A Family in Conflict
GROSSMAN, ANITA SUSAN
A Family in Conflict This Real Night By Rebecca West Viking. 266 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Anita Susan Grossman Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "Times Literary Supplement" Anyone...
...In the Introduction to the new edition of his autobiographical novel, Heritage, Anthony further claims that she cheated him of an inheritance and pursued him vindictively for years...
...Life and art differ, though, because all the inevitable bitterness of reality has been left out of thestory...
...As readers of The Fountain Overflows will recall, the story, set in Edwardian England, concerns the gifted but impoverished Aubreys: the father, a distinguished journalist undone by a passion for gambling that leads him to abandon his wife and children...
...World War I interrupts Richard Quin's matriculation at Oxford, and the women's forebodings when he volunteers for service prove all too justified...
...The novel's title echoes the famous comment of Sir Edward Grey, Britain s Liberal Foreign Secretary, in 1914: "The lamps are going out all over Europe...
...Among the most agreeable aspects of the saga is the gallery of odd characters within the Aubreys' orbit...
...In the earlier volume Mrs...
...Aubrey's abandonment of them is a cause for grief but not anger—except in the case of the eldest sibling Cordelia, represented as unlovable, stubbornly wrongheaded, the very embodiment of bad faith...
...Aubrey's Scottish lineage and her husband's wealthy Anglo-Irish background have a basis in fact too...
...But novelists are notoriously capricious judges of one another's work (Burgess, it should be remembered, once seriously proposed that Erica Jong's How to Save Your Own Life ranked with the best novels of the past half century...
...We wonder what will become of the Aubreys—particularly Cousin Rosamund, her strong attachment to Richard Quin having been abruptly terminated by the War...
...The musical gifts of Mrs...
...Rebecca's elder sister, Letitia, was named a Commander of the British Empire for her government work as a physician...
...Aubrey's successful effort to save this woman from the gallows is a high point of The Fountain Overflows...
...Dame Rebecca's portrayal of thisultrarefined group, an aristocracy of talent and feeling whose esthetic tastes are tantamount to moral judgments, may owe something to Henry James...
...The history of his roman a clef is itself an indication of the ill-feeling between the two: Appearing in the United States in 1955, it was kept off the press in England until Dame Rebecca's 1983 death...
...Misery engulfs not only the Aubreys but the civilization that produced them...
...Aubrey and her younger offspring preserve a cheerful innocence that leaves them largely indifferent to their poverty and confident about the future...
...musically accomplished twin daughters, Mary and Rose (the narrator...
...Aubrey rids her cousin's house of a poltergeist, and Rose can read minds for numbers...
...Future biographers will have to sort out the truth...
...Anthony West's H.G...
...Reviewed by Anita Susan Grossman Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "Times Literary Supplement" Anyone whose knowledge of Rebecca West comes solely from the recently published books by her celebrated lover, H.G...
...Her journalist father was addicted to speculative investments, forsook his long-suffering wife, a talented pianist, and died when Rebecca—or, rather, Cicily Isabel Fairfield— was a young girl...
...the mother, a former concert pianist...
...As for the controversy about Rebecca West's personal life, I cannot pretend to reconcile the woman Anthony West depicts and the writer who celebrates family love so movingly in This Real Night...
...Even i f we disregard these dismal accusations against Rebecca West the woman, This Real Night, the second volume of an unfinished trilogy that began with The Fountain Overflows in 1956, reaches us under less-than-favorable circumstances...
...Those who know something of Rebecca West's childhood will immediately recognize This Real Night's autobiographical resonances...
...Wells: Aspects of a Life, issued last year, depicts his mother as a pathetic young woman long deluded by the vain hope that her famous paramour, a man 26 years her senior, would throw over his spouse for her...
...the one pure invention is the brother, Richard Quin...
...Amazingly, she also left behind several other unpublished manuscripts that are scheduled to appear in the next few years, including an additional autobiographical novel, a memoir of her early life and a miscellaneous collection...
...Wells, and their son Anthony might not be much tempted to read this posthumous novel...
...However unpleasant their circumstances, Mrs...
...Like her heroine, she was one of three sisters in a cultured, impecunious family...
...At the same time, the unexpected twists of plot and the eccentric individuals populating these pages are virtually Dick-ensian...
...we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.' Among other things, This Real Night is an elegy for a way of life doomed by the War...
...as set pieces her descriptive passages are equal in brilliance to, say, the celebrated "Great Frost" chapter in Virginia Woolf's Orlando...
...In the meantime, we can take comfort in recalling Peter Shaffer's point in Amadeus: One need not be a flawless human being to create great works of art...
...an elder sister, the beautiful, conventional, untalented Cordelia...
...Certainly their affections transcend all class lines, so that the wealthy and cultured Mr...
...MaryandRose begin to give concerts, while Cordelia, having finally abandoned any hope of being a violinist, makes an advantageous marriage...
...Wells in Love, she is merely a minor figure of his harem, ranking fourth or fifth behind his wife and several rival mistresses...
...Soon afterward his mother succumbs to a protracted illness described in harrowing detail...
...There is a very good reason, however: It contains some of her best writing, triumphantly reminding us that she lost none of her brilliance in old age...
...The one dark note that soon penetrates this happiness is the father's death, learned about indirectly duringa visit to a friend...
...At the start of This Real Night the father has already decamped and the family is for once financially secure, thanks to the sale of ancestral portraits Mrs...
...In any event, This Real Night is awor-thy successor to The Fountain Overflows...
...Instead of discovering an unsuspected legacy, the Fairfield daughters had to struggle unassisted, making it all the more to their credit that they succeeded in their respective careers...
...and, in fact, The Fountain Overflows and This Real Nigh t have at least as much plot as most modem fiction...
...Aubrey had earlier falsely said were copies to keep something safe from her husband'scompulsion...
...Anthony Burgess has recently criticized what he termed the static quality of Rebecca West's writing and her evident inability to move plots forward...
...In the long-suppressed appendix to the great man's memoirs, brought out this year as H.G...
...Morpurgo is only too delighted to escort "Aunt" Lily, a barmaid at the Dog and Duck public house, on her excursions to Aylesbury Prison to visit her sister Queenie, serving a life sentence for murdering her husband...
...We shall know Miss West's intentions in time, for further chapters are to be published, along with a brief synopsis of the overall plan for guiding the entire trilogy...
...West's prose has an elegant clarity that gives her observations—on childhood, on music, on the natural world—a quality of freshness and surprise...
...Three fifths the length of its predecessor, the book is clearly incomplete and we may wonder why we should bother giving attention to a project the author evidently put aside...
...Moreover the style, no less than the story, keeps us reading...
...The son also presents a self-absorbed, negligent parent and, in later life, a monster of dishonesty guilty of rewriting her personal history to deceive gullible literary scholars and of slandering him to all and sundry...
...Miss West, reported to have been a good hater, doubtless had a generous measure of Cordelia in her make-up...
...and a beloved younger brother, Richard Quin, charming beyond his years in this precocious brood...
...she was also a barrister and an expert on medical jurisprudence...
...Still, we would be wrong to dwell on the gloom of the book's end as we have it, since it is simply part of a larger design full of wit and gaiety...
...Indeed, her work-in-progress is of far greater interest than the finished productions of a few of our most touted writers...
...More deaths are to follow...
...Life had treated Cicily Fairfield—forced to watch her mother being consumed by worry and ill-health—less kindly than she later treated her characters, whom she even granted a measure of supernatural power...
...Others become attached to the household as well, especially cousin Rosamund, an aspiring nurse...
Vol. 68 • April 1985 • No. 5
