West has received the Lannan Prize for Fiction, and The Tent of Orange Mist was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sven Birkerts calls West "one of our heroic writers. Reading his novels, we remember that style wedded to imagination is a nitroglycerin compound."

CF: Let’s talk about the inspiration for your most recent book, Terrestrials.

PW: There was some idea plucking away at me and finally a phrase came through: "The paradox of the fortunate fall." It came back. Here are these two elite, rather self-satisfied, heroic spies suddenly brought down into the African desert. It’s a fortunate fall because they come to learn more about themselves and they discover that life can be lived on a much lower plane. It’s almost an allegorical novel, though that wasn’t necessarily my intention.

CF: You have these fallen angels landing on the burning lake right there at the beginning.

PW: You see, the answer is that these images just come and I use them. I don’t inspect them for their overt meaning.

CF: Which brings me to another point, the word "gratuitous," in the sense of something "freely given."

PW: At least as I experience the act of writing, the writer is given a great deal. People who ask questions about the act of writing always assume that everything you do is calculated and deliberate and planned. But a great deal of what I do is done in a sort of trance-like condition. I get into a receptive state of mind and something begins to arrive. One of the fancy words, which I guess still is current, is "donnée." It’s a gift—a phrase, or a scene, or a sentence. You say, thank God, or thank somebody, and write it down, then something else arrives. Only people with a sort of erector-set mentality masquerade successfully as wholly calculating. I think anyone working on a fairly ambitious level who claims he is deliberate is a liar. Or else he has no imagination, no inspiration.

CF: And yet the architecture comes through in what you do.

PW: Well, it will have architecture. I’ve discovered that, maybe because the mind is the way it is, architecture builds itself. You don’t write without architecture. It’s second nature to build it and to construct it carefully as you go. Do I have a systematic plan? Not really. I very often plan things in the act of writing.

CF: You experiment sentence by sentence.

PW: Yes. The experimentation is on the level of texture. There is another piece of the mind that is carefully guiding what is going on along the way—I’m trying to sum up the experience; it’s very difficult to do. It seems to me writing happens on various levels simultaneously. One is the level of the architectonic, another is texture, and there are many other levels as well: interruption, the level of the lost form, the thing that won’t come back because you’re doing something else, so you waste time looking for it. All of this goes into the act of writing.

CF: This sounds very much like the Romantic idea of inspiration.

PW: It’s a dirty word nowadays. If you’re going to write for a living and you don’t have inspiration, your life is going to be very, very difficult. You’ll never be dragged screaming into the next book by a new idea. The problem with wannabees is that they either don’t want to do the work, or can’t face the kind of honesty you have to cultivate. You have to say I know what works for me, and work within that. Most people won’t do that. They’ll want a formula—how do I write a well-made novel?

CF: I’m thinking of the journalistic attack on so-called flowery writing.

PW: A lot of people slam away at what they call self-indulgence: Fancy, flowery, artsy-fartsy. They wholly ignore a great deal of the best literature. Don’t forget the female judge at the National Book Award, who, apropos of nobody and nothing, screamed into the phone while we were having a conference call, "I’m sick and tired of all this masturbatory writing." And nobody knew what she meant. So I asked who’s written masturbatory work? She said Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Nabokov, Woolf. Two of us started to laugh. I asked her what was wrong with masturbation anyway. She had no idea what she was talking about. That was her slam. I have a lot to say about the literary world, and I haven’t finished. I want to write a posthumous book in which I name names. And nail nails.

CF: Do you have a title?

PW: I do. I’m going to call it Something Rotten. It will not be that long. It’ll have its good side, its genial side, but the chapter that will count is called "Proctology."

CF: Sounds like something Rabelais would write.

PW: Rabelais is not a bad precursor.

CF: He has a list of what his ecclesiastical enemies were doing in hell.

PW: You’re right. He was one of the first writers I latched onto. My God, what wonderful freedom to do this, almost what you like. I guess people don’t read the Marquis de Sade, either. Well, I got a little bored with him. Rabelais is so much better than Sade. He’s more interesting. The trouble with Sade is he’s monotonous, he never saw the opposite. With really good writers like Beckett and Nabokov you always get the other idea, a shadowing. These people have enough wit to see the opposite of what they’re doing and that always invigorates whatever goes on. In Nabokov you have the handsome son of well-to-do arty parents, but there’s always the specter of total deprivation, of all this being removed and becoming a displaced person in Berlin. That’s what makes Nabokov so powerful: there’s the panoply and then only a millimeter away is total deprivation. I was thinking of his story "Solus Rex," about a fellow who thinks he has solved the riddle of the universe. He checks into a hotel so as to concentrate on the problem even more, and then they hear him screaming in his room. It’s one of Nabokov’s more enigmatic stories.

CF: Stylistically it foreshadows Pale Fire. He was working on it just before he sailed from France in 1940, and he wished that he’d continued it, for it promised to open up a new stylistic avenue in Russian.

PW: I think it’s Nabokov’s most Beckettian piece, and why didn’t he finish it? I suppose the answer is that he couldn’t. He’d reached the unsayable.

CF: Nabokov used to teach a course that students nicknamed "Dirty Lit."

PW: Well, Dirty Lit would be a good course. I’m not sure I have not taught it in my time. Proust is dirty lit, according to certain critics. They call him "mauvy" Proust, who writes dirty things about brothels and rats. They ignore the 99% that’s not about brothels and rats. However, dirty Proust is a great consolation to me. He’s not a phrasemaker. I was thinking the other day of the writers I still read, Faulkner and Proust, are not phrasemakers. They have a very peculiar noise that they make, and they tend to make their effects by piling things up, whereas writers like Nabokov, and maybe even Beckett, are phrasemakers. Very often a line of Beckett has more punch than a whole paragraph of some of these other guys. So I’m grateful for Beckett. Not the plays, though. I don’t get much from the plays. But the novels — superb stuff to reread, you get much more on the second and third reading. I don’t think Beckett realized how close he was to himself in some of those. Someone told me they had to strap him in his chair in his last months while he watched TV. That was it. If there’s anything more Beckettian than being strapped in your chair and watching TV, with no cricket, what a fate. That was pure, pure Murphy.

CF: Talk about being absorbed by a character in your own fiction.

PW: I taught Beckett’s fiction for twenty years, and I had enormous fun, and my students had fun. They used to write to him and he would send them presents, autographed books, always in French. Then they would come with trembling hands saying, "Beckett wrote to me! And he sent me this." There it was, scrawled away.

CF: Look at the different kinds of styles he wrote in—the early freer style and then the later, pared-down one that’s nothing like the kind of minimalism you get from its practitioners here.

PW: With Beckett—I wouldn’t use the word minimalism—it’s a Swiftian economy. He has this wonderful mind behind it all, so that even if he seems pared down, it’s only to make a certain phrase more pungent and copious beyond all measure. Beckett is in the business of distillation, of being concise. But what’s being made concise is enormous learning and a vast amount of upset.

CF: One thing I see you doing in Terrestrials is pay homage to Beckett.

PW: Yes. I learned a lot from Beckett. Perhaps all that people learn from him is the courage of their own phrasemaking. Some say Beckett comes out of the tradition of phrasemaking, and some say I come out of the tradition of stream of consciousness. I don’t think there’s a stream of consciousness. There’s a puddle, or there’s a pool, or there’s a swamp. I think I straddle both schools, and people don’t know what to do with me. It seems to me that —what did Nathalie Sarraute call it? — subconversation, that’s not really had its full play in the novel. People think a lot more than they actually say. Some of that is worth exploring, as she discovered. I’ve always wanted to do that. So in this case, although it’s clear they’re occupied with physical procedures, especially flying the plane, they also have bundles of thoughts that could be expressed, although they themselves are not doing so.

CF: This seems to me much more interesting than the straitened idea that such and such a character is limited by a certain education, a certain job, and therefore could never think such thoughts.

PW: I remember people in publishing houses used to push this and say, well, you can only write about a child in a child’s language. I’ve never heard such twaddle in my life. A competent narrator will write in narratorial language, whatever that narrator wants to do. It has nothing to do with a child’s idiom.

CF: Imagine Benjy writing his section of The Sound and the Fury.

PW: I’m very glad he didn’t. It’s very strange to find people who say, here’s an orchestra, and the one thing we don’t want is a conductor. They want them all playing their own version.

CF: Even John Cage conducts, if you will.

PW: John Cage is a very interesting figure, especially with Prepared Piano. If you’re dealing with an ancient language like English, you’re dealing with a prepared piano anyway. You have all of its conversations, all of its previous uses, as well as the way the thing has shaped itself through people’s epiglottises. I find that absolutely fascinating. You’re not dealing with something that was invented in 1945. It’s something that goes back to Indo-European, the squawks and harrumphs of people whose names we’ll never know. Literature can do a lot of things. It can be almost musical in its effects, probably more than musical. You have to live dangerously to do it. You need your Rabelais behind you, and Henry James, Proust, Djuna Barnes and Woolf. These are the great models.

CF: Do you think American writing is becoming parochial?

PW: You’ve raised a very interesting point, and that is, in a sense — putting poetry aside for a minute — fiction has almost no standing as an art form. It’s regarded as, I don’t know what category it’s in, imitation margarine. It’s supposed to be a commonplace, mercantile thing like toothpaste, to be used and spat out. Not pondered, or kept, or given as a present. I think the attitude of people towards nonfiction has a lot to do with this. They say in some sort of censorious, puritanical way that fiction is not real, that fiction is cowardly and evasive, blah blah blah. Well, it always was. Fiction is metaphorical. It isn’t documentary. I’m not sure where this notion came from that fiction is documentary. Maybe it’s because initially, in say, the 18th century when fiction began to grow, it was an instrument used by a specific social class for defining itself.

CF: And there’s Defoe writing things that look very much like documentaries.

PW: Which is entertaining, provided you don’t regard it as a novel. The novel is a wholly different growth. But it didn’t begin to become so only in the l9th century, it was already there in people like Rabelais and Thomas Nashe.

CF: And if you go back to the Romans —

PW: And the Greeks. They’re taking licentious liberties. Somebody like Longus is taking liberties way back when.

CF: The Satyricon, too.

PW: That’s a good example. Why punish fiction for appearing to become what it has always been. I don’t know, I haven’t figured it out. It has to do with puritanism, it has to do with hypocrisy. People somehow don’t like to be caught reading ambitious fiction. I don’t know why.

CF: You seem to have a more receptive audience in Europe, especially France.

PW: The most considered, most imaginative, most pensive accounts of my stuff come from the French, most often in Le Monde, which is a very friendly newspaper. They always give me the front page. They have a small team who write about serious fiction. I’m very grateful to Gallimard and the French critical reviewing constituency. With them, you don’t have to argue the seriousness of fiction. It’s a given. In America, and I think in England too, and possibly in Germany, fiction has somehow lost its clout. But not in Latin America.

I don’t know why this curious inhibition about fiction, which is actually the magic carpet, and always was — read the Arabian Nights for God’s sake — it’s a means of transporting your imagination in the context of the writer’s imagination. Fiction is there to supplant the world that is around you, and if it’s not doing that I’m not sure its fiction. It’s like this idiot who reviewed me when Amaryllis came out. He belabored the point that, in fact, Milton did not have a black girlfriend, and how could I presume that he did. And how could I read Milton’s mind? Didn’t I know Milton was dead? And on and on. The other book he reviewed with mine was also about Milton, Milton in America. He actually went to the trouble of saying we know well that Milton did not go to America, as if this has any bearing on anything. Here is this gorgeous implement, the imagination, and people keep bitching at it, saying it’s not trustworthy, its dangerous, it’ll provoke revolution. Damn right. I’m the guy who makes Stauffenberg [Count Von Stauffenberg, in The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg] narrate in English his own execution twice, and then go on to write the novel. Malraux, in talking about art, had the right idea: There’s nothing new. The things that Picasso was doing are things that were done in Africa long before. And today, the magic realists are just reclaiming ancient privileges. One should. The Bible is a monument to magical realism. Perhaps people would find 20th-century literature a lot easier if they realized how old-fashioned it was. Guy Davenport likes to bring in the classics, mixed with Kafka. It’s an exciting mix, but he gets little thanks for it.

CF: Just think if Shakespeare had never used the classics or Renaissance sources. Not a single play set in Italy, nothing set in Rome, nothing based on Holinshed .

PW: I used to say to my writing students, God help them, always write about what you don’t know. For instance, if you’re determined to write and you say to yourself, what do I know about train stations in Sebastopol. The answer, obviously, is nothing. Well, go and get a guidebook and find out. Research it. imagine what it’s like to go from station to station in Sebastopol.

CF: We’ve seen a spate of dramatizations of Jane Austen novels. Do you think that movies and television are reviving the public’s interest in reading?

PW: They claim this is generating a whole new generation of readers. But what are they reading? They’re reading kitsch. There’s almost nothing else. If publishers insist on making 20 percent profit, instead of the traditional three, or at most five, and have gotten rid of their best editors, and are humiliating their best authors, by and large not buying the books they write, then the kitsch is going to take over. And they will make their 20 percent, which is utterly contrary to the old idea of publishing as a "gentleman’s profession" in which you expected to lose money on literature and pay for it by producing books on chess and cooking.

CF: And some publishers engage in the cant of saying they give the public what they want.

PW: The public is not as gullible and dense as some booksellers and publishers, but the public is being swindled. They’re being told there’s no cake, that they’ll have to eat stale bread the rest of their lives. Because if they eat cake they will get above themselves somehow, they will become intellectuals. So people are surrounded by all this swill. Badly conceived books — they’re really non-books.

CF: What are you working on now?

PW: I’ve finished a novel about Wyatt Earp that should be released next year. I enjoyed making up the letters he writes to a nun. And I’m working on a novel that deals with the Gunpowder Plot and Catholic martyrs.