STEPHEN KOCH
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revaluating it downward, forced to conclude reluctantly that, junky though it
is, Schlesinger's movie is not so complete a betrayal of West as one might
hope .
W. H. Auden, in an admiring essay which is the best critical text on West
I know (and to which I am much indebted), speaks of the despairing hysteria
afflicting almost everyone in West's fiction as something he calls "West's
Disease,"-"a disease of consciousness which renders it incapable of con–
verting wishes into desires. A lie is false: What it asserts is not the case. A wish
is fantastic: It knows what is the case, but refuses to accept it. All wishes,
whatever their apparant content, have the same and unvarying meaning: 'I
refuse to be what I am . . . .' " A sufferer from West's Disease, therefore,
, 'cannot desire anything, for the present state of the self is the ground of every
desire, and that is precisely what the wisher rejects. Nor can he believe any–
thing, for a wish is not a belief; whatever he wishes, he cannot help knowing
he could have wished for something else ."
West's own attitude toward this disease, it's worth noticing, is extremely
ambivalent. He despises his characters and their paralysis, he thinks them
degraded fools, but never half such fools as those who are not afflicted with it.
West's despair has, for him, the status of an ultimate truth. And though that
truth consists of contemptible, irresolvable misery, its status as truth at least
prevents it from being, like any and all other modes of consciousness, beneath
contempt, a fatuous delusion unworthy of notice. In each of his books, West's
imagined landscapes carry the full conviction of his pessimism, but as he
moves toward the greater' 'realism" of
The Day ofthe Locust,
he more and
more succumbs to an impulse to sociologize that despair. Many people have
considered this a step forward-a maturation away from a more callow for–
malism in his earlier work. I have thought so myself. Now I wonder.
For West, Hollywood was not only a real place, festering with real and
enticing corruptions, but since those corruptions were fed on unreality, he
also felt perfectly free to appropriate Hollywood as the landscape of his phan–
tasmagoria. I rather suspect West privately believed that everybody (if only
they would admit the truth) ought to see their own destiny in Faye Greener's.
But West could not say that: his gift was not large enough, too many readers
would know that such a vision is simply untrue; West would be incapable of
getting them
to
suspend that disbelief. Auden remarks that West does not
understand the difference between pity and compassion. I would add he does
not understand the difference between despair and contempt . Understand–
ably enough, he could not live alone with his despair. Unlike Kafka, he seems
unable as an artist and moralist to encounter its full isolating power, though
that isolation is half its truth. Instead, West constantly seeks
to
justify and
sustain his despair by pointing out to us how we are surrounded by the con-
