Anthony C. West (1910-1988), like Beckett, Joyce, and many another writer born in Ireland, lived and wrote in exile. Nevertheless he, too, made Ireland the microcosmic focus for wider application, as he challenged intellectual and cultural oppression. At cost, perhaps, to his fame, but as a boon to his writing, West kept a maverick independence from schools and coteries. For his unusual language, West has been compared to Thomas and Lawrence; from the start of his career he has been hailed as one of the century's most distinctive stylists writing fiction in English. For his intellectual scope critics have ranked him with Beckett and Joyce. But for all the recognition of his self-educated talent, West has never been well understood as a spiritual writer. In Celtic, Christian, Socialist, Audrey Stockin Eyler suggests that he may indeed be the most systematically spiritual writer Ireland has produced since Yeats.Eyler shows how West describes the evolution of the human soul - with its antipodal capacities for destruction and creation - and charts its stages of development. Maturation of the soul is integrated with that of the body, and together they paradigmatically suggest for West the development of the culture and of the human race. Materialism, no intrinsically destructive thing to West, nevertheless dominates and impedes modern thought and action, feeds the insatiable Ego, promotes violence, and threatens true, healthy Egoity, essential human community, and even the planet. Eyler traces West's sources to demonstrate the syncretism and integrity of his approach.The four novels West published during his lifetime (The Native Moment, Rebel to Judgment, The Ferret Fancier, and As Towns With Fire) appeared independently of each other and stand firmly as separate works. Read as a series, however, they chronicle the spiritual growth of an artistic Every-son-of-the-Goddess, from his childhood intimations of immortality to the coming into his manfathering kingdom. Like the novels they discuss, the chapters of Celtic, Christian, Socialist are intended to be read both separately as introductions to particular novels and sequentially as a whole.Although it deplores the negative effects of this pervasive Egotism, West's quartet is not a simple jeremiad. It implies an unpridefully-offered spiritual alternative premised on the trust that a divine, femininely creative love has stirred the Aeolian harp, and the heart strings as well. Eyler shows how a Wordsworthian influence combines with West's lifelong studies in Celtic and Christian traditions, and how it inspires a Prelude in West's unique prose.

Celtic, Christian, Socialist: The Novels of Anthony C. West

Eyler, Audrey Stockin

Religion & Spirituality

UNKNO

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.

Staying West: The Writing Life of Anthony C. West

Biographies & Memoirs

Kitsap Publishing

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Books by Eyler, Audrey Stockin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Eyler, Audrey Stockin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Celtic, Christian, Socialist: The Novels of Anthony C. West

Staying West: The Writing Life of Anthony C. West