West, Paul 1930–

PERSONAL: Born February 23, 1930, in Eckington, England; son of Alfred Massick and Mildred (Noden) West; came to United States, 1961; became citizen, 1971; married Diane Ackerman (a poet and naturalist); children: Amanda Klare. Education: University of Birmingham, B.A. (with first honors), 1950; Oxford University, graduate study, 1950–53; Columbia University, M.A., 1953. Hobbies and other interests: Music, swimming, travel, and astronomy.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Elaine Markson, 44 Greenwich Avenue, New York, NY 10011.

CAREER: Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, assistant professor, then associate professor of English, 1957–62; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, associate professor, 1963–69, professor of English and comparative literature, 1969–95, senior fellow of Institute for Arts and Humanistic Studies, 1969–95, professor emeritus, 1995–. Visiting professor, University of Wisconsin, 1956–66; Pratt Lecturer, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1970; Crawshaw Professor of English, Colgate University, 1972; Virginia Woolf Lecturer, University of Tulsa, 1972; Melvin Hill Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1974; distinguished writer-in-residence, Wichita State University, 1982; writer-in-residence, University of Arizona, 1984; visiting professor of English, Cornell University, 1987–; visiting professor and novelist-in-residence, Brown University, 1992. Judge, CAPS fiction panel, 1975. Military service: Royal Air Force, 1954–57; became flight lieutenant.

MEMBER: Authors League of America, Authors Guild.

AWARDS, HONORS: Canada Council senior fellowship, 1959; Guggenheim fellowship, 1962–63; listed in Books of the Year by New York Times, 1969, for Words for a Deaf Daughter, 1970, for I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon, 1971, for Caliban's Filibuster, and 1986, for Rat Man of Paris; Best Books of the Year, Time, 1969, for Words for a Deaf Daughter; Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for fiction, 1974; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1975; National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, 1980, 1985; Heinz fiction prize, 1980 and 1986; Hazlitt Memorial Award for Excellence in Arts (Literature), 1981; Governor of Pennsylvania's award for excellence in the arts, 1981; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature, 1985, 1986; Pushcart Prize, 1987; named Literary Lion by New York Public Library, 1987; National Book Award, and Best American Essays award, 1990; nominated for Medicis, Femina, and Meilleur Livre prizes, and Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky (France), 1993; Lannan Prize for Fiction, 1993, for Love's Mansion; Distinguished Teaching Award, Graduate Schools of the North-East, 1995; Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 1996; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for fiction, 1996, for The Tent of Orange Mist; Art-of-Fact Award, State University of New York, 2000.

WRITINGS:

The Fantasy Poets: Number Seven, Fantasy Press (Oxford, England), 1952.

The Growth of the Novel, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1959.

The Fossils of Piety: Literary Humanism in Decline, Vantage Press (New York, NY), 1959.

The Spellbound Horses (poems), Ryerson (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1960.

Byron and the Spoiler's Art, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1960.

A Quality of Mercy (novel), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1961.

I, Said the Sparrow (memoirs), Hutchinson (London, England), 1963.

(Editor) Byron: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1963.

The Modern Novel, two volumes, Hillary (New York, NY), 1963, 2nd edition, 1965.

Robert Penn Warren, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1964.

The Snow Leopard (poems), Hutchinson (London, England), 1964, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1965.

Tenement of Clay (novel), Hutchinson (London, England), 1965, McPherson & Co. (Kingston, NY), 1993.

Alley Jaggers (first novel in trilogy), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1966.

The Wine of Absurdity: Essays on Literature and Consolation, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1966.

Words for a Deaf Daughter (biography), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1969, expanded edition with new preface by West published as Words for a Deaf Daughter [and] Gala (novel; also see below), Dalkey Archive (Normal, IL), 1993.

I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon (second novel in trilogy), HarperCollins (New York), 1970.

Caliban's Filibuster (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1971.

Bela Lugosi's White Christmas (third novel in trilogy), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1972.

Colonel Mint, Dutton (New York, NY), 1973.

Gala, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1976.

The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (historical novel), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1980.

Out of My Depths: A Swimmer in the Universe (nonfiction), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1983.

Rat Man of Paris (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1986.

Sheer Fiction (essays), McPherson & Co. (Kingston, NY), 1987, Volume 2, 1991, Volume 3, 1994.

The Universe, and Other Fictions (short fiction), Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 1988.

The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1988.

Lord Byron's Doctor (biographical novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1989.

Portable People (character sketches), drawings by Joe Servello, British American Publishers (Latham, NY), 1990.

The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper (historical novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1991.

Love's Mansion (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1992.

(Adaptor) Duets: Photographs by James Kiernan, Random House (New York, NY), 1994.

The Tent of Orange Mist (novel), Scribner (New York, NY), 1995.

A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery (autobiographical memoir), Viking (New York, NY), 1995.

My Mother's Music (memoir), Viking (New York, NY), 1996.

Sporting with Amaryllis (historical novel), Overlook (New York, NY), 1997.

Terrestrials: A Novel of Aviation, Scribner (New York, NY), 1997.

Life with Swan (novel), Scribner (New York, NY), 1999.

OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday, Scribner (New York, NY), 2000.

The Secret Lives of Words, Harcourt (New York, NY), 2000.

The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery, New Directions (New York, NY), 2000.

Master Class: Scenes from a Fiction Workshop, Harcourt (New York, NY), 2001.

A Fifth of November, New Directions (New York, NY), 2001.

Oxford Days: An Inclination, British American Publishers (Latham, NY), 2002.

Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun, New Directions (New York, NY), 2002.

The Immensity of Here and Now: A Novel of 911, Voyant (Ramsay, NJ), 2003.

My Father's War: A Memoir, McPherson & Co (Kingston, NY), 2005.

Regular contributor to Washington Post Book World, Boston Phoenix, and New York Times Book Review. Also contributor of essays, poems, and reviews to periodicals, including TriQuarterly, New Statesman, Iowa Review, Parnassus, Conjunctions, Quimera (Barcelona, Spain), Nation, Kenyon Review, Sinn und Form, Partisan Review, Washington Post, New York Times, Harper's, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Paris Review, New Directions Literary Anthology, Yale Review, and Chelsea. Fiction critic, New Statesman, 1959–60.

SIDELIGHTS: Paul West's writings span the genres of poetry, essay, criticism, biography, and the novel. Although his work in each genre has received critical praise, West favors the novel form for expression and experimentation. As Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brian McLaughlin noted, "It is as a fiction writer that he seems most happy, for there he can demonstrate at one and the same time the strength of the critic and the grace of the poet." Book World contributor Diane Johnson likewise commented that one of the most positive aspects of West's work "is his faith in the novel as an art form, as a dignified production of the human mind, capable of rendering, in its infinite variety, social comment, philosophic statement, comedy, pain, all of which West can do—impressively." Within West's novels, the author takes the guise of a variety of characters, including Jack the Ripper, the Rat Man of Paris, and his deaf daughter. West even reflects upon his parents' courtship and love life before he was born.

In his historical novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, for example, West portrays von Stauffenberg, a key figure in the anti-Nazi movement who orchestrated an unsuccessful plot to bomb Adolph Hitler's office in 1944. Von Stauffenberg was executed, and many of his conspirators were tortured and killed. "On these bones," wrote Frederick Busch in the New York Times Book Review, "Mr. West lays a flesh of living words: Dead dreams—of self, love, nobility, military service—are the stuff of his narrative." Written as a fictional memoir, the novel reveals the various facets of von Stauffenberg's character and chronicles his transformation from a moderate supporter of Hitler to an activist against him. In a preface to the novel, West explains the genesis of The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg: "I was devouring books about the bomb plot against Hitler, some grand, some shoddy, many of them giving details the others omitted, and almost all of them contradicting one another until I felt that some of what I was reading was fiction already and that a fictional attempt of my own—say an historical impersonation—might go."

The novel was indeed a critical success. As Partisan Review contributor Ronald Christ commented: "Having resisted the temptation to write an account, or indictment, Paul West has written instead a novel … that never forgets language and the sensibility it issues from as the real protagonist. The richness of West's prose is the real wealth here, and it is, like Stauffenberg's hours, loaded with all the treasures of a 'truant mind.'" Washington Post Book World reviewer Joe David Bellamy similarly observed that "There is little attention to conventional plotting and suspense, to the aspects that could have made the novel 'a thriller.' But a rich, textured style and metaphorical inventiveness are the dividends." In Contemporary Novelists, Elmer Borklund pronounced the book simply "West's finest novel."

West's novel Rat Man of Paris, like The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, is based on a historical figure. Inspired by stories of a man who haunted the boulevards of Paris at the end of World War II, flashing a rat at passersby, West began to "[fill] in the blanks" of Rat Man's life, as he explained to Publishers Weekly interviewer Amanda Smith. West's Rat Man is Etienne Poulsifer, and he carries a fox stole, not a rat. The stole is one of the few belongings Rat Man was able to take with him after his family and their entire village were burned alive by the Nazis. This event, reminiscent of the actual German extermination of the French village of Oradour, has shaped Rat Man's existence. Observed New York Times Book Review contributor Lore Segal: Rat Man of Paris "addresses the large question of our time: How does one live one's daily life in the span between past atrocity and atrocity to come? What happens to the wound that does not heal, that will not scar over?" Despite Rat Man's various eccentricities—he also bathes with his clothes on and hangs his soiled sheets out his window in the hope that the police will, according to Los Angeles Times critic Richard Eder, "arrest and launder them"—Rat Man attracts a lonely high school teacher, Sharli, who views him as "another of her pupils: bigger, heavier, and more of a liability, to be sure, yet a fount of promise so long as he is able to take his time." West described Rat Man in Publishers Weekly as "a parallel man, a man of distance who has a very uncertain relationship with civilization. He doesn't quite know what it is and where he belongs in it, and he's amazed that people think he does belong in it." When Rat Man discovers that a Nazi war criminal has been extradited to France, he wrongly assumes that the convict is responsible for murdering the villagers. As an attempt at vengeance, Rat Man outfits himself like a Nazi and walks the streets of Paris carrying a sign with the Nazi's picture on it and wheeling the "rat" about in a pram. Rat Man becomes, like his real-life counterpart, a local celebrity, but his renown ends when he is injured by a sniper's bullet. As Eder commented: "Up until the shooting, West's fable is compassionate and chill-ing. His Poulsifer, victim and avenger, has a questioning and original humanity. And then it all fogs over." Expressing a similar opinion, Newsweek reviewer Peter S. Prescott argued that "Rat Man of Paris achieves its quite dazzling effects early on and then settles down to work variations on them. The effect isn't one of motion or of answers obtained, but of a faint glow."

West's 1988 novel, The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, is set in a Hopi settlement in northeastern Arizona, and is told in various narrative voices, including those of George, Oswald, their deceased relatives, and Sotuqnangu, a mythical Hopi spirit. George The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests is a doll carver; his nephew Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over The Hill wants to be a Hollywood actor. When Oswald leaves the community, he ends up as a pornographic movie star, and enlists for a tour of duty in Vietnam. Oswald, as Thomas R. Edwards revealed in a New York Times Book Review article on The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, "tries to live up to his name by deserting his birthplace" and his people in favor of the White occidental world. But for Oswald, the "Anglo world … both attracts and nauseates," and he returns to his Hopi people when "the horrors of White America come closer to destroying him."

Much critical attention focused on the textual complexity of The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests. For John Calvin Batchelor, writing in the Washington Post Book World, West is "a writer's writer who aggressively goes too far, thinks too much, turns too many metaphors and explores too much strangeness for the casual reader." Steven Moore likewise found the novel challenging, but commented that the textual intricacy conveys "not only the Hopi culture but its linguistic structure as well." In his critique of the novel for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Moore argued that The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests requires careful, slow reading, in order that "the reader can better appreciate the detailed, visceral texture of the places West describes." Los Angeles Times Book Review commentator Hartman H. Lomawaima, though, quarreled with West's portrayal of Hopi life, deeming it superficial and inaccurate: "West's Hopis, in their shallowness, one-dimensionality, and simple-mindedness, owe nothing to Hopi culture. Perhaps this is inevitable, given West's incomplete knowledge of Hopi life. But this is scarcely to excuse him." The Hopis, Lomawaima noted, consider many activities of daily living within the realm of artistry, while West's protagonist, George, is "an artist in the narrower European sense," and the novel becomes "yet another stereotypical account of a provincial artist rebelling against his benighted home community" rather than something that truly reflects Hopi culture.

In the 1989 biographical novel Lord Byron's Doctor, West focuses on the small group of people who spent the summer of 1816 with the exiled George Gordon, Lord Byron, focusing specifically on John William Polidori. Polidori, the least famous member of the group which included Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Byron's mistress and Mary Godwin's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, was a "young physician traveling as the club-footed Byron's secretary and medical adviser. He also had a five-hundred-pound commission from a London publisher to report on the poet's adventures," noted R.Z. Sheppard in a Time review of the novel. Lord Byron's Doctor is West's version of the events written about in Polidori's diary, including the love/hate relationship between the doctor and Byron, the sexual exploits of Byron and Shelley, and Polidori's suicide. Pointing out that the author is a Byron scholar, Moore explained in the Review of Contemporary Fiction that West has fleshed out "Polidori's skeletal diary in a robust early-nineteenth-century style … [creating] a penetrating psychological portrait of Lord Byron's Doctor."

"Through Polidori, West compiles a lurid case history on the cruelty of genius," maintained Sheppard, who sees the author as "one of the most vigorous and inviting literary talents still punching away in semiobscurity." Moore concluded that Lord Byron's Doctor is a "stylistic tour de force of nineteenth-century eloquence, slang and technical jargon; and a wholly successful recreation of that crucial year in literary history when Romantic yearnings confronted the darker recesses of the unconscious, wreaking havoc in the personal lives of their creators, but also giving birth to poetry and monsters that haunt us still."

West chose another infamous historical figure for the focus of his 1991 novel. In The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, he revisits the fall of 1888 to explain the murders of five London prostitutes. The story begins some years prior, when Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Eddy, and the painter and Prince Eddy's chaperon, Walter Richard Sickert, are spending much of their time at London brothels. Sickert introduces Prince Eddy to the poor, young Annie Crook, the two fall in love, and soon after, Annie becomes pregnant. The pregnancy becomes the precipitating event to a savage conspiracy involving the royal family.

When the queen learns of the affair, she and the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, arrange to have Annie kidnapped and taken to the royal family's personal physician, Sir William Gull, who lobotomizes and perma-nently hospitalizes her. One of Annie's friends, Marie Kelly, and a few of her fellow prostitutes at Whitechapel, send a blackmail letter to the queen, demanding Annie's release and a sum of money to keep the matter quiet. The queen then sets Gull loose to hunt the prostitutes down and silence them, and Sickert is taken along to identify the women who signed the letter. Gull is eventually held in a private psychiatric hospital, and Sickert, who became increasingly entranced by the murders, takes into his own care Alice Margaret, the daughter of Prince Eddy and Annie.

The Women of Whitechapel is "superbly written and intricately choreographed, a work both sensational and serious," wrote Sven Birkerts in the New Republic. "But what finally remains vivid, long after the novel has shrunk down to its afterimage in the mind, is the feverish abandon of Gull and the descriptions of his myriad mutilations." "The passages are raw and uninhibited; they transmit perfectly Sickert's fascinated repulsion," Birkerts added. "The visual precision is a triumph of artistic detachment, even as it horrifies." West's "prose glistens with bright ideas and boldly inventive turns of phrase," commented Dan Cryer in Newsday. Josh Rubins, critiquing for the New York Times Book Review, had a similar view, finding that West's "specialty is filling in the missing details—psychological and otherwise—through verbally exquisite interior monologues or provocatively vivid evocations of unfamiliar milieus." Chicago Tribune Books commentator Vance Bourjaily called West "possibly our finest living stylist in English."

In the Lannan Prize-winning Love's Mansion, West's 1992 semi-autobiographical novel, the author explores the life of his own parents before his conception. Albert Mobilio argued in the Voice Literary Supplement that only an author like West, who "dotes on the minds of assassins, madmen, and murderers … might be … adequately girded to peer under the sheets on his parents' wedding night. In Love's Mansion … he does just that, pulling back the covers on both how he came to be, and how memory comes to life." Love's Mansion is the story of Clive Moxon, a novelist in his mid-fifties who asks his ninety-four-year-old mother, Hilly, about her relationship with his father. The novel recounts Clive's father Harry's adventure in World War I, from which he returns blind. Despite this handicap, upon his return, he and Hilly get married. Joseph Coates noted in Chicago Tribune Books: "Both of them know it's a misalliance, each having 'made a new demand on life' that excludes the other without having the resources to enforce it. Harry is an existentialist before his time, wanting nothing better than a life of continental vagrancy and sensuality; Hilly wanting a life in art." Over time, as Jonathan Yardley commented in the Washington Post Book World, their "marriage seems an enormous barrier to what used to be their affection." Yardley summarized: "Hilly, determined over Harry's objections to have a child, at last becomes pregnant with Clive and then with a daughter, Kotch. However improbable a family they may be, a family is what they are: a small mansion with four rooms, but a mansion all the same."

With The Tent of Orange Mist, noted a Publishers Weekly critic, West's "versatility and imagination are again evident." Scald Ibis, a sixteen year old, becomes the property of Colonel Hayashi as her home is turned into a brothel for Japanese soldiers during the assault and occupation of Nanking, China. West's story of severe and unspeakable violence becoming commonplace, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle fiction award, came highly recommended by Robert E. Brown, who, in Library Journal called the work "both moving and intriguing…. An affecting novel." Commenting that West explores and "illuminates the consciousness of each of his … characters—especially Scald Ibis' struggle to come to terms with her pillaged youth," Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman lauded West's "scorching insights into the consequences of evil." In the New York Times Book Review, however, John David Morley had a different take. Despite deeming The Tent of Orange Mist a "most arresting thesis" and West a "gifted writer," Morley faulted the novel on credibility: "that Scald Ibis should become reconciled to her fate with such savvy and bounce—is so far removed from experience that it is impossible to participate in the book's jollity. Victims of rape under the threat of imminent murder simply do not behave like this." Though allowing that West's narrative does wear "thin in spots," Seaman nonetheless concluded that West writes with "mindstopping clarity and power." Richard Eder, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, referred to the book as "a small masterpiece" and argued that "West has never written anything so risky and triumphant."

One of West's most widely read books—and considered by some to be one of his most eloquently written—is Words for a Deaf Daughter, a biography of his daughter, Mandy, born deaf and suffering from a brain dysfunction. Like the characters in some of West's novels, Mandy is an outsider. People turn away from her in the street because, according to West, "they don't like a universe that's absurd," related Claire Tomalin in the New Statesman. Mandy is destructive yet obsessed with order and symmetry. She will fly into a rage because of a missing button or crooked barrette, for example, yet she will happily paint her face green, chew cigarettes, and cut her hair at random. Her parents hope that Mandy will, with encouragement, develop fully, and the book is written in anticipation that she will one day be able to read about the early years of her life.

Borklund described Words for a Deaf Daughter as "the astonishing account of West's infinitely patient attempts to understand the world in which Mandy is enclosed but not, if he can help it, defeated." As Chaim Potok observed in the New York Times Book Review: "Trapped, by whatever it is that traps people, into a potential horror and hell, West converted the trap into a doorway to a world filled with the strange fruit of nonverbal communication and creative silence." Time critic R.Z. Sheppard commented that "West writes joyfully for a can-be Mandy, but obviously adores Mandy as is…. A lifelong slave of words and reasons, [West] envies the intensity with which Mandy perceives the world nonverbally through her four acute senses." Commentary contributor Johanna Kaplan, however, found West's optimistic, celebratory portrait of Mandy disturbing. She disputed West's description of Mandy's handicaps as a special gift. "For whom is it a gift?" the critic asked. "Not Mandy, clearly, for so cut off is she from the ordinary and essential means of human interchange that to try to understand the function of everyday objects, to give them some kind of place in what is for her an especially confusing world, she must 'smell at a pencil newly sharpened, inhaling from the beechwood its own sour-soot bouquet, or trace with addicted fingers the corrugations on the flat of a halved cabbage before eating it raw.'"

Words for a Deaf Daughter was reprinted in 1993 in a volume that also included a new introduction by West and a reprint of his 1976 novel Gala. As Borklund observed, "Words for a Deaf Daughter is 'fact'; Gala is 'fiction,' or, as West puts it, 'the scenario of a wish-fulfillment,' in which the adolescent Mandy comes to visit her father in America and finally speaks to him. The importance of this wish-fulfillment is central to West's fiction." West commented to Amanda Smith in Publishers Weekly: "Words for a Deaf Daughter was written a long time ago, and it's a sort of hard and fast and settled book. Maybe the sense of the outsider, the dispossessed prince or princess, the pariah, the person who is shunned or spurned for whatever unjust reason—maybe this is a gathering pattern in one's work over twenty years. I'm sure one could make a good case, but I don't think in those terms. If I did, I wouldn't be able to write."

West's autobiographical work A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery explores his experience with several diseases, including migraine headaches, heart disease, and diabetes, and his stroke, which forced him to accept a pacemaker implant to regulate his heartbeat. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, D.T. Max remarked that West "must have been, without doubt, a nightmarish patient. As feckless as any autodidact, he reads and rereads the diagnostic manual with a fervor born of terror." Max praised Stroke of Genius despite finding that West buries disease itself under an "avalanche of prose." Still, in West's book, the reader is allowed closer to the trauma of disease than in other memoirs of a similar nature, "not because West is braver—he is a complete chicken—but because he is franker," Max concluded. Dwight Garner noted in a Nation review that West focuses on his "generation's ingrained existentialism," which argues against passivity and leads "happily" to "a simple dignity in being a 'critic, fighter, and perfectionist to the end.'" Alexander Theroux, in a Chicago Tribune Books critique of Stroke of Genius, quoted West's explanation for his preoccupation with his illness: "I ponder such matters in much the same spirit as I memorize the names of all the actors when a movie's final credits roll—not because I care who they are, but because I want to show myself I am still competent."

After A Stroke of Genius, West published another memoir, My Mother's Music. Set mainly during World War II, the book focuses on how West's mother, who gave piano lessons to help support the working-class family, inspired her son and encouraged his aspirations. West shows himself as an "awkward kid" who "finds in 'Mommy' a haven, a soul mate and (eventually) an exacting mentor, who plies him with good books and high standards and goads him toward scholarships and success," related David Sacks in the New York Times Book Review. In this exploration of his mother's awakening him to "the music in words," however, West's language is so dense that he fails to provide a "satisfying portrait" of either himself or his mother, in the opinion of a Publishers Weekly critic. Sacks had some reservations about the work as well, noting that the emphasis on West and his mother, at the expense of other family members or friends, "can become monotonous," and that West fails to explain how it felt to leave his mother when he emigrated from England to the United States. "Still, My Mother's Music stands as a bold, touching, entertaining work," Sacks concluded.

In Sporting with Amaryllis, West, as in many of his other novels, uses an historical character as his protagonist. In this case it is the great seventeenth-century English poet John Milton. West imagines Milton in his youth, suspended for a term from Cambridge University—the suspension may have in fact occurred—and meeting a young woman he calls Amaryllis—named after a character in one of Virgil's works—who takes him on a wild sexual adventure and serves as his muse. The book's title is taken from Milton's poem "Lycidas," in which he ponders if it might not be better "to sport with Amaryllis in the shade" than to dedicate oneself to taxing work. West's language in this novel is earthy and explicit, regarding not only sex but other bodily processes, and sometimes "rises to rather uncomfortable levels," according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who nonetheless pronounced the book "a rich feast for lovers of ornate and stylish prose." To New York Times Book Review contributor Tony Tanner, though, Sporting with Amaryllis is "pretentious, distasteful and futile" and is "counterfactual—in spades." In American Scholar, however, Morris Freedman observed that the "shocking material so early in West's book can easily put one off, except that it serves to prepare the reader to see young Milton without the filter of a sterilizing idolatry." He allowed that some of Milton's admirers will not care for the portrait of their hero as a randy youth, "but one doesn't have to swallow a word of West's flamboyant writing to find it piquant."

Terrestrials: A Novel of Aviation takes West's readers through a far different story, one of American espionage agents who are actually space aliens who have come to believe they are human earthlings. They survive nightmarish ordeals following a plane crash in an African desert, only to be harassed by government investigators on their return. Along the way the agents, Booth and Clegg, reflect on World War II's Battle of Britain and the history of aviation in general. "West's theme is the unreality of the present—except insofar as you can contrive to live it as myth," remarked Lorna Sage in the New York Times Book Review. The book, she noted, is also a meditation on male bonding; Booth and Clegg are "basically interested only in each other and in the elusive essence of flight." In Terrestrials' universe, she noted, "a woman can play only a flaming goddess or a 'solace figment,' an accurate phrase for the role female characters are often assigned in fiction, with a lot less honesty." Sage concluded that Terrestrials "isn't [West's] best book—it gives off too acrid a scent of labor and loneliness for that—but it's a moving tribute to two-dimensional masculinity." The novel contains West's trademark dense prose, which may discourage some readers, remarked a Publishers Weekly critic, who added that "the persistent, however, will savor the way West, an accomplished stylist, explores the dilemma of Booth and Clegg: knowledgeable yet unknowing … puzzling out the mystery of their terrestrial lives."

The 1999 novel Life with Swan is closer to home for West, although space travel again figures in the plot. This novel is a portrait of a marriage, with the husband and wife based on West and his wife, poet and nature writer Diane Ackerman. The fictional wife's name, Ariada Mencken, is an anagram of Ackerman's; her nickname is Swan, and the book is narrated by her husband. Like their real-life models, Mencken and her husband are involved in academia and literature, and they are friends with a scientist, Raoul Bunsen—based on West and Ackerman's friend the late Carl Sagan. Bunsen arranges for them to attend the launches of various space missions, which they find fascinating and an inspiration for their writing. The book also provides a detailed look at other aspects of the couple's life and makes clear how much Swan's husband adores her. "Not the most engrossing of plots, perhaps, but Life with Swan is a book whose effect depends more on its atmosphere and language than its story," reflected Roger Kimball in the New York Times Book Review. "At bottom, it is an extended invitation to admire the narrator and his inamorata." A Publishers Weekly reviewer found the novel "rather touching, though a bit too pleased with itself." Kimball summed it up by saying, "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. The rest of us, alas, are out of luck."

Throughout his career West has been fascinated with historical events and figures—Cheops, Hitler, Lord Byron, Jack the Ripper, Guy Fawkes—and has used them as a springboard for his fiction. His work The Immensity of the Here and Now examines the history surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. The drama of the World Trade Center bombings sets the stage for the story of two friends, both damaged physically and emotionally, and chronicles how the events of 9/11 affect them. In Booklist Seaman commented that "West, an intrepid and adroit prospector of the psyche, provides an atomizing rumination on the emotional shock waves of 9/11."

West clearly relishes words and "attests to his obsession in a piquantly entertaining celebration of the evolution of language," noted Seaman in Booklist, reviewing West's The Secret Lives of Words. In this volume the author describes the etymology of 400 common and obscure words, and says that words are living testimony to "human ingenuity and the bizarre twists we permit our minds to make." He shows his passion for words and their impact in Master Class: Scenes from a Fiction Workshop, in which he describes the interactions he had with his M.F.A. students. David Madden quoted West in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, as saying: "The idea is to make the arrangement of the prose unrecognizable … then restore each [word] to its proper place in the pattern." Madden wrote that Master Class "offers a unique glimpse into West's own aesthetic."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 96, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Contemporary Novelists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Madden, David, Understanding Paul West, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1994.

PERIODICALS

American Scholar, winter, 1998, p. 176.

Booklist, August, 1994, p. 2017; August, 1995, p. 1929; November 1, 1996; January 1, 1999; May 1, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of The Secret Lives of Words, p. 1634; September 1, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 911, p. 63.

Book World, May 28, 1972.

Commentary, January, 1971.

Commonweal, September 30, 1966; December 9, 1977.

Critique, fall, 1998, David Madden, "Indoctrination for Pariahdom: Liminality in the Fiction of Paul West," p. 49.

Harper's, October, 1970.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 1992, p. 1534; October 1, 1996.

Library Journal, September 15, 1988, p. 95; May 1, 1993, p. 119; August, 1995, p. 121; February 1, 1999; August, 2002, Henry Corrigan, review of Oxford Days, p. 96; October 15, 2003.

Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1983; February 12, 1986.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 9, 1988, pp. 2, 15; September 10, 1989, p. 3; September 6, 1992, review of Love's Mansion, p. 3; May 7, 1995, p. 1; September 10, 1995, p. 3.

Nation, January 8, 1977; March 20, 1995, pp. 391-394.

New Republic, August 19, 1972; May 6, 1991, p. 37.

Newsday, April 21, 1991.

New Statesman, August 29, 1969, review of Words for a Deaf Daughter.

Newsweek, August 31, 1970; March 10, 1986.

New Yorker, October 24, 1970; August 25, 1980.

New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1970; September 27, 1970; September 10, 1972; July 3, 1977; November 9, 1980; February 16, 1986; September 11, 1988, p. 7; May 12, 1991, p. 11; October 18, 1992, review of Love's Mansion; July 11, 1993, p. 20; September 20, 1993, p. 16; September 3, 1995, p. 17; May 12, 1996; April 6, 1997; October 19, 1997; March 14, 1999.

Partisan Review, summer, 1982.

Publishers Weekly, February 28, 1986; July 29, 1988, p. 219; July 21, 1989, p. 50; January 18, 1993, p. 464; July 11, 1994, p. 72; July 3, 1995, p. 48; April 1, 1996, p. 63; October 6, 1996, p. 59; August 11, 1997, p. 383; December 14, 1998, p. 56.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1988, p. 156; fall, 1989, p. 215; spring, 1991 (special Paul West issue); fall, 2000, Irving Malin, review of The Dry Danube, p. 144; spring, 2002, David Madden, review of Master Class, p. 149; fall, 2003, David Madden, review of Cheops, p. 129.

Sewanee Review, spring, 1993, p. 300.

Southern Review, winter, 1979.

Time, September 7, 1970; September 11, 1989, p. 82.

Times Literary Supplement, January 21, 1965; October 16, 1969, review of Words for a Deaf Daughter; April 23, 1971; January 28, 1972; June 8, 1973; February 6, 1981; November 8, 1991, p. 31.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 14, 1991, p. 1; October 18, 1992, p. 5; February 19, 1995, p. 13.

Voice Literary Supplement, September, 1992, p. 15.

Washington Post Book World, April 26, 1970; August 23, 1970; January 2, 1977; August 3, 1980; February 2, 1986; September 18, 1988, p. 3; September 27, 1992, p. 3.

ONLINE

Center for Book Culture Web site, http://www.centerforbookculture.org/ (August 26, 2004), David Madden, interview with West.