Staying West

When Anthony C. West’s first collection, River’s End and Other Stories, appeared, the reviewer in the Oxford Mail (August 11, 1960) described reading it as “quite an experience. Like a kick in the guts from a jack-booted leprechaun.” The image is apt. West powerfully united violence, decay, and corruption with natural, fanciful, poetic, and spiritual beauty. The combination is the complex, contradictory texture of life itself, of course, and West had a genius for making the reader see and feel it. Through the senses, he reached for the head and the heart. Like his literary countrymen Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, and Sean O’Casey, West offered a complete world view. Parts of that view were esoterically Christian; all of it was socially munificent, and most of it was ahead of its time in being ecologically responsible. 

Receiving highest praise, his work was in print for fifty consecutive years: The Native Moment, Rebel to Judgment, The Ferret Fancier, As Towns with Fire, miscellaneous poems, essays, and a dozen or more short stories. For recent decades, however, it has seen neglect. Attempting to repair this loss, Eyler explores West’s critical reception, his auto-fictive method, and other mysteries about his writing life. She has discovered among his papers other novels, promised but never published, and she brings to light his surprisingly feminist magnum opus, The Lady Actaeon, which occupied him over six decades.

West’s remarkable life (1910-1988) became the material for his ever-developing art: his childhood spent between big house and peasant fields in Down and Cavan, his hobo years in the United States during the Great Depression, his Royal Air Force Pathfinder navigating in the bombing of Germany, his experiments in communal farming, his role as father of eleven children, and his own spiritual development. This narrative he steadily mined for his separate but cohering fictions. Through the fiction—especially through Actaeon—and through his letters and interviews, Eyler investigates the special proximity of West’s life to his fiction and finds a way to let the writer tell his own amazing story of fidelity to his art.