Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust (28 page)

by John Sanford

Nathanael West and I were friends once, but the friendship had ended long before his death. I’ve written elsewhere of the breach, but only for the few who read my books. Never have I spoken of it in the press, and I don’t intend to speak of it here. But resentment is hard to control, and fearing that it would color,
dis
color, whatever I might say of West and his work, I tried to beg off this assignment. I wasn’t permitted to beg off.

I have small regard for myself as a critic, and as to West’s writings, I feel competent to say only that in his cut-short life, West produced four novels, two of which have great distinction.
Miss Lonelyhearts
and
The Day of the Locust
earn him a high place in American letters. They’re deft and lean (two of his favorite qualifiers), and I pay them my best compliment: I wish I’d written them.

As to West himself, I feel better able to comment. We were Harlem boys when we met in 1914, he eleven and I a year younger. He wasn’t Nathanael West then, nor was I John Sanford; he was still Nathan Weinstein, and I was still Julian Shapiro. His family lived on Seventh Avenue at 119th Street in a block of flats called the de Peyster. Out front, between the sidewalk and the gutter, lay a broad strip of earth planted with elms, and on that strip, my mindless chums and mindless I shot immes out of a circle, and on that sidewalk, we pitched buttons at a crack. These scientific pursuits were well beyond the abilities of the tall, skinny, flap-armed kid who often watched our skills from the stoop. Plain to see, he was badly made, a composition of parts that didn’t fit and that obviously didn’t work. Worse, the signals he sent to those parts were seldom the ones they received, and his movements were spasmodic and misdirected: he was ungainly, he was simply out of sync. One day, a garbled message would kill him. He’d put his foot on the gas instead of the brake, and he’d die of a broken skull. But that day was still thirty years off.

This was 1914, and there he stood, an ill-favored kid we didn’t trouble ourselves to give more than a glance: He couldn’t run, he couldn’t skate, he couldn’t throw or catch a ball, and we only had to see those trembling hands to know that he couldn’t hit an imme with a fire hose. We were so busy ignoring him that we failed to notice that he never spoke to
us
. All we ever saw was a long kid in short pants, hoping for an invitation that he wasn’t going to get. It’s been many a year since then, and I still can’t say what it was that made me break the ice—pity, it may have been, or curiosity, or maybe none of my lackwit cronies happened to be around. Whatever it was, it led to the first words between us…and my birthday!

This misfit, as I’d thought, this spastic slap-up—he was no dumbbell yearning to join us at pitching buttons. Once he opened his face, he showed that he dwelt not in the dirt with an agate; even then, he flew. He
knew
things, that ungainly kid—books I’d never heard of, places I couldn’t spell, people, events, quotations, anecdotes, jokes and the make of every car from as far as a block away. He knew things, that rickety kid, and I’d’ve known a few more than I did if his family hadn’t moved to another part of Manhattan, leaving me with my marbles, buttons and cards that came with a pack of cigarettes. I stayed stupid.

It was a dozen years before I saw him again, this time on a golf course in Asbury Park. Overtaking him at a tee, I said
Natchie Weinstein!
only to be informed that he was now Nathanael West, lately of Brown University. We made a twosome of it then, he displaying much of his old-time difficulty with hands, feet and paraphernalia. During the round, he asked me what I’d been up to, and I told him, a little pridefully, that I was studying law at Fordham. And he, I asked, what was he doing these days? The rest of the round is missing from memory; he expunged it with his reply.
I’m writing a book
, he said. I can still hear the words. Seventy years have passed since he put them on the air, but they’re there for me yet, undiminished and stunning.
I’m writing a book
, he said.

I couldn’t have known it at the time, but that meeting in Asbury determined the course of my life. For a period of several years afterward, West and I consorted with some regularity. Sad to say, though—sad for me, that is—I found myself further outdistanced than ever. Our conversations while walking the streets of the city were really monologues, lectures, oral essays on authors, poetry (verse, he called it), painting and painters, writers to read, particularly a comer named Hemingway. I heard of Apollinaire too, of Gaudier, Pound, Perse, Carco, Jarry, Cummings, Joyce and the etcher Meryon—and with each of them, knowledge of my ignorance grew. Without end, lore poured from West—Pep now to all—and I marveled. Where had he been and whom had he known—and where and with whom had I? It was as if I were still shooting marbles.

The more we talked—say, rather, the more I listened—the more dimmed the luster of the law, and it was while reading proof with West on
The Dream Life of Balso Snell
that I realized what dazzled me now: the word, the printed word. I began to write; with an apprenticeship served at pitching buttons, I began to write. That took gall, but West had set an example I found it impossible not to follow: I’d just been reading
his
printed word, and the world I saw through it glittered. In the spring of 1931, when West was writing his second novel,
Miss Lonelyhearts
, I was working on
The Water Wheel
, my first.

Neither of us was progressing with speed or satisfaction, and when West proposed that we get away from the city, I turned up the right place to go. I’d met an upstate game-warden, and through him we obtained, for $25 a month, a seven-room cabin in the Adirondacks, together with a forest preserve of 1,200 acres and a 50-acre pond—Viele Pond, it was called. There in that private realm, we wrote, fished, swam, and shot away the summer.

With everything but words, West was the clenchfist and slewfoot of old. His writing stayed as translucent as ever, but he had trouble tying his shoelaces; he needed both hands to light a cigarette; and as for driving a car, it was a living thing, a beast he was never able to master. Carrying a gun, he was the friend of game and the enemy of man. No one more dangerous ever took the field; witness his passing me a loaded and cocked shotgun by prodding my belly with the muzzle. It was a good summer, though; we did much writing, and I managed to stay alive. On the return-trip to New York, he took the wheel out of Albany while I read him the book reviews in the Sunday
Times
. He missed the road, of course; before I knew it, we weren’t far from Hartford.

Soon afterward, he invited me to live rent free at the Sutton, an east-side hotel that he was managing, and for a period of some months I did. Save comings and goings and an occasional breakfast together, we saw little of each other during my stay. While there, I completed
The Water Wheel
, wrote a series of short stories and began a second novel,
The Old Man’s Place
. That novel ultimately took me to Hollywood and Paramount Pictures. One of those stories ended my friendship with West.

A magazine called “Contact,” edited in Paris by Robert McAlmon, had been taken over by Moss & Kamin, the booksellers who published
Balso Snell
. The editors now were William Carlos Williams and West, and a story I’d submitted was accepted. Later, because of its suggestive title, it was rejected and returned. My fellowship with West was never the same after that and in time it dwindled to nothing. We encountered each other on the coast, and we exchanged a few civilities, but the Harlem and Adirondack days were over—forever, as it proved. I wish I hadn’t been so unrelenting, so unable to endure a disappointment. I wish I’d known what was only two years away.

In 1940, I was working at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in collaboration with my wife, the screenwriter Marguerite Roberts. Away on an errand, I returned to our room to find her glancing through the pages of the daily paper. Almost at once, she cried,
Johnny! Johnny! Pep West is dead!

Dazed, I took up the paper and read:

CRASH NEAR EL CENTRO

Nathanael West, 36, prominent scenario writer and novelist, and his wife, Eileen, 27, were killed in an automobile accident three miles east of El Centro yesterday. Their station wagon collided with a car driven by Joe Dowless of Somerton, Ariz….

and dazed still, I read the lines again, as if by rereading them, I could undo the accident, steer the cars, and send them safely on their separate ways. But the cars kept on going toward each other, and when they met, Nathanael, Nathan, Natchie, Pep, was gone from the world.

I’m so sorry, Johnny
, said Marguerite, but unable to respond, I drifted out of the room and into the Thalberg hallway. A throng of memories floated with me: Pep’s brag that he could improve Dostoevsky with a pair of shears; his gentle, soft-spoken, sickly father, whom he greatly loved; his five-foot safari-bag, too heavy to carry even when empty; his trick of speaking a cliché in italics; his fitful driving, as if the car were driving him; his way of walking, like a man with shackled feet. And I remembered that he was always tripping over something, always fumbling, always ill-related to the world’s furniture. Only in his writing did he seem to be at home, and there he handled language with the ease and grace that he could never muster for the lighting of a cigarette. In one of his passages, he writes of Miss Lonelyhearts in a park: “He walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear.” Deft and lean, those two sentences; they meet his own criteria.

Most keenly, though (most piercingly), was I aware of my monumental obligation to him. I’d become a writer because of a chance meeting with him on a golf course, and writing had brought me to my Marguerite—and not to have known her would’ve meant not to have lived. My debt could never be extinguished; it could only be acknowledged. The first book I wrote after his death contains this dedication:

To Nathanael West
1903–1940

Had it not been for that story, that trifle, Pep and I might’ve been…but we weren’t, it grieves me to say. We weren’t friends when he was driving a car that day three miles east of El Centro.