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.
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| F. Scott Fitzgerald |
On the occasion of the 92nd Academy Awards, I quoted at length the decidedly dim view that Edmund Wilson took of the Hollywood scene in 1937. While he lacks the enthusiasm for the motion picture medium that his contemporaries Otis Ferguson and James Agee possessed, Wilson’s views were not as outlandish as they seem. It is by now a commonly held view, for example, that the quality of the Marx Brothers’ films suffered a noticeable decline when they left Paramount and signed with MGM.
Of the many novels that use Hollywood as a backdrop, there are two that stand out: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, published in 1939, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, left unfinished at the author’s death in December 1940.(1) Edmund Wilson, who had been a close friend of Fitzgerald’s, and who had corresponded with him during the writing of the novel, undertook the preparation of The Last Tycoon for publication in 1941. Both Fitzgerald an West had worked in Hollywood movies as script-writers. The money they made there was outrageously disproportionate to their output, although the money that West made allowed him to live out his last years in comfort. And they both managed, with uneven results, to turn their experiences under what Wilson called “the insipid Hollywood sun” into compelling novels.
But I left out a particular passage from Wilson’s review of the book The Great Goldwyn because I wanted to expand on it. The passage was about Hollywood’s treatment of writers:
And the writers. Before the vultures have picked the bones of theatrical talent, the big white worms of the studios have grown fat on the decaying flesh. But the vultures get the worms, too. Have we not all had needy friends who have gone West with a smile on their lips and who have never returned again? – from whom we have ceased to hear and whose names we no longer mention, whom we remember as young people of promise, wondering what they have found to do and never thinking to connect them with the processed stuff we hear croaked out, between kisses and pistol-shots, by the smooth-faced gigantic phantoms, when we are foolish enough to go to the movies? It is true, as Mr. Johnston tells us, that Sam Goldwyn always wants the best writers; and there they are out on the Golden Coast, cooped up in their little cells, like school children in study hour. Teacher is the supervisor, and one hopes to be teacher’s favorite. There they are, blowing in their money on goofy Los Angeles houses and on ostentatious cocktail parties, at which they talk about their salaries and their options and always speak of their superiors with admiration, while they submit to being spied upon and having their correspondence opened. Those who do not care to admit surrender pretend to be uncompromising Leftists, getting together in little groups to give three discreet cheers for Stalin and to shed a tear for Republican Spain. But when the Writer’s Guild was organized, it took only one woof from Schulberg to send them running like prairie-dogs – leaving the job to the technicians and the actors. And now the blacklisted leaders ate creeping back, having become so profoundly habituated to high salaries for low work that, no matter how radical they claim to be, they don’t know how to get along without them.
As I mentioned above, Wilson had been in correspondence with Fitzgerald when he was at work on The Last Tycoon, which is an intimate portrait of a maverick young movie producer that resembled Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald knew first hand how writers were valued by the big studios, and how their treatment by the producers exposed their utter incomprehension of what writers do. Fitzgerald introduces a character named Boxley in the novel and includes him in the following scene in which Monroe Stahr, the novel’s protagonist, tries to explain to him how to write a movie scene:
Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kindly fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it finally emerging as what it was: a smile of kindness sometimes a little hurried and tired, but always there toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult, aggressive and outright.
Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged, though no one apparently had a hand on him. He stood in front of a chair, and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr's invitation, one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.
Stahr looked at him courteously. "Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?" The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence. "I read your letter," said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference.
"I can't get what I write on paper," broke out Boxley. "You've all been very decent, but it's a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you've teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it - they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words."
"Why don't you write it yourself?" asked Stahr.
"I have. I sent you some."
"But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more."
Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but none to amusement, and said: "I don't think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket." He barked again and subsided.
"Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?''
"What? Naturally not."
"You'd consider it too cheap."
Movie standards are different," said Boxley, hedging.
"Do you ever go to them?"
"No – almost never."
"Isn't it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?"
"Yes – and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue."
"Skip the dialogue for a minute," said Stahr. "Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write - that's why we brought you out here. But let's imagine something that isn't either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?"
"I think it has," said Boxley stiffly, "but I never use it."
"Suppose you're in your office. You've been fighting duels or writing all day and you're too tired to fight or write any more. You're sitting there staring - dull, like we all get sometimes. A pretty stenographer that you've seen before comes into the room and you watch her idly. She doesn't see you, though you're very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table --" Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk. "She has two dimes and a nickel and a cardboard matchbox. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the matchbox and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there's a stiff wind blowing in the window but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello - listens and says deliberately into the phone, 'I've never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.' She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match, you glance around very suddenly and see that there's another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes." Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket.
"Go on," said Boxley smiling. “What happens?"
"I don't know," said Stahr. "I was just making pictures."
Boxley felt he was being put in the wrong. "It's just melodrama," he said.
"Not necessarily," said Stahr. "In any case, nobody has moved violently or talked cheap dialogue or had any facial expression at all. There was only one bad line, and a writer like you could improve it. But you were interested."
"What was the nickel for?" asked Boxley evasively.
"I don't know," said Stahr. Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, yes the nickel was for the movies."
The two invisible attendants seemed to release Boxley. He relaxed, leaned back in his chair and laughed. "What in hell do you pay me for?" he demanded. "I don't understand the damn stuff."
"You will," said Stahr grinning, "or you wouldn't have asked about the nickel."
Nearly a decade after Fitzgerald’s death, Wilson was asked to look at a movie adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, starring Alan Ladd. Stanley Kauffmann was at the private screening and provided the following account:
When I saw the 1949 film of The Great Gatsby, the only other person in the screening room was Edmund Wilson (whom I didn’t know). Afterward, as he left, a smiling Paramount publicity man asked him how he had liked the picture. “Not very much, I’m afraid,” said Wilson, and kept walking to the elevator. The Paramount man looked less disappointed than betrayed, as if saying, “We’ve gone to the trouble of making a whole movie out of your friend’s book and you don’t even appreciate it!”
(1) Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940 and Nathanael West was killed in a car crash on December 22. Fitzgerald was 44, West was 37.
