The Day of the Locust—Nathaniel West

Hollywood Idols and Ideals

In the middle of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, swarms of locusts swept through the Midwest, destroying many of the few remaining crops. Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust doesn’t deal with that event—or maybe it does. Published in 1939, it describes Hollywood during the ’30s and the people who swarmed it, grabbing up all available work, seeking the American Dream. Unlike farming, as described in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the movie industry thrived, creating movie moguls like Howard Hughes and George Kennedy, as well as movie stars like Shirley Temple and Gary Cooper.

American audiences at the time ate up any movie, no matter how poorly made, so long as it promised to deliver a meal of exotic fantasies. West satirizes this Hollywood, an industry fueled by the public’s addiction to lies, steered by the equally addicted lie pushers. This so-called Golden Age of Hollywood flooded, not just a depressed America but also a depressed world, with wave after wave of toxic optimism. Not even the horrors of World War II could shake Hollywood out of its comforting fantasies. Families unable to feed themselves nevertheless bought tickets to the movies where they could live for an hour or so in a world teeming with rich, beautiful, and noble people. But writers like West and Steinbeck insisted on rubbing our noses in the mess we had made of our country, from the hardscrabble farms to the glitzy cities. Eventually, anti-Hollywood movements in cinema would emerge—film noir, the French New Wave, Italian neorealism, Dogme 95—but those would all come later. In the 1930s, fantasy ruled.

The storyline develops mainly through the lens of the main character, Tod Hackett, fresh from the Yale School of Fine Arts, who veers from his artist-to-illustrator trajectory and moves to Hollywood to learn about set design. There he sees two sorts of people, the pretenders who play dress-up and the ones who have “come to California to die.” Of the pretenders, West says,

The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain but an insurance office; the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandana around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court.

Wherever he looked, Tod saw people pretending to live the lives they dreamed about. Even the houses pretended.

On the corner of La Huerta was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a little highly colored shack with domes and minarets out of the Arabian Nights.

But the unillusioned, the ones who have come there to die, form a quiet and ominous backdrop.

Scattered among these masqueraders were people of a different type. Their clothing was somber and badly cut, bought from mail-order houses. While the others moved rapidly, darting into stores and cocktail bars, they loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred.

The minute Tod noticed these quiet people, he knew he had found the true subjects of a great painting he dreams of creating, The Burning of Los Angeles. West’s novel cavorts frenetically along to its end focused mostly on the dreamers, seemingly forgetting the somber ones. But they hover just off-screen, like gathering storm clouds. West had originally entitled the novel, The Cheated, before adopting the locust metaphor.

West insists that Tod, despite appearances,

was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. And The Burning of Los Angeles, a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved he had talent.

I suppose we’ll just have to take West’s word for it, since Tod mostly plays the part of a lost child at a carnival, blinking and taking in the bizarreness around him. We learn the most about two other characters: Faye Greener and, believe it or not, one Homer Simpson. Faye’s aspirations greatly exceed her talent. Even though wherever she goes all the men in the room seem to hover jealously around her like territorial hummingbirds around a cerise flower, when it comes to acting, she has only attracted a bit part as a Turkish dancer in a “two-reel farce.” Homer, in contrast, has no illusions. He came to Los Angeles for his health, and now lives an exquisitely dull life. “Although Homer had nothing to do but prepare his scanty meals, he was not bored.” To help us get to know Homer a little better, West spends a full page on his fascination with a lizard on his porch, then adds, “Between the sun, the lizard, and the house, he was fairly well occupied.” Yet somehow, Homer and Faye end up living together—albeit not so blissfully.

Tod’s planning for his future masterpiece, The Burning of Los Angeles, returns at various points in the novel. He sketches the people who make up his social network, mentally assigning them roles within the apocalyptic image. But the painting, which I pictured as something like Guernica as Goya might have painted it, remains unrealized.

Tod becomes entangled with several characters I would call “grotesques,” like creatures from the mind of Flannery O’Connor, had she written about Hollywood. But West’s characters, unlike those of O’Connor, we’ve all seen before. In fact, the blur of offensive stereotypes might put off the modern reader, but surely West invokes his stereotypes deliberately, not gratuitously. Hollywood grew fat off of phony images it created or perpetuated, so who but familiar tropes could live there? Faye, the gold digging starlet, Harry, her washed up vaudevillian father, Earle the dime store cowboy, Honest Abe the bookie dwarf, Miguel the Mexican gamecock baiter, Audrey the classy madame—reading scenes in which these characters interact felt to me like watching a food fight at a Hollywood cafeteria: anachronistic, funny, shocking, and surreal.

Occasionally, beneath the pirouetting gargoyles, we glimpse a repressed violence that could lead at any moment to a conflagration. Several of the chapters have an increasingly dreamlike quality, working up to a final scene in which a large crowd forms at the world premier of a new picture. The mob grows in size and unruliness until it erupts and sweeps Tod up in an unplanned but inevitable riot. Carried along by a human tsunami, he imagines details of the still unpainted Burning of Los Angeles.

Nathaniel West, born Nathan Weinstein, certainly understood fakery and the frustrated pursuit of the American Dream. He altered his high school transcript to get into Tufts University, where he flunked out. Then he used the transcript of another Nathan Weinstein at Tufts to get into Brown. He always had a great deal of trouble trying to get his writings published, and, when he did, the limited printings generated poor sales. In the end, we only have four novels of his and some scattered lesser works. A year after publishing The Day of the Locust, at the age of 37, he and his wife died in a car accident when he ran a stop sign on their way back from a hunting trip. Though praised by some during his life, his work only achieved widespread popularity after his death.

Dark satire appeals to me, and The Day of the Locust delivered plenty of that. West’s portrait of the human locusts clogging the streets of Los Angeles seemed not so much to condemn the movie industry as to blame those addicted to its sweet lies. However, it seems to me that West himself engages in a bit of pretending. He writes as a kindly, humane observer of the pitiable lives surrounding him.

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the result of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

But his sighs sound an awful lot like derisive snorts.

Amazon links to works related to this post.

The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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