A Question and Answer Session on Nathanael West with Joe Woodward author of Alive Inside the Wreck - A Biography of Nathanael West.

Today I am very happy to present a Q and A Session with Joe Woodward, author of a wonderful new biography of Nathanael West, Alive Inside the Wreck - A Biography of Nathanael West.  

My Post on Alive Inside the Wreck - A Biography of Nathanael West by Joe Woodward

My  Posts on the Novels of Nathanael West

Official Bio of Joe Woodward from his webpage

http://joewoodward.net/

Joe Woodward is a native of California and currently lives in Claremont, California.  He is a four-time finalist and two-time winner of a Los Angeles Press Club Award.  His non-fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Poets & Writers Magazine and regularly in The Huffington Post.  His fiction has appeared in Passages North, Notre Dame Review, Zone 3 and elsewhere.

Joe received his BA in English at the University of Redlands and an MFA in English from Brooklyn College.  He is grateful to his teachers including Allen Ginsberg, L.S. Asekoff, Joan Larkin, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Ralph Angel, Bruce McAllister, and the many others. 

He is represented by Elizabeth Evans at the Jean V. Nagger Literary Agency in New York.  

Select Publications: 

Books

Alive Inside the Wreck A Biography of Nathanael West -- O/R, 2011

Short Fiction

"At the Airport" -- Peregrine, 2012

"The Season of Her Imagination" -- Passages North, 2012

"Salad Days" -- Notre Dame Review, 2012

"Crossings" -- Connecticut Review, 2011

"Viola" -- Lake Effects, 2011

"The Decemberists" -- Zone 3, 2010

"The Autopsy" -- Southern Indiana Review, 2010

Profiles

"The Gun on the Table: Tobias Wolff -- Poets & Writers, 2008

"A Novelist's Inner Poet: Carol Muske Dukes -- Poets & Writers, 2007

"In Search of David Foster Wallace" -- Poets & Writers,

"Welcome to Ellis Island: Bret Easton Ellis" -- Poets & Writers, 2005

You can read his work on these links

Profile of David Foster Wallace -- Poets & Writers

http://www.pw.org/content/search_david_foster_wallace


The Writer and the Fallowed Field -- The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-woodward/the-writer-and-the-fallow_b_858986.html

There are also links to two of his short stories on his webpage.

Nathanael West (1903 to 1940) was a sublime chronicler of the dark side of the American Dream.  Joe Woodward in his brilliant, very well written and documented biography of West, Alive Inside the Wreck -  A Biography of Nathanael West, helps us understand how he came to write his novels, why he kept writing when his work found only the smallest of audiences. The general literary consensus on West is that Miss Lonelyhearts is for sure a master work and probably The Day of the Locust is also.  Little interest is shown in his two shorter,  very strange novels, The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million.  Woodward book takes us deeply into the life of West, his very successful work as a screen writer in Hollywood, his Jewish roots, his friendships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and other well know writers and his tragic death in a car wreck.  In a fascinating segment he details the reading habits and loves of West. I hope to reread them of West's novels in 2015 and I think after reading Alive Inside the Wreck - A Biography of West I will be able to see a bit deeper into West's oeuvre and enjoy it more.  West's work is dark, randomly violent and focuses on the Preterite of America but it is also very funny at times and a delight to read.  

How did you first get interested  in Nathanael West?  When did you decide to write a biography on him?

I first read West in college (The Day of the Locust), in the same course that I also first read Flannery O’Connor. It was a strange and heady time for sure. I was mesmerized by both of them. Of course, I learned later that O’Connor was indeed greatly influenced by West—her characters struggle with the grotesque in and around the religious experience. They both are so very brutal in their characterizations of us all. Brutal but tender, empathetic.  

I am a great reader of literary biography. I’ve been interested since I can remember in the writer, the artist, the maker. How and why do they struggle on in the face of such terrible disappointment. Why!! So, when I read the great West biography by Jay Martin, I wondered if there might be more to say about how West wrote, what compelled him to continue in the face of such public apathy. Also, nothing new had been written about in about 40 years when I started. Finally, I did some research and found that a great archive rested just 20 miles from my home.

In what order should a reader new to West read his four novels?

I believe his great masterpiece is Miss Lonelyhearts. It is the most completely original, brutal and tender of his novels. I would read The Day of the Locust next. Again, a fantastic and perhaps easier novel. A Cool Million is a wonderfully entertaining literary experiment, but somewhat flawed. The Dream Life of Balso Snell is a freshman effort, and so perhaps most useful to the budding writer and less so for the general reader.

Do you have a favorite West novel?  

Miss Lonelyhearts always seems so starkly original, so deeply awful and troubling to read. I love that while you completely understand nothing like this novel half-world exists, it is in fact our world in a mirror—punishing us sentence after sentence with true unfairness.

 

                                 Ellen McKenny West 1940 

Is Harold Bloom right in saying that Miss Lonelyheart is really about being Jewish in America?  Is that the deepest meaning of West?

I don’t believe Bloom is right here. Certainly, West was concerned with understanding what it meant to be Jewish in America…what it mean for himself as opposed to his father and uncle, his grandparents etc. His position, in my mind, on this subject was conditional, shifting. It was not the great concern of his life or his work however…nearly every close confidant has said so.

For me, what West does better than anyone is defend those who can’t defend themselves, draw our attention to them. He has a great passion for revealing the hateful, perhaps even the evil that walks the earth. He blames of for either participating in it, or standing by and doing nothing about it.  

How American do you have to be to really get into West?  

Well, in fact, you do not need to be American at all. In fact, the French took to him first and with such passion. Europeans have loved him for so long. He is perhaps too dark in a way for most of America. I believe his discussion of the individual in society speaks to every political system on the planet. Certainly, his take on “all that glitters is not gold” is buried in Chinese and Japanese literature…and beyond.

I saw Candide in A Cool Million and did not see the characters as underdeveloped cartoon figures but as representatives of a type or theme as a character in a No play.  Is this way off?

I think this is right. Nothing is underdeveloped in West. He is an artist that draws what he sees as critical, but nothing more. He does not embellish. He does not believe in it as a literary tool or otherwise.  

         

              West at Fourteen

As West wrote about the novel, it is about “The breakdown of the American dream.” It is a sample of our “success literature” told in reverse. At every turn, the story grows darker and darker. In fact, the character is literally pulled limb from limb. And it’s a comedy. So, there you have it.

I am very grateful to Joe Woodward for his very insightful  responses.  I hope he will make another appearance on my blog one day and I look forward to reading his next book.

7.  What are some of the best movies on which West was a script writer ?

The best movie made from a West script I think is "Stranger on the Third Floor." West "polished" this script, but his language is all over it. It is one of the first (or the first) real noir film. I do believe that he would've got quite good at script writing would he have kept at it. He did not believe it was "art," which made be why I think he would've conquered it. Instead, what we are largely left with is impossible plotting and thin characters, etc. In fact, though Fitzgerald did believe film writing an art, West did not.

8.  What are some of your favorite literary biographies!
 
My favorite literary biographies include.... Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey, Flannery: A Life by Brad Gooch, and anything written by Claire Tomalin--Hardy, Dickens, Pepys...all classics.

9.  What is the best film made of a West novel?

 
Finally, the only truly watchable film of a West novel is John Schlesinger's "The Day of the Locust." This was done in 1975 and stars Donald Sutherland, Karen Black and others. Still, it is a very strange film to watch...though, indeed, not as terrifying as the novel itself. 

End

I am very grateful to Joe Woodward for his very insightful  responses.  I hope he will make another appearance on my blog one day and I look forward to reading his next book.

Alive Inside the Wreck - A Biography of Nathanael West by Joe Woodward (2011)

My  Posts on the Novels of Nathanael West

Nathanael West (1903 to 1940) was a sublime chronicler of the dark side of the American Dream.  Joe Woodward in his brilliant, very well written and documented biography of West, Alive Inside the Wreck -  A Biography of Nathanael West, helps us understand how he came to write his novels.   The general literary consensus on West is that Miss Lonelyhearts is for sure a master work and probably The Day of the Locust is also.  Little interest is shown in his two shorter,  very strange novels, The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million.  All I can say is read all these novels, total page length is under six hundred pages.  Then when you have read and been stunned by these books (if you are not amazed by them, and wonder if it you or West that is at fault here, it is you) then you are ready to read Joe Woodward's   biography of West.  You can see Woodward likes West a lot personally but he does not shield us from his darker side.  He loves West's books.  I hope to reread them all in 2015 and I think after reading Alive Inside the Wreck - A Biography of West I will be able to see a bit deeper into West's oeuvre and enjoy it more.  West's work is dark, randomly violent and focuses on the Preterite of America but it is also very funny at times and a delight to read.  

I do not feel inclined  to repeat the outlines of West's life but want to talk a bit about some of the factors that make me highly recommend Woodward's biography to not just the obvious audience of West lovers but anyone interested in American culture in the 1930s, a time of terrible ecomonic hardship lasting for the decade, known as the Great Depression.  All of his books were wriiten in the 1930s.

Harold Bloom, for whom I have great respect, has said that Miss Lonelyhearts is about being Jewish in America.  (He also said that along with I Lay Dying and the Byron the Bulb Segment in   Gravity's Rainbow, Miss Lonelyhearts were the only three examples of the sublime in American literature.) West (born as Nathanael Weinstein in New York City, his mother was a German Jew and his father Russian, West legally changed his name, Woodward tells us, to make himself  seem more main stream American for his screen writing career) grew up in relative affluence.  His father was successful in the building  and hotel businesses in New York City.  As I read Woodward's  very well done material on the background of West's parents I thought I saw for sure the ghost of the  darkly comic visions of powerful Yiddish writers like Lamed Shapiro.   There are deeply buried memories of Eastern European pogroms in West and Woodward helped me see this.  West's spoke no Yiddish but a few slang words and thought of himself as an American.  He had a comfortable upbringing and worked for a while in a family owned hotel.  I can see him observing with a comic eye the comings and goings of the guests.  In a very entertaining and informative section Woodward lays out for us West's academic career.  West was no great shakes as a student but he was very well read in European classics, especially Russian and French.  After some shady episodes he did graduate from Brown but he was more interested in partying than excelling.  In this you can see West has no great respect for authority figures and little impulse to please.

West came into full maturity just as the economy of America went into a terrible downturn.  We see in Woodward how this impacted West's life and  his work.  His work is almost a case study of living through the Great Depression in America.  

Woodward really helps us understand what West's life was like once he relocated to Hollywood and became a script writer.  He always earned very good money, in part because he was reliable, if you told him to write a script by next week on race car drivers in Mexico, he could be counted  on to do it.  He made a huge score, in partnership with a friend, on a twenty six page movie proposal and was paid over $36,000 for it.  Woodward said this had the buying power of about $500,000 today.  Compressing a lot, he married a lovely woman and bought a beautiful house.  He became  good friends with people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, S. J. Pearlman ( who married West's sister) and Dorothy Parker.  Woodward's goes into a lot of fascinating detail on the business side of being a Hollywood screen writer.  I liked it a lot when I learned that West lived when he first got to Hollywood in a hotel catering to Hollywood hopefuls, extras, starlets who  are prostitutes on the side and people who came as far west as they could in America to wait to die.  Readers of The Night of the Locust will see this experience and learn how an American cartoon icon got it's name.  The Night of the Locust is considered to be a strong influence on The Crying of Lot 49 (a book I have read numerous times) and I for sure see that.  

Woodward also spends a lot of time talking about West's love of hunting and the outdoors.  He often went down to Mexico with Hollywood friends to hunt and party.  Woodward helped me understand this was a city boy's  get away.  

Woodward talks about West's marriage, sadly it was cut short soon.  We learn that before marriage West visited Brothels but Woodward does not say much on this.  I do not know if it is out of respect for   West but I would have liked more data.  He also makes veiled refrences to suggestions that West may have been bisexual at times but he provides no details.  On this I would only say I prefer things be stated for all to know, to hide details suggests it is shameful, or don't vaguely mention it and leave us to wonder.  

Woodward's book begins with the tragic car wreck, he was on the way to the wedding of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which West and his wife were killed.  Beginning and closing the book with a very detailed account of the car wreck brought a fine structure to the book.  West was at work on another book.

One of the big questions Woodward helped me understand is just why did West keep writing when all of his books were ecomonic failures.  He made more from one month as a screen writer than all his books.

Woodward very happily includes a list of all the movies West worked on and I hope to see some on TCM one day.

Woodward loves the work of West and that love brought him to a very deep understanding of his great novels.  All four are must reading for all literary autodidacts and students of America in the 1930s.

I have read a lot of literary biographies and I count Woodward's among the very best.  He places West very clearly in American and world culture.  The sections on West's reading habits was really fascinating.  

Woodward gives his theories on the novels and I found them consistently illuminating. 

Official bio of Joe Woodward from his webpage

http://joewoodward.net/

Joe Woodward is a native of California and currently lives in Claremont, California.  He is a four-time finalist and two-time winner of a Los Angeles Press Club Award.  His non-fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Poets & Writers Magazine and regularly in The Huffington Post.  His fiction has appeared in Passages North, Notre Dame Review, Zone 3 and elsewhere.

Joe received his BA in English at the University of Redlands and an MFA in English from Brooklyn College.  He is grateful to his teachers including Allen Ginsberg, L.S. Asekoff, Joan Larkin, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Ralph Angel, Bruce McAllister, and the many others. 

He is represented by Elizabeth Evans at the Jean V. Nagger Literary Agency in New York.  

Select Publications: 

Books

Alive Inside the Wreck A Biography of Nathanael West -- O/R, 2011

Short Fiction

"At the Airport" -- Peregrine, 2012

"The Season of Her Imagination" -- Passages North, 2012

"Salad Days" -- Notre Dame Review, 2012

"Crossings" -- Connecticut Review, 2011

"Viola" -- Lake Effects, 2011

"The Decemberists" -- Zone 3, 2010

"The Autopsy" -- Southern Indiana Review, 2010

Profiles

"The Gun on the Table: Tobias Wolff -- Poets & Writers, 2008

"A Novelist's Inner Poet: Carol Muske Dukes -- Poets & Writers, 2007

"In Search of David Foster Wallace" -- Poets & Writers, 2006

"Welcome to Ellis Island: Bret Easton Ellis" -- Poets & Writers, 2005

I endorse Alive Inside the Wreck - A Biography of Nathanael West to any and all interested in West and his world.  

I hope to do a Q and A with Woodward so look for that soon.

 

 

 

 

 

A Cool Million by Nathanael West 1934 -- The Order in Which you Should read his novels

1903 to 1940

Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents; from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in New York, he befriended writer and humourist S. J. Perelman (who later married his sister), and started writing and drawing cartoons. As his cousin Nathan Wallenstein also attended Brown, West took to borrowing his work and presenting it as his own. He almost didn't graduate at all, on account of failing a crucial course in modern drama. West indulged in a little dramatics of his own and, in tearful contrition, convinced a gullible professor to upgrade his marks.

After spending a couple of years in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, he returned to New York, where he managed (badly by all accounts) a small hotel, the Sutton, owned by his family. As well as providing free board for struggling friends like Dashiell Hammett, the job also gave West ample opportunity to observe the strange collection of misfits and drifters who congregated in the hotel's drugstore. Some of these would appear in West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts.

West spent the rest of his days in Hollywood, writing B-movie screenplays for small studios and immersing himself in the unglamorous underworld of Tinseltown, with its dope dealers, extras, gangsters, whores and has-beens. All would end up in West's final masterpiece, The Day of the Locust.

West's life ultimately ended as tragically as his fictions. Recently married, and with better-paid script work coming in, West was happy and successful. Then, returning from a trip to Mexico with his wife Eileen, he crashed his car after ignoring a stop sign and killed them both. This was just one day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.  From Goodreads

Imagine Candide set in America in 1933, the economy is in ruins (far worse than now), millions are near starving, unemployment is at 25%, banks are failing, the roads are full of the homeless.  The worse kind of political charlatans emerge to profit from this (worse than the Tea Party), telling people it is the fault of either the capitalists, the socialists, the Jews or the Catholics.  A Cool Million is kind of a mix of the one disaster after another style of Voltaire, the grotesque characters of southern gothic writers and the black humor of the great Yiddish writers with a dose of the All American writer Horatio Alger.  Our lead character leaves home to make money to help his mother.  He loses all his teeth, is falsely imprisoned, loses a leg and what money he has before he is shot when he is duped into participating in  Fascist type rally in the American South.  When The Red Shirts end up ruling the country,he is made a national hero.  Lem, the hero has his Cunogodne, his love. Just like in Candide she is repeatedly raped and placed in a brothel.    It has been years since I read Candide and I suspect there are other similarities.   I concede this may not be as good as The Day of The Locust or Miss Lonelyheart but you are missing out if you skip this book.  

I read a number of articles and posts on the work of West.  Most give the very bad advise to skip A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Bruno Snell.  Taken together these two works are under 300 pages.  Here is my suggested West Reading Order.

Start with A Cool Million, which I concede is the weakest one.  It is under 100 pages, hilarious in spots, very perceptive about American society in the 1930s, surprisingly sexual at times.  It helps a lot if you know Candide a bit.

Then read, The Dream Life of Bruno Snell.  How can you pass on a story set in the gastro-intestinal  track of a horse? It is very surreal.  You have never read anything quite like this before.

Ok now we are on to the works the academy endorses as master pieces. 

I would say next read The Day of the Locust, a quintessential dark side of Hollywood in the 1930s book.  Full of very weird people.  Just a wonderful book.  There is debate over which of these two works is more powerful, right now I would lean to Miss Lonelyheart but I am not rigid on this.

Now you come to the great reward of your journey, Miss Lonelyheart. This a great account of the preterite of New York City.  Parts of it are simply beyond praise.  

Please share your experience with West with us.  

The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West (1931)

Miss Lonely Heart and The Day of The Locust by Nathanael West (1903 to 1940-USA-died in auto accident) are among the very greatest of American novels.   His characters are grotesques, isolates, rejects from the world of the American dream.   He also wrote, in addition to ten Hollywood movie scripts, two other novels, both under 125 pages.   In my research most seem to say you should not bother with his other two novels unless you are interested in reading all his novels, under 600 pages. This is terrible advise, at least as far as The Dream Life of Bruno Snell goes.   

As in his two more famous novels, there is deep religious symbolism in this work, as much as in a writer he resembles in a strange way, Flannery O'Connor.   The plot line is totally bizarre.   Bruno Snell enters the actual Trojan horse through the horse's anus.   in the intestine and bowels of the horse he encounters great writers, Bruno is a writer, meets lots of strange people including a seven foot hunchback woman pregnant with a baby in her hunch back.  Much of the work is preoccupied with death and suicide.   This is as strange a work as you will find.   OK it is weird.  I loved it.  

First read Miss Lonely Heart (you are missing out big time if you don't read this, and very soon) then The Day of the Locust,   ignore the advise of those who say stop here, in fact ignore anything said by anyone who bad mouths Nathanael West in anyway!

Mel u