Cicily fairfield was born in 1892 and died in 1983. At 19 she began a successful career as a journalist and adopted the name Rebecca West, the heroine of Ibsen's Rosmersholm. If ever a writer so young demonstrated what Shakespeare called "the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind," it was she. Hardly anybody now writes such devastating reviews, and few later feminists have written about politics with such accurate fury.
In the course of a life spanning most of the century, she lost none of her force. As traveller, novelist and political essayist, West won fame on both sides of the Atlantic and grew rich in the process. She made an enormous number of interesting friends in the US and Europe as well as in England, and she wrote them many long, fluent letters, which she expected them to keep. In her twenties she was welcomed in the most adventurous artistic circles, frequented the Vorticist club, was a friend of Ford Madox Ford, and contributed to his English Review and to Wyndham Lewis's avant-garde magazine Blast. At Virginia Woolf's instigation, Ottoline Morrell invited her to the Bloomsbury outpost at Garsington, an honour that West did not greatly enjoy; she had more respect than affection for Bloomsbury.
West's first book, a brief study of Henry James, was published in 1916, and her first novel, The Return of the Soldier, in 1918. Other novels followed at irregular intervals, none achieving the success of her book about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942), and her studies in treachery, The Meaning of Treason (1949), later revised as The New Meaning of Treason (1964). The novels, 11 in all, are somewhat disappointing. They fell into neglect until, to her great satisfaction, they were revived by the feminist Virago Press in the 1980s. She earned her celebrity by her writing, but her private life also received, over the years, a measure of public attention which was far less welcome.
Many people still alive and not yet falling apart knew Dame Rebecca in her later years, and could therefore claim a tenuous connection with the style and manners of the literary world of almost a century ago. I met her in 1969, when we were both serving as judges for the first Booker prize. Whether in modest London restaurants or in the grand country house that we had been lent for our deliberations, she provided exhilarating but often daunting company. It never seemed to occur to her that her opinion of a book might reasonably be questioned, or that anybody else's deserved more than the most cursory consideration. Iris Murdoch? "Miss Murdoch writes a very good book one year and a poor one the next. This is the bad year." Out she went. Muriel Spark? Clever but flimsy. I tried to promote a novel by Nicholas Mosley called Impossible Object-this book, unlike some of its competitors, is still worth reading-but it was dismissed as a piece of narrative trickery. (She had little time for anything that looked a bit like what she thought was the wrong kind of avant-garde, as may be gathered from her remarks concerning TS Eliot and other contemporaries such as Yeats. But she loved Proust.) In the end, the other judges felt that they had no option but to vote unanimously for her firm though not enthusiastic choice-PH Newby's novel about the 1956 Suez crisis Something to Answer for, not at all a bad book but, like most novels after 30 years, now forgotten.
We who had lost the argument were more delighted than irritated by the company of so formidable, talkative, and domineering a septuagenarian. Readers of this handsome selection of her letters will see why. From the outset West thought and wrote with every appearance of authority. She read indefatigably, and she consolidated acquaintance with mostly genial, no-nonsense letters. Still in her twenties, she was on familiar terms with the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell. In some respects, though, she had a hard life, with much illness and deep, insoluble personal troubles which she discusses in her letters with considerable candour.
At 21, West became the lover of HG Wells, and her private life was dominated by her rather wretched and, as it proved, undiscardable relationships with him and with their son. Wells was a middle-aged womaniser with a complacent wife; West was by no means the first young woman whom he seduced. As some of these letters insist, he was hard to live with; but the affair lasted from 1913 to 1923 when the son, Anthony West, was nine years old. She loved them both, but she believed them to have made it their business to ensure that, despite its many diverting aspects, her life would be essentially unhappy.
There is in her letters a curious strain of energetic self-pity. Some "external force is working against me," she complains; this force operated through her other kinsfolk: her elder sister, a distinguished doctor against whom she had many grudges; and Henry, her husband of nearly 40 years, a banker whose health broke down and who chased other women. They lived in a grand country house, but he pretended to be short of money, made West pay the servants' wages out of her earnings, and cheated her in other ways. After he died in 1968, she provided a friend with a list of the women her husband had seduced. "What I object to is the disregard for my dignity."
A believer in women's sexual freedom, she had a number of adventures herself: an unhappy one with Lord Beaverbrook; and another, in her fifties, with the judge Francis Biddle, whom she met in 1946 at the Nuremberg trials, when she was a reporter and he the chief US representative. And there were others. Without being a female equivalent of Wells, she still claimed her rights.
Wells, it seems, was not a good father to his illegitimate son. He was remote when he should have been close, and interfering when he should have kept out of it, as when West decided to adopt the boy in order to ensure that he would never need to admit his illegitimacy. "I always knew you would hurt me to death some day," she writes in 1913, early in the affair. "You've always been unconsciously hostile to me... I was the wrong sort of person for you to have to do with." Wells, too, was mean about money, allowing her to pay the household expenses out of her earnings, and appearing to grudge every penny spent on Anthony, who had a serious and costly illness.
In 1923, she left Wells. She calls him insane, claiming that "he has a violent anti-sex complex like Tolstoy's-you punish the female who evokes your lust." She hears that he now maltreats her successor, "gives her black eyes and so on, which is surely not done in our set." West is soon complaining to Bertrand Russell of her "hard luck with men," thinking this time of her abortive affair with Beaverbrook. A decade or so later, aged 41, she told her US agent that "I realise that sleeping with people is a whole lot of fun but it doesn't amount to a row of pins... unless you sleep with someone who is capable of a grand attitude to life and is better than you."
It was a lot to ask, and on the whole she did not think well of men. Perhaps she briefly found one who came up to the mark in Biddle, although little is known about that episode. Whatever her adventures, she was sure that she always loved the intolerable Wells. "Dear HG," she wrote when he died in 1946, "he was a devil, he ruined my life, he starved me, he was an inexhaustible source of love and friendship to me for 34 years."
I dislike writing about other people's intimacies, especially when they are as disastrous as West's relationship with her son. It is horrible to imagine being talked about in the same way oneself. But we are dealing with the letters of a writer who thought it important to preserve them in public collections. She doesn't conceal the exasperation and the pain that was an invariable aspect of her dealings with Anthony. She had the care of him mostly as a single mother, and found it irksome. During the war they went to the south coast, only to find themselves repeatedly bombed by German planes. It seemed that the only solution to the problems of safety and working time was to pack the boy off to a boarding school. When he later complained that this happened when he was only two years old, his mother was shocked and corrected him: he was three.
Time did not heal this breach. As West's biographer Victoria Glendinning puts it, mother and son spent "half a century scoring points off each other." In 1955 Anthony West published a novel, Heritage, which contains unkind portraits of his mother, her husband and Wells. West is represented as an actress who, having married the Wells figure as a short cut to the top, neglects her son. She found Heritage "full of monstrous clotted spite... the vulgarity of the book is astounding." There was a deep mutual mistrust and even dislike, compounded by arguments about money. The quarrel was never made up, and West cut Anthony out of her will.
It seems that West's deepest relationships always involved ineradicable affection and deep disappointment, all at the same time. That is certainly true of her relations with Wells and her son and her husband, and also of her connection with Beaverbrook. In the end, she concluded, no man was "capable of a grand attitude to life."
There is a similar ambivalence in West's attitude to others less closely associated with her. Proud of her Scottish-Irish ancestry and of her own gifts, she was open-minded yet quick to condemn the manners of the most casual acquaintance. One of the most surprising remarks in this book is her claim that she is "not a snob." But she can be quick to express disapproval of inferior classes of person, however respected by the larger world-if they had the misfortune, for instance, to go to a red brick university. She sometimes describes people as "common"-a class usage, I am glad to say, I have not heard lately.
Among the persons so described are Wallis Simpson and, more strikingly, Ingrid Bergman. Having dined with Bergman and her husband Roberto Rossellini, West decides that the actress, is "common and mannerless, with a flatness of which Henry discovered the secret when he found that she was half-German-her mother came from Hamburg, and she might well be a housemaid in a big Hamburg hotel." (One is grateful for the tincture of generosity in that epithet "big.") Afterwards she wrote to Bergman, saying, among other "honest" remarks, that "you may love your husband very much, but you should face the fact that he has no talent," and advising her to change directors at once. She does admit that this was an extraordinary letter, and says that she had never written its like before. It does not appear that Bergman replied. A pity, because West was capable of changing her estimate.
As an example of fine discriminations of class, consider West's account, in 1927, of an "attractive young Jew of about 28-not a Kike, he belongs to a very old established Jewish family"-who, as it turns out, tried to rape her. At least he wasn't common. All this is the more extraordinary in that West was a philo-Semite, and regarded anti-Semitism as a tiresome social disorder which should not affect educated people. But here, considerations of class prevailed, and a sort of careless candour. She could be exuberantly unkind, and could hardly complain if others followed suit. Virginia Woolf said of her that "she has great vitality: is a broad browed, very vigorous, undistinguished woman, but a buffeter and a battler: has taken the waves, I suppose; & can talk in any language: why then this sense of her being a lit up modern block, floodlit by electricity?"
Politically West was, in her own account, "the last liberal left," and so often advertised her fear of US communism that she had to repudiate descriptions of her as a McCarthyite. Yet she believed that the US was seriously threatened by infiltration. A certain intemperance coloured more than her political opinions. Shaw said of her early journalism that she "could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could, and much more savagely," and it is clear that at no time in her life had she any idea how to be moderate and dull. A fierce critic, she lacked self-criticism. At moments of stress, she substituted for it self-pity.
Bonnie Kime Scott must have enjoyed her labour on this book. It is not quite flawless, but she has done well to continue the work done by an earlier generation of feminists towards the restoration of Rebecca West to a place of honour among the writers of the 20th century.
Edited from an article which originally appeared in the Washington-based The New Republic, © The New Republic, Inc
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