Love's Mansion

by Paul West

It is the early part of this century. Two childhood sweethearts are growing up in provincial England, with dreams of making a life together despite the boy's low standing and the girl being of the haute bourgeoisie. In an act of youthful desperation, the boy, Harry, decides to overcome his origins by becoming a hero in the Great War. What happens when he comes home not a hero, but blinded? How can he embrace his virginal, serious-minded Hilly after enjoying the delectable ravishments of his lascivious nurse, Sister Binche? Will Harry ever stop giving passionate lectures on military protocol to his son, Clive? How, in short, does this crippled yet committed couple survive the grave disillusionments of life and love? Clive narrates his parents' lives, taking us behind the curtain of Georgian propriety, conjuring up the pathos of youthful romance, the humor and insularity of small-town life, and the terrible price of war. Love's Mansion's classical themes of love, death, and village life recall the great nineteenth-century novels, and the battle scenes rival those of Tolstoy. West, one of our greatest living prose stylists, is in top form - at his most stunning and controlled. His ingenious use of language, his subtle understanding of human nature, and his vivid evocations of a both zany and tragic world have never been so masterful. Here is an exquisite portrait of timeless humanity limned with the daring strokes of a literary pioneer. Love's Mansion is the personal novel West fans have been waiting for. An ode to the author's parents, who were the models for Hilly and Harry, it has the warmth and wisdom of a classic. Here is an intimate novel that few will be able to resist.

Genres: Novels, Fiction

339 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 1992

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Paul West remains massively under-read and under-known, here is a little intro:

British-born American author of more than 50 books – poetry, criticism, essays, memoirs and novels. His protagonists included dwarf wrestlers, amnesiac aliens, John Milton, the victims of Jack the Ripper, Hitler’s would-be assassin Count von Stauffenberg and the 9,999,999,999th cell in Shakespeare’s brain.

Some quotes about him:

“No contemporary American prose writer can touch him for sustained rhapsodic invention—he creates a hyperbolic hymn to joy, a swashbuckling swirl of sentences. West stands as an authentic voice in the wilderness, a visionary who plugs the ghosts of history and morality into his textual dream machines.” - Bill Marx

Gass said: “I believe that Paul West listens to music, earphoned for the night through which he writes, so that the rhythms will get into his blood, and for the energy he can draw from sounds that at the same time block out everything of the world but art. “

And “But Gass isn’t an antiquarian. He is for good writing, period—if only it “grasp[s] the lasting quality, rather than the passing changes, of the language.” Asked to list a few of his favorite contemporary writers, he mentioned Paul West and Alexander Theroux. “

"His is one of the most original talents in American fiction."-The New York Times Book Review
"Paul West is a writer splendidly attuned to history."-Walter Abish
"A sorcerer of language."-Publishers Weekly
"West is a master."-the Washington Post Book World

Joseph McElroy and Carl Sagan have also raved about him.

E.g "However, as Joseph McElroy noted of Paul West, "There seems to be nothing that he cannot and will not imagine––nothing human that his compassionate interest can’t find its own hilarious and surprising way into, no mode of feeling he can’t find the original language for.""

Alexander Theroux thought him a great writer – he reviewed one of his memoirs here: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/19...

West’s wonderful essay on “purple prose” can be read here http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/15/boo...

From an interview (which I include for a certain Mr NR in particular):

DM: Is there anything more you want to say about influence or appreciation of the Mexican, Latin American, or South American writers whom you have talked about in so many places? Do you want to say anything about why you have such strong feelings of affinity with them?

PW: I think they reminded other people than me as well that it was possible to write the “total novel.” I think the phrase is Mario Vargas Llosa’s. In other words, the novel is not a form of exclusion. Anything can fall into the novel, including unrespectable things like superstition. There is no taboo. In other words we can move into history and move it around. History can be imagery, and theology can be a matter of miracles and textures and impromptu discoveries. It’s all available, ransackable material. I think that the Latin Americans in their sophisticatedly innocent way remind us of that. I guess I knew it all along because I was always zooming off, thinking Europeans have a much wider horizon than the English writers I was supposed to be reading in my student days.

DM: Did it provide a shock like that of finding unknown kin?

PW: Yes, I felt less lonely all of a sudden. Reading Sarte I felt less lonely and reading the Latin Americans made me feel there are people who are doing the kind of thing I want to do and they have different reasons than I. An enormous door swung open and I thought I’d come to the wrong country. I should have gone south of the border, down Mexico way. That’s where I really belonged. You see, I don’t want the arts to linger behind. It’s not so much a matter of experiment; you can experiment in the dark or you can be deliberate about it, but I think there is an energy in a given art form that propels it. There is a potential in both the doer and the product, the book that implies further development. There is no full-fledged or consummate form of the novel or poem. Things have to evolve just as human beings have to evolve. It’s defeatist and defeating to think that back in 1927 they discovered for all time the perfect way to have the novel and everything else after that is redundant or repetitious….

…

DM: Do you see fiction as a kind of assault on the reader in the demands that it makes?

PW: Mine sometimes, a lot of fiction, no. Much fiction is like mustard spread over the belly, take it or leave it, who cares. Some fiction has intentions on the reader and wants to inflict grievous bodily harm. My Hopi novel inflicts grievous bodily harm on the reader as does some of Beckett, and some Kafka. They create disturbances in the well-tempered harmony of everyday life. I think perhaps one novelist in twenty-five does it. Thomas Bernhard certainly inflicts something upon the reader, and Max Frisch in the very short book, “The Man in the Holocene,” is trying to injure the reader. De Quincey was trying to do it. And Carlyle. Joyce certainly.

DM: I think Nabokov also destabilizes the reader.

PW: A lot. What’s that dreadful phrase? Reader-friendly? It isn’t reader friendly; it’s saying to the reader, “I bet you can’t take this, and if you can you’re the kind of reader I want and you’ll stay with me. If you can’t take it, I don’t want you to read me anyway.” It’s a power play, I guess, and I do some of that. Some of that is in my Ripper novel, not half as much as you might think. There is very little of it in “Byron’s Doctor,” very little indeed, but it’s in the Hopi novel."

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All of which is to say, he should probably be on your radar....

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another triumph of style, West reimagines the early life of his parents with his characteristic incisiveness, wit, incorrigible imaginative brilliance, and hilarious inappropriateness.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes this novel is West's way with a sentence. It’s not like anyone else’s way. The closest to his odd way with words and images is Nicholas Mosley, but Mosley’s oddness is far more narrow and repetitive. West hangs on the edge of unhinged, as if almost pulling the hinges off by swinging back and forth (or, more correctly, moving in some kind of irregular motion, as if one of the hinges was loose).

Nearly every sentence seems to be a surprise, but of course it isn’t, or it would be too much. There’s just enough oddness, and enough normalcy, to make it seem as if constantly surprising, without actually being.

There are characters and something of a plot, although characters and memories and descriptions take precedence over plot. The plot is only that lives are lived, in this case, the lives of his parents, together, apart, together, apart, and eventually his own life, once he is born in the second half.

West, like Mosley, risks the precious, but he is less precious because more creative. It doesn’t get more creative, or more enjoyably so.