Paul West

Paul Noden West (23 February 1930 – 18 October 2015) was a British-born American novelist, poet, and essayist. He was born in Eckington, Derbyshire in England to Alfred and Mildred (Noden) West. Before his death, he resided in Ithaca, New York, with his wife Diane Ackerman, a writer, poet, and naturalist. West is the author of more than 50 books.

Early life

West grew up in Eckington, a rural mining town in Derbyshire, England. His father, partly blinded in World War I, was often unemployed. His mother, a talented pianist, gave private lessons to help support the family. She encouraged West in his love of words and his literary ambitions.

After graduating with honors in English from the University of Birmingham, West studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, and then as a Smith-Mundt scholar at Columbia University in the United States from 1952 to 1953, from which he graduated with a master's degree. His early life also included a stint in the Royal Air Force from 1954 to 1957,

Analysis

West's work is highly varied in form and content. According to reviewer Lore Segal, "He has published poetry, criticism, essays, memoirs (including an extended, sometimes hilarious meditation on learning to swim in middle age) and...novels of an unsettling nonuniformity." Among the many writers who influenced West's work, writes literary critic David Madden, were Jean-Paul Sartre (direct prose, existentialism, alienation, self-definition); Shakespeare (language); Thomas De Quincey (involutes; that is "compound experiences incapable of being disentangled"); Samuel Beckett (word play, nonconforming fiction); and T. S. Eliot (the objective correlative, which West called "an emotional shorthand; a morse for the soul").

According to Madden, West placed high importance on the role of the imagination, as distinguished from convention or dogma, in the creation of fiction and non-fiction. He favored intense flamboyant prose over minimalist writing, which he regarded as generally vapid. His interest in the mutability of what is conventionally thought to be real led to an interest in Latin American fiction and its "penchant for the magical and improbable". Likewise, it led him to scientific studies of "the overwhelming abundance of the universe" from atoms to stars, a friendship with astronomer Carl Sagan, and the writing of The Universe, and Other Fictions and other work expressing amazement at existence.

West told Madden that music was his favorite art and that he usually listened to music while writing. For the writing itself, he used an electric typewriter, which for him had a musical link: "Sometimes I think I am playing the piano, which I cannot do, but I hear rhythms in my tapping and sometimes, Glenn Gould-like, I chant as I go to remind myself what's coming in the next few lines."

West and his novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg figure prominently in a chapter in Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee's title character is disturbed by the horrors West describes in his book, which includes vivid descriptions of the deaths, by torture and hanging, of the Germans who tried to assassinate Hitler. In a lecture, "Witness, Silence and Censorship", given in Amsterdam at a conference on evil, she plans to question whether authors should think or write about such things. West (Coetzee's fictitious character), unbeknown to Costello until only hours before her pointed lecture, is also attending the conference. When she seeks him out to warn him that she is using his novel an example of something that should not be written, he listens but says nothing. Author and critic David Lodge, in his review of Elizabeth Costello, says, "For a writer to introduce another, living writer as a character into his fiction, especially in such a prejudicial light, is a very unusual, perhaps unprecedented, thing to do."

Personal life

West retired from teaching in 1995. He died on 18 October 2015 at the age of 85 in Ithaca, New York, from pneumonia. He is survived by his sister, Sheila Forster, and perhaps by a daughter, Amanda, about whom he wrote but with whom he later lost touch.

Works

Long fiction

A Quality of Mercy, 1961 Tenement of Clay, 1965 Alley Jaggers, 1966 I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon, 1970 Caliban's Filibuster, 1971 Bela Lugosi's White Christmas, 1972 Colonel Mint, 1972 Gala, 1976 The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, 1980 Rat Man of Paris, 1986 The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, 1988 Lord Byron's Doctor, 1989 The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, 1991 Love's Mansion, 1992 The Tent of Orange Mist, 1995 Sporting with Amaryllis, 1996 Life With Swan, 1997 Terrestrials, 1997 OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday, 2000 The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery, 2000 A Fifth of November, 2001 Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun, 2002 The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11, 2003

Short fiction The Universe and Other Fictions, 1988

Poetry Poems, 1952 The Spellbound Horses, 1960 The Snow Leopard, 1964 Alphabet Poetry Tea with Osiris, 2006

Non-fiction

Books The Growth of the Novel: Eight Radio Talks as Heard on CBC University of the Air, 1959 Byron and the Spoiler's Art, 1960 – 2nd ed. 1992 I, Said the Sparrow, 1963 The Modern Novel, 1963 Robert Penn Warren, 1964 The Wine of Absurdity: Essays in Literature and Consolation, 1966 Words for a Deaf Daughter, 1969 Out of My Depths: A Swimmer in the Universe, 1983 Sheer Fiction, 1987 Portable People, 1990 Sheer Fiction, vol. 2, 1991 Sheer Fiction, vol. 3, 1994 James Ensor, 1991 My Mother's Music, 1996 A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery, 1995 The Secret Lives of Words, 2000 Master Class, Scenes From A Fiction Workshop, 2001 Oxford Days, 2002 Sheer Fiction, vol. 4, 2004 My Father's War, 2005 The Shadow Factory, 2008

Articles

Edited text Byron: A Collection of Critical Essays (Twentieth Century Views series), 1963