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Notes PREFACE 1. Harry Levin compared West's critical negations to the "power of blackness " that distinguished Hawthorne, Melville and Poe (in his magisterial study by the same name) during his visit to the Seminar in American Studies, Harvard University , 1987. The phrase "poet of darkness" comes from a lecture that Harold Bloom delivered at Harvard University in 1989. For an extended meditation on West as a poet of darkness in the "Miltonic-RoInantic" mode, see Harold Bloom, The Breaking ofthe Vessels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 21-25. As I said, West is often described as an apocalyptic writer. See especially Leslie Fiedler's commentary on West in his provocative account of the thirties, "The Two Memories: Reflections on Writers and Writing in the Thirties," in Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 3-25; and Donald Weber, "West, Pynchon, Mailer, and the Jeremiad Tradition," South Atlantic Quarterly 83, no. 3 (Summer 1984): 259-68. 2. West has been described as a surrealist by Edmund Wilson, "The Boys in the Back Room," reprinted in the first and still the most important collection of critical essays on West, Nathanael West: A CoUection of Critical Essays, ed. Jay Martin (Englewood Cliffs, N.].: Prentice Halll, 1971), 140; Leslie Fiedler describes him in similar terms in "The Beginning of the Thirties: Depression, Return , and Rebirth," Waiting for the End (New )brk: Dell Press, 1964), 49-50. He is briefly included among writers on the left by ])aniel Aaron in his book Writers on the Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 175,307, 432. Malamud and Heller acknowledge their indebtedness to ,~est in Lloyd Michaels, A Particular Kind ofJoking: Nathanael West and Burlesque (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1972), 27-28. Lavonne Mueller explores the relationship between Malamud and West more fully in "Malamud and West: Tyranny of the Dream Dump," Nathanael West: The Cheaters and the Cheated, ed. David Madden (Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973),221-34. John Hawkes comments on his literary predecessors in "Notes on the Wild (ioose Chase," Symposium: "Fiction Today," Massachusetts Review 3 (Summer 1962): 784-88. 3. The phrase "particular kind of joking" is actually a misquotation of the 139 140 Notes to Pages xii-xv original, which reads "private and unfunny jokes." The mistake seems to have begun with Richard Gehman, who got both the quote and the addressee of the letter wrong in his introduction to The Day ofthe Locust in 1950. The letter was sent not to George Milburn but to Edmund Wilson on 6 April, 1939. And it has been misquoted ever since. I have followed Norman Podhoretz (who used the misquoted phrase as the title of his essay on West), James F. Light, and others in their "error" because it seems to describe West's distinctive mode of apprehension better than he described it himself. The letter has been reprinted accurately in Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1970), 334. 4. As quoted in James F. Light, Nathanael West: An Interpretive Study (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 164. 5. According to Jay Martin, West was a full-time member of the Screenwriters ' Guild from the time of his arrival in California in 1933, but he became an active member upon his return in 1936. On 22 May 1939, West was elected studio chairman at Universal for the guild, and six months later he was elected to its executive board (Art of His Life, 349). West gives an interesting account of his involvement with the guild in this letter to Edmund Wilson: There is a funny situation out here now. The sound men are on strike, and the other unions, camera men etc. are evidently going out with them. We "Writers" (a funny thing out here-when anyone asks you what you are you say "Writer") have a new union and a very radical one, organized by such old "movement" men as Howard, Lawson, Ornitz, Weitzenkorn, Caesar, and practical [sic] every editor of The Call since Abraham Cahan's day. But there's no chance of our ever striking-behind the barricades we'll go willingly enough, but organized labor action never. I went to a union meeting where there was some big talk, but at the slightest bit of Producer opposition we'll fold like the tents of the Arabs. The strange thing is that almost all the members of...

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