THERE IS ALMOST A 'STAR-CROSS'D' QUALITY IN both the life and literary career of Nathanael
West. When he was graduated from Brown University in 1924, the college annual said, 'He seems
a bit eccentric at times, a characteristic of all geniuses.' His first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, dispensed entirely with plausibility, and
his other three could certainly be labeled 'grotesque.' If Balso Snell
was ignored and A Cool Million called a disappointment, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust were
highly regarded by his friends, especially Edmund Wilson. Yet A Cool
Million was remaindered; Miss Lonelyhearts came out just as
Live-right was going bankrupt; and when The Day of the Locust had sold
but 1,480 copies, West wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'So far the box score stands: Good
reviews—fifteen per cent, bad reviews—twenty-five percent, brutal personal
attacks—sixty per cent.' Although he went to Hollywood after 20th Century-United Artists
bought Miss Lonely-hearts, he never worked on the script and it came
out under another title; and except for RKO's 'I Stole a Million,' his talents were wasted by
the movies on Westerns and B-pictures. Nine months after he married his Irish beauty they were
both killed in an auto collision in California. The New York Times
account of the accident featured his wife, the Eileen of 'My Sister Eileen,' put her in the
headline, misspelled his name, got two of the titles of his novels wrong, erred on his age and
in other particulars. Even his sister-in-law, Ruth McKenney, got his age wrong in her book,
Love Story, as do Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft's Twentieth Century Authors (also the day of his death), Malcolm Cowley's
Exile's Return, and most other accounts.
Those who have written on West cite his four novels, but there is no bibliography of his
work and of writings about him. He is ignored by Alfred Kazin's On Native
Grounds (New York, 1942), by W. M. Frohock's The Novel of Violence,
1920-1950 (Dallas, 1950), by Blanche Housman Gelfant's The American
City Novel (Norman,
1954), and by Fred B. Millet's
Contemporary American Authors (New York, 1940), which treats 219 writers. The
three-volume
Literary History of the United States (New York, 1948),
edited by Robert Spiller and others, gives him but two sentences; Lewis Leary's
Articles on American Literature, 1900-1950 (Durham, 1954) lists only one
article about him, and the Hoffman-Allen-Ulrich
The Little Magazine
(Princeton, 1946) gives his name in one place and spells it wrong. James Hart's
Oxford Companion to American Literature omitted him from the first edition
(New York, 1941) and the second edition (1948), but in the third edition (1956) he is given a
brief paragraph.
In addition to his being treated in the Oxford Companion, there are
other indications that Nathanael West may be given the attention many think he deserves. A
Ph.D. dissertation and at least two M.A. theses have been written on his work; Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust have
both been reprinted by New Directions in their 'New Classics' series; these two and A Cool Million were recently published in London; Miss
Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust have been reissued in
paperbacks; Miss Lonelyhearts was translated into French; and finally,
critical essays—such as those by Robert M. Coates, Malcolm Cowley, Richard B. Gehman,
Alan Ross, and Edmund Wilson—continue to appear from time to time. An ironical footnote
to West criticism is that the longest essay yet printed, in the Western
Review, which the editors called 'definitive,' resulted in a charge of plagiarism.[1]
Asked to choose the 'most undeservedly neglected book' of the past twenty-five years, Leslie
A. Fiedler wrote in the Autumn 1956 American Scholar that he considered
A Cool Million but decided against it because West had 'after all,
achieved [a] reputation, though not for the works I prefer.' While this reputation is not yet
fixed, it is surely true that West at the moment is neither brutally attacked by critics nor
completely ignored.
Finally, in May 1957 Farrar, Straus and Cudahy issued The Complete Works
of Nathanael West, containing the four novels and an introduction by Alan Ross (from Horizon). The Saturday Review put his portrait on
its cover, every review I have seen has been laudatory, and The New
Yorker said the book 'contains some of the best writing
that has been
produced by an American in this century.' To paraphrase Richard B. Gehman: 'Seventeen years
after his death: that is the final ironic, tragic, Westian joke.'
