University of Virginia Library

"Miss Lonelyhearts and the Lamb," Contact: An American Quarterly Review, I (February, 1932), 80-85. "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Dead Pan," Contact, I (May, 1932), 13-21. "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Clean Old Man," Contact, I (May, 1932), 22-27. "Miss Lonelyhearts in the Dismal Swamp," Contempo, II (July 5, 1932), 1-2. "Miss Lonelyhearts on a Field Trip," Contact, I (October, 1932), 50-57. These articles are listed in William White, "Nathanael West: A Bibliography," Studies in Bibliography, XI (1958), 207-224. For a discussion of West's connection with the short-lived little magazine Contact, see James F. Light, Nathanael West: An Interpretative Study (1961), pp. 70-71. Contempo was an almost equally short-lived iconoclastic newspaper published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Page numbers not otherwise identified refer to the New Directions edition of Miss Lonelyhearts, n.d.

Prof. Light makes some perceptive comments on the importance of this change, in Nathanael West, p. 83. There is a slight suggestion that the use of the interior monologue may have been the choice of the Contempo editors rather than the author. Much of the revision that West ostensibly made later consists only of inserting punctuation, and so, likewise, the interior monologue technique could have been brought about in the first place merely by omitting the original punctuation. Furthermore, there is one "my" in the monologue that seems to refer to an entirely separate person rather than to a part of Miss Lonelyhearts' mind. Still further evidence appears on another page in this same issue of Contempo: a letter from an irate contributor claims that his earlier contribution had been greatly changed without permission, and the editors, in a brief reply, rather crassly and fatuously defend their action. In any case, whether West's doing or not, the experiment was an unwise one.

The result of this revision is one example of the "static, pictorial quality" which Prof. Light shows is an integral part of the novel. See Nathanael West, pp. 95-96.

This change is in the Contempo chapter, and again there is room for suspicion that the editors there may have changed it originally. Twenty seems far too young in either the early or the revised version.

I am deeply indebted to Prof. James B. Colvert of the University of Virginia, who made dozens of valuable suggestions while this study was in progress.