Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky | Memories of the Future / 2009

forgetting to notice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Memories of the Future, translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov (New York: New York Review Books, 2009)

 

The Russian author Sigizmund Krhizhanovsky, so we are told in Joanne Turnbull's Introduction to Memories of the Future, was born in Kiev, graduating from Kiev University in law. After a short stint in the Red Army, "he lectured intensively in Kiev on the theater and music." Abandoning poetry, he took up writing stories, ultimately moving to Moscow, where his tales became more philosophical in nature.

 

    Finding a room on the old Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky joined the thousands of other Russians in a cramped, communal life, filled with sounds and smells of crowded human bodies. In 1924 he was teaching drama theory in the experimental studios of the Kamerny Theater, and the following year one of his tales was published in the literary journal Rossiya. From 1925 to 1930 the young author found work as an editor for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, writing further stories through these years. When his work on the Encyclopedia came to an end in 1931, a friend of Krzhizhanovsky's published a small monograph titled Poetika zaglavii (A Poetics of Titles), which ultimately allowed him acceptance into the Soviet Writers Union, and allowed his wife to enter his works into the formal State Archive of Literature and Arts upon his death in 1950.

      In short, Krhizhanovsky's life at first seems to parallel many minor Soviet authors of Stalin's regime. Yet this author and his writings, radically satirical outcries against the Soviet system, survived precisely because almost none of his work was published during his life. The few stories he did submit were determined to be "untimely," and several of his tales, such as "Red Snow" might have resulted in imprisonment or even death. It was only a quarter of a century that later critics discovered his Kafka-like creations, works that created worlds unlike any others. As late as 2001-2010 Krhizhanovsky's complete writings were finally published. In short, this author wrote in almost utter silence, self-censoring his own output in order to survive.

     The nightmarish satires that make up seven tales of this volume are all worth reading again and again. "Quadraturin" is a Gogol-like parable, where Sutulin, a prisoner of the cramped communal quarters—a room so small that he can open the door with his toe while lying upon his bed—is visited by a stranger who offers him a magic essence, a "proliferspansion" ointment, for free, if only he will sign a testimonial. Sutulin somewhat reluctantly agrees, and when the visitor leaves applies the substance with water to the walls and floors of his warren. He runs out of the essence, however, before being able to apply to the ceiling. In a short while the room does indeed begin to expand, but the walls and floor do not move equidistantly, but create strange, "monstrously misshapen" forms which transform his comfy coffin into a terrifying labyrinth of space. From the bed, he cannot even find the light.

     Before long, the match-box room has squared itself again and again to establish itself as a huge narrow barrack-shaped space that continues to grow minute by minute so that, finally, Sutulin cannot even find his way to the door.. A desperate cry of terror for not being able to find his way out brings the apartment house-dwellers to his little cell wherein he now is totally lost in space.

     "The Bookmark" begins with a man rediscovering in the confines of a book a bookmark that he once used and loved. Intending to rejoin his bookmark friend once more on a journey through a text, he seeks for a title, but unable to find an appropriate book, goes for a walk. On the street he encounters a slightly garrulous writer telling amazing stories to a friend; soon after, he himself joins the writer and, metaphorically becomes the bookmark himself, as he points to possible stories, plots, imaginary events. In one of the writer's stories the Eiffel Tower goes mad, and attempts to walk away from the City of Light; in another a cat trapped outside an office window on a sill for days, encountering storms and starvation, jumps to its death; in still another a corpse misses its own funeral and haunts a nearby grave digger who tries to find a way to dispose of the body. Each tale is more fantastic than the others, all are remarkably imaginative, but one after the other they are rejected—just as Krhizhanovsky's own works—by editors for being inappropriate. The author describes his own condition in another series of stories: Stories for the Crossed-Out.

     In "Someone Else's Theme," the narrator encounters a man, Saul Straight, who sells philosophical systems for the price of a bowl of soup. In "The Branch Line" an exhausted train rider falls asleep as the conductor calls for "All dreams, please." The nightmarish journey this rider takes, where various forms and types of dream imagery push him forward, backwards, and sometimes block his path, are as outlandish as those of Borges or even Kafka's labyrinths.

     The best story in this fascinating collection is the novella "Memories of the Future," a tale of an obsessed genius Shterer, who, almost from birth, is fascinated with time and tinkers throughout his life on a H. G. Wells-like time machine that will hopefully take him into the future.

     So obsessed with his invention, Shterer barely notices the rest of the world, focusing on attempts, despite poverty, to create his machine; but almost the moment he finishes he is called up into the army, where, soon after, he is arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp. There he receives word that his father has died, leaving him his fortune, if only he can return to Russia. After much pleading and maneuvering (Shterer has loaned his genius for creating mechanical devices to the Germans, improving their gates), the man is freed, but the Revolution has dispensed with the money and the bank.

     Finally, the determined Shterer finds a group of individuals who will support his venture in turn for rides into the future in order to escape the Soviet system. Shterer eventually achieves his goal, but before he can share it with the others, he is blasted off alone, returning years later, an exhausted and changed man. A journalist befriends him, and others told what he has experienced demand that he share what he has witnessed there, in that unknowable world. But the man who has paid such little attention all his life to things around him is vague about what he has done and seen, and the little he remembers is obviously terrifying to those in power, as is made evident by a secret visit to Shterer from Stalin, who leaves Shterer's under-the-staircase quarters, in a rage.

    What Shterer has not comprehended, Krhizhanovsky brilliantly demonstrates through his own life and writings: in order to have a future you must have a past, even if that life is lived in the shadows.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2010

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (March-April 2010).

 

Harold Pinter | A Slight Ache / 1962

 the wasps

by Douglas Messerli

Harold Pinter A Slight Ache in 3 Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1962)

 

Pinter's brilliantly absurd parable of people born to the estate—particularly of their paranoia, boredom, and lost dreams—is played out in a simple and quite humorous narrative: Edward (Emlyn Williams in the first stage production) wakes up with "a slight ache" in his eyes as if he hasn't slept; as he attempts to tell his wife, Flora, (Alison Leggat), of his condition, a wasp becomes trapped in the jam pot, and she becomes terrified of its possible bite. Edward insists that wasps do not bite. They sting.

 

    Yet, a "wasp" does indeed nip away at Edward much as the jury haunts Philocleon in Aristophanes' ancient comedy. Like Philocleon, Edward has been a Justice of the Peace. And much like that monster, we quickly perceive, despite Edward's insistence that he, as always, slept "uninterruptedly," he clearly suffers from irregular sleep, obsessional thinking, and is utterly paranoid.

    A nearby matchseller has been watching him, Edward in convinced, keeping an eye on his estate, both his home and himself.

 

                           Edward: He's back again.

                           Flora: But he's always there.

                           Edward: Why? What is he doing there?

                           Flora: But he's never disturbed you, has he? The man's been standing

                               there for weeks. You've never mentioned it.

                           Edward: What is he doing there?

                           Flora: He's selling matches, of course.

 

     But Edward cannot be convinced. The road on which they live is not at all likely to be traveled by people interested in matches. And why does this matchseller arrive at seven o'clock each morning? Determined to watch him devotedly, it does not take much before Edward is obsessed with the poor man, and, finally, becomes determined to invite him inside to get to "the bottom of things."

      The ridiculous one-sided conversations between Edward and the matchseller (who speaks not one word) results in a tale about an acquittal that again points up his relationship to the Greek lawyer; his story is about a man whom Edward describes as a poacher who he comes upon laying, possibly injured, in the road. When Edward dismounts to check the man out, he falls, the pony taking off down the valley, he "up to [his] ears in mud." He continues:

 

                         Years later, when I was a Justice of the Peace for the county, I had

                         him front of the bench. He was there for poaching. That's how I

                         know he was a poacher. The evidence though was sparse, inadmissible,

                         I acquitted him, letting him off with a caution. He'd grown a red beard,

                         I remember. Yes. A bit of a stinker.

 

     Before long, of course, he is cursing the dirty, smelly, old man before him, accusing him of sins he himself is guilty. What he reveals about himself is a life of accumulation and dispassion, speaking like a true paranoid, of "lists of people anxious to do me down." But most of all, he reveals the pointlessness of his own life. And even as he speaks, the old man begins to transform, finally growing young again. Is he the young Edward before his has become the monster he is now?

 

                        You look younger. You look extraordinarily...youthful.

                        ....I would like to join you...explain...show you...the garden...explain

                        The plants...where I run...my track in training...I was number one

                        sprinter at Howells...when a stripling...no more a stripling...licked...

                        men twice my strength...when a stripling...like yourself.

 

    Before Edward's aching eyes, the matchseller, whom he has attempted to convict (this time in a "home court), has turned the tables, so to speak, and—symbolically at least—has been acquitted of his supposed crimes.

      Flora, who has named the matchseller Barnabas—evoking the disciple who, along with Paul, oversaw the church at Antioch and later, at the Council of Jerusalem, helped to permit Gentiles into the Christian Church—comes to take him into her garden, her polished house. As she takes him by the hand, she passes over his tray of matches to a speechless Edward, who might well, like Philoclean proclaim:

 

                    And so I have charged my conscience with the acquittal of an accused

                   being! What will become of me? Sacred gods! forgive me. I did it despite

                   myself; it is not in my character.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2008

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (September 12, 2024).   

César Aira | How I Became a Nun / 2007

a gap in the wall

by Douglas Messerli

 

César Aira How I Became a Nun, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2007)

 

Although Argentinean author César Aira has the potential of becoming a very popular writer in English, some of his work, such as this 2007 translation of Cómo me hice monja, is an acquired taste.

 

    That is perhaps rather strange way to begin writing on a fiction that itself starts with the idea of "taste." A young boy (more often referred to in this self-narrated tale, as a young girl) is taken by his father for an ice cream treat, the first apparently of his life, since they have recently moved from the more isolated Coronel Pringles to the large city of Rosario. With great anticipation of his son's delight, the father awaits the child's lick of the strawberry ice cream, but the over-reactive child immediately spits it out in disgust. As the child observes, "...that horrendous taste, having descended into my throat, rose again like a backlash and sent a sudden shock through my body." The dismayed and somewhat appalled father insists the boy eat it, which results in a verbal battle between the two and ends with the boy's bending over in a series of retchings. When the father finally tastes the substance, which his son argues is "bitter" to the father's repeated insistence that it's "sweet," he realizes that there is indeed something terribly wrong with it. Insisting that the manager that he has sold him something rotten, the father reacts to the vendor's placid denial by stuffing his face into a drum of the strawberry substance, ultimately killing him.

     This almost absurdist situation might be hilariously funny except for the fact that the father is sentenced to eight years of imprisonment, and the boy-girl who has consumed the substance, contaminated with cyanide, is sickened for several months.

     As the narrator—who shares the name of the author of the book—tells us, the child's life begins with this series of events, which soon leads to his entering school months later than his peers, finding himself intellectually behind his fellow students; in the mere few months that he has missed, they have all learned to read.

     A minor mishap at the school to which the boy-girl's mother overreacts leads to even greater isolation for the child, as the teacher refuses to even recognize his/her existence. This, in turn, leads to the creation of an imaginary world for the child, who, in Oulipo-like structures, creates a private world for each of his classmates, suffering in the young César's imagination from various learning disabilities, which he must overcome in order to be able to teach them. His father's absence also brings him closer to his over-protective mother, and together the two enter another imaginary world where they daily encounter radio plays, one devoted to the childhood of Jesus Christ, one to historical events told through the voice of an elderly grandmother, and the third to the complex adult-like situations inherent in any soap opera.

     All of these imaginative situations, in the hands of a lesser fabulist, would seem to be perfect fodder for a surrealist or absurdist work. But as strange as these stories may seem, Aira transforms them into tales with psychological possibilities so that we are almost stunned by their impossible results.

     Another game the child begins to play is something experienced by many children growing up. It might be described as "losing mother," wherein the object, on shopping trips with his mother, is to keep several steps behind her, slightly hiding behind various trees, individuals, and signs until she loses sight of her offspring, and later, loses him/her entirely. On one such outing, César is picked up by a woman claiming to be an old friend of the family from Coronel Pringles, and offers the girl/boy an ice cream. Despite the child's knowledge that this woman is lying, she politely goes along with the series of events, which ends with the woman admitting that she is the wife of the murdered ice cream vendor and is seeing revenge. Almost as suddenly, she throws the child into a drum of strawberry ice cream, like some madly possessed witch, suffocating him/her to death.

     For the logic-oriented reader, this is the last straw in what seems now to be a series of tall-tales by an oversensitive child. How could the story have been told by a dead girl/boy? And what on earth does any of this have to do with "becoming a nun?"

     On one level, of course, nothing does have anything to do with the other. Instead of presenting us with a tale bound to the psychological realism he has pretended, the author has shown us the logic of storytelling, given us a glimpse of a world created by the written word instead of natural events. Aira writes of the moment César, the child, first discovers that difference:

 

                  The drama started later on....The drama was triggered for me by the

                  realization that the mute scene I was witnessing, the teacher's and

                  pupils' abstract mimicry, affected me vitally. It was my story, not some-

                  one else's. ....I was and was not involved in it; I was present, but not

                  a participant, or participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the

                  performance, but that gap was me! At least I had finally realized

                  (and for this I should have been grateful) why I was missing out on

                  the mental soundtrack: I couldn't read. My little classmates could.

                  By some sort of miracle, they had learned how to in those first three

                  months; an abyss had opened between them and me. An inexplicable

                  abyss, a void, precisely because there was no way to account for the

                  leap.

 

    Sometime after this event, however, César discovers that he too can now read. But for him the experience of that gap will remain forever, and the written word of his fellow students' assignments are transferred through his imagination into acts. On a visit to his father at the prison, César soon finds "a gap in the wall," entering the prison itself and becoming lost until the following day. In a sense, all his stories exist in a "gap," in a void where reality cannot enter.

     Such a world, of course, is, like a nunnery, an isolated world, a world in which the novitiate or novice removes herself from the world, dedicating her life to a higher being. Aira's dedication is to language, to the magical world of fiction that necessarily, at least temporarily, estranges one from the world at large, the world we know as "reality." An utter faith in his fabulous tales is all this author can offer—but that is everything to those who love, as I do, such marvelous fantasies which become more real in the mind that everyday life.

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2008

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (May 2011).

Stacey Levine | Mice 1961 / 2024

how to save characters from traditional fiction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stacey Levine Mice 1961 (Portland, Oregon: Verse Chorus Press, 2024)

 

Fiction writer Stacey Levine’s fifth major work of fiction is a superlative blend of genres recounting the experiences of two sisters, Jody Marrow and “Mice” Huberman—obviously the spawn of different fathers—who have been forced to live together after their mother Candy’s death in the working-class Miami neighborhood of Reef Way. Jody has a job which permits them to barely survive, but Mice, a girl with a mild case of albinism, seems incapable of doing any kind of activity except building miniature radios and out-racing the gangs of high-school girls and others who daily try to corner her, mock her, and threaten worse—both actually rather time-consuming activities.

    It is 1961, the time of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time of cold war hysteria. And some of the feelings generated by Mice’s appearance is a result of the feelings of “otherness” it arouses in the poorly-educated neighbors.

      One might describe the first fourth of this fiction, in fact, as a tale of outsiderness, a struggle for one young shy girl, who much like the tortured gay boys of later LGBTQ films, is simply attempting to go about her life while keeping the female and other neighborhood bullies away, and simultaneously quelling her beloved sister’s increasingly bourgeois demands that she take a job in the nearby bookmobile under the domain of a woman named Florence.

      Many of the early pages of the work, in fact, are devoted to the “irritation” that Mice’s presence causes the neighbors. As the narrator observes:

 

“As I pieced it together, few locals, in the weeks after the sisters arrived to the neighborhood, saw Mice. But after a time, neighbors slowly grew to know about the girl and immediately expressed irritation toward her. As Mice began to traverse the neighborhood during the evenings, neighbors blazed as if horrified to see her, overall full of objections to her tender, chapped looking hands and the outer ears so peel-thin, devoid of the rolled tops that characterize others’ ears. A number of neighbors chewed with enjoyment over the girl’s weird, abrupt, off-topic speech, too, confirming for each other that wariness, when it came to Mice, was the best approach. To pity the girl was also reasonable, they implied, in light of her hopeless appearance: the all-whiteness, clumsy, exploratory demeanor, and small blue eyes that twitched near-constantly.”

 

     In her all-white appearance, Mice attracts the fear and hostility of the world around her almost as if she stood in league with Herman Melville’s terrifying White Whale, or the horrifying hieroglyphs at the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym signifying the word “White.” In US literary culture, one must remember, an all-white world, representing “absence,” is far more horrific than a mixed and colorful society, which despite the values spouted by some dictatorial politicians throughout our history, is what US culture has been from the start.

     Other than her sister, Mice’s seemingly only friend is an older neighbor named Lance, who collects crystal radios and encourages her to build receivers so that she might hear the coded messages of Russian spies and the Americans who plan an invasion. Every day he pumps her for any information that she might have heard, interpreting even a woman mentioning numbers as a spy reading out coded signals.

     Soon after, Mice is trapped in a first floor window-well by mean school-girls who spend most the time talking drivel amongst themselves before every so often returning their attentions to their trapped “mouse.” But they, like everyone else in the neighborhood, soon depart, as they prepare for a big party at the local bakery, which nearly everyone but Lance plans to attend. Jody has insisted that Mice be there as well, mostly to talk to Florence about a possible job at the Bookmobile.

      The rest of Levine’s fiction shifts into a grand dialogue fiction, through which we not only get the opportunity to thoroughly come to know all the neighbor figures, but to hear their strange and often impenetrable palaver, filled with colloquialisms, clichés, and endless conversation stoppers as they spout and stammer their way through the long afternoon and evening with all the intelligence of normal American chit-chat. Anyone who loves the colloquial language of our country will adore their stream-of-unconscious blather that takes up topics ranging from cranberry salad to God.

      As critic Northrup Frye long again argued in his still revelatory critical study Anatomy of Criticism, the dialogue genre is closely related to the literary anatomy, the kind of fictional work that takes us, as in Petronius’ Satyricon, from the lowest of the social orders of a culture, in this case, perhaps represented by the local school janitor who men are sent to fetch and bring to the party, to the highest, in Levine’s community, represented, perhaps, by the Gruelins a wealthy brother and sister who have swooped down into the neighborhood from Paris and elsewhere presumably because their father hopes to set up a new “plant” in the neighborhood.

      When she discovers Mice has not come to the party, however, Jody almost ruins the first hours of the grand pot-luck as she hovers between self-pity and worry about her sister's whereabouts, until finally the narrative gets rid of her by shuffling her off to a bedroom upstairs and into the arms of the local detective, Denny, who has to come to report that he found their kitchen stove turned on, which might have caused a major fire or explosion, something clearly that Girtle, the girl’s servant-protector, seems almost to desire.

       Meanwhile downstairs Larry the beatnik attempts to play some serious jazz (Charles Mingus) against pleas from the others for music to which they can dance. Fruit salads fall from platters onto the concrete, and spaghetti goes flying. But the real fun of this melee exists in the endless flow of constantly interrupted conservations. One of the best, reminiscent of Gilbert Sorrentino’s great fiction Mulligan Stew occurs in a woman’s discussion with the local poet, which will have to serve of dozens of such delightful tidbits throughout Levine’s work:

 

“What are you doing dear?”

“Oh hello Gabby.” The Artist removed small eyeglasses. “I’m finishing a poem. Free-form.”

“Marvelous!”

“I’ll read it aloud tonight for the poetry circle.”

“What’s the title?” Mrs. Fox peered at the oversized page.

“Lilacs and Gym Shorts.”

“You’re terribly artistic.”

Eyebrows shifting with feeling, The Artist read the first line: “In that we are growing…” But Mrs. Fox had already left, sailing down the hallway with her pastry bags, past the counter and out the front door. I ran to the window, glimpsing in the passage seat a plump, motionless husband in shadow as the car spun away.”

 

     When Mice finally does arrive, Jody is nowhere to be found, and that oddity of Reef Way is suddenly taken up first by Eve Gruelin whose brother wants to hire Mice as basically a plaything for his sister. Soon after an utter stranger to the party, Kenny Anther, takes a real liking to Mice, trying to get her to dance with him. But even here, Mice’s endless questions begin to drive him off, and before the evening is over he leaves her since she seems intent on leaking his apparent secret, that he truly is a “government hireling,” a flyer come to Miami to possibly attack Cuba.

      By party’s end, as Anther attempts to quiet the usually silent Mice, she escapes into a cornfield, this time perhaps to never return to the sociable world in which she has discovered she will never be welcome, freed at last from all, including fictional, restraints.

       Stitching up all these various tableaux in the role as narrator has been Girtle, a kind of simulacrum of the author herself, who attempts to girdle up her central figures, keeping them out of harm’s way— particularly when it comes to the traditional narrative patterns in fiction featuring women. As Girtle explains, she also is an outsider, an escapee from Children’s Home, someone who recognizes that she has finally grown up into adulthood, however uncomfortable that role may be. In previous fictions, such as Frances Johnson, as well, Levine has clearly been terrified for the arrival of the “perfect man” to which the fiction usually marries off the heroine. In this fiction, Girtle describes such a man as “the helper,” the male who takes over the narrative as he leads away the heroine into the space outside the fiction.

      Throughout this work, where poor Girtle is forced to sleep on the floor and mostly hide-out from the other characters, the narrator fears the arrival of “the helper,” who would also, obviously, displace her, taking over her role as the reader’s imagination is called forth to finish the tale after the close of its last pages. In this book, Girtle is finally convinced that the “helper” is Kenny Anther, particularly since he appears to literally be courting the character nearly everyone else in the story evades, as I mentioned, with irritation and fear.

       But Levine’s final narrative proves even her (or at least Girtle’s) own fears wrong, as Anther suddenly takes a swerve to become the someone Lance had long been warning Mice to be on the lookout for. And in this case, instead of falling in love with the male and dancing away with him to some impossibly happy future, he drives the central character, Girtle’s special charge, off into her own kind of freedom, a world which also lies outside of the book.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2024

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (September 2024).

Marion Meade | Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney / 2010

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

 

Marion Meade Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)

 

As biographer Marion Meade makes clear in this dual study of two individuals destined to die in each other's arms, there was perhaps no more unlikely couple on the earth. Eileen McKenney, the sister to Ruth McKenney whose series of New Yorker sketches My Sister Eileen had made her sister a household figure—and in the years after her death would become even more known through a long-running Broadway play, two movies, Leonard Bernstein's musical adaptation Wonderful Town and a television series—was, at least superficially, an innocent out of Ohio, brought up in Midwestern normality. The two sisters' plucky determination to "make it" in New York would become almost a template for hundreds of other such stories, films, and plays about Midwesterners and others trying to adapt to the big city.

     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 notables, including S. J. Perelman (who married his sister, Laura), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Bennett Cerf, William Faulkner, John Sanford, and Josephine Herbst. Although he made hardly any money from his books, he lived a pleasant life from screenwriting, seriously devoting himself to Republic Studio's grade-B movies, including It Could Happen to You, Born to Be Wild, Five Came Back, and Let's Make Music.

      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.

 

*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.

Los Angeles, September 7, 2010

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Winter 2010/2011).