“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― from TO THE LIGHTHOUSE By Virginia Woolf, 1927
Paul West, Writer Who Shoveled Absurdity Into His Books, Dies at 85
By WILLIAM GRIMESOCT. 21, 2015
Photo
Paul West with his wife, the nature writer Diane Ackerman. He was known for his quirky novels with unusual protagonists.CreditJill Krementz, All Rights Reserved
Paul West, a prolific novelist, essayist and critic with an ornate prose style, who managed to write again after a severe stroke reduced his Shakespearean vocabulary to a single syllable, died on Sunday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 85.
The cause was pneumonia, his wife, the nature writer Diane Ackerman, said.
Mr. West, a transplanted Englishman, wrote quirky novels with unusual themes and even more unusual protagonists: a dwarf wrestler in “Tenement of Clay”; an astronaut who sees an angel in “Colonel Mint”; a deranged survivor of World War II in “The Rat Man of Paris”; a pair of amnesiac aliens in “Terrestrials”; and, in one of his short stories, a neuron — the 9,999,999,999th cell in Shakespeare’s brain. His characters, often alienated and tormented, navigated a sea of absurdity.
As a stylist, Mr. West pulled out most if not all the stops. “Some creative heads, in order to see the world at all, and to find it worth representing, need to begin by putting it in gaudy colors,” he wrote in the 1985 essay “In Defense of Purple Prose.”
In the 1980s he turned to historical fiction, inhabiting the minds of actual people both marginal — John Polidori, Byron’s physician, is the central character in “Lord Byron’s Doctor” — and celebrated. John Milton and Jack the Ripper take center stage in “Sporting With Amaryllis” and “The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper.” In “The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg,” he reimagined, in a first-person narrative, the life of a German army officer who played a leading role in a plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944.
Mr. West had his debilitating stroke while being treated in a hospital for a kidney infection in 2003. It was not his first stroke. In “A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery” (1995) he had described his recovery from a stroke in 1984. But this time the event was catastrophic, affecting crucial language centers in his brain and making it impossible for him to walk or swallow food.
Very slowly, words returned, but in unexpected combinations. He was fond of calling his wife by pet names, a habit alluded to in the title of her 2011 memoir. Now they assumed baroque form: Spy Elf of the Morning Hallelujahs, Parakeet of the Lissome Star.
“He would come out of the bedroom and say, ‘Where’s my cantilever of light?,’ ” Ms. Ackerman told The Guardian in 2011. “I suppose you can only know that this means a velour tracksuit when you have been living with someone for four decades.”
Slowly, he began writing again. At his wife’s urging, he set down an account of his stroke. “You know, dear, maybe you want to write the first aphasic memoir,” she recalled telling him two months after the stroke. “He smiled broadly, said: ‘Good idea! Mem, mem, mem,’ ” she wrote in a preface to an excerpt from the eventual memoir, “The Shadow Factory,” in The American Scholar. That book was published in 2008.
Mr. West went on to write three self-published novels, “Red in Tooth and Claw,” “The Ice Lens” and “The Invisible Riviera,” as well as two novels and an essay collection that remain unpublished.
Paul Noden West was born on Feb. 23, 1930, in Eckington, a mining town in Derbyshire. His father, Alfred, was partly blinded during World War I and was frequently unemployed. His mother, the former Mildred Noden, was a pianist who once aimed at a concert career but settled for giving private lessons at home for nine hours a day, meanwhile encouraging her son’s literary bent.
“I early on came to appreciate words as what I now realize are repositories of human history,” Mr. West told the reference work Contemporary Authors in 1984. “They were magical things to me, a bit like supercritical helium held with your bare hands.”
Mr. West fictionalized his parents’ relationship in the 1992 novel “Love’s Mansion”; paid tribute to his mother in the 1996 memoir “My Mother’s Music”; and described his father’s combat experience and their shared life during World War II in the 2005 memoir “My Father’s War,” which was published after his stroke but written before.
Eckington provided the setting for a trilogy of early novels: “Alley Jaggers” (1966), in which the title character, a brutalized plasterer with an artist’s soul, turns to murder; “I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon” (1970), which describes the moral awakening of Alley’s pitiable wife, Dot; and “Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas” (1972), which recounts Alley’s experiences in a hospital for the criminally insane.
After earning a degree in English with first-class honors at the University of Birmingham, where he began writing poetry, Mr. West won a scholarship to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, and in 1952 enrolled atColumbia University, where he earned a master’s degree a year later.
He did his compulsory military service with the Royal Air Force and then took a teaching post in English literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. After publishing several volumes of poetry and numerous essays and critical articles, he began thinking of himself as a novelist.
“Looking back, I see myself as a late starter who, between 30 and 40, in a sustained and intensive spell of application, set down half a lifetime’s pondering and moved from a restless contentment with criticism and fairly orthodox fiction to an almost Fellini-like point of view,” he told the reference work World Authors.
In 1963, he began teaching at Pennsylvania State University, where, in the early 1970s, he met Ms. Ackerman, an undergraduate at the time. He retired in 1995. In addition to his wife, Mr. West, whose first marriage ended in divorce, is survived by his sister, Sheila Forster.
Over the years, Mr. West turned his hand to a wide variety of subjects, both fictional and nonfictional, a distinction he eventually grew weary of. “Half the time I don’t know the difference anyway,” he told Contemporary Authors. He added, “A strong imagination will work simultaneously in different moods and different modes.”
He wrote about his deaf daughter, Amanda, known as Mandy, in “Words for a Deaf Daughter” (1969); about learning to swim as an adult, in “Out of My Depths: A Swimmer in the Universe” (1983); and about his student experiences, in “Oxford Days” (2002). Family members said that it was not known whether his daughter, with whom he later lost touch, survives him.
Before and after his stroke, Mr. West was intoxicated with words, a sworn enemy of minimalism in fiction and a passionate advocate of extravagant language. The impulse behind purple prose, he wrote, “is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened by something intolerably vivid.”
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