`The Full Panoply of Speech'

Fate is cruel, sometimes with a precision that implies metaphysical sanction. Paul West is a 77-year-old English-born American novelist, author of more than 50 books, who is in love with the joyous profligacy of language. He titled an essay “In Defense of Purple Prose,” and he meant it:

“I am suggesting that purple prose, ornate and elaborate as it sometimes is, reminds us of things we do ill to forget: the arbitrary, derivative, and fictional nature of language; its unreliable relationship with phenomena; its kinship with paint and voodoo and gesture and wordless song; its sheer mystery; its enormous distance from mathematics, photography, and the mouths of its pioneers; its affinities with pleasure and luxury, its capacity for hitting the mind’s eye – the mind’s ear, the mind’s very membranes – with what isn’t there, with what is impossible and (until the very moment of its investiture in words) unthinkable.”

This word-drunk writer, who described purple prose as “the style of extreme awareness,” suffered a stroke in June of 2003 that left him with global aphasia, the loss of speech both spoken and written, its expression and comprehension. The stroke killed cells in the Broca’s area (speech production, language comprehension) and the Wernicke’s area (language comprehension) of the brain. His wife, writer Diane Ackerman, calls his condition “the curse of a perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory hunt.” Rather than resign himself to the limbo of the language-less, West laboriously composed a memoir, The Shadow Factory, parts of which have been published in The American Scholar, and has also finished writing his first post-stroke novel. To place the accomplishment in perspective, imagine Dr. Oliver Sacks writing one of his portraits in applied epistemology from the point of view of a patient who has suffered a neurological catastrophe. Here’s a triumphant excerpt:

“The second day in the rehab unit I heard the voice of pellucid, articulate reason droning on in the absence of any sound and I knew at once that I was going to be all right even then, in spite of the evil-seeming things that had been happening to me. I mean that though I hadn’t tried to speak yet and the whole world was some kind of abstract fanfare waiting to be fed on or off, I would be all right because I could still think language even though it led to an immensely private universe decorated with the full panoply of speech.”

What has been salvaged is not a voice, some second-best expedient, but Paul West’s inimitable, sui generis voice. I’m happy for West and happy for us, for the welcome reminder of how our species, on rare occasions, excels at being human. Oddly, I thought of West earlier in the week, before reading his memoir, when quoting a passage from Emerson (who also suffered from aphasia late in life) in which he deployed nine ampersands in two paragraphs. Here, from The Secret Lives of Words, published in 2000, is West’s memorable definition of “ampersand”:

“&? An exercise for the symbolic logician? Hardly: This is the sign meaning `and per se and,’ which phrase isn’t much help even when you know it means `and by itself and.’ This sign and only this sign means `and.’ Can it mean that? Or does it hark back to old grammar books in which it was printed last at the end of the alphabet, and the name of this sign or character is `and?’ Or was it once a way of writing Latin et? With much curlicue and twist? After all, the quaint pseudo-word `ye,’ meaning `the,’ has stuck around for ever, on tea shops and old curiosity shops, and it was merely an earlier culture’s way of scrawling `the.’ In my childhood, during which my father read The Daily Express, I became accustomed to the newspaper’s own emblem: a Crusader with his shield against his side.”

This definition, so personal and effortlessly learned, signifies a life spent dwelling in language, and West generously shares his relish for words. Thanks to his definition, I can read The Dream Songs, where Berryman is a spendthrift with “&,” with more understanding. It’s symbolically fitting that West should gloss “&.” His work is an exercise in conjunction, in fusing the severed and never-joined, the way neurons in a damaged brain sometimes mend.