The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Sporting with Amaryllis by Paul West
David Madden

Paul West. Sporting with Amaryllis. Overlook, 1996. 158 pp. $19.95.

The publication of any new work by Paul West is cause for celebration, and celebrate we should over Sporting with Amaryllis. Here West turns his indefatigable imagination to John Milton, and as he did with John Polidori in Lord Byron’s Doctor, West rewrites history in alarming yet invigorating ways.
The novel opens in 1626 when a seventeen-year-old Milton is banished by his tutor, Chappell, from life at Cambridge. He is to return home to London where he will serve his “rustication.” However London is anything but the quiet countryside, and the young man longs “for bustle, sunshine, crowds, a world of unkempt morals, where the will had something to cut its teeth on.” It is women, in fact, that he is fascinated by, and his yearning is soon answered by an extraordinary figure.
Although her name is never mentioned, Milton is convinced she is Amaryllis, the shepherdess from Virgil’s Ecologues and the spirit of pleasure and diversion in “Lycidas.” Through her, the novel poses the questions—what is a muse, where does artistic inspiration originate, what are the elements in the strange alchemy of artistic creation? This muse is a source of ambiguity—her age is indeterminate, she both appeals and frightens, she wanders in search of talent which she herself does not possess and to which she can rarely respond with enthusiasm and tenderness.
What she creates for young Milton is nothing less than a liminal retreat. Ironically, through an orgy of the senses, Milton is removed from the quotidian, which for him is university life, classical literature, and a possible career as a clergyman. As is the case for any liminal inductee, Milton’s former self is annulled through a series of personally destabilizing rituals.
As is always the case with West, language is foregrounded and offered as a presence as palpable as any character. Each page abounds in delights as West takes nuance and raises it for rapt inspection and consistently manages to make abstractions concrete. [David Madden]