Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust: Notes

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WEST'S MISS LONELYHEARTS & THE DAY OF THE LOCUST Notes including • • • • • • • •

Life and Background of the Author Introductions to the Novels Lists of Characters Critical Commentaries Character Analyses Critical Essays Essay Topics and Review Questions Selected Bibliography

by Mordecai Marcus, Ph.D. Department of English University of Nebraska

LINCOLN, NEBRASKA 68501 1-800-228-4078 www.CLIFFS.com ISBN 0-8220-7275-0 © Copyright 1984 by Cliffs Notes, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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LIFE AND BACKGROUND OF THE AUTHOR Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City on October 17, 1903, the first child of Max and Anna Weinstein. Both his parents were German-speaking Lithuanian Jews, who married in 1902, shortly after their arrival in America. West's father was a hard-working and successful building contractor until the Depression curtailed the construction industry. His parents were cultivated people and both of them came from close-knit, large families. West attended grade school and high school in upper Manhattan and was always a poor student, preferring to spend his time reading books. He often skipped his classes and did not graduate from high school, but on the basis of a forged transcript, he was admitted to Tufts University in Massachusetts. There, he also neglected his studies and was finally forced to withdraw. West soon gained admittance, however, to Brown University on the basis of the transcript of another Nathan Weinstein. At Brown, West studied what he wished, participated in college dramatics and publications, and made a reputation for himself as a satiric cartoonist. He immersed himself in modern literature and art and read widely in what were then considered to be decadent books, as well as many other books about esoteric lore and religion and magic. He was rejected for fraternity membership because he was Jewish, which was one of the reasons why he eventually changed his name legally. In his younger years, West became notorious among his friends for his laziness, which earned him the lifelong nickname of "Pep" (the opposite of his usual behavior). At Brown, West began many friendships with the young writers and artists on campus; then after graduating from Brown in 1924 with a Ph.D., he worked for his father until he sailed to Paris late in 1926, presumably to write. Although West allowed his friends to believe that he was abroad for two or three years, he was really there for less than three months. He returned to New York early in 1927 and secured a job as a desk clerk in a second-rate residential hotel, a type of job which he held sporadically during the early 1930s. At the Kenmore Hotel and, later, at the Sutton Hotel, West saw the seamier side of American life and enjoyed putting up his down-on-theirluck friends without charge. During these years, West wrote and rewrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), which received little attention and sold poorly. This short novel is a surrealistic fantasy about a young writer's sojourn up and into the intestinal tract of the Trojan Horse, where he encounters various specimens of deranged, deformed, and unsavory humanity. West satirizes optimistic social formulas, religious cliches, and artistic pretensions in an elaborate, epigrammatic style. As in his later work, he shows distaste for the human body and expresses doubts about the dignity of sexuality. During this period, West's range of friends increased and his artistic dedication intensified. He was friends with William Carlos Williams, Dashiell Hammett, James T. Farrell, Quentin Reynolds, and Josephine Herbst, among others. His closest friend was the humorist S. J. Perelman, who married West's favorite sister, Laura. West interrupted his menial hotel work with stays in the country, where he labored arduously on his second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. This book, his masterpiece, on which West worked at the rate of about one hundred words a day, was published in 1933 and was recognized by friends and reviewers alike as a work of original genius. But its publisher went bankrupt shortly before the book's publication, and the book never received wide distribution. In 1933, West began the first of several stints as a Hollywood scriptwriter, working on hack movies with various teams of writers. During this time he finished and published A Cool Million (1934), a contemporary satire of the nineteenth-century Horatio Alger-type stories, those tales which chronicled the success of honest young workingmen--stereotypes that are still major myths in American culture. This novel tells the story of Lemuel Pitkin, a smalltown boy whose attempts to gain success allow him to fall repeatedly into the hands of unscrupulous businessmen, wheeler-dealer operators, and politicians. Pitkin, who is literally dismembered as the novel progresses, ends up an unwilling martyr to the cause of an American Fascist-principled president. Intermittently funny and characterized by West's typical grotesqueries, the novel tends too often to depend on practical jokes. However, this technique is

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www.cliffs.com occasionally extremely effective in West's satirical questioning of the American formula of Endurance + Ambition = Success, a scheme which West had treated with tragic intensity in Miss Lonelyhearts. During the second of West's stints as a Hollywood scriptwriter, he conceived and began his fourth and last novel, The Day of the Locust (1939), in which he broadens his social criticism. West had always been a man who had hid much of himself and who had presented many faces to the world. A bookish intellectual, he delighted in hunting and fishing expeditions and counted the novelist William Faulkner among his hunting companions. He loved dogs and open spaces, yet he was also a withdrawn observer-despite the fact that he could, if necessary, socialize with warmth and grace. Wittily satirical, West was also capable of being sensitive and tender. He was always inclined to exaggerate his own experiences, doubtlessly trying to act out his defenses against the world while, at the same time, satirizing its more faddish, empty enthusiasms. No other major modern American novelist is perhaps less autobiographical than West. Yet he did put certain aspects of himself into all of his fiction, especially into Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. In his last novel, in particular, he emphasized the artificiality and the dishonesty of Hollywood's films and filmmakers, while portraying at the same time the despair, the rage, and the boredom of those ordinary citizens who still continue to flock to California's warm and hedonistic atmosphere where, allegedly, "dreams come true." Despite several casual love affairs and a long, inconclusive engagement to a girl whom he knew early in the 1930s, West was basically a loner. Happiness, however, loomed for him when, in 1940, he met and married Eileen McKenney, a young widow with a son; Eileen was later to become famous through her sister Ruth McKenney's biographical sketches and subsequent play, My Sister Eileen. Eight months later, in December, West and his bride were killed in an auto accident while returning from a hunting trip in Mexico. He was thirty-seven years old. At the time of his death, West's four novels had sold only about 4,000 copies. In the decades after his death, he achieved an international reputation as one of the most skillful and original of modern-day novelists. His two best-known novels have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and critics and scholars all over the world have studied them avidly and exactingly. He was planning a new novel when he died. What striking departures he might have taken, however, can remain only a conjecture. Although the body of his work is small, the painstaking craftsmanship of his two best books, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, has provided material for engrossing entertainment and serious thought. These short novels make a mirror for their times that is paradoxically both personal and impersonal.

MISS LONELYHEARTS INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL Nathanael West first got his idea for Miss Lonelyhearts in 1929 when a friend who wrote an advice column for the Brooklyn Eagle showed him some of the agonized, pathetic, illiterate letters he received. West was deeply moved, and taking these letters with complete seriousness, he immediately began to plan a novel based upon them. He worked on this novel for about three years, usually writing no more than 100 words a day, frequently changing his plans and rearranging his material. In early versions, the hero was called Thomas Matlock. The shift to "Miss Lonelyhearts" enabled him to concentrate on the trapped obsessiveness of his hero and to emphasize the impersonality implicit in his relationships with the other characters and in their relationships to one another. West sometimes conceived of his work as a comic strip in novel form, which helps to account for its condensed, episodic form and its characters who are

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www.cliffs.com tagged by basic mannerisms and symbols. At this time, West also believed that a deep psychology was irrelevant to fictional characterization, so he used action and minimal dialogue in a behavioral way to suggest whatever depths his characters possessed or were lacking. But despite this mood, West produced a novel of great psychological sensitivity. Miss Lonelyhearts is a product of social and literary currents of both the 1920s and the 1930s. From the thirties, West brought the scorn of artists for a commercialized culture which followed the gods of advertising slogans and adapted churchly religion to material values. He also employed the symbolic methods of writers such as Joyce and Eliot, who used repeated motifs (small themes often attached to physical details), and he also used mythological archetypes in order to represent social ugliness which these writers despised. But unlike these writers, and unlike such witty satirists as Aldous Huxley, West did not play off the sensitive but often narrow-minded artist against a crassly commercialized world. In fact, West's novel, like his other works, has no heroic figures and no figures of significant resistance or revolt. This technique links him to the social and literary values of the 1930s, the period of the Great Depression, for West's social anger, as far as it can be determined, is directed not against a society that tortures a few sensitive souls, but one that crushes or leaves empty all who live in it. Uncharacteristic of the 1930s, however, are West's doubts about all absolute values and of the possibility of people treating one another according to truly humane values. Miss Lonelyhearts can be read with ease and speed; it is engrossing entertainment, but West's methods create problems of interpretation. In addition to condensation, symbolism, and caricature, West frequently alludes to literature, art, and the Bible--and almost always for satirical purposes. The majority of these allusions appear in Shrike's speeches. Another problem when one evaluates this work is the tone which West adopted towards the assorted letter writers and many of the other characters. West uses a great deal of what is now called black humor. Suffering is often presented in grotesque forms, and it is often expressed, especially by the letter writers, in such an inarticulate fashion that the reader does not know if tears or laughter is the appropriate response. But probably the greatest difficulty in interpretation results from West's ambiguous attitude towards the protagonist. Some of these problems can be partially resolved by grouping and contrasting the major characters. Miss Lonelyhearts is flanked by Shrike and Peter Doyle, who are probably alter egos for Miss Lonelyhearts. Shrike represents the articulate and cynical disillusionment in Miss Lonelyhearts, which strikes out against all assertions of positive value. Doyle, on the other hand, suggests the inarticulate side of Miss Lonelyhearts' nature, that part of him that can only express resentments incoherently. The three important women in the novel--Betty, Mary, and Fay--form another group which revolves around the character of Miss Lonelyhearts. Each of them projects her own variety of innocence, and each one acts victimized, but actually they all victimize Miss Lonelyhearts, and, in addition, Mary and Fay (with Miss Lonelyhearts' help) victimize their husbands. From Miss Lonelyhearts' encounters with these women flow many of the important sexual themes of the novel. In interpreting Miss Lonelyhearts, it is necessary to pay close attention to all religious allusions, the discussions of religion, and the intellectual debates. The greatest difficulty in this area is in determining what attitude to take towards Miss Lonelyhearts' religious strivings--whether the reader is to see Miss Lonelyhearts as a tormented soul with genuine and admirable religious yearnings, or whether Miss Lonelyhearts is primarily a satirical portrait of intellectual despair, sickness, and hysteria masquerading as religious fervor. This problem requires the consideration of whatever positive vision may underlie West's largely nihilistic treatment of life.

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LIST OF CHARACTERS Miss Lonelyhearts The novel's otherwise unnamed twenty-six-year-old protagonist; a newspaper reporter turned advice columnist, he seeks faith for himself and his readers, but he never truly finds it.

Willie Shrike Miss Lonelyhearts' editor, a corrosively cynical intellectual who enjoys deflating and tormenting Miss Lonelyhearts and ridiculing all human and social values.

Betty Innocent and healthy minded, but a willfully naive girlfriend to Miss Lonelyhearts; she is finally and briefly his lover and fiancée.

Mary Shrike Shrike's attractive wife; she is both loved-starved and puritanical.

Fay Doyle Thirty-two-year-old correspondent of Miss Lonelyhearts; she meets him supposedly to seek advice about her marriage but, actually, she hopes to seduce him; she is the mother of an illegitimate girl, Lucy, by Tony Benelli.

Peter Doyle Forty-one-year-old crippled meter reader; unhappy husband to Fay.

Miss Farkis Sluttish bookstore employee; occasional companion to Shrike.

Ned Gates A fellow reporter and drinking companion to Miss Lonelyhearts.

George B. Simpson An old man who is taken to a speakeasy by Miss Lonelyhearts and Ned Gates, who abuse him.

Goldsmith Fellow reporter of Miss Lonelyhearts; he writes Miss Lonelyhearts' column when Miss Lonelyhearts is ill.

Sick-Of-It-All; Desperate; Harold S.; and Broad Shoulders Correspondents of Miss Lonelyhearts, they appear only in their letters to him.

Tony Benelli The alleged father of Fay Doyle's daughter, Lucy.

Jake Bartender at Delehanty's.

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CRITICAL COMMENTARIES Chapter 1: "Miss Lonelyhearts, Help Me, Help Me" The first chapter's caption heading is one of the novel's best. It suggests Miss Lonelyhearts' isolation as he sits at his desk while disembodied voices cry at him in desperation for help which he cannot give. As the novel begins, Miss Lonelyhearts is mockingly identified with Christ by Shrike, the feature editor of the newspaper. Miss Lonelyhearts accepts the identification seriously, only to be tormented by it until, as the novel progresses, he becomes ill and eventually goes out of his mind. Shrike's first utterance is parody, and almost everything he says throughout the novel will be parody. The phrase which Miss Lonelyhearts uses--"A clear white flame"--alludes to Walter Pater's (an English poet) desire for life to burn with a hard gemlike flame. Later, Shrike parodies the idea of a man of eighty-six, so full of positive energy, that he begins to learn Chinese, a feat that is more than likely impossible. Shrike believes such ideas are nonsense, and he mocks them for the sheer pleasure of being nasty, but also to cheer himself up. The letters that Miss Lonelyhearts must respond to with comforting advice are semi-literate expressions of agony, written by people who are aware of their desperation but have little understanding of its causes. Their letters' garbled style reflects the writers' inability to express the parts of their experience together into a coherent pattern. This disjunctive style may seem humorous to the reader who might unconsciously feel superior to such inarticulate people. Each letter, however, describes a helpless victim. "Sick of it all" is victimized by the combination of her husband's sexual appetites and her mechanical adherence to religion. Being a good Catholic means obeying absolute rules, not acting with common sense. Rather than offering help, then, religion oppresses her. The girl without a nose is the prey of meaningless fate. She wants to be cheerful, but her parents make things worse by offering her explanations that are at best irrelevant and at worst designed to make her feel guilty when she is really innocent. Her father is nice, but he acts cruelly, either out of ignorance, or from unconscious resentment at having such a disfigured daughter. The third letterwriter's sister is also an innocent victim; she has been exploited by a stranger and now faces rejection and punishment from her parents, for she is pregnant through no fault of her own. Her only champion is her devoted younger brother, who is kind but completely helpless. All these people are pathetically alone, made to suffer by self-righteous relatives or by the brutality of strangers. Two of the letterwriters must endure the consequences of other people's crude sexual needs, and the other one is frustrated in her desire for life's normal intimacies. Their relatives are the ones who most need help--help in understanding the plight of their despairing family members--but they could never recognize this. These cruel relatives in the letters resemble many of the novel's main characters in their blindness to any needs other than their own. Like the letterwriters, Miss Lonelyhearts is a victim--of Shrike, and of himself. This chapter contains the only physical description of Miss Lonelyhearts. His being a Baptist minister's son accounts for his puritanical streak. The cleft in his chin implies a devilish, sensual side to his character, a capacity for lust and contempt. He wants to turn to Christ, but his awareness that his religious enthusiasm will make him ill, and thus bring on Shrike's rancor, shows that his faith is artificial, excessively intellectual, and aesthetic. Shrike can successfully penetrate Miss Lonelyhearts' pretenses. He is not really his own man, but Shrike is not to blame for this, for Shrike's mocking voice echoes only the self-mockery inside Miss Lonelyhearts himself.

Chapter 2: "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Dead Pan" The heading of Chapter 1 presented a picture of Miss Lonelyhearts sitting alone, listening to a barrage of desperate and unanswerable voices. The second chapter's heading creates an image of Shrike as a figure looming over Miss Lonelyhearts' world. On the surface, "dead pan" refers to Shrike's expressionless face Cliffs Notes on Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust © 1984

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www.cliffs.com as he delivers his humorous jibes. On a deeper level, "Dead Pan" is the god of pagan values--the belief in nature as good and sensuality as joyous, religious values that Christianity has tried to replace with its own opposing creeds. Shrike, in fact, tries to live by these pagan values, but he also sees their inadequacies, and he is spiritually dead. He mocks himself, as well as the world and Miss Lonelyhearts. Miss Lonelyhearts seeks solace in drink and also in a brief sojourn through nature in the park. But the park is a wasteland paralleling his soul. Like Miss Lonelyhearts, it needs a spiritual drink, but such a drink will not really help either him or the park. Miss Lonelyhearts has nothing to offer his lonely, sad writers but stones, an allusion to Christ's mockery of those who offer stones instead of bread. The ridicule which he attributes to Shrike is really his own ridicule, directed inward, as well as outward to his readers. The sky is empty of religious omens and signs, and not long after Miss Lonelyhearts enters the speakeasy, he hears Shrike's mock-celebration of the humanistic values of the renaissance, values which Shrike counter-poses to those of Christianity. However, as Shrike describes them, these values are related more to drinking, murder, and lechery than to art. His allusion to the manuscripts and mistresses in Robert Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" satirizes the sensual hypocrisy in renaissance Christianity. Shrike correctly notes that Miss Lonelyhearts is really very interested in women and makes fun of Miss Lonelyhearts' identification with Christ. The "deadness" of Shrike's appearance contrasts with his fantastic and sensual words. Shrike's report on a bizarre religion that seeks salvation through addingmachine rituals suggests that modern religion has been reduced to the purely repetitive and mechanical (as do, in different ways, the letters written to Miss Lonelyhearts). The chapter concludes with Shrike acting with brutal tenderness towards Miss Farkis (whose name seems to combine the idea of a joke and a squirt of air). This linking of tenderness and aggression, repeated throughout the novel, implies that most of the characters hate their love objects and seek to relieve aggressions and sexual desires simultaneously. Shrike's monstrous parody-description of human innards as tropical growths deflates the natural values he claims to praise, and at the same time, he accuses Christianity of being equally and disgustingly sensual (Christ's wounds resemble women's sexuality). This decadent flight of fancy prepares for Shrike's aggressive sexual conquest of Miss Farkis.

Chapter 3: "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Lamb" This chapter's heading refers to the Lamb as Christ, to Miss Lonelyhearts himself, and to the sacrificial lamb in his second dream. The focus is on Miss Lonelyhearts' pursuit of the lamb, which he will kill clumsily. Frustrated by his inability to help his readers and tormented by Shrike's degradation of natural values, he turns to Christianity, especially as embodied in Dostoevsky's Father Zossima, who advises that one should love all of creation. Creation, however, is the world of Miss Lonelyhearts' letters and of nature, as Shrike sees it. Miss Lonelyhearts' nailing his ivory Christ to the wall is futile; it makes Christ merely decorative. Miss Lonelyhearts wonders what his true vocation is, and he becomes hysterical because he knows he really can't preach love because it is an illusion. Both of Miss Lonelyhearts' dreams show that he is a failed priest who can only put the lamb that he had intended for a religious sacrifice out of its misery--by crushing its head with a stone. In the first dream, he does tricks with doorknobs and leads mechanical prayers, which suggest that doors will not open naturally. His ironic prayer, borrowed from Shrike, ostensibly praises the blood of the lamb over all other fluids, but the prayer actually equates religion with a vulgar medicine show. Shrike's voice, as so often in the novel, fuses internally with Miss Lonelyhearts' own. Miss Lonelyhearts' second dream, involving the sacrificial killing of a lamb by Miss Lonelyhearts and some college classmates, is so realistic that some readers do not notice that it is presented as a dream, for it resembles memory more than dream. In any case, it indicates that Miss Lonelyhearts' religious obsessions have a long history. The dream is a parody of a religious procession, with Miss Lonelyhearts as priest. But as a sacrificial priest he is clumsy, his knife is dull, and, failing to kill the lamb cleanly, he

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www.cliffs.com must stone it to death to end its misery. The dreams imply that, for Miss Lonelyhearts, religion is fakery and magic--a cruel ritual that defaces nature, for the lamb is left to the flies amid the bloody flowers. Miss Lonelyhearts wants to bring a dead world (his readers) to life, but seemingly, he is able only to kill.

Chapter 4: "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb" Less visual than earlier chapter headings, this one is more subtle but equally successful in summarizing its main point. The fat thumb is Miss Lonelyhearts' tongue, symbolizing his inability to communicate with Betty, from whom he seeks salvation. The thumb also implies brutality in Miss Lonelyhearts' attitude towards Betty. Later, thumbs will be associated with breasts, and breasts with sexual brutality. Most of the themes in this chapter are explicit. Miss Lonelyhearts longs for order in the physical world around him, and he is drawn to Betty because she represents order. It is, however, an order which Miss Lonelyhearts actually dislikes, partly because it lacks violence. Evidently, Miss Lonelyhearts, like Shrike, is fascinated by values that he finds repulsive. Miss Lonelyhearts' tongue is like a fat thumb because he knows that he really can't talk to Betty. He can't articulate his sufferings to her nor adopt her values. Betty's name suggests the American wholesomeness of apple pie and the girl next door. In a moment of panic, Miss Lonelyhearts takes a taxi to her apartment. She invites Miss Lonelyhearts to stay for dinner, her unconscious version of communion. This is typical of the nourishing gestures she will continue to offer him. When he calls her a Buddah, he is objecting to what he feels is withdrawal, masquerading as warmth, and he is partly right. He experiences hatred for her because she won't take his suffering as seriously as he would like her to, and she can only propose an easy way out of his dilemmas. Just as Shrike caresses his women aggressively, Miss Lonelyhearts is also brutal in his sexual approach to Betty, and he is angered that she labels his actions and views as "sick." Miss Lonelyhearts knows that he has a Christ complex; that is, he acknowledges the artificiality and pride of his desire to save people, but he is not able to make any constructive use of this self-knowledge. He declares his love for mankind, but he immediately wants to strike Betty. He prefers suffering humanity to the relatively healthy and happy Betty because suffering has a morbid fascination for him. He is fearfully suspicious of happiness. Betty enters the novel abruptly, but she is clearly a part of Miss Lonelyhearts' background. She is probably intended to be a parody of commonsense humanity. Some months ago, Miss Lonelyhearts proposed to her, hoping to enter her world of "normality," but since then he has avoided her in order to remain in his world of suffering. The chapter ends with a minor reversal of attitudes, Betty rejecting Miss Lonelyhearts because he has introduced disorder into her life and, in addition, he has hurt her feelings. In contrast, Miss Lonelyhearts feels superior to Betty but won't give up his claim to her. His failure with her parallels his past failure as a columnist and preludes future ineptitudes for him. But, significantly, Miss Lonelyhearts has not made a decisive break with Betty, and the continuation of their relationship seems likely.

Chapter 5: "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Clean Old Man" The scene described by this chapter's heading does not appear until the last third of the chapter, but its image looms symbolically over the entire chapter. Here, minor characters, as well as Miss Lonelyhearts, take fiercely aggressive stances against innocent people, male and female, who seem intolerable to him because of their suggested sexual behavior or lack of it. Still resentful against Betty, Miss Lonelyhearts' anger rises within him like a bomb. Instead of coming to terms with his aggressiveness, he jokingly thinks of it as an assassination attempt against the president. The group of Miss Lonelyhearts' friends at Delehanty's who fulminate against women writers and declare that these women need to be raped are echoing Shrike's and his own feeling that artistic activity is merely a "precious" mask for repressed sexual and sadistic desires. Miss Lonelyhearts correctly, but hazily, realizes that they are attacking something--

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www.cliffs.com abstract ideals--that they and he formerly believed in. In jest, they mock the names of women writers into ridiculous combinations: Ella Wheeler Wilcox (a sentimental poet), Mary Roberts Rinehart (a mystery story writer), and Willa Cather (a serious novelist); the changing of Cather to Catheter plays on the idea of bodily elimination and catharsis. Miss Lonelyhearts' friends are imitating Shrike as they analyze Miss Lonelyhearts' motivations, and they are at least as accurate as Shrike in plumbing Miss Lonelyhearts' feelings. A real religious experience for Miss Lonelyhearts would be merely personal and therefore meaningless because it would concern only his own soul, not his relations with others. This idea underlies the statement that they all have no outer lives, only inner ones; but there is also satire here, for the inner lives of these other men are not genuine either--unless selfishness is the only truth. Miss Lonelyhearts, nevertheless, still wants a religious experience, and he sees their jibes as a hurdle over which he cannot leap. This power to hold him down is the same force that Shrike exerts over him. Then, as Miss Lonelyhearts begins to feel warm and good from the whiskey, he remembers a tender scene from his childhood. The memory of his playing the piano while his sister gravely danced creates within him a sense of order and harmony. This mood is broken when Miss Lonelyhearts receives a punch from a man he accidentally collides with and apologizes to, making him realize that his acts will continue to be rebuffed. Knowing that many things will keep him from ever being truly Christ-like, he rejects his fantasy of order. He wishes to forget about Christ; he wishes that he could be transferred to the sports department. When Miss Lonelyhearts goes out with Ned Gates into the park and abuses the "clean old man" physically and verbally, he is reversing his usual role as Miss Lonelyhearts, for the old man wants no attention, help, or understanding from him. But Miss Lonelyhearts insists on giving all of these, brutally and satirically. He and Gates are acting out in words the rape which his drunken friends had proposed for certain women writers. Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing were serious, early twentiethcentury investigators of sexual behavior--forerunners of Alfred Kinsey and his associates. Miss Lonelyhearts' and Gates' behavior is a parody of those men's concerns. Miss Lonelyhearts pretends sincerity, but his use of the word "pervert" reveals his true attitude--a mixture of anger and disgust with sexuality. The scene also introduces a homosexual motif into the novel. Miss Lonelyhearts' customary pity turns into cruelty--an expression of his pent-up aggressions and his desire to crush those whom he can't help. He tries to summon up sympathy within himself as he asks the old man to relate his life story (perhaps wishing to continue his usual priestly role), but when the old man refuses, Miss Lonelyhearts, identifying the old man with his readers, twists his arm savagely in a punishing gesture. The aggressions he had earlier displayed in the dream of the slaughtered lamb (a dream which was, in part, filled with compassion) and in the scene with Betty (where there were sexual overtones) have now become more direct and inexcusable. Miss Lonelyhearts, a man who wishes to be like Christ and to save all the loveless people in the world is himself quite incapable of love, and he feels more of Shrike's disgust with sexuality than he is aware of. The final gesture in which Miss Lonelyhearts is knocked unconscious is especially appropriate to his mood, for a temporary darkness is the only remedy for his mounting frustration.

Chapter 6: "Miss Lonelyhearts and Mrs. Shrike" The heading for this chapter is less pictorial and satirical than most of the other chapter headings. It focuses on Miss Lonelyhearts' adulterous desire for Mary Shrike and on her grotesque teasing of him. During the course of the chapter, there is an ironical reversal of roles as Miss Lonelyhearts, the unsuccessful seducer, becomes the victim. He is not so much caught in the act of attempted adultery as he is lured into a situation where he will become a pathetic butt for an elaborate practical joke.

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After being delivered home unconscious the preceding evening, Miss Lonelyhearts awakened in a numb and desperate state. Later, during a walk through the park, his sexual urges are aroused by sight of the phallic, Mexican stone obelisk. These sexual desires are visibly surfacing for the first time in the novel. Miss Lonelyhearts wants a woman. It would be a pleasure to seduce Mary Shrike because he could pay Shrike back for tormenting him. Mary Shrike is a woman of complicated and ambiguous sexuality. Her name suggests the Virgin Mary, and there is something virginal about her, but when she gets excited she gives off a sexual odor. Miss Lonelyhearts needs violence to stir his desires, which helps explain his sexual encounters with Mary Shrike and, later, with Fay Doyle. Mary's use of her breasts for flirtation connects sexual attraction with evasion and death. She is obsessed with the fact that her mother died of breast cancer, and, curiously, she hides a medallion between her breasts. When its inscription is finally revealed, we learn that it is an award for a 100-yard dash. West, in a moment of high irony lets us see that her breasts represent flight from men. Miss Lonelyhearts' difficulty after becoming sexually aroused with Mary stems from his hidden shame about sex and his need of violence to arouse himself. Mary's telling Miss Lonelyhearts on the telephone that she is finished with Shrike, and Shrike's welcoming Miss Lonelyhearts to his home for "a date" with Mary indicate that the Shrikes have a sick relationship. They are unconsciously conspiring to torment Miss Lonelyhearts and themselves in order to keep their marriage going. When Mary declares to Miss Lonelyhearts that she is finished with Shrike, she is lying more to herself than to Miss Lonelyhearts. Shrike makes what he terms "a clean breast" of his sexual situation with his wife and confesses to Miss Lonelyhearts that his wife's castrating coldness ("a knife in the groin") drives him to other women. The "clean breast" recalls Mary's shame and her using her breasts to flirt with Miss Lonelyhearts. Mary is really a cold person, but Shrike gets the most he can out of her. Realistically, Miss Lonelyhearts should have taken warning from Mary's revelation that Shrike lets other men excite her so he, Shrike, can reap the sexual rewards, but Miss Lonelyhearts seems to listen to all of this revelation as though he were in a trance. Miss Lonelyhearts and Mary go to a dining club called El Gaucho (the cowboy); the name of the club satirizes Miss Lonelyhearts' intentions towards Mary, a point illuminated by his thoughts about men who want to cushion their heads on breasts. Ironically, however, Miss Lonelyhearts cannot get himself sexually excited, and throughout their dinner, Miss Lonelyhearts becomes increasingly aware of how the restaurant's artificiality parallels the social stereotypes that are oppressing him. This awareness and Miss Lonelyhearts' frustrations make him fear that he is becoming sick, a fact emphasized by his self-deception that sex with Mary will make him happy. As Mary enjoys describing to Miss Lonelyhearts in detail how her mother died of breast cancer, we realize that she is pitying herself and longing for a martyr's role, feelings reinforced by her declaration that her father was cruel to her mother. Miss Lonelyhearts recognizes that Mary's account of her father as a great portrait painter is the stuff of dreams (another evasion of reality), and that Mary may be making up this entire story. Miss Lonelyhearts' disgust with all this fakery contributes to his inability to become sexually excited, and when he takes Mary home, his desperate kisses and attempts to undress her outside her door reveal his total frustration as he furiously tries to bring his dead desires to life. Meanwhile, Mary is imaginatively drifting off into her own self-pitying dream world, and her verbal repetition that her mother died of breast cancer is designed to discourage Miss Lonelyhearts, who has now been trapped by both Mary and Shrike. At this point, Mary and Shrike will have managed to work their aggressions off or to excite themselves sufficiently to enjoy sex, and Miss Lonelyhearts is left out in the cold with his own "knife in the groin." The Christ-figure in him fears or rejects sex, while the aggressor in him does not

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www.cliffs.com seem aware of his need to associate sex with violence. At the end of the chapter, Shrike appears as both satyr and voyeur. Although he is a "dead Pan," he is not quite as dead as Miss Lonelyhearts, who has become ill and sexually unresponsive because of the conflict between Pan and Christ within himself. However, one could also argue that Miss Lonelyhearts' conflicts are a sign of his greater moral sensitivity and are thus expressions of a different and deeper vitality.

Chapter 7: "Miss Lonelyhearts on a Field Trip" This chapter's heading is one of the most effectively satirical lines in the novel. The "field trip" ostensibly takes Miss Lonelyhearts out of his confined office and into the world where his correspondents live and suffer. The "field," however, turns out to be Fay Doyle's body, and Miss Lonelyhearts makes his trip to satisfy his lusts, not to gather knowledge useful for his "priestly calling." The section opens with Miss Lonelyhearts back at his desk in a state of reverie. Statistics about murder and about home runs by Babe Ruth blend in his mind, suggesting that for the journalist and for the popular mind, murder is just another entertainment. These events take place, in West's words, in an imaginary desert, a desert which encloses Miss Lonelyhearts' desperate correspondents, who, spelling his name out with imaginary clam shells, look towards him as a picturesque Redeemer. After Miss Lonelyhearts reads Fay Doyle's letter, he plans a sugary and trite pep-talk for his readers, but the imaginary desert reappears and his correspondents are now spelling out his name with random junk, adding even more ugliness to the desolation of the earlier fantasy. Note here that Goldsmith, Miss Lonelyhearts' colleague, delivered Fay Doyle's letter to Miss Lonelyhearts with a knowing leer, for he has already read it, and he and Miss Lonelyhearts enact sort of a comic routine. Then Miss Lonelyhearts tosses the letter into the wastebasket, but as soon as he imagines his name spelled out with junk, he retrieves the letter. Fay's letter echoes the misogyny of the entire novel, this time from a woman's viewpoint, as Fay declares her distrust of women. In particular, Fay expresses scorn for her crippled husband as if his being crippled is the whole of his identity and prevents him from being a real husband. She has seen Miss Lonelyhearts--he was pointed out to her in Delehanty's--and the help that she really wants is not advice. Fay wants and needs sex with Miss Lonelyhearts. Interestingly, Miss Lonelyhearts' fantasy, as he reads her letter, indicates that he expects to have sex with her. The passage, then, fuses two grim jokes. West likens Fay to "a pink tent," and this image recalls the description of Goldsmith's cheeks as "rolls of pink toilet paper," and Fay's being "a skeleton in a water closet" (a bathroom) transfers the skeleton from the traditional closet to the realm of the toilet. Furthermore, the image of a skeleton symbolizes both Fay's disguised intention towards Miss Lonelyhearts and Miss Lonelyhearts' motives beneath his Christ pose. Additional images continue to debase the idea of sex, and as the chapter continues, the notion of sex as excretion predominates. Ideally, Miss Lonelyhearts would like to resist this sexual temptation. If Christ were real, and adultery a sin, he could find order in the world and he would have a basis for advice for himself as well as for his readers. But he can't find sufficient faith. Telephoning Fay, he sees two disembodied genitals drawn on the wall of the phone booth, a perfect image for the impersonal sex which he is headed towards. Fay pretends to be coy, but succeeds in luring Miss Lonelyhearts, and, symbolically, he suggests that they rendezvous near a tall, phallic park obelisk. This seductress is the third of the trinity of women whom Miss Lonelyhearts pursues. Her name suggests a fairy lightness, the opposite of her real physical appearance and character, and her flirtatiousness has neither the timid pretense of Mary Shrike nor the aggressive propriety of Betty. A virtuoso satirical paragraph introduces Fay, grotesquely emphasizing her strength, masculinity, and aggressiveness. Her feigned reluctance to go to Miss Lonelyhearts' apartment (a cliche speech) melts instantly, and almost immediately they are locked in an embrace. This episode makes it clear that Miss Lonelyhearts is more easily aroused when a woman pursues him than when he must do the pursuing. Moments later, they are in bed together, and their encounter is presented in another compact and satirical

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www.cliffs.com passage. Fay's identification with the movement of the sea makes her a symbolic earth mother or sea goddess, but her behavior is disgustingly animal, or fishlike, and Miss Lonelyhearts' being worn out by the lovemaking is emphatically joyless. The two plunge into bed after exchanging only a few words, and after the event, Fay acts out a series of apologies, insincerely accusing herself of immorality and implying that her husband is impotent. Then she supplies an even better excuse for her adultery by narrating the story of her seduction and betrayal by Tony Benelli. This is the standard story of "the betrayed girl," but completely lacking in poetry or romance. Her liaison with Benelli is, seemingly, as impersonal as her relationship with her husband--"that cripple"--and her relationship with Miss Lonelyhearts. Possibly Fay's account of Benelli is supposed to be a fabrication or an exaggeration, for his receiving her at his home with his wife present is difficult to believe. Fay's confession and its possible exaggeration are reminiscent of Mary Shrike's tale of her past. But Fay's description of her husband's desire to be known as Lucy's father is wholly convincing, and her stupid and cruel denunciation of her husband for his attachment to Lucy also has the ring of truth. As this episode ends, Miss Lonelyhearts makes a halfhearted effort to return to his priestly role by telling Fay that her husband loves her and her child--typical and not unsound advice for her problem--but this is not what Fay wants to hear. She doesn't want advice or moralisms. She wants Miss Lonelyhearts' body again, and as she grabs him, he turns into a limp object, but she drags him back into bed. Miss Lonelyhearts' experience with Fay is grotesque and comic, but its main purpose is to dramatize his weakness and ineffectuality--aspects of his character that have been implied more subtly in the earlier chapters. Miss Lonelyhearts either drifts aimlessly into situations or is pushed into them by others. However, now that he made a decision to meet Fay and after he passively accepted her sexual favors, he has put himself into a morally untenable and potentially dangerous position.

Chapter 8: "Miss Lonelyhearts in the Dismal Swamp" The Dismal Swamp of the chapter's title is the actual name of an enormous swamp located in Virginia and North Carolina. Miss Lonelyhearts' swamp, however, has no geographical location; it comprises the despairing depths of his consciousness and all the impossible solutions to life's ills, solutions which Shrike ridicules towards the chapter's end. Miss Lonelyhearts' recent encounters with Betty and with the clean old man have left him stunned. His experience with Fay was even more disorienting, and now he has slept for two days. He wakes up on the third day, a time scheme that parodies Christ's resurrection on the third day. In his daydreams, Miss Lonelyhearts tries to battle the disorderliness of nature and his own animal-like urges. Then he has fantasies of making a gigantic cross from assorted objects, both natural and manmade, suggesting that--try as he will--he cannot create religious order from any source. Betty, now playing the role of mother, arrives to nurture and heal Miss Lonelyhearts, and to steer him towards a more sensible job. Miss Lonelyhearts answers her with his most serious and straightforward speech in the novel. He admits that he took his present assignment in the hope of its leading to an assignment as a gossip columnist (a lucrative but not very savory job), but now he finds himself trapped because he sees the gravity of his correspondents' plights and their faith in him. Because of his compassion, he has become their victim, and in order to advise them honestly, he must continually examine his own values. Betty responds as if she has understood nothing. She thinks him a fool because she can't understand his feeling of responsibility to the letter writers. She looks on his weakness as merely a foible. She seems not to recognize or believe in sin. Just as Mary Shrike and Fay Doyle seemed to have rehearsed parts of their life history--confessions to gain Miss Lonelyhearts' attention, Betty now tells him about her childhood on a farm, hoping to impress him with her innocence. Unlike all the others, Betty seems to know that Miss Lonelyhearts needs healing,

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www.cliffs.com and she is trying to convince him of nature's curative powers. But Miss Lonelyhearts' thoughts, actions, and fantasies in the novel's earlier chapters reveal that he experiences nature as being made of lust and disorder. Shrike suddenly bursts into this scene like a devil, and he and Betty become, figuratively, Miss Lonelyhearts' good angel and bad angel. Shrike has heard enough of Betty's talk to enable him to attack the idea that nature is curative. Shrike now begins savagely to parody various modes of escape from life's torment. He agrees that Miss Lonelyhearts is an escapist and pretends to think that Miss Lonelyhearts is seriously considering, but rejecting, Betty's suggestion for escape; thus, Shrike will propose something more effective. Shrike then proceeds to ridicule all modes of escape. First, he makes fun of the idea of country life and its simple, uncorrupted joys. His allusion to William Wordsworth's sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us" implies that the attractions of country life are mere literary fantasy. His description of such life is heavily sexual, including a reference to bestiality, and it implies that country life is crudely lustful, self-deluding, and mindless. Miss Lonelyhearts' thought that Shrike has made him sick by smothering Christ in words suggests that Miss Lonelyhearts was seduced by Shrike's rhetoric. Miss Lonelyhearts wants Christ for a crutch, but he cannot have faith because he recognizes his own Shrike-like nature. Miss Lonelyhearts' sickness, then, results from his inability to either accept his own urges or to actually fight against them. Shrike's satire against superficial solutions to life's problems takes the form of parodies of movie scenarios. The South Seas idyll portrays an impossible dream and makes fun of people who, in fantasy, defy social aspirations that they actually love. Next, Shrike parodies the hedonistic way of life--the pursuit of pleasure amid artistic masterpieces--by inventing another scenario, in which people both enjoy and suffer from decadent sensual behavior, but willingly pay the price. Shrike, becoming more hysterical, proposes that the creation and enjoyment of art can make up for all of life's miseries. Suicide and drugs get very brief mention because they are more readily available "cures" for suffering and don't satisfy our fantasies as much as the other escapist ideas do. Shrike's last and most savage attack is on religion. Shrike's First Church of Christ Dentist is an allusion to the Christian Science faith (The Church of Christ Scientist believes that faith can overcome physical limitations and disease and that only lack of faith causes them). Changing Scientist to Dentist reduces this and other religions to the desire only for relief from physical discomfort. This Christ Dentist prevents not sin but decay--that is, bodily ills and imperfections. The new church doesn't believe in sin. Shrike implies that the God of this church is the kind of God whom the modern world calls upon. The new trinity of "Father, Son, and Wirehaired Fox Terrier" mocks the idea of domestic comfort as the goal of prayer. The fox terrier, which makes every home a cliche of completeness and fulfillment, is substituted for the holy spirit; thus, West, through the mouth of Shrike, implies that the dreams and values of our culture have driven out the spirit. Shrike then composes a letter from Miss Lonelyhearts to Christ, in which he cleverly emphasizes that Miss Lonelyhearts can find no comfort in bodily pleasures, nor in spiritual things, and he satirizes the idea of Miss Lonelyhearts as saint. Shrike's concluding request for a quick reply from Christ sneers at the impossibility of Miss Lonelyhearts' replying adequately to his readers. Shrike is enjoying tormenting Miss Lonelyhearts and himself. There is no need for Miss Lonelyhearts to reply to Shrike's tirades, for it is clear that Miss Lonelyhearts can find no answers. Shrike has reduced every aspect of existence to a sentimental, hackneyed, literary plot. His attitude contrasts with Miss Lonelyhearts' taking his readers' letters about suffering seriously. Shrike is suggesting to Miss Lonelyhearts that the only replies possible to such letters are lies, but Miss Lonelyhearts has already realized that, for himself, words only obscure moral problems.

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Chapter 9: "Miss Lonelyhearts in the Country" Although this chapter's heading appears to be straightforward and idyllic, the country idyll actually contains much of the illusion, threat, and decay that Miss Lonelyhearts hoped to leave behind in the city. Betty continues her role from the preceding chapter--that is, she continues to be the nurturing mother, bearing soup and trying to make the naughty child forget about things which he can do nothing to solve. If Miss Lonelyhearts will just "forget suffering and Christ," she implies, his sickness will go away. Again, she argues for the healing power of nature and the country. Miss Lonelyhearts is smugly amused at her notion that zoo animals will comfort him, but when she provides transportation to a farm owned by her aunt, he is willing to take a chance and also to pursue his pleasures. As they approach the Connecticut farm, nature is initially attractive, but the farmhouse contains the smell of wood rot. Betty immediately busies herself in housewifely fashion to clean it up, showing the same kind of simple determination with which she tries to sweep the rot from Miss Lonelyhearts' mind. Their first day and night are almost idyllic, but, by accident, Betty scares away some deer they are watching, and later when they go to bed, her refusal to be intimate with him parallels his encounters with Mary Shrike and Fay Doyle. Earlier, Mary had teased him coyly, acting the sensitive and wounded soul, whereas Fay seduced him outright, then immediately afterward, pretended it was "bad." Once more, in Betty's refusal, she is pretending to be the "good, clean girl." Their second country day contains harsh signs of discord. When the gas station attendant tells Miss Lonelyhearts that the yids (Jews), rather than the hunters, drive off the deer, Miss Lonelyhearts makes no comment, but the irrationality and hatred contained in the bigoted statement affect him. They are echoes of the self-righteous brutality of the oppressor figures who are described in the letters written to Miss Lonelyhearts. Also, the fact that the deer at the pond fled from a noise made by Betty implies that Betty is not as intimate with nature as she thinks she is. After the garage man's speech, Miss Lonelyhearts begins to notice evidence of death and rottenness--even in the woods. Since the time of the year can be no later than very early spring (there was snow in the city park only a few days ago), the presence of this deathly vegetation is realistic, but Miss Lonelyhearts is keenly aware of it and is oppressed by it because it mirrors his mood. Clearly, even a casual sign of human evil, as in the gas station attendant's remark, can resurrect his former despair. In such a world, nature is not the healing force that Betty assures him that it is. The rest of the day drags a little for both Betty and Miss Lonelyhearts. Out of boredom, they swim briefly and nip on gin, and Betty does some laundry. In this atmosphere, Betty is able to discard her coy inhibitions and make love to Miss Lonelyhearts. Her nakedness while hanging up clothes in front of Miss Lonelyhearts indicates that she wants to tempt and seduce him. Her breasts' resemblance to pink thumbs is reminiscent of Mary Shrike's death-associated breasts and of Miss Lonelyhearts' tongue being a fat thumb. These associations suggest that Miss Lonelyhearts expresses his real self by pursuing sex, but this pursuit always leads to a kind of death. Nevertheless, Miss Lonelyhearts' moment of lovemaking with Betty provides a brief reprieve for him. It contrasts with his deep-seated despair and illness. Even this scene, however, is not entirely happy. West notes that the thrush's song sounds like a flute choked with saliva. Thus, we are left with a feeling of limited happiness. The combined smell of sweat, soap, and grass as the pair make love seems to symbolize the difficulty of scrubbing natural impulses clean. The lovemaking seems distinctly temporary.

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Chapter 10: "Miss Lonelyhearts Returns" This chapter's heading suggests at least two overlapping pictures: Miss Lonelyhearts gazing at the misery of the city streets, and Miss Lonelyhearts once more sitting at his desk, ready to give attention to his correspondents' unhappiness. Back in the city, Miss Lonelyhearts knows that Betty and nature have not cured him, and he is relieved that he can return to what he envisions as trying to effect a Christ-like role, a role that would be denied him if he were happy. When Miss Lonelyhearts lived in Betty's world, he felt like a dishonest fool and a betrayer of the wretched letterwriters. He sees a poverty-stricken woman avidly picking up a love-story magazine, and a sick man headed towards a romantic movie. These lonely people juxtapose the false dreams of our culture with our actual, ugly and pathetic human situation. Miss Lonelyhearts realizes that the mass media's portrayal of dreams is a betrayal of people's hopes, and he knows that as Miss Lonelyhearts he is part of this conspiracy. But he still feels that if he can discard the cynicism of Shrike--which is really part of himself--he can ease suffering by preaching true Christian virtues. He resolves--and vows--to be humble and sincere, but his decision to write his daily column without reading his letters shows that his resolve is fragile. Miss Lonelyhearts begins a column about the virtue of Christian suffering, but he recognizes that his stilted style is the Shrike-voice surging up in him. Unable to continue with the column, he turns back to reading the letters, but he does this chiefly to torture himself, as if his only reality were based on suffering. He reads a long letter, one which comprises almost two-thirds of the chapter and is not followed by any further action or commentary. This letter, from Broad Shoulders, comes from a woman who is different from the other correspondents. Unlike the others, she is no passive victim. She has struggled to follow all the basic virtues (the Christianity which Miss Lonelyhearts wanted to preach about) with almost heroic determination. Amidst terrible deprivation, she has cared for her children and her husband. She puts up with and forgives crazy and sadistic behavior from her husband, and has resisted the advances of her sympathetic male boarder, who might have eased her economic suffering after her husband appeared to have run off permanently. However, merely because she seems more intelligent, courageous, and principled than the other correspondents, these qualities seem to have done her no good. She is also a considerably more appealing person than any of the women in the novel's main action, and West may be trying to soften the book's woman-hating tone. It is clear that Miss Lonelyhearts can say nothing to this woman, except perhaps to congratulate her on her strength and virtue. If he tells her that she is a true Christian and will somehow reap the rewards of virtue, he would be fatuous. Her letter closes up the circle of Miss Lonelyhearts' thoughts about his priestly role, although his conscience will continue to be tormented with such thoughts. The novel has now reached a turning point. In the next chapter, West will take his protagonist back to the world which he has insincerely meddled with and will show this world crushing Miss Lonelyhearts physically as well as emotionally.

Chapter 11: "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Cripple" This chapter's heading alludes to its central scene, Miss Lonelyhearts' first encounter with Fay's husband, Peter Doyle, who refers to himself as a cripple almost as obsessively as his wife does. Miss Lonelyhearts, in revolt against Betty's interference, is ready to return to his priestly calling and to offer help to the Doyles. He has no other role left to play and no other claims to make for himself. But his humility is now forced and desperate. Shrike's jibe at the faithless as being "the truly sick" is actually directed towards Miss Lonelyhearts, for Shrike senses the forced quality in Miss Lonelyhearts' faith, and Goldsmith also sees that Miss Lonelyhearts is sick. Shrike's mock praise--he calls the Miss Lonelyhearts of the world modern America's priests--hurts Miss Lonelyhearts because he recognizes his society's false, dreamlike values. By being one of its priests, as it were, Miss Lonelyhearts is a betrayer, and he has acted out the betrayal by giving delusive advice and by going to bed with Fay.

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www.cliffs.com Peter Doyle's wife had pretended to seek advice from Miss Lonelyhearts, but Doyle himself is a person who would really seek Miss Lonelyhearts' help, for he is a weak man in a dead-end situation. West's initial description of Doyle, and his continued description later on, when Miss Lonelyhearts sits down with Doyle, are grotesque. Doyle's crippled condition is clearly severe and painful--he looks, West says, "like a partially destroyed insect." His face is out-of-balance and resembles a composite photograph. This last detail denies Doyle a real identity and makes him a walking summary of Miss Lonelyhearts' correspondents. Greeting Doyle, Shrike alludes to the Bible text: "What is man that thou art mindful of him?"--implying that Doyle is a representative man. Shrike voices the rejection of Doyle that Miss Lonelyhearts will not allow himself even to think about. Doyle is a meter reader and makes a joke about meter readers replacing icemen in jokes about adultery, a pathetic boast of sexual prowess which he does not have, and an act of which he would disapprove. Doyle is pathetically trying to relate to his new acquaintances by being "one of the boys"--another myth of American life. When Doyle invites him to dinner that evening, and shortly afterward, when Doyle hands Miss Lonelyhearts a letter about his desperate situation, Miss Lonelyhearts acts with artificial sweetness and in a sympathetic and priestly manner. He is trying to accept what he feels is revolt within himself and within others. Note that before Doyle gives Miss Lonelyhearts the letter, Doyle attempts to express himself in speech, but his jumbled words demonstrate the near-impossibility of real communication from such oppressed people; Doyle is one of the many lonely people who can put his feelings better into a letter; for such people, a speech about his real feelings would be an aggressive act, and in a letter he can rely on cliches. The letter is subservient (Miss Lonelyhearts might help Doyle because Miss Lonelyhearts is educated) and apologetic (Doyle is no "red"), but Doyle does manage a factual account of his miserable situation and a graphic depiction of his deep despair. Doyle's asking "what's the meaning of it all?" is the very question that plagues and frustrates Miss Lonelyhearts. As the chapter ends, Miss Lonelyhearts forces himself to clasp the hand Doyle accidentally extends under the table. As they sit holding hands, Miss Lonelyhearts represses his disgust and tries to feel love for Doyle. He really wishes to affirm the human bond, but his gesture takes on a homosexual tinge, showing Miss Lonelyhearts inducing shame in himself as punishment for the warmth he allows or forces himself to feel. Miss Lonelyhearts is becoming increasingly self-deluded. He does not see the hypocrisy and danger of trying to help a man whom he has betrayed. His fate is becoming inevitable.

Chapter 12: "Miss Lonelyhearts Pays a Visit" This chapter's heading is similar to West's parody in "Miss Lonelyhearts on a Field Trip," and it also resumes that chapter's plot material. On "the field trip," Miss Lonelyhearts was supposedly the working journalist. Paying a visit to the Doyles, Miss Lonelyhearts plays the part of a priest calling on his parishioners, to deliver healing advice. The situation is ironic, for he has no advice that he believes in, and he is himself partly responsible for the division between the husband and wife. Also, his visit increases their dissension and leads to another sexual advance from Fay. As the chapter opens, Miss Lonelyhearts seems to be going mad. He feels triumphant in his humility; that is, he is enjoying humiliating himself, and he continues in his delusion that he is Christ-like. When Doyle drunkenly calls on Christ to "blast" his wife and his crippled foot, he expresses a type of feeling that is foreign to Miss Lonelyhearts. Miss Lonelyhearts is almost hysterical because he joyously anticipates the approach of Christ. When they arrive at Doyle's home, Fay's surreptitious sexual advances to Miss Lonelyhearts make him want to recover the emotions he had while holding hands with Doyle, another sign that his homosexual guilt is a reaction to his attempts at expressing brotherly love.

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Doyle notices his wife's interest in Miss Lonelyhearts, and after drunkenly labeling himself a pimp, Doyle acts like a dog, a newspaper in his mouth, tearing open Miss Lonelyhearts' fly and rolling over on the floor. Again, the homosexual theme can be explained as part of a pattern of self-humiliation. Doyle best relates to his wife by assuming a masochistic pose, and he can claim friendship with Miss Lonelyhearts only if he accepts sexual humiliation. Fay, who does not understand Miss Lonelyhearts' and Doyle's need for both affection and humiliation, denounces them both as fairies. At last, Miss Lonelyhearts believes that he is ready to deliver the kind of sermon which he has long had in mind, but as he bids the couple to love each other and asks Fay to encourage Doyle sexually, he knows that his words are absurd, for he knows what Fay really wants, and he sees how thoroughly these people hate each other. Doyle's embarrassment at Miss Lonelyhearts' speech may come from shame for his sexual limitations, but it is also based on his consciousness of his and his wife's true feelings. Miss Lonelyhearts mistakenly thinks that he has failed because he hasn't tapped his religious faith, but when he tries to deliver a religious speech, he lapses into a Shrike-like satirical mode, calling Christ the "bidden fruit" (spirit) that replaces the forbidden fruit (body). Miss Lonelyhearts has only demonstrated, once again, how clumsy and inept he is, for when he attempts to substitute praise of spiritual love for praise of physical love, he manages only to satirize them both. Obviously, Doyle does not understand the real meaning of Miss Lonelyhearts' second speech, for he declares his love to Fay out of loyalty--not because of love for her. At the end of the chapter, Fay sends her husband out of the house to get some gin, and she immediately begins making advances to Miss Lonelyhearts, who is now so revolted, embarrassed, or fearful that he is able to resist her. This resistance, his brutal violence toward her, and his flight make him a potential target for Fay's revenge.

Chapter 13: "Miss Lonelyhearts Attends a Party" The "party" of this chapter's heading resembles, in its ugliness, Miss Lonelyhearts' previous encounters with drunken, lonely, and satiric people, and when he finally flees the party, in a trance, he exhibits an increasing loss of sanity. All of Miss Lonelyhearts' sexual encounters have left him sick and despairing. After his grotesque visit with the Doyles, he becomes more disturbed than ever. He goes to bed for three days, as if preparing for a sea voyage. He eats crackers in a self-denying ritual and jams the telephone to cut off the world. Unable to learn from his fiasco at the Doyles that he cannot be Christ, he retreats within himself to a state of dreamy and smug serenity. When a fresh round of torments arrives--as Shrike and his friends barge in and insist that Miss Lonelyhearts come with them to a party--Miss Lonelyhearts imagines himself a rock, impervious to Shrike's screams and cynical desecrations. The rock alludes to Saint Peter, the rock on which Christ founded his church. Shrike is cruelly preparing a party where letters to Miss Lonelyhearts will be read and ridiculed, but Miss Lonelyhearts is so sure of his invulnerability that he does not refuse the invitation. Mary Shrike is present, and Shrike's declaration that she wishes to fight with Miss Lonelyhearts because he had insulted her parallels Miss Lonelyhearts' encounter with the Doyles and foreshadows the novel's tragic ending. At the party, Miss Lonelyhearts is still confident that he can resist those around him, the way a rock tosses away the sea. Shrike calls Miss Lonelyhearts a swollen Mussolini of the soul, accurately assessing Miss Lonelyhearts' growing megalomania. Shrike enjoys inflating Miss Lonelyhearts' self-importance so that he can destroy it; he has planned this fantastic game for just such an attack on Miss Lonelyhearts. Shrike paraphrases several desperate letters, adding cynical comments on his own, as well as cruel puns, satirizing popular remedies for social ills. Then Shrike prepares to deliver his trump blow; he hands Miss

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www.cliffs.com Lonelyhearts a letter, but Miss Lonelyhearts drops it without reading it. Shrike has been setting Miss Lonelyhearts up to read aloud a letter which would put him in an indefensible and embarrassing position. At this point, Betty leaves and Miss Lonelyhearts follows her, determined to show her how invulnerable he has become. Here, the action proceeds without Miss Lonelyhearts' presence, the only such instance in the novel. But this narrative device is necessary, for Miss Lonelyhearts must continue to see himself as Christ-like and, unknowingly, propel himself forward to his doom. The letter reveals the very real danger that Miss Lonelyhearts is in, although Miss Lonelyhearts is now perhaps too wrapped up in his fantasy to perceive it, even if he had read the letter. Shrike proceeds to read Doyle's accusing letter, which, although based on factual mistakes, correctly accuses Miss Lonelyhearts of hypocrisy. The chapter ends with Shrike's mock-gospel account of Miss Lonelyhearts as the savior moving ever upward, and Shrike revels in the contrast between his little fiction and Miss Lonelyhearts' base behavior.

Chapter 14: "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Party Dress" With this chapter's heading, West returns to his cartoon-like narrative technique; this time, the title pictures Miss Lonelyhearts' mock-enthusiastic courting of Betty as their being a couple of storybook adolescents. Miss Lonelyhearts invites Betty for a strawberry soda, but inwardly he addresses her not as Betty but as "the party dress." He is pretending to have given in to her cheery Pollyanna values, and although he is acting, he does not feel guilty. Nevertheless, the strength which he shows is really sickness, for his rock-like imperviousness serves a different kind of pretense, the pretense of domestic bliss rather than that of priestly sanctity and service. When he learns that Betty is pregnant, he follows convention and proposes marriage. He tells her all that she wants to hear, although he does not really believe in the values that go with his declarations. Their plan for twin beds for sleeping and a double bed for lovemaking symbolizes the split in Miss Lonelyhearts between desire and propriety. The chapter's last two paragraphs make explicit that Miss Lonelyhearts has been lying to Betty. From inside his fully protected self, he has projected fantasies to make her feel good. But when he leaves her, he prepares to go home to his "voyaging bed." The clash between Miss Lonelyhearts' desire to play Christ and his knowledge that he can help no one will still torture his body and soul. His situation is impossible. He must quit his job for the sake of his sanity, but if he does this, all he will have left is another equally devastating set of pretenses. The conventional world of Betty's party dress is an artificial fantasy world. But his action in the real world-the world of his correspondents and the pathetic wretches whom he sees on the streets--is, at best, inappropriate and inept, and, at worst, hypocritical and dangerous to himself and others.

Chapter 15: "Miss Lonelyhearts Has a Religious Experience" This chapter's title is the most ironical in the entire novel. It refers to Miss Lonelyhearts' hallucination of the world as a fish caught on the hook of Christ, to his conviction that he is becoming one with Christ, to his delusive rush to offer salvation to Doyle, and to his own self-crucifying death. As Miss Lonelyhearts recovers next day in bed, his rock becomes a furnace, and he feels physically sicker than ever. His fever represents the mounting conflicts within his split self. He must suffer and overcome this fever in order to live but its immediate effect is to increase his delusions. He shouts aloud for Christ as life; he shouts to a Christ who is seizing the world as if it were a fish. He is ecstatically convinced that this is a part of God's plan: As an embodiment of Christ, Miss Lonelyhearts will be able to heal, and so when Doyle appears, Miss Lonelyhearts rushes out, his arms widespread, to work his first miracle. Doyle, who is also acting out of compulsion, but compulsion he cannot wholly believe in, wants to warn Miss Lonelyhearts. Doyle is frightened and only pretending to himself that he needs revenge. Because

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www.cliffs.com Miss Lonelyhearts sees Doyle as representing all his lonely, suffering readers, he cannot see Doyle's human reality--an angry, shamed, aggressive, but also timid and driven person. Doyle's retreat, for he really wants to run away, is blocked by Betty. Miss Lonelyhearts is caught suddenly between their opposing worlds, and he is accidentally killed as they collide. The killing is an accident brought about by all of Miss Lonelyhearts' meddling and his Christ-like delusions, for Miss Lonelyhearts is most dangerous when he is most active. Dead now, he is released from his torment, but he leaves behind two more victims--a pregnant woman and a man who will be falsely accused of murder, perfect candidates for future letters to yet another Miss Lonelyhearts.

CHARACTER ANALYSES MISS LONELYHEARTS The identity of the novel's protagonist is swallowed up by his name. In the eyes, words, and thoughts of others, he is nothing but his role, a role which provides for his readers false hopes and, for his colleagues, a target for their cynicism. Miss Lonelyhearts also feels that his identity is buried in this role, and thus he is obsessed by the idea that he must be helpful to those in trouble. A twenty-six-year-old reporter for a New York newspaper, the son of a New England Baptist minister, Miss Lonelyhearts is given little history. He has been to college, and he once had artistic ambitions. He has a girl friend with whom he has broken off before the novel's action brings them together again. Fragments of his memory appear in his dreams. The disjointed and vague presentation of his background, however, is in keeping with his disjointed and compulsive character and life. He is ambitious enough to want to become a gossip columnist, which might ease his financial problems and enable him to marry, but the main aspect of Miss Lonelyhearts' character that the novel is concerned with is the existence within him of major tensions and conflicts: between his animal lusts and his inability to satisfy them tenderly; between his desire to believe in decency and hope for other people and his perception of their selfishness and oppressed circumstances; and between his desire to see the world and his own powers realistically and his compulsion to regard himself as a real-life savior. Engulfed by these conflicts, Miss Lonelyhearts slowly loses contact with reality and innocently promotes his own destruction.

SHRIKE The feature editor of the New York Post-Dispatch, and Miss Lonelyhearts' nasty boss, Shrike bears the name of a bird that impales its prey upon thorns, implying that as Shrike's victim, Miss Lonelyhearts is a kind of Christ. Shrike is older than Miss Lonelyhearts and plays the part of a father, but his guidance is cynical and destructive. Shrike has a wife who can't satisfy him, and he enjoys the suffering which his sadism brings him and the justification it gives him for infidelity. He is very well read and compulsively witty, and he uses this learning and wit to demolish all hopeful views of human nature. Virtually all of Shrike's speeches and actions indicate that he believes that everyone is lustful, selfish, and self-deluded. Shrike ridicules art, religion, and love, although there are some slight hints that he would like to take pleasure in art and love, and would like to believe in something. His mocking of all positive values suggests that he is ashamed of his inability to live by them. His most savage satire is directed towards cultural stereotypes of love, hope, and success. He functions as an alter ego for Miss Lonelyhearts, who shares Shrike's doubts and conflicts, but struggles to believe that everything is not futile. Shrike treats Miss Lonelyhearts ruthlessly, partly because he can't bear to witness in Miss Lonelyhearts traces of the hope that he is trying to crush in himself. Unlike Miss Lonelyhearts, Shrike can survive because he has created for himself the semblance of a uniform identity. In spite of his conflicts, he has achieved an inner equilibrium. Although he continues to suffer, he does not seem to be in danger of the kind of severe emotional and mental breakdown that destroys Miss Lonelyhearts. Cliffs Notes on Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust © 1984

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BETTY Betty's name, her manners, memories, and acts suggest that she is an innocent country girl trying to make her way in the frightening city. She displays enough solicitude, kindness, and patience with Miss Lonelyhearts to fool some readers into thinking her to be an attractive voice of sanity. But the novel implies that she is naive, somewhat manipulative, coy, and willing to exploit her sexual appeal. Rather than being a virtue, her innocence suggests an unwillingness to look squarely at the evil around her. She thinks, or pretends, that a healthy country life and conventional courtship and marriage could provide solutions for Miss Lonelyhearts' inward pain, a pain which she can only slightly understand. Considered as Miss Lonelyhearts' good angel, as opposed to Shrike as Miss Lonelyhearts' bad angel, she is a weak figure because she can't affirm any values except her own narrowly personal ones. Betty is incapable or afraid of thinking about the specific dilemmas that are crushing Miss Lonelyhearts.

MARY SHRIKE Mary Shrike's name suggests an impaled virgin, and this is the role which she plays with her husband, although she is also a person who herself impales others. She behaves like a willful little girl, enjoying her own suffering and her memories of her mother's suffering. She pretends kindness towards Miss Lonelyhearts, and she makes gestures of independence from her husband, but those pretenses hide her subtle and cunning attempts to torment both men. Her sexual frigidity and her feverish girlishness make her a suitable object for Miss Lonelyhearts' desires, for he needs an impersonal but potentially violent relationship to become sexually aroused, and he also enjoys being humiliated and rejected. Mary is a good companion for the sadistic Shrike and an effective tormentor for the masochistic Miss Lonelyhearts.

FAY DOYLE Fay Doyle's name suggests a combination of lightness and crudity, the lightness paralleling her delusions of her girlish charm, and the crudity corresponding to her muscular build, sexual aggressiveness, and her disregard for the feelings of others. Like the novel's other women, she is always acting a role of which she seems unaware. She pretends to be the injured wife and concerned mother but, in actuality, she despises her husband and she patronizes her daughter. She asks Miss Lonelyhearts for help with her family situation but quickly makes it evident that she wants only instant sexual gratification. West's grotesque description of her makes it apparent that she is exactly the kind of person from whom Miss Lonelyhearts should have fled the moment he saw her. Miss Lonelyhearts' "field trip" presents him with a mean slut, not one of the pathetic creatures of his letters. His succumbing to her starts him on the road to ruin.

PETER DOYLE Peter Doyle is the only character in the novel who does not seem responsible for his own sufferings. Unlike Miss Lonelyhearts, Doyle is wholly the victim of his circumstances. We feel sorry for Miss Lonelyhearts' correspondents, but, with the exception of Fay Doyle, they are not really part of the action. However, West has minimized our attitude of pity toward Doyle by making Doyle's crippled condition disgusting--West likens him to a crushed insect--and also by emphasizing Doyle's self-rejection and selfpity. Doyle tries to put some meaning into his life by loving his stepdaughter and by sticking faithfully to his painful job, both actions which the reader can admire. But his complete lack of respect for himself, when he calls himself a pimp for bringing Miss Lonelyhearts home to his wife, and his grotesque and foolish behavior when he grovels like a dog, suggest masochistic pleasure in these degrading roles. In his attempt at vengeance, he reluctantly plays the injured husband, trying to make up for his inadequacies. This last action even casts doubts on the genuineness and unselfishness of his affection for his stepdaughter, for Doyle always seems to be performing a part.

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CRITICAL ESSAY MISS LONELYHEARTS: PROBLEMS OF INTERPRETATION Our analysis emphasizes the idea that Miss Lonelyhearts is a study in nihilism; that is, all human motives are selfish, and the universe is empty of any power that can judge people, set things right, or provide guidance to help them improve. The efforts of Miss Lonelyhearts and Betty, the novel's most attractive characters, to love each other and to help suffering humanity bog down in self-contradictions. Miss Lonelyhearts' selfish desires, combined with his competitive enthusiasm for a mystical religious faith, lead him into dangerous and foolish behavior. Religion is a delusion which he cannot fully accept until he is almost out of his mind. Shrike is explicitly a nihilist, and although on the surface he is an antagonist to Miss Lonelyhearts, he suffers inwardly from conflicts very similar to Miss Lonelyhearts'; he can be seen as the voice of one side of Miss Lonelyhearts. We may pity Miss Lonelyhearts, but we can foresee no way out for him. Modern popular philosophy and religion, pursued by Miss Lonelyhearts, and satirized and mocked by both Miss Lonelyhearts and Shrike, sell people myths that encourage them to accept their miserable situations with unthinking cheerfulness rather than to struggle against them rationally. The idea of suffering as being creative is exposed, for the suffering of Miss Lonelyhearts, his friends, and his correspondents produces nothing of value. This hopeless world destroys Miss Lonelyhearts, and it victimizes and entraps the other characters. The dark and tragic conclusion to the novel suggests that the remaining actors in this drama, as well as Miss Lonelyhearts' correspondents (who are the embodiments of all the ills of wretched mankind) will continue to live in misery. There are no solutions to their problems and no ease for their pain. A complementary view is that the novel is a study in psychopathology that presents a vivid gallery of distorted and maimed human types. With this theory in mind, one can note the disturbed sexuality of most of the characters; some of this can be traced to their backgrounds, which are not filled in very extensively by West, but which are sufficient to account for some of the characters' conflicts. This approach may suggest (as it has to some critics) that Miss Lonelyhearts suffers from an Oedipal fixation, an ambivalent terror of women, and latent homosexuality. We have argued that the novel's homosexual themes relate to Miss Lonelyhearts' and Peter Doyle's inability to experience human affection in a way that does not feel shameful. It is unlikely that West would deliberately use a latent homosexual as his main instrument of satire, but he does seem to have considerable insight into how disturbances in human relationships are connected to uncertainty about sexual roles, an insight also revealed in many details not connected to homosexuality. The nihilistic and psychopathological interpretations are not mutually exclusive, but their interrelation raises the question of West's intention. He has put no tenderly loving, thoughtful, or even slightly selfanalytical characters into the novel. He has written a passionate, angry, and vivid book, and how do these characteristics relate to his nihilism? One answer, perhaps, is that his book is intended to be an unrelenting attack on the Christlessness of the modern world, so unrelenting that it will allow the reader no easy exits from its dilemmas, but, rather, compel us to examine the real world for evidence of positive values. This view, however, must account for the fact that West excludes touchstones for such positive values. Sentimental as this view of the novel may seem, it is not completely unreasonable, for West's angry and nihilistic manner resembles that of other despairing writers who have wished the world were different. If West's novel is seen as a voice from his own secret grief, a voice muffled by its merciless cynicism, the novel can then perhaps be taken as a protest that the love, sincerity, truthfulness, sacrifice, and devotion missing from its world ought to exist.

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ESSAY QUESTIONS AND REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Compare and contrast Miss Lonelyhearts, Shrike, and Peter Doyle. 2. Compare and contrast Betty, Mary Shrike, and Fay Doyle. 3. Compare and contrast the characters in the main narrative and in the letters. 4. Why is Miss Lonelyhearts unable to resist the advances of Fay Doyle? 5. Discuss sexual disturbances in the various characters. 6. Compare and contrast Miss Lonelyhearts' various dreams, including his daydreams. 7. Discuss the satire of religious values. 8. Compare and contrast examples of sadistic behavior. 9. How do West's physical descriptions contribute to his characterizations? 10. How does the novel interrelate its criticism of nature and of society? 11. Is West's apparent nihilism a major limitation of this novel? 12. Would a contemporary Miss Lonelyhearts face the same kinds of frustrations in replying to his or her correspondents?

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THE DAY OF THE LOCUST INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL Nathanael West's fourth and longest novel, together with Miss Lonelyhearts, establishes his claim to permanent attention as a first-rate literary artist and analyst of twentieth-century American life, an achievement which had its genesis during West's five years of close observation of Hollywood in the first decade of talking pictures. West went to Hollywood in 1933 as a screenwriter, and except for a few brief trips, he spent most of his remaining life there. He lived in a rundown apartment house, like the one described in The Day of the Locust, and he was a close observer of the city's varied denizens and pretentious decor. Hollywood was becoming the nation's "dream factory," as a famous anthropologist called it years later, both through its products and the hopes which it held out to the many who dreamed of successfully becoming glamorous actors and actresses or juvenile stars. The surrounding city of Los Angeles also attracted, because of the California climate and the presence of celebrities, numerous bored retirees living on tight pensions; alongside this phenomenon, many religious and health cults and fads promised easy salvation, all competing with one another for their money and loyalty. It was the decade of the Great Depression, whose poverty intensified the desperation of those who sought riches and fame, or merely excitement. West conceived of his novel shortly after arriving in Hollywood in 1933, but despite much planning and note-taking, he settled down to serious work on it only in 1937, and completed it in 1938. At first, West called the novel The Cheated, but shortly before its publication, he chose the present title, which alludes to the plague of locusts described in the Bible. The novel treats West's social concerns more extensively than Miss Lonelyhearts does, and it creates a more specific social scene. The Day of the Locust is often described as the best novel ever written about Hollywood, but it is a novel which puzzles some readers who expect a story about glamorous and talented performers or about successful filmmakers. West, however, deliberately kept such people at the fringes of his action, where they serve only as false ideals to his characters. Rather, he portrays the seamier side of Hollywood, a world peopled by untalented would-be actors, rundown vaudeville performers, prostitutes, and émigrés from the rest of America, all who have come expecting excitement along with the California sunshine. Tod Hackett, the novel's most important character, does not quite belong to any of these types; thus, he can function as both observer of them and as an outsider who is sucked into Hollywood's fantasy world. Tod is flanked by Homer Simpson, an inept, emotionally damaged retiree, who has aimlessly drifted to California for a rest cure. West's use of two protagonist-like figures creates problems of interpretation which will be discussed later. The reader should not confuse the artist Tod Hackett with the author Nathanael West. Despite some sympathy for Tod's discomforts and much agreement with his analysis of the Hollywood world, West is critical of Tod. Although West projects aspects of himself into Tod and Homer, he does this with more objectivity than in his portrayals of Miss Lonelyhearts and Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts. In that novel, the empathetic portrayal of the characters' suffering suggests the writer's identification with them. In The Day of the Locust, his approach is more clinical. Readers coming to The Day of the Locust after reading Miss Lonelyhearts should also be prepared for other differences. The characters in the later novel are also grotesques and composites, but many of them are aware of their artificiality and have accepted it as necessary to their survival. They assume that role playing is the path to success and that material success comprises reality. In addition, these characters are shown in more complex networks of relationships than the characters in Miss Lonelyhearts, and their

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www.cliffs.com environment and financial situations are more detailed. Many of them are victims, but for several reasons they receive less sympathy than do the characters in Miss Lonelyhearts. In The Day of the Locust, most of the victims are also purveyors of the dreams that destroy. They are at the mercy of a social fabric which they sustain by more than just their acquiescence in it. In this novel, violence and sterility replace the violence and despair of Miss Lonelyhearts, and the large-scale violence is assigned to almost faceless groups of people. A similarity to Miss Lonelyhearts is both novels' adaptations of cartoon technique. West himself thought of Miss Lonelyhearts as resembling a comic strip. Its images, however, are often static, while The Day of the Locust is like an animated cartoon, where the characters assault one another with impersonal violence, after which they immediately pick themselves up. Unlike most animated cartoons, however, these sequences are filled with explicit sexuality. A somewhat less carefully formed novel than Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust is nonetheless intensely fascinating and demonstrates West's incisive psychological and social probing.

LIST OF CHARACTERS Tod Hackett In his early twenties, he is a Hollywood set designer, whose sensibilities record and respond to the novel's main events. His fruitless pursuit of Faye Greener makes him the protagonist.

Homer Simpson Forty-year-old retired hotel bookkeeper from Wayneville, Iowa. Repressed and numb. His sexual obsession with Faye, combined with his delusions about her, make him a parallel with and a contrast to Tod Hackett.

Faye Greener Seventeen-year-old, platinum blonde would-be Hollywood actress and sex goddess. Shallow, heartless, and manipulative, she provides the focus of attention for most of the male characters.

Harry Greener Middle-aged father of Faye, he brought her up by himself. An out-of-work vaudeville comic performer who lives in the past and in fantasies of new success.

Abe Kusich A dwarf about three feet high. Tough-talking and aggressive; racetrack hanger-on and occasional actor.

Claude Estee Hollywood scriptwriter whose home provides the scene for a party.

Earle Shoop Stupid, young out-of-work cowboy. Part-time boyfriend to Faye.

Miguel Sexy and macho Mexican keeper of gamecocks, who successfully cuts in on Earle Shoop's interest in Faye.

Audrey Jenning Owner-manager of a fashionable brothel; ex-silent screen actress. Very good businesswoman; unusually well read and cultured.

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Mary Dove Prostitute friend of Faye Greener.

Mrs. Johnson Janitor at the Greeners' apartment house, she supervises the funeral for Harry Greener.

CRITICAL COMMENTARIES Chapter 1 The novel's brief first chapter introduces the protagonist, Tod Hackett, and many major themes. It also shows how West will use his protagonist's stream of thoughts (and later Homer Simpson's) simultaneously to create character and to analyze the Hollywood milieu. The Hollywood sets that Tod observes are our first clues to the city's false face, and they are immediately contrasted with the incongruous appearance of its successful citizens, whose garb belies their real occupations, and then West compares these people with the desperate poor, those who hate everything they stare at. These falsities are paralleled by Hollywood's pretentious and imitative architecture, whose artificiality is emphasized by the shoddiness of its material. The chapter blends Tod's observations of this fraudulence with a brief sketch of his character and background. Tod's complicated personality partly explains what we will see later as his obsessive interest in Faye Greener and his combined sympathy and criticism for much that he sees. His plan for his painting, The Burning of Los Angeles, launches the novel's apocalyptic theme, affirming Tod's seriousness as an artist, and here West hints at Tod's aggressive pleasure in thoughts of destruction. Tod's desire to imitate the art of Goya and Daumier, great painters who portrayed lower-class life satirically, identifies Tod as an incipient social critic. However, he will become engulfed in the fantastic world which he means to criticize. The contradictions in Tod's character are manifested in his wish to see the fraudulent architecture dynamited, and in his recognition at the same time that few things are sadder than "the truly monstrous," and that ordinary people can long for beauty and romance. This chapter contrasts dreams and reality, the permanent and the impermanent, the outside and the inside (as in the incongruity of Tod's plain appearance and his inner sensitivity), and his dual feelings of compassion and violence.

Chapter 2 In this chapter, West expands on the seaminess and grotesquerie of Los Angeles and introduces us to Tod Hackett's strong fascination with Faye Greener. Tod's encounter with the dwarf Abe Kusich suggests that grotesque figures are a familiar part of the Hollywood world--Abe is a would-be performer with a background of prostitution, horse racing, and compulsive violence. Because of Abe's aggressive "bullying," Tod leaves one sleazy apartment house and moves into another, where he meets Faye Greener, thus setting the novel's plot in motion. In a brief flash-forward, we learn that Abe will become an additional figure in a lithograph by Tod, in which Abe and others are compelled into performing a kind of grotesque and dizzying dance before an uneasy audience. This detail also continues the themes of people who stare and those people who allow themselves to be stared at, manipulated, those people found in Chapter 1. Tod himself, however, becomes both a manipulated and a staring person; he knows already what an acute observer he is of Hollywood; now we see him letting himself be badgered by Abe into moving into the San Bernardino Arms Apartments and how easily he is snared into moving there after his first sight of Faye Greener. At the chapter's conclusion, Faye stands as a contrast to the dreary filth of the apartment house, but later in the novel she will be revealed to be part of its essence.

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Chapter 3 The first three chapters combine exposition, retrospection, and some action; here, West finishes his exposition about Tod and is ready to place him in continuous scenes. Faye, who has for some time been a figure of painful and teasing attraction for Tod, is first described in her tiny film role as a woman in a harem. Tod's photograph of her from that movie awakens in him his violent lust for her. Essentially talentless, Faye's taut sexual appeal is, she hopes, her ticket to success, while Tod's plainness denies him the hope for anything except a surface friendship. We learn later that Faye, if she cannot have immediate theatrical success, will take as an alternative only dynamic sexual satisfaction. Tod can supply neither. In Tod's view, Faye's sexual invitation is to death rather than to love; however, it is an invitation that Tod welcomes, perversely. He longs for sex with her as if it were destruction--perhaps an ultimate sexual thrill combined with the desire to rub out his own divided self. Faye manipulates Tod the way everyone in Hollywood manipulates everyone else, and Tod seems willing to be a passive victim merely for the faint hope of obtaining forbidden satisfactions.

Chapter 4 This chapter presents the novel's first fully dramatized and continuous scene, using a Hollywood party for unity and as a device to broaden West's bitter, satiric portrait of the Hollywood milieu. Claude Estee, at whose imitation Mississippi mansion Tod attends a party, is the only true Hollywood "success" in the novel, but he too is a satirical figure, whose spiritual seediness is exaggerated by his deliberate role playing. Estee's pretense that his Chinese servant is a plantation black, and the grotesque imitation dead horse in his swimming pool are attempts at frivolity that produce no gaiety in anyone. Estee is completely cynical about the movie industry. During his shoptalk with fellow filmmakers, he mocks ignorant industry leaders who make money but won't take the time to put up a fraudulent, philanthropic "front." And his conversation with Tod reveals that, for him, all human experience is merely material for film scripts. Claude's pretended happiness with his artificial world is paralleled by Joan Schwartzen's pretended grief over Tod's indifference to the rubber horse in the swimming pool and her exaggerated interest in overhearing dirty stories. These people act as if they are enjoying their giddy, sybaritic lives, but, actually they are bored, a theme related to West's motif of underlying violence which is always implicit in the Hollywood milieu. This connection is made clearer later when Estee attends a cockfight simply because he wants to have a new experience. In this chapter's concluding dialogue, Estee praises Mrs. Jenning's whorehouse as a "triumph of skillful packaging," which gives Tod a chance to attack commercialized sex by comparing it to the ability to turn love into a vending machine, a place for deposit. Tod, however, seems well aware that his desire for Faye is a mechanical burden that might be relieved by such an action. Perhaps he is turning his criticism of commercialized sex into a confession that he is really no better than anyone else in the Hollywood world. Hypocritically enough, he and Estee are on their way to Mrs. Jenning's brothel when the chapter ends, but once there, they do not pursue any sexual relief.

Chapter 5 The action here is continuous with the preceding scene, as Tod, Claude, and others arrive at the brothel. West, however, divides this chapter into three basic parts: a description of Mrs. Jenning, the frustrating, interrupted showing of a pornographic film, and, by chance, Tod's seeing a prostitute friend of Faye's and his sudden hope that Faye might also be a prostitute. Mrs. Jenning is a kind and polite madam, concerned for her girls and her customers. Pretending that her business is right and natural, she adds a thin, but

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www.cliffs.com polished veneer to a degrading profession. The pornographic film, Le Predicament de Marie, is a satirical comment on Mrs. Jenning's pretensions, and the film projectionist is an arty and ineffectual type, who speaks of the film as "marvelous" and "too exciting," an attitude that in our day would be called "campy." The brothel's viciousness, contained within a glittering package, is a parallel to the film's portrayal of the lasciviousness that festers in a "respectable family." The sexual desires in the film--or at least in the fantasies which the film appeals to--are what psychoanalysts have termed polymorphous perversity, and West may be using this perversion to imply that everyone's sexual desires are actually like those in the film. The breaking of the film and the audience's frustrations at not seeing its conclusion is West's way of satirically showing us how both sexual teasing and sex are commercial products; this, in turn, provides a transition to Tod's renewed hopes of possessing Faye. The mini-demonstration of frustration when the film breaks foreshadows the riot at the novel's end. In fact, this entire chapter subtly makes the point that Tod is becoming part of the Hollywood milieu, a process symbolized by his desire to eventually, literally, buy Faye.

Chapter 6 This chapter and Chapter 7 shift the center of interest away from Tod and towards Homer Simpson, whose interest in Faye Greener resembles Tod's. The shift in focus is accomplished partly by West's showing us how both Tod and Homer exploit their interest in Harry Greener to get closer to Faye. Harry is portrayed through elaborate description, seen through Tod's eyes, and through a long quotation from a theatrical review which Tod reads. Harry's clownish imitation, using a banker's soiled hat and suit and his mock-elegant behavior parallel the clothing masquerades in earlier chapters, but with a difference, for Harry ridicules his own imitation. Harry's costume contrasts with his hopeless figure, and the miracle silver polish which he sells is a parallel, a fraud, overpriced and made from cheap ingredients. Although Harry tries to use excerpts from his reviews fraudulently, he remains a pathetically sympathetic figure, and Tod is genuinely drawn to him, even though his main interest is in Faye. We first see Homer Simpson as he appears to Tod, who recognizes in him another one of those staring figures "who come to California to die." But Tod learns that he was mistaken about the fevered stare, and he becomes sympathetic enough to try to befriend Homer. Similarly, Tod was also mistaken about Faye when he thought she was a prostitute. However, ironically, at the novel's end, we find that these first impressions were close to the truth. Homer is beginning to serve in the novel partly as an alter ego for Tod. This brief chapter conveys an aura of poverty and loneliness, which softens its satire of the pretentiousness of theatrical people. They seem to have no alternative than to role-play, and they often need it to maintain their self-respect.

Chapter 7 In this chapter the point of view shifts to Homer. At the beginning of the narration, the information about Homer, his origins and his arrival in California, seems to have been relayed to Tod by Homer, but as the chapter reveals how Homer rented his cottage and describes the cottage in detail and its surroundings, the narrative voice combines an inside view of Homer's feelings with an analysis of his motives. Thus the chapter provides a link forward to a more extensive history of Homer, and an explanation for his timidity. He has been bullied by a real-estate agent into taking only the second house he looked at, and he is quick to acquiesce to his illusions about it, a process he will follow more intensively in his relationship with Faye. His cottage and its surroundings are typical Hollywood sham and bad taste, but there is no sign that Homer is aware of the artificiality. The chapter also introduces the lizard in Homer's garden, which will later function symbolically.

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Chapter 8 This chapter is devoted entirely to Homer Simpson and is divided into two parts: first, there is an elaborate description of Homer as he awakens after a late afternoon nap, and then a long retrospect to the traumatic incident when he was a hotel clerk in Iowa, an incident that disturbed his life enough to propel him into illness and impromptu retirement in California. A dramatization of Homer's experiences from his own point of view is subtly combined with metaphorical and analytic observations by the authorial voice. Homer is initially characterized in a scene that pictures his efforts to awaken his mind and body, especially his hands. Homer is essentially passive, but he is capable of being stirred. His slowly awakening hands represent his sexual and aggressive nature, which is the unconscious part of him. Just as immersion in cold water "awakens" his hands, immersion of his body in hot water awakens his most precious and intense memories. Homer is a compulsive, sex-starved bachelor. His secret self was awakened by his tense encounter with the prostitute Romola Martin, and he seems to think about her every day, without realizing the significance of his memory, except to intuit that the present meaninglessness of his life is centered around it. Homer's sonambulistic behavior is a defense against the kind of feelings which Romola Martin aroused in him, and his automaton-like behavior makes him resemble that segment of people in Hollywood who have been labeled by Tod as "the people who stare." In the incident with Romola Martin, the mousy Homer allows himself to be pushed around by the hotel room clerk, the manager, and even the housekeeper. When he confronts Miss Martin with her past-due bill, he is also being manipulated, a victim of his fears and his repressed sexual desires. He runs away, but not before making clumsily violent gestures towards Miss Martin. This foreshadows Homer's later crazy, obsessive, and violent behavior, and it also helps explain why he can only be comfortable in a non-physical relationship with Faye Greener. Although Homer is partly a film stereotype of the mousy person who later commits a crime, there is something genuinely sinister about him.

Chapter 9 As Homer finishes the bath that had made his mind return to his experience with Romola Martin, and then goes out to buy groceries, timidly and stealthily, the depiction of his fearful and repressed character continues. His waves of emotion which collapse before they can crest parallel his experience with Romola Martin, where his fumbling attempt at sex collapsed at the sound of a ringing telephone. Going forth to buy food for his dinner, he wants to run through the warm evening because to linger would awaken the senses he fears. Typically, he becomes an easy mark for a beggar, who resembles yet another of the threatening Hollywood masses who stare. The food market he enters is like a movie theater, its lights casting a falsifying glow across the food products--another tacky Hollywood scene. Homer's choosing to buy canned soup, sardines, and crackers instead of the elaborately displayed foods is in character--he prefers unimaginative and unchallenging simplicities. Even this simple foray has strained him so much that he must take a taxi home.

Chapter 10 This chapter's rather static account of Homer's simple life at home repeats and intensifies already established themes. We learn that Homer is forty years old and that the Romola Martin incident was almost the only interruption in his robot-like life. Once more we see that his hands have a life of their own, a life which he, seemingly, won't let become conscious. As he sits in his dingy backyard, he refuses to turn from an ugly view of his garage to a more attractive scene of nature; in his backyard, there lives a lizard, and Homer is fascinated by it. When the lizard pursues flies, Homer's attention fixes on it. His staring at the camouflaged skin of the lizard resembles the staring of the Hollywood street people.

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www.cliffs.com Always, Homer sympathizes with the flies, for unconsciously he associates them with himself as victims; significantly, he never thinks of interfering to save them from the lizard. He accepts their fate, just as he has passively accepted his own situation. Having quieted his memories of the past, Homer is ready to become a victim.

Chapter 11 We know from Tod's first encounter with Homer at the Greeners' in Chapter 6 that Homer is fascinated with Faye. This chapter describes the first meeting of Homer and the Greeners, when Harry came to his door with his silver polish routine. Homer's becoming romantically enmeshed for the second significant action of his life is dramatized at length, and the portrait of Faye and Harry is sketched in more detail than before. Harry manipulates Homer cleverly, partly by making him feel cheap, but Harry ultimately becomes the victim of his own playacting when he finds that he really is ill. Unable to handle the situation except by pretending that his real illness is feigned, Harry is trapped by his role-playing into putting himself into real danger by his clown-like exertions. Homer's response to Harry and to Faye demonstrates the combination of the puritan and the lecher in him. He is troubled by Harry's gulping the supposedly medicinal port wine, and after he is attracted to Faye, his hands stir to life, but he manages to keep them off of her. His reaction to Faye recalls his adventure with Romola Martin and foreshadows his calamity with Faye and his final impulse to kill. Seventeen, but dressed like a child of twelve, Faye manipulates both her father and Homer. She uses this protective childlike guise to treat Homer as a father while he gives her lunch, and she uses it as she acts out a vaudeville routine with her father and then pretends daughterly concern for his sickness. Both Harry and Faye have created roles which subvert any real family feeling, and they can see no difference between what they ought to feel and what they pretend. For them, the whole world has become a stage. Homer is also an actor, but his mechanical behavior, unlike theirs, is unplanned. When Faye is forced to slap her father hard to stop his hysterical laughter, Homer can't see in this act evidence of her dangerously impersonal character. He is already a hypnotized victim and is fascinated by her pretentious claim that she is going to be a movie star. He is like a child blindly acquiescing to another child's fantasies so thoroughly that he unthinkingly shares the excitement of her dreams. The stage is set for a continuing relationship between Homer and Faye when Homer displays interest in Harry's idea that he take in boarders, and when Faye flirtatiously suggests that Homer look them up. Homer's clutching Faye's hand as she leaves (earlier, he was afraid to touch her) reveals that his feelings for her are intensifying and suggests that he will try to continue the relationship.

Chapter 12 The momentum of this short chapter lies in Homer's fascination with Faye, which parallels his experience with Romola Martin. Homer's hands, described here as "twining like a tangle of thighs," become active, indicating a dangerous awakening of his sexuality. Homer's thought-stream, and West's authorial analysis, make it clear that Homer knows that he must defend himself against his buried impulses, impulses which might destroy him if he were to act upon them. West's compassion for Homer is implied in his description of Homer's sleep patterns becoming reversed: He has difficulty falling asleep, he awakens easily, and he feels more alive than at any time since the Romola Martin incident. Homer's sexuality is part of a repressed vitality that neither his character nor the people around him will allow to blossom. Homer is a lost soul without any real hope, caught in a tangle of emotions, suspended between a self-protective sonambulism and an impulse towards a dangerous awakening. His singing "The Star Spangled Banner," the only song he knows, to express his joy shows

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www.cliffs.com the poverty of his culture and his imagination. The conflicting feelings that drive him to the Greeners' home, bearing wine and flowers, are represented by tears, for he can neither understand nor verbalize his feelings. With Homer's departure for the Greeners' apartment, the novel's action goes back to the moment in Chapter 6 when Tod met Homer.

Chapter 13 This chapter returns to Tod's preoccupation with Faye, which will remain at the novel's dramatic center until Chapter 19, when Homer's fascination with Faye will reappear as the focus, interwoven with Tod's feelings for her. However, the reader can already see the similarity of Homer's and Tod's feelings for Faye. This chapter consists almost entirely of a scene between Tod and Faye in which Tod's view of her is dramatized and analyzed. Harry's illness gives Tod an excuse to visit Faye, a device used earlier by both Tod and Homer. Tod is a keen observer of Faye's affectations, but he tries to excuse them to justify his interest in her and also because they attract him. He thinks that Faye doesn't know how to act differently and that, perhaps, she is partly laughing at herself. Tod gives Faye the benefit of the doubt when he chooses to interpret her dealing herself fantasies like playing cards to mean "that any dream was better than no dream." Agreeing to listen to Faye's trite ideas for movie plots, Tod manages to keep irony from his voice because he knows that she is only making up dreams for herself. Faye is following the Hollywood cliché--selling dreams for money--when she asks Tod to write up her stories and sell them. A brief reference to her fantasies about spending her imagined earnings reveals Tod's ironical viewpoint, for he knows that her stories are worthless. In her South Sea Island movie plot, she places herself amidst riches and adventure and is condescending to a poor lover who may turn out to be a rich boy in disguise. Later, in a thinly sketched Cinderella story, she is a poor girl catapulted suddenly to a world of riches and splendor. Here, West is satirizing the tawdriness of Hollywood plots, and Faye as a person who feeds on them. Tod continues to remain the spineless intellectual when he is with Faye. She amuses and encourages him, happy to have another admirer, but she will not respond to his sexual advances. Tod never thinks of helping Faye sharpen her perceptions. Although he sees that she is already a kind of victim, he is ready to make her another kind of victim as well. When, in Chapter 3, Tod contemplated her photograph, he thought of impaling himself on her. Now his desires are more rapacious. Infuriated by her selfcontainment and her refusal of him, he wants to crush her, revealing within himself a combination of sex and aggressiveness that resembles the trembling lust at the core of the vegetable-like Homer. But although Tod is aware of his impulses, he does not feel ashamed of them. His desire to rape Faye combines resentment with a need to intensify sexual excitement. Like Homer, Tod is, in his own way, locked within a passive but restive self. The chapter concludes with the novel's second description of Tod's painting, The Burning of Los Angeles; the description is presented in an active present tense, which implies that the painting will someday become a reality. His picture shows Tod's destructive lust for Faye as a part of the apocalypse which it predicts, but it is ambivalent about Faye's role. Seemingly, she is the target of the violence, but she is able to flee and escape the fury.

Chapter 14 This chapter introduces two of Tod's more successful rivals for Faye's attention, and at the same time it further develops the theme of sex and violence which foreshadows later, explosive scenes. The first of these rivals is the stupid and wooden-faced cowboy, Earle Shoop, a bit-player in "horse operas" (western movies) whose reasons for spending his days standing in front of a saddlery store are never explained. He is probably another variation on "the people who stare" and is just hanging around because of boredom. Faye finds his shallow handsomeness attractive; she disregards Tod's judgment that Earle is stupid. Faye Greener, determined to be a movie star and forever dreaming of brilliant romances, enjoys the romantic

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www.cliffs.com companionship of this dolt, who seems destined, like her, never to realize the Hollywood dream. In fact, he is a passive movie-world hanger-on, living a role that Faye cannot admit is her own as well. Earle's inability to pay for a dinner, and the squalid camp in which he lives with Miguel, make explicit the poverty of Faye Greener's actual companions. Earle and his cowboy friends engage in some enigmatic joshing and practical joking which satirizes Hollywood's dream life and echoes the novel's violence. When Tod and Faye arrive at Miguel's camp, the violent beauty of nature and of the fighting cocks helps set the scene for more sexual teasing. The trapping and eating of the quail is predatory, and Earle cuts up the birds with crude ruthlessness. Faye's sensibilities are offended, but in her own way she will soon behave as ruthlessly. Her phoniness is emphasized by her pleasure in eating the quail after she had shown disgust over their dismemberment only minutes earlier. Faye had teased Tod by allowing Earle to kiss her passionately, and she will soon tease Earle by performing a kind of mating dance with Miguel. The description of the Mexican in earthy and exotic terms associates him with his beautiful and violent fighting cocks, and Faye is drawn to him. Miguel knows that he is cutting in on Earle with Faye, and his song about how the boys in Havana "love Tony's wife" functions as a threat to Earle and works as a flirtation with Faye. After Earle discovers that he can join the dance between Faye and Miguel only as an outsider, he furiously knocks Miguel unconscious. Tod has been watching in silence, and he now grabs at Faye, hoping to rape her, his third such impulse. The chapter ends with Faye having driven on off alone and leaving Tod, alone, reflecting on details for his painting. Faye's flight portrays her as the successful teaser who won't face the consequences of her teasing and who may fear the violent sexuality that she is continually inciting. Unable to achieve relief by action, Tod projects his angry desires into images for his painting. Tod at first questions the accuracy of his prophecy that crazy Hollywood types will set the city and the country on fire, probably realizing that the painting represents his desires more than it shows his prophetic powers. But unable to stand this insight, he renews and revels in his convictions that Hollywood's values will create an apocalypse. In the meantime, Faye has escaped.

Chapter 15 This chapter returns the action to Faye's and Harry's home life; this is West's preparation for Harry's death. Homer will now play a larger role in Faye's life and become a competitor with Tod for her attention. Tod, however, is no by-stander; since Faye drove off alone, he looks for her at home. He finds that Harry is seriously ill and acting the way he did during Tod's and Homer's first meetings with him. As death approaches, Harry is still playing the sentimental clown, feeding elements of his illness into his role, and reminiscing about his old vaudeville days. Tod's observations of Harry lead him to reflect on the relationship between playacting and suffering, and he realizes that under their protective guises, actors probably suffer as much as anyone. But Tod does not apply this insight to Faye, who--he has just learned--has gone to the movies with Homer Simpson. In this scene, Harry pretends to be suffering in order to protect himself from the real suffering. Aware that he is dying and that he is singing a swan song, he reminisces at length on how he once entered barrooms and told elaborate and self-mocking stories about his wife's betrayal and desertion of him. This "performance" reminds us that Harry brought up his little girl (Faye) by himself, a fact which introduces the pathos of the next chapter. Sadly, Harry's last words continue a vein of self-mocking pretense. As Faye enters and finds her father asleep, she may be showing some real concern for him or just using the situation as an excuse to get rid of Tod. Looking at the sleeping old man, Tod senses the decay of Harry's life. Harry's death, like his life, will provide Tod with further opportunities to continue pursuing Faye.

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Chapter 16 Harry Greener's death is reported from the viewpoints of both Tod and Faye. Tod learns of it from a hushed gathering outside the Greeners' apartment, which he enters to bestow his attentions on Faye. Tod's fresh awareness of her sexual appeal shows that his pursuit of Faye remains stronger than any true concern for Harry. He treats her with conventional pity, which is a mask for his urge to stay near her. Tod is quietly playacting, but Faye's playacting is more dramatic. She curses herself for killing her father, presumably by neglect, but her description of her last moments with him belie this concern. As she tells Mary Dove and Tod about her discovery of her dead father, we realize that when she came home and talked to him without waiting for answers, he was already a corpse. She joked about an old theatrical rival of his and continued to fix her face in the mirror even when she must have realized that the silent Harry was very sick, and then she went on to berate him for not being able to buy her a new dress to help her get a bit part in a movie being cast. Her indifference and mockery towards Harry while she didn't know he was dead, we realize, resemble her behavior while he was alive and healthy. Oblivious to the hypocrisy she has just revealed to Tod and Mary, Faye now presents a sobbing act about how much she misses him already, and what a tender father-daughter relationship they had. The scene in which the pushy, cold janitor, Mrs. Johnson, insists that Faye give Harry a proper funeral serves several purposes. It emphasizes Faye and Harry's poverty, and it draws a contrast between Mrs. Johnson and Faye. Mrs. Johnson loves funerals and enjoys taking charge, but her morbid bossiness is almost refreshing in the face of Faye's maudlin self-deceptions. The situation also allows Tod to offer Faye financial assistance to keep her from working at Mrs. Jenning's to pay for the funeral expenses. But there is no real hope for Tod to be able to manipulate Faye into being grateful to him, for Faye's indifference is shown by her performing a fellow-trollop act with Mary, and so Tod is left out in the cold. Faye's declaration that she "was saving it" seems to imply that she is a virgin (that is the way Mary understands her), but it is probable that Faye means she was saving prostitution for a more desperate situation. Faye is willing to prostitute herself, but not to her admirer, Tod. She prefers to keep him dangling.

Chapter 17 The preceding chapter dramatizes how Tod's pretended interest in Harry conceals his pursuit of Faye. In Chapter 17, that theme becomes much more explicit. On the day of Harry's funeral, Tod is drunk--not out of concern for the dead Harry, but out of increasing desperation that Faye is slipping from his grasp, for if she will sell herself to strangers but refuse him, then his case is hopeless. At the funeral, Faye is playing a new role, for she has taken the occasion to make herself dazzlingly beautiful in a tight, new dress, and her studied sobs are a flirtation with her audience. In his dialogue with Faye, Tod continues his struggle with her which he began in the previous chapter, and his full despair is now revealed as he attempts to dissuade her from prostitution. Harry's funeral expands West's satire against Hollywood sensation-seekers, as well as those people who stare relentlessly at everything around them. These are the mob in Tod's apocalyptic vision. There is an air of foreboding as Tod notices that the crowd in the back is suddenly leaving, probably rushing off to see a movie star, a motif which predicts the riot at the novel's end. The playing of a chorale by Bach, related through Tod's consciousness, makes him aware of the irrelevance of Christian love for the world around him. The congregation/audience has no interest in the music's bidding, and the chorale stops instantly at a wave from the officious Mrs. Johnson. The viewing of Harry's corpse introduces more variations on sensational staring. The Eskimo family, people who have genuine feelings for Harry, must be restrained from excessive viewing, whereas those who hold back timidly must be thrust forward by Mrs. Johnson. This chapter presents a series of vignettes, emphasizing the selfishness of the thrill-seekers and their

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www.cliffs.com indifference to the dead and the living, except as objects of sensational emotion or sensual satisfaction.

Chapter 18 This chapter delays the action while West elaborates his satire on Hollywood artificiality and shallowness. The only important plot material is the information that Faye has left her apartment and that Tod is anxious to find her. Seeing her from his office window, he follows her across a jumble of movie sets but loses sight of her. This juxtaposition implies that Tod's pursuit of Faye is as meaningless as Hollywood's sham world. Tod walks through a series of sets, one after another, and all strikingly different. He perceives in them the jumbled wreckage of civilizations that still provides material for Hollywood's dreams. His potential use of these images for bizarre and satirical paintings shows Tod's combined fascination with, and repulsion for, the decaying civilization which Hollywood represents. The elaborate account of the collapse of an unfinished set for a movie about Napoleonic warfare suggests a contrast between the great actions of history and Hollywood's shabby imitations, but, more likely, West is emphasizing that the real world and Hollywood's fantasy merge indistinguishably. Napoleon's historically unsuccessful charge and the Hollywood charge up the unfinished set symbolize humanity's stupid blundering towards disaster, which foreshadows the novel's ending. West is laughing at these clumsy antics, and his humorous treatment extends into the next chapter's delineation of the joy of the minor actors over the compensation they will collect for their injuries.

Chapter 19 This long chapter offers proportionally a great deal of both thematic and basic plot material. In general, it centers on the new relationship between Faye and Homer. Faye's going to live with Homer provides plot continuity and an opportunity for Tod to observe Faye and Homer together and to contrast his own situation with Homer's. Homer's agreement to sponsor Faye until she can become a movie star resembles a trite, unrealistic film script, and the idea that Faye can become a star is absurd. The emphasis on dressing her up for her new pursuit continues the satire on packaging as a key to Hollywood success, and the new relationship of the sexually repressed Homer with Faye is filled with an overpowering foreboding of terrible, eventual violence. Tod's refusal to advise Homer about legal arrangements for Homer's "contract" with Faye indicates that Tod sees that this arrangement is ludicrous. Nevertheless, Homer's temporary contentment will allow the situation to continue for a while, making Tod irrationally jealous of Homer. The introduction of the cosmetically beautiful child actor, Adore, and his cliched stage mother, Maybelle Loomis, briefly interrupts the main action. Adore is almost a parody of Hollywood's shameless perversion of innocence. His clearly sexual song, complete with body language, contrasts with his playing with a sailboat, and his manner of singing shows that he is being trained to play teasing roles exactly like Faye's. Maybelle Loomis' conversation illustrates the power and absurd silliness of the health and religious cults which flourish in California. She clearly manipulates her son just as she manipulates herself. Her presence leads Tod to reflect about different cults, whose pseudo-scientific rules for health combine desperation and vindictiveness. Tod's observations of Homer with Faye, of Mrs. Loomis and her son, and of Faye's self-containment amidst all this artificiality bring out in him mixed thoughts and impulses: the desire to smash the unattainable Faye; plans to portray the Hollywood world in various styles of art; and a resolve not to pursue Faye any longer. Tod's notion that he can forget about Faye by putting aside his drawings of her, occurring in juxtaposition with his thoughts of painting the Hollywood cult figures, suggests that his artistic aims are linked to his aggression and lust. He senses in himself the anger and dissatisfaction that he sees in the cults and crowds around him.

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Chapter 20 This chapter begins the novel's final crescendo of violence, associated with sex, which will continue to mount until the apocalyptic final chapter. West analyzes incisively the deteriorating relationship between Homer and Faye, then graphically dramatizes it in the nightclub scene, where Tod's feelings towards Homer and Faye are made very plain. Homer's sexuality, and Faye's nasty reactions to it, parallel Tod's less obvious cringing, as well as his tolerant view of Faye. Faye is infuriated by Homer's behavior--partly because she likes the traditional macho man, a role that neither Homer nor Tod fits, and partly because she is ashamed of herself. She is also acting out her resentments about her career frustrations. Her grossest act is her forcing Homer to drink liquor, which shows her pleasure in emotional and sexual domination. When Tod asks Faye to sleep with him, her refusal demonstrates her persisting in several roles. She is the prostitute who will have non-paying sex only with a man whom she loves, and--although she refuses gently--she enjoys putting Tod down, just as she enjoys deflating the superiority which she imagines that she sees in the puritanical Homer. The sleazy, disgusting nightclub scene is full of rampant sexuality as the characters watch a female impersonator, who later is unable to give an adequate performance as a man, just as are Homer and Tod. This incident gives Faye another chance to bait Homer as an ignorant hick, but Homer remains unwilling to offend Faye. When Faye goes off to dance with another man, Homer and Tod's dialogue advances the plot and presents symbolic material. Tod learns that Earle Shoop and Miguel are now living in Homer's garage, where Miguel is housing his fighting cocks, along with a hen whose ugly scabrous condition shocks and disgusts Homer. Tod tries to get back at Faye by suggesting, unsuccessfully, that Homer kick out Earle and Miguel. Homer's loathing for the hen is a symbol of his disgust at sexual crudeness, and it reveals his own self-disgust. Again, sex is coupled with violence. The hen symbolizes Faye as she really is--a whore. Homer is frightened at the thought of losing Faye, but he remains angry with her for her treatment of him and because he senses her whorishness. Homer is the least predatory of the characters, but his selfdestructiveness has its selfish aspects. He makes Faye feel guilty, thus helping to push her into the stereotyped behavior of the predatory woman. Homer tolerates the squatters in his garage so he can preserve his relationship with Faye, even though he knows that it is doomed. His moderation leads Faye to soften her attitude towards Tod and invite him to a cockfight at Homer's place, an ominous scene prepared for by this chapter's description of the cocks and by Faye's bickering actions.

Chapter 21 For his graphic and symbolic presentation of the cockfight in the driveway of Homer's garage, West assembles a large cast of characters. Earle, Miguel, and Tod arrive. Tod brings along Claude Estee, and the dwarf Abe Kusich is already present, playing his usual role of gambling tout and tough guy. Faye and Homer are nowhere to be seen, and in the next chapter we learn that they were inside Homer's house while the cockfight takes place, for it is natural that the timid Homer and the squeamish Faye would not want to witness a cockfight, although they are capable of provoking or watching its equivalent among human beings. Before the cockfight begins, Abe tries to pick a fight with Earle, foreshadowing their fight in the next chapter, and Abe succeeds in bullying Tod. The cockfight itself foreshadows Miguel's and Earle's fight over Faye, which in turn echoes the scene of Faye's earlier, flirtatious dance with Miguel. The cockfight

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www.cliffs.com symbolizes sexual cruelty. "Hermano" means "brother" in Spanish, and the weaker and already damaged bird which is handled by its fellow underdog, Abe Kusich, sufficiently explains the ironic symbolism. Hermano may be the "brother" of Homer and Tod, but they show little of this creature's gallant courage. The symbolism is perhaps clearest in the fact that both of them are symbolically struck dead through the eye by Faye, as Hermano is struck dead by Juju. The cockfight brings out a male camaraderie among the participants, as well as aggression. They fire off cruel insults at one another, but they all share admiration for the birds. Like everything else in Hollywood, the cockfight is something to be watched, but this passive activity doesn't fully satisfy the men. Their movement from staring at the cocks in this scene to fighting one another in the following chapters will foreshadow the violent explosion of Hollywood's morbid spectators at the novel's end.

Chapter 22 This chapter is composed of two interludes, both of which prepare us for future violence. In the first scene, Faye struts like a peacock in her green silk lounging pajamas before her admirers; in the second scene, Homer and Tod try to suppress their sexual despair over Faye, for Faye's partly unbuttoned pajamas are especially designed for sexual provocation. She struts affectedly before all the men, but she pulls out the stops as she rants to her latest admirer, Claude Estee, about her Hollywood ambitions. Claude is an actual Hollywood success, so Faye sees in him someone who might help her career. Her pretentious talk about her devotion to acting echoes her earlier comments to Homer, but she now piles on allurement and sexual teasing. Fascinated by her physical appeal, the men all accept her playacting as natural. Her gesture of running her tongue over her lips as a promise of intimacies which she won't grant shows her insincerity, and her buttocks, shaped like a heart turned upside down, symbolize what love has become in her world. The men's uncritical stares suggest their total acceptance of the "Hollywood dream" fantasy. Both Tod and Homer are sickened by Faye's behavior. Tod goes outside, and Homer follows him, reversing the scene in Chapter 6 where Tod followed Homer out of the Greeners' apartment in an attempt to befriend him. Now, Tod is angry at Homer and unable to feel sorry for him. He cannot help him, he senses his own predicament as a parallel to Homer's, and he resents Homer's continuing devotion to Faye. As Homer and Tod sit outside, Homer's hands begin a familiar routine, struggling between sexual expression and repression. Homer's friendly gestures and clasping hands with Tod hint that his sexual energy is groping towards male friendship. Homer's and Tod's mixed, but contrasting, feelings for Faye surface as they hear her singing a song about how smoking a reefer makes her become a "viper." Homer's fidelity does not waver--he finds her voice pretty. Doubtless Tod realizes that Faye is always a viper. Homer thinks of protecting her from herself by getting rid of Earle and Miguel, but when Tod agrees to help get rid of them, Homer knows this will also drive Faye away. Tod is acting with a subtle vindictiveness that becomes explicit when he tells Homer that Faye is a whore. Earlier in the scene, all the men stared at Faye like predators; now, still unsuccessful in his own selfish purpose, Tod longs to destroy her. His sexual and aggressive feelings toward her merge and continue to mount.

Chapter 23 In Homer's absence, Faye's teasing of the remaining men increases, and soon she creates a small riot. When she dances with Miguel, his way of holding her and her increasingly revealing pajamas provoke the other men; they feel that it won't be long until Faye and Miguel go to bed together. Homer has locked himself in his room to protect himself against these carryings-on, and Tod again becomes concerned for Homer. Soon, Tod is witnessing a scene similar to the one at camp when Faye danced with Miguel and provoked Earle to violence. Here, the dwarf Abe Kusich plays a role like Earle's in the earlier scene, for

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www.cliffs.com when Faye begins to dance with Earle, Abe is sexually aroused and tries desperately to cut in on Earle. When Earle kicks Abe away, the dwarf retaliates by assaulting Earle in the groin, a successful, temporary castration, for Earle is incapacitated by the pain. This time, Miguel comes to the rescue of Earle, but in the next chapter these two men will again be bitter rivals, for in West's world, sex always triumphs over friendship. Everyone stares at Faye, and Tod is swept back into his fascination with her, his lust intensified by her increasing state of undress. Tod makes an advance toward her, but she rebuffs him casually; her suddenly declaring that she is going to bed prepares for her sexual scene with Miguel. She plays the men off against one another and then makes her own choices. Abe wants company in the pursuit of girls (whores), but Earle is hurt, Miguel has disappeared, and both Tod and Claude are not interested in a commercial product.

Chapter 24 In Chapters 21 through 23, West has been shifting the point of view away from Tod towards a combination of objectivity and analysis of the feelings of the participants. This technique conveys the somewhat hysterical state of all the men. With Chapter 24, the point of view again narrows down mainly to Tod's, for the other characters are dispersing, and West wants to concentrate on Tod's reaction to the novel's final events. Chapter 24 briefly goes back to describe the preceding evening's party from Homer's point of view, and it also portrays Homer's near-madness that resulted from the party's aftermath. Returning to Homer's house the next day, Tod finds Homer in a trance and learns that Faye and her friends have vanished. Homer's plan to return to Iowa suggests that the plot of the novel is winding down, although West has fresh violence in store. When Tod gets Homer to communicate what has happened and how he feels, he sees that Homer's emotions are more tangled than ever. Homer's hands are playing their usual agitated tricks, and now that Homer must face the truth about Faye, the restiveness of his hands implies a potential for destruction as much as a struggle with his repressed sexuality. Homer's semi-coherent story to Tod picks up last night's events. Homer is still angry that Tod called Faye a whore, although he soon reveals his own observation of her lustful acts. As Homer describes his return to the party, we learn that he had enjoyed watching Faye, and that this had infuriated her. Apparently she enjoys teasing most men but she senses that it is sick for repressed people like Homer to spy on her. Homer had seen Faye dancing with Earle and then dancing with Miguel, after which he went to bed. This is the moment at which Tod had returned to the party and had seen Faye and Miguel dancing. Homer now narrates what happened after Tod had left the party. The moment of truth was arriving for Homer as he went to Faye's room in response to moans which he took for signs of illness. Faye, in bed with Miguel, had left the door unlocked; perhaps she was enjoying the recklessness of her behavior. But when she is discovered in bed with Miguel she hides under the sheets and when, moments later, Earle comes in and fights with Miguel, she still hides under the sheets, showing her combined exhibitionism and squeamishness. Perhaps she has wanted Homer and Earle to intrude, so she can be rid of Homer and provoke a fight between her two young gamecock lovers. Her lovemaking with Miguel reveals her mindless lasciviousness, perhaps stimulated by her brief service at Mrs. Jenning's. Homer is so innocent that he scarcely recognizes the meaning of Faye's sexual moans, but he knows that he has been betrayed, and now he realizes what Faye is really like. Tod shows compassion for Homer, perhaps because he can see his own situation reflected in Homer's, but he can do almost nothing for Homer. He can only offer him coffee, listen to his ravings, and suggest that Homer is now better off.

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Chapter 25 This brief chapter continues the preceding action. Homer's going into an immobile trance gives Tod a chance to reflect on Homer's condition. The image of Homer as a tightly wound-up spring--now free from its function as part of a machine--symbolizes both Homer's retreat from experience and his potential for violence. This symbolism is more dramatic than Tod's conventional observation that Homer has assumed the fetal position, typical of people who have lost their minds. Tod intellectualizes about Homer's state, but he does nothing practical to help him; he doesn't seem to understand his own indifference and detachment. He leaves because he wants food and a drink. Although he is willing to make the effort to analyze Homer's abnormality, he walks out at the slightest excuse. And Tod tiptoes out when he leaves because he really doesn't want Homer to wake up and require attention. He has been friendly to Homer mostly because it helped him stay close to Faye, and now Faye has disappeared.

Chapter 26 Try as he may, Tod cannot forget about Faye. From his sneaky retreat from the emotionally crushed Homer, Tod moves to a sneaking renewal of his pursuit of Faye. He goes back to the saddlery store pretending to seek word about Earle, but actually looking for Faye. As he probes for information, he has to put with irrelevant bickering between Earle's friend Calvin and a self-degraded Hollywood Indian. Their debate about whether there are any good Mexicans is satirical in the context of their own seamy lives. Earle's claim that he fought with Miguel over stolen money and that he is finished with Faye, parallel Tod's duplicity in pretending interest in Earle and his being chummy with the Indian and Calvin to get information. The scene at the saddlery store lends its disgusting aura to the previously disgusting party. Tod remembers the hunger that gave him an excuse to leave Homer, but he spends most of his time in the restaurant indulging in a vivid fantasy of raping Faye. His thoughts of how he might assault her are presented with brutal objectivity, and he incongruously imagines the accompaniment of beautiful birdsong. This key passage has several thematic implications. The California birdsong contrasts beauty and ugliness and shows us how California puts a glossy exterior on everything--even an act as ugly as rape. Tod's fantasy expresses his rage against Faye's ability to be completely amoral and still continue to survive. Probably he envies this in her and is also resentful that he lacks the nerve to be violent. Tod is not much more moral--if at all--than the dream-driven people whom he has viewed so critically. He, too, feels the allure of passion and violence, and he, too, needs a terrible outburst to relieve his frustrations.

Chapter 27 In this chapter there is a release in the terrible spring that was wound up inside Homer, and there is a parallel eruption of the Hollywood masses into violence. All this action is narrated from Tod's point of view, and we see repetitions, changes, and complications in his attitude toward preceding actions and toward many of the aspects of Hollywood life that he has reflected on throughout the novel. With great skill, West uses a mob scene outside a movie premiere at Kahn's Persian Palace to stage Homer's destruction, and Tod's final, almost-demented response to the Hollywood world. The Hollywood mob consists of the same desperate watchers mentioned frequently throughout the novel. Now they are actually promised a chance to see their dreamland heroes. They are angry, poor, bored, cheated, and violent, and at last they get a chance to release their resentments. They do this largely by assaulting one another, and, at the same time, they denounce the lewdness which they love. Thus they can talk murderously of lynching perverts as they press up against one another and enjoy talking about sexual assault. The police put up a facade of politeness, but privately they beat up arrested people.

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www.cliffs.com When Homer stumbles in a trance into this mob, on his way to the railroad station to go home to Iowa, Tod acts more protectively of Homer than at any time earlier. But he is powerless to save Homer. His good intentions are not enough. The mob atmosphere makes it impossible for Tod to restrain or redirect Homer, and the appearance of Adore Loomis seals both Adore's and Homer's doom. Adore plays a manipulative game with Homer, using a purse on a string, but Homer is no longer capable of being manipulated, and when Adore lets out his aggression by throwing a stone at Homer (think of how Adore himself has been bottled up!), Homer retaliates by stomping Adore to death. Homer is getting back at Adore as a symbol of the Hollywood milieu: nasty, deceitful, manipulative, and always acting. Homer is probably also revenging himself symbolically on Faye. Adore acts meanly and mechanically, and the scene resembles an over-matched cockfight as Homer stomps repeatedly on Adore's back. As if this weren't a shock great enough to drive Tod half out of his mind, he finds himself swept along by the murderous crowd, he witnesses a near-rape of a young girl by two men, and then he has a leg badly injured, possibly broken. He is horrified by all he sees, and he tries desperately to save the girl from the first of the men who assault her. This is the same Tod who had repeatedly fantasied raping Faye. As he is carried away by the mob, he observes their frantic sexual aggressiveness and the hypocrisy in their combining lust with puritanical outcries. Tod is at last seeing much of what he had been imagining for his painting of the burning of Los Angeles, so it is natural that he thinks of this painting while in the grip of the mob. His earlier thoughts of the painting have suggested that it served as a catharsis for his lusts and aggressions, those he has for the apocalypse which he has wanted to paint. Now that a miniature version of this apocalypse has arrived, Tod's thoughts about his painting show more compassion and ambivalence. In his painting, he describes the crowd as wild, cruel, and murderous, but he still thinks of them as "poor devils." He imagines Faye, Harry, Homer, Claude, and himself in the vanguard of the mob--they are fleeing from the crowd behind them. They are both a part of the mob and also its victims, implying that they are also victims of themselves. Tod's portrayal of himself picking up a stone identifies him thematically with the ill-fated Adore, and suggests that he is both aggressor and victim. Harry, Homer, and Claude are also in threatened postures, but Faye, who runs proudly, has not changed her role. As always, she is somehow above it all and enjoying the havoc which she has helped create. Faye remains the icy sensationalist, an absolute victim of the Hollywood dream--that is, she is completely without morals, and almost innocent in her blindly manipulative lusts. Tod's desire to rape her has represented both anger at her falsity and a desire to share the pleasures of amorality. The novel ends on a horrifying note. Tod is screaming mindlessly in imitation of the siren of the police car that has come to his rescue. This scream represents a hysterical release of the frustration and horror which he has never quite been able to put into words. Possibly it also signifies some realization of his own participation in the spirit that produced this violence. At the end, he tries to act with true good will towards Homer and the girl who was being assaulted, but he was powerless to help them. Now he can't help himself, and one wonders if his long-planned painting will be realized, or remain only the memory of a hopeful ambition. West's novel dramatizes the mixed feelings that would have gone into such a painting.

CHARACTER ANALYSES TOD HACKETT Tod's name suggests that he is partly dead, through his first name's allusion to the German word for death, and his last name's implication that he is a hack artist, although the narrative itself indicates that he is both knowledgeable and talented. A recent graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, he is in his early twenties. Tod's large, sprawling, unattractive body reflects his lassitude of spirit as he succumbs to the Hollywood values that he criticizes. Also, his plainness assures that Faye Greener will reject his advances. West's authorial voice declares that Tod has a complex personality, and his contradictory attitudes reveal this

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www.cliffs.com complexity. He has a good deal of self-understanding, but its nature is never clarified. A sharp observer of Hollywood's artificiality and decadence, he usually reacts with a combination of pity and anger. But his sexual fascination with Faye Greener keeps him from judging her for her pretensions and amorality. He is taken in by her as the masses are taken in by the dreams that Hollywood purveys, and his submerged aggressions against Faye resemble their aggressions against the dream world (and dream country) that has cheated them. In his friendship with Homer Simpson and Harry Greener, Tod is capable of understanding and pity, but he uses these men to maintain his contact with Faye, and he is ineffectual when he tries to help them. Tod seems aware that he has no chance to possess Faye (his claim that "once will be enough" emphasizes the symbolic self-destructiveness of the act). His continual pleading for her to go to bed with him makes him appear so weak that he provokes a refusal; thus, his pursuit of her seems deliberate self-torture. At the end, his self-knowledge is growing, but West's use of Tod's character and actions as symbolic parallels for the novel's main theme is not compatible with creating a character capable of much growth and change.

FAYE GREENER Faye's first name suggests fairy lightness, and her last name suggests the green freshness of nature. Her true character is a parody of these qualities. Faye is a seventeen-year-old platinum blonde who possesses a mature body and outward-pointing breasts and sharply beckoning buttocks. She often dresses like a child, emphasizing her teasing offer of forbidden sex to the men who look at her. She has been trained by her father to think of herself as a theatrical performer and to act with a maximum of artificiality. Faye is in accord with the American illusion that ambition and will are the equivalent of talent. Although she has no real acting ability, she may not really be unintelligent, for in her milieu, using her brain could serve no purpose. Self-criticism would only lower the defenses she must maintain against the predatory Hollywood world. She needs complete faith in all her pretensions, and, as Tod sees it, her false self has actually become her real self. Faye senses that people are judged mainly by their presumptions and assurance--by the "fronts" they manage to put up--so she acts as if wish and word are as good as fact and deed. She derives pleasure from her power to manipulate men, and she may be vaguely aware that her real talents are not artistic, but sexual. Possibly, she is a virgin early in the novel, but she is strongly sexed, and she couples with Miguel much like an animal. Before this, she was a prostitute for a short time, but emerged unscarred, because she was able to make the sexual act entirely a role. She seems somewhat sadistic in her relationship with her father and also with Tod, but when she grows bored and irritated with Homer, she becomes viciously sadistic. If the emotional cost is small, Faye is able to make half-hearted gestures of fellowship and good will, partly because she is confident of her ability to survive. Her disappearance from the novel's action makes it hard to come to a final judgment of her character, but Tod's assessment of Faye as a survivor (he likens her to a cork dancing on waves that could sink ships) seems reasonable.

HOMER SIMPSON Homer's first name suggests that he is a misplaced hometown boy and points towards his plan to return home at the novel's end. His last name emphasizes his simplicity. This forty-year-old retired hotel bookkeeper, however, is not an ordinary, simple homeboy. He is a grotesque figure of repressed and dangerous sexuality. Many critics have noted his similarity to Wing Biddlebaum, the protagonist of Sherwood Anderson's story "Hands," in the novel Winesburg, Ohio. Wing Biddlebaum has been a schoolteacher who was almost lynched because he could not keep his hands from wavering over his male students; he lived and died in social isolation. Quite possibly, West borrowed the symbolic, aggressive sexual wavering of Homer's hands from this source, but Anderson's character is more sensitive and receives a more sympathetic treatment. Homer Simpson is infantile, automaton-like, and repressed, but the reader does not learn how he got that way. Back in Wayneville, Iowa, Homer was the same timid, compliant, somnambulistic person he is now,

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www.cliffs.com but he does not seem to have been typical of Wayneville's population. If Homer is a victim of those American sexual repressions that are paired with lustful Hollywood dreams, West has not dramatized the idea, except perhaps by implying a parallel between Homer's repressed violence and the violence that breaks out in the Hollywood mob. When Homer's aggressions at last burst, he becomes murderous. In his guise of daddy-figure to the exploitative Faye, Homer is easier to sympathize with than in his role of the sex-driven pursuer of Romola Martin and Faye Greener. West emphasizes that Homer knows that he will be destroyed if his passions lead to sexual acts, and even the mere witnessing of Faye's lovemaking with Miguel is enough to produce disaster. Hollywood is dangerous for Homer. He would have been far safer (and, perhaps, happier) living out his sleep-walking life in the quiet of Wayneville, Iowa. Homer is a very clever portrait of a type, but it is hard to see him as a representative American except in his naive capacity for lying to himself about Faye--and in his tendency to think the best of everyone. Probably he is intended to represent the simple, unsophisticated American, as opposed to the more explicitly violent people who line the Hollywood streets in order to flock to its cults.

HARRY GREENER Harry Greener dies about half-way through the novel, and his role tends to be static. He is characterized largely through his relationship to Faye and in a series of retrospects about his theatrical career. A middleaged vaudeville performer with a minimum of talent, Harry is down on his luck and out of work. His pluckiness in trying to earn a living--even by peddling fraudulent silver polish--and his dedicated devotion to a possible movie career for his daughter, Faye, earn him some sympathy. Harry's character is almost indistinguishable from the comic parts which he played in vaudeville, for he compulsively acts out these self-denigrating and slapstick roles in his everyday life. Nevertheless, his pleasure in trying to cajole and cheat his customers, shows a desire for revenge against the audience whom he must bow and scrape to in his stage performances, and he also shows similar aggression in his relationship with Faye. But since Harry's aggressions are harmless and his life is a ruin, he remains more likeable than the other Hollywood frauds.

CRITICAL ESSAY THE NOVEL: PROBLEMS OF INTERPRETATION This novel is difficult to interpret because it employs various methods to convey its themes, which are not always clearly interrelated. The novel is organized around two parallel actions: Tod Hackett's and Homer Simpson's self-destructive pursuits of Faye Greener. However, it uses many other symbolic devices to suggest ideas which are difficult to connect to Tod's and Homer's experiences. Unlike Homer, Tod understands much of his experiences, and he is constantly observing and analyzing Hollywood life. His point of view blends with the author's, and the critical stance is usually identifiable with Tod's. Homer, on the other hand, has little understanding of the milieu and of his own motives. His responses are treated satirically because he is deceived by the shoddiness around him, and thus he resorts to clumsy defenses. Both men pursue what is artificial, shallow, and glittering, as well as the explosively sexual Faye Greener, a symbol of Hollywood's falsity and the deceptive American dream. Partly aware of this, Tod still wants her, but he knows that he can't have her and, thus, he knows that his drive is destructive and futile. Unlike the hero of Miss Lonelyhearts, whose need for sex combined with violence seems rooted in childhood repressions, Tod presents less material for psychological analysis. His desire to possess and destroy Faye and his own self-destructiveness function largely as symbols for ideas. He wants to destroy the falsity and imperviousness which she represents, but psychologically his self-destructiveness appears to be an inner revolt against a repulsive attraction, a revolt which he never quite understands. Homer, who serves as an alter ego for Tod, is psychologically more understandable. His aggressions are expressions of anger against his entrapments, past and present, and although his final outburst is convincing, West's Cliffs Notes on Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust © 1984

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www.cliffs.com using it as a symbol of the destructive potential of the American masses--once they wake up to how they have been cheated--is clumsily allegorical. Homer, furthermore, is not representative of the masses, as shown in the novel's repeated descriptions of the desperate cultists and Hollywood voyeurs. These are the people who stare and wait for a catharsis of violence; West sees those people as the creators of a fascist upsurge. They are not individualized in the novel. Tod's view of them is only vaguely analytical as he watches their destructive potential and takes a certain relish in it. Almost the only character in the novel who might be voluntarily present at the movie premiere is Maybelle Loomis, but she isn't there, and Adore Loomis seems to have wandered onto the scene by chance. Tod Hackett's being part of the problem which he sees, and the novel's lack of a moral center add to the thematic diffusion and make it difficult to see the specific roots of the rotten values that are being criticized. In Miss Lonelyhearts, West presents brutal and blindly selfish characters in a society permeated by selfdeception and false optimism because of newspapers, advertising, and mass culture. West portrays a vicious circle in which a society exploits the worst in human nature. His method expresses anger against both corrupt human nature and false cultural codes. The parallels between Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust are the artificiality of Hollywood's denizens and the lies that the film world purveys. Here, however, the chief victims and agents of destruction remain faceless. The novel's main characters are caught in this situation, but some of them escape; others have brought their suffering on themselves, and others are so pathetic that the nature of their victimization remains obscure. West's focus on minor participants in the filmworld helps create tonal unity, but his limited portrayal of connections between filmmaking and the false Hollywood dream prevents serious social analysis. The reader must integrate for himself the novel's psychological and social themes.

ESSAY TOPICS AND REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Compare and contrast the characters of Tod Hackett and Homer Simpson, especially as they become enmeshed in the pursuit of Faye. 2. How do Harry and Faye Greener resemble and differ from each other? 3. Does the film Le Predicament de Marie have parallels in the main plot? 4. Discuss Faye Greener's sexual behavior (including the problem of her virginity) as it relates to her character and ambitions. 5. Compare the rivalry between Earle Shoop and Miguel to that between Tod and Homer. 6. Discuss the symbolic use of the cockfight as it relates to the novel. 7. Compare and contrast Homer Simpson's sexual behavior and that of the people in the mob scene. 8. Do the Hollywood religious and health cults reveal the same kinds of needs acted out by the main characters? 9. Trace out the pattern and motivation for Faye's teasing of the men. 10. How do West's physical descriptions of his characters contribute to characterization?

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www.cliffs.com 11. Trace the development of Tod's plans for his painting of the burning of Los Angeles and relate it to his other thoughts about art and painting. 12. Does the contemporary world of entertainment and moviemaking still promote the kinds of values exposed in this novel?

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY COMERCHERO, VICTOR. Nathanael West: The Ironic Prophet. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1964. Interpretation with psychoanalytic slant. HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR. Nathanael West. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Brief, pioneering critical survey. JACKSON, THOMAS H., ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Miss Lonelyhearts. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971. Essays and excerpts from critical books. LIGHT, JAMES F. Nathanael West: An Interpretative Study. Second Edition. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Combines biography and interpretation. MADDEN, DAVID, ed. Nathanael West: The Cheaters and the Cheated. Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1973. Essays and recorded dialogues about West's novels and about his similarities to other modern writers. MARTIN, JAY, ed. Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971. A variety of critical viewpoints about West's merits and methods. _____. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970. Thoroughly researched documentary biography, including details about West's Hollywood screenplays. Scattered interpretation. REID, RANDALL. The Fiction of Nathanael West: No Redeemer, No Promised Land. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Interpretation combined with analysis of West's debt to other writers, artists, and thinkers.

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