Calvinist Humor in American Literature

8. Nathanael West: “Gloriously Funny”

8 Nathanael West “Gloriously Funny” In Nathanael West’s play Good Hunting, Brigadier General Hargreaves says to Captain Stuart Steward Kilbrecht, the Laird of Ladore, “You carry your Calvinism too far, really” (502),1 thereby testifying at least to the author’s familiarity with the subject I have been discussing in this book. Admittedly, it is surprising that a writer born with the name Nathaniel von Wallenstein Weinstein should be proposed as an advocate of the literary mode that I have been calling Calvinist humor. However, as we have seen, Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol F. Singley maintain in The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era that “Catholic, Jewish, and African American writers . . . although not in direct lineage from the Puritans, engage Calvinism through their experience as Americans” (xiii).2 In this view, the writer who eventually became Nathanael West is as likely to share a Calvinist perspective on human experience as a writer raised in an environment drenched in Presbyterian orthodoxy—just because both grew up in America. Surely, this perception is accurate. As an American of his time and place, West would be in the position of understanding the Genesis story on which Calvin’s philosophy is based simply by joining the narrative toward its traditional close. To West, it doesn’t really matter how human beings got into the position of being fallen; all that matters is that they seem decidedly to be fallen from some putatively superior state. West’s secular Calvinism is evident, for example, in John M. Brand’s sour reflection that for West “[f]allen history is so repetitive that the experience of Adam, Cain and Babel recurs in the select society, that very society summoned to counter the effects of the Fall by 45 46 CALVINIST HUMOR IN AMERICAN LITERATURE reenacting the original obedience and dominion of Adam” (6). In Brand’s view—and in the view of most of West’s critics—no religious affiliation is required on West’s part to find most people’s experience pathetic and laughable most of the time. Just as Hawthorne and Melville were moved to Calvinist humor by their transcendental contemporaries’ assumptions that life could be different from what it “undeniably” was, so West was driven to Calvinist humor by his dissent from his own contemporaries’ comparable assumptions about life in America during the 930s. With thinkers ranging from those who believed—with Horatio Alger—that life could be converted through positive thinking and acting into an unbroken string of material successes,3 to those who believed—with the American Marxists—that an economic conspiracy was preventing the average Joe from attaining material comfort, West’s America was rife with believers of all sorts. Since West was not himself a believer of any sort, the assumptions of these Americans about economics, sex, the movies, and other popular topics seemed to him as wrongheaded and laughable as the actions of Melville’s fools and Faulkner’s southerners.4 West’s fictional characters, that is to say, became the targets of his Calvinist humor. “There is,” as Jonathan Veitch argues, “no Heavenly City in West’s fiction unless one counts the thwarted, utopian aspirations that lie buried in the cheap artifacts of mass culture . . .” (xiv). At the same time that all supernatural answers must be rejected according to West’s sense of secular rationality, there apparently remains on the part of many Americans a decided longing for some sort of universal solution, even if it cannot be exactly figured as a “Heavenly City.” Veitch also maintains that West’s character Miss Lonelyhearts “can do little but mourn this [secular] state of affairs and hanker after a now bygone Puritan ‘Age of Faith’” (82). It would finally seem that Miss Lonelyhearts resembles his artistic creator in this respect. As Leslie Fiedler explains, in Love and Death in the American Novel, West is like Franz Kafka in the sense that their fictions are “as uncompromisingly secular as they are profoundly religious” (486–87). When reading West’s work, we are therefore in the anomalous situation of watching a devoutly secular writer make Calvinist jokes about characters who are often as secular as he is. West’s path to this aggressive irreligion is easily tracked, but the consequences remain puzzling. As T. R. Steiner explains, West “began early to drift away from what little ethnic heritage he had . . . because of the...