BOOKS
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Bercovitch and Martin merely condescended to their bookstore audi–
ence, promoting their man just as the cashiers downstairs were selling
Starbucks (can one imagine any company making similar profit from a
West character as from Melville's?). West was, according to his editor
Bercovitch and his biographer Martin, a man of the people, who dutifully
marched in Union Square Socialist rallies and, as they each pointed out,
was the first Jew to break the Library of America barrier in a series that
had already included nearly a hundred writers (fellow Jew Gertrude Stein
subsequently rounded out the number). It was only Harold Bloom,
obstreperous as ever, who put a halt to the promotional pitch. West may
have cared for the masses, Bloom conceded, but the former Nathan
Weinstein not only denied his Jewishness-going so far as
to
become
something of an anti-Semite-but spawned a "rancid" nihilism that ulti–
mately belied any good political intentions.
It
is hard to attach any belief
to a writer whose writings contain a sweeping rejection of political caus–
es, religious faith, artistic redemption, and romantic love. Even though
people have learned to like West, many of them can't seem to agree about
what he stood for.
The edi tion creates an ideal occasion to address the ques tion of where
we place West, and why he might be more apt for our cultural moment
than he was for his own. In addition to the four previously published nov–
els
(The Dream Life oj Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million,
and
The
Day
oj
the Locust),
the new collection includes stories West couldn't pub–
lish in his own lifetime, a poem, a play, letters, outlines, screenplays, and a
Guggenheim proposal that was rejected despite a recommendation letter
from
F.
Scott Fitzgerald. There are plenty of unheard melodies in the new
collection, and among the spurts of brilliance are "Western Union Boy,"
a tale of a promising college chum gone wrong, and "Burn the Cities," a
parodistic political polernic in monotonous verse. But the standout among
the unpublished work is "The Adventurer," a burlesque combination of
Dostoevsky's Underground Man and Hardy's Jude who roams the reading
room of the New York Public Library and Central Park contemplating
apocalypse. Although West graduated from Brown the same year as mas–
ter parodist (and future brother-in-law) S.
J.
Perelman, his comedic prose
seems more prophetic of the self-hating angst of Woody Allen or Philip
Roth than the humor writing of his contemporaries. It was Perelman who
first showed West letters addressed to an advice columnist under the pseu–
donym Susan Chester; although Perelman couldn't make comic hay out of
it, West-like fellow Jewish agonists Allen and Roth at their best-was
able to nune the tragedy for all its comedy, without any loss of power.
Indeed, of all the works, it is
Miss Lonelyhearts
(1933) that stands alone
as West's unassailable masterpiece. The title character, a writer who takes
