The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter One 1900–1916
Chapter Two 1914–1922
Chapter Three 1923–1929
Chapter Four 1928–1933
Chapter Five 1933–1936
Chapter Six 1936–1941
Chapter Seven 1941–1947
Chapter Eight 1948–1966
Chapter Nine 1967–1983
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Peters Fraser Dunlop to quote from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, The Thinking Reed, and the unpublished writings of Rebecca West.
INTRODUCTION
The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West is the first book to explore the entire corpus of her extraordinary seventy-one year writing caree. Peter Wolfe published the first monograph on West. His short book is a competent but very selective study of West’s writings; he tends to emphasize the importance of her nonfiction, and he organizes his chapters around the themes of her most significant books. Motley Deakin provides a more straightforward introduction to the range of West’s work. His book contains a chronology of West’s life and career, and chapters on her as feminist, critic, journalist, historian, and novelist. He also includes a selected bibliography. Finally, Harold Orel complements Deakin’s introductory study, but his work appeared before the posthumous publication of several West novels and a memoir.
These books tend to chop West up into categories and genres. I propose, instead, to follow the evolution of her career, demonstrating how the fiction and nonfiction relate to each other, and drawing on her unpublished manuscripts and letters in collections at the universities of Texas, Tulsa, Yale, and in other archives.
West began publishing at the age of nineteen in 1911. An ardent feminist journalist, already an accomplished stylist, she astounded her contemporaries with her astringent wit and iconoclastic judgments. Her mother, Isabella Fairfield, trained as a concert pianist, guided her precocious child’s intellectual and esthetic development—as did her two older sisters, Letitia (who would become a doctor and a lawyer) and Winifred (a lifelong unpublished poet). West seemed to begin writing poetry and fiction almost immediately, attributing her early literary beginnings to nurturing in a family that loved to write and to argue. Her father, Charles Fairfield, a brilliant journalist with decidedly conservative opinions, brought home many of his intellectual friends to debate politics, literature, and the arts. West cherished the story (unverified) of her father’s winning a debate against Bernard Shaw.
Charles Fairfield presided over his family as though it were a court in which males were sovereign. In many ways a man of another age, he longed for a loftier station than he was ever to achieve, and he lifted his daughters to his high level of expectation, never talking down to them, always presuming that they would understand that the word, like his authority, was sovereign. The result, especially for his youngest daughter Cicily (a name she never abandoned among certain friends and family), was that she would come to have a remarkable affinity for royalty, for seeing life in terms of dynastic disputes, tracing her own troubles in family history, ferreting out treachery at home and abroad, in the annals of Central European monarchies she commands so brilliantly in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and in the spy trials after World War II. When things went to pieces, she would often think of what to her was the supreme work of literature, King Lear, which presented the world as a court and a family gone awry, a father fallen among three daughters whom he would have serve as caretakers of his legend.
Nearly sixty years later, when West set down her mature reflections on the literature that meant most to her, she titled her critical masterpiece The Court and the Castle, thus bounding literature as she had bound her life—between the politics of public and private interests, between kings (fathers) and children (subjects), who owed allegiance to authority, even though authority always compromised itself as something less than the majesty Lear required his daughters to revere. The flaw in human relations, as Hamlet discovered at court, was that they were corruptible, and that the castle could not stand as an abiding principle of loyalty and service to the king, his father. West insisted that Hamlet’s inability to reconcile the ideal of kingship and of family proved his undoing—not the fact that he could not steel himself to avenge his father. Hamlet was perfectly capable of violence (witness his murder of Polonius), she pointed out in The Court and the Castle, but not of remaining both a dutiful son and lawful subject of the state. Shakespeare knew kings governed badly, West averred, but without the principle of sovereignty society would disintegrate, since it could not, in itself, sustain its authority. Rejecting its king, the body politic lost its head. When Charles Fairfield left home and abandoned his family, he inflicted a dynastic wound and bequeathed to eight-year-old Cicily a lifetime’s search for sovereignty. In 1900, her last completed book, she affirmed:
The idea of a king who can save all his subjects from all enemies has the deep roots of a fairy tale. It also has the relation to reality that converts a mere fairy-tale into a lasting myth. A strong king can certainly make life safer for his subjects; history tells us that.
When Charles Fairfield left home (never to return) his eight-year-old daughter penned a painful poem of longing, addressed to him as her soulmate, her twin.
From her earliest age, West associated writing with self-expression, rebellion, and a search for authority. On the one hand, she admired her father’s articulate and controversial opinions (he was said to have lost a job in Australia defending the rights of Catholics to have their own schools). On the other hand, part of her writer’s task derived from combating his low opinion of unions, women’s rights, and socialism. She joined her sisters in suffragist campaigns, and she despised what she deemed her father’s arrogant Anglo-Irish, aristocratic attitudes—a fact she made plain to Bernard Shaw—when she called her father a “Dublin snob.” In later years, West’s attitude toward her father would soften, just as her critical views of the monarchy and of the modern, capitalist state would moderate as she assessed the threats to civilization posed by the two world wars and revolutionary movements.
How West came to adopt a position somewhere between left and right is not well understood. When feminist scholars rediscovered her in the 1970s, they tended to extol her earliest writing, neglecting the evolution of her politics—which is inseparable from the development of her literary career. Her primary intellectual guide was Edmund Burke, whom she also claimed as a family ancestor.
A full understanding of West’s literary development has been hindered by opposition to her fierce anti-Communism, and by an academic world that has not known how to interpret a writer whose work cuts across so many different genres. Fortunately, a new generation of scholars is providing a more nuanced and comprehensive appreciation of West’s career. This study contributes to their efforts by supplying the first organic account of her esthetic.
CHAPTER ONE
1900–1916
In 1982, shortly before her death, Rebecca West published a memoir/history of the turn of the century. 1900 retains all of her sparkling style, and it is a fitting companion to The Young Rebecca, a collection of her early, irreverent journalism, also published in 1982. Indeed, the continuity between the nineteen-year-old upstart who rocked the literary and political world of Edwardian London and the ninety-year-old doyenne of Margaret Thatcher’s first years in power is extraordinary:
Woman Adrift is a respectable piece of journalism, illuminated towards the end by some passages of meteoric brilliance, which starts out to prove that men are the salt of the earth, and women either their wives or refuse … “Woman is wholly superfluous to the State save as a bearer of children and a nursing mother.” There is a kind of humour in the way these things work out. Just as Napoleon proved in his latter end that no man dare be a despot, so Mr Owen finishes by showing that all men are fools and a great many of them something worse.
It looked as if society disapproved of homosexuality, since it was for long a capital offence, but on the other hand here in every generation were fathers sending their sons to the schools they themselves had attended, well knowing that what had happened to them within the ivied walls would happen to their children, and making no effort to change the pattern. Do not try to work this out. It is simply an illustration of the tropism by which male minds feel an instinctive desire to defend any unreasonable proposition.
West’s sweeping judgments and sardonic tone owe much to her father’s scornful sendups of the status quo. Writing as “Ivan” for a Melbourne newspaper, The Argus, he excoriated the governing class:
To-day, greatly given to cigarette-smoking, pigeon-shooting, dry champagne, and new ways indescribable, that class no longer believes in itself: if it still possesses the genius of command, it has more than once shown itself wanting in the loyalty to follow a capable leader, and courage to assert its constitutional position.
Charles Fairfield leveled his criticisms from the right, whereas West, following the lead of her sister Letitia, castigated society from the left.
Father and daughters agreed, however, on what Letitia termed “liberal imperialism,” a concept championed by Edward Fairfield (Charles’s brother) in the Colonial office. He believed that the empire could be a civilizing influence, expanding trade and improving living conditions throughout the world—even if certain imperialists corrupted the system and cheated colonials. Not to understand this fundamental attitude toward the Empire is to misunderstand much of what Rebecca West stood for politically, and it is an attitude that she and her sisters absorbed in their infancy from their father. Of imperialism, West writes in 1900: “In certain times and places it engendered such costly tragedy as the Boer War; in other times and places it abolished such accomplishments as head-splitting by sword. It has resembled parenthood as its most enlightened, and parenthood hostile and perverted” (108–09). As always, her metaphor had to be a familial one.
In an essay on Rudyard Kipling, West fondly remembers that during the Diamond Jubilee she had been petted by “dark men from the ends of the earth.” To be part of an empire seemed indeed like having a charming and exotic extended family: “They were amiable, they belonged to our Empire, we had helped them to become amiable by conquering them and civilizing them. It was an intoxicating thought,” and it gave the population of England, which had “slowly lost touch with their traditional assurances throughout the nineteenth century” a “new sense of religious destiny. Since they were subjects of the British Empire they were members of a vast redemptory force.”
West turned to journalism in the autumn of 1911 after a disappointingly brief career in the theater (studying at the Academy of Dramatic Art in London and taking roles in regional productions). A bout of tuberculosis ended her formal education; there was no money to send her to college—which she seemed not to want anyway, since she chafed at the formal requirements of the school curriculum and saw little to emulate in the careers of the educated women who had taught her at The George School in Edinburgh. She regretted that her mother’s concert career had been hampered by lack of equal opportunity and then cut short by marriage and child rearing. Isabella Fairfield, a bright, articulate artist should have dedicated herself to music, West believed. Instead Isabella had relied on an adulterous husband who gambled away his salary, abandoned his family, and died destitute in Liverpool when West was only thirteen.
Although Isabella did not approve of radical politics, she had a critical and esthetic temperament that her daughter emulated. Isabella took her young daughter to concerts and to political meetings. But West could not “remember a woman asking a politician a question at any meeting, though this was in Edinburgh, where women were given more leash as intellectuals than they were in London” (1900, 79). On one occasion, she observed a trembling woman stand up to put a question that took issue with a Protestant clergyman, who rebuked her: “Madam, you are dressed as a lady. Please behave as one” (1900, 79).
West believed that the structure of a male dominated society enforced the injustice that her mother and millions of other women suffered. British society, West later avowed in 1900, was like
a huge nesting-box containing many compartments which were designed according to a number of patterns; one was expected to behave in different ways, according to the type of compartment in which one had come out of the egg. One knew what one could and could not do, and everybody one met shared one’s knowledge of the pattern laid down for one; if one performed unusually well, or unusually badly, one moved into another type of compartment, and found oneself following another pattern. (113–14)
Only through political action and the power of the pen could the nesting-box be changed. In West, writing—the search for new metaphors—was a political act, a way of altering human consciousness and actions.
“Indissoluble Matrimony,” one of West’s first accomplished works of fiction evoked the fluid world of human consciousness a la D. H. Lawrence, whose writing she would champion in reviews and articles throughout her career. George Silverton is married to a woman with “black blood in her,” with “great humid black eyes,” a “mass of large hair,” and a large mouth. Evadne attracts and repels him—a goddess of sex, he hates her because she holds him in thrall. “The disgust of women,” he thinks, “the secret obscenity of women!” He feels demeaned and inadequate beside her ease of movement, comparing her to a cat and also to a “grotesquely patterned wild animal” as she runs down to the lake for a swim, her white flesh reflected brilliantly in the moonlight. So powerful is her sexuality that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, he suspects her of being unfaithful, for he can only suppose that such voluptuousness must seek out male lovers. The quarrel between them, however, is provoked by her insistence that she will accept an invitation to speak at a public meeting, for she is much in demand as a passionate socialist journalist, and he cannot abide this additional sign of her superiority. At the lake, an angry husband and wife are about to strike each other, but Evadne hesitates:
There entered into her the primitive woman who is the curse of all women: a creature of the most utter femaleness, useless, save for childbirth, with no strong brain to make her physical weakness a light accident, abjectly and corruptingly afraid of man, A squaw, she dared not strike her lord.
Her lord, having “no instinct for honourable attack,” strikes her in the stomach, and she pulls him into the water with her. After a struggle he drags himself on to a rock and then forces the head of his struggling wife down into the water, exulting in her death: “I must be a very strong man.” In fact, she has swum away from the pressure of his hands, and on his return home, an exhausted Silverton finds his wife soundly sleeping and “distilling a most drunken pleasure.” Admitting that he is “beaten,” he “had thought he had had what every man most desires: one night of power over a woman for the business of murder or love.” He undresses and goes to bed, “as he would every night until he died. Still sleeping, Evadne caressed him with warm arms” (Marcus, 267–89).
In physical appearance—“I should love to be a cat,” she divulged in one of her Clarion articles (Marcus, 170)—in sensuality and intellectuality, West and Evadne are coevals, and the story is an early dramatization of what West would call in her feminist book reviews “sex-antagonism” (Marcus, 97–101). The conflict between George and Evadne is so melodramatic that it verges on the comic, an effect West apparently intended, for she could not help fancying her story as a “jest,” she confided to novelist Violet Hunt. Yet the ironic reference to George as “lord” also evokes West’s ambivalence about the male prerogative.
The young Rebecca West favored a radical tone: “There are two kinds of imperialists—imperialists and bloody imperialists,” she declared on November 30, 1911 in her first article in The Freewoman, a journal dedicated to furthering the equality of women in all realms of society (Marcus 12–14). In her second, an attack Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the reigning female novelist of the Edwardian period, West observed that the “idea of Christ is the only inheritance that the rich have not stolen from the poor” (Marcus, 14). She reviewed literature, drama, social theory, and political tracts. In less than a year (from late 1911 to the autumn of 1912), she established her reputation as a witty and formidable critic.
As literary editor of The Freewoman, West strove to create a journal whose political and literary program coalesced. As she wrote to the journal’s founder, Dora Marsden: “I don’t see why a movement towards freedom of expression in literature should not be associated with and inspired by your gospel.” West’s own writing constantly melded the esthetic and the political, demonstrating how character development in a novel, for example, reflected political judgments. Praising novelist Rose Macaulay’s “exquisite” style, West nonetheless chides her for creating Louie in Views and Vagabonds as a “representative of the poor.” Macaulay equates, in West’s judgment, decreasing vitality with lowered social position, implying that Louie’s weak grip on life is what makes her a typical peasant. “If this were so it would be an excellent thing to form immediately an oligarchy with the proletariat in chains. But the proletariat isn’t like that. Even the agricultural labourers have shown in their peasant revolts that they have courage and passion” (Marcus, 27).
West herself was struggling to find a form for the novel that would do justice to both literary values and politics, shaping a vision of history that would transcend her work as a journalist and critic. Her most significant effort, “The Sentinel,” an abortive novel written sometime between 1911 and 1912, concerns a troubled science teacher, Adela Furnival, who feels the lack of art in her life. Her school work exhausts her, and she comes under the spell of a staunch Tory, Neville Ashcroft, an architect whose principles repel her and yet who exerts a narcotic and sexually arousing influence on her. She succumbs to his advances—in part because he is an artist whose style she finds irresistible. Instead of feeling fulfilled, she feels defiled and turns to a fierce involvement in the feminist cause, now that an inheritance releases her from the drudgery of teaching. In Robert Langlad, a Labor M.P., she glories in the principle of opposition, in joining an army of women fighting for the vote and for, as she sees it, the “earth’s redemption.” Life is not worth living without a protest, she affirms.
Yet Adela cannot give herself to Langlad any more than she can to Matthew Race, a robust Labor candidate for Parliament. She shies away from both men because she feels she is unworthy, having submitted to the erotic yearning that Ashcroft had excited. Instead, she takes on the most punishing protest assignments, getting herself arrested, beaten, and brutally force fed in prison. It is as if she is punishing the body that once betrayed her in an act of pleasure with a man she wanted but did not love. For Adela, as for Rebecca West, the personal and the political are one. Or as Adela asserts, “politics is minding the baby on a large scale.” By having given into her body’s craving once, Adela fears she has conceded the anti-feminist argument that women are primarily bodies, not minds.
The mind/body split, like the art/politics split, remains in tension in this uncompleted novel and would become the central theme of much of West’s fiction and nonfiction. It is at the heart of the book review that brought her to H.G. Wells’s attention on September 19, 1912. She attacked the famous novelist on the very ground he thought himself most advanced: the emancipation of women. While she conceded that too many women had been encouraged to please and prey on men, she rounded on Wells for his failure to conceive of a thinking woman. Marjorie Trafford, the heroine of Marriage, dislikes her scientist husband’s work and overspends him into a domestic crisis. Why can Wells only think of women as drags on men’s souls? West wonders. Has he taken a good look lately at his male fellow passengers on the tube? He would find them no more prepossessing than unimaginative women, West assures him. In effect, then, Wells was merely perpetuating a feminine stereotype that surely existed but that was unworthy of a writer who also claimed that women were as capable as men and ought to be treated as equals.
If West’s critique had gone no further, Wells might not have invited her to his home or begun an affair with her several months later. But she gave evidence of a sensibility not only like his own but of one from whom he could learn. She pinpointed a scene in which a cold, self-pitying Marjorie called for tea:
That repulsive desire for tea is a masterly touch. It reminds one of the disgust one felt as a healthy schoolgirl when one saw the school mistresses drinking tea at lunch at half-past eleven. It brings home to one poignantly how disgusting the artificial physical weakness of women, born of loafing about the house with only a flabby mind for company, must be to an ordinary, vigorous man. (Marcus, 67)
In effect, West was presenting herself as the thinking woman whom Wells had failed to create in his fiction, a woman with literary and political insights on a par with any man’s, and a woman unafraid to assess her own sex in terms that acknowledged Wells’s but showed that he had not gone far enough in conceiving a liberated female mind.
At their first meeting Wells found West’s aggressive and forthright personality attractive, though he believed that she was still unformed and did not know quite as much as her confident reviews suggested. He was also wary. He had already had one scandalous affair with a young woman, Amber Reeves, and fathered an illegitimate child. He had a wife, two children, and a cozy life in a country home—not to mention the attentions of a mistress, the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim. He wanted a hand in West’s career, but his first impulse was to deflect her obvious interest in having an affair. The evidence of her letters shows that she thrilled at Wells’s attention.
Later in 1912, the novelists Ford Madox Ford and Violet Hunt took West up after her review of a Ford novel, The New Humpty Dumpty. Just as she skewered Marriage, she excoriated Ford’s stodgy championing of an aristocratic hero—hardly a replacement for the roguish radicalism of Wells’s The New Machiavelli, the novel Ford was satirizing. West surveyed both men and found them somewhat wanting, but in such a deft way that each literary lion sought a share in her budding success. Wells kept up a steady drumbeat of letters to West about her articles, and Ford commissioned her to review books for his prestigious journal, The English Review.
When The Freewoman lost its financial backer in the middle of October 1912 and ceased publication, West was already working for The Clarion, a feisty socialist paper that allowed her to write about sex-antagonism, the conditions of women workers, the Labor Party, the women’s movement, socialists and feminists, and the Church. She seemed to take on every major institution of society in a heady prose that brought Wells round to make love to her after his liaison with Elizabeth von Arnim soured. Wells saw in her not just an attractive young woman (she was twenty and he forty-six when their lovemaking began) but his “lover-shadow,” a kind of female twin with whom he could debate any subject. Like him, she had a gift for fables and exuberant play and soon the couple took to calling themselves Panther and Jaguar. Their lovemaking was like her writing—robustly physical and metaphorical, a give-and-take like the tussling of two jungle cats. West’s lack of cant and gift for the arresting image enchanted Wells as much as it did her readers. The personal and the political came to vivid life in her prose:
At its best the Liberal Party is a jellyfish. Sometimes the milk of human kindness which flows through it, instead of blood, gets heated, and then it flops about and tries to do good. This warm milk enthusiasm soon evaporates, and it lies inert. At present it is lying on top of the Labour Party. Through the transparent jelly one sees dimly the programme of socialist ideals which those who have gone before wrote in their heart’s blood. To be wiped out by the Liberal Party is a more inglorious end than to be run over by a hearse. (Marcus, 110)
Ideas and political movements are not abstractions to West but concrete phenomena to be described with a novelist’s gift. As she would late argue in defense of Wells—replying to critics who chided him for dwelling so much on ideas in his novels—life exists on several levels at once, and the best writers try to capture the continuum of thoughts and feelings rather than separating them into concepts and characters.
West’s writing never lost its organic quality, or its humorous yoking of the physical and mental. In 1900, she explains that Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain’s family had moved from poverty to modest prosperity in three generations by the shrewd management of a boot and shoe factory, “and by a curious coincidence he himself looked like a single highly polished boot, with a monocle in one of its eyelets, and not at all unlikeable” (62). History, biography, social class, physical characteristics, mental tics—an extraordinary array of observation and learning—inform a Rebecca West sentence. Witness her devastating dismissal of Liberal Leader Herbert Asquith:
There can be no more damning indictment of the nation than the fact that it allows Mr Asquith to decide the question of woman suffrage. Is not the idea of letting Mr Asquith decide anything on earth not enough to blot out the sun in heaven? He would make an excellent butler. I can imagine that owlish solemnity quite good and happy polishing the plate or settling a question of etiquette in the servants’ hall. Such flunkey minds, afflicted at birth with an irremedial lack of dignity, must inevitably be attracted by the elaborate insincere ceremony of party politics. (Marcus, 193)
By the end of 1913, West had left The Clarion and her primarily socialist audience, and moved to Fleet Street, writing book reviews of fiction, literary studies, and political tracts for the Daily News & Leader. She also begin in 1914 to publish a series of articles in The New Republic asserting that “it is really art which governs the world.” Art and criticism were absolutely essential to the survival of civilization; a life that was not self-critical was no life at all. A humanity that forgets its art also forgets its collective memory of what holds humanity together and is amnesiac. West used The New Republic as a forum for harsh criticism which cut through the complacency of English men of letters, who were content to edit each other’s papers and publish “platitudinous inaugural addresses like wormcasts.” Even the greatest writers of the day, Shaw and Wells, required correction. Shaw believed “too blindly in his own mental activity,” and Wells brooded over the future while failing to notice that his stories were falling in “ruins about his ears.”
In her first book, Henry James (1916), West calls for an attachment to ideas as passionate as what the majority of people reserve for personal relationships, so that a concept could be felt with the “sensitive finger tips of affection.” In Henry James, West extended her critical insights beyond those of her reviews and articles, but because her book constituted part of a series of short studies of authors, she felt hemmed in. As she said of a brief book on Hardy, “one cannot erect any majestic tower of criticism on the narrow basis of twenty thousand words” (Marcus, 312) She chafed under the constraint, commenting to novelist Arnold Bennett: “I’m sending ‘Henry James’ but shamefacedly. Remember how hampered I was by lack of space.” Actually, the cramping of her form led to virtues as well as vices. With her power to pack wit into a sentence, she could economically encompass the divide between the Master’s early and late styles: “The Europeans (1878) marks the first time when Mr James took the international situation as a joke, and he could joke very happily in those days when his sentence was a straight young thing that could run where it liked, instead of a delicate creature swathed in relative clauses as an invalid in shawls” (41). Unfortunately, she also took refuge in grand but empty rhetoric, when she could not compact her meaning into short form. Of The Wings of the Dove, she concludes: “One just sits and looks up, while the Master lifts his old grief, changed by his craftsmanship into eternal beauty as the wafer is changed to the Host by the priest’s liturgy, enclosed from decay, prisoned in perfection, in the great shining crystal bowl of his art” (104).
Wells detested this kind of quasi-religious rhetoric in James and began to deplore its impact on West’s work. Eventually her Jamesian style would cause a rupture between them during the writing of her second novel, The Judge (1922). Wells had published an attack on what he called the “James cult” in Boon (1915) that had influenced West, although she later told biographer Gordon Ray “I was all against Wells in his view of James.” Yet she qualified the absoluteness of her assertion by adding: “it seemed to me as an earnest young Socialist that his [James’s] involvement in the drawingroom was excessive and that a tea-party manner took away the impressiveness of some of his subjects.” Boon argues that “literature is something tremendously comprehensive, something that pierces always down towards the core of things, something that carries and changes all the activities of the race.” West shared Wells’s capacious imagination, believing that literature should be redemptive. Dostoevsky, for example, was “celebrating the glory of the universe by reasserting, more hopefully than Schopenhauer, that there is a Will-to-Live which sustains and guides humanity with blind genius.” Dostoevsky had shown the complex human canvas of Russian life so palpably that it made the wartime alliance with England possible, an extension of a “literary friendship” she lauded because the “wonder of Russian literature is now as indisputable as the glory of Rome.” James, Wells contended, “seems to regard the whole seething brew of life as a vat from which you skim, with slow, dignified gestures, works of art.… Works of art whose only claim is their art.” In other words, James had removed art from life, not realizing “a novel isn’t a picture.… That life isn’t a studio.” James valued unity and homogeneity, but the result was sterility. One never got anywhere in his fiction. “He doesn’t find things out. He doesn’t even seem to want to find things out. You can see that in him; he is eager to accept things—elaborately” (104). Similarly, West protested that James had no sense of the past, and therefore no sense of history:
He was always misled by such lovely shells of the past as Hampton Court into the belief that the past which inhabited them was as lovely. The calm of Canterbury Close appeared to him as a remnant of a time when all England, bowed before the Church, was as calm; whereas the calm is really a modern condition brought about when the Church ceased to have anything to do with England. He never perceived that life is always a little painful at the moment, not only at this moment but at all moments. (27)
Wells and West sensed in the Master too much of an affection for the upper class and the Establishment. He was, in a way, a figurehead for their lambasting of “dons and prigs, cults of the precious and cults of style” (Boon, 276). They both lamented what Wells called the lack of a “common purpose” and “sense of a whole community.” The world of letters was filled with “posturing and competition and sham reputations.” For a moment, at the outset of the war, “people seemed noble and dignified,” but “what the devil do we stand for?” Boon asks. “Was there anything that amounted to an intellectual life at all in our beastly welter of writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of stylish fiction and fiction without style, of lazy history, popular philosophy, slobbering criticism?” (276) Among the younger novelists West held out hope only for D.H. Lawrence; the rest, she remarked, were “unanimously unaware of the existence of style (in all the work of Mr. Hugh Walpole, for instance, one could find hardly one sensitive phrase).” Yet even the great James had overlooked Lawrence in favor of Walpole in his criticism.
When West returned to the subject of Henry James in 1900, she deplored his butler-like attendance to the status quo and his static, ahistorical view of social reality, which bothered a writer with an exquisite command of history. Yet in her usual grasp of the concrete metaphor, she concluded: “But we cannot do without him; he diagnosed the world’s sickness, though that hardly excuses the too pliant knee of his nature. A great, great genius” (100).
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, West reported on and analyzed the crisis of a patriarchal society. She had cherished and rejected her father’s authority, seeing in him the promise and the failure of the paternal ideal—a subject she would return to over and over again in her fiction and finally set at rest in 1900. The events that resulted in the First World War also signified to her the death of the nineteenth century. Losing her father at such a young age was, in fact, a precursor of what the new generation would experience—some young people losing their fathers in the war, and others losing that certitude that had strengthened Victorian values. Characteristically, West dramatized the collapse of the nineteenth century in a scene with her father. In 1898, when West was five-years-old, England’s great Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, had died—a tragic event West was made to feel acutely by her father’s encomium:
Gladstone looked like the stern and wise and honoured father everybody would like to have. Where are we to find another like that? It does not matter on which side he is. Things are better for a country when they have an elder statesman who looks as if he could save one from any sort of drowning. But I don’t see it happening in England today. (6)
In 1900, reviewing the list of prime ministers succeeding Gladstone, West fails to find another father figure. “Since 1900 we have had no certainty at any time that there was somebody who would take care of us. We were going to have to look after ourselves” (8).
CHAPTER TWO
1914–1922
Life for Rebecca West became considerably more complicated with the birth of her son Anthony by Wells on the day Britain declared war. She managed to continue writing for periodicals, but it proved difficult to find the time to concentrate on a major work. American publisher Alfred A. Knopf wrote to her about turning her New Republic series, “The World’s Worst Failure,” into a book, but she replied that she had not finished it. It would have to contain the “ultimate wisdom about feminism” which she had had to acquire slowly, “by fletcherising my experience”—that is, masticating it hundreds of times so that it could be digested.
Although West had a nurse to help with her infant son, she felt harried by housekeepers who saw through the fiction of married life she and Wells tried to maintain throughout a decade of a passionate on-again, off-again affair. He was a fitful father who took several journalistic jaunts outside England when he was not shuttling between his country home and the various domiciles he established for West and her son that kept them out of London and thus out of range of the literary gossips. Wells, whose only birth control method had been withdrawal prior to ejaculation, admitted that Anthony had been an accident. Neither he nor West were prepared for the consequences and had to make do—in her case perpetuating humiliating ruses that had Anthony calling her auntie and his father Wellsie. Her days as an unfettered feminist were over, and West struggled to reconstruct her vision of a literary career.
West finally found her inspiration in Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier, which she reviewed in the Daily News on April 2, 1915. She hailed his work as “clever, as the novels of Mr Henry James are clever, with all sorts of acute discoveries about human nature; and at times it is radiantly witty.” She marveled at Ford’s union of passion and technique and set aside her youthful socialist dismissal of the rich:
For the subject is, one realises when one has come to the end of this saddest story, much vaster than one had imagined that any story about well-bred people. who live in sunny houses with deer in the park, and play polo, and go to Nauheim for the cure, could possibly contain.
What intrigues West is the story of Edward Ashburnham, a handsome member of the governing class with a “fatal touch of the imagination,” a romantic, in fact, with the sensibility of a creative artist. She had been seeking to create just such a character in her abortive novel, “The Sentinel,” but she had failed to achieve a vision of a male with Ashburnam’s degree of nobility, or to imagine a plot in which a woman might fail such a man—as Ashburnam’s wife, Leonora, fails him, not understanding, in West’s words, that “marriage meant anything but an appearance of loyalty before the world and the efficient management of one’s husband’s estate.” Starved for a love that Leonora cannot provide, Ashburnam develops a sentimental innocent passion for a “quite innocent young girl,” as West puts it. The denouement is a “beautiful and moving” tragedy told by an “intervener not too intimately concerned in the plot,” who manages to convey an exquisite “effect of effortlessness and inevitableness.” West’s concluding sentence sounds a reverent note not heard before in her reviews: “Indeed, this is a much, much better book than any of us deserve.”
West’s review is virtually a sketch of her first published novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918). At the center of her work is Chris Baldry, a handsome member of the governing class with a romantic sensibility. Indeed he is a Wordsworthian child who “was not like other city men,” for he had always shown a “great faith in the improbable,” really thinking that a birch tree would “stir and shrink and quicken into an enchanted princess,” and that a tiger would show its fangs in the bracken. Like Ashburnam, Baldry has a polished wife, Kitty, who observes the proper forms and is a neo-classical doll-like lady who cannot fathom his intensity. She substitutes “gracious living” for his “lack of free adventure” (21). Also like Ashburnam, Baldry is an innocent—an amnesiac victim of shell shock returning from war in the mental mood of a twenty-year-old, having obliterated any memory of his marriage to Kitty and yearning for an earlier liaison with Margaret, a lower class woman he courted but then spurned in a fit of jealously and misunderstanding (he concluded she would not answer his letters when in fact they were never forwarded to her). Baldry can think only of Margaret, crying out to the cold Kitty that he will die if he does not see her. Mediating between Chris and Kitty, between these romantic and neoclassical temperaments, is Jenny, the novel’s narrator—or intervener—who is obviously in love with Chris and yet who is removed enough from the action to see clearly the dilemma that the Kitty-Chris-Margaret triangle presents.
At first, Jenny rejects Margaret, who has grown dowdy and worn from work in the years separating her from Chris. To Jenny, Chris’s craving for Margaret shows Baldry Court for the sham it is; it is only a facade of happiness that she and Kitty have conspired to construct. Chris, Jenny realizes, never reconciled himself to the compromises of adulthood, to marrying a beautiful woman of his class who could make life tidy and comfortable but not exciting. It is Jenny who gradually comprehends the inevitableness of Chris’s unhappiness even as Kitty accuses him of counterfeiting amnesia and of secretly wanting a mistress. Dr. Anderson, the psychiatrist called in to cure Chris—that is, to return him to adulthood and to his marriage to Kitty—has his doubts about restoring Chris to an ordinary life. For Dr. Anderson points out to Kitty that there is all the difference in the world between the “deep self in one, the essential self, that has its wishes … and the superficial self” which suppresses those wishes and puts on a “good show before the neighbours” (163–64). Chris has had enough of good shows. But for Kitty, there is only self-control, good breeding and manners. It comes as a shocking revelation to her when Margaret confides to Dr. Anderson that Chris has always been “very dependent.” Margaret is confirming the doctor’s speculation that Chris turned to sex with a “peculiar need” (167). The maternal Margaret, Anderson implies, is a substitute for Chris’s cold mother and—though no one actually says so—an antidote to the icily correct Kitty.