PARTISAN REVIEW
349
faith." The substance of suffering and joy, the basis of all belief, was
largely denied to him. No wonder he drove murderously. West's death
rather furtively iIIustrates his own thesis that the violence in American
life, the violence
against
life, explodes out of disappointed feeling–
only in this instance it was feeling itself, and not any particular dream,
that had "cheated."
The special, ugly-poetic flavor of West's fiction - the sense of
"flowers that smelled of feet" - sprang from a contradiction in his
response toward emotion in others. On the one hand, West was repelled
by the "secondhand" dreams and feelings of the mass of Americans.
On the other, he had - as a result of managing two hotels during the
Depression - an acute and aching knowledge of their undeniable suf–
fering. Steaming open letters in the hotels and later cultivating Holly–
wood grotesques, West was a voyeur of suffering and, guiltily, he knew
he had nothing to offer the bored and cheated, except a compassion that
they did not want and could not use. H is brief books, volleys of scorn
and pain, are acts of a generous despair. And yet, so little hopeful was
West, so cynical was his generosity, that he ungenerously earned a living
by tossing off cheap film scripts in Hollywood - betraying in one
medium those whom he pitied in another.
All told, it is false to speak of West - as Jay Martin does - as a
moralist in the great tradition of those who have had, in Yeats's words,
dreams "of an impossibly noble life." Not only were West's daily fan–
tasies (by all evidence) anecdotal, comfortably trivial in despair of higher
dreams; his fiction constitutes an outright negation of wishing. West's
only nobility - and it is considerable - lies in his anguished antagonism
to dreams, his courage of skepticism and despair. In daily life, indeed
at the very moment of his death, West may well have been as dreamily
foolish and "betrayed" as the "broken bastards" he wrote about; in the
pages of his fiction, however, he took his essential poverty - his and
everyone else's - upon himself. For all the spareness and originality of
his anomalous fiction, West carried the noblest impulse of the classical
novel to its farthest end: he discovered, without hedging, the insuf–
ficiencyof the real. He is an exemplary instance of an antifantast work–
ing in the medium of make-believe. In West we find in crystalline form
the two qualities that - as the French critic Saurat has said - dis–
tinguish modern writing generally: "total sincerity and total courage."
Calvin Bedient
