The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings ed. by Sacvan Bercovitch
John Kulka

Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Library of America, 1997. 829 pp. $35.00.

The Library of America here collects the four short novels published during West’s lifetime, seven short stories, a play, two screenplays, selected letters, and what is likely the outline for the planned fifth novel, for which West was under contract with Random House at the time of his death. Of the previously unpublished material the stories are of the most interest for the general reader. The play and two screenplays are minor collaborative efforts. And while the letters fascinate, the selection is disappointing. The editors have chosen to include only those letters touching on literary issues, and at twenty-three letters this makes for a thin selection. Since space isn’t an issue, I can’t help wondering if a more general roundup wouldn’t have been better.
All published here for the first time with one exception, the stories were composed between 1929 and 1933, the critical years of West’s artistic development, coming between the dreadful Balso Snell and the perfectly realized Miss Lonelyhearts. As such they provide an unprecedented glimpse of what the young artist was up to. The stories reveal West’s early preoccupation with American popular culture and the extent to which he was willing to experiment with nontraditional narrative. They also reveal a profound anxiety of influence. Born in 1903, only four years after Hemingway, West nevertheless identified himself with the second generation of modernists who arrived late on the scene in the late ’20s and ’30s—with those writers who came immediately after the Lost Generation. The stories, and Balso Snell too for that matter, are filled with a sense of belatedness that sometimes overwhelms the early fiction. Not coincidentally, failure and fakery are the common themes of these stories.
“The Adventurer” is a story that bears some resemblance to the James Thurber story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” In spirit, though, it lies much closer to the darker works of Beckett and Pynchon. The story explores the gross discrepancies between the inner and outer life of its narrator Joe Rucker, an order clerk for a wholesale grocery. Rucker doesn’t engage in active daydreaming so much as he recalls memories of his old fantasies, images flickering dimly on the monitor in his head. In an earlier, happier state he hunted tigers in the reading room of the New York Public Library. But once awakened to the fact that he is one of an “innumerable horde” wasting his days in the library, Rucker can no longer take refuge in his dreams or in reading.
“The Adventurer” has no structure other than the associative memories in Rucker’s head and the ratiocination of a mind turning against itself. And once started, such a story can come to no logical conclusion. In another story called “Western Union Boy,” we encounter another of life’s casualties, F. Winslow, haunted by his dreams. In this case Winslow, an old college acquaintance of the narrator’s whom the narrator runs into in a speakeasy, is haunted by a particular recurring nightmare. It is about a semipro baseball game in which Winslow played as an adolescent. After dropping a fly ball and losing the game, Winslow is prevented from boarding the team bus by an older bat-wielding cousin as the rest of the team watches from the bus, and Winslow is forced to hitchhike back to town. The fact that the narrator has bothered to record Winslow’s story at all suggests that Winslow’s nightmare has in some sense become the narrator’s, and so by extension ours. In a longer unfinished story called “Mr. Potts of Pottstown,” the inversion of reality and nightmare is complete when Potts, another would-be adventurer, learns that the Swiss Alps he intends to climb are fake—indeed all of Switzerland, its “lakes, forests, glaciers, peasants, goats, milkmaids, mountains, and the rest of it” are all part of elaborate scenery in a huge amusement park owned by a giant corporation referred to only as “the Company.”
The most polished and finished of the stories, “The Impostor,” is a biting satire of the expatriate scene in Paris. (West spent a few months in Paris in 1926, the same year he legally changed his name from Nathan Weinstein to Nathanael West; afterwards he would circulate the fiction that he had lived there in poverty for years.) The story begins with the absurd premise that any artist in Paris in those days needed to look the part to be taken seriously, i.e., one needed to look “crazy.” The story’s narrator, a writer or likely a would-be writer, arrives in Paris well after the first and second waves of American expatriates have already landed. “As time went on,” the narrator complains, as if giving voice to West’s own anxiety of influence, “being ‘crazy’ became more difficult. . . . One had to be original.” The narrator’s brilliant solution is to portray his craziness “through the exaggeration of normality,” by donning a pressed suit, gloves, and a tightly rolled umbrella. He soon finds himself invited to every important party.
The perfection of West’s comic technique would require greater distance from his characters than he achieved in the short stories, but the stories display the same obsessions and stylistic brilliance found in the later novels that have earned him a high place in American letters and which mark him as a true forebearer of postmodern American fiction. [John Kulka]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings ed. by Sacvan Bercovitch John Kulka Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Library of America, 1997. 829 pp. $35.00. The Library of America here collects the four short novels published during West’s lifetime, seven short stories, a play, two screenplays, selected letters, and what is likely the outline for the planned fifth novel, for which West was under contract with Random House at the time of his death. Of the previously unpublished material the stories are of the most interest for the general reader. The play and two screenplays are minor collaborative efforts. And while the letters fascinate, the selection is disappointing. The editors have chosen to include only those letters touching on literary issues, and at twenty-three letters this makes for a thin selection. Since space isn’t an issue, I can’t help wondering if a more general roundup wouldn’t have been better. All published here for the first time with one exception, the stories were composed between 1929 and 1933, the critical years of West’s artistic development, coming between the dreadful Balso Snell and the perfectly realized Miss Lonelyhearts. As such they provide an unprecedented glimpse of what the young artist was up to. The stories reveal West’s early preoccupation with American popular culture and the extent to which he was willing to experiment with nontraditional narrative. They also reveal a profound anxiety of influence. Born in 1903, only four years after Hemingway, West nevertheless identified himself with the second generation of modernists who arrived late on the scene in the late ’20s and ’30s—with those writers who came immediately after the Lost Generation. The stories, and Balso Snell too for that matter, are filled with a sense of belatedness that sometimes overwhelms the early fiction. Not coincidentally, failure and fakery are the common themes of these stories. “The Adventurer” is a story that bears some resemblance to the James Thurber story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” In spirit, though, it lies much closer to the darker works of Beckett and Pynchon. The story explores the gross discrepancies between the inner and outer life of its narrator Joe Rucker, an order clerk for a wholesale grocery. Rucker doesn’t engage in active daydreaming so much as he recalls memories of his old fantasies, images flickering dimly on the monitor in his head. In an earlier, happier state he hunted tigers in the reading room of the New York Public Library. But once awakened to the fact that he is one of an “innumerable horde” wasting his days in the library, Rucker can no longer take refuge in his dreams or in reading. “The Adventurer” has no structure other than the associative memories in Rucker’s head and the ratiocination of a mind turning against itself. And once started, such a story can come to no logical conclusion. In another story called “Western Union Boy,” we encounter another of life’s casualties, F. Winslow, haunted by his dreams. In this case Winslow, an old college acquaintance of the narrator’s whom the narrator runs into in a speakeasy, is haunted by a particular recurring nightmare. It is about a semipro baseball game in which Winslow played as an adolescent. After dropping a fly ball and losing the game, Winslow is prevented from boarding the team bus by an older bat-wielding cousin as the rest of the team watches from the bus, and Winslow is forced to hitchhike back to town. The fact that the narrator has bothered to record Winslow’s story at all suggests that Winslow’s nightmare has in some sense become the narrator’s, and so by extension ours. In a longer unfinished story called “Mr. Potts of Pottstown,” the inversion of reality and nightmare is complete when Potts, another would-be adventurer, learns that the Swiss Alps he intends to climb are fake—indeed all of Switzerland, its “lakes, forests, glaciers, peasants, goats, milkmaids, mountains, and the rest of it” are all part of elaborate scenery in a huge amusement park owned by a giant corporation referred to only as “the Company.” The most polished and finished of the stories, “The Impostor,” is a biting satire of the expatriate scene in Paris. (West spent a few months in Paris in 1926, the same year he legally changed his name from Nathan Weinstein to Nathanael West; afterwards he would circulate the fiction that he had lived there in poverty for years.) The story begins with the absurd premise that any artist in Paris in those days needed to look the part to be taken seriously, i.e., one needed to look “crazy.” The story’s narrator, a writer or likely a would-be writer, arrives in Paris well after the first and second waves of American expatriates have already landed. “As time went on,” the narrator complains, as if giving voice to West’s own anxiety of influence, “being ‘crazy’ became more difficult. . . . One had to be original.” The narrator’s brilliant solution is to portray his craziness “through the exaggeration of normality,” by donning a pressed suit, gloves, and a tightly rolled umbrella. He soon finds himself invited to every important party. The perfection of West’s comic technique would require greater distance from his characters than he achieved in the short stories, but the stories display the same obsessions and stylistic brilliance found in the later novels that have earned him a high place in American letters and which mark him as a true forebearer of postmodern American fiction. [John Kulka]

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