Rebecca West

...To ignore her works in any biography of her, long or short, is to ignore the essence of the woman...

...Shortly after Mrs...

...In a review of Whittaker Chambers's Witness, which Miss Glendinning does not mention at all but which is perhapsthe most accurate analysis of Chambers written to date, West praised Chambers for writing "as writers by vocation try to write, and he makes the further discoveries about reality, pushing another half-inch below the surface, which writers hope to make when they write...

...Her mother was Scottish and had been a pianist...

...It is of course hard to determine ex- actly where a writer's talent comes from, but in Rebecca West's case it is easy to identify the sources of her extraordinary drive...

...If the recognition of the importance of knowledge is one motivation for the book, however, West knew just as well that accumulated knowledge will not necessarily protect people against the whimsies of world events...

...Miss Glendinning has written three previous biographies, all respectable and well received, of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, and Vita Sackville-West...

...At age fourteen her first published work appeared, in The Scotsman, in the form of a letter entitled "Women's Electoral Claims...

...In everything Rebecca West wrote she tried to do justice to her subjects, and they were the biggest subjects: betrayal, violence, man's relationship to God, the salvation promised by art...

...Although she may be accused of occasional untruthfulness and of frequent excess in both her work and her life, she probably never wrote a dull word or expressed an uninteresting idea...

...In a dazzlingly short span of time, the young freedom fighter found herself pregnant, friendless, and locked away with a household of reproachful servants in a remote part of Norfolk called -Hunstanton, where her son Anthony was born in 1914...

...In1901 he left his wife and daughters to start a pharmaceuticals factory in Sierra Leone...

...In 1910 she moved to London to become an actress, but was quickly lured like her father into journalism, writing for the feminist Freewoman and, later, the socialist Clarion...

...So she made a religion of the need for art, and for upholding certain standard concepts of Western thought as they applied to the modern world: justice, morality, loyalty...

...Anthony, for his part, never stopped complaining about his general unhappiness with the entire situation, for which he placed all the blame on Rebecca...

...Where we might expect the calm acceptance of the idea of the nation, we find an almost incantatory glorification of it...

...Another serious fault of the biography is its inattention to the books Rebecca West was writing throughout her long life...

...The prose no doubt deserves all the praise it has received, for it is very brilliant...

...Miss GlendinTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 45 nore the work in favor of the life is to miss a great deal...

...Hers was a synthesizing rather than a specializing mind...

...While this seems a munificent invitation to future scholars, in fact the statement betrays a large error of judgment...

...It seems an injustice that the first of two biographies commissioned by this vivid individual before her death in 1982, Rebecca West by Victoria Glen-dinning, should be as flat and formal as a newscast...

...Hers is a fine little coming-out book, full of peppery criticisms sprinkled over a base of solid admiration, incomplete but filled with promise...

...Her personality elicited strong feelings in others: she had hundreds of fiercely loyal friends and not a few enemies...

...ning's misrepresentation not only neglects the importance with which West regarded the malignity of Communism (she called it "Fascism with a glandular and geographic difference"), but it also weakens the biography's already brief discussions of West's works, especially The New Meaning of Treason—originally published in 1947 as The Meaning of Treason and updated in 1964—which seeks to examine the motivations of the Fascist and Communist traitors of World War II and after...

...her tendency to write to excess resembles that of many who write about religion...

...we can only hope that Stanley Olson provides us with a less perfunctory, more penetrating book...

...How best to characterize that life and work...

...Its rhetoric has a hectic flush...

...Miss Glendinning also seems less than comfortable with the large fact of Rebecca West's anti-Communism, which she attempts at several points to attribute to mere paranoia or to other kinds of mental illness...

...The venture failed, but he never returned...

...The body of work she left is more or less inimitable, but to explain the nature of her intellect one might perhaps most profitably compare her with an American contemporary of hers, the journalistturned-man-of-letters Edmund Wilson, himself a writer whose synthesizing mind looms much larger in his public's imagination than do any of his particular books...

...Having given a rudimentary and rather awkward account of the political situation in the Balkans and of Rebecca West's view of it, the author retreats (gratefully, it seems) into a cozy discussion of her subject's country-house life and her pleasure in canning, gardening, and making butter...

...her father, Charles, an Anglo-Irishman and former soldier, called himself a journalist but seemed to spend a lot of time gambling and pursuing women...

...In her introduction, Miss Glendinning asserts that her subject's story "is the story of twentieth-century women," but this is not at all true, because Rebecca West was an individualist to such a degree that she often defined her milieu most clearly when she stood in opposition to it...

...as a feminist, a socialist, and later as an anti-Communist, she maintained a truly independent point of view, never needing to seek refuge in a particular faction in the course of fleeing another...

...So much for women's liberation...

...Uncle Wells arrived always a little out of breath, with his arms full of parcels, sometimes rather carelessly tied, but always bursting with all manner of attractive gifts...

...She could make old subjects look new, comparing Augustine in another brief biography to Tolstoy (whom she hated) and Proust (whom she loved...

...We need not wonder that the prose of this documentarian of modern history is so anxious, writing as she does after one of the most anxious periods in twentieth-century history...

...Admirers of her writing speak of her with near-cultic devotion, while her own son (who died last December) spent much of his own writing career vilifying her for real or imagined injuries...

...she writes elsewhere in Black Lamb of "the appalling lack of accumulation observable in history, the perpetual cancellation of human achievement, which is the work of careless and violent nature...

...Along with her sisters she joined the suffragist cause...

...The following year she began using the pseudonym Rebecca West, after a character in Ibsen's play Rosmersholm, chiefly, as Miss Glendinning suggests, to quiet the fears of her disapproving mother...

...They had the generosity...

...Rebecca West clearly had a need for religion, as she needed all sorts of absolute convictions, but in the manyyears of wrestling with religious dilemmas she found herself less and less able to maintain an allegiance to any established church...

...The most interesting thing about Rebecca West was not the course of her life, although that was interesting indeed...

...In a famous essay about Arnold Bennett (in The Strange Necessity), she begins by writing: All our youth they hung about the houses of our minds like Uncles, the Big Four: H.G...

...It is remarkable for much the same reason Trilling chose to criticize it: because of the author's intense personal response to her subject—her total immersion, intellectually and emotionally, in it...

...In the back country of Rebecca West's mind she must have recognized the grand disappointment presented to her by life which this essay does not name but which is nonetheless conspicuous —the regret that she never had uncles like these, never even had the attention of a devoted father, and that all her relationships were so incomplete that she had to rely on literature to deliver what people could not...

...For her, art ("the strange necessity," as she titled one of her books) was the only intimation of hope, the only reason to want to continue to live in a violent, constantly betrayed, and betraying world...

...The same is true of her position as a writer...

...Lionel Trilling's review of The Meaning of Treason, published in the Nation in 1948, is one of the best criticisms of that tendency: . . . Miss West's prose seems unconsciously to know what Miss West's conscious mind prefers not to recognize...

...Even after his mother's death he was not done with REBECCA WEST: A LIFE Victoria Glendinning/Alfred A. Knopf/$19.95 Donna Rifkind 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 hating her...

...Later in her life, as Miss Glendinning writes, she was furious with Anthony beyond normal proportions for divorcing his wife, probably because she was reminded of her own father's desertion...

...at that time she also described Wells with some scorn as "only a successful version of my father...

...and could make new subjects look old, judging the traitors of World War II according to ancient notions of one's allegiance to one's country and to God...

...As the author calmly offers the rest of the events in Rebecca West's life as if setting out a tray for tea, however, one begins to suspect that Miss Glen-dinning is more comfortable with the romantic aspects of her subject's life than with the intellectual and political material...

...Rebecca West herself never made such an error...

...Capricious and brief as it is, it never underestimates the significance of the man's imagination or neglects to show how that imagination worked in his books...

...It is her literary criticism which manages, much more than the novels do, to define her intensely personal claim for the importance of art...

...But while her novels are sometimes irredeemably sentimental, they should not be discounted as aberrations among her work as a whole, for they explore the universe of her feelings as her journalism surveys the boundaries of her intellect...

...She was born Cicily Isabel Fairfield in 1892 in London, the youngest of three girls...

...The early betrayal burned a hole in the girl that she spent her life trying to mend: it made all future rejections seem a replay of the original pain, and it moved her to nurture a hatred of deception and a dedication to absolute standards, both of which became prominent themes in her writing...

...Rebecca West bears signs of having been hastily written—and written more out of a sense of duty than from a patient willingness to evince the spirit of the woman's life and work...

...Soon after her marriage, when she was thirty-eight, her husband wrote to her: "I hope you will recall how when I was lonely your work Donna Rifkind is the assistant managing editor of the New Criterion...

...After she reviewed his novel Marriage in The Freewoman in September 1911, the forty-six-year-old married writer invited nineteen-yearold Rebecca to lunch...

...Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Gals-worthy and Arnold Bennett...

...It is easy to see how her desire for a foundation of faith based on these concepts could lead her to write to impassioned excess about them...

...In the case of both Wilson and Rebecca West we sense at the source of their achievements a desire above all to gather up information which they could shape into artful prose, in an effort to make the most possible sense of their world...

...Her new name and plucky journalism were quick successes, and she was bold and pretty enough to make herself a celebrity in literary London...

...Certainly it is unfair to expect that a biographer's talent and dedication match her subject's...

...She worked as if there existed a grand, glittering emporium called Knowledge where she was a preferred customer, and something in her personality drove her to collect knowledge of as many diverse subjects as she had time to pursue...

...She explains why she undertook the project in this passage from the prologue: I had to admit that I quite simply and flatly knew nothing at all about the southeastern corner of Europe...

...She wrote in The Meaning of Treason that "a work of art gives satisfaction to the artist and the spectator because it analyzes an experience and synthesizes its findings into a new form that makes people eager for fresh experience...

...She was a prodigious rather than an emblematic figure: an individual who seemed larger than life not because she was a representative woman but because she had more than the usual amount of resources, and more courage, to respond to the requirements which her world presented to her...

...the charm, and loquacity of visiting uncles...

...But we sense Miss Glendinning's relief when, in another section, she finishes a long passage about Rebecca's involvement in Yugoslavian affairs just prior to and during World War II—an involvement which led her to write her great book on the subject, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon...

...Shortly thereafter the famous ten-year confrontation with H. G. Wells began...

...Fairfield took her girls to Edinburgh, her birthplace, which was cheaper to live in than London, Charles died in Liverpool in a boardinghouse, leaving his family nothing...

...When he published H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life in 1984, the book was more a demonstration of his anger toward Rebecca than the homage to Wells which the title promises...

...She speaks here with the simplicity and urgency of a child for the strange necessity for art in our lives, for a solid dedication to it in a world made sickening by betrayals, large and small...

...As she explains in her new book, she had been acquainted with Dame Rebecca in the 1970s, and the older woman left instructions that a short life be written by Miss Glendinning while a longer one (not yet completed) is to be published by the American writer Stanley Olson...

...her hatred of totalitarianism was of primary significance among her democratic-socialist positions, and she detested any political doctrine which threatened the individual's freedom in the way she felt Communism did...

...The Thinking Reed (1936), with its title borrowed from Pascal, is a study of moral choices regarding marriage which echoes aspects of the first years of her own marriage to Henry Maxwell Andrews beginning in 1930...

...She very early developed the attitude of the outsider and the underdog, insisting on maintaining both independence of mind and the self-pitying, superior air of always having just emerged from a slog through the mud...

...For example, we get plenty of information about Rebecca's unsatisfied infatuation with the newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, including some tabloid-style teasers like the following: "Rebecca, who had never been unfaithful to [Wells], was interested in another man—an interest that was to become an obsession...

...There is some question as to whether Rebecca West's own fiction fulfills the essential function she claims art must perform...

...Without the redemption of art, there seemed to her little possibility for faith...

...Most of the time she herself was able to push that extra half-inch below the surface—but perhaps never so successfully, and certainly not for so many pages, as in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941...

...Yet although she is excessive, and although a case can be made that the book never succeeds in reaching the core of its subject, The Meaning of Treason is nevertheless one of the richest works of journalism ever written...

...This sequence of events filled fourteen-year-old Cicily with enough disappointment to conquer and subdue a less resilient person, but she came out of it fighting...

...Even at the end, when West was ninety, a housekeeper described her life as "black and white and crimson and purple and wild...

...It was that conviction that allowed her constantly to push the necessary half-inch below the surface, a half-inch below anything Victoria Glendinning has managed to reach in this biography...

...Titles and dates are duly provided, but Miss Glen-dinning devotes a minimum of space to discussing the works...

...Rebecca West A Life convinces us only that there is plenty of material for a future biographer to work with...

...Miss West's prose, in short, is anxious prose...

...She claims in her introduction that "there is roomnot only for a detailed biography in the future, but for studies of aspects of her life and work which this first biography has not been able to cover fully...

...Rebecca herself alternated between animosity toward Anthony and love for him—and for Wells...

...But West herself would no doubt have protested that, far from being a quirk, her anti-Communism was absolutely consistent with the rest of her political beliefs...

...If nothing else, we believe in her need for belief...

...She wrote more, one suspects, out of a need to satisfy that driving restlessness to know than out of a wish to address a particular audience or to master a specific genre, and as a result it would be difficult to gauge exactly what kind of people her large audience was composed of...

...But for the intellectual occasion it is too brilliant...

...It was her intellect, that great synthesizing machine, a sparkling and marvelous engine whose contents she manufactured into books, that was and remains of the most vital importance...

...and since there proceeds steadily from that place a stream of events which are a source of danger to me . . . that is to say I know nothing of my own destiny...

...She was not a representative journalist, or novelist, or critic, or travel writer, although she worked in all those genres...

...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988...

...For while it is not true for many writers, in the case of Rebecca West her life was mixed into her work—and her work into her life—to such a degree that to igM iss Glendinning relates these circumstances in her usually dutiful manner, showing justification for all three points of view but in the end maintaining a loyalty to Rebecca that seems almost filial in its circumspection...

...Her first book, in fact, was a critical study of Henry James, also a writer whose life and works are inextricable...

...But in this case Miss Glendinning's cool, dutiful tone and superficial presentation betray a lack of engagement that dampens the spirit of her subject...

...its richness of metaphor and allusion and modification is too lavish...

...This two-volume work, a 500,000 word series of ruminations on European history disguised as a travel book about Yugoslavia, is one result of Rebecca West's ardent search to understand everything she considered important...

...What followed in the lives of these three people is very well known: Rebecca tried to get Wells to marry her, but he had not the slightest intention of leaving his efficient wife and comfortable estate...

...If she does not wholly succeed in persuading her readers that art is our salvation, or that the maintenance of the idea of the nation is essential to society, Rebecca West does succeed in assuring us of her complete conviction as a writer...

...Since they are closely autobiographical, the novels can be read as a series of emotional maps: The Fountain Overflows (1956), as its title suggests, is an outpouring about her early family life...

...recalled to me the ideals and enthusiasms of my youth and gave me strength not to compromise...

...In the same way, many whom you will never know are surrounding you with their blessings...