One of the strangest things about modern American reality — marked as it is by a multitude of threatening cataclysms (environmental, nuclear, fascist) that seem to loom closer all the time — is that it is funny. Who can deny that the geriatric TV showman, who looks like a cartoon character, pumping his fists and squinting into the teleprompter from which he reads the fascist propaganda that greases our slide into oblivion — is funny? Or that it’s pretty funny that, even as the record for “hottest day ever” keeps getting broken, untold quantities of energy are devoted to creating fake virtual toys? Or that the robots I encounter while walking in Los Angeles, which ferry gourmet food, locked inside metallic abdomens, past scores of homeless people, are — horrifying, yes — but funny?
Nor is it provocative to say so. Everyone thinks it’s funny. Scroll through any social media feed and what you’ll see, interrupted by the occasional expression of shock and outrage, is endless jokes, all in the same suave, acerbic register. Very often they’re all the same joke. Which is not to say they aren’t funny. And yet they seem increasingly, in their repetitiveness, in the eerie reflexiveness with which they accompany each new startling escalation of our predicament, to take on a kind of plodding mirthlessness that, rather than purging the horror, only adds a new dimension to it.
The novelist Nathanael West was the first to identify and explain this cycle of cartoonish horror and cynical irony in America. Plenty of novelists of the nineteen-thirties, when West wrote, took on the subject of the tremendous suffering that Americans were experiencing. But West, in his own terse novels, was the only one to pose a startling and profound new question: what do we do with suffering that has become funny?
It is not, as it is sometimes taken to be by explicators of West, a moral question — i.e., what should we do about this suffering? The question is, rather, existential, and aesthetic: how are we to be with this suffering, to exist amid it?
In the standard telling, West’s creative breakthrough — the moment when he realized that suffering had become funny — came suddenly, with the force of an epiphany, in March of 1929, when (as recounted in Jay Martin’s thoroughly-researched biography) West was shown a series of letters to the advice-columnist of a major newspaper. The letters, tales of horrific woe, were also, undeniably, funny — like jokes told by people trapped inside of them. Heightening the jokes only slightly, West spun the letters into “Miss Lonelyhearts,” his 1933 novel about a brooding advice columnist who struggles to cope with this new kind of suffering, which comes not only in the letters that he must try to answer (“Ought I to commit suicide?” one correspondent demurely inquires), but seems all-enveloping, suffused in the very air.
Indeed, in West’s telling, the joke-like character that suffering has acquired is a kind of pollutant produced by modern society as surely as its soot and its fumes. In response to it, the natural inclination is to laugh, to show you’re in on the joke; but this laughter, disseminated and flattened by mass media — in West’s time the movies, whose “dead pan” becomes a kind of standard-issue shield that everyone can wield — hardens into a vulgar cynicism that becomes just as choking an aesthetic pollutant as the suffering was.
Surrounded by these two choking clouds, West’s characters find themselves constricted. They don’t always wish to laugh — but attempts at sincerity must withstand the corrosive force of the cynicism that seeps into every room. The columnist of “Miss Lonelyhearts” visits his girlfriend, wishing for a respite of sweetness amid those awful letters, but finds that he is literally unable to be sincere with her. He instead provokes her sarcastically, parodying her with increasing viciousness, his voice “so full of hatred that he himself was surprised.” The actions of West’s characters are often constrained in this way, dictated not only by ordinary motivations and obstacles, but also by this awful new inescapable self-consciousness that is like an additional character in every scene — leering from a corner, taunting with a smirk: “Isn’t this just so trite?”
The result is an unbearable tension that explodes, again and again in West’s work, into violence. The laughter that everyone tries to put on in order to defuse the horrifying joke in which they are trapped becomes — as the piteousness of that joke reasserts itself — more and more strained and nervous, more and more self-conscious and false, until finally the only remedy is an impulse to violence similar to one that the columnist recalls experiencing as a child when he accidentally stepped on a frog: “Its spilled guts had filled him with pity, but when its suffering had become real to his senses, his pity had turned to rage and he had beaten it frantically until it was dead.”
This image would not be out of place in the work of Dostoevsky, one of West’s idols; but the violence that pervades the latter’s work seems somehow characteristically American. It is sudden, unmotivated, unconnected to any context, and when it is finished it recedes totally into a kind of horrifying amnesiac status quo. It never fully loses the imprint of its origin in an impulse that is close to laughter and to joking. In a way it is scornful laughter — laughter whose scorn has simply escalated to the point of action. And this imprint gives it, if you look closely enough, a sheen of the comic, though one that diminishes none of its horror. “The Day of the Locust” (1939), West’s harrowing novel of the underbelly of Hollywood, famously culminates in a film premiere at which the crowd degenerates into a riot. In an astonishing passage, Tod Hackett, the protagonist, is literally carried away by the baleful, lung-crushing crowd, as though by a riptide, coming to a stop from time to time at a series of “dead spots,” where the pressure momentarily becomes equalized. At the first dead spot, he struggles desperately to free himself from entanglement with the others pressed against him; at the second, he witnesses, and tries to stop, the assault of a child; then, at the third, unexpectedly, a kind of carnival atmosphere prevails:
In this part of the mob no one was hysterical. In fact, most of the people seemed to be enjoying themselves. Near him was a stout woman with a man pressing hard against her from in front. His chin was on her shoulder, and his arms were around her. She paid no attention to him and went on talking to the woman at her side.
“The first thing I knew,” Tod heard her say, “there was a rush and I was in the middle.”
“Yeah. Somebody hollered, ‘Here comes Gary Cooper,’ and then wham!”
“That ain’t it,” said a little man wearing a cloth cap and pullover sweater. “This is a riot you’re in.”
A little later, the stout woman being crushed by the hugging man calls out: “Hey you, I ain’t no pillow.” But she isn’t speaking to the man crushing her. It’s to the surrounding crowd that her remark is addressed. She’s trying to get a laugh. And she gets one.
In this scene, and in others throughout “The Day of the Locust” and “Miss Lonelyhearts,” one can sense American fascism almost itching to burst through the weakening seams of the society that West depicts. But it is only in a far less celebrated novel, written in between these two famous ones, that West took on the subject directly. “A Cool Million” — a comedy about fascism that appeared in 1934, just as the topic was becoming too serious to joke about — was an immediate flop, and has essentially remained one, the unread footnote of West’s career. But unjustly: this short book is his most straightforwardly funny and accessible; and it is also in its own way a complicated masterpiece that suggests that West’s vision of the horrifying American joke may have crystallized some years before he saw the “Lonelyhearts” letters.
Ostensibly, “A Cool Million” is a satire of the rags-to-riches stories of the nineteenth century American novelist Horatio Alger. West begins with a prototypical Alger hero: a naïve, virtuous, penniless adolescent named Lemuel Pitkin, who sets out from his rustic small town to the big city in search of fortune; but rather than meet spectacular success, as Alger’s protagonists inevitably do, he is instead subject to a string of incidents of cartoonish yet vividly excruciating violence that dismantle him limb by limb, eventually killing him. The book gets a good deal of its comedic punch by juxtaposing the extreme degree of Lemuel’s degradations against his inextinguishable pluck, and the encouragements he gets, as when he receives a pep talk from a young lady of his acquaintance on a bench in Central Park:
“I’m a failure,” answered Lem with still another sigh.
“Why, Lemuel Pitkin, how you talk!” exclaimed Betty indignantly. “You’re only seventeen going on eighteen and…”
“Well,” interrupted Lem, a little ashamed of having admitted that he was discouraged. “I left Ottsville to make my fortune and so far I’ve been to jail twice and lost all my teeth and one eye.”
“To make an omelette you have to break eggs,” said Betty. “When you’ve lost both your eyes, you can talk. I read only the other day about a man who lost both of his eyes yet accumulated a fortune. I forget how, but he did.”
But what elevates the book above the many other Alger parodies that have been written is that it doesn’t so much parody Alger as reveal the parodic nature that suffuses Alger stories. Alger stories function as capitalist propaganda, of course, the paradigmatic paradigms of the American Dream — but it’s a strange kind of propaganda that often seems to be winking at its own absurdity. The hyper-earnestness with which the books recount their heroes’ inevitable triumphs — never really through the hard work the books propagandize so much as through insanely improbable luck — seems at once put on and deadly serious, in a way that is similar to the inadvertently comedic tone that West was later to pick up on in the letters that inspired “Miss Lonelyhearts,” and that he mastered in that novel and his subsequent work. Indeed it may well be that the “Lonelyhearts” letters merely restruck a chord that had been heard, latently, much earlier, in childhood reading of Alger.
Certainly, as the bookish son of upwardly-striving immigrants, West must have read Alger early and avidly — and with an impact likely all the more forceful given the way his own family’s story was itself an almost parodically apt encapsulation of the American dream. Fleeing antisemitism in Lithuania under the Russian Empire, where they had worked as builders, they came to the United States, where it just so happened there was something fairly big to be built: Manhattan. Here, in 1903, West was born — as Nathan Weinstein — into a kind of fast-motion version of the standard immigrant rise. By the early nineteen-twenties, West was already the self-mythologizing, Ivy League-attending, literary-affectation-soaked aspiring novelist that it normally takes three or four generations to produce. For a while, in the true spirit of an Alger hero, he focused on fashioning an image of himself as a great novelist — changing his name, enjoying a Hemingwayesque Parisian sojourn, putting out stories about how he’d read all of Tolstoy by the age of eleven. (It was almost by accident that, rather than achieve the image of the great novelist, which always eluded him — he died, at thirty-seven, mostly unread and unrecognized — he became one.)
Whether the idea occurred to him earlier or only once he came to write “A Cool Million,” it seems clear that West was thinking quite explicitly about the connection between the joke that American reality had become and the “joke” of Alger stories. For at the same time that the book demonstrates the parodic nature of Alger’s vision of America, it shows that this parodic nature is inherent in American reality itself — as though American life is “narrated” in Algeresque prose.
This can be seen in the unusual and interesting way in which West wrote “A Cool Million.” Remarkably enough, he didn’t actually write it. Or at least not all of it: in a little-noticed act of plagiarism — the scholar Douglas H. Shepard pointed it out in 1965 in a small, academic journal called Satire Newsletter, but it has seldom been mentioned since — West copied dozens of passages straight out of at least two Alger novels and placed them directly into his own work. The question of the propriety of this act — one must at least be suspicious of West’s surreptitiousness about it — concerns me less than how, as a method, it is illuminating. For the great originality of the book lies in the way that the additional elements that West interspersed among actual Alger passages slot in with perfect seamlessness, and cast the surrounding Alger text in a revealing new light.
What West added to Alger, in addition to the cartoonishly horrifying violence, is fascism. Specifically, a genially degenerate sociopathic ex-President of the United States who is running to get back into office. (West is often called prescient.) Nathan “Shagpoke” Whipple — who with his chilling façade of avuncular sociopathy deserves a place in the pantheon of great American villains — was based on a real person: William Dudley Pelley, a novelist and screenwriter who, in the nineteen-thirties, led an American fascist movement known as the “Silver Shirts.” Pelley — who is among the menagerie of American Nazis described in Bradley W. Hart’s useful book, “Hitler’s American Friends” — espoused a visionary utopia called the “Christian Commonwealth,” to be governed under an incoherent blend of socialism and capitalism in which Aryan citizens would become “shareholders” in the state, which would take over everything while re-enslaving Black people and keeping a close eye — this important job was to be given to the Secretary of Jewry — on the conspiracy of the rabbinate. Pelley, a born showman, would explain all this to his fifteen-thousand followers who wore silver shirts emblazoned with a large letter L, for “Love, Loyalty and Liberation.”
In this cartoonish joke of a man, it was West’s genius to see — an Alger character. And to see in the fanciful, incoherent farce that he espoused to his followers an Alger tale. In transposing Pelley directly into an Alger story — and, brilliantly, placing him into the role of the kindly, virtue-rewarding savior who always shows up with miraculous serendipity to rescue Lem from his worst degradations — West shows how naturally American fascism blends into Algeresque surroundings. When Whipple exhorts a crowd of workingmen —
If America is ever again to be great, it can only be through the triumph of the revolutionary middle class. We must drive the Jewish international bankers out of Wall Street! We must destroy the Bolshevik labor unions! We must purge our country of all the alien elements and ideas that now infest her! America for Americans! Back to the principles of Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln!
— we can see how the rhetoric of Alger’s sanctimonious benefactors transitions so easily into that of fascism. But West is not done with his tricks: it is his final stroke of genius in “A Cool Million” that, within the narrative, the incoherently complex and farcical conspiracy of Jewish bankers and Bolsheviks that Whipple describes is not a figment that he is spinning merely to whip up the crowd, but an actual conspiracy. Rather than exaggerate the outlandishness of the conspiracy theories that animate the fascist mind, as an ordinary satirist of fascism might do, West instead leaves these theories pretty much as they are — what exaggeration do they need? — but instead, brilliantly, makes them real. After Whipple’s speech, as he signs the men up for his movement, West’s camera, as it were, pans over:
Mr. Whipple had just enrolled his twenty-seventh recruit, when the forces of both the international Jewish bankers and the Communists converged on his meeting. They arrived in high-powered black limousines and deployed through the streets with a skill which showed long and careful training in that type of work. In fact their officers were all West Point graduates.
As the book unfolds, it is not only the degradations of Depression-Era capitalism that destroy Lemuel — it is also the hijinks of these cabals of international Jewish bankers and Communist agitators, and of other sinister and outlandish conspiracies, which all play out side by side, interweaving seamlessly into the cartoonish texture of the surrounding Alger text. The book becomes an intentionally bewildering kaleidoscope of parody and counter-parody, until it becomes impossible to tell which are the Alger tales being foisted on the characters as propaganda, and which are the Alger tales that they are living. West’s book is literally a pastiche of Alger stories, fascist propaganda, and some “objective” observation of American reality in the thirties — but it doesn’t feel like a pastiche at all. It feels like a coherent and singular work of art. And that — the incredible seamlessness of the fabric — is the horrifying point.
It also demonstrates, forebodingly, why it is fascism that seems to be edging into frame in West’s other books. The people trapped inside a joke, trying to meet that joke with a pose of ironic knowingness, are eager to have the joke explained. What fascism offers is an explanation that turns out to be only another joke. But the final terrifying joke is that it doesn’t matter. Accustomed to living inside a joke, its victims can no longer tell what is joke and what is real. Historians of American fascism, and of the Confederacy and Jim Crow, have explained a great deal about the rise of Trump. But to read “A Cool Million” is to understand something of how a crowd assembled before a cartoonish showman can seethe with cynicism, with certainty that the official line is garbage, deep-state lies — and in all their skeptical knowingness proclaim that what’s really going on is that a cabal of pedophiles runs everything from a pizza parlor using vaccine-implanted microchips and 5G signals.. And no one can tell whether they are joking.