This article was written by Jim Tejani
El Centro, California lies sixty miles inside the Arizona border in Imperial County. This formidably-named milieu can pass all but unnoticed astride the whir of Interstate-8. It stands a paradox - a place where agriculture impugns the harsh realities of the desert, where pastoral farmlands defy the ever-expansive urban center to the west, where past and present remain eerily coalesced.
El Centro marks not "the center" but rather the fringe of Southern California, making it a true point of entry into the world of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. And oddly, it was here among the convolution of El Centro, on the edge of his literary wasteland, where a 1940 automobile accident cut short West's magnificent genius. But like the world his work immortalized, Nathanael West has never held beyond the reach of contradiction. West's life and legacy have continued to weave with a thread of bitter irony.
While many closely associate The Day of the Locust with California in general and Hollywood in particular, West was neither a native of the region nor claimed the Golden State as home for very long. In fact, the author found Los Angeles quite unwittingly and only by the cynosure of early failure. Born Nathan Weinstein in 1903 to a prominent Jewish-immigrant family, West (he would adopt the anglicized pen name in 1926) grew up amid the ethnic and intellectual ferment of early-century New York. A disinterested if not lazy student, West won admission, by means of questionable scruple, to Tufts University and eventually to Brown, where he fell into a circle of aspiring young writers. After a several-year stay among the bohemia and avant-garde of "Lost Generation" Paris, West began work on his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell. The book's commercial and critical demise (it sold only five hundred copies) did little to stifle West's ambition, and the writer plunged immediately into a second, more promising work.
Advertisement:
