Shagpoke

 If there's a greatest novel of the 1930s prophesying the rise of a future fascist dictatorship in America, it would have to be Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935). But Nathanael West's A Cool Million (1934) also deserves another look. Perhaps unexpectedly, it covers some of the same ground. And because it is steeped in West's mordant view of the world—even darker than Lewis's, for all that the latter is celebrated as a great satirist—it provides an even more acidic warning about our nation's future. 

I didn't come to A Cool Million expecting it to be a commentary on fascism, let alone a dystopian prophecy. I didn't really know what it would be at all. I picked it up because of the fame of the author; because I read Miss Lonelyhearts years ago and it made a great impression on me; and because it happened to share a slim volume with the author's first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Ah, I thought—here's a chance to kill two birds with one stone, all in the same weekend. 

The two works, though, are profoundly different. They share West's caustically sardonic vision of humanity, to be sure; and they are both marvels of compactness. West explains his method indirectly, through a character in Balso Snell: " I found it necessary to shorten my long outpourings; to make them, by straining my imagination, spectacular." This is indeed a valid description of what he is doing. The preference for the succinct, compressed, and outré runs through all three West books I've read. 

Both books also deploy West's perfect ear for stylistic parody; yet, the content they choose to mimic is quite different. Balso Snell is a literary collage of half-completed, half-abandoned literary detritus, emanating from different half-baked characters that the titular protagonist encounters as he wanders the entrails of the mythic Trojan horse. The genres it parodies range from the Russian existentialist novel to the bittersweet tragedies of the vie Bohème to the romantic expostulations of the Cavalier poets. 

To the extent that a theme unites these elements, it is that art is best explained either as a kind of gastric waste product (the idea of art as excrement runs throughout several of the book's barely-connected episodes), or as an elaborate form of sexual selection (viz. West's reflection upon the need for birds of very little plumage to find a way to manifest "internal feathers"). I found both ideas amusing enough—and West's inventiveness in varying the stale formulas of épater les bourgeois is great fun. 

They also appear to have been effective enough that they managed to épater Harold Bloom; and anything that can appall Harold Bloom as an affront to life and art wins my seal of approval. One wouldn't think that the vision of a load of feces being dropped on the head of culturally ambitious theater-goers would still pack that great of a punch, after decades of Dada; but apparently it did—and therefore, my chapeau has to go off to West for managing to come across as a wrecker of Western civilization. 

A Cool Million, as I say, works in a similar vein of literary parody—but it selects quite different genres for its targets. The whole novel is written in the style of a boy's adventure story, with a mixture of elements from Horatio Alger's "rags-to-riches" fantasies and early twentieth-century pulp fiction—complete with offensive racial and ethnic stereotypes from the era and other stock characters drawn from the pulps and 19th century romances (the hero; the love interest; the town bully; the good-hearted rich man, etc.)

West manages to turn these elements into a Candide-style satire on the vices of humanity. His plucky young Horatio Alger protagonist serves the same role as Voltaire's optimistic title character, as he enters the world with an uncomplicated view of the United States as a great "land of opportunity," only to have it be gradually disabused by the cruelty and injustice of the world around him. If A Cool Million were merely another entry in the vein of satires of innocence, it would already be successful. 

But the book is also more than that—it is a satire of American politics and the dangers at the heart of the American national ideology. For the protagonist's mentor, who teaches him the ideology of "opportunity" and "hard work," before sending him out into the world (serving the same role in the novel as Voltaire's Pangloss), is also a former American president—a local resident named Shagpoke who runs a bank, and who seems to embody the frontier ideals of the nation—only to evolve into something much darker. 

When West's hero first meets Shagpoke, the latter has retired from a successful career in politics to run a prosperous local bank. He gives the protagonist his first loan to get him started in the world, as well as a pocketful of advice and encouragement. America is the great land of opportunity, he tells our hero—and no young lad can go astray there so long as he approaches life with pluck and determination. He assures the protagonist that he will be rich enough by the end of our tale to save the family farm. 

Yet, in a very un-Alger-like development, Shagpoke's own bank fails shortly thereafter. The former president and log-cabin mythic archetype of the nation finds himself suddenly cast out on the street in the midst of the Great Depression (still raging when West published his novel). Shagpoke's ideology of "opportunity" and "fair play" becomes steadily warped, under these testing conditions. He decides that it must be the "Jewish bankers" and "communists" who are to blame for his circumstances. 

Shagpoke therefore evolves an elaborate conspiratorial ideology blaming foreigners, Jews, communists, Catholics, and labor unions for the failure of his Horatio Alger ideology to hold up under experience. He rejects his former Democratic Party as "socialistic"; he attacks Wall Street, yet seeks to separate out the "parasitical" capitalists of finance from the "good" capitalists, citing Henry Ford as his leading example. He rejects the class war, calling for a war of the nation against its "enemies." 

In short, Shagpoke becomes a fascist. He even issues a uniform for the crew of recruits he amasses, putting them all in the leather-and-denim ensemble, complete with "squirrel gun" and "coonskin cap," of the nation's frontier archetypes. He dubs his army of the disaffected the "Leather Shirts." And he turns his recruiting efforts toward the American South, where Klan ideology has already primed the citizenry to embrace a fascist movement that will pin all the nation's troubles on outsiders and racial minorities. 

I am reminded of Sinclair Lewis's observation early on in It Can't Happen Here: namely, that a nation that tolerated lynching for decades was already well on its way to embracing fascism. "Remember the Kentucky nigh riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings?" Lewis's protagonist asks. How can we say, then—he demands to know—that "it can't happen here." West's portrayal of a reactionary movement rooted in the South rings just as true. 

Shagpoke is an accurate portrayal of what happens to a certain type of person who is incapable of either truly accepting responsibility for their circumstances or, contrariwise, understanding the impersonal social forces to which they too may fall a victim. So long as he was financially successful, Shagpoke assumed that anyone could do it—those who failed must merely be lazy and undeserving. Yet, once fortune's wheel turned for him too, he didn't apply the same logic to himself. He assumed "foreigners" were to blame. 

He is also—even more aptly for our current political moment—an entirely plausible image of the type of demagogue who can exploit the imagery of the nation's past and shared ideals, in order to distort them into a vision of fascist dominance. A selection from Shagpoke's rhetoric: through his revolution, he declares, the nation was "purged of its alien diseases," and "America became again American." Yet, he declares, "There is an enemy in our midst, who, by boring from within, undermines our institutions." 

Does that not all sound a little too familiar, these days, for comfort? As soon as I had finished and put aside the novel last night, I opened up the news and there immediately found an article quoting Donald Trump, at his latest rally: "The enemies from within are more dangerous to me than the enemies on the outside." Has Trump not repeatedly described immigrants and asylum-seekers as an "invasion," as "poison" in the nation's "blood"? Or characterized liberal critics of his administration as "vermin"?

Plainly, we have a Shagpoke on our hands in real life. And his path to power through the nation has so far followed the fictional dictator's own. 

Trump has stirred the smoldering resentments of the nation by directing them against a handful of innocent scapegoats who are easy prey: immigrants, religious minorities, the "bad" capitalists (exempting the "good," right-wing ones), the liberal intelligentsia, etc. He has encouraged people to blame their problems not on any inadequacy in the national ideology of extreme individualism—but on a conspiracy of outsiders who have supposedly blocked and undone the nation's intrinsic "greatness." 

We have a man who takes his personal failures and inadequacies—his violations of the law, his many business failures and bankruptcies, his personal misbehavior that has alienated all the people who were once willing to work with them—and projects them onto the nation at large. It can't be my fault, thinks Trump—it must be everyone else who's to blame! "Not I am a fake, but America's phoney!" (E.E. Cummings), Trump says to himself. And so he goes out to warp the nation. 

The age of the "Leathershirts," then, may swiftly be coming upon us. West's prophecy may yet be proven true. He just happened to be about a century ahead of schedule.