DREAMERS
347
That tone is established once and for all in the work of Nathanael
West, in whom begins (however little the critics may have suspected
it in his own time) the great take-over by Jewish-American writers
of the American imagination: our inheritance from certain Gentile
predecessors, urban Anglo-Saxons and midwestern provincials of
North European origin, of the
task
of dreaming aloud the dreams
of the whole American people. How fitting, then, that West's
first book-published in 1931, at the point when the first truly Jew–
ish decade in the history of our cultural life was beginning-be called
The Dream Lite of Balso Snell;
and that it turn out to be, in fact,
a fractured and dissolving parable of the very process by which the
emancipated Jew enters into the world of Western culture.
Balso himself gets in by penetrating through the asshole of that
symbol of tradition and treacherous conquest, "the famous wooden
horse of the Greeks." West makes his point with some care, perhaps
a little too insistently for subtlety's sake: not only is it the "Trojan"
horse that alone gets us into the beleaguered city; but for us Jews,
just to make it into the horse in the first place is a real problem
-since, after all,
it
was built for Greeks. We do not need Balso to
tell us that there are only three possible openings, three entry-ways
into any horse, even the most fabulous of beasts; but which way is
for us we do not know in advance; and this he is prepared to ex–
plain, reporting of his hero, our thirties representative: "The mouth
was beyond his reach, the naval provided a cul-de-sac, and so, forget–
ting his dignity, he approached the last. 0 Anus Mirabilis!" 0 Anus
Mirabilis! It is a lovely, an inevitable pun-and not only in 1931;
since in any age, the Jewish Dream Peddler must, like Balso, "forget
his dignity" to get inside. Not for him, the High Road to Culture
via
the "horse's mouth," nor the mystical way of "contemplating the
navel"; only the acherontic Freudian back-entrance: the anal-sexual
approach. "Tradesmen Enter by the Rear."
For West's Balso, at any rate, the strategy works; in a moment,
he is transformed from outsider to insider, but he does not like it
after all. God knows what he had imagined would be waiting for
him in the belly of the horse; what he discovers in fact is that it is
"inhabited solely by writers in search of an audience," all Josephs and
no Pharaohs. And the approval of other approval-seekers is exactly
what he neither needs nor wants; though for a while he pursues one
of their number, "a slim young girl" called Mary McGeeney, who
