The Day of the Locust

What is one to do in the Windy City, on a rainy and miserably cold April day, when only last week spring - that flirtatious and treacherous harlot- let us have a peek under her titillating dress, standing a-la Marilyn Monroe on the subway vent, and letting golden rays of warmth wash over our chilled and winter-pale bodies, pushing the bubbling mercury way above the 70 degree mark, only to have her tug the garment back down with a brusque, businesslike movement, with her pretty head thrown back, eyes closed in a childish and petulant you-can’t-touch-this frown, and let the sleet and snow return on our despondent and defeated faces?
Well, one thing you can do is pick up a copy of Mr. Nathanael West’s classic tale of life in Hollywood in warm and sunny California, The Day of the Locust.

This good read was penned in 1939 and deals with a group of people living on the fringes of the American movie industry during the great depression.
But before we launch into this exquisitely told story of oddballs, soulless starlets and a whole cast of unsavory and shallow characters, I’d like to spend a paragraph or two cackling on about my weakness for good titles and the methodology behind my reading madness.
I love a good title. I am a sucker for them. And although I prefer the definite article-intriguing adjective-cool noun 1-2-3 punch, as in: The Human Stain, The Sheltering Sky, The Good Earth, The Daunting Douchenozzle and other classic calling cards for English literature, I was much drawn to the portentous and biblical-image evoking phrase; The Day of the Locust. I knew the book existed and had caught a glimpse of its reputation, but had I never heard of it before stumbling upon it on the dusty shelves of one of the second-hand bookstores I frequent, I would have purchased it for the title alone.
Needless to say that this strategy for selecting books isn’t guaranteed to send shockwaves of delight through your Clitterati Literati each and every time.

My selection process for candidates to be held in front of my Roman nose for several hours is fairly straightforward. I want to emphasize that I speak of Real Books here, as in real dead-tree residue and good old-fashioned ink.
Kunkle, Krinkle, Kindull, or whatever the name of that electronic abomination may be; to the pit with Thee, Demon!

I suppose the sheer volume of books on offer makes us all fastidious to some degree.
Were one shipwrecked and left alone on the proverbial island, even the discovery of a Dan Brown novel may bring about a euphoric reading experience, as it will be the only printed text to be read in the next 40 years before one succumbs to the combination of boredom, scurvy and the effects of excessive self-pleasuring (note: Swindle abusers caught in this predicament will find out after 3 days that having 10,000 stored stories doesn’t amount to Jack squat when your batteries have run out).
But if one has even a little choice in literati, Brown’s stories will immediately be recognized for the rancid stool water that they obviously are.
To guide me through the canyons filled with all those thousands upon thousands of books in our treasured English language alone, I found a trusted guide in a quite unlikely place; I use the Time Magazine list of best English novels published after 1923.
I scan the listing, take a quick look at the subject, and unless the book deals with a matter I really don’t care for, like sports or anything post-modern, I put it on my list and look for it the next time I skulk my way through the narrow aisles of Chicago’s used-bookstores.
I almost always buy my books second hand, not just because of the monetary incentive, but because I love everything about old books; their smell, the different fonts on the covers, the way the cloth covers feel against my palms, the lovely ochre color at the edges of the pages, contrasting with the pristine white in the center.
Hah ! Kindle, my tuchus! I stand erect on the barricades of tradition, the spirit of Gutenberg to my left and that fractious Frenchman General Pétain on my right, and in unison we bellow as we stare down the gathering swarm of electronic pixel vampires who besiege our literary Verdun: ” Ils ne passeront pas !”

But enough of this falderal, and on with the review.

Locust tells the story of Tod Hackett, a set-designer/painter who’s been lured to Hollywood, but who winds up being disillusioned by the people he meets in Tinseltown. Now, the trope of the shallow, desperate, empty-headed, starstruck Hollywood wannabes is indeed a familiar one, but West’s unflinching eye and first-rate dissection of human character, presented in terse, clear prose, exposes a dystopia not only devoid of true human worth and achievement, but one rife with viciousness and cruelty rising from the boredom and emptiness the émigrés to California experience after they find that the dream of a lifetime doesn’t deliver.

Tod’s acquaintances exist at the periphery of the illusion of Hollywood, and none of them go anywhere.
The storyline seems somewhat fragmented as we see Tod interact with some very well-described characters, but there isn’t much dramatic plot development, save the climactic final scene.
The structure of the story, or lack of it, reminded me a bit of Steinbeck’s style in Cannery Row.
A writer can only get away with this loose a story when the reader is fascinated by the characters and wishes to see what will happen to them even though none of them are particularly sympathetic and none of them will get what they want.
And, Jesus be praised, there are actually a few very funny moments in this otherwise brutally honest and sobering novel. For instance: an Inuit family, brought to Hollywood to be extras in a movie, confuses a funeral for a movie-set, with hilarious results.

The title of this book works very well, and it looms over the entire story from beginning to end.
Some deranged critic opined that the locusts are a reference to the rising fascism in Europe at the time.
As the saying goes; one has to be very well read to be this wrong.
The locusts are the seekers of a false dream, whose bitterness morphs into an insatiable appetite for ever more spectacular and violent diversions. In the case of the adorers of Hollywood royalty, this manifests itself into motion picture escapism, but the greatness of The Day of the Locust is that it constitutes a searing indictment of not only Hollywood, but of our entire entertainment culture and the trivial and meaningless icons we erect for ourselves, with all the detrimental effects this has on our humanity.

I have lived in California for a decade, including a two year stint in Southern California, and it is amazing how this 70-year-old story still accurately describes the lunacy, the vapid trend-seeking and cultural vacuity of modern-day Los Angeles.
Sarah Vowell, who is very funny, once observed that California is the worst place to be sad in. And she’s right. One has no excuse to be miserable in all that sun-drenched, natural beauty and there isn’t a season with clouds and rain in which a person can properly feel sad.
Perhaps for such as I, who almost got lost themselves in the Californian wasteland, this novel is more poignant than it will be for readers who haven’t lived in Southern California, but my hunch is that you will enjoy Nathanael’s superb creation.

The Frittati council awards this stunning piece of fiction with no less than 8 Wafting Winona’s and 1 Adorable Aniston to boot.
You will be distressed to know that I’ve set myself to the writing of a short story, and I have chosen as my subjects the classic Shakespearean themes of murder, cocaine and teenage prostitution. Developments will come your way as the plot thickens.

In the meantime, a la semaine prochaine, mes amis Literati, and if you have been wondering (as you bloody well should) what exactly is rotten in the state of Denmark;
well, it is the cheese.

Heart of Darkness and Ignatius Rising

Ah, there you all are, my pale-faced, bibliophile compadres.
Welcome back to the Literati thread, and by Jove, do I have a treat for your tired, red-rimmed eyes that take so much abuse from your habit of reading well into the wee hours of the morning by the light of that single flickering candle, as you are huddled up in your starched, linen nightshirt and matching cap with tassel, safe in the bosom of your fine Edwardian bedstead.

We will be serving not one but two heaping, steaming helpings of Frittati for your perusing pleasure this week.
The first is a review of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the second is a biography called Ignatius Rising: the life of John Kennedy Toole, by Rene Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy.
Conrad’s 1902 novella covers less than 100 pages with ink, and I should have been able to consume this famous story in a reading session or two, yet I found myself having difficulty immersing myself in this dark and lugubrious tale. For one, Conrad’s vision of humanity is bleak, to put it mildly, and being already familiar with the story (courtesy of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now, which is based on Heart of Darkness) I knew that the chance of succumbing to bouts of uncontrollable laughter, or stumbling upon any manifestation of beauty or hilarity were slim. Conrad has been much praised for his prose, but I found his style rather inaccessible. This book, being over a century old, contains a great many nouns which have long ago sunken to the bottom of that vast sea of desuetude which is the final resting place of so many once vibrant and productive English words. And this doesn’t improve the reading experience. Also, there is relatively little dialog in the story which leaves us marooned with Marlow the somber narrator and his dismal take on our hominid lineage.
There is no doubt that Conrad is a technically gifted writer; his description of the Thames and the towns on its banks, at the beginning of the story, is quite impressive, as is his vivid recounting of that other great river, The Congo, and its riparian, ominous jungle .

Most of you will be familiar with the plot, but I shall offer a summary nonetheless.
Restless sailor of the seven seas Marlow tells of his harrowing journey, piloting a rickety steamboat up the Congo River during the time of the brutal colonization of the Congo by the Belgians who were extracting the coveted ivory from its interior, while leaving a mountain of native corpses in their wake. Marlow is trying to reach a trading agent by the name of Mr. Kurtz whose station is the farthest reaching part of the greedy arm of the empire, and who enjoys an almost mythical status with his fellow traders who dwell in stations down river. The references to the heart of darkness, where Kurtz resides and into which Marlow is inching his way through the perilous jungle, are many. No news from Mr. Kurtz has reached the other trading stations on the river for over a year, and Marlow’s quest to find this man takes on the character of a peregrination. It is telling that Conrad often uses the word pilgrims for the traders who accompany Marlow on his leaky tub of a steamboat.
When he finally meets Kurtz, Marlow finds an insane, emaciated megalomaniac who’s made himself a God to the natives, and who has transformed the village and surrounding area into a charnel house.

While reading the novella, images of Coppola’s much vaunted movie kept coming to mind and erected another barrier between me and the story; yet another good reason to eschew motion pictures based on literature, or at least postpone their viewing until the book has been properly consumed.
Much has been written about Heart of Darkness, and the trek through the jungle, accompanied by the increasing callousness and savagery of the colonists, lends itself easily to morose musings on the hypocrisies of the ‘civilized’ European invaders and the more ethereal search for what truly slumbers in the hearts of men who wear incongruous starched shirts in the steaming jungle and who count elephant tusks while their colleagues are dying right next to them of tropical diseases.

I found the time that we actually get to spend with Kurtz disappointingly brief. His character is built up to almost legendary proportions, and Marlow keeps obsessing about the man, so that his brief appearance, disturbing and grotesque as it is, is something of a let-down, much like finally seeing the mechanical shark in the movie Jaws.

Conrad doesn’t think much of humanity which may automatically qualify him as a great thinker and author in some circles, but before the protean and ever febrile judges of the Irritati court, Heart of Darkness is awarded with a timid 6 Winonas. But, as we are in a generous mood today, we shall also heap upon Józef Teodor Konrad an honorary Aniston, which most people equate with roughly half a Winona. So there, Joseph.

Our second book today deals with John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces, whom I shall refer to in the remainder of this writing as Ken. Now, I don’t care for biographies, and would therefore never thrust one rudely and without warning into your trusting and tranquil countenance, but I will make an exception for Ignatius Rising because I am fascinated with Ken Toole and I, like many millions the world over, count A Confederacy of Dunces among my favorite books.
On March 26, 1969, when yours truly was still waddling around Holland on uncertain legs and had just mastered the art of not shitting oneself , a thirty-one-year old, well-dressed man from New Orleans, parked his white Chevrolet Chevelle in a rural area of Biloxi, Mississippi, covered the exhaust pipe with the end of a green garden hose, ran the other end of the hose through a cracked rear window, sat behind the wheel, turned the ignition, and started to breathe in the lethal fumes.
Only due to the perseverance and the antics of a mad, sad, highly eccentric and narcissistic woman -Mrs. Thelma Ducoing Toole- did it come to pass that the brainchild of her son Ken ever found its way out of obscurity and into the hearts of the world’s grateful readers, snapping up the first ever posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.

If you haven’t read A Confederacy of Dunces yet, you really, really should. It is an astonishingly funny book featuring one of the most unpleasant and memorable characters in all of fiction, Ignatius Jacques Reilly. Not possessing a single redeeming quality, this obese, self-obsessed flatulent snob and slob will nevertheless have you in stiches and, as so eloquently phrased by Walker Percy, who was so instrumental in giving Dunces to the world, “there is an underlying sadness in the book, and you never really know where it is coming from”. Dunces is considered by many literati the best book ever written about New Orleans and its denizens.

Ignatius Rising, published by Louisiana State University Press, 2001, and donning probably the worst and ugliest cover in the history of the printing press, tells the story of a precocious only child and his immensely overbearing mother. We learn of his academic achievements, his time in the service, his escalating alcohol consumption, the pressures of academic life, his unhealthy relationship with his mother, and finally his descent into depression and paranoia resulting in his untimely death.
It is well worth the read, but I shall not attempt to summarize a biography, because that would be silly.

What I would like to dwell on before I let you all return to your various louche activities, is the rejection by Simon and Schuster (and many other publishers) of this fine work.
We have all heard the stories of great works of fiction that were initially rejected by some dilettante editor or other, but in Ignatius Rising we are shown the actual correspondence between a sensitive and ambitious author, who’s deeply wounded by the rejections of his novel (which he knows to be good), and the quite sympathetic editor Robert Gottlieb, who also recognizes the quality of the work, but who ultimately sticks to his initial objection to the book, namely that “it isn’t really about anything”.

It is sad beyond words that a gifted editor (Gottlieb had Joseph Heller under his tutelage and encouraged him to complete Cath-22) could not come to an unusually good and original book without preconceived notions about what a story ought to be like.
It is very well possible that had he read the book properly, Ken would be with us today and writing his heart out, while sitting on his veranda in New Orleans, sipping a Mint Julep or a Sazerac.

Oh well, as that other author,who also insisted on writing stories that “weren’t about anything” said: So it goes.

Ignatius Rising gets 7 willowy Winonas.

Until next week, and if you must, please use a tissue afterwards.

Their eyes were watching God

Greetings, fellow Frittatis. And welcome to the third episode of the Literati thread.

Last week’s subject of my literary focus was Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 Their eyes were watching God.
I chose this book because it is short (180 pages). I knew I was going to have little time to devote to reading on account of my foolish new venture into yet another commercial endeavor.This fevered chasing after gold and silver is brought about by my sincere desire to ward off the horrors of penury and to shower Lovely Lola in all the satin and silk her mellifluous self deserves.

Their eyes were watching God follows Janie, a light-skinned black woman living in Florida in the 1930s.
The central theme of the novel is the desire for love and happiness against the back-drop of quite adversarial circumstances (i.e. being a woman and being black in the American South in the Thirties.)

Plot (with spoilers)

Janie’s an orphan who’s raised by her grandmother who insists on marrying her off as soon as Janie’s hormones show the very first signs of stirring. She marries a peasant of a man who thinks of her as chattel, only fit for cooking and cleaning. She soon leaves this simple beast and goes off with a well-dressed, debonair looking fellow with whom she spends the next 20 years and the next 100 pages.
Although this man is an improvement over beau number one, this ambitious and (relatively) wealthy man sees Janie as a trophy, and unhappily Janie advances into middle age, until…..
Tea Cake makes his appearance; a sunny, honest and much younger man, who makes Janie experience love and life, even though he is an unsophisticated laborer who loves to gamble and carries with him a switch-blade in case his fellow dice-throwers decide to recoup their losses with the aid of a straight razor.

Evaluation

In the first review on this thread, I mentioned that I read the book (The Second Coming, by Walker Percy) incorrectly, because I took too long to read it, which diminishes the overall reading experience by messing up the pacing of the plot.
Perhaps there are different ways to read a novel incorrectly and perhaps that is why I can’t be enthusiastic about Their eyes were watching God.
Or maybe the experience is better if the reader is black or female, but I simply did not like this book.
Short as it was, halfway through the story I deliberated whether I should push through to the end or just abandon the book and pick up next week’s subject.
Most of the book is in dialogue, as in “Us colored folks is too envious of one ‘nother. Dat how come us don’t git no further than us do”, which makes the story quite lively, but Mrs. Hurston’s prose, while narrating the story, is far from excellent and sometimes just plain clunky.
Another problem with the book is that it feels as if the characters (mainly Janie and Tea Cake) are being marched through the story in order for the author to get her point across.
Although I sympathize with Janie, I never had the feeling I got to know her. For better writers, such as Mr. Bowles who wrote the subject of my previous entry The Sheltering Sky, this isn’t a problem, as they can draw a reader in by the sheer force of their descriptive powers and their cunning prose.
It sounds unkind, especially since the subject of this story is such an important one, but I just don’t think Mrs. Hurston is a good writer, and this story could have been much better.
If anyone has read the book and is in violent disagreement with my review, I would like to hear from you, because it always bugs me when a work of art is much praised and people rave about the wonders to be found in the work, while I am left with my snout in the dirt hunting for, but not finding, the coveted literary truffle.

Until then, Their eyes were watching God receives a meager 4 Winonas on the Irritati scale.

Until next week, and if you have been, please stop at once.