Nathanael West’s first published novel, though at just under 100 pages it is more of a novella, The Dream Life of Balso Snell is a strange trip. In it, Balso Snell happens upon a Trojan horse outside of Troy, and after a brief examination, enters the horse through its backside. Inside the horse he finds another world, brimming with strange folk with even stranger tales to tell. A mystic writing a biography of a flea that lived in Christ’s armpit. A twelve year old boy who in a journal takes on attributes of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov in order to impress his English teacher with a thing for Russian literature. A beautiful young woman bathing suddenly transforms into a mannish middle-aged woman upon Balso’s embrace.
The wooden horse, Balso realized as he walked on, was inhabited solely by writers in search of an audience, and he was determined not to be tricked into listening to another story. If one had to be told, he would tell it.
And within this dream inside a horse, Balso himself rests in a café and dreams of a disfigured woman who makes him read letters addressed to her from an ex-lover reasoning his abandonment of her, in which he takes great delight in detailing the suicide that would have inevitably followed should they have remained together. Awakening from the dream, Balso learns from Miss McGeeney, the boy’s English teacher and the woman he found himself embracing, that the letters are a part of a novel she is writing. Falling in love, Balso speaks at length about sex and relationships to her, only to be rejected upon his attempt to consummate their relationship. She yields to his pressures, and at the point of orgasm, the novella ends with Balso in relief.
You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own color. This literary coloring is a protective one –like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail–making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.
Hopefully you can gather from this briefest of outlines the supreme weirdness of The Dream Life of Balso Snell. It’s surreal, funny, joyfully scatological and grotesque. Though the setting would suggest historical fiction, rather the dream life is an ahistorical plane, where Ancient Greece mixes with Shakespeare and the contemporary poets of West’s day. And while the novella drew me in with it’s odd landscapes and characters, I’m not too sure what the point, if any, of it is. What is West trying to say, especially about the act of storytelling? That truth is always unstable and dependent on motives, that our dream lives offer the most confused and complete image of ourselves? I enjoyed The Dream Life of Balso Snell as a ribald comedy but I can’t help but feel there is a deeper subtext here that I’m missing.
[If you're so intrigued, The Dream Life of Balso Snell is available to read online. If you do, please let me know your thoughts.]
