102
West administered a
coup-de-grace
to the Alger myth and incidentally
wrote the first of the postdepres–
sion fictional anticipations of Amer–
ican fascism.
The hero of
A Cool Million,
Le–
muel Pitkin, is a modern Phil the
Fiddler who follows the advice of
Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple, ex–
President, Vermont sage, and fu–
ture Fiihrer, and is slowly "dis–
mantled" for his pains. Imbued
with business folklore and rigidly
adhering to the success code, Pit–
kin successively loses his teeth, eye,
leg, and scalp. At the end of the
book and prior to becoming a Yan–
kee Horst Wessel for the Leather–
shirts, he is earning his living as a
stooge for a couple of comedians
who punctuate their patter by beat–
ing
him
with newspapers: "For a
final curtain, they brought out an
enormous wooden mallet labeled,
'The Works' and with it completely
demolished our hero. His toupee
flew off, his eye and teeth popped
out, and his wooden leg was knock–
ed into the audience."
A Cool Million,
in spite of its
heavy facetiousness and sophomoric
insolence, seemed mildly funny in
1934; it is not hilarious reading
now. At first glance it appears to
be a departure from the two pre–
vious novels and his last one, and
yet the characteristic themes per–
sist. Lemuel the Stooge, like Miss
L.
gets lost in his quest for certain–
ty, and the plight of his sweetheart,
Betty Prail-ravished by an endless
procession of men while Lemuel is
snatched away by the Third Inter–
national or languishes in a bear
PARTISAN REVIEW
trap-might symbolize the rape of
Columbia by resolute hordes of 100
per cent Americans. But West's un–
pleasantly genial parody is only a
weak tour de force which is hardly
saved by its serious undertones and
occasional insights.
With
The Day of the Locust,
however, we return again to a more
significant level of writing. Al–
though it lacks the concentration
and focus of
Miss Lonelyhearts–
the stories of Homer Simpson, the
Iowa hotel clerk, and Tod Hackett,
West's Yale man observer-hero, are
not sufficiently fused- it neverthe–
less shows a detachment, a curious
and penetrating discernment that
makes it, as Edmund Wilson has
said, one of the most satisfying
books about Hollywood. The plot is
negligible. Tod Hackett finds him–
self involved with a typical collec–
tion of queeries and degenerates:
a moronic but disturbing Venus
after whom the hero unsuccessfully
lusts, her batty ex-comic father, her
cowboy paramour, a vindictive and
swashbuckling dwarf, and a Sher–
wood Anderson grotesque named
Homer. The author's chief concern,
however, is not with the roisterings
of these infantile adults but with
the
Walpurgisnacht
which is Holly–
wood.
West's notations on the Holly–
wood flora and fauna are brilliant
enough. He writes amusingly and
with an air of wonder about the
architecture, dress, and lingo (one
character remarks: "How silly, bat–
ting an inoffensive ball across some–
thing that ought to be used to catch
