West's Disease

 Some years ago, a young relative moved to Los Angeles. He rented a unit, one of four, on a side street in a quiet neighborhood. Of the other units, one was rented by an aging foreign rocker, one by a young woman who acted in a serial drama of some sort--TV or streaming, I no longer remember--and the last I think by a retired couple. I mentioned this to a college friend long resident in that area, who said, Real Day of the Locust stuff.

I knew of Nathaniel West's novel The Day of the Locust, but had never read it. Recently I found a copy, a New Directions paperback containing also Miss Lonelyhearts, and did read it. I suppose I see what she meant, for among the residents in a rooming house, principals in the story, are a failed vaudevillian, his daughter, who is a not very successful actress, and a scenery designer.

Long ago, I read W.H. Auden's The Dyer's Hand, a collection of essays including "West's Disease", on the novels of Nathaniel West. On rereading the essay, Auden seems to me largely correct. I would say that the disease, or syndrome, of an inability to turn wishes into desires, does not seem to be something West discovered or exploited beyond his predecessors. Frederic Moreau in Flaubert's Sentimental Education seems to suffer from just such an inability to want and pursue something wholeheartedly.

 A minor character in The Day of the Locust asks, "What about the barber in Purdue?" According to West's brother-in-law, S.J. Perelman, Groucho Marx would ask, "What'll it mean to the barber in Peru?". Both had Indiana in mind, but Peru is a town, and Purdue a university. Both meant to suggest that one should avoid undue sophistication, but the fictional Claude Estee proposed to offer the barber "amour", and Groucho Marx I think must have had slapstick in mind.