Western Union Boy

Nathanael West (1903–1940)
From Nathanael West: Novels & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“Nathanael West as online muse” (Reader’s Almanac)

“Nathanael West: Funny, but desperately sad” (Martin Chilton, The Telegraph)

Previous Story of the Week selection by Nathanael West
“Business Deal”

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Nathanael West: Novels & Other Writings
The Dream Life of Balso Snell • Miss Lonelyhearts • A Cool Million • The Day of the Locust • screenplays and correspondence • 829 pages
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A group of Western Union messenger boys in Norfolk, Virginia, June 1911. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940). Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine documented working and living conditions of children in the United States between 1908 and 1924. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

As a teenager, Nathan Weinstein spent school vacations at Camp Paradox, a Jewish summer camp in the Adirondacks. The camp placed a strong emphasis on sports and games and, like many bookish adolescents, Nathan was unable to measure up to the prowess of his peers—particularly that of his athletic cousins. When the boys climbed nearby Mount Marcy, Nathan spent the entire following day asleep in bed, which earned him the nickname “Pep.” He did find some pleasure working on the camp magazine, for which he eventually served as art editor and satirized camp activities in sketches and cartoons, signing them Nathan “Pep” Weinstein.

In 1926, when Weinstein began to work on his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, he legally changed his name to Nathanael West. (Years later, William Carlos Williams asked, “How did you get that name?” and West answered, “Horace Greeley said, ‘Go West, young man.’ So I did.”) One can change a name, but it’s harder to forget the past. Biographer Jay Martin notes that West’s summer camp experiences “so haunted his imagination that eventually, a decade later, he would attempt to free himself from the bitterness it left by writing a story called ‘Western Union Boy.’” The tale turns around the bumbling failure of its protagonist at a pivotal point of a baseball game—and, on several occasions, West had described to a number of friends a similarly embarrassing incident from his own past. How much of the story is autobiographical is unclear, however, since (as Martin avers), “West was the first writer to discover, or at least the first to dramatize in vivid fictions, the psychological fact that once a fantasy is perfected, it may be lived over and over in further fantasies precisely as if it had been a real experience.”

West completed “Western Union Boy” sometime in the early 1930s, while he was working on his novel Miss Lonelyhearts, but—like his other stories written at the time—he was unable to sell it. It was never published during his lifetime, and the story appears in the Library of America edition of his collected works. We are pleased to present it here exclusively—for a limited time—as our Story of the Week selection.

Note: The Traction Interests, mentioned at the end of the story, was a term often used for the trolley and bus companies and mass transit authorities, which in the early twentieth century were often assailed in the press for corruption and strong-arm tactics.

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If you're not very busy, a grown man in the uniform of a Western Union boy should make you feel a little sick. . . . This story is no longer available. Read other recent selections from Story of the Week.

Business Deal

Nathanael West (1903–1940)
From Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings

Interesting Link
“Funny as a Crutch,” a review of the writings of Nathanael West (Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Review of Books)

Buy the book
Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings
The Dream Life of Balso Snell • Miss Lonelyhearts • A Cool Million • The Day of the Locusts • more

With the recent release of Marion Meade’s Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, the writings of Nathanael West are being rediscovered yet again. As Elizabeth Hardwick noted seven years ago: “Biographical and critical studies appear, important reviews, if not in a flood, an impressive stream of recognition. And yet, it is the practice of critics to lament the neglect of Nathanael West, despite the daunting accumulation.”

Although the “impressive stream of recognition” flows primarily from the strength of his novels (Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust), it was West’s work for the screen that paid the bills. By the end of 1934, the cumulative royalties for his first three books totaled $780; he made far more selling the movie rights for his largely unread fictional works, and he pulled in $7,500 for a film treatment (“Flight South”) that was never even produced. Yet he initially found his day job taxing; shortly after he started his screenwriting gig with Columbia Pictures in 1933, he wrote to a friend: “This stuff about easy work is all wrong. My hours are from ten in the morning to six at night with a full day on Saturday. They gave me a job to do five minutes after I sat down in my office—a scenario about a beauty parlor—and I am expected to turn out pages and pages a day.”

The same year he began his job at Columbia, he wrote “Business Deal” for the short-lived magazine Americana, which featured satirical works by the likes of James Thurber, E. E. Cummings, William Steig, and José Clemente Orozco. Included in a special Hollywood issue of writers “at present exiled in the Athens of the West,” the story shows the influence of S. J. Perelman’s earlier short piece “Miss Klingspiel Takes Dictation.” West’s spoof portrays a tenderfoot’s already-jaded weariness of the movie business—although his literary biographer Jay Martin remarks that its author “would go far deeper into the Hollywood dream than this.”

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For an hour after his barber left him, Mr. Eugene Klingspiel, West Coast head of Gargantual Pictures, worked ceaselessly. First he read The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and The Film Daily. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click the right button at the top of the reader to view the story in Google Docs or click here (PDF) to read it—free!

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