The Day of the Locust, first edition dust jacket, 1939. Larger.
The legend of easy living in the Golden State has drawn countless retirees from the Midwest, hard working men and women seeking good weather and a bit of peace and quiet. But what kind of life is that?
According to novelist Nathanael West, it's no kind of life at all, generating a boredom so profound as to produce restless and smoldering anger, palpable even when the lucky leisured attend a Hollywoodpremier.
. . . Until they reached the line, they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious. It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment.
Grauman's Chinese Theater where many Hollywood premieres take place, including "The Wizard of Oz," 1939. Larger.
All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?
Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don't know what to do with their time. . . . They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn't any ocean where most of them came from, but after you've seen one wave, you've seen them all.
Nathanael West's 1939 masterpiece, The Day of the Locust is a dark, Hollywood satire, a portrait of the California dream painted with a surrealist palate.
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