BOOKS

...He didn't pay his bills or his taxes, and he was, as one client-friend deplored, "a sassy debtor" who borrowed so that he could live extravagantly...

...Recognizing her own inconsistencies, she wrote that human beings carry "too much cargo" and "cannot handle our contradictions, our distressing multiplicity of characteristics...

...The theme of true friendship and survival over decades is an optimistic one, and it is both unusual and refreshing to read a novel of civilized people facing the problems of age and polio and cancer without the current omnipresence of drugs or alcohol or emotional breakdown...

...Wells all transmuted their real-life perceptions and grievances into "art...

...The backdrops for Larry and Sally Morgan and Sid and Charity Lang are the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Vermont and Italy, and the locales are vivid props in the narrative...

...In a cover story in Time, the writer said, "Rebecca West is a socialist by habit of mind and a conservative by cell structure...

...The character of Charity, the over-organized, dominant member of the group, is believ-ably developed...

...18.95...

...Though she disliked Ibsen, his Rebecca West was the strong-minded mistress of a married man, a coincidence that seems to presage West's later "psychic" tendency to predict something that then occurs...

...Crossing to Safety, he recounts the fascinating relationship of two couples from Depression days to the early 1970s, when they are in their sixties and one of them is about to die...

...Her most notable involvement was with Yugoslav politics, in which she became painfully entangled during World War II...

...by Ann Morrissett Davidon Deep contradictions racked the life of the "liberated" feminist, Rebecca West...

...Perhaps none of these works, nor those of H.G...

...Putnam's Sons...

...These personal aspects of Rebecca West's long life are only half the story, however...

...But I intend one day to do that, piqued by Glendinning's rich reconstruction of West's turbulent life and times...

...Gill maintains a delicate balance between Wright's architectural gifts and his personal derelictions...

...The personal and political sides of West's life appear to have overshadowed the literary ones—the novels in which she, Anthony, and H.G...

...277 pp...

...Born in 1892 as Cicily Fairfield, the youngest of three daughters in a genteel, poor family eventually abandoned by the father, the girl who became Rebecca West developed both an avid interest in the male world of politics and an enduring ambivalence about males themselves...

...In 1972 Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Angle of Repose, and he has an impressive background of other novels and stories, as well as a teaching career...

...In his witty biography, Gill traces Wright's development as a creative architect from his early years of struggle in Chicago to such mature accomplishments as the Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania and the Guggenheim Museum in New York...

...He might have added, "sometime slanderer by habit of tongue...

...Wells did, however, assume some financial and even personal responsibility for Anthony, taking him on excursions and paying for his boarding schools...

...The portrait she presents seems fair and even-handed, neither excusing West's occaAnn Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and critic...

...Victoria Glendinning—award-winning biographer also of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, and Vita Sackville-West—reveals Rebecca West's affairs, flaws, and flagellations (of self and others) with unsensa-tional and sympathetic neutrality...

...Wright, a chameleon of many masks, was an "artist-writer-dandy" with a boundless ego...

...Yet during the ten years of her liaison with H.G...

...But her virulent dislikes and devastating epithets—she once referred to Tolstoy as a "monster of hypocrisy," Yeats as an "old fraud," pacifist writer Vera Brit-tain as a "trumpeting ass"—did not endear her to everyone...

...She longed for the security of marriage—a security she did not achieve until she was nearly thirty-eight, and then chafed against the rest of her life...

...Henry Andrews...

...Gill calls him an "exotic bird of paradise...

...Her transformation from Cicily Fairfield to Rebecca West had already occurred when she hastily chose the pseudonym—to pacify her mother—for a piece in The Freewoman, a feminist weekly...

...West became increasingly anticom-munist after the war and was often lumped with conservatives and reactionaries by those who did not have the advantage of reading this book to understand her complexities...

...Anthony adored "Wellsie," but he carried his feelings of ambivalence and hostility toward the woman he first knew as "Aunt Panther" through his adult life...

...She was passionately generous and caring with friends, but she did not want the only son she bore and carried on a love-hate vendetta with him until her death...

...Immensely readable and generously illustrated...

...She had visited Yugoslavia before the war and was intrigued by its beauties and contradictions—resulting in the book for which she is perhaps best known, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon...

...Later in her life she wrote, "There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano...

...But Panther became pregnant, and despite the socialist feminism she espoused, Rebecca West went into a discreet seclusion, encouraged and supported financially by Wells...

...In his new novel...

...During the war, the struggles between Croats and Serbs, monarchists and communists, pro-Nazis and various breeds of patriots, became so complicated that West's anti-Nazi and anti-communist stance, combined with her personal penchant for Serbs and monarchists, made her suspect on many sides...

...Wells...

...544 pp...

...sional erratic and mean-spirited behavior nor belittling her considerable achievements...

...Shortly before she died, she said, "The only way any male could have been a useful friend to me would have been to marry me, which nobody did for seven years [after her separation from Wells...

...When West was twenty, her clever, acerbic writing had already attracted the attention of London's literati—including H.G...

...In chronicling Wright's complex personal life (he had three wives, assorted mistresses, and seven children), Gill deftly shuns sensationalism but not unpleasant facts...

...Yet writing was her life—as attested to by the astounding quantities of correspondence, reviews, essays, articles, stories, books—even poems—that she produced...

...If I had indulged that perhaps prurient whim, I would never have got this review written...

...West appears to have had some connection with every literary and political figure and event of the first three quarters of this century...

...24.95 Critic Brendan Gill first interviewed Frank Lloyd Wright as a reporter, later as a friend...

...Glendinning's assessments of West's books and accounts of her travels, journalistic achievements, and political involvements also make fascinating reading...

...After seven subsequent years of literary and journalistic success and short-lived affairs, Rebecca West took on still another identity: Mrs...

...More than twice her age and a notorious philanderer, Wells showed no signs of intending a serious involvement with his precocious "Panther" (he was her "Jaguar")—nor of fathering her child...

...His roofs tended to leak, and the chairs he designed often were uncomfortable...

...Wells, who fathered her son, Anthony, she urged Wells to divorce his wife and marry her...

...Their sex life had apparently ended in the mid-1930s, however, which she professed not to understand, and except for a few brief affairs—including one with Francis Biddle, who was a judge at Nuremberg when she was reporting on the postwar trials of the Nazis for The New Yorker—this intellectually and sexually energetic woman seems to have reconciled herself to a sexless life...

...She claimed at one point that except for her natural inclinations, if she could relive her life she would have chosen to be a lesbian...

...But it was a prickly, tortuous affair with many near-breaks and recriminations before it finally ended...

...When the flamboyant American architect died at ninety-one in 1959, Gill was intimately familiar with Wright's work and lifestyle at Taliesin East near Spring Green, Wisconsin, or at Taliesin West in Scotts-dale, Arizona, or at a suite in New York's Plaza Hotel...

...but while reading this biography, I had to restrain the impulse to run to the library and take out whatever books I could find by West and Wells...

...Even shortly before her death in 1983, she happened to witness, and reported on, the seizure of hostages and shootout at the Iranian embassy near her house in London...

...She considered herself a democratic socialist but hobnobbed with wealthy Tories and was obsessed by the Rupert Murdoch of her time, Lord Beaverbrook...

...Wells, for that matter, will last...

...The liaison with Wells endured probably longer than either expected, partly because of the advent of Anthony and partly because of their genuine attachment to each other...

...I would have been a good wife to almost any man...

...West wrote in her memoirs, "I was never able to lead the life of a writer because of these two overriding factors, my sexual life, or rather death, and my politics...

...Anthony (now seventy-four) also became a novelist and critic, and in a number of books has expressed both directly and in fiction his bitter resentment of the neglect and hypocrisy he believed his mother had subjected him to...

...Marriage provided her with the social acceptance and security she longed for, along with a companion whom she considered kind but rather dull—but with whom she remained (despite occasional dalliances on both sides) until his death in 1968...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Chameleon MANY MASKS: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright by Brendan Gill G.P...

...Friendship and Survival CROSSING TO SAFETY by Wallace Stegner Random House...