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mantlement; he was, as they say, asking for it. And the logic of things
in general, endorsing his fiction, obliged. In 1940, eight months after
marrying, West and Eileen died in an automobile accident, their skulls
dashed against pavement. And as for the world at large, it proved that
it was possible to go on even worse than before.
Jay Martin, 'West's first major biographer, says of West's death
that "West lived out his metaphysic of the accidentalness of doom."
Not so. Martin tells West's story scrupulously - if with neither fine selec–
tion nor finesse - and fixes West firmly in the America of his time; but
in perception and judgment he is almost invariably inexact. The truth
is that West killed himself, despite Eileen, out of a habit of not caring.
He drove "murderously" - a word whose precision Eileen both hit
upon and proved. A fellow writer at Republic Studios used to warn
West that he would die on the highway; West's answer - proceeding
as from one of his own melodramatic film scripts - "was always the
same scornful laughter."
It was life itself that West scorned - the life that for his genera–
tion, he said, had "lost its savour." Martin's biography, for all its care–
ful thoroughness, does not quite tell us why. Somewhere in West, amid
the whirl of nameable causes - the Great War, the Depression, his
parents' crass immigrant's dream of success - there lay an unattainable,
mysterious source of despair. As if born middle aged, he came preco–
ciously to a conviction, permanently cryptic, of "the necessity for laugh–
ing at everything, love, death, ambition, etc." Even when aiding Amer–
ican migrants or Spanish peasants, West could never think of "hope
and faith without a smile." He was helpless before his own despair.
Doubtless, the root cause was not intellectual, but it spread into an
intellectual form: a radical suspicion of all emotion. "You'd want to
... let an emotion out" in West's presence, says one of his friends,
but "you'd know that if you did, you'd offend him.... It would be
almost a physical offense." The reason was the most modern and in–
sidious form of highmindedness, a sterile insistence on sincerity. Re–
move from emotion the arbitrary structures that culture provides and
(so West seems to have concluded) it would assume no shape at all–
we could not even find it. In an outline for an abortive autobiographical
novel, West noted flatly: "The impossibility of experiencing genuine
emotion." His first novel,
The Dream Life of Balsa Snell,
usually read
as a parody of literature, is more fundamentally a mockery of "the
mystery of feeling": "the ritual of feeling" itself "demands burlesque."
I t was, in part, this skepticism toward the emotions that narrowed
West against women and against the daybreak calls of "hope and
