The Young Rebecca/1900
West, Rebecca
Consider poor Thomas Chatterton, who blossomed young, was starved of applause, and killed himself in despair. In our time there is the more ghastly case of Norman Mailer, who for the sake of...
...Nevertheless a few escape...
...If a wife is unfaithful to her husband, a bigger revolution takes place in her moral nature than takes place in the moral nature of her husband...
...In our time there is the more ghastly case of Norman Mailer, who for the sake of literature ought, perhaps, to have done the same...
...There have been so many of these bright starts which faded away, like Arthur Rimbaud, or warped at last into a stunted crankiness, like Bernard Shaw in his dotage...
...Like other protesters they tended to see conspiracy where there was habit, and to use exaggerated polemic to attract attention and shame their opponents...
...Female Britons in the early years of this century were a species of foreigners in male-dominated public life, really banausic and second-class citizens...
...In December of last year Dame Rebecca West was ninety years old...
...But even within the seven-year scope of this collection, she grows visibly in her social and political grasp of the events she is writing about...
...It was a very far cry from the hen-party sociological caviling and post-adolescent identity problems of most so-called "feminists" today...
...To this end she includes material which belongs back in the archives-reviews of obscure works by forgotten authors like Louis Billington Grieg, Mary H.J...
...Unfortunately Miss Marcus is determined to make The Young Rebecca harp on the feminist string at all costs...
...Eliot, and a few more who were giving new life and power to our wretched tongueincluding, of course, Rebecca West...
...Box 177, Freeport, Maine 04032 demotic adulation which is now a commercial commonplace...
...Miss Marcus, on the other hand, places errors and banality at the very center of her concerns, so that they dominate her writing...
...men...
...Now these are tricky terms to throw at a reader in the 1980s, when the political context is changed altogether and (as Miss Marcus forgets to mention) both "isms" have quite different connotations from those they carried in the Britain of 1911-17...
...She was deadly with adversaries in print, easily able to strangle an antifeminist author with the rope of his own prejudice, chapter and verse: "Bodily unfaithfulness rather than spiritual unfaithfulness" comes natural to them [i.e...
...These were the last years of Henry James...
...their work has nothing to do with the satisfaction of the natural hungers of mankind...
...As a writer she has never been ignored, but neither has she been stuffed like a French goose with the sort of hyped Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright living in Europe...
...a piece on Sir Edward Carson and the Irish question, and commentary on pacifism, antiSemitism, and Bertrand Russell, any of which would surely retain its heat in today's political climate...
...It would be gormless enough for anyone who knew the story of Cain and Abel to write that at any time...
...they were subject to types of misprision and actual assault that a jury today would probably regard as just cause for homicide...
...In order to make room for this stuff she has omitted an account of the first British performance of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard...
...The fault lies with the editor, an apparently feminist and vaguely left-wing academic called Jane Marcus, who has made the selection and contributed the gloss...
...There were others about, including Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S...
...Yet .. . this book will stir up many doubts...
...In other words, a man is always more of a hog than a woman...
...Much of it is enjoyable and historically interesting, but the book could have been a good deal better than it is...
...Framed by her peculiar brand of sanity, this tends to diminish her mistakes, so that they matter less than the excellence or sheer power of what is there besides...
...It is as though some envious god had laid a random curse upon literary talent of a certain excellence...
...The same women were imprisoned and subjected to force-feeding of a barbaric cruelty and crudity, now and then with fatal results...
...To write it in the 1980s is a dereliction of common sense...
...Obviously Miss Marcus has read the contents of this book but manages to overlook one glaringly patent fact: the "socialism" stitched into some of the coverage and essays is pro-forma rhetoric, a left-wing jargon which sticks out of Rebecca West's THE YOUNG REBECCA Rebecca West, edited by Jane Marcus / The Viking Press / $25.00 1900 Rebecca West / The Viking Press / $19.95 Herb Greer NOVELS by J. Inchardi i 4 An American Trilogy Lines On The Death Of A Fisherman Three Jews In A Tub Dreamship An Allegorical Trilogy Yurros A Paper Toy Intercurse A Demonic Trilogy Jehovah Mafioso Saturn Maru Drek Shlak 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...
...The gloss should be read skeptically and with great care-if at all...
...Women who demonstrated even for the banal democratic perquisite of suffrage were furiously denounced by reactionary members of their own sex...
...The Young Rebecca contains essays, book reviews, biographical sketches, one piece of rather bad fiction, and some other miscellaneous journalism, ranging from a magazine debut in 1911 to work for British dailies six years later...
...Men aren't like this...
...The feminist movement did not arise among the "oppressed" working-class, but with middle-class women who had time on their hands and so were able to think for themselves about the worn-out social patterns which condoned-among other abuses-a denial of their access to public life and the deprivation of their property rights in marriage...
...Ugh...
...Order by mail from Sirius Books P.O...
...As they had not before, these women demanded a recognition of their capability and independence as fullfledged human beings rather than household chattels...
...The saving grace of this anthology is its heartening proof that a brilliant intelligence, honesty, and superb literary flair can triumph over the facile underdoggery and superficial prejudice which come naturally to a passionate teenager...
...George, et al...
...Thanks to a British feminist publisher, Virago, and Viking, some of this is now available to the present generation of American readers...
...The young Rebecca wrote in support of her feminist contemporaries with stunning eloquence and a withering contempt for the smugness of the male establishment of the day...
...At this time-Miss Marcus asserts confidently-Rebecca West was writing "as a convinced socialist .. . and a dedicated feminist" and "was clear that the ideas of feminism were inseparable from those of socialism...
...Socialism, she says, "is a way of thinking which could make all men behave like brothers in the ordinary pursuits of life...
...Like any writer young or old, Rebecca West committed her share of howlers to paper, and there are splendid examples in this book: The men of the commercial and financial world are the merest accident of a complicated social system...
...But there is worse...
...But as she herself says, her dedication did not extend to activism.-She was not the marching type, but a consistently sane advocate who could (and did) censure her own side for their wilder flights of biological fancy, and for a certain tendency to promote the sex-hatred which is still around today...
...Skrine, W.L...
...As an academic in the field of English literature, Miss Marcus labels the years 1911-17 as "an age which saw the debasement of language...
...The work of those early days, which delighted and sometimes outraged her contemporaries, was until last year almost entirely buried in the archives of universities, libraries, and defunct publications...
...Instead he was glutted with praise, as he simultaneously ripened and rotted, like a medlar...
...Her writing is still as fresh, clear, lambent, and graceful as it was when she began her career before the First World War, at the age of eighteen...
...The occasionally breathtaking coverage in this book shows that feminism in those days was a serious and often very dangerous affair-for women...
...But they did have a legitimate cause...
...they were beaten up, sometimes viciously, by police or male bystanders, always with impunity...
...Worst of all, Miss Marcus's editing and commentary are intensely annoying because they try to cram the young Rebecca into a mold clearly too narrow to hold her...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
