Rebecca West
Rollyson, Carl
Nothing Like This Dame Rebecca West: A Life Carl Rollyson Scribner /511 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Christopher Caldwell R ebecca West was born early enough to join in dinner-table arguments over...
...is "Arthur," T.S...
...While we read it in the 199os as the authoritative (if Serb-slanted) treatment of Yugoslavian ethnic conflict, Rollyson is right to see it as much more, a twentieth-century Thousand-andOne Nights —that is, a combination of philosophy and autobiography in which West measured her own ideas and her life against those of a people she admired...
...To Noel Coward, who was also on the list, West wrote, "Just think of the people we should have been seen dead with...
...Her 1949 The Meaning of Treason argued—against progressive opinion—that British Nazi collaborators should be hanged, on the grounds that all that stood between the West and totalitarianism was the Rule of Law...
...Nowadays, we can see it as an instance of the 1990's "repressed memory" hoax avant la lettre...
...Which is strange, because this is not a bad book...
...West was born Cicely Fairfield in London in 1892...
...To sell books to homosexuals...
...She took her pen name from a shrew in Ibsen's Rosmersholm .) Her father was an Anglo-Irish cad who made his living as a right-wing journalist before abandoning the family when Rebecca was 9; her mother was a genteel Scotswoman whose family misfortunes and wretched marriage led her into a downward social spiral...
...Not only had she spent time in Yugoslavia and befriended the New York Herald-Tribune's prize-winning anti-Communist reporter Bert Andrews...
...In the late 1930's, West had made a series of visits to Yugoslavia, which convinced her that the minor countries of Europe were about to be obliterated by either German fascism or Russian Communism...
...There are also some incidental quirks of the sexual biography here, such as a tendency to refer to virtually every person by his first name...
...It would also shape the postwar political journalism which is today the cornerstone of her literary reputation...
...Between 1937 and 1941, she wrote her half-million-word masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon...
...to the extent that the reader is almost discomfited to find Joseph Stalin referred to as "Stalin...
...It is a beautiful voice and a keen and sensitive mind doing 'Big Thinks' to the utmost of its ability—which is nil...
...A vocal opponent of Nazism, he was fired from his job M 1934 for protesting the replacement of a Jewish colleague with a Nazi, and spentmuch of the thirties helping opponents of the regime to flee...
...Wells won West an invitation to Wells's home...
...That's the feeling we get as we read Rollyson's account...
...Over the long haul, of course, West proved a thinker of vastly greater depth and originality than Wells, who now strikes us as merely a high-energy mediocrity with little to say to our own time...
...And not only that: Wells may have boldly flouted "society's" strictures, but feared that the news of a fresh bastard would throw him off his game with his other mistresses...
...Its scholarship is thorough and its discussion of West's politics is admirably nonideological...
...So he urged that West present herself to her growing son as his "aunt" with the result that the boy had no idea of his parentage until late boyhood...
...If she was being used, she asked, why didn't he defend her against misinterpretation...
...And West recognized the memory as based in fantasy rather than fact: when biographer Gordon Ray mentioned the incident, West called it "nonsense...
...By the eve of war, West was vehemently opposed to the pacifism that had so weakened English preparedness...
...Of her third, a criticism collection that appeared in 1928 when they had drifted far apart, Wells wrote: "This book is a sham...
...of free love...
...AmaNgesen.or Even more shameless is Rollyson's raised-eyebrow implication that Rebecca was raped by her father, due to an image she recalled during a session of psychoanalytic free-association, which West later told AnaIs Nin about...
...Although she considered Joseph McCarthy "a stupid and violent demagogue," she was better informed about international Communism than her journalistic and academic colleagues...
...She has proved too big for Carl Rollyson, as well...
...But the andthen-and-then-and-then structure of the book, with its bawdy anecdotage interrupted by choppy and inadequate explications de texte, crowds out discussion of the arc of West's career...
...An attack on the novelist H.G...
...Becky is nuts," as Richard Rovere put it, and the opinion was unanimous...
...But Glendinning's work presented a better picture of how West the artist and West the intellectual came together...
...As West herself put it in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, As we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their beginnings, we realize that to the people who take part in them it is almost of greater importance that they should be stories, that they should form a recognizable pattern, than that they should be happy or tragic...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...It is also the first sign of West's increasingly Manichean conception of world conflict, with the liberal West on one side and Communism and fascism on the other...
...The marriage would last until Henry's death in 1968, despite infidelities on both sides...
...Yet Rebecca's vehement dislike of homosexuality is cause for investigation...
...I believe," she wrote in 1950, "in the Christian conception of man and the French Revolution's interpretation of his political necessities...
...Nothing Like This Dame Rebecca West: A Life Carl Rollyson Scribner /511 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Christopher Caldwell R ebecca West was born early enough to join in dinner-table arguments over the Dreyfus affair as it happened, and died late enough to comment on the novels of Martin Amis as they appeared...
...8i The American Spectator • January 1997 77...
...One cannot describe West's novels without more space than this review has...
...But Rollyson dwells too much on West's sex life, and occasionally descends into an opportunistic trashiness, tarting up his bio to appeal to all the sexual special pleaders of our day...
...The following year, she bore him a child, the future novelist and New Yorker critic Anthony West...
...He already had a mistress, but with the 19-year-old West taking the lead, the two of them launched an affair...
...She was being the brave intellect, she wrote—New York and London liberals were merely doing the "easier, much more popular thing," by asserting the hardly controversial position that "we are all much superior to Senator McCarthy...
...Rollyson admits that it may be "a latent, highly disguised sexual fantasy," but he is clearly titillated enough to want to believe it, and the description of Charles Fairfield on the book's dust-jacket as a "sexually abusive father" is a disgrace to both Rollyson and his publisher Scribner...
...Andrews was the scion of a British family long expatriated on the Continent: he had spent the whole of World War I in an internment camp, and made his career as a banker in Germany...
...today, we can see his attitude as satyriasis in the guise of progressivism...
...Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted...
...Certainly, by stringing West along, Wells deprived the world of vastly more good literature than he provided it...
...For all the liberals' self-flattering Schadenfreude about American fascism's threat to intellectual freedom, West was the only participant in the debate who had been on an actual fascist death list—Hitler's tally of intellectuals who would face arrest after a German invasion of England...
...If one's own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book...
...by her late thirties, fifteen years into a book-writing career, she had written only two books...
...She was drawn first into the theater and then into radical feminism, penning a constant flow of literary criticism and propaganda for a kooky London weekly called the Freewoman...
...Eliot is "Tom...
...This very largeness and variety has worked against biographers, and it works against her latest, Carl Rollyson, a professor of English at Baruch College who has written biographies of Marilyn Monroe and Lillian Hellman...
...This "Burkean" vision, as West described it, made her notorious in intellectual circles during the Cold War...
...her husband had counted both Allen Dulles and Jan Masaryk among his friends in the thirties and forties...
...Like many who find themselves the most rattily accoutered in their social group, West grew up with a chip on her shoulder...
...She led a remarkably active amorous life, including affairs with Lord Beaverbrook, Sinclair Lewis, John Gunther, Charlie Chaplin, and Nuremberg prosecutor Francis Biddle...
...Until recently it would have been called "ironic" that such an apostle of sexual equality as Wells should have caused so much misery to so many women...
...Wells comes off badly in Rollyson's treatment, but not nearly badly enough...
...When Arthur Schlesinger wrote to say that her sentiments were being used by the McCarthyites, she attacked him for his "impudent and lying letter," and threw it back in his face...
...Of a bisexual friend, Rollyson writes, "There is no evidence that Rebecca had a lesbian attachment to Pamela [Frankau...
...Wells, then on his second wife, had become a vocal apostle CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL is senior writer at the Weekly Standard...
...W est married the banker Henry Andrews in 193o, and it was only then that she began to breathe the clear air of her own genius...
...One could add that the first half of West's life was wrecked by her sexual "liberation," and that the second was bedeviled by it, as Anthony came to direct all his rebellious loathing at his mother, belittling her in person and in print...
...Not that sex wasn't important to West...
...Diana Trilling once said of West, I always wanted to write something about her, and I never did, because I didn't think I knew enough...she was too big...
...In articles accusing liberals of hypocrisy and moral preening, she became the most virulent critic of America's anti-anti-Com76 January x997 • The American Spectator 6 munists...
...Anthony West's unwillingness to fight led to the opening skirmish in a series of adult disagreements that would drive mother and son apart more or less permanently...
...In between, she laid claim to being this century's most gifted English-language prose stylist (according to many critics), the author of its finest novel (according to Elizabeth Bowen), its greatest journalist (according to Bernard Levin), and the inventor of the non-fiction novel (according to Truman Capote...
...eaders of Victoria Glendinning's R brief 1987 biography will come away from Rollyson wondering what happened to much good information: the poets West read as a child (Browning, Shakespeare, Whitman, Yeats, Tennyson), the way she spoke French (like "an Easter Island dialect"), her feelings about the American character ("It is missing—one doesn't want to say it—a soul...
...Why...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 1
