Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

Jim and I were in San Francisco for a few days. I hadn’t brought a book to read because we were going to be busy during the day seeing friends and going to the art museum. We were attending the opera both evenings we were in town. But I still wanted something to read on the plane home. Having lunch one afternoon in the Castro with friends, we arrived a little early and dropped into a bookstore there called Fabulosa. I looked through the literature shelves and found this novel, often called one of the best of the 20th century, which I had been thinking of reading anyway because I’ve been on a little kick of reading novels about mid-century Hollywood after What Makes Sammy Run? and The Crack-Up.

The book is two independent novellas published together. Miss Lonelyhearts takes place in New York, not Hollywood. Miss Lonelyhearts is a man who writes an advice column for a local newspaper. His actual name is never revealed. The desperate letters he receives depress him and he’s given up any hope of actually solving the problems described in the letters, several of which are printed in the novella. His editor teases him sarcastically. There’s a fine passage (pp. 33-35) where the editor, Shrike is his name, gives Miss Lonelyhearts advice on several possible routes to relieving life’s miseries. One by one he goes through the list and dismisses each one. A simple life as a farmer, “too dull and laborious.” Retreating to the South Seas, “played out and there’s little use in imitating Gauguin.” Hedonism: “You haven’t the money, nor are you stupid enough to manage it.” Then art, which gets dismissed as well. “After art, Shrike described suicide and drugs.” Dismissing them all, Shrike comes round to religion, which he treats as a self-evident joke but the novel keeps affirming, at least hopefully, if also doubtfully.

Miss Lonelyhearts’ personal strategy is drink, which he does regularly, and sex, when he can. He has a girlfriend named Betty who he proposed to earlier and then abandoned. Lost, he seeks her out again. She forgives him. They spend a few happy days together in an empty home in the country that belongs to her family but her love offers Miss Lonelyhearts only temporary relief. He tries sex with his editor’s wife. Mr. and Mrs. Shrike have an arrangement where Shrike permits his wife to be romanced by other men knowing that she won’t actually cheat on him but she’ll come home excited enough to consent to sex with him. Much of the book is similarly sordid. The characters are ugly. In one scene Miss Lonelyhearts and a friend drunkenly harass an old gay man they find hanging out in a public toilet.

The main action comes when Miss Lonelyhearts receives a letter from a woman who asks to receive his advice in person rather than print her letter in the paper. He calls her. Her name is Mrs. Doyle. They meet and she tells him her sad story involving a child out of wedlock and a marriage to a crippled man. They have sex. Later the crippled husband invites Miss Lonelyhearts to their home, and Miss Lonelyhearts thinks he’s arrived at a place of spiritual humility where he might actually be able to offer assistance to the suffering. But his beatification, whether true or brought on by a fever, ends tragically. The crippled man accuses Miss Lonelyhearts of adultery and shoots him in the stairwell of his apartment as Betty looks on.

Perhaps we’re meant to understand that in this world of sin, salvation is only possible in death. But the lesson didn’t take, at least for this reader. The novella is broken up into a series of chapters like the episodes in the gospels with individual titles such as, “Miss Lonelyhearts pays a visit,” and “Miss Lonelyhearts attends a party.”

The Day of the Locust is longer, which only amplifies the darkness. The main character is Tod Hackett. He’s an art school graduate from Yale who has come to Hollywood employed as a scene painter for the movies. Tod lives in an apartment building called the San Bernardino Arms in “Pinyon Canyon.” A dwarf Tod knows, named Abe Kusich, helped Tod find the apartment after Tod met the dwarf at a building where Tod was living earlier. It’s not a great apartment but it has the advantage of a beautiful girl named Faye Greener living in the building with her father. Faye is seventeen or eighteen, working as an extra in the movies with dreams of making it as a star. Her father, Harry Greener, is an old Vaudeville clown. Although Tod is supposedly working on a personal painting project titled “The Burning of Los Angeles” we never see him actually doing any painting. And though he works at a movie studio there are only a couple of short scenes set on the lot, and again, he does no discernible work for the movies. So I was disappointed that yet again I didn’t get the story of the movie biz I was actually hoping for. The Last Tycoon is still the best for that.

Instead, the story is about Tod’s unrequited infatuation with Faye. After introducing Tod, the novella has him attend a party at the home of a successful screenwriter, Claude Estee. Several of the guests leave the party to visit a whorehouse where they watch a stag film together and where Tod learns that one of the whores is “Mary Dove, one of Faye Greener’s best friends” which makes him wonder if Faye might also be available for hire. Not being able to attract her through romantic means, Tod constantly imagines having her in other ways.

Then, suddenly, we’re introduced to a new character, Homer Simpson, and are given several chapters of his back story before we’re told how he fits in to the main story. Yes, that’s his name. Supposedly, Matt Groening borrowed the name for his cartoon father after reading this book in college and recognizing both his father’s actual first name, Homer, and a last name that begins by calling him a “simp.” This Homer Simpson, also a simp, lives in a little house a little further up the canyon and is also wooing Faye Greener. She’s only interested in a man that has money or looks. Tod has neither. Homer has money that he saved from his work as an accountant at a hotel in the midwest, but hasn’t got looks. Then we meet another suitor who has the looks but no money. He’s Earle Shoop, a taciturn cowboy-type who plays cowboy-types in the movies.

The novella revolves around this collection of Hollywood hanger-ons: a half-dozen men all beguiled by the single female character. There’s a scene where Earle takes Tod and Faye up to a camp in the hills above Hollywood where they meet with other guys living off the grid. A guy named Miguel dances with Faye around the campfire which leads to a fight. The scene reminded me of scenes in For Whom the Bell Tolls, both in the setting and in the writing, too, which is not bad. But more than Hemingway, the novel reminded me of James Purdy in the mean-ness of the characters and the perversity of their stories.

It doesn’t get better. Harry Greener dies. There’s a scene at the funeral parlor. Faye does turn to prostitution to raise the money for the funeral. After that, she moves in with Homer as a “business arrangement” where he gives her the money to buy the clothes and things she thinks she needs to get a start in the movie business in exchange for the fantasy of a percentage of her future earnings. Earle and Miguel move into Homer’s garage where they keep their roosters for cock-fighting. There’s a party at Homer’s house where both Claude Estee and Abe Kusich attend. There’s more jealousy and fighting over the girl. Faye flees the scene.

There’s a line here that harks back to Miss Lonelyhearts and Shrike’s speech about the various places where one might find comfort in life. Tod finds Homer asleep curled up in a ball after the trials and humiliations of the party and compares him to a babe in the womb. “What a perfect escape the return of the womb was. Better by far than Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands” (p. 172). He decides to leave Homer in peace, go get something to eat and check back on Homer later. “When he arrived at Musso Frank’s restaurant, he ordered a steak and a double scotch” (p. 174). During dinner he entertains a fantasy of raping Faye, but is interrupted by the waiter. Leaving the restaurant he turns away from Homer’s house, attracted by searchlights in the opposite direction. There’s a movie premier at “Kahn’s Persian Palace Theater.” The last ten pages of the book are a nightmare scene of the crowd filling the street at the premier. Tod is swept by the mob one way and then another. He runs into Homer carrying two suitcases because he’s decided to go back to the midwest. But Homer is teased by a bratty child actor we met earlier named Amore Loomis who lives across the street from Homer with his mother. Homer, crazed, violently assaults the kid. Tod’s leg is broken by the crowd. He fantasizes about completing his painting of the destruction of Los Angeles, filling it with portraits of all the characters he’s met going up in flames. Then he’s brought back to reality when he’s rescued from the melee by a couple of policemen who offer to take him to the hospital but he accepts a ride, instead, to his screenwriter friend’s, Claude Estee’s place.

I suppose it’s a vision of hell, or of descending circles of hell. The falsity of Hollywood seems to be a target. There are a couple of descriptions of the movie backlots with one fake setting and costumed actors morphing into the next. And there’s a swipe at Los Angeles architecture. It seems a cliche now, though it might have been fresh in 1939 when West wrote this novel. “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon” (p. 61). At first he’s sympathetic, “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous” (p. 61). But by the end of the novel West isn’t sighing, he’s condemning. And his target grows much larger than merely Hollywood, to include all the folks like that crowd in the streets who buy into the dream that Hollywood is selling, which means all of us who have ever found escape in a movie, or dreamed of being a star in one, or fantasized about sex with an attractive actor. That breadth of misanthropy is a little too all-encompassing for me. When an author is willing to insult pretty much everyone, he’s going to insult the reader, too, and I didn’t feel edified by his judgment of human sin, but offended by his failure to see human virtue.