Nathanael West

Books in the family apartment

He began as Nathan Weinstein, born in New York on October 17, 1903, to Max Weinstein and Anna Wallerstein Weinstein. His Lithuanian-Jewish father built apartment houses, providing the family with a comfortable place in the city. The boy’s most memorable domestic arrangement, however, concerned the doorway to his own bedroom. He trained his bull terrier to guard it while he read Dickens, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. A room protected from interruption mattered to him long before he had a hotel at his disposal.

The books suggest an education pursued on his own terms. School offered a less satisfactory fit. He left DeWitt Clinton High School without graduating; at summer camp he acquired the nickname “Pep,” which followed him into the recollections of friends. The reading boy and the troublesome student were the same person. Literary appetite did not translate into a conventional academic record, and his eventual arrival at Brown University depended on a piece of paperwork that belonged to someone else.

A borrowed transcript, lasting friends

After attending Tufts, he transferred to Brown using another Nathan Weinstein’s transcript. It was an audacious way of exploiting a shared name. At Brown he formed two of the friendships that would later give the Kenmore Hall its particular character: with S. J. “Sid” Perelman and with Quentin Reynolds. The Perelman papers at the New York Public Library preserve a copy of the 1924 Brown yearbook, with the young writer appearing under the elaborate name Nathaniel von Wallenstein Weinstein.

Perelman supplied a Goethe bookplate for his friend’s library, an apt gift for someone so intent on books. He would also marry West’s sister Laura, making the friendship a family connection. Reynolds’s bond with West had its own comic adventures. West helped save him from expulsion for bootlegging and wrote his Class Day speech, introducing the figure of St. Puce into a university occasion. The future novelist could already turn an institution’s ceremonies and rules into material for a joke.

These college friendships help explain the later hotel story. Perelman and Reynolds did not first appear at the Kenmore as literary names on a guest list; they had known its night manager before he called himself Nathanael West. Their history included books, evasions, favors, and shared amusement. When the friends gathered again on East 23rd Street, West was able to offer something less ephemeral than a clever speech: rooms in which people could stay and work.

Nathanael West goes to Paris

In October 1926, Nathan Weinstein legally became Nathanael West. The change preceded his departure for Paris, where he grew a beard and lived in Montparnasse. After the borrowed transcript and the expansive name printed in his yearbook, this was an identity that would last. He took it with him into a literary life whose practical shape was still unsettled. There was no successful book behind the new name, and no certainty that writing would provide an income.

In Paris he worked on “The Impostor.” The title sits neatly beside the stories of his earlier reinventions, though it would be too simple to treat every fictional impostor as a confession. West was making literature, experimenting with what a story could do. The freedom to pursue it abroad depended on money from home. Montparnasse might offer the setting for a young American writer’s apprenticeship, but it could not insulate him from the state of his father’s business.

Thirty-five dollars and a room

The summons came in January 1927. Max Weinstein’s construction business was foundering, and West returned to New York. The reversal brought the material conditions of authorship into sharp focus. Someone who had been able to go to Paris now needed a job. Apartment building had supported the family; a different kind of building, with rooms let to temporary residents, would support the son. At the Kenmore Hall Hotel on East 23rd Street, he became the night manager.

The salary was thirty-five dollars a week, with room and board included. Those details matter because they explain how the arrangement worked for an unpublished novelist. West did not have to earn his rent from fiction before he could write it. The hotel supplied lodging and meals, while the quiet periods overnight left room for reading and composition. At 145 East 23rd Street, close to the older literary addresses around Gramercy and Irving Place, he found a daily routine into which a writing life could fit.

Five hundred volumes after hours

West brought a serious reader’s resources to the Kenmore: a library of about five hundred volumes. During the quiet overnight hours he read and worked on The Dream Life of Balso Snell, the strange, satirical book that would become his first published novel in 1931. Its composition belonged to the hotel years even though its publication came afterward. The desk job provided a framework for work that had little in common with the orderly transactions expected of a hotel manager.

The Kenmore also became a meeting place. Perelman and Reynolds were joined by the poet and novelist Maxwell Bodenheim, and West’s workplace acquired the sociability of a clubhouse. For these writers, literary conversation could take place in the premises where a friend earned his living. The setting was less formal than a club dining room and less private than an apartment salon. It depended on West’s presence and on his willingness to make the hotel useful to the people he knew.

A suite for Hammett

The most memorable beneficiary was Dashiell Hammett. After an eviction, he needed lodging while completing The Maltese Falcon. West gave him the hotel’s best suite and concealed his identity behind “T. Victrola Blueberry,” a name with more comic flourish than discretion. A bottle of bootleg gin completed the hospitality. The anecdote has survived because the alias is irresistible, but its substance is straightforward: one writer had access to a room, and another writer needed it.

There is a useful distinction between what West supplied and what Hammett accomplished. West did not write his guest’s novel, and the Kenmore was not a literary institution with a program or an endowment. Its contribution was immediate and domestic. Hammett could stay there and finish his work. In a neighborhood remembered for imposing houses and celebrated hosts, this small act of shelter deserves its place beside the grander occasions. The night manager’s authority, exercised generously, bought another writer some time.

Dinner with an advice columnist

An invitation took West and Perelman from the Kenmore office to dinner with a Brooklyn Eagle advice columnist who wrote as “Susan Chester.” She showed them letters from readers asking for help. Their distress became the starting point for Miss Lonelyhearts, a book on which West would work for four years. An encounter outside the hotel had given him a subject that would outlast the job: the suffering delivered to a stranger through the ordinary machinery of a newspaper.

The circumstances carried an uncomfortable mismatch. An advice column promised a response in a few inches of type; the people writing to it brought troubles that could not be made manageable so easily. West’s novel would explore that gap through its fictional columnist. The letters offered more than curious copy or a collection of eccentric voices. They confronted a writer accustomed to absurdity with human need, and made the act of answering—seriously, glibly, or not at all—the center of a story.

Hospitality in the Depression

Late in 1930, West moved uptown to manage the Sutton Club Hotel on East 56th Street. The work on Miss Lonelyhearts continued as the Depression deepened. Hotel life exposed him to distress outside the pages of a letter, including suicides. His fiction’s darkness should not be reduced to a list of incidents, but the circumstances in which he wrote it were far from abstract. He was earning his living in places where people’s private difficulties could become a manager’s immediate concern.

He continued to provide lodging for writers. Perelman, Lillian Hellman, Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, and Hammett belonged to the Sutton circle. Hellman was working toward The Children’s Hour; Hammett’s work included The Thin Man. The pattern established at the Kenmore persisted at another address: West used a hotel to support literary work, including his own. By the time Miss Lonelyhearts appeared in 1933, its author had spent years combining composition with paid duties and hospitality. Publication ought to have opened a more secure interval.

The publisher fails

The reviews of Miss Lonelyhearts were enthusiastic. The timing of its publication was disastrous. In the spring of 1933, the Liveright publishing house went bankrupt, and the printer impounded the books. Favorable notices could not help readers buy copies that were unavailable. For a writer who had spent four years bringing the novel into shape, the failure was brutally practical. The book could be admired and still fail to provide the income or readership that might have followed a successful launch.

West’s experience makes the familiar phrase “critical success” sound especially incomplete. A review, however perceptive, is not a royalty payment, and a reputation requires books to reach readers. The hotel years had already taught him how closely writing depended on material arrangements. Now a publisher’s collapse interrupted the passage from manuscript to audience. He continued to write, but earning a living remained a separate problem. Hollywood offered another way to be paid for words.

Studio work and a novel of his own

By 1936, West was in Hollywood writing low-budget scripts for Republic Pictures. It was professional work inside a business with its own demands, quite different from the solitary labor of a novel. He also found literary company at the Stanley Rose Bookshop, a gathering place associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker. Once again, a commercial address supplied a setting for writers’ friendships. The bookshop was neither a hotel nor a studio, but it offered a place where the writing life could be discussed among people living it.

Alongside his screenwriting, West worked on The Day of the Locust, published in 1939. Hollywood gave him the setting for a novel whose vision extended beyond the production of movies to the desires and disappointments surrounding them. The author of Miss Lonelyhearts had moved from the newspaper’s promise of advice to the screen’s promise of fulfillment. These were different worlds, but each offered a public language of hope against which private unhappiness could register with terrible force. The studio salary sustained the writer; the novel remained his own.

West and Eileen McKenney

In April 1940, West married Eileen McKenney. Readers already knew a literary version of her through her sister Ruth McKenney’s My Sister Eileen. The marriage joined two people whose lives had entered print in very different ways: his through the fiction he composed, hers through another writer’s affectionate and comic accounts. They had less than a year together as husband and wife. On December 22, 1940, both died in a car crash near El Centro, California. West was thirty-seven.

F. Scott Fitzgerald had died the day before. The closeness of the dates has bound the two writers’ endings together in literary memory, but it should not obscure Eileen’s place in the loss. Two lives ended in the collision. West’s books were left to find the larger audience that had eluded him, without their author present to see it. His career had produced a small body of fiction under difficult conditions, with years of hotel and studio work around it.

A later room beside the Park

The publication of The Complete Works of Nathanael West in 1957 helped bring that body of fiction before a new generation of readers. Collected together, the books could be considered beyond the accidents of their original publication. The printer’s impounded copies of Miss Lonelyhearts no longer determined its prospects. West’s reputation grew after his death, as readers discovered how much his brief novels contained and how resistant their troubling humor was to the passage of time.

There was also a later return to this neighborhood, though it was Perelman’s. From 1972 to 1979, West’s old Brown friend and brother-in-law lived at the Gramercy Park Hotel at 2 Lexington Avenue. It was a different establishment from the Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street, and West had been dead for more than thirty years. Yet Perelman’s address brings the story back within a short walk of the place where the two had gathered as young men. The friend who once visited the night manager had become a hotel resident beside the Park.