The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West could really write. His first novel Miss Lonely Hears was not great. Some printings pair it with his last novel which aside from both being short.. having nothing in common. Most of his output was in the form of screen plays, and if it didn't lend a visual quality to his prose then the inverse must be true.

The Day of the Locust was his most autobiographical work and it shows. Sadly his screen plays mostly became B-movies while his fiction became classics.

"Earle caught the birds one at a time and pulled their heads off before dropping them into his sacks. Then he started back. As he walked along, he held the sack under his left arm. he lifted the birds out with his right hand and plucked them one at a time. Their feathers fell to the ground, point first, weighted down by the tiny drop of blood that trembled on the tips of their quills."

Mezz Mezzrow

The best works suspend disbelief just as film can. Much of that is language, the new-age types will call it "the authentic voice" in other words: to write honestly and in the language you speak. Mezz was a man who genuinely wanted to be black. He was born Jewish but was madly in love with Hot Jazz, and the people that created it played it and the culture that surrounded it. In the early 1940s he wrote a book about early jazz music, and all in the slang of the era. For him it was a life of poverty, crime, incarceration, and mad, mad love for music.

He writes pages upon pages to describe performances. I'll quote a long passage that exudes his adoration:

"He started to blow his chorus, tearing his heart out, and the tones that came vibrating out of those poor agonized lips of his sounded like a weary soul plodding down the lonesome road, the weight of the world's woe on his bent shoulders, crying for relief to all his people. He was fighting all the way, aiming to see it through and to be understood by all, right down to the last heartrending wail of his plea. All the lament and heartache of life, of the colored man's life, came throbbing out through that horn. That wasn't any horn blowing that night. It was the conscience of the whole aching world, shouting damnation at sins and evil...
...Louis began that tortuous climb up to high F, the notes all agonized and strangled, each one dripping blood. He was like the prodigal son who finally sights his home, sick and weary of a lifetime or roaming, determined to get back there before his heart stops beating. He was fighting and sweating blood all the way, and what came out of his horn sounded less like music than the terrible wild shrieking of the lost and damned...
...And then, with the last breath of life left in him, like a man in death convulsions, heaving with his heart and soul lacerated guts for the last time, Louis clutched and crawled and made that high F on his hands and knees, just barely made it, at the last nerve-slashing second. A shock and a shiver ran through the theater. The whole house shuddered, then rocked with applause. Louis stood there holding his horn and panting, his mangled lip oozing blood that he licked away, and he managed a bow and smile again, making pretty for the people."