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PARTISAN REVIEW
a tough guy, as Gary Cooper, as a stout Confederate colonel. Surround–
ing them is the professional play-acting of Hollywood, where these
dreams are manufactured. The veil is stripped away in a cinematic
Waterloo which turns into a real disaster:
«
'Sauve qui peut!'
they
cried, or, rather, 'Scram!'" Waterloo looks forward to the riot with
which the book ends, a riot led by the faceless thousands who have
come to California to die. They are Miss Lonelyhearts' pathetic cor–
respondents, the native fascists of
A Cool Million;
unlike the grotesques
at the center of the novel, they cannot be pacified because they have
no masks, no identities other than their own bleak selves. Once more,
they are the tragic world invading the comic oasis of West's imagination.
West appalled his contemporaries- and, apparently, himself-be–
cause he saw comic and ugly things which were merely real and not
significant. He could not confine himself to instructive social phe–
nomena. He saw meaningless, unpremeditated violence. "In America
violence is idiomatic," he wrote. "In America violence is daily." He
saw and reflected what had best be called, clumsily if accurately, xeno–
phobia. Foreigners are especially unpleasant, in West, in an admittedly
unpleasant world-from the Jewish guide in
Balso Snell,
to the Italian
who fathered Mrs. Doyle's bastard in
Miss Lonelyhearts,
to the crooked
Jewish lawyer and the Chinese brothelkeeper in
A Cool Million,
to the
tough Jewish bookie and the Mexican cockfighter of
The Day of the
Locust.
In
A Cool Million,
we are told: "It is lamentable but a fact,
nevertheless, that the inferior races greatly desire the women of their
superiors." The principle is still in force in
The Day of the Locust.
Six
men, each in his fashion, lust after a dazzling platinum blonde, Faye
Greener; the one who is found in bed with her is, inevitably, the Mexi–
can. And he's not even a proletarian! Clearly, West did not write im–
proving literature. The other day, I heard a well-known critic speak
on the buoyant, hopeful spirit of the '30s. I was not surprised that he
ignored Nathanael West.
Henry Popkin
POWER AND BELIEF
MASS CULTURE. Edited
by
Bernord Rosenberg ond David Monning
White. The Free Press. $6.50.
The title of course is a paradox, which the book amply justi–
fies . The irony is that this critique of mass culture is a defense of ro-
