Be concise. Then stretch like elastic. The wisdom of Paul West

Paul West—a novel innovator, a proponent of risk, a teacher who, by his own accounting in Master Class, challenged, abraded and applauded—recently passed away. He had been living in the aftermath of a stroke that had rearranged his language. He'd been living loved by his wife, the writer Diane Ackerman.

In honor of his passing I went back last night and re-read passages of Master Class—a plea for originality, a template for the new. Perhaps I like this book so much because I side with West. I believe in the unusual mix.

But let's give the words today to Mr. West himself. A passage from his account of a final class.

From time to time I encourage them to see their work in an almost Dionysian way, at its most creative, trying to experiment in every sentence, not through wild excess but with timing, almost covert touches that will transform a phrase. Be concise to begin with, I tell them, and then stretch it out like elastic, filling in all the spaces.

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English 145

Yesterday the brave souls of English 145 at Penn lobbed Natalia Ginzburg, Paul West, and Annie Dillard around the room—declaiming, declaring, rebutting, suggesting, insisting on asynchronous points of view.

West, via his essay "Remembrance of Things Proust," emerged variously as brilliant, smug, teacherly, full of his own conceits, and ultimately vulnerable. Ginzburg, with her classic "My Craft," riled the suspicious among us with her declaration that, "When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy, memory acts with greater force." In "To Fashion a Text," Dillard won the hard-to-win with her words, "What impels the writer is a deep love for and respect for language, for literary forms, for books. It's a privilege to muck about in sentences all morning. It's a challenge to bring off a powerful effect, or to tell the truth about something. You don't do it from willpower; you do it from an abiding passion for the field... Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong."

We took a break. We caught our breath. We leaned in toward the end of the day. We sat for a moment with Larry Woiwode, his words: "All experience is simultaneous, stilled and sealed in itself, and we manage daily by imagining we move from minute to minute, somehow always ahead. Our multiple selves collide at every second of intersection, one or the other vying for supremacy, the scars of the past flooding through the present texture of our personality, and maturity is knowing how to govern the best combination of them."

Finally we agreed to read Ondaatje's Running in the Family, perhaps my favorite memoir of all time. It's not just story. It's not just language. It's the making of memoir, revealed.

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