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The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

£6.00

Set in Hollywood, where West had been working for several years as a scriptwriter, this novel was published in 1939, and was West’s last published piece before his early death. West was in many ways anti-Modernist, with Hollywood and mass culture as his backdrop, and his wish to expose the sick roots of American society and its progress. The book’s title – it’s working title had been The Cheated – almost certainly refers to the plague of locust in Exodus, sent as retribution.

AMERICAN RETRO SERIES : AR10
C format paperback (216mm x 135mm)
gatefold cover. 160pp

cover design by Alexandra Andries

Biography

NATHANAEL WEST (1903-1940) was born Nathan Weinstein in Upper West Side in New York City. He was expelled from school and only just passed his degree at Brown University. He had gained admittance to both college and university by deceit, after he had forged his high school transcript and ‘borrowed’ one from a cousin who had the same name for his university entrance. (Malcolm Cowley referred to these misdemeanours as “the ethics of Dada.”) His Jewish background excluded him from much of fraternity life at university. He was supremely inadequate at sport, a trait he mythologized as raconteur and writer, and he flunked his classes spectacularly. When a student he read widely, though he was drawn far more to French surrealism, Dada and the Fin de Siècle British and Irish writers, Oscar Wilde especially, than to the bestselling realism of his time.

His family’s business failures meant that his financial support, which had afforded him life in Paris for three months in 1926, was withdrawn. From the late 1920s he worked for his father’s building firm, and eventually as night manager of Manhattan’s Hotel Kenmore Hall, then assistant manager of the Sutton Hotel, East 56th Street, which he turned into a writers’ retreat. Dashiell Hammett finished The Maltese Falcon there; Maxwell Bodenheim, Erskine Caldwell, S. J. Perelman (West’s brother-in-law), Edmund Wilson and others were frequent overnight visitors. This job also afforded West time to write: The Dream Life of Balso Snell was published in 1931 and Miss Lonelyhearts, considered his best novel, was published in 1933, though it had been started in early 1930 and finished in late 1932; A Cool Million followed in 1934.

These novels were commercially unsuccessful though. West relocated to Hollywood as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures. He worked on B movies mostly, with no outstanding success, and completed his last novel, The Day of the Locust, which was published in 1939. He had written to Scott Fitzgerald: “So far the box score stands: Good reviews—fifteen percent, bad reviews—twenty five percent, brutal personal attacks, sixty percent.” He admitted though that: “Sales: practically none.” This disappointed West, who originally had high hopes for the books but reflected that “I seem to have no market whatsoever.” Bennett Cerf, his publisher at Random House, was enthusiastic initially but in fact did little to promote the book. West described the book to Edmund Wilson as a “definite flop.”

Nathanael West died in California in December 1940 with his wife in a car accident when he jumped a stop line; by repute he was a bad driver. He was only 37. His great friend F. Scott Fitzgerald had died the previous day.

“…an artist can afford to be anything but dull.” – NATHANAEL WEST

“Wildly funny, desperately sad, brutal and kind, furious and patient there was no other like Nathanael West.” – DOROTHY PARKER

Bibliography

Nathanael West’s Bibliography

1931: The Dream Life of Balso Snell
1933: Miss Lonelyhearts
1934: A Cool Million
1939: The Day of the Locust

Extract

1

Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office. The groan of leather mingled with the jangle of iron and over all beat the tattoo of a thousand hooves. He hurried to the window.

An army of cavalry and foot was passing. It moved like a. mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing from some terrible defeat. The dolmans of the hussars, the heavy shakos of the guards, Hanoverian light horse, with their fiat leather caps and flowing red plumes, were all jumbled together in bobbing disorder. Behind the cavalry came the infantry, a wild sea of waving sabretaches, sloped muskets, crossed shoulder belts and swinging cartridge boxes. Tod recognized the scarlet infantry of England with their white shoulder pads, the black infantry of the Duke of Brunswick, the French grenadiers with their enormous white gaiters, the Scotch with bare knees under plaid skirts.

While he watched, a little fat man, wearing a cork sun-helmet, polo shirt and knickers, darted around the corner of the building in pursuit of the army.

“Stage Nine–you bastards–Stage Nine!” he screamed through a small megaphone.

The cavalry put spur to their horses and the infantry broke into a dog trot. The little man in the cork hat ran after them, shaking his fist and cursing.

Tod watched until they had disappeared behind half a Mississippi steamboat, then put away his pencils and drawing board, and left the office. On the sidewalk outside the studio he stood for a moment trying to decide whether to walk home or take a streetcar. He had been in Hollywood less than three months and still found it a very exciting place, but he was lazy and didn’t like to walk. He decided to take the streetcar as far as Vine Street and walk the rest of the way.

A talent scout for National Films had brought Tod to the Coast after seeing some of his drawings in an exhibit of undergraduate work at the Yale School of Fine Arts. He had been hired by telegram. If the scout had met Tod, he probably wouldn’t have sent him to Hollywood to learn set and costume designing. His large, sprawling body, his slow blue eyes and sloppy grin made him seem completely without talent, almost doltish in fact.

Yes, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. And “The Burning of Los Angeles,” a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved he had talent.

He left the car at Vine Street. As he walked along, he examined the evening crowd. A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. Their sweaters, knickers, slacks, blue flannel jackets with brass buttons were fancy dress. The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandanna around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court.

Scattered among these masquerades were people of a different type. Their clothing was somber and badly cut, bought from mail-order houses. While the others moved rapidly, darting into stores and cocktail bars, they loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred. At this time Tod knew very little about them except that they had come to California to die.

He was determined to learn much more. They were the people he felt he must paint. He would never again do a fat red barn, old stone wall or sturdy Nantucket fisherman. From the moment he had seen them, he had known that, despite his race, training and heritage, neither Winslow Homer nor Thomas Ryder could be his masters and he turned to Goya and Daumier.

He had learned this just in time. During his last year in art school, he had begun to think that he might give up painting completely. The pleasures he received from the problems of composition and color had decreased as his facility had increased and he had realized that he was going the way of all his classmates, toward illustration or mere handsomeness. When the Hollywood job had come along, he had grabbed it despite the arguments of his Mends who were certain that he was selling out and would never paint again.

He reached the end of Vine Street and began the climb into Pinyon Canyon. Night had started to fall.

The edges of the trees burned with a pale violet light and their centers gradually turned from deep purple to black. The same violet piping, like a Neon tube, outlined the tops of the ugly, hump-backed hills and they were almost beautiful.

But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the 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.

When he noticed that they were all of plaster, lath and paper, he was charitable and blamed their shape on the materials used. Steel, stone and brick curb a builder’s fancy a little, forcing him to distribute his stresses and weights and to keep his corners plumb, but plaster and paper know no law, not even that of gravity.

On the corner of La Huerta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a little highly colored shack with domes and minarets out of the Arabian Nights. Again he was charitable. Both houses were comic, but he didn’t laugh. Their desire to startle was so eager and guileless. It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.