Miss Lonelyhearts 
by 

Nathanael West

 

Choosing Your Poison

A story of relentless, universal, even cosmic failure. Every character is a failure: as writer, poet, husband, wife, journalist, and most importantly, follower of Jesus Christ. All are "stamped with the dough of suffering," demonstrate a sort of extreme frustration-neurosis, and are demoralised. Failure provokes cruelty and hatefulness: men dislike each other; men despise women, and gay men only slightly less; women manipulate men when they can; they ignore them when they can't. The world is essentially mad:

"You are plunging into a world of misery and suffering, peopled by creatures who are strangers to everything but disease and policemen. Harried by one, they are hurried by the other..."

The letters-to-the-editor, largely illiterate, describing the personal misery and failures of the public at large pour on to the desk of the advice columnist, Miss Lonelyhearts. He often feels compelled to recommend suicide as the only effective remedy for the pain that is recounted to him. And not just to reduce their pain: "Christ may be the answer," he says, "but if he did not want to get sick he had to stay away from this Christ business." Christ had become "merely decorative" not only in the protagonist's shabby room, where the human figure had been removed from his cross, but also in society at large.

Violence by the stronger against the weaker is normal and expected. The slightest mis-step or ill-considered phrase results in rage and instant retaliation. Prohibition, the Great Experiment, is in force but unenforced; alcohol is the universal drug of choice to dull the tedium of life. Oblivion is the normal state of being for the protagonist. Social contracts from marriage to employment are meaningless formalities and breached in spirit if not in fact. The daily headlines testify to the general barbarity of existence. Racism and suspicion - of blacks, Jews, foreigners - is typical in everyday encounters.

What are the alternatives? Back to the land is a boor. Escape to the South Seas is a worn-out cliche. Hedonism is too expensive. Art is an illusion. Treating the world as a joke is generally what the world does but Miss Lonelyhearts simply can't do that. Shrike, his editor, suggests the only available path, "The church is our only hope, the First Church of Christ Dentist, where He is worshiped as Preventer of Decay."

One has to remind oneself repeatedly while reading it that Miss Lonelyhearts was written in 1933. Nothing about it is dated. It anticipates the culture of sex, drugs, social disintegration and national narcissism that was only temporarily interrupted by WWII but that re-emerged with force in the 1960's and thereafter. Miss Lonelyhearts could easily be mistaken for the novelistic manifesto of existentialism. 'Suicide is always a live option' is a theme presented persistently a decade before Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, and two decades before its translation hit New York City.

That West was able to detect the more fundamental deterioration occurring below the more apparent economic ills of the Great Depression is remarkable. His perception is poetic:

"Americans have dissipated their radical energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians. And they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them."

And not even if Christ gets back on his cross does it make any difference to the fate of anyone involved.