anaesthetizes us, acting as a sort
of laughing gas; the book is, in fact, very funny.
The Day of the Locust
restores the tension between comedy and
pathos. Here West assembles his most considerable menagerie of gro–
tesques, all of them spiritual freaks who know just how appalling their
reality is. They start back in horror from the mirror, and they escape–
not to the South Seas, but into a variety of comic performances--as a
movie star, as a song-and-dance man (doubling as dear old daddy), as
