Paul West — Colonel Mint [1972]

Prolific Derbyshire-born novelist, memoirist, poet, and critic Paul West changed tense on October 18^th (2015). His vast corpus is intimidating for the newcomer, and no fervent Westites exist at present to help us navigate the five decades’ worth of fiction and non-fiction. The Review of Contemporary Fiction published an issue in 1993 on West and Alexander Theroux, after which West penned ten published novels (and various unpublished ones), however, this might help the reader to find a footing. I chose Colonel Mint as the cheapest out of print West available (a large swathe of West is oop), and this proved a fortuitous selection. West’s first two decades seem to have been spent writing verbally dextrous comic fiction of a surreal nature, from the Alley Jaggers trilogy (West’s “British” period), to novels with fantastic titles like Caliban’s Filibuster written after West’s lifelong exile to America. This hilarious and shocking comic novel concerns the titular hero: an astronaut who witnesses the sighting of an angel from a spacecraft’s window. Upon his return he is isolated and interrogated by Lew R., whose task is to expunge the sighting from Mint’s mind. Among his techniques include the assassinations of two fellow astronauts, lowering Mint into a “five-foot-high tea-chest full of thick black ooze reeking of rancid fruit, cowsheds, and drains”, a sequence of violent sexual encounters with Connie Langoustine, a series of staged hallucinatory episodes, and continual poking from a strange taser-like gizmo named the Brabazon. The star of this novel is West’s athletic style, which compliments the surreal and baffling sequence of scenes presented: in terms of humour, we are closer to the overt sexism of Terry Southern and his ilk (each male character has plentiful sex with the unprotesting Connie), however, the satirical message here is sound: the Colonel could not tell the world he had seen an angel in space, for the implications for America and the world would be too large. The novel never strikes a tone of pathos, remaining in its frenetic comic mode throughout, but West plants this pip of pathos in our heads regardless. If one can excuse the period humour, Colonel Mint is a raucous and outrageous entertainment with a point in there somewhere (never too important). West moved into historical novels for the remaining two decades. In 2003, he suffered a severe stroke, from which he recovered (an experience chronicled in his wife Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love), publishing two non-fiction titles but not finding a home for the novels he wrote in the period. Here is the excellent obit in the New York Times. And here is West’s one appearance upon KCRW’s Bookworm. And here’s to more plundering of his works!

Editions:

Hardback, 1972, E.P. Dutton.

Hardback, 1973, Calder & Boyars.

Bibliography:

Novels:

A Quality of Mercy, 1961, Chatto & Windus.

Tenement of Clay, 1965, Hutchinson.

Alley Jaggers, 1966, Hutchinson.

I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon, 1970, Harper & Row.

Caliban’s Filibuster, 1971, Doubleday.

Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas, 1972, Harper & Row.

Colonel Mint, 1972, E.P. Dutton.

Gala, 1976, Harper & Row.

The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, 1980, Harper & Row.

Rat Man of Paris, 1986, Doubleday.

The Place in Flowers, Where Pollen Rests, 1988, Doubleday.

Lord Byron's Doctor, 1989, Doubleday.

The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, 1991, Random House.

Love's Mansion, 1992, Random House.

The Tent of Orange Mist, 1995, Scribner.

Sporting with Amaryllis, 1996, Overlook Press.

Life With Swan, 1997, Overlook Press.

Terrestrials, 1997, Scribner.

OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday, 2000, Scribner.

The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery, 2000, New Directions.

A Fifth of November, 2001, New Directions.

Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun , 2002, New Directions.

The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11, 2003, Voyant Publishing.

Short fiction:

The Universe and Other Fictions, 1989, Overlook Press.