Review: The Day of the Locust

WEST, Nathanael, The Day of The Locust, Penguin Red Classics/Penguin Group (Aust.) Ltd., Camberwell Vic., 2006.

Octavo; paperback; 183pp. Minor wear. Very good.

In the first half of the Twentieth Century many American writers gravitated to the West Coast and to Hollywood to see if they could make a living writing for the movies. Some, like William Faulkner, lived in desperate straits, scratching out a meagre living with stupid deadlines and crazy demands placed upon them; others lived life in the fast lane, hob-nobbing with the glitterati. Quite a few of these writer-types became bitter and cynical after a sojourn to Tinseltown and none moreso than Nathanael West.

West reads a lot like an unacknowledged relative of Raymond Chandler – he’s hip and flip, tinged with irony and black humour. Never hugely popular during his life, his novels won wide acclaim after his untimely death in a car accident. The novel Miss Lonelyhearts is considered his masterpiece, with this book following hard on its heels.

The Day of The Locust is set in Hollywood largely in an apartment block on Hollywood Boulevarde. The story concerns an artist named Tod Hackett, employed as a scene painter by the studios, who creates in his mind a grand painting depicting Los Angeles falling into a flaming holocaust. During his stay in the building, he meets several of the other occupants and their tawdry lives impact upon him in various ways. Prime among these are Faye Greener, a wannabe actress who has all the looks but none of the talent, and Homer Simpson (I kid you not!), an accountant from Iowa staying in Hollywood for his health. Faye, notoriously, rejects Tod as a suitor since he hasn’t any money, and then gravitates towards Homer, a soft-natured non-confrontational schlub who falls hard for her. Tod becomes the spectator of their inevitably degenerating relationship in which she walks all over Homer, taking him for all he’s worth, before abandoning him to his eventual breakdown.

The novel is very episodic, with Tod accompanying Faye, sometimes with Homer, to meetings with other colourful Los Angeles characters. There’s the irascible dwarf Abe Kusich, a bookmaker and hustler; Earle Shoop, a cowboy impersonator who works at a Western clothing and novelties store; Miguel, a Mexican who works with Earl and plays Native Americans in the movies; and Harry Greener, Faye’s ailing father, a former vaudeville performer who makes his own brand of (fake) silver polish to earn a crust. These few, along with a string of just as bizarre lesser types, paint a grotesque picture of the Hollywood lifestyle, a world that is all flash and no substance. The skill with which West sketches these characters is revealed by the fact that none of them ever ring false, or as anything other than utterly convincing.

The players mooch their way across the landscape seeking purpose and diversion with very little success. There’s an horrific scene that takes place in a backyard garage where a cock-fight is staged by Miguel, and a meeting with Earl in the Hollywood hills where he camps out, being unable to afford to rent a proper home. Inevitably, Faye begins an affair with Earl, despite him being unable to give her any money, and later still, she sleeps with Miguel in order to make Earl jealous. Homer, the doormat, witnesses all of these shenanigans and cannot bring himself to respond in a meaningful way. Eventually, after being ridiculed by a precocious child actor, he explodes and tramples the child to death in a monolithic outpouring of his repressed emotions.

This final outburst is witnessed by Tod who watches from the other side of the street just down from a cinema called “Mr Kahn’s Pleasure Dome” where a film premiere is taking place. At the moment that Homer explodes, a riot breaks out among the waiting cinema patrons and a chaotic mob frenzy takes place, picking Tod up and sweeping him along with its madness. The crowd is mashed together in a thronging crush and Tod witnesses a series of ghastly tableaux: a woman against whom he is indecently pressed is raped by another man behind her; people get trampled and go mad or descend into horrible animalistic violence. Finally, Tod gets pushed out of the crush and finds himself staggering by a passive police car, its siren screaming but its occupants mutely witnessing the carnage. Tod, unsettled, thinks that it’s himself making the noise and tries to mimic the siren before collapsing in hysterical laughter.

There’s a lot of construction in this novel; it definitely isn’t an organic creation or a haphazard amalgamation of vignettes. A clue lies in Tod’s name: “Tod” comes from the German for “death” and “Hackett” is a riff off the term “hack”, as in an uninspired craftsperson working for cash rather than for any artistic notions. Therefore Tod is a “dead hack”, and consequently his Ivy League artistic education is turned over to painting scenery and to planning a grand painting that will never see the light of day. All the action in the book tracks the inevitable ruination of Faye and Homer as they sink to the lowest of levels, through scenes of increasing moral and spiritual bankruptcy. The final horror of the bestial crowd violence is humanity sunk to its lowest ebb.

This book is as cynical and hard-bitten as it gets. There’s no redemption; there are no wins. All the glitz and glamour of 1930s Hollywood is revealed to be tawdry and hollow. If you like it black, it doesn’t come any darker than this.

Four-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.