Nathaniel West
Miss Lonelyhearts
[Miss Lonelyhearts] was a short read. It is only 58 pages long in the edition that I read. It starts by presenting the newspaper advice columnist, male, though he writes as Miss L., and then shows three letters that came from readers of the newspaper. The problems in the letters are not about how to find a boyfriend, or any other relatively minor issue, but instead are about problems that seem overwhelming, for example, a woman who has borne 7 children and is pregnant again, though it may kill her, and can't get an abortion because she is Catholic.
The other main character in the novel is the newspaper editor who seems to be a jaded, cynical sort of person - to me he seemed to bear a resemblance to the murdering judge in [Blood Meridian] but without the murdering - whose favorite occupation seems to be ridicule of Miss Lonelyhearts and callous advice as to what he should say to the readers.
In a way Miss Lonelyhearts could be seen as one individual's answer to the question of: what do I do faced with all the suffering of the world?
This, of course, is a question we are all faced with all the time, because we know so much more about it, earthquakes in Haiti, the tidal waves that killed millions, Katrina. To make it harder, we also know that many attempts to help have not actually helped - one example, supplying food aid from U.S. farmers has sometimes undermined local farmers, leaving a country with less food producing resources at the end of the crisis. We may give to Save the Children or some other organization and still worry that we aren't really improving anything. I wonder sometimes how that changes us from a time when perhaps we only knew of the sorrows of a village, and even events in another part of the country were only known by word of mouth, or a newspaper report after the fact. We don't want to be callous, to shut ourselves off from suffering by not feeling (as the editor does), and yet, we weren't meant either to be so involved with suffering as to be able to do nothing else.
Towards the end of Schindler's list Schindler is speaking to people in his factory of people he has saved from concentration camps and he is saying that he could have/should have done more - I don't remember exactly, but he takes off a ring, I think, and says, I should have sold it, it would have saved two more. And, how about us. There are millions of children who don't have enough to eat, who die from hunger and other resources which are small on the scale of what we consume every day. Yet, we are all meant for happiness (at least according to Pierre in [War and Peace]) and we need a life that includes something beyond bare necessity, small pleasures and luxuries, and just enjoyment of our day to day lives. So what do we do?
One response would be to deny what I said in the last two sentences and to deny ourselves those things and to devote ourselves totally to overcoming the suffering. There are people like Mother Theresa whose vocation is to do this. I respect this choice, but I can't do it. Nor, does Miss Lonelyhearts.
All Miss L. really has to do is pick out a few letters each day and respond to them the best that he can. The book never shows an actual response to one of the letters. This is one approach to what is overwhelming, take it one piece at a time and do what you can. This is closest to the approach I take, and probably a lot of other people. The logic for choosing what is my piece of the world is fuzzy - pick one kid and sponsor them, help someone who has happened into your knowledge, pick one project or one charity to support. It is an uneasy solution because there is so much more that is ignored, and it feels like little in a sea of suffering.
In Miss L., early on, he says that Christ is the answer - though it is not an answer he allows himself in his column - and, it seems to me, that the approach that he wants to take is a spiritual communion with all the suffering.
At one point he is reading Doestoevsky, a passage about loving all of God's creation, and, if you do, you will perceive the divine mystery in things and come to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. He thinks, "It was excellent advice. If he followed it, he would be a big success. His column would be syndicated and the whole world would learn to love. The Kingdom of Heaven would arrive. He would sit on the right hand of the Lamb."
His response to not being able to achieve this is to be a total jerk, who treats his fiance and other people cruelly. When he dreams he tries to lead the audience in prayer, but found himself saying the jaded prayer of Shrike (the jaded editor). This seems to me like he strives for a grand solution, and that in his disappointment he descends into cynicism and cruelty. At one point he is twisting the arm of an old man, trying to get him to tell his life story, "He was twisting the arm of all the sick and miserable, broken and betrayed, inarticulate and impotent. He was twisting the arm of Desperate, Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, ...."
All in all, it was a pretty strange book, and I'm not sure how seriously to take it. It definitely wasn't what I was expecting, which was a book about someone who genuinely tried to respond to the hurt in the letters and got overwhelmed. That might be the case, but it seemed to leave out the beginning when he tried to respond, and go directly to when he was overwhelmed, so it was hard to feel any genuineness in his emotions. Still it was interesting to read, and there is something that resonates in it (basically all that I discussed above).