The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests

by Paul West

Fiction. Reprint. Paul West is one of the English language's finest novelists. Considered by many to be among his greatest and most rewarding books The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests recounts an odyssey from Arizona's Hopi mesas to the California motels where sex films get made, from Vietnam's battle zones to the very stars. First published in 1988, this edition contains a new introduction by David W. Madden, and two provocative essays by West on contemporary fiction.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Indigenous, Literature, Native American

502 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1988

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


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Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Then the infinite one created the finite. First he created Sotuqnangu, saying to him, ‘I have made you, the first power and instrument, as a person, to carry out my plans for life in endless space.’” Hopi Myth
The narration is complex and polyphonic, the story is told by Sotuqnangu, the uncle, the nephew, those around them and some spirits of the dead. The uncle and the nephew are principal characters.
The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests is a dark gnostic novel… There are four worlds created by the evil demiurges… First World is a corrupted civilization of violence, greed, crime, pornography and false values – the nephew just has escaped this world. Second World is a domain of primordial mentality, pristine passions and desires of the flesh… The blind uncle resides in this world and he is a demiurge too – he creates unique kachina dolls…

I have been, I still am, an outdoor carver, free as a buzzard while the air billowed all around me. I have gone through, truly gone into, several tons of cottonwood root, gallons upon gallons of paint and glue, thousands of fallen feathers, dozens of knives and a score of saws, so as to model for my tribe upward of three thousand gaudy dolls which, quaint or moody, fierce or lofty, have taught the children of several generations the names and forms of the beings the dancers mimic in their dance. Given over to holy carving, I have weathered the arrivals of collectors, tourists, professors, soldiers, policemen, tax collectors, missionaries, and smart interviewers, and have hardly ever nicked my thumb. “My name is George The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests.” I say it aloud.

The uncle was told that there are also demiurges of the other kind – they create their worlds on paper…

The only one who ever appealed to me, at least in this bunch, was the tiny chicken farmer George Borhez, deep in the jungles of all the Americas below us, who made up riddles about knives and executions. George The Maze In Jungles Where Anacondas Rest. Borhez rhymes with Cortez. He walks with a white cane among the anacondas and the man-eating pupfish of his native land, calming himself amid his green mist with parables about exploding gardens, bamboo canes wedged in sacred mud, and the constant need for upset.

Third World is a realm of war and death… It is Hell – the product of the hallucinating consciousness… Fourth World is the universe of madness… The nephew dwells there and he is a demiurge as well… He creates nightmares…

His was the war of peering, and all day, with prickly eyes, he entertained mentally the images gathered from the night, coppery reds and iron sulfate greens, heads in the shape of cakes or tureens, trunks of tiger grafted onto men, legs that multiplied through a quirk of light, trucks that became loaves of bread, bicycles that uncoiled themselves like snakes, animals that fused with one another on the run. He saw apples with mustaches, penises with wings, stethoscopes made of leaves and creepers, tigers that lined themselves up with the bars of cages and vanished forever.

Every man is a demiurge of his own world.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Paul West’s most ambitious novel, the Hopi Shoshonean mesas are transformed into pearl-laden tsumanis of breathless and original prose, a brutal tapestry of mid-century America. Centring on Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill and his “Uncle” George The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests, the former a failed porn actor, the latter a master carver of kachina dolls, the novel rolls on for around five hundred pages inside the vast amazons of West’s explosive verbal talents, in paragraph-free small-fonted pages, rich in poetic language, beguiling imagery, and that particular weird Westness familiar to readers of shiners like Rat Man or Orange Mist. Beginning on the mesas before George’s quietus, to the swelt of Vietnam and back to the mysterious mesa outlands, hopping from voice to voice, from the suffering women and local simpletons, to brothers, teachers, the God Sotuqnangu, and to George and Oswald, the novel is a microcosmic portrait of an unfamiliar and harsh world explored with pathos and wit. A truly spectacular plate-spinning performance, and West’s monolith.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the broadest description of this novel, 25- or 26-year-old Navajo/Hopi Indian returns to his Arizona home/family/tribe in the early 1970s and tentatively/anxiously/eagerly/confidently comes to feel a part of his culture. Along the way, this young Indian experiences a number of things that alienate him from his culture, the culture at large, and with humanity itself, but these are experiences that ultimately re-direct him to connect/re-connect with his birth culture. This particular journey is not, as one reviewer suggests, an odyssey of the Homeric kind, but is instead an ox-cart journey of the Buddhist kind. The signposts of the Homeric Odyssey (Circe, Cyclops, Calypso, sirens, Penelope’s loom, etc.) are not evident in this tale. Instead, the story is of the Buddhist variety, a going away from the home, other ways/customs/societies experienced, then a return, with changes assimilated and home’s way understood in the context of the wider world.

West patterns his tale on the Hopi mythology of four successive worlds, each destroyed then replaced. In the novel’s epigraph, West cites both Cervantes (“What giants?”) and Hopi myth:

“Then the infinite one created the finite. First he created Sotuqnangu, saying to him, ‘I have made you, the first power and instrument, as a person, to carry out my plans for life in endless space. I am your Uncle. You are my Nephew. Go now and lay out these worlds in proper order, so they may thrive in harmony together, as I intend.’”

West imaginatively re-invents the mythic, peculiar son/nephew relation of the infinite one and Sotuqnangu in the mortal relationship of Kachina-maker George and wanderer Oswald. It is then to Oswald that the task of living out/sorting the four worlds is given, and it is in the many voices/narratives that the events in these worlds is given, sometimes contradictory and almost always without proper chronology. The worlds are fragmented, and the narratives are a jumble. It is by tracing Oswald’s existence—his going out, coming back, going out, coming back—that we see the worlds are jumbled and must be laid out in order, brought into harmony with a chronology somewhat like this:

1943 George’s wife Bessy Butterfly dies, drowned by conjoined idiots (BertandAnna)
1944-45 George rapes/seduces brother Emory’s wife Fermina, who then bears Oswald (son/nephew)
1950-61 Oswald educated at reservation school
1962 Oswald spends half year in community college
~1963-6 Oswald in Hollywood cum Palookaville, making pornos, accidentally kills woman
1966-68 Oswald back in Arizona, on mesa with Uncle, treating/nursing him as he dies
1969-70 Oswald spends one year in Vietnam
1970-71 Returns to mesa of his family/people, becomes a star gazer, tries telling stories, becomes fertility Kachina Matsop, “comes home”

What’s interesting in this tale is West’s ventriloquism, his assumption of an identity alien from any he might be familiar with in his own upbringing in England. It’s a feat of imagination to take on personalities and a culture foreign to oneself. Authentic? Who knows? Who cares? The act of imagination belongs to writer and reader both, and the reader’s part is to open herself to what is being offered. West’s imaginative ventriloquism went so far in his novel Terrestrials that he imagined himself an extraterrestrial speculating on the lives of two US reconnaissance pilots in the 80s. In this novel, he voices the god Sotuqnangu, the aging Kachina maker George Place In Flowers Where The Pollen Rests, his wife Bessie, nephew Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill, Oswald’s mother Fermina, Oswald’s father Emory, Oswald’s brothers Abbott and Thomas, village idiots BertandAnna, Kachina connoisseur/collector Apperknowle, and teachers Mitits Judson and Holmes.

Much of the novel is woolgathering, voices mulling/ruminating/thinking and talking about action/events already transpired. West is testing the limits of imaginative speculation, trying on the thoughts of those alien to him, wondering what they might think given this and that circumstance. In the process West creates a verbal muddle—much that is repetitious and banal, much that is extraordinary, and much difficult to comprehend—but it’s a feat of making/creation that lesser writers eschew for fear no reader will follow. West is both foolish and brazen in his belief that there will be readers, no matter how difficult the terrain he navigates. He is much like his own creation George Place in Flowers Where the Pollen Rests, an artist who creates without regard for what happens to her creation when it’s out of her hands…

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhhL4...

[Vincent Czyz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set on the Hopi mesas of northern Arizona and in the jungles of Vietnam, the book is told alternately by George The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests, his nephew Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill ("not so much a name as an expedition") and even Sotuqunangu, a Hopi god. "Unhandy names, these," West writes, but they bring something to life on the mesa: a touch of color, which is the obvious thing to say, but also, to the very act of naming, something narrative, as if all of nature had been in motion at the moment of your birth. It was."

Oswald, who has learned to speak English and made his living in Los Angeles as a porn actor, returns after the accidental death of one of the actresses he was working with. He tries to re-establish the relationship with his "uncle", George, a carver of one-of-a-kind kachina dolls (a kachina is a kind of Hopi angel) who is considered the Picasso of his art. Nearly blind and hampered by a failing heart, George, for the first time, has need of Oswald-who is in fact his son-not only as someone to guide him through his perpetual dusk, but to listen to his stories of Hopi gods, Jimsonweed girls and the ghosts of his past. Ironically, it is Oswald who, in his confusion of two cultures, receives guidance and it George's voice, perhaps, that is Oswald's salvation while fighting in Vietnam.

Returning to the mesa after his tour of duty, Oswald tries, after his uncle's fashion, to get up-close and personal with stone formations, with the desert wind and even, after picking up a book on astronomy, with the stars.

There is no page you can turn to in this book where you will not find a sample of an extraordinary prose style or an observation that a lesser novelist would have saved as the punchline to end the book. For example, on the topic of happiness, West writes, "Don't try. Don't try not to try. Happiness is an incidental thing like feathers falling from a bird in flight. Fly, be a bird, and feathers will fall." In these few sentences West has captured the essence of the Baghavadgita and its "Way of Right Action." The book is simply loaded with stunning insights and beautiful sentences--the kind that put many younger authors of "Big Books" (Franzen, DeLillo) to shame. One of the absolute best novels I have ever read, readers have far too long ignored this masterpiece.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing can exist without being next to something else
so he who lives successfully will have
a certain next-door-mindedness—
& always an adorable thing beyond the one you’re looking at.

That’s nature’s way: unpeelable.

Over the horizon, forever—
Something else ignoring you or coming toward you as itself….

It’s when the outside world no longer has a hope
of taking you in
[I mean conning you]
that your mind really begins to bite home into it.

They have come to watch that long slither into nothingness.

Would it be possible to hold your breath while dying?
and then keep it in forever?
then you turn into a drum
to be beaten on special occasions.

Give the mind an acre and it will invent to fill the space.

What I said just now, to myself
floating away, there it goes, it was only just in my head
like the breath I breathed out
was only just now in my chest;
look how you do it—

They would go down in history—
well, everybody went down in history
there was nothing else to go down in…

History was a piggy bank full of diesel fumes
and the peculiar molasses reek of
shattered rubber trees
for which, after the fighting
receipts were signed and handed over as if to
maintain the continuity of property
and world history be buggered.

Each man once upon a time
the autopilot of his tribe
each blinded so as to
have to fly on instruments forever.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 3 out of 5]

A plot-free book in which a fuck-up returns from his sordid life in L.A. to the Hopi mesa where he'd been born, to heal, and hang out with his old, blind uncle. Odd cadences and dense, odd prose make this a difficult and demanding read. More of a spiritual treatise than a 'novel', we are taken around the world, into madness, and out into the stars before the protagonist finds a modicum of peace in life. Some pretty great lines, but overlong and borderline obtuse.

[Danette Baltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oswald has reappeared in Palookaville, returned with a secret that's darker than a starless night on the reservation. Was he the one who killed her? He'd had his hand on her throat but they'd all been involved, was it his grip or one of the other actors who had finally caused her to turn blue from being held so tightly for so long? It was on the tape but he wasn't waiting around to find out and who was going to come looking for him on the Reservation? And as his Uncle George The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests nears death, Oswald finds a place to hide in caring for his invalid relation. As time passes however and their relationship deepens, Oswald's "care" amounts to little more than fussing while the nurse becomes reliant upon patient. When at last their earthly relationship is severed, Oswald is still haunted by his uncle's presence as he wanders through the swamps of Vietnam where he builds a "gook" from body parts of the dead that lie all about until he's finally sent home and back where he began. Back in his own village he finds the truth of his own narrative and attempts to find his place among the living as story teller in his own right.

Although the story seems straight forward and clear as described on the book jacket (and as I have described it), there is nothing linear or clean about Paul West's writing. From the first sentence you are on a wild ride of metaphor and description that forces you to pause and look back or wonder and reread and digest. It is as though you were eating the best meal you could possibly imagine and couldn't get enough, yet sometimes you just get full and need some time to let the food settle before you can sit back at the table to eat again. In one particular spot a single sentence flows through three pages! In another, a simple paragraph that concerns Oswald giving back his phone... "He phoned the phone company and handed back the shiny set. Now he had no number in his life" Here is a craftsman, whose intention is not to describe the phone but everything about loneliness and a man who was going to miss the half-life his character has built for himself as he moves on to think of his uncle who "shuttled back and forth between uncle and apparition... more like a cloud with a voice, a mesa in his own right." Poetry in motion, the story moves without the reader realizing they are being taken on an adventure. Oscar's time in Vietnam, begins midway and lasts a third of the book, is a cacophonous event that keeps the reader riveted even as the colors deepen and darken, twist and deviate. Characters flow in and out of focus showing us West's impeccably chosen dialogue. Each person has it's own lilt and sway as though you can see them walking down the street, smell their perfume. A masterpiece written by a master story teller, this has "Written for Hollywood" no where on it. It is simply too complex and lyrical to be on the big screen. I highly recommend this book to all who are ready to face the Mount Everest of fiction.

[Marianna Monaco · Rating 1 out of 5]

too rough.

[Sandy Schoenholtz]

Could not read this one.