The greatest English journalist of her time
Francis King
REBECCA WEST: A SAGA OF THE CENTURY by Carl Rollyson Hodder, £20, pp. 442 As this biography vividly demon- strates, the most important relationship of Rebecca West's early years was her love-affair with H. G. Wells, the most important of her later years her hate-affair with their embittered, devious, talented son, Anthony.
Not long before her death, I wrote to invite West to a PEN dinner. She replied that she would be happy to have dinner with me anywhere else, but certainly not at PEN. Since she had not merely been a friend of the remarkable woman, Mrs Dawson Scott, who had originally created PEN, but had also been one of its founder members, I was astonished. Then I remem- bered that the membership list contained another Anthony West, the son-in-law of the writer and then General Secretary of International PEN, Peter Elstob. Reading the list, West had mistakenly thought this Anthony West to be her son — with whom she was not then on speaking terms.
In dealing with this relationship at length, Rollyson accords Anthony rather less, and West rather more, sympathy than each deserves. His account vividly illus- trates the bouts of paranoia from which West suffered and which became more and more frequent and more and more intense in her later years. It was this paranoia which impelled her to write long letters of self-justification to people whom she knew either little or not at all. Such a letter, many pages long, she despatched to me merely because, in the course of an other- wise favourable review of The Meaning of Treason, I had remarked that she was lack- ing in compassion. During the War she became convinced that, because of her support of General Mihailovic, Anthony, a pacifist, might be lured by Tito sympathisers in the Foreign Office into taking part in some kind of traitorous activity which would then dis- credit her. To the end of her life, she kept sniffing out such plots. Secretaries and domestics would often progress in the course of a few months from being 'abso- lute treasures' to being 'totally mad'. In the case of the secretaries, what constituted the madness' was often merely the fact that her banker husband, Henry Andrews, was showing too much interest in them. I used to speculate why West had mar- ried Andrews — a decent and cultivated man, but dull, ponderous and pompous. Certainly, he had money, inherited from an uncle; and West, despite the bohemianism of her early years, enjoyed the kind of luxu- rious life-style — a large country house with farm attached, servants even during the War — which his money could buy. But more than his money, it must have been his stolidity which attracted her. After the hurley-burley of the chaise longue (Max Beaverbrook and Compton Mackenzie had been other lovers), no doubt she welcomed the deep peace of the double bed. The revelation of this biography is how deep that peace soon became. I had always imagined that Henry, to all appearances so unbending in his rectitude and so support- ive of Rebecca, however erratic her behaviour, never for a moment looked at other women. But Rollyson shows that he not merely looked at other women, he also showered gifts on them. Any sexual relationship between him and Rebecca soon ceased, leaving her bewildered and humiliated.
During her years of greatest unhappi- ness, when she was struggling simultane- ously to bring up Anthony and to make an adequate living, West underwent a short period of intense analysis. It was then that she 'uncovered' — or imagined, as so often in such cases — a 'Father Violation Memo- ry' of her father offering the tip of his penis to her mouth when she was still a small child. This, she and her lay analyst decided, accounted for her addiction to strong men, much older then herself, before whom she could abase herself in masochistic subjec- tion. To this addiction Rollyson ascribes a `harshness' to homosexuals. But he over- looks the fact that during her last years no less than five homosexuals were among her closest and most trusted friends.
West was, as Rollyson repeatedly demonstrates, someone whom it was much easier to admire than to love. She constant- ly radiated light — and what a brilliant light! — but rarely warmth. There was the further problem that (as Charles Curran, a former editor of the Evening Standard, with whom she had an abortive affair, once put it), she suffered from psychological haemophilia, bleeding profusely at the slightest prick of criticism. Like many people so afflicted, she was wholly unaware that others could also bleed.
When West wrote to Vita Sackville-West one of her innumerable, discursive letters of complaint about Anthony's malice against her, Sackville-West sent a charac- teristically wise reply. What seems to be malice, she said, is often no more than human silliness, misunderstanding and busybodiness. One should no more allow an obsession with malice to get into the beams of one's life than a death-watch beetle into the beams of an ancient church. By then the death-watch beetle of an obsession with malice was gnawing West's life to pieces.
Despite the immensity of West's fame during her lifetime on both sides of the Atlantic, Rollyson leaves one with the impression that, though he rightly sees her as the greatest English journalist of her time, the intellectual's Bernard Levin, he has doubts about her stature as a writer of fiction. These doubts I share.
Elizabeth Taylor once gave me an account of how West had patronised and condescended to her after having invited her to tea at Ibstone House. But I am con- vinced that, just as Gwen John, so delicate in her perceptions and so narrow in her range, was a superior painter to Dame Laura. Knight, so Elizabeth Taylor was a superior writer of fiction to Dame Rebec- ca.
The fault of this biography is that a plethora of detail sometimes blurs the out- lines of events and characters. Its strength is that its author, unlike his more sprightly predecessor, Victoria Glendinning, has had access to the important Yale archive and has put it to most effective use.
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