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Summary
Summary
NATHANAEL WEST--novelist, screenwriter, playwright, devoted outdoorsman--was one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939). Seventy years later, The Day of the Locust remains the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood.
EILEEN MCKENNEY--accidental muse, literary heroine--was the inspiration for her sister Ruth's humorous stories, My Sister Eileen , which led to stage, film, and television adaptations, including Leonard Bernstein's 1953 musical Wonderful Town. She grew up in Cleveland and moved to Manhattan at 21 in search of romance and adventure. She and her sister lived in a basement apartment in the Village with a street-level window into which men frequently peered. Husband and wife were intimate with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katharine White, S.J. Perelman, Bennett Cerf, and many of the literary, theatrical, and movie notables of their era. With Lonelyhearts, biographer Marion Meade, whose Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin earned accolades from the Washington Post Book World ("Wonderful") to the San Francisco Chronicle ("Like looking at a photo album while listening to a witty insider reminisce about the images"), restores West and McKenney to their rightful places in the rich cultural tapestry of interwar America.Author Notes
MARION MEADE is the author of Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? and Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. She has also written biographies of Woody Allen, Buster Keaton, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Blavatsky, and Victoria Woodhull, as well as two novels about medieval France.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When their car smashed into another during the waning days of 1940, Nathanael West (ne Nathan Weinstein) and his pretty young wife, Eileen McKenney, were largely unknown to the public. At 37, West's four novels, with their pitchfork skewering of the American dream, hadn't sold especially well. West was then better known within Hollywood circles for his potboiler-script writing and doctoring. Eileen became famous a few days after the pair's untimely death with the Broadway opening of My Sister Eileen, written by Ruth McKenney. Meade (Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?)has skillfully concocted a snappy dual biography of this odd couple. He was a promiscuous New Yorker whose sexual orientation could not unreasonably be questioned in light of his fiction. Eileen was an uptight Midwesterner whose probable rape as a youngster left her sexually unresponsive. Thrown into this mix is Ruth McKenney, Eileen's ugly duckling sister, who turned herself into a favorite among New Yorker sophisticates. This is a well-packed re-creation of the lives of star-crossed lovers through an era that would come to be defined in part by Nathanael West-but only well after his death. 32 photos, 1 map. (Mar. 11) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* West and McKenney died young in a car crash in 1940 too soon for him to know that his lacerating novels, especially The Day of the Locust (1939), would become American classics; too soon for his new wife, Eileen, to claim her life for her own after her sister, Ruth, co-opted it to write her best-seller, My Sister Eileen (1938). Meade, an adept biographer and group portraitist (Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, 2004), tells the trenchant and secret-laden life stories of West (born Nathan Weinstein in New York) and Ohioan McKenney in a ravishingly atmospheric yet propulsive narrative. Bookish, coddled, yet feral, West wangled his way into the circle that included S. J. Perelman (who married West's sister), Dashiell Hammett, and Scott Fitzgerald, and when his risqué fiction earned more hostility than sales, he joined the exodus to Hollywood. McKenney, the pretty sister, and Ruth, the brainy one, survived traumatic childhoods, then fled to Greenwich Village, where secretary Eileen floundered and radical writer Ruth thrived. A single mother starting over in Hollywood, Eileen, 27, had a brief spell of happiness with wild man West, 37, until the car crash. The first to fully chronicle and entwine these careening lives, Meade forges an engrossing, madcap, and tragic American story of ambition, reinvention, and risk.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GREAT Depression or not, the 1930s wasn't such a bad time for writers. For some there was the W.P.A., with its government subsidies for artists; for others Hollywood was a cash cow. Magazines still paid pretty well, a Broadway play could set you up and a little money went a long way. But you had to hustle. There were so many cigarettes to smoke, drinks to quaff, parties to go to, people to sleep with and, for Nathanael West, so little time. In his brief life, he got a lot in, what with earning a living, regularly contracting gonorrhea from prostitutes and organizing hunting trips to shoot small animals, especially doves. And that doesn't include writing two certifiably great novels. And then one day when the 37-yearold West (known to be a terrible driver) was on his way back to Hollywood from a hunting trip in Mexico, he ran a stop sign, crashed into another car and killed himself, along with his new bride, Eileen. That West should die in 1940, only a few months after Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, and that Trotsky, too, enjoyed shooting small birds, is without any significance whatsoever. I mention it only because Trotsky's name is one of the few Marion Meade doesn't drop in "Lonelyhearts," her breezily entertaining new book about Nathanael West and his crowded circle of friends and relations. Meade, the author of a life of Dorothy Parker and other biographies, knows these characters and their territory. West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York in 1903, the son of a successful building contractor. With a false transcript (there was something of the con man in him), he got into Brown University, where he met his future brother-in-law, S.J. Perelman, and also Quentin Reynolds, who, when he became a journalist, happened to show West some letters written to his paper's "lovelorn" columnist. Like everyone else, West wanted to be a writer. As the night manager of the Kenmore Hall Hotel on East 23rd Street he used the small hours to start work on "Miss Lonelyhearts." Later, he managed the Sutton on East 56th Street, where he let his writer friends sleep free in the empty rooms while he continued work on his novel. Eileen McKenney In the meantime Ruth McKenney was making her way from Ohio to New York, where her sister, Eileen, soon followed. Ruth became a writer and a Communist; Eileen became a Communist, sort of. It is Meade's conceit to structure her book so that the lives and adventures of the McKenney sisters run parallel to West's life, until Eileen and West finally meet up in California and, improbably, marry. But back to the writing. West's first novel, "The Dream Life of Balso Snell" was published in 1931, to small acclaim and sales. Two years later "Miss Lonelyhearts" was hailed as brilliant and funny, and was on its way to becoming a best seller when West's publisher went out of business. Bad luck. West went to Hollywood. He was almost insanely prolific. Twenty-eight screenplays (many never produced but paid for nevertheless) and a couple of stage plays, plus two more novels, including his Hollywood masterpiece, "The Day of the Locust." All this between 1933 and 1940. And that was it: the Christmas hunting trip to Mexico with his new wife, the crash, the immortal afterlife of a great writer. Meade covers so very many very active lives that there is not much room left for literary discussion. For a little of that we can turn to Elizabeth Hard wick: "Nathanael West's stunning four novels are American tales, rooted in our transmogrifying soil. Morality plays they are, classified as comedies. They are indeed often funny. Funny as a crutch." West had very little time, but in his brief life he certainly got a lot in. Dorothy Gallagher is writing a book about Lillian Hellman.
Kirkus Review
An ingenious dual biography of a classic American author and an unlikely literary muse. The romance between novelist Nathanael West (19031940) and Eileen McKenney (19141940) was tragically brief. They met in October 1939, married six months later and died in a car accident shortly before Christmas 1940. Consequently, only a fraction of the latest biography by Meade (Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties, 2004, etc.) covers the life the two shared together. However, the book shows that they were often kindred spirits, and the author offers a glimpse of how literary life functioned on the East and West Coasts in the '20s and '30s. The son of an upper-middle-class Manhattan family, West grew up as a ne'er-do-well who entered Brown University by essentially committing identity theft. Battling his own lassitude and a pervasive anti-Semitismhe eventually changed his name from Nathan Weinsteinhe found time in New York to produce a handful of comic novels, including the acclaimed Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). He struck his fortune in Hollywood, though, getting to know the many writers who headed to California to make a quick buck from the studiosa culture West skewered in his final novel, The Day of the Locust (1939). McKenney wasn't an author, but she was embraced by New York's literati thanks to her sister, Ruth, whose series of embellished humor pieces about Eileen ran in the New Yorker. For all their notoriety, each harbored deep anxieties that helped connect them. West questioned his talents and bemoaned his poor sales, while McKenney was a product of a broken home who raised her son alone after divorcing her alcoholic husband. Meade doesn't labor to suggest that the pairing was kismet, nor does she aggressively foreshadow the accident that cut short her subject's lives. Instead, she foregrounds their intelligence, humor and luckboth dodged the worst of the Great Depressionand creates a substantive tale about finding the good life in tough times. A funny, informed, daringly constructed literary biography. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 IN THE HOTEL SUNDAY, MARCH 16, 1930 THE LOBBY OF the Kenmore Hall Hotel was deserted at three in the morning. Its skylit lounge was shrouded in pearl shadows, the passenger lift stood wearily at attention, the night porter dozed in the vestibule. Sitting behind the front desk was the assistant manager, a long-legged youth of twenty-six in a Brooks Brothers, three-button wool suit. On this night he bent over the keyboard of a typewriter, pounding out a letter to his girlfriend, Beatrice, in Paris and puffing on a cigarette. "Nothing happens," he wrote. Kenmore Hall, a pretty redbrick residence hotel not yet two years old, was home to hundreds of young professionals who booked by the week or month. Prized for its desirable address near Gramercy Park, its reasonable rates, and amenities such as a pool and roof garden, the place always had a waiting list for vacancies, sometimes a long one. Nat was supposed to remember guests' names, but he happened to know a great deal more, and not just gossip either. He knew exactly when they awoke and when they left for their offices, who got mail and from whom, what time they went to bed, and which ones couldn't sleep, because the bleary-eyed were known to shuffle down to the lobby and fret about it, as if he could do anything. There were friendly women who found pretexts for inviting him to their rooms. To all proposals he would beg off with an easy smile and a general refusal worded to give no offense. He took fewer pains with the prostitutes, alone or in pairs, who constantly tried to sneak past the desk on their way to the elevator. Hookers--and stolen bath towels--were his biggest aggravations. Otherwise, the position of assistant manager was not terribly taxing. Aside from charming everyone, the main requirements on the graveyard shift were staying awake and issuing orders in emergencies. Even at the best hotels, the worst things were liable to happen after midnight, and Nat had trained himself to take in stride noisy parties, fires, heart attacks, failed suicides, occasional corpses, and unscheduled checkouts of guests trying to jump their bills. As some anonymous hotelier once said, "Listen to everything and say nothing." And so Nat had diligently learned to comport himself with a silky mixture of servility and severity. But typically nights at Kenmore Hall were serene. From the tiled spa and pool below his feet rose the steady slapping of brilliant sapphire-colored water. Stacked on top of his head stretched the hushed building, seven hundred rooms, twenty-two stories, its long carpeted hallways mouse-quiet. He kept a room there and when nothing required his special attention he could, if he wished, slip upstairs to 207 for a short rest (but he could never close his eyes). Occasionally he invited people to drop by for a nocturnal swim. Alone, he was rarely in the mood to bother changing clothes and showering, returning to the desk with wet hair and the faint perfume of chlorine still in his nose. For a year now, he'd been saving his free time for his book. Last winter, something like March--or maybe February--he had gone to eat at Siegel's, a deli nestled under the Sixth Avenue elevated tracks in the Village. It was a friendly place smelling of pickles and pastrami, and Nat liked stopping there before work to meet two former classmates, Quentin Reynolds and Sidney Perelman, both of them writers and the latter his sister's fiancé. One day Quent showed up with a handful of letters from readers of the newspaper where he was employed. Like most big papers, the Brooklyn Daily Times published an advice column, "Susan Chester Heart-to-Heart Letters," which appeared on the women's page, hemmed in by meat-loaf recipes and Modish Mitzi fashion cartoons. Signing theatrical pseudonyms ("Puzzled," "Heartbroken and Blue"), the letter writers typically sought guidance on unrequited love or how to attract husbands sure to bring them lifetimes of misery. Whether there ever had been a person named Susan Chester scarcely mattered; the Susan beat was rotated throughout the newsroom, to female and male staff alike. The only qualification for doling out advice was reasonable good sense. Not surprisingly, the assignment was viewed as an irritation, something to be endured without complaint, accompanied by prayers for speedy deliverance. Quent, keen to cover sports or straight news, was stuck with Susan for the moment. To Siegel's he brought six letters the paper had discarded as too disturbing for its readers, thinking Sid might be inspired to do a satire on advice columns. Midway through dinner the letters were passed around the table, but Sid handed them back with a shrug. A few showed "comic superficialities," he told Quent, but where were the laughs? For that matter, were they true? It was hard to tell if the writers were real people. Some impressed Sid as stock characters, your average New York crackpot. What he needed were subjects lending themselves to subtle ridicule, like his lampoon of dental magazines, in which he offered a guide to performing one's own extractions. The Dear Susan letters were quickly forgotten when the conversation shifted to more pressing matters. In recent months he and Quent had been collaborating on a humorous novel but had yet to agree on a suitable title, something catchy that might sell a million copies. Through the Fallopian Tubes on a Bicycle? Nat, who had remained silent, began to look at the letters out of curiosity. One of them came from a woman identifying herself as Broad Shoulders, who claimed that her husband beat her and infected her with gonorrhea before abandoning her with a brood of kids. Another writer was a crippled sixteen-year-old who feared never being asked for a date. Still others described problems having to do with the evils of gin. To be sure, the situations sounded pitiful, but after a point it was really hard not to giggle. Immediately Nat was intrigued by these freaky people who, claiming to be cheated of a normal life, kept busy reporting their sagas to anonymous editors, and to strangers who might bear witness to the ¬unfairness of their plights. How in the world did they manage to keep going, let alone write about it? Of course Sid could be right in suspecting the letters to be stunts. For all Nat knew, they came from aspiring writers in disguise, although there had to be easier ways to get ¬published. As the men were leaving the restaurant, Nat decided to stick the letters in his pocket. It was possible that the material was wrong for satire but useful fodder for fiction. To begin with, the idea of Quent, a big guy who'd played varsity football at Brown, being shoved onto the lovelorn beat and forced to pretend he was Susan Chester, was good for a few laughs. With the addition of the crazed letter writers--a regular mulligan stew of loons, cripples, permanent deadbeats, and retards--the story became even more tempting. Imagine what complications might follow if the poor guy had to meet one of these screwy dames. For weeks on end, Nat pondered the letters. Maybe something unpredictable could be done, perhaps a kicky cartoon story about a male advice columnist. Such an original concept would surely provide a lot of fun. A whole year had passed since that evening at Siegel's and he had made little progress on his story about a columnist he was calling Thomas. Later, of course, the columnist wouldn't be called Thomas and Nat would forget he ever had writer's block, even try to repress how he got the letters in the first place. But now he was bogged down in details like whether to use first- or third-person narration. He couldn't tell who was the hero and who the villain. Were they the same person? And did it really matter? After reading several chapters, Sid said the manuscript resembled something out of Beowulf. It was too epic, too professorial, too ridiculously intellectual. Get rid of the Dostoyevsky stuff, he suggested; forget about playing amateur psychologist and start describing "people and things," like other writers. Nat said that was "just what I was trying to avoid." He didn't want to be like anybody else. He had already completed a first novel deemed absolutely, positively unpublishable by all who had seen it. A published author in his daydreams, he imagined himself living on some little street in the heart of the Latin Quarter, lounging on the sand beaches of the Côte d'Azur, and writing whenever the mood took him. Planning to join his girlfriend in June and get married, he had memorized ship schedules but now he knew he wasn't going anywhere. He couldn't. Quitting his job was too scary. When Beatrice found out, she would kill him. With the appearance of daylight on that Sunday morning in March, Nat's shift was drawing to a close. Beyond the lobby the early morning smell of baking bread floated in from the kitchen; above stairs, there were polished shoes and folded newspapers lying outside doors and laundry baskets that would soon be overflowing with crumpled sheets; and so another day was about to dawn for the dreaming ladies and gentlemen of Kenmore Hall. In a rush to finish his letter, Nat ignored the spelling errors and ended gracefully something he hadn't wished to write in the first place. He typed, "You are a swell girl," which was true, followed by "and I love you," which was open to some doubt. When his night-duty report had been turned over to the manager, it was time to weave his way uptown, past Madison Square Park, toward Times Square and Columbus Circle, into the quiet streets of the Upper West Side, where he lived with his parents in a cramped apartment, its four rooms a melancholy reminder of all that had gone wrong lately. Five months after the stock market crash, upheavals in residential construction had left developers like Nat's father feeling powerless and his wife of thirty years terrified. Consumed with worry, Anna Weinstein could not be bothered with her son's Gentile girl or his ambition to become a writer--and as she liked to say, everybody knew that writers were good-for-nothing bums. His mother didn't believe in him. The trouble was, neither did anybody else. But he was going to be writer anyhow; it was something he had known since he was eight, reading Anna Karenina on his roof in Harlem. If writing meant becoming a bum, that's what he would be. Excerpted from Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen Mckenney by Marion Meade All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
The Ensemble | p. xiii |
Introduction | p. xv |
1 In the Hotel | p. 1 |
2 Dusty Esky in Harlem | p. 6 |
3 Mishawaka | p. 19 |
4 San Juan Hill, New York | p. 26 |
5 The Stenographer from Canton | p. 36 |
6 Crimes and Misdemeanors | p. 46 |
7 Becoming "Nathanael West" | p. 59 |
8 Balso Snell's Book of Dirty Little Secrets | p. 73 |
9 Cleveland Heights Princess | p. 83 |
10 Ring Out, Wild Balls | p. 91 |
11 The Big Steal | p. 110 |
12 Marooned on Silsby Road | p. 131 |
13 Screwballs and Screwboxes | p. 141 |
14 Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves | p. 152 |
15 14 Gay Street | p. 171 |
16 Cheapsville | p. 187 |
17 Sister Eileen and Mrs. White | p. 209 |
18 Destined to be a Heroine | p. 223 |
19 An Arsonist's Guide to Los Angeles | p. 236 |
20 Stinkolas, Humdingers, Lollapaloozas, Twisteroos | p. 256 |
21 Eileen in Disneyland | p. 267 |
22 Together | p. 288 |
23 El Centro | p. 300 |
Postscript | p. 315 |
The Works of Nathanael West | p. 325 |
Notes | p. 328 |
Acknowledgments | p. 362 |
Photo Credits | p. 367 |
Index | p. 368 |