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ALIVE INSIDE THE WRECK Preface Nathanael West worried over America: its landscape, its people,
its future, its art. During the whole of the 1930s when West published his four short novels, The Dream
Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934), and The Day of the
Locust (1939), there was plenty to worry about. America collapsed. America caved in.
Europe was in step. Yet what interested West most was how to fashion himself into a great American
writer, in essence, how to write The Great American Novel. As is noted in his own words, he settled finally
on two ingredients: violence and brevity. “You only have time to explode,”
he said. And he did.
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ALIVE INSIDE THE WRECK
The
Accident
The accident happened at five minutes to three, two days before
Christmas—December 22, 1940. Rain puddles stood in the dips of the road from a morning storm.
Broken thunderclouds lingered over the flat California desert. Nathanael West was on his way home. The Woody station wagon held West’s new wife Eileen and their liver-colored
pointer, Julie. Like the paper said, as he crossed the intersection where Route 111 runs into Interstate
80 West and Eileen collided with the Dowless family—a husband and wife and two-year old daughter. West
was traveling north out of Mexico after a weekend hunting trip. His car was full of dead quail and duck,
the legal limit—four shotguns rattled loose in the back seat. West should have stopped at that intersection
and turned left, but he didn’t. A notoriously bad driver, West was easily distracted by conversation
and daydream. After the accident, many of West’s friends recalled numerous near misses on the open
road. One friend spoke about narrowly missing a group of school children crossing a street—another
mentioned a wrong turn that ended with the car precariously dangling over the edge of a bridge. The police report
filed that afternoon recorded four feet of tire skid into the intersection—so West must have realized what was coming.
The collision spun the Woody around unlatching all four doors. Eileen flew out of the passenger
door—resting in the drainage ditch at the side of the road. West landed on the other side of the
road. The dog was injured, but fine. “The dog was cut with
glass in a number of places…and was running around attempting to get back into the station wagon.” More
than forty feet east of the Wests and clinging to the road from the bottom of the ditch was the Dowless’ white Pontiac.
Mrs. Dowless suffered a broken leg and a shattered pelvis. Mr. Dowless severed an artery in his
left arm. But the little girl, the Dowless’ daughter, was fine. The girl and the
dog were fine. The Dowless family would survive. It’s known from the police report
and the single journalist at the scene that after the initial squeal and skirr of the crash everyone was still alive inside
the wreck, for a time. In the newspaper photo, steam rises up out of the torn engines, gasoline drips,
oil and water pool on the road. There is a suggestion in the photograph of a hard afternoon wind pushing
sand across the desert, small funnels of dust in the distance. The first house east of the intersection
phoned the accident into the county sheriff’s office. It took over 30 minutes for a single patrol
car to arrive from Calexico. It took another half-hour for an ambulance to come, without a doctor.
The Imperial County Hospital was just three miles away from the scene of the accident, but in this case close proximity
wasn’t the same thing as good luck. No bystander acted, either. Even after making
it to Imperial County Hospital there was trouble. The hospital was hardly equipped to save lives—bring
people back from the dead. It was meant to bandage migrant field workers and get them back on the job. With
West it’s always best to start with the wreckage and work your way backward. It’s best to move
quickly through the early promise, the idyllic youth, and into the complications that followed—his walk through college
into manhood, how and why he returned to Hollywood again and again to write for the movies, how the withdrawn Easterner becomes
the artist, the novel writer. Paris, too. The novels. The final masterpiece
outlined, but never finished. The farm in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. Suffering the cheap
apartments off Sunset Boulevard. The last house. The last weekend spent hunting across
the border in Mexico. The Leon d’Oro, Mexicali. Alvarez, the man who owned the
Leon d’Oro, who commanded West come to Mexico in December because the hunting was good. Alvarez was
the man who told West the storm would pass. It would not.
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