A Sharp Eye for Everything

...Kaiser Wilhelm," she tells us, "was like a wasp at a picnic...

...Van Wyck Brooks is one of those young American writers who would have made excellent wives and mothers...

...And anyone thinking that terrorism is a new thing should look at the calendar for April, June, July and November...

...She advises the reader tartly: "Do not try to work this out...

...Here she makes such developments as Max Planck announcing his quantum theory and Albert Einstein receiving his diploma from the Zurich Polytechnic comprehensible and occasionally amusing...

...Her ardent radicalism undoubtedly provided the ferment in her youth...

...The next article might calmly begin, "Mr...

...Pank-hurst do we learn that the law allowed suffragist hunger strikers to be released from prison when they reached the danger of death, only to be clapped in again as soon as they were well enough to appear on the street...

...Her present view is long, without illusions about the results of social upheaval, but she is still certain of the need for change...

...Although 1900 contains scores of rare period photographs and drawings that inevitably feed nostalgic longings, Dame Rebecca's text on the era's prominent figures and events keeps the reader from slipping off into a dream world...

...But many of their villainous ideas are far from dead and West's wit is needed still to demolish them...

...Under "Literature* Thought" we learn that new from the press in 1900 were The Oxford Book of English Verse, Sister Carrie and Berg-son's On Laughter, not to mention Peter Rabbit, The Wizard of Oz and Little Black Sambo...

...Her early discovery of Freud (used in the second of her seven novels, Harriet Hume) has been integrated, like her radicalism, into her own inspired, original common sense...

...it is just large enough to do justice to the illustrations...

...Amid the portraits of authors we come upon Tolstoy and Chekhov sitting in a Crimean garden, facing a romantic Russian-bloused Maxim Gorky...

...Lawrence, for instance) and poke fun at the second-rate...

...Yet it is no less astonishing to find the same wit, and much of the wisdom, in articles published before she was 20 years old...

...If many of the struggles have long been won, it nonetheless quickens the blood to read an eyewitness account of day-to-day battles...

...It may seem a startling achievement for a writer nearing 90 to maintain this level throughout a book that illuminates a whole century (she goes back and forth in time, telling the singular life stories of participants whose significance her insight has freshly uncovered...

...In analyzing the case of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, West recalls that while society seemed to disapprove of homosexuality, "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 picture...

...She described in lyrical detail two ladies at a polo match, their wrists delicately turning as they played with their parasols...

...The gallery within these covers is so rich—ranging from Queen Victoria in a donkey cart to doodles by Edward Elgar—that one seeks out, and almost misses, the tiny credit line, "Picture research by Faith Perkins...

...The easy conversational tone and the irony come as a welcome change from the grandisonance of her substantial nonfiction...

...History for West is a continuing process of fumblings by men driven and obsessed, men who had strange ancestors (though few as bizarre as the forebears of Lord Alfred Douglas) and unique, propelling childhoods...

...Not until we reach the 1933 memoir about Mrs...

...West has always been a demon elu-cidator...

...Rebecca West was part of that time?she can remember the death of Gladstone in 1898, her seventh year—and she enjoys taking us back...

...In these early pieces collected by Jane Marcus, West speaks as a spirited, intrepid girl...

...It is fun to be able to read this historic review...

...Rebecca West's actual meeting with Wells resulted from a review she published at 19, teasing the eminent author for the oldmaidish sexual attitudes in his novel Marriage...

...One such speech that brought many into the movement had for its climax a jocular description of a future female Lord Chancellor being seized with labor pains on the woolsack, and left no doubt that the speaker considered labor pains themselves, apart from the setting, a funny subject...

...There never was a story," she says of The Carnival of Florence by Marjorie Bowen, "more completely strangled by its own doublet and hose...

...A manageable 10" x 8 1/2" horizontal rectangle, 1900is delightfully designed...

...On the back a painting of that year seems to be a Toulouse-Lautrec with touches of Renoir, except that it is signed by the newcomer to Paris, "P.R...

...In January, for example, Emile Zola was honored for his services in the Dreyfus affair...

...It is the fault of the gods if temptation is the one crop on this earth that never fails...

...Also, though few notes are necessary, a needed one is lacking in the case of the "Cat and Mouse Bill," mentioned often and angrily by the young writer...

...Wells...

...Giving the background of the Boer War, she remarks that Cecil Rhodes "could do anything but keep sane____In 1877 he had made a will, indicating that the fortune he rightly guessed he would make before he died should be spent on various objects, including the ultimate recovery of the United States as an integral part of the British Empire...

...Wells' London apartment house through long evenings, hoping for a glimpse of the great man—until one rainy night he takes pity on her, brings her in, dries and warms her, and finally responds to her adoration...

...Even in The New Meaning of Treason her pontifical passages sometimes set up a resistance to the exciting detective-story escapes of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean—although the details prove how the Soviet Union sowed discord in the free world through skillfully revealed spying that made the Western governments distrust each other and internal political rivals...

...One day West could report seeing a member of a deputation who was waiting quietly for a ministerial interview?an elderly woman of great altruistic accomplishment—being thrown down a flight of stairs by half a dozen policemen...

...Despite the helpfulness of Marcus' introductions, however, she tends to skim the cream from what is to follow by extended quotation...

...Its source, I realize now, is a novel by her son, Anthony West, called Heritage, whose hero is the illegitimate son of two famous Londoners...

...In the thick of the most violent phase of the struggle for women's minimal rights, writing wrathfully about the malnourished lives forced on female school teachers, she could turn with sure discrimination to recognize new first-rate literary talent (D.H...

...Itis simply an illustration of the tropism by which male minds feel an instinctivede-sire to defend any unreasonable proposition...

...The captions approach the substance of novels: Beside a lakeside scene showing Freud and his young son fishing we get a summary of The Interpretation of Dreams, a work that stirred outrage rather disproportionate to the number who bought it—the 600 copies took eight years to sell...

...Pankhurst was herself rearrested as she tried to make her way, still frail and ill, to the funeral of her fallen comrade Emily Davison, who in a desperate effort to show the seriousness of the women's cause had thrown herself under the racing hooves at Ascot...

...Taking stock in 1933, West says: "Women, listening to anti-suffrage speeches, for the first time knew what many men really thought of them...

...which was the beginning of the British Labour Party...

...The front jacket reproduces a perhaps unintentionally comic canvas by Jean Beraud—showing a cafe in the Bois with women cyclists arriving in sailor hats, their shirtwaists belted tightly above bloomers in which their behinds truly bloom...

...Thus, after sketching in Britain's growing concern for the poor, she declares: "So I will swear that the most important event in 1900 was the meeting...

...Picasso...

...The Young Rebecca proves that from the very first West had thedouble vision essential to a great writer...

...now the wine has aged...

...With sensuous pleasure she presents women shaded by wide hats (whose nodding plumes were torn from the live bodies of endangered ostriches), and possessing figures possible only among the leisure class (for no female could work with her waist laced to fit within her lover's two clasped hands...

...The father in that book is clearly identifiable as H.G...

...The yearning for a past dimmed just enough by decades is barely diminished even in those well aware that the clip-clop of horses' hooves was not a romantic sound when you heard it all day long, and that London's little mews houses are far more charming now than when they smelled of dung and buzzed with flies...

...She fought with youthful passion against current injustices, petty and great, visited on the helpless around her, especially poor women...

...The picture is false...

...True, he was only 24, but even at that age he should have had more sense...

...In her 1966 novel The Birds Fall Down (really about the plots and counterplots of a double-agent who is murdered, opening the way for Lenin), West offered a brief glimpse of what she does on a much larger scale in 1900...

...She looks back with understanding into the bewildered gaze of the dispossessed orphan who as Viscount Milner would cause much havoc in South Africa, but she does not sentimentalize...

...About Westerners' looting Chinese art during the Boxer Rebellion she observes: "Well, it is not altogether our fault...

...It has an idolatrous teen-age Rebecca West waiting outside H.G...

...Her essay, confidently professional, so impressed Wells that she was invited to his home for lunch, an occasion duly recorded in his wife's diary...

...Indeed, young women today (those who can afford the book), may find themselves becoming manhaters in reading The Young Rebecca because of the villainy of Englishmen who have been dead half a century...

...The book's prelude, divided into "A Chronology" and listings of major events by category, demonstrates at a glance how consequential those 12 months were...

...At the same time she was able to stand apart, study the scene objectively, and keep her sense of humor sharp and shining...

...The Young Rebecca helped correct a sort of mental videotape that I have for years believed to be accurate...

...An admirer of Henry James (her first book was an appreciation of his art), she nevertheless says that he was, "it must be owned, like loud and ill-played church music in his snobbery...

...Jane Marcus did well to gather West's pieces from the Freewoman and the Clarion, among other publications (along with one strangely dated and anti-feminine short story, "Indissoluble Matrimony," published by Wyndham Lewis in the first issue of his magazine Blast...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" IF THE National Center for Disease Control has done nothing about Nostalgia, perhaps it is because the epidemic is out of hand...

...When Lord and Lady Rosebery had put him up for a weekend, his bread and butter letters could have been arranged for Ihe organ as a substitute for the Magnificat...

...The men standing soberly by," she added with a realistic flick, "might have been members of another species who kept these lively multi-colored creatures as pets and were exercising them...

...in 1900 as a spirited, intrepid woman of 88...

...Neither does she psychoanalyze...