The Day of the Locust     by Nathanael West Original language: English Published by Buccaneer Books, Inc. Pub. Date: 1997 Format: Hardcover Dimensions: (in inches): 0.77 x 8.84 x 5.82 ISBN: 0899663028 List Price: $28.95, £18.41 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £18.41 Buy online from Amazon.com for $28.95

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Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City on October 17, 1903. His parents were Russian immigrants though his mother, Anna Wallenstein Weinstein, came from a rather wealthy family. West’s father, Max, was a building contractor. Though West showed little writing aptitude as a youngster, fiction seemed to be in his blood as he was accepted at Tufts University by falsifying his high school transcript since he never graduated from high school. Failing at Tufts, he was admitted to Brown University on the strength of a transcript of another Nathan Weinstein. While at Brown, West not only did not participate in Jewish activities, but as one college friend wrote, West ’writhed under the accidental curse of his religion.’ He was the classic case of the un-Jewish Jew whose perspective is that of the outsider looking in sardonically and yet sympathetically...

’Though the silence hovers endlessly the noise becomes undone; for the masses see with violence, the locusts grin with pain.’ Arthur Rimbaud, the great Freench poet and rebel, once said that the poet should be a voyant, a seer, one who has within himself the capacity to transcend the pedestrian, whose voice reaches farther than the voice we hear today. Charles Baudelaire was a voyant, and paid for it with the phlegmatic accusations that his poetry was obscene. Nathanael West empathised with Baudelaire, and so too did he share with him the spoils of the voyant; misunderstanding, scorn, antipathy, and the vexation of the publishing industry.

West wrote only four novels: The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) was privately published (only 500 copies) and was hardly reviewed; Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) received mixed reviews, though most were favourable, but with Liveright the publisher, declared bankruptcy weeks later; A Cool Million (1934) was published by a small firm and almost immediately became neglected; The Day of the Locust (1939), published by Random House, sold less than 1500 copies. One year after The Day of the Locust was published, West was killed in an automobile accident. It would appear that with only four novels, none of which gaining any ’success’, there would be little to say about the work of Nathanael West; but West was a voyant, and the work of voyants is not measured quantitatively...

Baudelaire wrote little and Rimbaud even less... Of his two best novels, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, the latter may be one of the finest and most representative novels of twentieth century ennui. In it, West has synthesized the malaise of twentieth century man and woman into one hundred and twenty pages of poignancy, perception, and poetry. Though present, the influences of both Baudelaire and Kafka do not obscure West’s own style, but, to the contrary, enrich it.

The Day of the Locust takes place in California, the paradise that searchers always seek before they die. The searchers are Homer Simpson, a trusting mid-western rube who moves to California only to be cheated by its ’warmth’, and Tod Hackett, a Yale art graduate who attempts to satisfy the artistic and emotional needs of the searchers of the world. In Los Angeles they meet Faye Greener, the nubile embodiment of pretension and deceit, Tod’s defeat and Homer’s death; Harry Greener the aged embodiment of the artist who fails; and Abe Kusich the bookie dwarf who sells lies and dreams — these characters are all a part of West’s wasteland, and they are personalities representative of twentieth century American neuroticism.

West weaves into his characters a preoccupation with decay, perversion, and violence: the logical consequence to the boredom inherent in the character of many twentieth century men and women. Predating the Absurdists, West cogently dramatizes the slow, lingering death of civilization, culminating in the last and most vivid scene of the novel, the riot at the theater.

It is in the riot, a juxtaposition of what has been called the ’cheated’, or the lower middle class whose emotional needs demand satisfaction and the ’performers’, or the cheaters who are attempting to satisfy the emotional needs of others, that Tod reflects on in his painting The Burning of Los Angeles.

This vision is West’s epiphany, that which Joyce referred to as a revelation, and which Revelation itself states in 9:3-9: ’And out of the smoke there came forth locusts upon the earth.’ The locusts, the demonic collective unity cheated by the ’artificiality of oranges,’ by the mundanity of comfort and the boredom that is leisure. This was West’s prophecy: the locusts have arrived, the Apocalypse is at hand, there will be death by fire. The Day of the Locust should be read, for the anguish on his lips is the pain within our soul, the terror within our vision.

’As he stood on his good leg, clinging desperately to the iron rail, he could see all the rough charcoal strokes with which he had blocked it out on the big canvas. Across the top, parallel with the frame, he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center winding from left to right, was a long hilly street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. For the faces of its members, he was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die; the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, the airplane, funeral and preview watchers — all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super ’Dr. Know-All-Pierce-All’ had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.’