Many years ago, nearly twenty-three in fact, I received a request from a Spanish priest stationed in the Philippines for an essay by Paul West. Knowing that the author and I taught at the same university, he had taken it for granted that I would have access to the piece. I didn't. Since I was at a campus other than University Park, where Paul West taught, I didn't know the author either (nor, to my chagrin, even his name). Checking the meager holdings of my small campus library for a book of his that might contain the piece, I drew the proverbial blank. But since collegiality is the hallmark in the best of all possible worlds, the academic, I wrote the author a note explaining my friend's pressing need for the essay (he was working on his doctoral dissertation) and his offer to pay for it (I don't recall if in Spanish pesetas or Philippine pesos).

Sometime thereafter, I received a letter from the author explaining that the essay would reach me as soon as the English Department secretary got around to Xeroxing it. I guess she never did for I received instead a package via intercampus mail that contained not one but two copies of Paul West's The Wine of Absurdity, in which the desired essay on Graham Greene appeared. And the books were gifts from the author, one for the needy priest and one for me! It was my first opening to Paul West.

The largesse of my newly discovered colleague toward two strangers not only impressed me as a humanitarian (or should I say, humanistic?) sort of thing, but also verified my Panglossian belief in the utopic nature of collegiality. Over the years, where others have caused deep erosion of my naïveté, Paul West has continued to uphold its veracity by periodically bestowing upon me many and sundry titles—novels, essays, stories, memoirs, poetry. These works have made manifest to me what a reviewer writing in the New York Times Book Review has termed "his ability to make language behave the way he wants it to."

And, indeed, in his writing Paul West's words are impressive in their virtuosity and power. They open venues and vistas for the one who accompanies him, the reader, much like Virgil's statements rendered openings for Dante's entry into the uncharted geography encountered in his journey through the inner depth that is the first part of The Divine Comedy.

Having led Dante through the gate of Hell into the infernal vestibule, Virgil sought passage for both of them across the river Acheron. But Charon refused to ferry the living body of the Florentine. It was then that Virgil used the first Word of Power in the Inferno: "Thus it is willed where Power / and Will are one; enough; ask thou no more" (canto 3). The hellish oarsman wilted before the authority behind Virgil's commanding words and gave safe passage across the infernal river to the petitioners. Again, on encountering opposition from Minos, the judge of Hell, Virgil uttered similar formulaic words that would guarantee the continuance of his and Dante's journey (canto 5). Yet another incident, this time with Pluto, caused Virgil to use the Word of Power a third time, with equal efficacy (canto 7).

Just as the reader accompanies Dante on his personal journey, proceeding through levels that spiral in or out of the depths of the Florentine's fertile mind, so too is the follower of Paul West led to the gates of the complex edifice that is his creative work; and, just as Dante the author has granted his character Virgil the wherewithal to permit passage, Paul West opens the structure of each piece and helps the visitor to ford the stream of his poetry and fiction through Words of Power uttered by an omniscient narrator, an eloquent character, or both. Potent words powerfully stated open the pathways to the author's highly charged, often chilling imagination, as selected examples from his poetry and prose will illustrate.

The journey could well begin in The Snow Leopard, the 1964 collection of poetry, which opens with "Avila" where the poet observes that in the evening "black pigs are driven in through dark stone gates," there to encounter "a splutter and fury of oil frying" which "Says, pigs, oil, people, accept their conditions" perhaps like the reluctant denizens of Dante's Inferno, for West sees that "Neither meaning / Nor bafflement fits this place" where Saint Teresa was born and lived out her mystic existence, "her nose / Upturning from the sealike stench of frying oils." Nonetheless, access to the esoteric city of Ávila is seen as gratifying by the poet because "There, the walking is privileged, the light indulgent," as in the place of Dante's unique perambulation.

The image of pigs driven into the walled city through its "dark stone gates" is indeed reminiscent of Dante's Inferno since these unfortunate beings, like those in the Florentine's work, must abandon all hope upon entering their own infernal world. Not only does Paul West's image make a powerful impact upon the reader with its implacable promise of destruction, the nonchalant, reportorial nature of the statement itself underscores the terrible stoicism in the lives of both pigs and humans. Like Dante before the tribulations of the denizens of his Inferno, West finds that both sense and perplexity are inadequate where the harshness of life culminates in the frying fires of Ávila. Perhaps it is their glowing embers that make it possible for the poet to see the intertwined fate of two types of beings, one wholly a beast and the other, a pretender to superior laurels, concealing its bestial nature under human guise. Dante too could see in Hell despite the utter darkness there.

Journeys through the insanity and absurdity of the human condition are the stuff of West's locutions. But why not, for as his first collection of short fiction, The Universe, and Other Fictions (1988), suggests via its Borgesian title, the very cosmos is unreal; furthermore, in West's expansive perspective, it is a situ fraught with supernatural inanities. The opening piece, "Life with Atlas," initiates the reader into West's particular cosmic vision through the narrative voice of one Thor, a writer with apparent (read hallucinatory) deific connections:

I no sooner thought than I began to withdraw from the consequences; understand, if you will, the embarrassments of being a vicarious voice: I, hearing Atlas, uttered him, but in no way managing to reproduce the intonations, nuances, or even the tart symphonic thrust of the voice I heard. And now, thanks be Fortune, Atlas is coming out as words, and I'm in the near-fatuous position of transposing a voice-in-the-head, but spoken into the tape by myself, into yet another medium, of which not even my best friend, Etna, would call me master.

The Atlas who speaks through the mediumship of Thor is less than a Titan in tone, sounding at times like a vulgar page out of London's News of the World as he trivializes mythology: Maia becomes Ma; Mercury, Merc or Herm; Zeus is diminutized into Zeusy-Boy. At other times, he apologizes for being "downright sentimental" in recalling how his daughter Maia rubbed his massive back to soothe the aches brought on by his punishing and eternal task. Thor first observes that "Atlas sounds like he's cracking up," and later, as the Titan's voice dwindles, that the sound is "Atlas groaning in the hoosegow of his mind." Like Nimrod, one of the Giants whom Dante (and others) confused with the Titans, Atlas speaks randomly and makes sense only part of the time. When he ceases talking altogether, his interviewer-medium, practical man that he is, prepares for a potential second exchange of cosmic words with the Titan: "I need my wits about me, peace of mind, some extra supplies of sherry, and, above all, some fresh tapes, tabulae rasae for him to deface."

And in the ironic dark humor of Paul West, here as elsewhere, lies another entry into the power of his words to startle first and then to embroil the reader in the discord between fantasy and reason, somewhat like Calvino in his outlandish cosmogonic mode. In an interview appended to Caliban's Filibuster, West says of the mind that it "is in the world, at the world, yet only contingently attached to it, and is often in outright opposition to it, to its predominantly bourgeois or square quality. God's the square pig in the round hell." The mind's position in West's world is akin to that of the soul in the Gnostic universe, "a stranger in a strange place," except that here literature is the concern, not religion; that contrast can also be made with The Divine Comedy.

But there is also the more down-to-earth perspective of other novels. The "three feet five inches high" Pee Wee Lazarus, narrator of Tenement of Clay (1965), introduces himself to the reader directly: "Pardon me for interrupting whatever it is that you might better be doing just now. Having got this far, I hope to grow on you." That he can deal with not having grown normally is evident in his cavalier, if self-deprecating, way of describing his physical condition: "It's all a matter of perspective: for toilet basins and washbowls I am lower, and to whatever they contain and diffuse…. Call me navel-high if you like, or buttock-low: it's true." But he is not only stunted in size, for as he says of himself: "It is not the nicest person who is telling all this." And yet, he does grow on the reader because, as he states with a leer, "you are all easy to involve, even at my level."

Another lowlife type with aspirations to creativity is Alley Jaggers, protagonist first of the 1966 novel that bears his name. On the first page, he questions his own strange thoughts: "Ee, what the hell's wrong wi' me? I get some funny ideas; real daft." Shortly before this autopsychoanalysis, he enters into the reader's view riding a phallic symbol à la Freud: "Coasting home fed-up, a spluttering engine below his knees, Alley Jaggers falls out of love with his motor-bike. Revving, he shuts out the engine noise and tunes in to himself with both ears, as he always does when he is miserable." Those ears are "heavily lobed and face forward as if to measure the wind or brake the bike." They are the best features of a head with very odd mouth and jaw and nose rather ill-suited to each other: "The over-all effect is not pleasing … He leers, scowls, squints, and even inflates his cheeks, hoping to become so abominable that lightning will kill him out of sympathy."

Living grotesques were very much in Paul West's ken from the beginning of his novelistic career, as pervasive therein as the exotically distorted dead-existing beings in the Inferno. In their physical deformity and inner depravity, Pee Wee Lazarus and Alley Jaggers seem to have crawled into modern times out of a phantasmagoric canvas by Breughel or Bosch or, closer yet to our era, out of the human follies etched by Goya. West, the contemporary writer once thought of largely as one of the new realists in British fiction, is better thought of as being in the line of the Spaniards Quevedo, Valle-Inclán, and Cela, maestros who pursued the aesthetic of the grotesque by going beyond the limitations of the world around them. For Paul West too, as he says in the interview-afterword to Caliban's Filibuster, reality is a springboard for

imagination—the faculty we were given for the express purpose of flying in the face of the First Cause. What a gratuitous universe it is, anyway; what a bloody surd; Bela Lugosi's White Christmas—as I found out in some depth while writing Words for a Deaf Daughter, what with such defectives as waltzing mice, axolotls that should become salamanders but don't, children born without one of the human senses. Not that I'm harping on the universe's lapses rather than its norms; no, what impresses me finally is the scope for error within the constancy of the general setup contrasted with our power to imagine things as otherwise—to rectify, to deform.

That power is what ultimately makes Alley Jaggers a dreamer; in that metamorphosis lies the rectification of and compensation for the character's physical deformity.

The protagonist of Rat Man of Paris (1986) is another of the odd fellows in this line of strange, quirky beings, a human figure avenging his personal hell on earth by "tweaking" the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie with the rat he carries inside his coat.

In the old, postwar days, before his rage mellowed, he worked the streets of the city with a squad of kids, flashed his live rat at the diners and Pernod sippers on the boulevards while the kids picked pockets…. Poulsifer, alias Rat Man, seemed to be everywhere, a postwar apparition both harsh and playful, reminding the world of what it had recently gone through, but also making fun of the trauma too. A Rat Man could amuse…. He still hunts the perfect demeanor for what he does with his rats. He envisions the correct degree of limp, the just-so pouncing movement as he reveals the off-color pink of the nose. He dreams of the perfect accost …

West presents his antihero with Rabelaisian gusto, meaning as well to tweak the societal sensibility that finds Poulsifer (and indeed Lazarus and Jaggers) repugnant at first and ultimately ludicrous. Yet, like the last human in Ionesco's Rhinoceros, Poulsifer will join the throng, becoming Poussif, "the ordinary chap." Once again the author has called upon the imagination to recast a lost soul through the magical power of his words. Paul West, Redeemer, is yet another facet that opens itself to the reader of his exotic fictions. Again, like Dante, he faces the death of body or of spirit around him and carries on, but he does so without truculence, his words underscored instead by his sardonic glee over the curious state of things.

The stuff of his writing is at the juncture of the ridiculous and the sublime. The opening to The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests is through death, the seemingly peaceful death of a beautiful woman who, had a wake been held, "would still have been the best-looking person present." It is a death that came about "because of a fluke" rather than through the premeditation of the perpetrator, who can behold her inert form with detachment.

Her eyes in the final spasm had this far-beyond-it-all and happy look: well, if not exactly happy, then at least resigned, as if she was glad it was over and done with for this lifetime anyway, all because of a fluke…. She looked as if she had seen a familiar ghost and was just on the point of greeting it, her eyes wide with gentle surprise…. She looked every inch in contact with her life …

The power of this gentle opening is that it instigates the reader to pursue the rest of the paragraph, which runs to more than three pages, in order to learn more about the dead beauty and the "fluke" that caused her demise. But in the process of reading on, the reader is confronted with the implacability that turns the beauty of her stillness into the clinical reality of death's toll:

Nothing but that first faint reek of baby napkin, coming from below where the muscles had begun to relent a little. She was only being normal. Her body, where she had recently been, was behaving like a body…. He [Oswald] could see how she had begun to sag, all slack and quite rested-looking…. She was naked, of course, but nobody had thought of covering her up. She worked naked and naked she had died. It was as if her breasts and thatch were all of a sudden invisible, which was what happened when he looked at those ghastly pictures from the death camps…. It was so quiet, though he could hear some gurgling from deep inside her. The vital processes were still going on.

Through the skillful rendering of his words, West has turned the beautifully evocative Sleeping Beauty, albeit a naked one, into a sexless corpse ready for disposal at the hands of the other two men present: "There was a flurry of newspapers and plastic bags, ropes and sticky tape, as if Stu and Clu had been ready for this all along, and all he could think to do was dress and go wash his hands over and over." The blood on his hands leaves indelible marks, like those that haunted Lady Macbeth and that Pontius Pilate thought he could wash out of history; like them, they had others to dispose of the victims.

Such friends-in-need as in West's novel (first voyeurs to Oswald's passion, then witnesses to his inadvertent crime, now co-conspirators in the coverup) "kept you fresh to keep them off the hook. You became a kind of trophy, a souvenir, to keep their eyes on." And when the time came for them to get him, "they would find all the fight gone out of him, his throat arched in soft welcome to the razor, her image on fire in his vacant eyes."

The New York Times reviewer of The Place in Flowers addressed the verbal virtuosity of the author as displayed in the novel: "Paul West is fascinated by what language tries to hide from us in its deep pleats and pockets, and he's good at loosening its folds just enough to glimpse what may be inside." This is exactly what Jewish mystics sought through the esoteric exegesis of the Pentateuch, the Torah. In another age West most assuredly would have joined the company of the cabalists to work with letters and numbers toward the decipherment of the secret meaning of the universe. In his time, he has opened hermetic seals on his own, decoding a broad spectrum of things on the terrestrial and astral planes of the universe. In this he has followed Dante's path.

On reading that first of his many books to come my way, I had become a fan of Paul West the critic; subsequently, I began to seek out other of his works and so read his poetry, novels, and memoirs. A year or so after the initial contact, I became his colleague at the main campus of Penn State and took the occasion to have him autograph The Wine of Absurdity. More importantly, I became his friend, so I began to know the man as well and, in the process, came to an appreciation of him which has increased over the years of partaking in conversation and banter on subjects high and low. It's all a matter of words, as he said in the Caliban's Filibuster interview:

When we die, our bodies fit back into nature in predictable ways, but what our minds put into print or paint, or whatever, affects people in ways that aren't predictable at all. If it isn't put into print or paint, or whatever, though, it vanishes. Ah, the miracle of words! Life's one long filibuster, killing of time with talk.

Paul West's is a language which opens those who encounter it, be it in its vocal or its written states, to new perceptions of the universe. As with Dante's Virgilian locutions, his language is composed of powerful verbal signs powerfully stated which open hearer or reader to the torrents of imaginative filibustering that gush forth out of Paul West's mighty ken. His are, as these samplings from openings to his works verify in their verbal diversity, Words of Power.