The Nathanael West Project

Miss L Meets the Doyles

 Miss Lonelyhearts on a Field Trip

Chapter 7

Miss L. receives a letter from Mrs. Doyle.  She says she needs to meet him in person.  She says, "I am 32 years old but have had a lot of trouble in my life and am unhappily married to a cripple."

"He went over to his typewriter and started pounding out his column.

'Life, for most of us, seems a terrible struggle of pain and heartbreak, without hope or joy.  Oh, my dear readers, it only seems so.  Every man, no matter how poor or humble, can teach himself to use his senses.  See the cloud-flecked sky, the foam-decked sea...Smell the sweet pink and heady privet...Feel of velvet and of satin..As the popular song goes, 'The best things in life are free.' Life is...'"

"But despite these thoughts, he remained as dry and cold as a polished bone and sat trying to discover a moral reason for not calling Mrs. Doyle.  If he could only believe in Christ, then adultery would be a sin, then everything would be simple and the letters extremely easy to answer."

Miss L finds Mrs. Doyle and they begin an affair, of sorts.  Her troubled life soon becomes a fisherman's net thrown over his own.

 

Miss L. & the Wheel of Pain

 Miss Lonelyhearts and Mrs. Shrike

Chapter 6

Here in Paris at the foot of Baudelaire's grave, West felt at home.  It was the beginning and the end--the end of his childhood and the beginning of his life as a writer.

"He made too perfect a butt for Shrike's jokes.  Once he had tried to get fired by recommending suicide in his column.  All that Shrike had said was: 'Remember, please, that your job is to increase the circulation of our paper.  Suicide, it is reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose.'"

"Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile."

"When I was child, I saw my mother die.  She had cancer of the breast and the pain was terrible.  She died leaning over a table."

"He stopped listening and tried to bring his great understanding heart into action again.  Parents are also part of the business of dreams.  My father was a Russian prince, my father was a Piute Indian Chief, my father was an Australian sheep baron, my father lost all his money in Wall Street, my father was a portrait painter.  People like Mary were unable to do without such tales.  They told them because they wanted to talk about something besides clothing or business or the movies, because they wanted to talk about something poetic."

"My mother died of cancer of the breast,' she said in a brave voice, like a girl reciting at a party. 'She died leaning over a table.  My father was a portrait painter.'...she began to mumble and repeat herself."

 

 

Miss L: Gravely, Sweetly Dancing

 Miss Lonelyhearts and the Clean Old Man

Chapter 5

"He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it."

"He decided to go to Delehanty's for a drink."

"At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end.  When they lost this belief, they lost everything.  Money and fame meant nothing to them.  They were not worldly men."

"As Miss Lonelyhearts stood at the bar, swaying slightly to the remembered music, he thought of children dancing.  Square replacing oblong and being replaced by circle.  Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing."

"Yes, I know, your tale is a sad one.  Tell it, damn you, tell it."

Gravely, sweetly dancing. Umm.

 

 

Miss L. Meets Betty

 Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb

Chapter 4

For the first time, Betty appears.  The love interest.  The angel figure.  The figment of his imagination, yet a real woman.

"Miss Lonelyhearts found himself developing an almost insane sensitiveness to order.

"She had often made him feel that when she was straightening his tie, she straightened much more."

"She came to the door of her apartment in a crisp, white linen dressing robe that yellowed into brown at the edges.  She held out both her hands to him and her arms showed round and smooth like wood that has been turned by the sea."

"Her world was not the world and could never include the readers of his column."

"More than two months had passed since he had sat with her on this same couch and had asked her to marry him.  Then she had accepted him and they had planned their life after marriage, his job and her gingham apron, his slippers beside the fireplace and her ability to cook.  He had avoided her since.  He did not feel guilty;  he was merely annoyed at having been fooled into thinking such a solution was possible."

"And I love you," he said.  "You and your damned smiling through tears."

And he did.

 

Miss L and the Lamb

 Miss Lonelyhearts and the Lamb

Chapter 3

This first chapter appeared, alone, as a story, in Contact in February 1932.

"He lived by himself in a room that was as full of shadows as an old steel engraving.  The walls were bare except for an ivory Christ that hung opposite the foot of the bed...Instead of writhing, the Christ remained calmly decorative."

 

"For him, Christ was the most natural of excitements."

"Oh, Lord, we are of those who wash solely in the Blood of the Lamb."

"The paraded the lamb through the market.  Miss Lonelyhearts went first, carrying the knife, the others followed, Steve with the jug and Jud with the animal."

"Their hands were covered with slimy blood and the lamb slipped free.  It crawled off into the underbrush."

"After some time had passed, Miss Lonelyhearts begged them to go back and put the lamb out of its misery.  They refused to go.  He went back alone and found it under a bush.  He crushed its head with a stone and left the carcass to the flies that swarmed about the bloody altar flowers."

Christ and suffering.  Religion and art.  The human condition raw and exposed.  West is relentless here. 

 

Miss L Leaves the Office

 Miss Lonelyhearts and the Dead Pan 

Chapter 2

This piece first appeared as an excerpt in the first issue of the literary magazine Contact (May 1932), which West co-edited with William Carlos Williams.

He leaves the office of the paper and goes for a drink.  He passes through the city park on his way.

"He entered the park at the North Gate and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained it arch.  He walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear."

"It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt."

"He searched the sky for a target.  But the gray sky looked as if it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser.  It held no angels, no flaming crosses, olive-bearing doves, wheels within wheels.  Only a newspaper struggled in the air like a kite with a broken spine."

"Forget the crucifixion, remember the Renaissance."

"We were discussing Christ, the Miss Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts.  America has her own religion."

"Numbers, he explained, constitute the only universal language."

"His caresses kept pace with the sermon.  When he had reached the end, he buried his triangular face like the blade of a hatchet in her neck."

Enough said: "...he buried his triangular face like the blade of a hatchet in her neck."

 

 

Miss L: The Masterwork

 Miss Lonelyhearts, the masterwork, West's second, is a triumph.  Published in 1933, it's a lyric celebration of what is possible in the short novel.  What is possible, what can be done, is this: SEE HOW WE ARE.  

In fifteen short entries, I'll take you the best of the novel's fifteen short chapters--sharing the best of it.  Pointing to the page...

"Are you in trouble?--Do-you-need-advice?--Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.

"Life is worth while, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstasy, and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar."  But he found it impossible to continue.  The letters were no longer funny."

"And on most days he received more than thirty letter, all of them alike, stamped from dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife."

"Art Is a Way Out."

"Do not let life overwhelm you.  When the old paths are choked with the debris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths.  Art is just such a path.  Art is distilled from suffering."

"For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation.  For those..."

"Go on from there."

Indeed, the psychological break caused by Miss L's religious conversion is underway, is in mid-stream.  If Christ is not the way.  If Art is not the way.  Well...well...that's West.  He writes novels of questions.  His villans are beautiful and always win, and so on. 

 

Alive Inside the Wreck: Where Art & Politics Collide

My piece today in The Huffington Post discusses the trouble with mixing art and politics--the trouble and the fun.  If forced to choose, choose, well, both.  Life isn't worth living without one or the other.  Life isn't lived. 

Read more about the artist George Grosz, Nathanael West...and the trouble the two still keep getting into.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-woodward/george-grosz-moma_b_940935.html

 

Google Map Feature and Me on GALLEYCAT: The First Word in Book Publishing

I was invited by the groovy website GALLEYCAT, to be interviewed about my new book Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West as part of their new feature BOOK MAPS.  My short interview rolls over the places Nathanael West lived and played and worked in Hollywood (RKO Studios, Columbia Pictures and more).  In addition, they have loaded in a cool Google Maps feature that allows you to follow along.

Just stay away from the intersection of Route 111 and Interstate 8.  If you don't know why now, well wait until you finish the book.

Many thanks.  Joe.