Happy birthday to Nathan Weinstein aka Nathanael West, who displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript. After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student who was also named Nathan Weinstein. Although West did little schoolwork at Brown, he read extensively. He ignored the realist fiction of his American contemporaries in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in particular Oscar Wilde. Wests interests focused on unusual literary style as well as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and mysticism, as experienced or expressed through literature and art. Wests classmates at Brown ironically nicknamed him Pep after a school trip where after only a few minutes of walking he quickly ran out of breath. West barely finished at Brown with a degree. He then went to Paris for three months, and it was at this point that he changed his name to Nathanael West. Wests family, who had supported him thus far, ran into financial difficulties in the late 1920s. West returned home and worked sporadically in construction for his father, eventually finding a job as the night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. One of Wests real-life experiences at the hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that would later appear in The Day of the Locust In 1933, West got a job as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood. He published a third novel, A Cool Million, in 1934. None of Wests three works sold well, however, so he spent the mid-1930s in financial difficulty, sporadically collaborating on screenplays. Many of the films he worked on were B-movies, such as Five Came Back (1939). It was at this time that West wrote The Day of the Locust. West took many of the settings and minor characters of his novel directly from his experience living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. The obscene, garish landscapes of The Day of the Locust gain added force in light of the fact that the remainder of the country was living in drab poverty at the time. Though West attended socialist rallies in New Yorks Union Square, his novels have no affinity to the novels of his contemporary activist writers such as John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos. Wests writing style does not allow the portrayal of positive political causes, as he admitted in a letter to Malcolm Cowley regarding The Day of the Locust: I tried to describe a meeting of the anti-Nazi league, but it didnt fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film. West saw the American dream as having been betrayed, both spiritually and materially, and in his writing he presented a sweeping rejection of political causes, religious faith, artistic redemption and romantic love. This idea of the corrupt American dream endured long after his death, in the form of the term Wests disease, coined by the poet W. H. Auden to refer to poverty that exists in both a spiritual and economic sense. A new biography, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade was published in 2010. West ran a stop sign in El Centro, California, resulting in a collision in which he and McKenney. his wife, were both killed. https://youtube/watch?v=wFSWmfqMp7o
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 00:50:35 +0000
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