DAME REBECCA WEST

The Meaning of Treason

1949

“MY SALUTATIONS TO DAVID Pryce-Jones,” Dame Rebecca has written on the frontispiece of this book, with her signature and the date, 1973. At that time, the attraction of so many British people to Nazism before and even during the war seemed to me a worthwhile subject to write about. I had the example of Unity Mitford and her Hitlerite sister Diana Mosley already in mind. The Meaning of Treason was the obvious trail-blazer. Nothing much could be added to Rebecca West’s marvelous portrayal of William Joyce, otherwise Lord Haw-Haw, hanged for broadcasting throughout the war from Berlin. John Amery condemned himself to the gallows by pleading guilty at his trial, and she thought that all along he had “slapped the normal human process in the face.” I wondered if so expressive a judgment could be put into biographical form. We corresponded. “I probably know much less about John Amery than you do,” she wrote. “I should be so very pleased to see you and to be of any help I can.”

It turned out that we had met once before in quite other circumstances. I was born in Meidling, my mother’s family house in Vienna. Dame Rebecca’s husband Harry Andrews, a banker and German-educated, had been in Vienna in 1936 dealing with the crisis caused by the collapse of the Creditanstalt, one of the factors creating the economic instability giving rise to Nazism. At my father’s invitation, the two of them came to Meidling. Dame Rebecca remembered seeing me when I was a few days old.

Since the publication of her first book, a study of Henry James, she had been a singular figure on the English literary scene, unconventional in behavior, in opinion and especially in the vividness of her language. A competitive Virginia Woolf found her “a cross between a charwoman and a gypsy.” In her life she had a number of lovers, famous men all, one of them H. G. Wells. After breaking with him, she wrote him a letter that shows her spirit. “I know you are a great humbug. I also know you’re a great man.” Anthony West, the son she had with Wells, seems never to have got over his illegitimacy. In her biography of Dame Rebecca, Victoria Glendinning surmises that public quarrelling energized the two of them.

To Rebecca West, Communism and Nazism were twin evils and she entered into close combat with apologists for either dogma. She suspected that Yugoslavia was doomed to be a testing ground for these political horrors and as war approached she went there to see for herself. Written in a few weeks, her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in two hefty volumes is as remarkable a travel book as any in the language. She idealized the Serbs of Yugoslavia as magnificently and misleadingly as T. E. Lawrence did with the Sherifian Arabs in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Long after her death and the disappearance of Yugoslavia, her book survives as literature.

Quite rightly, she advised me that she had sounded out relatives of John Amery and “it would not really be a suitable proposition” to write about him. Unity Mitford’s Nazism also slapped the normal human process in the face. The concluding sentence of Dame Rebecca’s review of my Unity book illustrates the genial way she made her language rise to her subject. “The moral atmosphere in which these events took place is that of a burnt-out fairground.”

Now and again I would go and have tea in her spacious apartment with a view out over Hyde Park. At some point she went on a trip to the Middle East. In Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, then the Mayor, gave a reception for her. Next stop, Beirut. The telephone rang in her hotel room and a voice said, You have been fraternizing with the Zionist enemy and I am from the PLO with orders to shoot you. I cannot be word-perfect but her answer was along the lines that she had lived a full and rewarding life, had only old age to look forward to, the dear boy should be sure to load his gun and come to the right floor, she would leave the door open for him. She heard no more.

I like to think of her as the high priestess of the temple.