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?

 

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