In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away. And even the smallest and most incomplete offering at this time can be a proud act in defense of that faith.
Katherine Anne Porter
I am reading Virginia Woolf’s next-to-last novel, The Years, a sort of family chronicle very unlike Galsworthy. More beautiful, personal and, of course, modern - published in 1937. It is divided into years in the lives of members of the Pargiter family, beginning in 1880 when most of the principal characters are children. A lot had happened to the family by the time Woolf got to 1913, including the death of the patriarch, Abel Pargiter. One of his daughters, Eleanor, to whom he was especially close because she never married and ran his household at Abercorn Terrace, has the onerous duty of selling the old house. It is one of the most moving parts of the novel (I haven’t yet finished it). So moving that I felt compelled to post a part of it here.
1913
It was still snowing when the young man came from the House Agents to see over Abercorn Terrace. The snow cast a hard white glare upon the walls of the bathroom, showed up the cracks on the enamel bath, and the stains on the wall. Eleanor stood looking out of the window. The trees in the back garden were heavily lined with snow; all the roofs were softly moulded with snow; it was still falling. She turned. The young man turned too. The light was unbecoming to them both, yet the snow—she saw it through the window at the end of the passage—was beautiful, falling.
Mr Grice turned to her as they went downstairs,
"The fact is, our clients expect more lavatory accommodation nowadays," he said, stopping outside a bedroom door.
Why can't he say "baths" and have done with it, she thought. Slowly she went downstairs. Now she could see the snow falling through the panels of the hall door. As he went downstairs, she noticed the red ears which stood out over his high collar; and the neck which he had washed imperfectly in some sink at Wandsworth. She was annoyed; as he went round the house, sniffing and peering, he had indicted their cleanliness, their humanity; and he used absurd long words. He was hauling himself up into the class above him, she supposed, by means of long words. Now he stepped cautiously over the body of the sleeping dog; took his hat from the hall table, and went down the front door-steps in his business man's buttoned boots, leaving yellow footprints in the thick white cushion of snow. A four-wheeler was waiting.
Eleanor turned. There was Crosby, dodging about in her best bonnet and mantle. She had been following Eleanor about the house like a dog all the morning; the odious moment could no longer be put off. Her four-wheeler was at the door; they had to say good-bye.
"Well, Crosby, it all looks very empty, doesn't it?" said Eleanor, looking in at the empty drawing-room. The white light of the snow glared in on the walls. It showed up the marks on the walls where the furniture had stood, where the pictures had hung.
"It does, Miss Eleanor," said Crosby. She stood looking too. Eleanor knew that she was going to cry. She did not want her to cry. She did not want to cry herself.
"I can still see you all sitting round that table, Miss Eleanor," said Crosby. But the table had gone. Morris had taken this; Delia had taken that; everything had been shared out and separated.
"And the kettle that wouldn't boil," said Eleanor. "D'you remember that?" She tried to laugh.
"Oh, Miss Eleanor," said Crosby, shaking her head, "I remember everything!" The tears were forming; Eleanor looked away into the further room.
There too were marks on the wall, where the bookcase had stood, where the writing-table had stood. She thought of herself sitting there, drawing a pattern on the blotting-paper; digging a hole, adding up tradesmen's books… . Then she turned. There was Crosby. Crosby was crying. The mixture of emotions was positively painful; she was so glad to be quit of it all, but for Crosby it was the end of everything.
She had known every cupboard, flagstone, chair and table in that large rambling house, not from five or six feet of distance as they had known it; but from her knees, as she scrubbed and polished; she had known every groove, stain, fork, knife, napkin and cupboard. They and their doings had made her entire world. And now she was going off, alone, to a single room at Richmond.
"I should think you'd be glad to be out of that basement anyhow, Crosby," said Eleanor, turning into the hall again. She had never realised how dark, how low it was, until, looking at it with "our Mr Grice," she had felt ashamed.
"It was my home for forty years, Miss," said Crosby. The tears were running. For forty years! Eleanor thought with a start. She had been a little girl of thirteen or fourteen when Crosby came to them, looking so stiff and smart. Now her blue gnat's eyes protruded and her cheeks were sunk.
Crosby was stooping to put Rover on the chain.
"You're sure you want him?" said Eleanor, looking at the rather smelly, wheezy and unattractive old dog. "We could easily find a nice home for him in the country."
"Oh, miss, don't ask me to give him up!" said Crosby. Tears checked her speech. Tears were running freely down her cheeks. For all Eleanor could do to prevent it, tears formed in her eyes too.
"Dear Crosby, good-bye," she said. She bent and kissed her. She had a curious dry quality of skin she noticed. But her own tears were falling. Then Crosby, holding Rover on the chain, began to edge sideways down the slippery steps. Eleanor, holding the door open, looked after her. It was a dreadful moment; unhappy; muddled; altogether wrong. Crosby was so miserable; she was so glad. Yet as she held the door open her tears formed and fell. They had all lived here; she had stood here to wave Morris to school; there was the little garden in which they used to plant crocuses. And now Crosby, with flakes of snow falling on her black bonnet, climbed into the four-wheeler, holding Rover in her arms. Eleanor shut the door and went in.
In Part IV of George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up for Air a bomb is dropped inadvertently in the old center of Lower Binfield, the town where the novel’s hero, George Bowling, grew up in the Edwardian era and to which he has returned to rediscover the past. One of the most refreshing aspects of the novel is how it doesn’t romanticize the inter-war years, called by some the Long Weekend. But the years before the First World War must’ve seemed especially rosy in 1939 to a survivor of that war. It wasn’t Orwell’s generation (he was just 15 when the war ended), but Orwell was well acquainted with their psychology.
What inspires Bowling to take his sentimental journey is the imminence of war in Britain. Was it inevitable or not?
I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. Is it going to happen? No knowing. Some days it’s impossible to believe it. Some days I say to myself that it’s just a scare got up by the newspapers. Some days I know in my bones there’s no escaping it.
Those words, “rubber truncheons” appear seven times in the novel. They appear in Orwell's journalism as well. To suggest that they were a peculiar fixation of Orwell’s is to pretend that their appearance wasn’t deliberate. George Bowling wanted to know if such things were coming to sleepy old England. So he tells us about the world of his childhood and goes back 25 years later to see if any of it is left. Just as he is getting used to the reality that the past – the world he knew before the last war – has completely vanished, a bomber on a training run drops a bomb on the town by mistake. (Orwell describes the aftermath with telling details, like a thin stream of marmalade oozing along the floor of a demolished house mixing with another stream of blood.)
I’ll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you’ve got at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it—at any rate, I knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.
And what terrifies Bowling even more than war is the “after-war”:
The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, sloganworld. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.
The after-war world that Bowling predicts never got as far as England. Orwell expanded on it in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four, but it was one that was all too familiar in the occupied countries of Europe. The British government knew that war was coming, but the avoidance of war at all costs was their guiding principle. Before war was declared, Germany had already re-taken the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia with no one to oppose them. It was somewhat reasonable to assume that appeasement would go on until the Germans possessed all of Europe. Whatever you did, appease the Nazis or not, the coming catastrophe could not be averted.
When France was invaded in May 1940, its leaders decided, after just 6 weeks, to capitulate rather than put up a fight. The fall of France in June 1940 was eventually blamed by the Vichy government on the Third Republic and its failure to take Nazi Germany seriously, even after the invasion and rapid conquest of Poland, and to prepare France for when its turn would come.
But the Vichy government, anxious to place the blame for their cowardice elsewhere than squarely on themselves, also named certain films for having effectively demoralized France in the ominous months before the blitzkrieg arrived. This seems hard to comprehend even now, 80 years later. But two particular films, both masterpieces, were singled out for having grasped the terrible mood of the moment and for having indelibly expressed it. The two films were Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lêve and Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu. The films were banned and were both thought to be lost by the time of the liberation four extraordinarily long years later.
The vulnerability of France in 1939 was greater than anyone realized. It was best expressed in the last great effulgence of creativity on defiant display in its cinema. Jean Renoir, who had achieved popular success with the realistic melodrama, La bête humaine, in 1938, was given what grew into the biggest budget ever for a French film to make a film that was initially intended to be entertaining. When the film, La règle du jeu, was released on July 7, audience reaction varied from unfavorable to hostile. The producer demanded that Renoir cut the film, including all the scenes in which he himself appeared in the role of Octave. The cuts, eventually amounting to thirty minutes, simply made the film more confusing and audiences more hostile to it, until the French government banned it outright as detrimental to national morale.
Like Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, the climax of Jean Renoir’s 1939 film The Rules of the Game takes place with an explosion – in the film’s case with a shotgun blast. Andre Jurieu is shot to death by Schumacher, a groundskeeper who mistakenly believes he is absconding with his wife. It is a completely unforeseeable end to the film, viewed by some as a satire on the French upper class on the eve of World War II. Renoir did everything he could to appease the public and cut and cut and cut his film, noting the things the audience didn’t like and removing them as much as possible. One of the things about the film that no one seemed to like was Renoir himself in the role of Octave. But why?
Octave, although old friends of Robert and of Christine’s family, and a close confidant of Andre, is a peripheral character is every way. He is a hanger-on, without a title or a profession or any apparent means of income. If he resembles any other character in the film it is Marceau, the tramp poacher. In fact, one of the most touching scenes in film takes place near the very end, after Andre has been killed. Having to some extent caused the “accident” (he’s the one who brings Andre to Robert’s country estate and Schumacher was convinced that he was shooting Octave), he knows that it’s time to go. Octave and Marceau are leaving together, in the dead of night, and as they walk away from the chateau there is the following exchange:
Octave: “Where are you headed?”
Marceau: “Back to the woods. I’ll try to pick up some odd jobs here and there. And you?”
Octave: “I’m going back to Paris. I’ll try to manage on my own.”
Marceau: “We may run into each other again some day.”
Octave: “I doubt it. But you never know. Anything’s possible. Good luck!”
Marceau: “Good luck!”
Renoir’s film turned out to be a kind of memorial to a moment in history so fragile and transitory that it could never have lasted. Even before his film was finished the moment had passed. This is what gives the film a strange, lustrous beauty – we are witnessing the end of a society. Renoir enlisted in the French army film department and remained in France into 1940. When the invasion took place, he wisely fled to Hollywood. The maker of the pacifist film La Grande Illusion, that had dared to suggest that Germans and Frenchmen were brothers and that war was a big illusion, Renoir's name was high on Hitler’s list of people to be arrested by the Gestapo
Meanwhile, under the blitz in England, George Orwell seemed to enjoy the straightened conditions. According to John Carey, “Friends believed that he actually the shortages and discomforts of the war. He welcomed clothes rationing, and longed for the time when moths would have devoured the last dinner-jacket even if it meant everyone wearing dyed battle-dress in the interim.”
Such, such are my thoughts in the middle of my first week of self-quarantine here on my island among the tinkling palms. The virus has yet to penetrate this far. But the pandemic is still young.
Max von Sydow, who died last Sunday at the age of 90, was more than just one of the great screen actors who, like too many others I could mention, lavished his talents on mediocre star vehicles. Though he finally succumbed to the lure of Hollywood in 1965, he was lucky enough to work multiple times with two great filmmakers in his native Sweden - eleven films with Ingmar Bergman and seven with Jan Troell. Although it was with Bergman that he received the most attention, in iconic roles like the knight Blok in The Seventh Seal, who outwits Death in a game of chess, and Töre in The Virgin Spring, who savagely avenges the rape and murder of his daughter, it was for Troell that von Sydow gave his most convincing (and comprehensive) performances. He is at the center of the six-and-a-half hour Emigrants saga, playing Karl Oskar, the patriarch of a Swedish family that emigrates to Minnesota in the mid-19th century. He was totally convincing playing Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun. But it was in the relatively overlooked Flight of the Eagle (Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd, 1982) that von Sydow gave what one critic called "a magnificent, stricken-oak performance,"(1) and that I wish to use as his memorial.
Troell derived the story of the film from Per Olof Sundman's 1967 documentary novel of Salomon August Andrée, an engineer and a staunch technocrat with an interest in ballooning, who came up with the bold idea of flying a hydrogen balloon across the North Pole. In 1896, nearing the very end of the Age of Discovery, Andrée managed to persuade the Swedish King, Oscar II, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Alfred Nobel that the expedition was feasible. It was accepted as a bold plan that would bring prestige to the nation and funding was provided.(2) Andrée recruited two men, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg, and together they trained and outfitted themselves for the journey. The film devotes all the time it needs to these preliminary stages, with its private and public details, to establish not just their historical context but to give convincing life to the three men, to salvage them from history. Troell is abetted in these efforts by his actors, Sverre Anker Ousdal as Fraenkel and Göran Stangertz as Strindberg. Max von Sydow gives us Andrée, a man of some accomplishment who is quite overwhelmed by the efforts of those he has inspired in the realization of his dream. He is neither a fool nor a dreamer, but a practical man of science who, the film makes clear, gets in over his head when he is given the opportunity, in the summer of 1897, to put his plans into action.
The balloon, christened the "Eagle," doesn't leave the ground in Spitzbergen until fifty-five minutes into the film. Just after it is airborne, the balloon is caught in a downdraft and nearly sinks in the ocean. The crew throw enough ballast overboard to raise the balloon, but the accident also severs two of the three long guide-ropes which were going to be used to navigate the balloon. The men notice this, as do members of the ground crew, but the balloon continues on its way. And just sixty-five hours later - thirteen minutes in the film - it is on the ice, never to rise again. What ultimately brought the balloon down was ice buildup on the rigging and gondola, making it too heavy to gain the altitude it needed. From the time when the balloon drifted out of sight in Spitzbergen, the script had to rely on notes taken by Andrée to re-create events, simply because the fate of the expedition remained unknown until 1930. Troell opens the film with photographs taken of the remains that were discovered, including the bones of Andrée himself.
The last hour of the film, when the balloon is brought down and the men have packed sledges to make the trek across pack ice to the nearest island, is one of the most grueling stretches of film ever recorded.(3) Even so, I wondered at Troell’s use of flashbacks, as all three men find in their memories something to give them comfort or strength for the days ahead. I think the last hour would’ve been more harrowing if it had been unrelieved by the men’s glowing (and so splendidly colorful) flashbacks. One moment, however, is unforgettable: Strindberg opens a locket containing a picture of his fiancée and a lock of her hair, he removes the hair and touches it to his swollen and chapped lips.
Once they arrive on Kvitoya, a small island east of Svalbard, the film enters its final phase. Strindberg, whose photographs appear throughout the film (his photographic plates were discovered among the team’s remains) is the first to go. His body was found in a makeshift grave on the island, but there is speculation about the circumstances of his death. Some believe he may have committed suicide, others that he was killed by a polar bear. Troell simply shows him collapsing suddenly on the ice. When only Andrée and Fraenkel are left, Troell shows them, near the end, having a bitter argument, but they embrace pitifully when they realize that all they have left is each other. It is a heartbreaking moment.
It was a time when no one was around to ask the simple question, "What could possibly go wrong?" Flight of the Eagle is more than just a careful record of a doomed expedition. Yes, it was Andrée’s folly. But Troell gives the account a tragic dimension. In the film’s last moments, in which Fraenkel is killed by a polar bear and Andrée begs him not to leave him on the blasted island entirely alone, Max von Sydow emerges from the tent and peers around him at the eventless horizon, one that seems to merge the sky and the earth, and the look in his eyes is devastating. It is a moment that calls to mind a speech by Hamlet:
...
this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. (4)
(1) Vernon Young.
(2) It was the same spirit of adventure that Terry Jones and Michael Palin so brilliantly mocked in their Ripping Yarns episode, "Across the Andes by Frog."
(3) When Flight of the Eagle was in limited release in the US, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, unwitting defenders of middlebrow taste, singled it out for derision on their popular TV show, Sneak Previews. When they showed the clip from the film of the balloon lying, deflated, on the ice and the three men saluting it, Siskel and Ebert both laughed, proving that a jackass can look into a mirror, but a philosopher can't look back.
(4) Act 2 Scene 2.
Last Thursday I began to read the Saul Bellow novel Seize the Day. Though only half the length of a good-sized novel and the narrative covering the event of a single - an especially terrible - day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, it took me a week to read it, one chapter every day. I enjoy reading like this, so that the story spills into my daily life. Uneventful enough, in a routine that is itself a protection from living, from the rising and falling passions that afflict the people among whom I am living - poor provincial Filipinos.
I arrived at the final chapter last night before going to bed, and found it, like everyone else who has read the novel must have found it, unforseeable, extraordinary, abrupt, and exquisitely moving. I got out of bed this morning and prepared myself for an errand in town. Returning home before lunchtime, I sat down in my sala, reached for my tablet and opened Facebook. The first thing I saw was a message from an old friend telling everyone he knew that his 13-year-old son's mother had died and that the boy’s heart was broken. My friend took the time to explain the circumstances of the woman's death, and he thanked individuals who had helped him through the arrangements of the woman's passing.
I didn't know the woman nor did I know anything about her life or her illnesses. She was a complete stranger to me when my friend announced her death this morning. But I suddenly found myself crying, as someone would cry at the news that a dear friend had been terribly hurt. And in the midst of my tears I remembered Tommy Wilhelm in the last chapter of Seize the Day. Walking down a Manhattan street, after fleeing his hotel after his estranged wife, Margaret, had hung up on him, he thought he recognized the man who had cheated him out of the little money he had left and somehow found himself helplessly swept up in a crowd of mourners entering a synagogue. Bewildered, feeling lost and hopeless, he was in the line of people filing past the open coffin:
He stood along the wall with others and looked toward the coffin and the slow line that was moving past it, gazing at the face of the dead. Presently he too was in this line, and slowly, slowly, foot by foot, the beating of his heart anxious, thick, frightening, but somehow also rich, he neared the coffin and paused for his turn, and gazed down. He caught his breath when he looked at the corpse, and his face swelled, his eyes shone hugely with instant tears.
The dead man was gray-haired. He had two large waves of gray hair at the front. But he was not old. His face was long, and he had a bony nose, slightly, delicate twisted. His brows were raised as though he had sunk in to the final thought. Now at last he was with it, after the end of all distractions, and when his flesh was no longer flesh. And by this meditative look Wilhelm was so struck that he could not go away. In spite of the tinge of horror, and then the splash of heartsickness that he felt, he could not go. He stepped out of line and remained beside the coffin; his eyes filled silently and through his still tears he studied the man as the line of visitors moved with veiled looks past the satin coffin toward the standing bank of lilies, lilacs, roses. With great stifling sorrow, almost admiration, Wilhelm nodded and nodded. On the surface, the dead man with his formal shirt and his tie and silk lapels and his powdered skin looked so proper; only a little beneath so--black, Wilhelm thought, so fallen in the eyes.
Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry. He cried at first softly and from sentiment, but soon from deeper feeling. He sobbed loudly and his face grew distorted and hot, and the tears stung his skin. A man--another human creature, was what first went through his thoughts, but other and different things were torn from him. What'll I do? I'm stripped and kicked out.... Oh, Father, what do I ask of you? What'll I do about the kids--Tommy, Paul? My children. And Olive? My dear! Why, why, why--you must protect me against that devil who wants my life. If you want it, then kill me. Take, take it, take it from me.
Soon he was past words, past reason, coherence. He could not stop. The source of all tears had suddenly sprung open within him, black, deep, and hot, and they were pouring out and convulsed his body, bending his stubborn head, bowing his shoulders, twisting his face, crippling the very hands with which he held the handkerchief. His efforts to collect himself were useless. The great knot of ill and grief in his throat swelled upward and he gave in utterly and held his face and wept. He cried with all his heart.
He, alone of all the people in the chapel, was sobbing. No one knew who he was.
One woman said, "Is that perhaps the cousin from New Orleans they were expecting?"
"It must be somebody real close to carry on so."
"Oh my, oh my! To be mourned like that," said one man and looked at Wilhelm's heavy shaken shoulders, his clutched face and whitened fair hair, with wide, glinting, jealous eyes.
"The man's brother, maybe?"
"Oh, I doubt that very much," said another bystander. "They're not alike at all. Night and day."
The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm's blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart's ultimate need.
It is the strangeness and suddenness of the novel's last scene that catches the reader by surprise. Having lived through Tommy Wilhelm's long day alongside him, feeling his rising frustration and the congestion in his chest, and his inability to explain to his father or his wife or to Tamkin, the charlatan whose cockeyed wisdom causes Tommy to trust him enough to invest his remaining savings in the trading fortunes of lard on Wall Street, what he is feeling, what he wants in his life, made the release of his tears, at the side of a strange man's coffin, provoked by his love and his fear and his grief at the waste of half his life, an utterly convincing and uplifting conclusion to his day.
On December 3, 1994 the comic Adam Sandler introduced his “Chanukah Song” on Saturday Night Live. It was so popular that, in perennial appearances during the holidays, Sandler performed the song with new lyrics, all of them about how Jewish-Americans have endured, and prevailed, during the Christmas Season, pointing out how American culture has been enriched by Jews.
When you feel like the only kid in town
Without a Christmas tree
Here's a list of people who are Jewish
Just like you and me
Those first two lines are what informs the rest of the song – the feeling of isolation from, and resentment towards, the prevailing – Gentile - culture. Ever since I first heard the song, I have had the overwhelming feeling that it was an anthem of pain – the outcry of a Jewish kid growing up in a goyim world.
One name you won’t find on Sandler’s list of Jewish people is Nathanael West, author of the novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.(1) Born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein in 1903, his short-lived career as a novelist (just nine years) was beset with misfortune. His second and fourth novels, among the best writing of the 1930s, sold fewer than 2,300 copies in his lifetime. When his fortunes at last turned in his favor and he was enjoying happiness in marriage and success as a screenwriter in Hollywood, he was killed in a car crash.
In his monograph on West, Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote:
West received little or no education in the Jewish religion, and although he was probably circumcised, he was never confirmed in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony. During his years at Brown [University], West threw off what he could of his Jewishness, and suffered for the rest. "More than anyone I ever knew," his friend John Sanford later reported, "[he] writhed under the accidental curse of his religion." West had nothing to do with any organized Jewish activity on campus, hung around the snobbish Gentile fraternities, and was intensely anxious to be pledged and intensely bitter that he never was. "Nobody ever thought of [him] as being Jewish," a college friend has said, but apparently the Brown fraternities did.
West's first novel, The Dream of Balso Snell, seems to have been first written in college, but he rewrote it and in 1931 he managed to get it privately printed in a limited edition of 500 copies. The book listed "Nathanael West" as author and thus marked West's official change of name. He had spent much of his class time at Brown doodling "Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein," which was the name signed to his [Brown literary magazine] contributions, but even that had turned out to be not Gentile enough. West explained to William Carlos Williams how he got the name: "Horace Greely said, 'Go West, young man.' So I did." West's anti-Semitism was now considerable. He referred to Jewish girls as "bagels," and avoided them.
West's personal life in the East was no more successful than his literary career. Balso Snell was dedicated to Alice Shephard, a Roman Catholic girl who had gone to Pembroke College with West's sister Laura. He was secretly engaged to her from 1929 to 1932, then publicly engaged, but they never married, although West had bought a marriage license and carried it around with him for several years. His poverty was the explanation given out, but in Sanford's opinion the engagement foundered on the religious difference.
West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts is a unique achievement in American literature. By interjecting interior states into its action of a newspaper columnist exiled to providing advice to the lovelorn (or the otherwise disenchanted), West takes the reader in the opposite direction of contemporary “realistic” writing, away from Hemingway and toward European modes, from Baudelaire through Kafka to the Surrealists. The novel's protagonist, whose name is always “Miss Lonelyhearts,” becomes so overwhelmed by the misery expressed so clumsily in the pile of letters he receives every day that he becomes ill both physically and emotionally. Miss Lonelyhearts becomes an alter ego, it possesses him and, eventually, destroys him. It doesn't matter that, as Edmund Wilson pointed out, Miss Lonelyhearts overestimates the veracity of the letters to him and ascribes disproportionate importance to them. As the son of a Baptist minister, he is predisposed to regard the suffering in the letters, and the moralizing responses they provoke that he publishes in his column, as demonstrations of Christian love and forgiveness. So it is not exactly surprising that, just as he is attaining a kind of Christian grace in his attitudes toward his subject, it leads him directly to disaster.
But West does offer his hero a real chance for human - not divine - salvation in the character of his fiancée, Betty. He has a transcendant idyll with Betty at a country farm in which West's language becomes suddenly explicit and expressive of the physical beauties of the natural world and the conditions of living in its proximity:
He sat on the porch and watched her work. She had her hair tied up in a checked handkerchief, otherwise she was completely naked. She looked a little fat, but when she lifted something to the line, all the fat disappeared. Her raised arms pulled her breasts up until they were like pink-tipped thumbs.
There was no wind to disturb the pull of the earth. The new green leaves hung straight down and shone in the hot sun like an army of little metal shields. Somewhere in the woods a thrush was singing. Its sound was like that of a flute choked with saliva.
Betty stopped with her arms high to listen to the bird. When it was quiet, she turned towards him with a guilty laugh. He blew her a kiss. She caught it with a gesture that was childishly sexual. He vaulted the porch rail and ran to kiss her. As they went down, he smelled a mixture of sweat, soap and crushed grass.
It is, of course, terribly ironic that Miss Lonelyhearts should be undone by Christian love. West's efforts to divest himself of his Jewishness, his having studied medieval Catholicism at Brown and his aborted engagement to a nice Catholic girl, led him, in his last months in Hollywood, to achieve the comfortable life of a successful screenwriter (even while attempting, with The Day of the Locust, to exploit that experience through a fictional attack on Hollywood). He had at last married a nice Gentile woman and was on his way home from a camping trip with her when they both died on Ventura Highway. West's remains were returned to New York where they were buried in a Jewish cemetery.
(1) Sandler’s ever-expanding list of people who are Jewish includes David Lee Roth, James Caan, Kirk Douglas, Rod Carew, Dinah Shore, and The Three Stooges.
