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ANALYSIS
The Day of the Locust (1939)
Nathanael West
(1903-1940)
The novel opens and ends with a mob scene, the first artificial and the last real. Circular structure is a characteristic of the transcendental mode and of Modernism, as in The Sun Also Rises and Finnegans Wake. In contrast, the structure of Locust implies a downward rather than an upward or progressive movement— to madness rather than transcendence. The great noise outside the office of Tod Hackett is a fake army moving “like a mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing from some terrible defeat.” This image prefigures the defeat of illusory dreams that provokes the mob riot at the end of the novel.
The soldiers of European nations at war evokes the brutal recent history of western civilization, culminating in decadent Hollywood. They are stampeding to the wrong “stage” and their leader, in a cork sun-helmet that evokes colonialism, is chasing after them cursing and shaking his fist like a fool in a dark farce. Late in the novel Faye Greener, another force of Nature, is said to be “like a cork. No matter how rough the sea got, she would go dancing over the same waves that sank iron ships and tore away piers of reinforced concrete.” That the dominant forces of history and Nature are beyond control is a Gothic and a Naturalist vision of life. Naturalistic also is the detached view West takes of the retired people who “had come to California to die.” They are like locusts.
West implies that believing in what you see on the movie screen is as foolish as believing that the set of “half a Mississippi steamboat” will get you somewhere. The reference to “masquerades” brings to mind The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, set aboard a Mississippi steamboat. Melville depicts society as a masquerade in which people are either con men or the conned. On the Hollywood dreamboat of West, everyone is both conned by their dreams and conning others to attain them.
Tod is said to have talent as a painter, but “he was lazy” and his looks—appearances are everything in Hollywood—“made him seem completely without talent, almost doltish in fact.” With his “large sprawling body, his slow blue eyes and sloppy grin,” he resembles the doltish Homer. But appearances are deceiving. The rest of the chapter illustrates that from the clothes people wear to the incongruous mix of imitated architectural styles, including castles and palaces, Hollywood epitomizes the illusions of the modern world. Previously T. S. Eliot in “The Waste Land” and Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt, both published in 1922, had likewise illustrated modern decadence and loss of cultural integrity with incongruous imagery, mixed styles, cheap imitation and fakery. Artifice clutters the landscape in Hollywood, coloring the trees “like a Neon tube.” A repetition of the color “violet” is a submerged allusion to the “violet light” in “The Waste Land,” as West dramatizes a pessimistic rebuttal to Eliot’s affirmation of faith.
Tod will express his vision in his painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles,” analogous to the burning of Rome under Nero and to this novel by West. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is legendary or mythic. West’s analogy approximates the “mythic method”--making correspondences between a myth from the past and a narrative in the present--advocated by Eliot and illustrated by Eliot and Joyce. Although his friends accuse him of selling out as a set designer, Tod believes he can still rise in the world as a painter even though he envisions the world coming to an apocalyptic end: “He reached the end of Vine street and began the climb…” Tod and West reject the Realism of Winslow Homer and the Romanticism of Thomas Ryder and will be Expressionists in the dark style of Goya and Daumier. The chapter ends with a direct statement of West’s feelings about what he will be depicting in the novel: “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”
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Tod lives in a place called ironically the San Bernardino Arms. He is in no sense living in the arms of the Christian Saint Bernard. Religions are merely styles of decoration here. With its pink Moorish columns, the apartment house is another example of lost integrity, meaning and faith in the modern world as epitomized by Hollywood. This technique of incongruity and degradation also is borrowed from “The Waste Land.” Degeneration is also represented by the hustler Honest Abe Kusich, a slave to his audience neither honest nor tall like Abe Lincoln, who freed slaves. The slavery theme is expressed when Abe says, “Who gave her forty bucks for an abortion?” Forty dollars and a mule were promised to emancipated slaves after the Civil War. Then the promise was aborted, implying by parallel that Abe’s sex partner was not freed by abortion. Sexual exploitation and abortion are also themes in “The Waste Land.” As a dwarf Abe is a metaphor of arrested development in show business and “grotesque depravity” induced by desperation to please a resentful audience: “It was their stare that drove Abe and the others to spin crazily and leap into the air with twisted backs like hooked trout.”
Abe wears a green Tyrolean hat, introducing the motif of green from The Great Gatsby— as in money, the green light meaning Go for it! and the original promise of the American Dream imaged by Fitzgerald in “the fresh green breast of the New World.” Tyrolean refers to heights and the “high, conical crown” of the hat is a peak, imaging aspiration. “There should have been a brass buckle on the front.” Abe looks like an elf in a fairy tale. He is West’s view of the American Dream during the Great Depression of the 1930s: ridiculous, malformed, dishonest, and vulgar. He uses gutter slang, gives his sex partner money for an abortion and threatens her when she gives him the “fingeroo” and throws him out: “I can get her leg broke for twenty bucks.” Abe claims to have the lowdown and tries to bully Tod into placing a bet, the American Dream reduced to a horse race. 3
Tod awakens into his dream of attaining Faye Greener. He gazes infatuated at his studio picture of her in a farce. His infatuation is a farce because “He had nothing to offer her, neither money nor looks, and she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her.” West emphasizes her perversion of spiritual values with a romantic cliché undercut by irony: “She put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn’t move.”
In his picture of Faye she is in a harem, one of many women available only to a Hollywood sultan with money and power. She is hard in “breastplates,” animalistic in a “monkey jacket,” and conditioned to luxury “stretched out on a silken divan.” She has a romantic “moon face” with “her arms and legs spread, as though welcoming a lover, and her lips were parted in a heavy, sullen smile.” The modern love goddess cannot love. A siren of death with “swordlike legs,” she is identified not with the traditional Garden of the heart, but with the heartless City: “If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper.”
The first chapter of The Great Gatsby ends with the image of Gatsby stretching out his arms toward the distant green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Daisy is equated with the green light and Gatsby goes for her with lots of green money. Faye Greener is “greener” than Daisy in being more of an attraction to more men--more promiscuous, greedy, superficial and corrupt.
Just as Tod is an artist like West, Homer worked in a hotel like West. The artist is an individual, hotels represent society. Tod and Homer to some extent personify aspects of the psyche of West. Homer is the collective unconscious, West’s connection to the human race and the most universal figure in the novel. Homer is the masses--the consumer, the dupe of Honest Abe, the audience of Harry Greener, and the fan of Faye. He is so easily influenced that he moves to California because his doctor advised it in an “authoritarian manner.” He rents a cottage because “the agent was a bully.”
His rented cottage is another example of deception, with a fake thatched roof and a front door “of gumwood painted like fumed oak” and machine-made hinges “carefully stamped to appear hand-forged.” The place is like a studio backlot of movie sets in a diversity of styles and periods. One bedroom contains a “governor Winthrop dresser painted to look like unpainted pine.” The reference to Winthrop evokes American history from the start, implicitly contrasting the robust integrity of the Puritans to the decadent population of the present, as Hawthorne did in his fictions. The inertia of Homer is comparable to the somnolence Hawthorne describes in “The Custom House” introducing The Scarlet Letter. West extends the history of decline from pious Puritanism into pagan Hollywood.
The real estate agent also deceived Homer about the wildlife in the neighborhood. Instead of birds, traditional metaphors of spiritual freedom and transcendence, Homer sees only spiders and a lizard. “He grew very fond of the lizard.” They loll in the sun together. The human has not evolved very far beyond the reptile. In the next chapter his head bobs like the head of a toy dragon.
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Homer has a small head and sleeps half the time— 12 hours a day! He can barely wake up. He gets out of bed “like a poorly made automaton.” His hands seem independent of his will, emphasizing how subject he is to deterministic forces beyond his control. This theme and comparisons of Homer to animals—lizard, dog, dragon—are characteristics of Naturalism. His hands “crawl” about and he carries them like burdens. Critics have noted the influence here of Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands,” the first story in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Homer is a more representative figure than Wing Biddlebaum in “Hands,” embodying as he does a vision of mass depth psychology in America during the Great Depression. When he is overcome by desire for the prostitute Miss Martin and hugs and gropes her, “He was completely unconscious of what he was doing.” Completely unconscious, he is conditioned by the still Puritanical culture of the Midwest and “hurriedly labeled his excitement disgust.”
Impressionist imagery here is so extreme—so unreal--it becomes Expressionism, exaggerating artifice. Miss Martin resembles a doll: “Her youthfulness was heightened by her blue button eyes, pink button nose and red button mouth.” All these buttons are cliches. Homer likewise is rendered as if he has been mass produced in an artificial romantic world: “He was like one of Picasso’s great sterile athletes, who brood hopelessly on pink sand, staring at veined marble waves.” He is so out of touch with reality he still cries because he has never seen Miss Martin again, as if he actually knew her. And now her replacement in his dream world is the even more unattainable Faye Greener. In contrast to his namesake the great heroic poet Homer, this modern Homer is “neither strong nor fertile”—he is impotent.
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One night he goes down to Hollywood Boulevard for food. “If he just sat around, the temptation to go to sleep again would become irresistible.” He gets intimidated by a beggar, shops at a market and returning home is so frightened by the steep climb in the dark he takes a taxicab. His timidity emphasizes the contrast with the heroic age dramatized by the poet Homer.
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Homer is a drone who has always “worked mechanically.” Now he appears to be “sleep-walking or partially blind. His dissociation from himself is evident when he is cut severely opening a can yet seems to
feel no pain, as if he is numb, as people can be when deeply depressed during a Great Depression. In his backyard he reclines in the sun without looking at the book in his lap or at the vista of canyon twisting down to the city. He defines his outlook on life by choosing to sit facing the closed door of the garage, a sooty incinerator and the remains of a cactus garden. Homer himself is compared to a plant. Although he is fond of the lizard, he identifies with its victims the flies. He could feed the lizard something else, but he chooses not to interfere, not to influence outcomes. He is inert, like the masses who do not respond to calls for social revolution. Homer surrenders to events, like most humans in depression and war.
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Harry Greener performing his routines door to door thousands of times is mechanical like Homer and is likewise a failure. He “let his derby hat roll down his arm. It fell to the floor.” Harry like Homer does not know himself, “wondering himself whether he was acting or sick.” The gothic or “black humor” in this chapter derives from (1) Harry’s pathetic clowning while having a heart attack; (2) the fact that such a clumsy vulgar butt of his own jokes is selling polish; and (3) that the consumer Homer, a poor loner, buys polish for silver he does not own: “I really need some silver polish.”
Harry’s clowning repertoire is a sample case full of slapstick cliches. He keeps trying to hustle Homer the “sucker” even while he is dying: “He was really sick… Suddenly, like a mechanical toy that had been overwound, something snapped inside of him and he began to spin through his entire repertoire…like the dance of a paralytic. He jigged, he juggled his hat, made believe he had been kicked, tripped, and shook hands with himself…then reeled to the couch and collapsed.”
His daughter Faye is as callous toward him as he is toward Homer. Her father is dying and she is casually dismissive: “He has a vile heart, poor dear.” Faye is already hard at 17, yet remains immature, “dressed like a child of twelve.” She has an “artificial” voice and “seemed a dancer rather than an affected actress.” Homer does not notice how rude she is to him--that she is totally self-absorbed--whereas Harry is offended: “In a serious moment like this, her ham sorrow was insulting.” Yet no one is more a ham than Harry. Suddenly facing death, Harry drops his clown act. His defense mechanism of reflexively laughing at everything becomes sincere and exaggerates into a “machinelike screech.”
Facing reality infuriates Faye. She shakes the dying man to shut him up and then smashes him in the face with her fist. “I’m a fright,” she says looking into a tiny mirror, becoming more grotesque for her preoccupation with cosmetics. All she wants is to be a star. “She talked on and on, endlessly, about herself…” Even after getting socked in the heart and in the face, her father remains a slave to illusion-- claiming to be “Fine and dandy, baby. Right as rain, fit as a fiddle and lively as a flea.” He “tried to disguise how weak he was by doing an exaggerated Negro shuffle”—sustaining the slave motif. At the end of the chapter Harry is still trying to hustle Homer the sucker until he grabs his Adam’s apple as if gasping his last breaths. As Faye says, “We Greeners are all crazy.”
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Homer is “troubled by dreams” that make his fingers twine “like a tangle of thighs in miniature.” Like Wing Biddlebaum in Anderson’s “Hands,” Homer suppresses his hands and impulses: “He snatched them apart and sat on them… He somehow knew that his only defense was chastity, that it served him, like the shell of a tortoise…. He couldn’t shed it even in thought. If he did, he would be destroyed.”
When in his loneliness he resorts to singing aloud to himself, he sings the national anthem—“the only song he knew”—still loyal despite his great depression, making him a metaphor of America, of the national unconscious, of the mass psychology of frustrated American dreamers. He makes himself more miserable by daydreaming of escape to glamorous Mexico and Hawaii, until he cries himself to sleep. Though knowing that “his anguish is permanent,” he continues to dream by courting Faye. Whereas in Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio dreaming is affirmed as spiritual aspiration, in West dreaming is illusion that can lead to severe depression and madness. Anderson’s story “The Egg” is closer in spirit to West, though Anderson is sympathetic and still hopeful, whereas West is detached and pessimistic.
Tensions are raised by tequila and jealousy in the heat of their campfire. Faye plays the men off against each other, bringing Tod tagging along. She necks with Earle as if she means it, but then embraces Miguel. She drinks like the three men and grows increasingly excited, reckless and sexy while dancing with Miguel in front of Earle. Finally the cowboy bashes Miguel over the head with a stick. Faye runs away, chased by Tod until he falls on his face, hearing an ironic comment from Nature on his failure to fulfill his rape fantasy: “Somewhere further up the hill a bird began to sing.”
Ironically, this last bird does signal, even inspires, a degree of transcendence via his art. “When the bird grew silent, he made an effort to put Faye out of his mind and began to think about” his visionary painting. The bird sings again and he envisions his painting as a prophecy of “civil war”—implicitly a Marxist revolution. Speaking for West as well, Tod concludes that it does not matter whether his prophecy comes true. “His work would not be judged by the accuracy with which it foretold a future event but by its merit as painting.” West was right. The merits of The Day of the Locust as art transcend its failure as prophecy, in contrast to U.S.A. (1930-36) by Dos Passos, which is more invested in Marxism.
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The theme of mechanical behavior continues as Tod decides he has to let the unstopable clowning Harry “run down like a clock.” Harry sees a movie as a “vehicle,” as Mrs. Schwartzen considered Tod when she asked him to “convoy” her across the room. Harry has been acting for so long that his head “was almost all face, like a mask.” Like an actor after poor cosmetic surgery. Due to “years of broad grinning and heavy frowning…he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furtherest degree.”
The life story of Harry is comparable to Tod’s—“an idealist who desired only to share his art with the world.” He was disillusioned by his repeatedly unfaithful wife, like bitter Wash Williams in Winesburg, Ohio : “Again he forgave her and again she sinned. Even then he didn’t cast her out, no, though she jeered, mocked and even struck him repeatedly with an umbrella. But she ran off with a foreigner.” Just as Harry was led on and betrayed by his wife the dancer, Tod is led on by Faye who is compared to a dancer. Whereas Wash Williams is traumatized into hating all women and becoming a recluse, Harry the polish salesman hides his contempt for all suckers under his clown act.
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The death of Harry the fool corresponds to the death of Tod’s foolish dream of Faye. Although she appears to feel guilty enough to blame herself for Harry’s death, Tod sees that Faye is merely acting: “Faye had begun to act and he felt that if they didn’t interfere she would manage an escape for herself.” She has internalized the scripting of movies—contrived, trite, sentimental--as her personal way of life, to avoid reality and evade adult responsibility as represented by her dying father. “She asked him how he was, but didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, she turned her back on him to examine herself in the wall mirror.” Looking into a mirror yet not seeing yourself for what you are is a stock ironic situation in fiction. “She realized that he must be pretty sick” but she does not pay attention “because she noticed what looked like the beginning of a pimple.” When she proceeds to sing lyrics of “Jeepers Creepers” emphasizing eyes, the effect is both ironic and creepy. “Where’d you get those eyes?”
As a childish narcissist, Faye lacks the intelligence to script her roles. She depends on “vehicles” like Tod to do it for her. The tone of gothic or black humor continues as the janitress Mrs. Johnson takes over the funeral arrangements for Harry as if disposing of some trash: “She shook hands with Faye, as though she were congratulating her.” Faye “wore a hard smile” as she asks Mary Dove to get her a job working in Mrs. Jenning’s call house. She has been planning this all along and has just been waiting for her father to die: “I was saving it.” Faye inverts traditional values by saving herself for prostitution rather than for marriage--a cynical Postmodernist irony. “The change that had come over both of them startled Tod. They had suddenly become very tough.” At the end of the chapter they treat him with contempt. Both ironic names of the whore Mary Dove are iconic in Christianity, reflecting the subversive attitude toward religion common in Hollywood since the 1930s.
Tod gets drunk on the day of Harry’s funeral, preparing to confront and quarrel with Faye. “He shouted at her like a Y.M.C.A. lecturer on sex hygiene.” She runs away from him and performs her role as the grieving daughter. There are gawkers seated in the back of the chapel. “It seemed to Tod that they stared back at him with an expression of vicious, acrid boredom that trembled on the edge of violence.” They represent the frustrated masses. “When they began to mutter among themselves, he half turned and watched them out of the corner of his eyes.” Paranoia such as this is a characteristic of dark Postmodernist fiction later in the century, epitomized by Thomas Pynchon.
The carnivalesque and the socially marginal, other characteristics of Postmodernism, are expressed at Harry’s funeral by diversity that is comic in its incongruous extremes: Eskimos brought here for a picture about polar exploration who stayed because they like Hollywood, neurotic locust people from the Midwest, the obscene dwarf Honest Abe Kusich, and Bach played on an electric organ. Christian music is played but the narrative tone is mocking: “If there was a hint of a threat, he thought, just a hint, and a tiny bit of impatience, could Bach be blamed? After all, when he wrote this music, the world had already been waiting for its lover more than seventeen hundred years.”
West ends this funeral chapter in the spirit of Postmodernist black humor with Mrs. Johnson, whose hobby is funerals. Strict and inescapable, with a common name, Mrs. Johnson insists upon the reality of death as common to us all. She intimidates people into facing the fact of annihilation in the form of Harry in his coffin, while Tod, whose name means death, sneaks out.
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Faye is now playing a role in “Waterloo,” about the great defeat of Napoleon—the violent end of his dream. Influenced by the French Surrealists, West deconstructs the making of movies and modern dreams with abrupt juxtapositions of incongruous backlot sets that become increasingly absurd: Tod rests beside an ocean liner of painted canvas, crosses a desert being extended by dump trucks, passes a paper mache sphinx and a jungle with a tethered water buffalo where “an Arab charged by on a white stallion.” He pushes through the swinging doors of a saloon in a set with no back onto a street in Paris. “On a lawn of fiber, a group of men and women in riding costumes were picnicking. They were eating cardboard food in front of a cellophane waterfall.” He passes “celluloid swans” on a pond and a Greek temple containing a fallen god. He skirts the skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of Troy, a flight of baroque palace stairs, part of the Fourteenth Street elevated station, a Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimac, the corner of a Mayan temple, a vista of Venice and a charwoman on a stepladder washing the face of “a Buddha thirty feet high.”
The studio lot is a “dream dump,” analogous to the unconscious of an individual and to the collective unconscious of the country. “A Sargasso of the imagination! And the sump grew continually, for there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath and paint.” As in this production of the battle of Waterloo: “The French killed General Picton with a ball through the head and he returned to his dressing room.” West is witty, using techniques of compression, analogue and irony learned from “The Waste Land” while presenting an Atheist rebuttal to Eliot’s vision. His depth psychology is reductively materialistic—the unconscious is merely a dump—as opposed to Jung, Eliot and most other Modernists.
Ironically, the director of “Waterloo” makes the “same mistake” made by Napoleon, thinking the terrain is suitable for a cavalry charge. Hollywood dreamers never learn. Obscured by cannon smoke, the as yet unfinished set collapses under the horses in a director’s nightmare and the “whole hill folded like an enormous umbrella and covered Napoleon’s army with painted cloth.” Hollywood is rarely accurate about history: “Waterloo instead of being the end of the Grand Army, resulted in a draw.”
most readers and save his novel. The more artful the writing, the less forceful the propaganda. That is why Marxists and Feminists are intolerant of art. 20
At the Cinderella Bar, Faye treats both Homer and Tod with condescension: “Mama’ll spank… No, baby…” The floor show of female impersonators reflects the emasculation of the men. Homer twists from her “as though he already felt the ruler on his behind.” Later he “leaned away as though she were going to hit him.” Faye has further imposed on Homer by inviting her other boyfriend Miguel to live in his garage—with cages of fighting cocks—as West adds to the atmosphere of the Great Depression: “Lots of people are out of work nowadays”; “There’s a lot of unemployment going around.” Tod has vowed to get real and stop running after Faye. When she flirts with him he refuses to dance.
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Cock fighting is analogous to the fighting of the men over Faye. West’s hunting companion Faulkner had used the cock fight pun 8 years before in his story “A Justice” (1931), where the analogy is both allegorical and very humorous. West is not so funny. Like Stephen Crane he combines Naturalist themes with pretty Impressionistic imagery for darkly ironic effects: “It was one of those blue and lavender nights when the luminous color seems to have blown over the scene with an air brush. Even the darkest shadows held some purple.” Earle and Miguel look “picturesque.” West’s blending of beauty and disgust, sublimity and horror is reminiscent of Poe in literature and the Surrealists in painting.
According to the tone, the savagery of the cock fight is ugly, abusive and pathetic: “Abe, moaning softly…licked its eyes clean, then took its whole head in his mouth.” Although West sides with the Reds and portrays the red cock as noble, his view of the Reds is also expressed in the fact that the red cock—the noble cause--is being managed by an arrogant, stupid, crude, disgusting and pathetic dwarf. The red cock in the hands and mouth of Abe has no chance with the additional handicap of a cracked beak, just as Abe has no chance with Faye. In contrast to Abe the bird is “very gallant.” Earle “handled the dead cock gently and with respect,” unlike the way he treats Abe, who responds to frustration and abuse by becoming profane and abusive himself. West is the best writer after Stephen Crane at combining Realism, Naturalistic themes, Impressionistic techniques, gallant heroism (of the red cock) and irony. The unusual length and detail of the cockfight episode also makes it stand out as an allegory, as in Faulkner’s story: The fate of the red cock is a prophecy that in the coming civil war, the Reds will lose.
The word red lights up like a neon sign. During the 1930s Communists—the Reds—were prominent in show business in New York and Hollywood, as well as in journalism, publishing and universities. Patriotic and religious groups boycotted movies and picketed theaters, reducing attendance and sometimes killing a picture at its premiere. The year before West published this novel the Democratic Party established the House Committee on Un-American Activities to investigate extremist political organizations. Democrats published a report over 400 pages long exposing the Ku Klux Klan and Republicans were calling for an investigation of the influence of the international Communist Party in the government and in Hollywood.
West may have been reacting to the backlash against the Reds when in the church episode he personifies “messianic rage” in the angry Christian speaker from the Midwest. The concerns of such Christians are “economic as well as religious.’ West’s venomous contempt for Christians as a “crusading mob” expresses the sense of superiority typical of the Communists toward those who disagreed with them—likewise a characteristic of the politically correct Postmodernists. At the same time, however, in the late 20 th^ century publication of The Day of the Locust would have been unlikely due to its portrayal of a dwarf and its un- Feminist depiction of woman characters.
After the Congressional hearings exposed hundreds of Communist Party members in the movie industry, for the rest of the century liberals denied that the Communist influence was significant. On the contrary, West was there and in this novel he places the red cock on an equal footing with his adversary. The Reds were taking over the unions and guilds. The red cock only loses the battle because his bill is split like the Communist movement in the United States, between the hard core operatives of the international Communist Party bent on violent revolution and taking orders from Moscow and the thousands of their
naïve liberal supporters—the Reds called them “useful idiots”—who thought the Communists were merely idealists trying to help the poor. Although the Reds were defeated in the arena of public opinion, the red cock won in Hollywood and remains alive and well and champion to this day.
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The tone is set by a dead chicken on the carpet of the garage. The motifs of mechanical behavior and seeing others as vehicles culminates here with humans displacing automobiles. Abe the hustler and Claude the screenwriter join the party in the house. They belong together, as according to West, screenwriting reduces the character of a writer to a mental dwarf. Faye is hostess—“very much the lady”—with the top three buttons of her jacket open, exposing “a good deal of her chest.” Dressed in green—the word is repeated like the motif of green in Gatsby —Faye Greener is again seen as greener than Daisy Buchanan in being more ambitious and corrupt: “‘That’s a becoming shade of green,’ Tod said.”
Daisy is upper class and desired by two rich men. The promiscuous lower-class Faye pretends to be a lady “whenever she met a new man, especially if he were someone whose affluence was obvious.” Actually she is more like Myrtle Wilson in Gatsby : “‘Charmed to have you,’ she trilled.” As if speaking as a prostitute. “The dwarf laughed at her.” Even the dwarf, a metaphor of all that is stunted and arrested in development, is more savvy than Faye. She orders people around “with stilted condescension”…“in a voice stiff with hauteur,” like Myrtle in her Manhattan flat kept by Tom Buchanan. As hostess of a cock fight in a garage, Faye is lower than Myrtle.
West emphasizes the predictability of the behavior to follow: Abe is such a vehicle of vulgar cliches he “looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy.” Earle and Miguel “took long, wooden steps, as though they weren’t used to being in a house.” Faye’s “running her tongue over her lips…seemed to promise intimacies, yet it was really as simple and automatic as the word thanks.” Her buttocks are “like a heart upside down”—a symbol of seduction by false hopes of fulfilled desire and the upside-down values of the movies, teasing dreamers. “Faye peacocked for them all.” Tod is like the other men staring at her, but he “stood on the outer edge.” Homer irritates him with his self-pity, “resignation, kindliness, and humility.” West contrasts Tod with the lovelorn columnist Miss Lonelyhearts in his previous novel: “He had never set himself up as a healer.” Nevertheless, he finally made “an attempt to be kind.”
Homer’s big hands play the traditional child’s game “here’s the church and here the steeple,” and hid in his armpits. “It was the most complicated tic Tod had ever seen.” Tod is so upset by this obsessive compulsive ritual he explodes, “For Christ’s sake!” Homer’s compulsion to form a church and to repeat meaningless rituals is West’s metaphor of religion. “But I can’t help it, Tod. I have to do it three times”— enacting a Trinity. Tod says okay but he turns his back on Homer, as on religion. West reduces religion to a psychological disorder. Religion does not protect Homer from Nature, the siren allure of Faye, who sings the song of a vamp and identifies herself repeatedly as a “viper”—a snake in the Garden of the heart. Homer is the foolish American Adam who falls for a dream.
Tod agrees to help Homer by reporting Miguel’s chickens to the Board of Health, as if that will do any good. Homer’s dream of Faye is like being drunk and Tod resists being an enabler: “Stop calling me Toddie, for Christ sake!” Finally the best thing he can do for Homer is tell him the truth, but like the lines in Faye’s song, Homer is too high on his dream to accept that she is a viper.
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The atmosphere is the prelude to an orgy, with Tod, Earle, Abe and Claude watching Faye dance a slow tango with Miguel. “All the buttons on her lounging pajamas were open and the arm he had around her waist was inside her clothes.” Earle is next to dance with her and “When the dwarf lowered his head like a goat and tried to push between them, she reached down and tweaked his nose.” In the ensuing fight, Faye’s silk pajamas are torn, she strips to her black lace underwear and Miguel swings the dwarf by his ankles into the wall like “killing a rabbit against a tree.” Yet the goatlike Abe survives everything, tells Claude to go to hell and leaves for a whorehouse. “I’m just getting started.”
the ecstasy of fits.” The mob attacking Tod “were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment.” The old Christians have become “poor devils” who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence.” Older middle-class Americans were all miserable “slaves” to the system all their lives. “They have slaved and saved for nothing.” West’s characterization of Christians as bored and disappointed is based upon his cynical assumption that they do not really believe in their religion.
As an East Coast urbanite, West projects his own boredom and disappointment in California: “after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all.” He thinks middle-class people are stupid: “They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure.” Enjoying leisure is possible only to smart people who read books and all pleasure takes money and sexual potency. The disabled might as well be dead. West is unable to imagine that some older people might enjoy life with very little money, find Nature enjoyable for more than killing birds, attain fulfillment in a marriage or as a parent, or just enjoy playing golf.
Tod worries that he might not be able to “wake” Homer, who then appears walking somewhat like an awakened Frankenstein: “more than ever like a badly made automaton and his features were set in a rigid, mechanical grin”—“moving blindly.” Homer no longer even recognizes Tod and both are going mad— both dissociated within themselves and from reality. The child actor Adore, who thinks he is Frankenstein, acts like a monster by teasing Homer and then hitting him in the face with a rock. “Before he could scramble away, Homer landed on his back with both feet, then jumped again.” He “went on using his heels” like a fighting cock. Homer is last seen merging with the mob, pulled down into it in his symbolic role as the collective unconscious of the masses.
In the riot scene, Tod has physical experiences that enact what he has previously experienced mentally: “He became part of the opposing force”; “He fought to keep his feet on the ground”; “riding the current when it moved toward his objective”; “then gave up and let himself be swept along”; “until he thought he must collapse.” He gets kicked and when a sobbing woman hangs on to him and almost drags him down, he “kicked backward as hard as he could. The woman let go.” Now he is kicking like a fighting cock. In the midst of it all he thinks about his painting, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” By now “his mind had become almost automatic.” Art offers him no transcendence, it is merely an “escape” like the movies. No wonder he sold out.
Going nuts, he escapes from reality into imagination and thinks he is standing on a chair painting flames that are destroying “a nutberger stand.” He fears the police. “Tod had the presence of mind to give Claude’s address.” Actually, he has lost his mind. He identifies himself with the corrupt screenwriter Claude, confirming his own corruption, and ends screaming like a siren—a pun on Faye the siren. We may be sure that the police will take him to an appropriate home. The ending is Postmodernist in being (1) Atheist; (2) solipsistic; (3) insane; (4) dehumanizing; (5) pessimistic; and (6) apocalyptic.
For all his pessimistic determinism in The Day of the Locust, West’s own life contradicted his vision in the novel: He attained his American Dream in Hollywood. He lost it not because he got attacked by a mob of elderly Christians, but because of his own character. He ran a red light. Michael Hollister (2015)
