''A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin'' is
Nathanael West
Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940) was an American writer and screenwriter. He is remembered for two darkly satirical novels: ''Miss Lonelyhearts'' (1933) and ''The Day of the Locust'' (1939), set r ...
's third novel, published in 1934. It is a brutal satire of
Horatio Alger's novels and their eternal optimism.
Plot summary
''A Cool Million'', as its subtitle suggests, presents “the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin,” piece by piece. As a satire of the
Horatio Alger myth
Horatio Alger Jr. (; January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was an American author who wrote young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through good works. His wri ...
of success, the novel is evocative of
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his ''nom de plume'' M. de Voltaire (; also ; ), he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—es ...
’s ''
Candide'', which satirized the philosophical
optimism
Optimism is an attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable. A common idiom used to illustrate optimism versus pessimism is a glass filled w ...
of
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of math ...
and
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...
. Pitkin is a typical ‘Schlemiel’, stumbling from one situation to the next; he gets robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited. In a parallel plot Betty Prail, Pitkin's love interest, is raped, abused, and sold into prostitution. Over the course of the novel Pitkin manages to lose an eye, his teeth, his thumb, his scalp and his leg, but nevertheless retains his optimism and gullibility to the inevitably bitter end.
Pitkin's troubles, however, don't end with his death. Even after his death he is exploited as a martyr by the ‘National Revolutionary Party’, a political organization led by Shagpoke Whipple, a manipulative former American president. Pitkin's birthday becomes a national holiday and American youths march down the streets singing songs in his honor. Whipple speaks out against aliens and calls for a rejection of “sophistication,
Marxism
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...
and International
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...
.” The novel ends with a series of roaring "hails" from the crowd.
Literary significance and criticism
Pitkin's pathetic inability to conform to society's standards, or to the ‘American’ way of life, is the main cause of his repeated failures. Nevertheless, there is something admirable in Pitkin's naïve persistence, as West wrote in a letter to
S. J. Perelman
Sidney Joseph Perelman (February 1, 1904 – October 17, 1979) was an American humorist and screenwriter. He is best known for his humorous short pieces written over many years for ''The New Yorker''. He also wrote for several other magazines ...
:
:Suppose he had the Horatio Alger slant and was a guy who was trying to get one foot on the ladder of success and they were always moving the ladder on him, but they couldn’t touch the dream.
West not only parodies Alger by mimicking his prose style, he also lifted several passages directly from a number of different Alger novels. In ''A Cool Million'', West presents Italian slavers, Chinese pimps, brutal Irish cops, and greedy Jewish lawyers. Though most of the early criticism dismissed the novel as too direct a parody to have any real literary merit, it is seen by some as an early example of
postmodernism.
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was described as "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking worl ...
includes ''A Cool Million'' in his list of canonical works of the period he names the Chaotic Age (1900–present) in ''The Western Canon''. Bloom also deems the rhetoric used by Shagpoke Whipple as prophetic of such presidents as
Ronald Reagan.
Publication history
West began writing ''A Cool Million'' in the fall of 1933. A handwritten first draft was completed in November. Though
Harcourt, Brace rejected the novel, West continued to work on it until it was finally accepted by Covici-Friede in March 1934. The novel was published in New York City in an edition of 3,000 copies to mixed reviews and poor sales; it was not reprinted in West's lifetime. The novel later appeared in several reprints starting from 1940, following West's renewed fame, and was collected in a single volume edition of the complete novels, as well as in the
Library of America
The Library of America (LOA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published over 300 volumes by authors rang ...
edition of West's collected works.
[West, Nathanael. ''Novels & Other Writings''. Ed. ]Sacvan Bercovitch
Sacvan Bercovitch (October 4, 1933 – December 8, 2014) was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the United States. During an academic career spanning five decades, he was considered to be one ...
. New York: The Library of America, 1997. 814.
''A Cool Million'' – a screen story
In September 1940 West wrote an original screen story in collaboration with Boris Ingster. They used ''A Cool Million'' as their title, though the story had nothing to do with the novel, hoping that a studio would pay more for a story allegedly based on a published book. West was certain that no one would actually read the book to check whether the screen story had any relation to the novel. On September 24, 1940
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production studio that is a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is one of the Big Five studios and a subsidiary of the mu ...
bought the story for $10,000 and assigned it to screenwriter
Sidney Buchman. However, the studio soon abandoned the project and ''A Cool Million'' was never filmed. The text of the screen story appears in the Library of America's edition of West's work.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cool Million, A
1934 American novels
American comedy novels
American satirical novels
Parody novels
Novels by Nathanael West
Films with screenplays by Nathanael West
Covici-Friede books