BOOKS
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slavery of Asians, pseudo-Nazi rallies, and so on), more than a Michael
Gold-style call to political action.
The Day of the Locust,
while collapsing under its own weight, still con–
veys with macabre comedy the society of the spectacle in the booming
Hollywood of the 1930s, one of the few operating dream factories dur–
ing the Great Depression. Wi th its indictment of the shallow Hollywood
culture that would come to dominate all of American culture (and, inci–
dentally, would suppress its Jewish origins as West suppressed his own), the
novel's influence is evident in any recent send-up of Hollywood, especially
Michael Tolkin's (and later Robert Altman's)
The Player
and the Coen
Brothers'
Barton Fink.
The riot that closes the novel, it has been observed
many times, anticipates both the carnage of Watts and South Central, and
the frenzy that would become a part of mass culture. Its feverish prose
redeems the shaggy-dog quality of the banal escapades of Tod Hackett and
Homer Simpson (a name that would provide a prophecy of another order).
The novel reminds us of the ironic relationship between West as serious
novelist and West as Hollywood hack. The appropriately named Hackett–
a Yale
artiste
turned Hollywood set designer-is, like Miss Lonelyhearts, a
recent college grad who has renounced his artistic pretensions to conde–
scend to mass culture. Unlike Hackett, perhaps West aspired to writing
films without selling out. Had he lived longer, could he have realized an
art that fused his novelistic ambitions and pop-culture sensibilities? (The
less said about the sophomoric
Dream Life
if
Balso Snell,
the better. If
Melville scholars must suffer through
Pierre,
then West scholars must make
their way through the story which is essentially a pretentious fart joke) .
The rest of the volume-with its unpublished stories, unproduced
screenplays, failed play, and despondent letters-shows the disadvantage of
being ahead of your time. Many contemporary writers, including David
Mamet, Tom Stoppard, and Harold Pinter have shown that it is possible to
straddle high and low, balancing serious writing careers with lucrative
Hollywood screenwriting; since West was finally getting good advances for
his screenplays in the last year of his life, he may have combined these two
careers himself had he not fatally run a stop sign with his new wife at the
age of thirty-seven. The very thing that put people off in the 1930s, his
grim fascination with popular culture, is suddenly a boon to him in a cul–
tural moment so simultaneously apocalyptic and cornic, veering from
Kasczynski to Lewinsky at the speed of a sound bite. There were plenty of
near misses that deferred West's fame: if only Liveright hadn't folded just
as
Miss Lonelylwarts
had gone into print; if only Hitch cock had produced
West's screenplay
Bifore the Fact,
which he realized too late was actually
superior to his eventual production of
Suspicion,
based on the same novel;
if only the systems of mass production-the magazine editors, the studio
