34b
CALVIN
BEDIENT
cess. After all, he had exceptional talent, and he wrote conscientiously,
in strenuous dead lifts - five pages a month; he was deserving. So with
almost the innocence of his own Lemuel Pitkin, West awaited renown.
It did not come.
The Depression, then Hitler, and a reading public hungry for
dreams, not antidreams - these combined, like the nails of one claw,
to choke West's career.
Miss Lonelyhearts
(1933) - which stood, accord–
ing to the
New York Times,
"to be one of the hits of the year, to win
both popular and critical approval" - went not to the bookstores, but
to one of its publisher's creditors, with whom it blushed unseen. A few
months after publication,
A Cool Million
(1934) remaindered for twen–
ty-five cents.
Gentlemen, the War!,
a play written with Joseph Shrank,
died in the silence of an audience that was not amused: mockingly anti–
war, it came to the boards several months too late, having been upstaged
by Hitler's first pogroms against Jews. West's last novel,
The Day of
the Locust
(1939), proved "a complete financial bust." The only way
to increase sales, West said, was
to
assassinate Hitler.
With women West fared no better. They stepped toward him, and
the floor gave way; but it was, in most instances, West who pulled the
trap. There was something in his heart that excluded them. In 1930,
Beatrice Mathieu, a correspondent for the
New Yorker,
left for Paris
with a dog that West had given her. He was to follow, but did not; she
had the dog to remember him by. Next carne Alice Shepard, chief
fashion model for Elizabeth Hawes. West saw her off one night at Grand
Central Station, then slept with a friend of hers; Alice found out and
failed to "understand." She got the dedication to
The Dream Life of
Balso Snell
(1931). Then there was the married woman who lived near
West's farm in Pennsylvania; she tried suicide. Intermittently, West got
his own back, in gonorrhea and a prostate gland (so he almost boasted)
as big as an orange.
Then came the Eileen of Ruth McKenney's
My Sister Eileen.
Case–
hardened to both rejection and rejecting, lost from herself, she strayed
into the inmost chambers of West's curious heart and, miraculously, was
not evicted. West was surprised and elated; he grew, people said, be–
fore their eyes. He even turned hopeful about politics, as if, himself
having ceased to bait and crush, the world would follow. West's loyalty
to procommunist Eileen sent him to a Marxist study group rather as
one sends a child to Sunday school; and soon West - the most gnawing
public skeptic of his age -was solemnly criticizing those who use "their
own gnawing doubt to eat away other people's affirmative acts." "I feel
quite bitter about it," he said. Having achieved this fresh innocence,
West - according to the logic of his own fiction - was ripe for dis-
