Prince Myshkin in Hollywood

...when, near the end of his life, he tried to get an advance of $ 1,000, and thus a little freedom, from Bennett Cerf, Cerf told him not to be unreasonable and gave him $250...

...First, Martin is a demon researcher: he fully documents West's "murderous" absent-minded driving, the cause of the Wests' death...

...his four novels brought him a total income of $1,280...

...He idealized his mother and sisters, especially Laura, and, as Martin says, was always "more at ease with prostitutes than with those girls he regarded as 'nice.' " Finally, West's books were (and still are) greatly misunderstood, even by those close to him...

...At least in Miss Lonelyhearts, West was the closest thing we have had to Dostoevsky (as in the same analogy with Flannery O'Connor's radical Christian dualism, this is a matter of kind, not of scale...

...For example, William Carlos Williams, West's discoverer, saw the theme of Miss Lonelyhearts as "the terrible moral impoverishment of our youth in the cities," and West's friend Edmund Wilson blurbed the book as "a miniature comic epic...

...He is often inelegant ("These groups sponsored ideals importantly dissimilar...

...Had he lived, West might have written The Insulted and Injured, with both those scenes in it...

...When Miss Lonelyhearts received excellent reviews, financial chicanery in the Liveright office got most copies of the book attached by creditors until public demand no longer existed...

...pretentious (Abe Kusich and Homer Simpson in The Day of the Locust are interpreted as Abraham and Homer, "the foun-tainheads of Hebrew and Greek culture...

...he goes into extensive detail on all the classes West cut and all the courses West failed...

...He shrewdly observes that "Shrike shows a wit so devastating that it is close to hysteria and implies, what Miss Lonelyhearts never sees, that Shrike himself is undergoing torments similar to his own...

...a laborer at the obvious ("West tended to fantasize in compensation for unsatisfactory reality...

...West shared with Dostoevsky the curious trait that his early drafts for novels (which Martin prints and synopsizes in profusion) invariably seem hopeless, yet his "almost faultless skill in revision" invariably succeeded in quarrying out the pure marble...

...and melodramatically ironic (his first and last chapters, on the fatal accident, are awash in irony...

...Like Richard Ellmann and certain other of his illustrious predecessors, Martin is a better biographer than critic...

...he used the transcript of a more scholarly Nathan Weinstein (West's born name) to transfer to Brown...

...This driven figure fought the world by cheating: he forged a transcript from Clinton High School to get into Tufts...

...West fought similarly by endless lying, although here Martin obscures the record by calling West's lies "a heroic tale of a mythical, epic" sort, "free fantasy," "constructing a myth," and so on...

...West found Dostoevsky's novels overupholstered compared to his model, Madame Bovary, but he was fascinated by the figure of Myshkin, and briefly called himself "Prince Myshkin" in 1930...

...Beyond all this, Martin's worst fault is quite simply that he presumes...

...He told a newspaper interviewer the following year that "the next two thousand years belong to Dostoevsky's Christianity...

...Earlier, when he felt most lonely at his farmhouse, he used to dance with his dogs...

...He was a profound self-analyst and self-critic, as Martin shows, and not only understood his worldly failure but used his peculiar gifts to their utmost...

...It is authorized in the sense that S. J. and the late Laura Perelman, West's brother-in-law and sister as well as his literary executors, cooperated with Martin by making West's papers available for the first time and in various other fashions...

...Sometimes Martin shows a tentativeness, a humility, which is engaging in contrast to all this bold assertion: "West's own surrealist fiction—if it can be called that...

...West had, supremely, what Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up called "the authority of failure" (a term popularized in the title of William Troy's excellent article on Fitzgerald...

...he even dares put on divine authority and tell his readers why West fell in love with Eileen McKenney: it was "a love whose source was compassion...

...He despised and rejected his family's (pre-Depression) business success, and if he wanted large sales for his novels or commercial success in the theater, he developed the melancholy authority which comes from not getting those things...

...West was probably the most hard-luck writer of our time...

...When West was at a low ebb in Hollywood in 1935, alone and sick, he was cared for by a midget and a part-time hooker, who alternately brought him chicken soup...

...he reveals the names of the originals of the brothels in A Cool Million and The Day of the Locust...

...Martin is somewhat casual about his sources, chary with credits, so that I recognize far more ideas, published by myself among others, than he acknowledges...

...Along with his bales of documentation, Martin contributes a number of genuine insights...

...he finds the real-life source for the dwarf Abe Kusich in the latter novel...

...The book has a number of impressive virtues...

...his nearest approach to a theatrical hit ran for two nights on Broadway (with West's last thousand dollars invested in it...

...Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (Far-rar, Straus & Giroux, 419 pp., $10.00) is naturally much fuller and better than James F. Light's previous biography—although some of Light's grubs remain preserved in amber, such as his reading of the chapter "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Dead Pan" as a lament for the god Pan...

...He reveals the previously unknown cause (a rather shoddy betrayal by West) of the break between West and his fiancee Alice Shepard, and adds perceptively that West "had at last (however unconsciously) forced a separation rather than face real involvement...

...When West takes an authentic letter from a girl who has no dates because of a slight limp, and turns it into the famous letter in Miss Lonelyhearts, from the girl with no nose, Martin says that West has made the original "seem more 'real' "—surely "real" here means "fantastic...

...West's personality was richly complex and ambivalent, even somewhat schizoid: Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts, the mocker, is as much an aspect of West as is the title figure, the idealist...

...Nathanael West: The Art of His Life, in one of its aspects, is like lifting up flat rocks and watching the little creatures, Hollywood writers and 1930s "progressives," scurry for cover...

...for the last eight months of his life West was happy for the first time, married to Eileen McKenney and finally succeeding in Hollywood, then he and Eileen, at 37 and 27, were killed in an auto accident...

...Perhaps the fairest judgment is that of Boris Ingster, West's collaborator in Hollywood and a literate man by local standards, who said that Miss Lonelyhearts might have been another Idiot "if West had not committed himself to understatement...

...he even details a sad "intense" adultery which West had with a married neighbor in Erwinna, Pa., in 1934 and 1935...

...At the same time, while West failed and suffered, in more important terms he was a figure of success and good fortune...

...But this wound, if it was such...

...Alongside these virtues there are, alas, some faults (I have space for only a single example of each...

...In my opinion (already stated in my pamphlet Nathanael West) West was the finest American writer of the 1930s, and Miss Lonelyhearts is one of the three best American novels of the first half of our century (with The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby...

...West's application for a Guggenheim grant was rejected (although his sponsors were Fitzgerald, Cowley, Wilson, and George S. Kaufman...

...West did not marry until his last year because of a bad case of what Freud calls "the degradation of the erotic principle...

...at his nadir in Hollywood he was even swindled out of his shoes...

...owlish (when West autographs copies of Balso Snell, "From one horse's ass to another," Martin translates, "All men are deceitful, base Trojan horses...

...Martin properly praises the various speech patterns in The Day of the Locust as "vivid and alive, evocative and complexly symbolic of the characters...

...he reports at least three occasions when his hero had gonorrhea...

...For all its virtues and faults, Jay Martin's book leaves us ultimately, as does West's work except at its very best, with Westian images...

...He could be his own Shrike," Martin says somewhat patly, later explaining that West had "a particularly intense hatred" of shrikes...

...He refers infuriatingly to "several other writers from The New Yorker, as well as journalists like A. J. Liebling...

...he copied his roommate's exam and induced his roommate to confess to the act...

...As a Communist fellow traveler in Hollywood in the 1930s, he tried to write positive and didactic fiction, but proved unable to do so: a meeting of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League had to be cut out of The Day of tile Locust because "it didn't fit...