Uneasy Success
CLEAVER, CAROLE
Uneasy Success Rebecca West: A Life By Victoria Glendinning Knopf. 300pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Carole Cleaver Co-author, "Horace Pippin: The Artist as a Black American " Victoria...
...Wells, bore him an illegitimate son, and continued to captivate him throughout their 10year liaison...
...Yet none of this is discernible in Glendinning's biography, which concentrates on telling a tale of woe...
...She admitted that she was not "in love" with him...
...summers in the sun...
...rooms full of books and flowers...
...With no husband to provide for a son born out of wedlock, she was forced to develop her budding literary talent...
...The union was far from happy...
...Rebecca West was certainly a victim of this conventional wisdom during her life: Great though her achievements were, she was not socially secure without a man, badly as he might treat her...
...Her marriage at age 38 to Henry Andrews, a quiet businessman, astounded her intellectual friends...
...She was even knighted by the Queen...
...With no father to protect her, she learned to take care of herself...
...the best parties in London, in Paris, in New York...
...The breakup with her son created a vacuum she filled with travel, thought, self-justification, work...
...Abandoned by her impecunious journalist father, the girl, who was born Cicely Fairfield, perpetually sought that lost male affection and rarely got it...
...Life does not offer much more...
...She was in desperate need of a "security blanket," however, and took a sort of refuge in Andrews until his death 38 years later...
...Henry, who quit the connubial bed after the fifth year, was constantly unfaithful—and Rebecca paid most of the bills...
...But this leaves another primary relationship unexplained...
...Interestingly, it seems that even in the 1980s and in the hands of a woman biographer, male-female attachments still take precedence ? ver a woman's accomplishments...
...1 woman writer...
...Glendinning reduces it to a petty, disagreeable squabble...
...The facts speak for themselves...
...On the other hand, the grand passion she conceived for the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook was ill-placed, and her self-confidence was bruised by his impotence in her presence...
...Top editors of major American and British magazines and newspapers vied for her work, and her friends and acquaintances were a veritable Who's Who of the international intelligentsia...
...Many women have suffered more—without the comforts of fame and fortune, without the daily joy of interesting labor...
...Her books will continue to be read, her brilliance will endure...
...Unfortunately, theinnuendos and backbiting cannot be comprehensively dealt with by Glendinning, since the West letters will not be made public until after Anthony's death...
...After West's break with Wells, there were other adventures...
...The photographs in Glendinning's book tell more about West than the text: As a girl she appears romantic, passionate, even exotic...
...A financially feckless mate spurred her pen to a more prodigious output...
...No clues here...
...And it is in the work that the personality of Rebecca West, so obscure in this volume, is expressed...
...A quick roll-inthe-hay with Prince Antoine Bibesco, a long ardent friendship with John Günther, a romantic attachment to a Welsh doctor, and a brief encounter with a Nuremberg judge—none without pleasurable aspects...
...What did they see in each other...
...Rebecca," the author concedes, "had the satisfaction of her work, celebrity...
...Their affair at its best must have been an exciting, passionate war—they called each other Panther and Jaguar...
...Born in humble circumstances and educated solely at a Scottish girls' academy, West made herself Britain's leading woman of letters, then was heralded by Time in 1955 as "indisputably the world's No...
...as an old lady, imperious, regal...
...Sing no sad songs for Dame Rebecca...
...She attracted the famous H.G...
...In the journalism, the criticism, the short stories, the novels, and especially in her epic travelogue of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, a portrait of her psyche in all its variousness is drawn...
...a vast range of interesting acquaintances, a sufficient number of intimate friends and in the end, money...
...as a woman self-confident and efficient...
...She was a success...
...Yet it was the very weakness of the men in her life that gave Rebecca West her strength...
...Why did they continue...
...She led a meaningful life...
...She adored all these things and she communicated and shared her pleasure in them.' Nevertheless, we are told, "her private life was a sequence of disasters...
...While West's life may not have been happy, it was never boring...
...the deep pleasure she found in landscapes, paintings, ideas, pretty clothes, good food, music...
...The tragedy Glendinning sees has largely to do with West's unfulfilling and disheartening relationships with men...
...he would not divorce his wife and marry her...
...Ultimately, though, he would not commit himself to her...
...The last major blow was the fallingout with her son (by Wells) Anthony...
...I've never met anything like her before," saidWells, "andldoubt if there was anything like her before...
...West was a dynamo of unique intelligence, wit and charm...
...Following years of recriminations, he published two hurtful books designed to discredit her both personally and professionally...
...Reviewed by Carole Cleaver Co-author, "Horace Pippin: The Artist as a Black American " Victoria Glendinning has chronicled all the events in the 90-year-life (1892-1983) of that formidable writer, Rebecca West—without giving us the faintest idea of what she was like...
...Wells—who because ofhisagemight have been a stand-in father—loved her, did battle with her and supported her both psychologically and financially for many years...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 18
