The Immensity of the Here and Now

by Paul West

Fiction. "In Paul West's 23rd book of fiction, The Immensity of the Here and Now, the aftereffects of [9.11] gradually come into view, then withdraw into a jungle of memory and hallucination...the tragedy perpetually accessible and elusive, too easy and too impossible to imagine"--Ed Park, The Village Voice. "Risky, raucous, filled with moments of audacious beauty, Immensity proves that West, our foremost word wizard, won't play it safe, unlike so many American artists."--Bill Marx, WBUR radio (Boston NPR).

232 pages, Hardcover

First published August 13, 2003

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).


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Reviews

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I come to Paul West’s final official novel, 2003’s THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW: A NOVEL OF 9.11, hot on the heels, so to speak, of the three novels comprising the Alley Jaggers trilogy, originally published as these were in 1966, 1970, and 1972. Considered as an entity unto themselves, the Alley Jaggers novels mark my official beginning(s) with Paul West, an encounter that has registered in a manner most impactful, suggesting something akin to honest to goodness sea change. Paul West has opened up to me, having heretofore evaded my radar systems, and I am committed, in hot pursuit. West never commanded a sizeable cult, and he continues not to do so. It is somewhat difficult to account for this, but it has been to a large extent congenial to my interests, as I have in the past few months been able to acquire nine West first editions at moderate expense, including two signed first editions I found on eBay and which are currently en route. That’s a lot of first editions in a short period of time, and it does not reflect behaviour typical of myself, the zeal here uncommon, perhaps extraordinary. Though it has often been noted by disparate commentators that there is much book-to-book variability as regards West’s interests, methodologies, and the quirks of (generally maximalist) style, I cannot help but note that THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW has striking commonalities with the Alley Jaggers novels of just over three decades previous, especially with the final novel in the series, 1972’s BELA LUGOSI’S WHITE CHRISTMAS. In writing about that earlier novel, which finds Alley Jaggers, our disreputable-in-the-extreme hero, having committed a wretched and pathetic homicide at the end of the trilogy’s first novel, confined to a “security hospital” under the observation of psychiatric doctors, among whom is counted one enterprising enabler named Doctor Withington (his moniker reduced for the most part to With in WHITE CHRISTMAS), I suggested that much of the novel is a sort of jape on psychiatric methodologies of the period (think of the legacies of such figures as R.D. Laing and Félix Guattari), as such at least in part a raucous farce on the subject of transference between analyst and analysand. If we have Alley (or AJ) and With operating as anarchic conspirators in BELA LUGOSI’S WHITE CHRISTMAS, we have in THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW the patient Shrop and the psychiatrist Quent, new complexes being negotiated, the first forty-one pages of the novel switching back and forth between the voices of the two men. This final novel proper is set approximately one year after its 2003 publication, which is to say about three years after the events of September 11th, 2001, a period in which the geopolitical landscape has altered substantively (on a global scale), and Shrop, personally affected in a manner most grave by the events of that aforementioned date, has experienced a “loss of memory” coterminous with the “erosion of what we fancifully called our infrastructure.” Once a philosopher of note, Shrop has lost his systems, his grid, and thus his world. He is “a man whose philosophy vanished in a puff of spores.” (The spectre of envelopes containing Anthrax is part of the amped-up paranoia of the young 21st century’s maximally discomfiting news cycle.) Early in the book I noted a couple of direct parallels to BELA LUGOSI’S WHITE CHRISTMAS. For instance, in the earlier novel AJ teases his doctors in his patented madcap fashion, rapping about “the place being reserved for him at one of the Oxford women’s colleges, where, he tells them with a lear straight out of horror drama, he’ll study in a black cape like Bela Lugosi’s when he’s Dracula, suck the blood of the lady tutors, and set the river on fire by rowing stroke for the Dark Blue boat.” In THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW, Shrop and Quent discuss the Eaton boating song, something that may or may not be legitimately remembered by one or either. If BELA LUGOSI’S WHITE CHRISTMAS was in many respects outrageously jaunty—and calculatedly outrageous at that—THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW, its title tellingly lifted from Hermann Broch’s THE DEATH OF VIRGIL, is comparatively lachrymose, almost oppressive in its dense solemnity, even if the prose-craft is typically breathtaking, peerlessly virtuosic, unmistakably that of the same monumentally gifted literary technician. This is a novel about grief, certainly, and though it becomes increasingly clear what Shrop specifically lost on 9.11, the specificity is itself in need of retrieval, being part of a greater loss, the world that vanished along with the frame that made it tenable, intelligible. The loss of the world is also the loss of its history, its sense of meaningful sequence, linearity, genealogy. History itself has been wounded, perilously, perhaps terminally, and there are intimations of a “glorious inspissated silence that has taken over the poisoned land.” Shrop: “my own poor beleaguered name, Shropshire, echoing a certain famous lad, I suppose, though he never an immigrant, always has a look of sapped sunlight. Had I been unluckier at Immigration, I’d have ended up Shropshin or Scrapsir, but no, I was a lucky lad alright, wondering if on the isle of detention I’d run into some congeners such as Hampshire and Herefordshire, all the home counties, but I never did. What, I always wondered, was a Shrop?” There seems to be here some consonance with the philosopher Vilém Flusser’s theory of “post-history,” a state of affairs in which text, letter, language, and temporal succession are superseded be screens, simultaneity, the dissolution of sequence, and the dominance of programs (computer or otherwise). Post-history itself, as theorized by Flusser, would appear to suggest crises of memory. What happens for the dazed, the exiled, and the worldless should they happen to outlive the historical age? This is in large part the principal matter with which West would appear to be grappling. The novel may not satisfactorily present us with a hero able to reclaim his memory, temporal ground, and world, but it begins by presenting us with Quent’s primary injunction to his charge, “On,” a single word, both injunction and precept, indicating that there is no alternative to the living but to make some kind of hardscrabble go of it. Quent is himself a wheelchair-bound paraplegic and former fighter pilot, victim of a harrowing accident. Hinting at something like arcane diagnosis, Quent reflects upon The I CHING, “Ming yi, brilliance injured.” Addressing Shrop, his friend, his patient, perhaps, problematically, his guinea pig and tabula rasa: “I now in my private files have come to refer to him as the Chaos Attractor, special in that he just doesn’t put up with the horrors; he finds them coming toward him, fangs bared, the taste of him already familiar. They want him, he whose system was the most meticulous, so much so that in his present disheveled state he cannot remember it, and nobody else needs it. Raw importunity assails him at every corner, and life is a jigsaw puzzle with no interlocking pieces. He takes it all on the chin.” Quent seems close to admitting defeat, consigning Shrop to indefinite purgatorial damnation. Alas, a plan is hatched, perhaps reckless, certainly decisive. After those first forty-one pages, the Shrop-Quent back-and-forth, a new modus insinuates itself, and along with it a journey to the Island of Manhattan, to Ground Zero, October, three years and one month aft. Ground Zero, still a mess, a mass, “block solid human terrene”: “What is it like on first view then? Moshe Dayan’s eye socket after the bullet has squirted through the binoculars and buzzed him with glass fragments. Deteriorating picket fences lurch and sag in the coils of razorwire. There is no way through.” West gives everything he has to Ground Zero, the events of 9.11, the heft of that scene, the legacy of grief. Many, many dazzling, heartbreaking passages. “What does it feel like to be killed before you feel pain? Is there a momentary reprieve in that? Why have the thousands entombed not told us? What law forbids them to write their four-word autobiographies? ‘It doesn’t hurt, Mamma.’ That would be enough for us, just to know that the disintegrative dunt marches faster than the nerves can burn. That might do it, tempting thousands more to leap, say, hand in hand or not. Is that the problem then: to be blotted out before anything hurts at all, reassuring those whose faith in the loving god moves mountains of steel, bunkers of poisonous grey silt, billows of noxious smoke?” You would have to call THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW an experimental novel, I think, and, true to its ontology, you cannot say that it moves in a cleanly sequential fashion or operates like a work for which narrative is the primary consideration. The thread is there, but it can become recessed, sometimes lost, and time itself becomes horribly thick, like pea soup, or, more pertinently, the fog of unspeakable calamity, disintegrative dunt, billows of noxious smoke. The journey to Ground Zero does certainly lead to eventuation, a series of successive consequences, and there are unpleasant, even tragic results. It will come to be revealed that it is Quent rather than Shrop who has all along been in the most direct psychospiritual peril. There is also much opportunity for meditation, poetic striving, literary élan, and for hope, especially at the macro. In the dissolution of self and world precipitated by history’s derailing(s) alone we find space for awe, Kant’s sublimity of impossible-seeming scale, what West calls our capacity to be “shocked by sheer survival.” On, on. Shrop’s lost frame of reference, his de-systemed systems: all very much paralleled with other systems, suggesting of course a certain literary legacy, the modernist and so-called “postmodernist” literature of systems. It must be said that Paul West strikes me as unmistakably contributing to this tradition and that his contribution is major in the extreme. Shrop is obsessed not only with 9.11 but also with Idlewild, the former name of John F. Kennedy International Airport. Shrop considers IATA airport codes, station codes or location identifiers, foregrounding a sense of global systems connected to 9.11, to a global schematics, acceleration, intimations of transcontinental schism, to rupture, points of vulnerability. Information and people, speed and exchange, collapse of reference frame, Great Disaster a cosmic given. I write this in the first hour of January 23rd 2020 and we are two days short of the Year of the Rat (per Chinese Lunar Calendar). For the last couple days I have been considering how the rat might be said to represent infrastructure and the porousness of infrastructure. The rat has its equivalents in THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW, especially images of beetles, “constellations” of them “foaming around […] in the underground floors.” Alley Jaggers was a builder of large model airplanes. They tended to perform poorly. Much of the Alley Jaggers trilogy was about reckless ascents and predicable crash-landings. We have the image of Quent’s crash, spavined in jungle canopy. We would also appear to have TERRESTRIALS, a West I have not yet read, evidently a novel in large part about earth-locked fliers. THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW is also the final published novel by an author who would suffer his second stroke, a devastatingly incapacitating one, the same year it was published. He would go on to produce, with the aid of his wife Diane Ackerman, “the first aphasic memoir,” an eventuation THE IMMENSITY OF HERE AND NOW might itself be argued to uncannily portend. I have long called William H. Gass the finest writer of sentences the English language ever produced. On the back of the Voyant first edition of IMMENSITY we have a blurb from Mr. Gass: “West is an extraterrestrial, and while he flies over he sometimes looks down on us poor word-birds pecking at our corn.” Notices hardly get better than that! In an essay from the 1980s entitled “In Defence of Purple Prose,” West discusses his own method: “The impulse here 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.” THE IMMENSITY OF HERE AND NOW, true to its title and true to its visit to Ground Zero, upon which so much here depends, is almost intolerably vivid, its own shock therapy. Its poetics are extraordinary and profound, and the novel declares at one point that words and their manipulation are a godsend to amnesiacs, that they have the capacity to transform them into phoenices, however grim the ever-grim indicators. “Didn’t Auden stick a rotten orange on his mantlepiece in Oxford, putrid side outward? Already, he KNEW, even if to come there were men on the moon and robots on planets.” I leave you with a lengthy passage, withholding commentary: “Unable to discern in everyday life things that had gone wrong or awry, Shrop began to pick on bizarre reports that told him, as well as many others, they were indeed living in an unusual, even unprecedented time. It was not that almost everyone reported a headache, but that a certain Beast of Cricklewood, in fact a lynx, had stalked the streets of Purchase, NY, unidentified, for months, while in New Delhi a Monkey Man—short, human body, with a monkey’s head and metal claws—had committed numerous nighttime attacks. In the Pacific area, a gigantic stick insect had been identified as a ‘walking sausage.’ Crocodiles had been found in Vienna. A minor tornado had deluged a Wiltshire golf course with goldfish and koi carp. Frogs had poured, and were pouring, from the Italian skies. Sand from the Sahara (ah, this he understood and saw as normal) was landing on the cars of Europe. It was clear to him, however, that the world was twisting about, trying to be different. Evolution, he persuaded himself, was scratching itself and trying to be flashy. Had the two topless towers not been attacked, he wondered, would all this have seemed in the least strange? One injection of the weird was enough to draw attention to all the weird stuff that had lain doggo for years, unsaluted and unappraised. It was like (he tried in his befuddled way to regain his Shakespeare) the night in MACBETH when the horses go mad in the stables and start to eat one another, just because other unnatural things are happening in the human domain (Duncan is being murdered). All things go together, he told himself: first one, then all the rest, in wholesale perversion.”