imitating sirens
“He was carried through the exit to
the back street and lifted into a police car. The siren began to scream and at
first he thought he was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his
hands. They were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some reason
this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could.”
—Nathanael West, The Day of the Locusts
Nathan Weinstein, the young man who later transformed himself into the
writer Nathanael West, was, on the other hand, born to some wealth in that
city, the son of a builder of numerous Harlem and West Side high rise
apartments still visible today. As a child, Nathanael was a shy boy, found most
often hiding away to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other major novelists. But
despite his bookish ways, he skipped years of school, dropping out before
graduation. Although he hid out in the New York Public Library in order to
read, he later harbored terrible grudges against the place and imagined how he
might set that great institution on fire. Although it's clear from Meade's
commentary that the boy was far from popular with his peers, and in later
years, evidenced by several of his central characters (including the notorious
Miss Lonleyhearts), was likely a highly conflicted gay man,* the young
Nathanael frequented whore houses, developing an ongoing battle with gonorrhea.
Indeed, it would be hard to find an individual of more contradictions
than West. With ill-fitted body parts betrayed by "congenital hand
tremors" which manifested itself in other physical problems—clumsiness,
poor coordination, difficulties in using a knife and fork and dressing himself,
and an abnormally slow gait—he loved the out-of-doors, taking up, later in his
life, bird hunting (particularly doves). Despite his inability to graduate from
high school, he illegally entered Tufts University, and when he was dismissed
from there, took over another student's identity (in a situation much like
today's cases of identity-theft) to attend Brown University, from which he
managed to graduate. A dreamer and ne'er-do-well at heart, he nonetheless
managed for many years two of the most prestigious of New York's residence
hotels. Although his "spidery penmanship...lurched between script and
print, the 'gaunt caps and lank descenders' wobbling downhill across the
page," West was determined to take up writing, and produced four
brilliantly bitter satires before his death in 1940. The shy boy later became
close friends with a host of
On the distaff side, the two sisters, at least in their fictions, were
well-adapted innocents trying to make a go in the city; but in real life Ruth
attempted suicide several times and found living with her step-mother so
impossible that she was sent away from home. Although Eileen was portrayed as a
slightly empty-headed beauty who had her choice of hundreds of men, she was a
good conversationalist with strong, political viewpoints, and sexually, she
later discovered, frigid.
In short, both of these remarkable figures were not at all what they
seemed, each having a sort of inner force that, despite their complex problems,
attracted people to them. As one of West's characters in his early fiction, The Secret Live of Balso Snell notes:
"...I', fed up with poetry and art. Yet what can I do? I need women and
because I can't buy or force them, I have to make poems for them.". No one
could really imagine that the two might get on, but for a few months before
their tragic deaths, they seemed to live a delirious fantasy that contradicted
everything in West's art and life. In some senses both of them were
"imitating sirens," Ilene pretending much of her life to be a great
attraction for the male sex, through his writing, Nathanael shrieking out about
the injustices of American life.
Having now reread all of West's fictions in light of Meade's amiable,
yet revealing biography, I think that one might see West as kin to another
great American satirist, Flannery O'Connor. Despite West's secular personality,
there is something in his surreal-like works that shares with O'Connor's
apocryphal visions of life. Both grew up apart from the worlds in which they
lived, both were "strange birds"—both were obsessed with birds, West
to kill them, O’Connor to raise them— despite their ability to draw renowned
friends. Both died at the height of their powers, after writing just four
works. The characters in their oeuvres include a wide range of fanatics,
preachers, unhappy and dangerous homosexuals, and just plain desperate people,
none of whom are loveable, but who represent an impossible desire to discover
love and meaning. That such things are unattainable for such outsiders is
inevitable given these authors’ powerfully bleak visions.
Well known as an outrageously poor driver, West took Eileen on a short
hunting trip just before Christmas and on the 22nd of December crashed into a
car near El Centro, California, killing them both along with Eileen's
two-year-old daughter, sitting in the backseat. Four nights later, the play My Sister Eileen opened at New York
City's Biltmore Theater, with Shirley Booth, Jo Ann Sayers, Richard Quine, and
Morris Carnovsky; it would run for 864 performances. Although ignored in his
lifetime, West's books, particularly Miss
Lonelyhearts and The Day of the
Locusts, would eventually be seen as American classics.
Los Angeles, September 7, 2010
Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Winter 2010/2011).
*One of West's favorite childhood
pastimes was to watch the gay couples having sex in Central Park's
"Brambles," he and his friends leaping down with shrieks at the
moment of orgasm.
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