Christmas books
The bright old thing
Rebecca West: A Celebration (Macmillan E8.50) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Rebecca West (Macmillan £7.50) Hard on the heels of an excellent London revival of Rosmersholm, the play from Which the very young, bright and beautiful Cicily Fairfield, having herself just out of RADA played the part, took the nom de Plume, plumard et tout le reste that she has borne with such distinction ever since, there comes this huge multidecker sandwich of a volume (getting on for ten pages for each of er eighty-five years), a Festschrift only in as title, for it is made up solely of chunks of her own writings save for the introduction, a reprint of a 1973 TLS piece by Samuel nynes in which, laying it on with a cereonial trowel, he hailed her as 'the greatest living example of a woman who has been both a thinker and an artist — ' whose books combine to make one created work of art, the mind of Rebecca West'.
H. G. Wells had said of her, as he had round her some years before the Great War, the outbreak of which had exactly coincided With the birth of their son Anthony West, that 'she was the only woman who ever ,inade me stop and wonder when she said 'Look" ', and the originality of her visions and its expression has never lost its power to Compel attention.
A Bright Young Thing in the 'twenties had superficially thought that 'her lust for hfe was stronger than her love of letters' and Iloted her charming ability to break up a literary discussion and suggest adjournment the nearest pub, where she must have oeen racy and witty company. Was it not she who had dubbed the diminutive Michael Arlen 'Every other inch a gentleman'? And W.hen a quarter of a century later the egreg„toos Arthur Miller, whom she knew neither sight nor name, stupidly asked her what She had thought of the first night of Death of Salesman, she splendidly replied 'Twaddle! What was he going on about?' file hundred and more pages of extracts from her fiction remind one that she was already as a girl one of the first to understand and appreciate the work of Henry Jrames who has clearly left his mark upon ner both as novelist and critic (she seems ks°111ehow to have been born with all the owledge and perception James put into 'Its celebrated letter to H.G. about literature and art). , Vet 'Topical journalism', the book's olurb emphasises, is 'often regarded as her fate' and the sharp polemical passages in the Present-day reviews which from time to tirn e brighten the Sunday Telegraph still confirm what Shaw said sixty years ago, namely that 'Rebecca can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely'. A hundred pages of her very free-style war-and-peace-crime reporting are offered. Not exactly yellow journalism but all the same the pages have undoubtedly yellowed a bit with the passage of time. The Dame is on record as having found Truman Capote's dollar-a-word litxuriation In Cold Blood, which was certainly a potent bestseller, 'a grave and reverend book'.
Her own accounts of genocide and murder trials, treason and plot smack strangely more of puritanical pulpit than of press gallery and by no means shine by comparison with the Mrs Sybille Bedford's faultless Law Reports and courtroom sketches. 'From the time we are children we know that the people round about us are good or bad', is her most insistent refrain. Faced with her as a jurywoman, I would certainly offer her peremptory challenge on sight. Her reprinted account of the trial and execution of William Joyce, 'Lord Haw-Haw', reminded me of the miles by which she missed its main point; now fully confirmed by the publication of documents and memoirs, which was that the Lords turned down his appeal for reasons not of law but of the State from which the law is supposedly separated.
Mr Hynes is not alone in thinking Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, lately reissued in one volume, 'her masterpiece', adding 'and what an odd masterpiece', outside all genres and comparable really only to such (exotic) achievements as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (though it is D.H. Lawrence who is her earnest, patriotic literary pin-up boy). The book became a solace and even a cult for many in blackedout and blitzed Britain. So much rich prose 'off the ration' was evidently hard to resist. The esoteric subject matter enthralled. In the summer of 1941 her singular Slavophile obsessions were just what our local Doctor Goebbels were avid to order. Baader-Meinhof was far enough away for few eyebrows to be raised by her mitigatory plea for the assassin of Franz Josef's pretty Wittelsbach Empress who had failed to accomplish for Slays what she had managed for Magyars, 'He performed his meaningless act out of his consciousness of what is perhaps the most real distress of our age. It was the essence of his case against society that it had left him unfit to offer suggestions, unable to form thoughts or designations other than the crudest and most violent.'
Dame Rebecca claims to have done some revision of the thirty-five-year-old text of her magnum opus but it could do with the devil of a lot more. In today's world where India's Prime Minister gets his daily `Kruschen feeling' from breaking his fast on a recycled beaker of his own wine, her selfindulgent digressions about Nazi obsessions with human waste products seem to strike a jarring note. As for the long 1942 Epilogue, as it stands in its present unaltered form it quite simply qualifies the whole book for reclassification as Fiction. As was said, without subsequent protest from author or publisher, a year or two back in the TLS, it is 'fantasy masquerading as history, pure quatsch dressed in purple kitsch' and 'must surely bring blushes to her cheeks'.
A character in one of her novels somewhere remarks on how kind Racine was to tragic people. Not so Dame Rebecca herself. Documentary evidence, much of it available to zealous seekers after truth long before even the cessation of hostilities, and now accepted by the best historians of all Yugoslavia's many nationalities, reveals her account of wartime events in that country to be utterly bogus, just a fascis of wrong ends of sticks, and it seems extraordinary that Mr Harold Macmillan and his publishing family should have so long permitted it to remain uncorrected. And what of the author herself, who only recently in these pages called a book 'pernicious', 'because it is full of denigrating material which could destroy the described person's standing and authority, but which could not be challenged in the law courts , , since they are belittling but not defamatory'. It so happens that what Rebecca West wrote and left in print for more than three decades of his life was both pernicious, belittling and defamatory of the late Prince Paul of Yugoslavia but he had no wish to seek for pecuniary advantage from British law courts the verdict of history. The latter is for once likely to coincide with that of The Times which in its obituary more justly wrote (the anonymous pen being, I believe, that of a very highly reputed woman historian of modern Yugoslavia where she is both persona grata and Tito's biographer) of him that 'an Anglophile by inclination and education, his sympathies were with the Allies: but when faced with a choice between love of Great Britain and love of his country, he naturally and rightly put Yugoslavia first [my italics]'. As for the plotters whose heroism Rebecca West so extravagantly extolled in Black Lamb, she still seems unaware that almost their first act was voluntarily to confirm their predecessors' ratification of the Tripartite Pact. 'Art cannot talk plain sense', she had written; 'it must sometimes speak what sounds at first like nonsense . . OK for Art maybe, but no go for any journalism save the 'Never check a good story' school which ought to be beneath Dame Rebecca West, most admirable of writers and critics, who also once wrote that 'There is so much nonsense about, fully of folly packed so tight that it has assumed the density of wisdom', seven whole pillars – full of them alas in some of her own tragical-comical-historicalpastoral Balkan balderdash.
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