Archive find: read your West

It is fitting that one hundred years since the birth of Nathanael West there are no major literary celebrations planned, no InStyle-covered fetes thrown by Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson to mark his career as a studio screenwriter, no Bloomsday-like readings of his works scheduled in libraries, and no public memorial of his fateful death in a car crash in the derelict border town of El Centro, CA, when west was a spry thirty-seven years old, legally crossing the Mexican border from a hunting trip with his wife, also killed in the wreckage. In his lifetime West sold about five thousand copies total of his four novels, which because of miniscule word count and lack of heft, would not garner the publicity or praise doorstops like Middlesex or The Corrections receive these days. West was not celebrated when he was alive, so why should we care a hundred years on?

Whether one has read it or not, The Day of the Locust, West’s final novel, is the metaphor we in Northern California have chosen for our brethren in the south. Here West depicts Hollywood and the Southern Californian as a loitering loser who hangs around the afterglow of the famous few and “had come to California to die.” West likens the inhabitant of the southland as a participant in a masquerade, and there are few among us now that would doubt things have changed. Perhaps those in the state’s south would like to ties us to the kind burnouts of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, but nothing written about a town and its industry will impact a northern reader like The Day of the Locust.

West, New York born and educated at brown thanks to a forgery of his transcripts, is remembered as a California writer the way William Faulkner is, and this is shameful. The two peers and hunting companions found steady employment in Hollywood’s studio system, but West left us with a masterful record of his time here with Locust, whereas Faulkner cashed his checks and jumped the next train to Oxford. Seeing Faulkner’s name in the credits for “The Big Sleep” causes a cringe rather than a smile. There is nothing of Faulkner’s art in this classic; every reader knows his collective body of work is light years beyond his cash and carry endeavors. West’s film writing was confined to movies few have seen or want to see, and he remains uncelebrated in Hollywood. That his books sold poorly was testament to his approach; he found ideal material among his companions and poked fun with a sharp stick.

If one believes that narratives are more relevant records of a society’s lifestyles, attitudes, and mores than history books, then the blueprint for the lower third of our state is Locust. Fans of a California split in two or three need only a handful of novels to make their case rather than a master cartographer, and the 405-south crowd won’t shake West’s depiction any more than Mississippi will elude Faulkner.