Miss Lonelyhearts—Nathaniel West
Rocks of Ages
The advice column, “Miss Lonelyhearts,” started as a joke, but now attracts a large following of emotionally tormented readers. The columnist, referred to throughout only as “Miss Lonelyhearts,” never by any other name, no longer sees any humor in his work. Instead, he feels his readers’ pain too deeply, but also knows he can do nothing to help. The frustration born of this impotent compassion drives him to cruelty or even violence, making him an unlikable protagonist, yet we, too, feel his pain. He plays at the role of savior, all the while desperately needing a savior himself.
On the surface, the novel describes a few days in the life of an advice columnist, as he struggles with a job he no longer enjoys, gets drunk with his friends, and tries to get laid. We can’t help but laugh at the absurd, shocking, or ridiculous episodes, such as this sex scene with a large woman.
He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was a creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.
But West has written this novel, it seems to me, without one spare word. As often happens in truly magnificent art, everything in it serves multiple purposes. As a result, critics have had a field day unearthing their favorite layer(s) of meaning: Jewish gnosticism, female masochism, homosexuality. With so many interpretations to pick from, you will surely find your favorite.
I see the novel as both a condemnation of modern Christianity and a plea for the salvation actually promised by Christ. The human condition, as described by West, offers nothing but pain, longing, suffering, loneliness, and death. As one teenage girl, born terribly disfigured, writes in a letter to Miss Lonelyhearts,
“What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didnt do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesnt know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide? Sincerely yours, Desperate.”
“Christ was the answer,” West tells us, “but if he did not want to get sick, he had to stay away from the Christ business.” Miss Lonelyhearts had removed an ivory Christ from its cross and nailed it to the wall of his apartment. “But the desired effect had not been attained. Instead of writhing, the Christ remained calmly decorative.” This split between a decorative religion and a dangerous, writhing one permeates the novel.
As a boy in his father’s church, he had discovered that something stirred in him when he shouted the name of Christ, something secret and enormously powerful. […] He knew now what that thing was—hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. […] For him, Christ was the most natural of excitements. Fixing his eyes on the image that hung on the wall, he began to chant, “Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ. Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ.” But the moment the snake started to uncoil in his brain, he became frightened and closed his eyes.
We see repeated instances of his care and love for a sufferer flipping into a murderous fury when he sees he can do nothing to help. In one dream (or maybe a college memory) Miss Lonelyhearts and his drunken friends decide to sacrifice a lamb. When he tries to strike the fatal blow, he misses and breaks his knife blade on the makeshift stone altar. The lamb, wounded, escapes, but he catches it and bashes it to death with a rock. In another drunken scene, he and his friends taunt an old man. “Miss Lonelyhearts felt as he had felt years before, when he had accidentally stepped on a small frog. Its spilled guts had filled him with pity, but when its suffering had become real to his senses, his pity turned to rage and he had beaten it frantically until it was dead.” And once again, in a Whitmanesque moment, he holds the hand of Peter Doyle, the crippled husband of a woman he has recently bedded. “What a sweet pair of fairies you guys are,” she comments. He lovingly brings them both into reconciliation with each other, cuckolded husband and wife. But when she sends Peter out for some more gin, she thrusts herself on Miss Lonelyhearts and tries to pull him down onto the floor with her. “He struck out blindly and hit her in the face. She screamed and he hit her again and again. He kept hitting her until she stopped trying to hold him, then he ran out of the house.”
In this negative morality play of West’s, the Devil has a name: William Shrike, Miss Lonelyheart’s demanding editor, pitiless critic, and self-appointed Juvenalian satirist. The Shrike, commonly known as the Butcher Bird, typically impales its prey on a thorn, and that nicely characterizes Shrike’s treatment of Miss Lonelyhearts throughout the novel. His lampoons increase in viciousness until, toward the end, he and a handful of drunken friends barge in on Miss Lonelyhearts, who has not left his room for three days. During that time, Miss Lonelyearts has undergone a change, calming him, so that Shrike in his ineffectual taunting resembles “a gull trying to lay an egg in the smooth flanks of a rock, a screaming, clumsy gull.” Shrike announces a great new party game of his own invention. He takes Miss Lonelyhearts and the others back to his apartment. There he deals out to everyone a letter from a stack he has filched from the office files. He orders them each to read their letter and do their best to answer it. Then Miss Lonelyhearts will diagnose their moral ills from their efforts. In response to this goading, “Miss Lonelyhearts stood it with the utmost serenity; he was not even interested. What goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock.”
West invokes the image or symbol of a stone frequently. The lamb scene, of course. The rock he became after his three-day retreat. And again here, while waiting in the park for a rendezvous with Mrs. Doyle, he examines the sky
like a stupid detective who is searching for a clew to his own exhaustion. When he found nothing, he turned his trained eye on the skyscrapers that menaced the little park from all sides. In their tons of forced rock and tortured steel, he discovered what he thought was a clew.
Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians. And they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them.”
In the novel’s final scene, Miss Lonelyhearts, feverishly ill, experiences a religious conversion, and vows to “plan a new life and his future conduct as Miss Lonelyhearts. He submitted drafts of his column to God, and God approved them.” Then hearing the doorbell, he climbs out of bed and stumbles down the stairs. He sees Peter Doyle, coming toward him holding something wrapped in a newspaper. “God had sent him so that Miss Lonelyhearts could perform a miracle and be certain of his conversion. It was a sign. He would embrace the cripple and the cripple would be made whole again, even as he, a spiritual cripple, had been made whole.” He caught a very confused Peter, and embraced him. Needless to say, in the struggle, the gun Peter has brought goes off, killing Miss Lonelyhearts. Should we see this as the fate of Christ in the hands of his Church and recall Christ’s words to Peter, “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18)?
I have only scratched the surface of this short, dense, intense novel. One need not look for spiritual depth, psychological insights, or social commentary. One can simply enjoy the story and the grotesques who populate it. But it gives back as much you put into it.