You see, I really thought I should have been Nathanael West

Every English major (of my day, anyway) knows Nathanael West. Miss Lonelyhearts is probably the most famous 60-page novel ever written.  Day of the Locust, his other remembered work, has been made into a movie most actors would like to have starred in or at least been in. I read his other, less famous books. ‘The Dream Life of Balso Snell.’ ‘The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin.’ ‘Cool Million.’ I identified with him somehow. Why?

We weren’t very much alike. He hated his birth name, which was Nathan Weinstein. I loved my birth name. He desperately wanted to be some other person, maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald. I didn’t want to be Fitzgerald; I was already better by birth. I just wanted to be as good a writer as FSF was, which was a mountain I wanted to climb Nathan never could. So why would I bond with the poseur called “Nathanael West”?

Three reasons. When I read his stuff I could see myself. He was floundering. He wanted to be different. New. I was floundering. Wanted to be different. New. 


It killed him. Sadly, he looks like William Powell, one of my all-time favorite movie actors. But he was always destined to be ‘Miss Lonelyhearts,’ and he never found the new thing he sought. I felt for him. Worse, he died before he could find that new thing I think he could have found.

Thing 3. He was 37 when he died. I was 37 when The Boomer Bible got published. I came to envy the writer with no name. Thought I should have died in a car wreck a month after TBB came out. I’d be famous now. I’m not.

What I have always had are dreams I’m sure he had simulacra too. I am in a valley staring at a mountain ridge. And HE is walking slowly across, all robes and blood and sandals and such, and he pauses for just a moment, in which moment I think he’s going to crook a beckoning finger, saying, “I gave you a great gift, now you come with me” that kind of thing. But in my dreams he does not beckon. There’s only a faint, phantom, cock of the head and he walks on. Nathan. 37. Maybe he got the beckoning sign. Maybe he’d done enough. 

Why, perhaps he got laid out with FSF and I probably won’t even have a funeral, because there will be nobody left to call me “that poor sonofabitch.” Doesn’t play well to the masses if there are no paparazzi, right?

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

A Reclamation Project Begun

Image
As you work your way through the links here, don’t be shy. Get ‘Click Happy.’ Even on pics. FIGHTING BACK ONE FILE AT A TIME … How bad has it gotten? I uploaded this video from the old Instapunk at YouTube an hour ago. It has already been removed for violating YT Community Standards.  There’s a pdf version, just published, of the post from Instapunk.com the video above was created for. Nobody censored it 15 years ago. Back then, it was unquestioningly covered as freedom of expression. Here’s my pdf file of ‘ The Goosestep Enigma ’.  This was by no means the most controversial post or graphic included in Instapunk’s 2,000+++ posts over the years. Now I’m going back in time to make pdf versions of the key parts of that website, meaning the most comical, controversial, reflective, insightful, and graphically provocative. But why reinvent the wheel. It’s all still there, isn’t it? The sad fact is that the truly huge resource called Instapunk.com is facing a ticking clock. The orig...
Read more

The Best Book on the Trump Phenomenon

Image
Everybody rushed in after the fact to be first with the goods on how Trump pulled off the biggest electoral upset in modern presidential history. I was already ahead of them though. I had been covering the political briar patch with a steady diary approach for four presidential election cycles, both terms of W, the meteoric rise and weird re-election of Barack Obama, and of course the first flutterings of the Republican country club riot over replacing him. I had three blogs to draw from over that time, and a couple+ books out of it, including one demonstrating that I had Obama  figured out long before even his fiercest beltway critics caught on. Here’s another relevant book . I recognized the unique potential of Trump to win the whole thing early, in June of 2014. I could prove it. Why has it taken me this long to do my own book about the most spectacular politician of all our lifetimes? Two reasons. I didn’t realize I had produced so much material about Trump, the blog in ...
Read more

Guess I’m the last one who’s fighting back with nunchucks…

Image
YEAH. THE VP DEBATE You have no idea. This is all an apotheosis for me. The Joke meme has captured me. Like, you know, I know there will be Democrats out there and vociferating about how good Walz did in appropriate ethnic accents. Defending Kamala was always a loser. Bathos is hell.  And they think this POS is on their side. They do. Actually this is called projection. Here’s the real basis of Tim Walz. A banjo-banging would-be wise man who claimed Minnesota children were “above average.” Keep watching, rolling over to the next vid too. Keillor is a Walz… uh huh. Older, fatter, meltier… 2028 My very first blog, Gloves Off, contained a spirited defense of the ones we used to call Ladies. All gone now except for the ones still motoring onward with walkers and cute hair with no cosmetic surgery. They were mostly mothers. Not all. I have memories none of you can match — my own mother, Addie and Adelaide, Mildred Conklin, Gwendolyn Fennessy, Emma Jones, Rosa Riggs, Joy Coleman, Sis Hin...
Read more

Kamala’s Girl Guards Ready to Come Off the Bench

Image
  See? Here are a couple of them rallying to her side already. Maria Shriver  & Liz Cheney. Protecting her from the kind of stupid male questions no menopausal woman has the patience to deal with. Got her six. It’s no secret that Kamala Harris has been taking her lumps on the campaign trail of late. Not surprisingly, the men who were supposed to help have done exactly the opposite. Her boss, Big Joe, has thrown her under the bus a couple of times, essentially forcing a loyalty oath on her that ties her hands policywise. Bill Clinton had done likewise, intimating in his disingenuous way that she is responsible for the deaths of innocent women occasioned by her, well, failure to secure the border. Even the God Obama has done more harm than good, pissing off black men by ordering them to vote Democrat like always, even though Kamala is a woman. Good thing there are so many Girl Guards out there, archetypal females of power who know that the One True Campaign Issue is a woman’...
Read more

The Wall and Other Things

Image
  I have a friend, real not FB, Bryan Womack, who dates back to the original Boomer Bible website , where he posted under the sobriquet Winston_Sith, an obvious reference to Orwell’s 1984. We’ve never met in person, but I have done this in his honor… The accompanying post is here … He was and is, out there somewhere, a mathematician in search of the truth about prime numbers, which I also follow under his leadership but with differing results. We both think they’re the key to the universe, but our surmises are discrepant .  Okay. That’s a lot. What does it have to do with The Wall, Pink Floyd’s much glossed over masterpiece and musical legacy, despite the vicious antisemitism of Roger Waters? There’s this lady, a classical musicologist who has never been to a Stones concert, or any other rock concert I can discern, who is obsessed with Pink Floyd’s The Wall. And she fills me with envy. Everything is connected. Anybody who knows me at all knows this is my cardinal tenet. Back i...
Read more

A Near-Perfect Microcosm of “The Swamp”

Image
Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. There’s an intensely contemporary reason for taking a close look at Scientology. The Swamp is so huge it seems like the Borg. But what are the stripped down essentials of the Borg? Here’s a look at a laboratory example, a microcosm if you will. In the interests of full disclosure, I did encounter Scientology back in the weird year of 1968. I was in Boston, got scooped in to a “Dianetics” exercise, and got speedily thrown out for having too much “charge” to participate. The one in charge was blond, bland to the point of creepy, and I almost (but not quite) succeeded in making him lose his temper. In further interests of disclosure, I spent years on Facebook, debating Trump-haters. They did lose their tempers. But they also exhibited the exact same repetition of Talking Points the lefties (and Scientologists) employ. Exact. Same. Words. How I made the cult connection. Overview Like it says. Troublemaker. Destroy Utterly  Horror Show Squared More ... ...
Read more