West's Disease Revisited
In January 1991, our still on-going book group read Nathanael West's short novels "Miss Lonelyhearts" and "Day of the Locust". As the nominator of these books, I was responsible for the initial presentation. I had little memory of the books or, initially of how I approached them thirty years ago; but I recently had the urge to revisit "Miss Lonelyhearts" (1933), set in Depression-era New York City.
"Miss Lonelyhearts" combines bleak sadness with an almost cartoonish portrayal of bodies and snappy short scenes. The main character, only known as Miss Lonelyhearts, is a young man of 26, the son of a minister and a college graduate. He has a job for a nespaper writing the advice to the lovelorn column and receives and responds to squalid, unremitting letters of human misery.
The job gets to Miss Lonelyhearts. He becomes increasingly depressed by the parade of unresolvable human pain and feels the misery of his correspondents, and others, in his own life. His colleagues, particularly his supervisor, Shrike, see his job as a joke and as a money-making gimmick for the paper. Miss Lonelyhearts comes to take human misery, emotional disconnection, and poverty deeply personally and finds no answers. He takes to drinking at the local speakeasy, sitting in the park, wandering the streets, and acts of brutality. He spends much time in his lonely apartment in bed. His fiance, the blandly normal Betty, becomes puzzled by his behavior and wants him to leave his job and find a more remunerative, less emotionally taxing position. Miss Lonelyhearts has affairs with one of his correspondents and with the wife of Shrike.
A key piece of symbolism in the novel is the rock, which in the ocean has waves constantly beating against it but never gives in or changes its character. Late in the book, Miss Lonelyhearts says that he sees himself as a rock, impervious to pain. He is woefully self-deceived.
As I read the book again after many years, I came to remember how I presented "Miss Lonelyhearts" to our book group. The poet W.H. Auden wrote a 1962 book of literary criticism, "The Dyer's Hand" which included an essay, "West's Disease". The great poet examined the four novels West wrote during his short life, including "Miss Lonelyhearts" and found that West failed as both a novelist and a satirist due primarily to the caricatured nature of his writing. Auden questions the hopelessness of West's vision, both as it applies to the lack of religious belief and to its picture of an unredeemably materialistic, commodified society which keeps many people irrevokably in poverty, emotionally stunted, and ignorant. For Auden, West's characters, including Miss Lonelyhearts suffer from a confusion of desires and wishes. Miss Lonelyhearts is caught within himself (desire) with no ability to act on what he wants and to attempt to realize it (wish). This condition Auden calls "West's Disease". He sees it as literarily unsuccessful and, more importantly, as unfortunate as it has become an all-too-common attitude in the United States with people rejecting religion and their country.
In my reading, I thought again about "Miss Lonelyhearts" and about "West's Disease". The novel is sad, haunting and provocative. I was glad to read it again. I was also glad to remember Auden's wise counsel about the nature of "West's Disease".
Robin Friedman
