Overview

"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."

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9781942661030

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Many readers will find Eyler's chronicle of West's last years affecting - never sentimental, but an inspiring portrayal of a born writer continuing to work despite mounting problems and setbacks along the way. It does not end Staying West on a despairing note, but rather a celebratory one. A statement culled from a 1950's letter sums up what we should glean from the book's conclusion and, ultimately, the entirety of this life's tale - I'm a writer. Fiction. Trying, I suppose, to bridge this widening gap between more subjective 'fiction' and true fiction, in the sense of the valid fairy story. Those first four words could go on the man's tombstone. Anne Hollister Staying West leaves nothing about West's life unexamined, but Eyler never bogs readers down with unnecessary details and her writing style, alternated with West's own writing, doesn't suffer in comparison. Instead, the learned yet conversational tone she adopts for her own contributions helps make a sometimes dizzying life much more digestible for readers. This is one of the finest literary biographies I've read in recent memory and prods me to learn more about this writer. I think the latter is perhaps the finest compliment I can give the author and I do so without reservation. It isn't a weighty tome better used as a doorstop nor some overwrought tribute to a deceased author. This long moribund reputation deserves revisiting and, perhaps, this book will serve as an all-important first step towards realizing that goal. Bethany Page Audrey Stockin Eyler - Staying West It's all here for interested parties - West's triumphs, setbacks, joys, sorrows, breakthroughs, and final days. Eyler has captured the measure of a human being and writer's life in a way few biographies ever accomplish. At its finest, and when documenting an artistic life, the biography can light up dark unknown corners and reveal aspects of a person to us we would have never known if not for the efforts of the biographer. Eyler has brought this largely forgotten Irish author to life once again. Her magic is real, stamped on each page of this book, and those who love fine literature can only hope her wish that this work spark even a minor revival of interest in Anthony C. West is fulfilled. Kim Muncie

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