Dave's Book Blog: "The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West

Tuesday, 6 October 2020

"The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West

Tod Hackett is a young artist, head full of Goya and Daumier, working on sets in a Hollywood Studio in the 1930s. Behind the scenes, he knows that it is all pretend. The streets are full of wannabe film stars, but he is interested in the others. "Scattered among these masquerades were people of a different type. Their clothing was somber and badly cut, bought from mail-order houses. ... they loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred. ... they had come to California to die." (C 1)

One of these unfortunates, whom Tod befriends, is a dull, heavily built retired hotel bookkeeper by the name of Homer Simpson! Others include Faye Greener, a wannabe actress, and her vaudeville comic father Harry, an ever-angry betting-mad dwarf called Abe, and two cowboys: Earl and Mexican Miguel. They live on the margins of tinsel-town, but their lives have a sordid reality that the movies can't imitate.

The book includes possibly the most graphic scene of cock-fighting in literature.

A short book with some very short chapters.

A great novel about those who live in the shadows behind the arc lights.

Selected quotes:

"He was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes." (C 1)
"It was their stare that drove Abe and the others to spin crazily and leap into the air with twisted backs like hooked trout." (C 2)
"If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn't even have time to sweat or close your eyes." (C 3)
"Most people, he had discovered, won't go out of their way to punish a clown." (C 6)
"He hurriedly labelled his excitement disgust." (C 8)
"Homer was too busy with his growing excitement to speak or even think. He closed his eyes to tend it better, nursing carefully what he felt. He had to be careful, for if he went too fast, it might wither and then he would be cold again." (C 8)
"His hands kept his thoughts busy. They trembled and jerked, as though troubled by dreams. To hold them still, he clasped them together. Their fingers twined like a tangle of thighs in miniature. He snatched them apart and sat on them." (C 12)
"Any dream was better than no dream and beggars couldn't be choosers." (C 13)
"Although the events she described were miraculous, her description of them was realistic. ... She ... seemed to think that fantasy could be made plausible by a humdrum technique." (C 13)
"His legs were so straight that his dungarees, bleached very light blue by the sun and much washing, hung down without a wrinkle, as though they were empty." (C 14)
"Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he couldn't express anything wither subtly or exactly. They wouldn't permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree." (C 15)
"He had seen young birches droop like that at midday when they are over-heavy with the sun." (C 17)
"Tod suddenly became very conscious of his dull, insensitive feet bound in dead skin and of his hands, sticky and thick." (C 19)
"His servility was like that of a cringing, clumsy dog, who is always anticipating a blow, welcoming it even, and in a way that makes overwhelming the desire to strike him." (C 20)
"His generosity was still more irritating. It was so helpless and unselfish that it made her feel mean and cruel, no matter how hard she tried to be kind. And it was so bulky that she was unable to ignore it. She had to resent it." (C 20)
"It was one of those blue and lavender nights when the luminous colour seems to have been blown over the scene with an air brush. Even the darkest shadows held some purple." (C 21)
"She was very much the lady. It was her favorite role and she assumed it whenever she met a new man, especially if he were someone whose affluence were obvious." (C 22)
"She repaid him for his compliment by smiling in a peculiar, secret way and running her tongue over her lips. It was one of mer most characteristic gestures and very effective. It seemed to promise all sorts of undefined intimacies, yet it was really as simple and automatic as the word thanks." (C 22)
"Without any noticeable transition, possibilities become probabilities and wound up as inevitabilities." (C 22)
"None of them really heard her. They were all too busy watching her smile, laugh, shiver, whisper, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick out her tongue, widen and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed across the red plush of the chair back." (C 22)
"His big hands left his lap, where they had been playing 'here's the church and here the steeple', and hid in his armpits. They remained there for a moment, then slid under his thighs. A moment later they were back in his lap. The right hand cracked the joints of the left, one by one, then the left did the same service for the right." (C 22)