Miss Lonelyhearts

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Miss Lonelyhearts (in Germany also in older editions Write Miss Lonelyhearts ) is a 1933 novel by the American writer Nathanael West . The life of a New York newspaper reporter who gives life advice to desperate people in a column under the name of Miss Lonelyhearts is portrayed in black humor and expressionistically .

action

New York City during the Great Depression : A young reporter, whose real name remains anonymous , writes a column under the pseudonym Miss Lonelyhearts . Most of his colleagues, including his editor-in-chief Shrike, are cynical and ridicule the column. “Miss Lonelyhearts”, on the other hand, is seriously touched by the many letters of the desperate and lonely people who reach him. He falls into deep depression, drinks a lot and also has fierce arguments with colleagues and strangers. The reporter feels the need to help the people in his columns, but doesn't know how.

Miss Lonelyhearts tries to escape the letters and their consequences in different ways: He looks for answers in his Catholicism and identifies with Jesus Christ , takes trips to the country with his fiancée Betty, who cannot reach him emotionally, and even lets himself go a brief affair with the wife of Shrike. However, he cannot permanently escape the terrible thoughts. He meets with Mrs. Doyle, a reader of his column, who seeks advice. He begins an affair with Mrs. Doyle, who is married to the crippled, rundown gas works worker. The couple invite Mrs. Lonelyhearts to dinner. Mrs. Doyle tries to seduce him again on his arrival, whereupon he beats her. She then reports to her husband that Miss Lonelyhearts tried to rape her.

Finally, Miss Lonelyhearts quits his job at the newspaper and spends a few days in bed sick. He believes he has a religious enlightenment and now wants to proclaim the alleged word of God in the columns. At that moment the vengeful Mr. Doyle arrives, who has hidden a gun in his rolled newspaper. The enlightened Mrs. Lonelyhearts wants to make Doyle the first object of his new help in life and wants to hug him. A shot from Mr. Doyle's pistol goes off and the two men roll down a flight of stairs.

Origin background

West wrote his second novel between 1930 and 1932 while working as a night porter in a New York hotel. In the meantime, his first work The Dream Life of Balso Snell came on the market in 1931 , but the edition was only 500 copies, of which West had to buy 150 himself. West had already published excerpts from Miss Lonelyhearts in two literary magazines, but it was almost unclear to him from which narrative perspective he wanted to tell. He discarded the first-person narration and the inner monologue as they would have been difficult to reconcile with the death of Miss Lonelyhearts at the end of the narration. Ultimately, he decided to portray the main character in a distant and anonymous way - she doesn't even get a real name - which underlines the character's isolation.

Reviews

The novel had little commercial success when it was published, especially since West's publisher Horace Liveright went bankrupt just three weeks after publication. The reviews, however, were largely positive compared to West's debut novel Balso Snell and encouraged West to continue working. For the contemporary critic Josephine Herbst, the novel read like a “detective story” that would only take place in a dreamlike “semi-darkness” the entire time. Accompanied by the noise of the engine, jazz music, the unemployed and sad drunks, West shows the "emotional bankruptcy" of "modern society". To this day, Miss Lonelyhearts is considered a masterpiece by many literary critics.

Edmund Wilson viewed West's narrow work as one of the most perfect works of his generation. Harold Bloom listed Miss Lonelyhearts on his short list of the most artistically outstanding American works of the 20th century. He feels the novel is clearly West's best work, which in the American literature of the 20th century is at most trumped by the best works of William Faulkner . In his foreword to a volume of essays he edited on West's novel, Bloom writes that the “messianic desire for redemption, if necessary through sin” is one of the central themes in Miss Lonelyhearts . West's humor is "apocalyptic" and original in the sense that it has no liberating elements and leads to defensive laughter.

Tobias Lehmkuhl wrote on the occasion of a new German edition for Deutschlandfunk in 2012: “Like a good comic book author, Nathanael West only needs a few lines to clearly emphasize everything that is important to him. A lot would seem grotesque in a conventional novel, but here it has its place, its own veracity. ”Linguistically, a“ laconic newspaper style ”is striking, which fits the content, but the architecture of the novel is really extraordinary: Each chapter is like set up a comic strip in which images of violence would mix with the illustration of everyday events.

Adaptations

In 1933 the first film was made, which, however, handled the original very loosely: Advice to the Lovelorn , directed by Alfred L. Werker with Lee Tracy in the lead role, added an illegal trade in dangerous drugs to the plot and ended with a happy ending. West's name is even misspelled in the opening credits. A second film adaptation from 1958 came in Germany under the title Life is a lie in the cinemas, Montgomery Clift played the leading role of the film written and produced by Dore Schary . This second film adaptation is closer to the original, but also ends with a happy ending in which Miss Lonelyhearts is not shot and finds his true love. A third film adaptation was made in 1983 as a television film with Eric Roberts in the lead role.

Howard Teichman also wrote a theatrical adaptation of the material, which was shown on Broadway in October 1957 (with Pat O'Brien , William Hickey , Pippa Scott and Ruth Warrick, among others ). In 2006 the opera Miss Lonelyhearts premiered in New York, the music was written by Lowell Liebermann and the libretto was written by JD McClatchy .

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer: Epilogue to the new edition of Miss Lonelyhearts. Manesse, 2012. pp. 148-149.
  2. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer: Epilogue to the new edition of Miss Lonelyhearts. Manesse, 2012. p. 150.
  3. ↑ James F. Light: Nathanael West. An Interpretative Study. Northwestern University Press, 1971. pp. 106-110.
  4. ↑ James F. Light: Nathanael West. An Interpretative Study. Northwestern University Press, 1971. p. 109.
  5. ↑ - A novel like a comic strip. Retrieved on July 17, 2020 (German).
  6. ↑ David Wiley: A Certain Slant: Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. In: A Certain Slant. January 19, 2010, accessed July 17, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Harold Bloom: Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanael West . Infobase Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4381-1403-3 ( google.de [accessed July 17, 2020]).
  8. ↑ A novel like a comic strip. Retrieved on July 17, 2020 (German).
  9. ↑ Advice to the Forlorn (1933) - IMDb. Retrieved July 17, 2020 .
  10. ^ Miss Lonelyhearts (1983) at the Internet Movie Database. Retrieved July 17, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Miss Lonelyhearts - Broadway Play - Original | IBDB. Retrieved July 17, 2020 .