Brilliant Young Man

The Dream Life of Balso Snell and Miss Lonelyhearts from Nathaniel West: Novels and Other Writings.  pp. 1-126.  Library of America.  $40.00. ****

Reading the early work of Nathanael West brings to mind David Somerville, a friend I haven’t thought about for fifty years.  He lived in the room beside mine in my freshman dorm at Duke University.  Within my first few days of meeting him, I knew he would be my best friend at the place.  He was short, slight, bashful, and quite witty when you got him away from people.  He had brought only a very few books with him to college, which he put on the small shelf above his desk, including Raintree County; Look Homeward, Angel; and Ulysses, all of which he had read assiduously.  We fell into talking and hanging around together, studying together.  In our sophomore year we roomed together.

Like me, he had gotten into the freshman class creative writing seminar, taught by Reynolds Price; we had had to submit a writing sample.  (He later told me, this was quite endearing, that when he went into class that first day, he had fully expected Price to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased and humbled to let you know that we have an actual genius in our midst.  Mr. Somerville, may I read your writing sample to the group?”  I told him that I’d had exactly the same fantasy.  Actually, Price chose another student to read his story, who turned out to be the most talented among us, Michael Brondoli.)  Somerville had strong ambitions to be a writer, as did I.  He didn’t tell me in so many words, but I knew it just by meeting him.  It takes one to know one.

Somerville wrote what would now be called fantasy stories (and taken perfectly seriously, no doubt); he wrote about Cossacks in 19^th century Russia, or warriors in the Middle Ages, or a character who suddenly developed bird’s feet (he’d also read Kafka).  He wrote rather brilliant, heroic sentences, which we admired for their wit and beauty.  He had obviously absorbed his literary influences.  Price, to say the very least, was a different kind of writer, who wrote about contemporary life and concerns, not necessarily in a realistic way (he had just published A Generous Man, which I would hardly call a realistic novel), and pooh poohed what Somerville was trying to do; he wanted him to write more the way he did.  I felt at the time that Price wasn’t being fair to Somerville, and feel it even more now.  Later, on the occasions when I taught creative writing (which weren’t many), I tried to let young writers do what they wanted, even if I didn’t particularly like or understand it.  I felt I was there to help them become themselves.

Somerville immediately lost confidence, getting swatted down like that.  He didn’t have an abundance of it anyway (as none of us did.  What the professor said was vitally important to us).  He fumbled around trying to write his kind of story while also satisfying Price’s demands.  He was never able to do that.

In our sophomore year we were inseparable companions.  I studied almost constantly, and in that way was a good influence.  He was the kind of person who always resolved to get up early, often to get to a first-period class, but as often as not slept in, feeling guilty afterwards (his first period class was some kind of language study, French or Russian, and he was a brilliant linguist, so it didn’t really matter.  I don’t know why the hell he signed up for a first period class if he could never make it).  He was a bit of a depressive anyway, the kind of guy who, given the choice, would stay up late reading, smoking his Meerschaum pipe, and wake up the next morning about 11:30, ready for action.  I was always an early-to-bed early-to-rise type, and a morning person.  We were a bad match in that way, and despite our friendship, at the end of our sophomore year I told him I wanted to get a single.  He did the same.

By the next year I had a girlfriend, and spent most of my time with her.  Actually (though this was against school rules, and we were liable for expulsion) we spent a lot of time in my room, in the dark, in bed.  Sometimes I heard Somerville come down from his upstairs room and knock on my door, and I didn’t answer.  I’m embarrassed to say it, but sometimes I didn’t answer even when I was in there alone.  I had too much I wanted to do, and felt he was dragging me down.  My memory is that he didn’t show up at all for our senior year, and I lost track of him altogether.  I inquired about him and Duke and, weirdly, they have no record of his enrollment.  I think of him as a casualty of the Sixties.  He wasn’t the only one.

Somerville comes to mind because The Dream Life of Balso Snell seems to be the product of a young man who was widely read, brilliant in his own way, more than a little cynical, and who wrote great sentences.  I can hardly believe the book was published as a novel; it occupies only 54 pages of this Library of America volume, and has no plot whatsoever.  If you held a gun to my head right now and asked me what it was about, I’d have to tell you to go ahead and shoot.  But it’s full of literary illusions, and the sentences themselves are superb.  He wrote it when he was just 26, though it wasn’t published for a couple of years.  I can see why a publisher wanted to invest in this young man, and encourage him.  It came out in an edition of 500 copies.  (I read somewhere that, in his entire short life, West sold 6,000 books total.)

West himself was a lackadaisical student, but his chronology says that, in seventh and eighth grades, he read Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Dickens, Shakespeare, Hardy, and Balzac, in between issues of “Field and Stream” (he was an avid outdoorsman).  It’s not surprising that, in New York, he got into DeWitt Clinton High School, where he read Petronius, Rabelais, Donne, Laforgue, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, James Branch Cabell, Authur Machen (I love such lists), but he left school after three years.  He altered his transcript and got into Tufts, but rarely went to class and dropped out after one semester.  He somehow got his hands on the transcript of another Nathan Weinstein (his birth name), and got into Brown as a second-term sophomore.  Even there he mostly did his own reading and hung out with S.J. Perelman, a fellow student, who became a friend.  Many of us, in college and elsewhere, suffered from imposture syndrome, but West actually was an imposter.  In 1926, supposedly because of Horace Greeley’s famous statement, Go West, young man), he changed his name to Nathanael West.

In 1929, just after West had finished Balso Snell, Perelman introduced him to a woman named “Susan Chester” (not sure why that name is in quotes in the Chronology), who wrote an advice column for the Brooklyn Eagle, and she showed him some letters which eventually became the basis of Miss Lonelyhearts.  That is a different kind of book altogether.  It too is short—just 71 pages in the LOA volume—but instead of the disjointed, wandering non-narrative of Balso Snell (the fact that it is someone’s “dream life” doesn’t make up for all that) West writes in brief stunning chapters that do form a narrative (though he published some of them as separate stories, and I wondered at times if he assembled them in the right order) and carry the reader forward.

In Miss Lonelyhearts, this cynical hyper-literate young man, confronted real human heartbreak and difficulty, letters like this one. “I am writing to you for my little sister Gracie because something awfull hapened to her and I am afraid to tell mother about it. . . . Gracie is deaf and dumb and bigger than me but not very smart on account of being deaf and dumb. . . . Last week a man came on the roof and did something dirty to her . . .”  Or this: “I am a cripple 41 yrs of age which I have been all my life and I have never let myself get blue until lately when I have been feeling lousy all the time on account of not getting anywhere and asking myself what it is all for.”

West’s advice columnist, as cynical and hard-drinking as newsmen often are, has nothing to offer such people except bromides about positive thought, vaguely Christian in origin (that seemed odd to me, because religion figures nowhere in West’s chronology).  At the same time, the suffering he encounters—West was writing in the midst of the Great Depression—is tearing him up.  He has no answer for it, as none of us would.  He gets involved in a humorous plot with various of these people seeking his help, and the result is an odd mix of satire, comedy, and real heartbreak.  We’re laughing at the situations as our hearts are aching.  I felt that the ending was a bit of a cop out, though I must admit I had no feeling for where the narrative should go.  There are some subjects that are too strong even for the most brilliant satirist.

West moved on to Hollywood eventually, the last refuge of the cynic, and wrote one of the famous Hollywood novels, The Day of the Locust.  At this point one can’t help seeing his whole life and work in light of his sad end; always a terrible driver whose friends dreaded riding with him, he and his wife died in a car accident where he had run a stop sign.  He was 37 years old.  He’s credited as the author of one of the iconic Hollywood novels, but I’m not sure Miss Lonelyhearts—short as it is—isn’t his masterpiece.