ArticleIP_3007.txt

   
   
      
         
            The Hipness Is All

            People
make a mistake in supposing "hip" to mean "stylish." Hip is a
self-consciousness. Nathanael West offered an example of it in his short novel
The Dream Life of Balso Snell , by writing this:

            An intelligent man finds
it easy to laugh at himself, but his laughter is not sincere if it is thorough.
If I could be Hamlet, or even a clown with a breaking heart 'neath his jester's
motley, the role would be tolerable. But I always find it necessary to
burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source; I must laugh at myself, and if
the laugh is "bitter," I must laugh at the laugh.

            But
that's not all. He also laughed at the laugh at the laugh, and so on, unto
eternity. The self-burlesquing quality in the truly hip is relentless, which
means that hip is a tragic condition. From this point of view, life must have
been hard for Nathanael West. But it is true that hip is amusing.

            West wrote only four novels before dying in an auto crash
at the age of 37, in 1940. The last of those novels, The Day of the
Locust , was filmed in 1975, which makes it the most famous of his titles
today. But the key to understanding him lies in the first of his novels, The
Dream Life of Balso Snell , which took three years to write, from 1926 to
1929, and ended up 49 pages long. The Dream Life is wild. West's hero
climbs into the anus of the wooden Trojan horse and goes wandering through its
intestines, having adventures. He meets a little boy, who shows him his
writings, and he meets his old writing teacher, Miss McGeeney, who shows him
her writings. The little boy's writings turn out to be by Miss McGeeney, and
the hero and Miss McGeeney end up having sex. And so forth--with the effect
being, exactly as promised by the manifestoes of Surrealism, a work of total
realism.

            For you
feel, in The Dream Life , that West has filmed a jerky-camera record of
his own dream life, and that each new, ridiculous scene represents a further
unfolding of an altogether real and plausible personality. The personality is
nervous, fearful, sexually frustrated to the point of hysteria, terrified of
women, and perhaps mildly homosexual. But it is also too rigidly imprisoned in
sardonic literary references, or in the movies, or in popular clichés, ever to
penetrate its own deepest emotions--which, in any case, are too shameful to be
acknowledged. The personality is not unlike Kafka's, except with less
intellectual intensity, which is too bad, and with American inflections, which
is wonderful. Perhaps there was something Jewish in the style--though West, who
went to the trouble of changing his name from Weinstein (which in those days
was a good idea from a career perspective, even in Hollywood, where he wrote
his screenplays), might not have appreciated the ethnic emphasis.

            T>he Dream Life of Balso Snell seems to have taught
him the rudiments of literary form, and in his next two novels, Miss
Lonelyhearts (1933) and A Cool Million (1934), he funneled this
half-hysterical personality of his into some reasonably disciplined yet fully
grotesque story lines--in the case of Miss Lonelyhearts , the noir daily
life of a cynical Christian advice columnist, and in the case of A Cool
Million , the adventures of a Horatio Alger-type character. I suppose that
Miss Lonelyhearts should count as West's masterpiece, due to the
fantastic procession of importuning advice-hounds that traipses across its
pages--a procession of battered wives, crippled cuckolded husbands, syphilitic
children, rape victims, and deformed teen-agers whose sufferings could break
your heart--except that West's demeanor makes the whole thing slightly funny,
as in a sick joke. There's much to be said for the tone of comic-book violence:
"He buried his triangular face like the blade of a hatchet in her neck."

            But A
Cool Million is, in its modest way, the most perfect of his books. The
novel is strictly a sendup of American patriotic inspirational literature. A
young hero sets out to earn his fortune and save his aged mother from eviction.
He passes through every station of the uplift narratives: He meets a beneficent
banker and patron, falls in love with the girl next door, traverses the United
States. Every word in the novel plunks the tinkly piano keys of a dime novel.
But the American land of opportunity that goes reeling by in the background
turns out to be a nightmare of free-floating violence and organized fascism
(brilliantly imagined, by the way), until the America of A Cool Million
has outdone in scariness even the America of Kafka's Amerika . West's
hero loses his thumb, his teeth, his leg, his scalp, and his nose; and the
creepier his sufferings become, the funnier is the book, sad to say.

            It's hard to imagine that West could ever have written a
conventional novel with any success. He tried in The Day of the Locust
(1939), with its more or less realistic story of Hollywood down and outs, but
mostly he succeeded in placing a veneer of hard-boiled literary conventions
over his manias about women and sex, which makes him seem just as crazy as in
his other books, but less aware of it, therefore less entertaining. The Library
of America edition of his writings, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, includes, in a
spirit of thoroughness, random essays and stories that the author never
finished; some screenplays; and a few letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund
Wilson, and other literary figures. These have their points of interest. "My
dear Mr. Fitzgerald, You have been kind enough to say that you liked my novel,
Miss Lonelyhearts . I am applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship."

            But those first three novels
show us everything that is appealing about West. He had the kind of neurotic,
sardonic, satiric, manic, and generally -ic personality that I imagine was not
so common 60 years ago (for who else was like him in American letters? I can't
think of anyone), only to become mandatory today. So he was prophetic, too. The
test of time has never been an accurate gauge of literary genius. Greater
writers than West have been doomed to fade with the years. Time does tell us
something, though. In the case of Nathanael West, it tells us that earnestness
ages and hip is ever fresh.