Rebecca West was something like the English version of Parker, in that she was a woman writer who was greatly celebrated in her own time. But as a young person, West had steeped in Fabian Socialism and the experimental morals of the artists and writers, like Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, of the Bloomsbury set. She had a comfortable footing among the “serious people” of her world from the beginning, a kind of sureness that she belonged among them that had always eluded Parker. But then, West rarely suffered from a lack of self-confidence. If anything, her confidence was what often sent her to the brink of her ambitions.
West made her mark when she introduced herself to the novelist H. G. Wells by attacking him in a newsletter called the Freewoman. The episode marked possibly the only time in history that future lovers have met when one gave the other an abysmal book review. The very young West had read Wells’s now-forgotten novel Marriage and hadn’t liked it. The fact that Wells was among the most respected writers of his day did not frighten her. “Of course, he is the Old Maid among novelists,” she wrote, taking direct aim at Wells’s proud claims to sexual radicalism:
Even the sex obsession that lay clotted on [his novels] like cold white sauce was merely Old Maids’ mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.
We now remember Wells best for his airships, the scientific romances like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. But by the time West met him, Wells’s oeuvre consisted chiefly of books like Marriage: confessional, thinly veiled autobiographical novels about love and sex. The novel before that one, Ann Veronica, had told the story of a scandalous affair very like one Wells had just conducted herself. The plot details of these books are less memorable than the dim view of matrimony they took; wedded bliss was a kind of prison for Wells. Every story was meant to chip away at marriage’s claims to bestow eternal comfort and happiness.
In theory, this should have made West and Wells natural allies. Certainly, Wells thought of himself as an advocate of equality for the sexes. He was a supporter and regular reader of the Freewoman. He was usually careful to frame his criticisms of marriage as being about the liberation of women as much as men. He thought marriage took women away from their most important and fulfilling pursuits. Somewhat undermining his sense of female personhood, though, was his apparent belief that most women were exclusively interested in interior decorating and fashion. West called him to task for it:
I wonder about the women who never come across any man who was worth loving (and next time Mr. Wells travels in the tube he might look round and consider how hopelessly unloveable most of his male fellow-passengers are), who are not responsive to the lure of Dutch clocks, and forget, as most people do, the colour of the dining-room wallpaper, who, being intelligent, can design a becoming dress in five minutes and need think no more about it. I wonder how they will spend the time. Bridge-parties I suppose, and possibly State-facilitated euthanasia.
To Wells’s great credit he was not offended. He did not write some glowering, condescending letter to the editor. Instead, he invited West to the rectory where he resided with his wife, Jane, in what was a thoroughly admirable display of maturity when faced with harsh criticism. West turned up there for tea by the end of the same month she’d publish the review. She made a good impression, possibly a better one than she intended. Somehow she was always at her most charming when she was disagreeing with someone.
West came by her combative spirit honestly. Partly it was the environment she grew up in. In the first years of the twentieth century, London was a more militant place than New York. Great Britain was not quite the cultural center of the world—that would have been France, or perhaps Germany—but it was the political and economic one. The preoccupations of its thinkers and writers were hard matters of votes and money, less suited to the kind of carefree jesting style that had come to annoy the hell out of Parker in New York. Societies of intellectual socialists, suffragette demonstrations: these were the things of an English writer’s life, circa the 1910s.
But West had a romantic streak and didn’t head straight for politics or writing. She had at first thought she might be an actress, inspired by several months she spent hanging out with an Edinburgh theater company when she was a teenager. The Fates, unfortunately, had other ideas for her. On the way to her audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1910, West fainted on the tube station platform. Three women helped her up. One of them could not hold her pitying tongue, West wrote to her disapproving elder sister: “Poor child—an actress! I’ll pay for the brandy.”
It was a bad sign. West did get into the school in the end, but she barely lasted a year. The fainting happened again and again, the result of a delicate constitution. And although pictures of West in the era show a young woman with large, expressive eyes and mounds of glossy hair, she always said she wasn’t considered pretty enough to be an actress. It became clear early on that she would have to write her own place in the world, if she was to have one.
She was still going by her long-winded birth name then, Cicely Isabel Fairfield, a fussy name that evoked someone of the sort of meek, obedient disposition West never in her life possessed. Like Parker, West came from a shabby-aristocratic background that had bequeathed her a certain reflexive defensiveness. Her drifting father, Charles Fairfield, was the sort of paternal figure you find in Frances Hodgson Burnett novels: a dashing man, great fun, adored by his children. But only when he was around, and he wasn’t around very often. In a novel based on her childhood, West would call him a “shabby Prospero, exiled even from his own island, but still a magician.” This was more apt than she knew. Her father had a real talent for sleight of hand. He kept secrets of near-epic scope; a West biographer recently dug up a prison stay, prior to his marriage, that his wife and daughters never seem to have known anything about.
Fairfield’s defects of character might have been easier to forget had he been a good provider. But he could not seem to concentrate on anything long enough to make a proper go of it. He had started out as a wayward journalist, then morphed into an entrepreneur. What little income he did make, he gambled away. In the last of his schemes, he went to Sierra Leone to try to make a fortune in pharmaceuticals. Within a year he was back in England, penniless. Too ashamed to return home, he lived alone for the rest of his life, dying in a squalid boardinghouse in Liverpool before his three daughters had left adolescence.
As an adult, West could be scathing about him. “I cannot say that my father went to the dogs, because there is something definite about a dog,” she’d write. She took offense, too, on her mother’s behalf. Isabella Fairfield had been a talented pianist before she married, a real catch, but her life was effectively ruined by the stress of Charles’s adventures. She was haggard, worn. “It was an odd training to have such a mother,” West continued. “I was never ashamed of her, but I was always angry about it.” The whole thing had led her to believe that marriage was a tragedy, or at least a pitiable fate
Another way of looking at it, though, is that her father’s ruin defined his daughter in the best possible way. It taught her an unforgettable lesson about the necessity of self-sufficiency. You could not depend on men. Romance novels were full of lies. Before any ideal of a “liberated woman” really existed, West knew that women often had to earn their own keep. She never seems to have questioned that she would have to make a way for herself.
So West was attracted to the suffragettes for obvious reasons: she felt their mission was important, that it spoke to her experience. But their raucous style appealed to her too. West was raised a fighter, arguing incessantly with her two sisters. There was also room, in political activism, for use of her natural charisma. West quickly fell in with Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, who were at the time two of the most visible suffragettes. Their organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union, was the standard-bearer of the movement by that time. The Pankhursts were celebrities, to the extent such a thing existed in their day. “Crusade That Stirs All England; Pretty Girl Commander-in-Chief,” read one representative American headline. “Christabel Pankhurst, Who Is Rich, Besides Young and Comely, Was the Initiator and Is the Chief Organizer of Agitation for Female Suffrage.”
West marched with them often and admired their work, but she never quite fit in to their world. The Pankhursts—particularly Christabel—were firebrands, fierce and earnest in the defense of the suffrage cause. West often admired this, especially in Emmeline:
One felt, as she lifted up her hoarse, sweet voice on the platform, that she was trembling like a reed. But the reed was of steel, and it was tremendous.
Even as a teenager West had a more literary disposition. She had always read novels, and been interested in the ideas about sexual freedom nurtured in more artistic circles than the relatively prudish Pankhursts were willing to occupy.
Another suffragette, Dora Marsden, proved a more crucial influence. Marsden, unlike West, had been to university—a proletarian sort called Owens College in Manchester. She barely lasted two years working with the Pankhursts. As an escape plan, she proposed to West and some other friends that they start a newspaper together. It would be called the Freewoman (and later, after a reorganization, the New Freewoman), and it would be more ambitious than your average feminist newsletter, allowing its writers to pronounce more widely on the matters of the day. This, Marsden hoped, would get the real writers of the suffrage movement out of the shackled forms and clichés of propaganda. This all appealed to West, who was thrilled to have the Freewoman’s relative editorial freedom to air the kind of views on sex and marriage that would horrify her Scottish Presbyterian mother. And to protect the family name, West then chose the nom de plume she’d use the rest of her life.
She’d claim she picked Rebecca West at random, simply wanting to escape the “blonde and pretty,” “Mary Pickford” implications of her old name. Indeed, she did pick a pseudonym that had a firmer sound. The source was an Ibsen play called Rosmersholm. In it, a widower and his mistress slowly descend into an ecstasy of guilt over the pain their affair has caused his dead wife. The mistress admits to having aggravated the suffering. Eventually, at the end of the play, both commit suicide. The mistress’s name is Rebecca West.
The layers of potential unconscious meaning here could fill a book by themselves. There is the repudiation of the absent father; the gesture at early, if ambivalent theatrical ambitions (and why an Ibsen character); and then, its prescience, because West would eventually carry on a famous affair herself. But that she would reach for the name of an outsider, an outcast, and an eventual guilt-ridden suicide: that’s a matter worthy of note.
West was known all her life as a woman unafraid of showing emotion in her work. She rarely equivocated in her writing, always wielding the first person to remind you that you were in the land of subjective authority. But a friend told the New Yorker that she had “several skins fewer than any human being, a kind of psychological hemophiliac.” Her work cut very directly at what she thought, what she wanted, how she felt. She was not a self-deprecator like Parker. Her shield was different. West overwhelms you with her personality. Her work can be read as one long, run-on sentence punctuated only occasionally for want of money. That looks like confidence, but it was actually a very elaborate mask. She worried about everything: about money, about love, about just about every subject on which she delivered such deceptively assured opinions.
But assured they were, from the start. She had a knack for choosing targets. For her first piece under her new pen name, West took aim at the exceptionally popular romance novelist Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs. Humphry Ward), a woman who suffered from a “lack of honor” in West’s young estimation. A man angrily wrote to the Freewoman with the somewhat inapposite accusation that she was defending industrialism. West’s reply began by elegantly flipping off her interlocutor: “This is most damping.” Her boldness always managed to pull out a laugh, at least on the page. It was around this time West fired her book review cannon at Wells, then went over for tea. Of the pair, West had the more insulting first impression, finding Wells odd looking, with “a little high voice.” Wells would remember the young woman who arrived that day as bearing a “curious mixture of maturity and infantilism.” It was only their intellectual attraction that struck flint on steel. Wells was not the sort of person who turned away from challenges, so that elusive quality drew him in: “I had never met anything quite like her before, and I doubt if there ever was anything like her before.” To Dora Marsden, though, West confessed she was intrigued by his mind.
It turned out West had correctly diagnosed Wells’s romantic style in that review. At first, he behaved toward her in exactly the old-maidish ways she’d seen in his work. Seduction was forged by intellectual discussion. But he refused to touch West, despite her advances. It was not out of deference to his wife Jane. The Wells’s marriage was an open one, his affairs conducted with Jane’s full knowledge. But Wells had another mistress on the go at the time, and his practical streak seems to have kicked in. Two mistresses would have been a lot even for a liberated man.
All that notwithstanding, his resolve to be good lasted only a few months. One day in late 1912, Wells and West kissed accidentally in his study. Between two ordinary people it might have been nothing, the simple rise of a needle already trending toward an affair. Between two writers, each of an unusually analytical cast of mind, some kind of wrenching conflict seemed necessary to consummate the attraction. But at first, Wells withdrew again, and West was sent into a nervous breakdown by the rejection.
The notion that so intelligent a woman might have been undone by romantic rejection is not palatable to the feminism of our era. But West was nineteen and Wells appears to have been her first real taste of love. She also managed, as ever, to fit her emotional distress into a beautiful piece of writing, albeit one she did not publish. We have it only as the draft of a letter, written to Wells but believed not to have been sent. It begins:
During the next few days I shall either put a bullet through my head or commit something more shattering to myself than death.
The letter accuses Wells of an unfeeling nature. “You want a world of people falling over each other like puppies, people to quarrel and play with, people who rage and ache instead of people who burn.” West can’t abide this treatment:
When you said, “You’ve been talking unwisely, Rebecca,” you said it with a certain brightness: you felt that you had really caught me at it. I don’t think you’re right about this. But I know you will derive immense satisfaction from thinking of me as an unbalanced young female who flopped about in your drawing-room in an unnecessary heart-attack.
If Wells ever knew she felt this way—either by reading the letter, or otherwise—he did not immediately come running. He appears to have written a reply to West, but in it he castigates her for being so emotional. He didn’t understand. It wasn’t merely Wells stopping the affair before it started that bothered her. It was that Wells used his emotional distance to mock her anguish, too.
West wrote this letter in June 1913 from Spain, where she had gone with her mother for a month to recover her senses. From there she still sent dispatches to what was now called the New Freewoman. In “At Valladolid,” she produced a lengthy suicide fantasy that presages the mood, tone, and themes of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The narrator, a young woman, arrives on the grounds of a hospital having shot herself. The source of the narrator’s trouble is a love affair too, and it echoes what we know passed (and didn’t pass) between Wells and West: “For though my lover had left my body chaste he had seduced my soul; he mingled himself with me till he was more myself than I am and then left me.”
It’s worth mentioning that West knew Wells was still reading the New Freewoman. He, obediently intrigued, would write her letters about her pieces. “You are writing gorgeously again,” read the first one, which as far as we know she didn’t answer. Instead she wrote a review of his latest novel, The Passionate Friends. In it, she wrote that she agreed with him there may be some link between sex and creativity:
For it is true that men often turn willy nilly to the business of love-making as a steamer however urgent for far seas must call at the coaling station: for some great thing they have to do they need the inspiration of an achieved passion.
Then she insists that women who engage in such liaisons are not as wholly destroyed by these brief affairs as Wells imagines them to be in his fiction. The key, she agreed with him, was that the woman in question needed autonomy in her own sexual and romantic life:
The woman who is acting the principal part in her own ambitious play is unlikely to weep because she is not playing the principal part in some man’s no more ambitious play.
Not only did West begin this affair with a book review, she also perhaps unknowingly argued for her passion in subsequent book reviews.
It got the job done. The signal was received. Within a few weeks of publishing the review in the fall of 1913, Rebecca began meeting Wells in his study for trysts. The flirting through book reviews quickly stopped; their letters descended instead into a kind of romantic patois. They called each other by feline names, usually Jaguar (for Wells) and Panther (for West, which she later gave to baby Anthony as his middle name). The baby-talkish tone of those letters doesn’t really show these writers in their best light.
Soon, something like dramatic irony struck their fates. Their second time together, Wells forgot to put on a condom. West had already been writing angry screeds for a new British journal called the Clarion about the plight of unwed mothers, who were mostly pariahs in British society up and down the class ladder. She could not have been thrilled to become one herself.
Indeed, from the moment Anthony Panther West was born in a tiny cottage in Norfolk in August 1914, he represented a problem for his mother. Her ambivalence about motherhood marked him deeply, he’d later insist. She could not hide her impatience with him and with the limits he imposed on her. West took little pleasure in being locked up in a house, staying behind the scenes, and fussing over baby things:
I hate domesticity … I want to live an unfettered and adventurous life … Anthony looks very nice in his blue lambs-wool coat, and I feel sure that in him I have laid up treasure for the hereafter (i.e. dinners at the Carlton in 1936) but what I want now is ROMANCE. Something with a white face and a slight natural wave in the dark hair and a large grey touring car.
Wells, it bears mentioning, did not have these characteristics (except perhaps the white face). Though he behaved as honorably as he could under the circumstances, setting West and the baby up in a home of their own, he was not around enough to satisfy West. He was still her lover and intellectual mentor, but she proved not particularly suitable for the gilded existence of a favored mistress. She was too interested in a life of her own.
So West kept writing, at a pace many new mothers might envy. She began a novel while Anthony was an infant. Articles appeared at all her usual haunts, and she got a new venue for her thoughts too: Wells had gotten himself involved with a new American magazine, funded by the Whitney fortune, called the New Republic. He invited West to write for it too. She would appear in the magazine’s inaugural issue, published in November 1914, the only woman to write for it, with an essay titled “The Duty of Harsh Criticism.”
This would become one of West’s most well-known pieces. It was written with a solemnity uncharacteristic of all her Freewoman work, presenting itself as more of a bookish Sermon on the Mount. Instead of an “I,” West speaks from a royal, disembodied “we.” Her analysis is delivered from a commanding position:
There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger.
Given that she was building a successful literary career on exactly the kind of criticism she had found lacking, West was perhaps overstating the case. Her flight into abstraction here is somewhat unusual. Generally, her work was built on personal anecdote, but this essay had none. It’s possible her call for “harsh criticism” was related to her frustration with her own situation at that particular moment of her life. She was stuck, but could not write about it because of the taboo against having children out of wedlock. To export the problem to “criticism in England” was to write about the banality of her life without addressing it directly. “Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind,” she wrote, which is true as it goes and also has the quality, cast against her circumstances, of a reminder to oneself.
Yet even in her frustration her personal fame was growing. In advertisements for their new magazine, the New Republic’s editors listed her as an attraction, making an issue of her sex, calling her “the woman H. G. Wells calls ‘the best man in England.’” She did not return the debatable compliment, taking his writing as one of the targets of “The Duty of Harsh Criticism.” Wells was a “great writer.” She also wrote that “he dreams into the extravagant ecstasies of the fanatic, and broods over old hated things or the future peace and wisdom of the world, while his story falls in ruins about his ears.”
The relationship was, at that point, going well. But Wells, reading this, might well have seen a double implication: on some level “his story” included Rebecca and Anthony. The young boy would be a point of contention between his parents all his life. At first they didn’t tell him, clearly, that they were his parents. They also fought, bitterly, about whether Anthony would have a formal place in Wells’s will. Wells was unwilling to reassure West on that score. It soured things.
And perhaps sensing how odd it was to continue to review her lover’s work in the pages of magazines even as she wrote him love notes dripping with sentimentality, West began to focus on other writers and started on a book-length critical study of Henry James. She began outlining her interest in him in an early column in the New Republic, when she described having spent an entire night’s World War I air raid in the country reading James’s essay collection Notes on Novelists. As sirens sounded overhead, she derived less and less comfort from James’s extreme precision as a writer:
He splits hairs until there are no longer any hairs to split, and the mental gesture becomes merely the making of agitated passes over a complete and disconcerting baldness.
As though reasoning with herself, though, West eventually comes around to James’s exacting, but wandering tones. Passion, fire, seems suddenly overrated in context. The planes “circling above my head in an attempt to locate the lightless town for purposes of butchery,” she writes, “were probably burning with as pure and exalted a passion as they could conceive.”
She’d be changing her mind about that. In her book, the core of West’s objection to James was his “passionless detachment”—a complaint you may now recognize as one of her signature issues with the writings of great men—that he “wanted to live wholly without violence even of the emotions.” It was not that every book of his had this problem. She admired The Europeans, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square. But she hated The Portrait of a Lady because she found Isabel Archer, its protagonist, to be a “nincompoop.” James’s worrisome detachment became particularly acute, West complained, when it came to women:
One can learn nothing of the heroine’s beliefs and character for the hullabaloo that has been set up because she has come in too late or gone out too early or omitted to provide herself with that figure of questionable use—for the dove-like manners of the young men forbid the thought that she was there to protect the girl from assault, and the mild tongues of the young ladies make it unlikely that the duel of the sexes was then so bitter that they required an umpire—the chaperon.
James would die about a month before West published the book in England, which led to its becoming a popular subject for reviews, perhaps more than a critical study could ordinarily garner. In general, the reaction was positive: The Observer called it “rather metallically bright.” And most American critics seemed to agree. But one Chicago Tribune books columnist—a woman named Ellen Fitzgerald—was downright insulted by the book’s “breach of literary honor.” “Very young women,” she argued, “should not write criticism of novels, either. It is hard on the novelist.”
It is hard to imagine that West would be wounded by such a review. Breaking the rules for “very young women” was, by this time, old hat for her. She did not worry about whether she was making the right impressions on the right people. She did not care about the pieties novelists might build up about themselves and their works.
In any event, West was not ignorant of the travails of novelists. She went on to write a lot of fiction herself, publishing ten novels. They received generally positive reviews: “so austerely veracious, so gravely and only beautiful, so triumphant in their exalted spiritual realism,” went one representative observation about her first book, The Return of the Soldier, published in 1918. Generally, though, even in praise reviewers reported disappointment, because her reputation preceded her. “It falls short of that measure of perfection so able a writer as Miss West might easily have attained,” a Sunday Times reviewer wrote of The Judge, published in 1920. No one was surprised to find she could write a good novel, but reviewers expected her to write a great one. “But for her wit and the warm flashes of beauty in her intricate, slow-moving style, one might easily run aground half-way through her book and give up the struggle with its psychological shallows,” the novelist V. S. Pritchett complained of Harriet Hume when it appeared in 1929.
This was the price one paid for being such a well-regarded critic who wanted to be more than just that. People become accustomed to a certain writerly persona, and every bit of subsequent work gets measured against it. Parker battled this when she wanted to be better known for her fiction than her quips and verse, and she couldn’t achieve it. West’s intelligence in prose turned out to be something of a devil in fiction; readers of the novels wondered where her digressions had gone.
Certainly her journalism did a better job of paying her bills, which were only partially handled by Wells. The New Republic columns led to more work in the New Statesman, and in other, lesser magazines and newspapers like Living Age and the South China Morning Post. West was not picky about where she appeared. She needed the money and was rarely short on opinions.
Nor was she picky about topics. She tended to take off from a book and then land somewhere far afield. She wrote about George Bernard Shaw’s war speeches. She wrote about the strains of Dostoevsky she found in a drunk she met on a night train. She complained about the way one of Dickens’s earlier biographers kept interrupting chapters with weather reports. She complained about novels that took the lives of the rural poor as their subjects: “They always work out tedious and unauthentic.” She was also frequently called upon to write about women, and as World War I raged on, about the place of women in war. In the Atlantic, she delivered another long, passionate sermon, this time on the ways in which wartime nursing had fulfilled the promises of feminism, making ordinary women a part of the war. “Feminism has not invented this courage, for there have always been brave women,” she wrote. “But it has let it strike its roots into the earth.”
She was presenting herself with confidence on the page but other parts of her life had begun to crumble. Things with Wells were in trouble. He was always adding new mistresses and though the philandering could not possibly have come as a surprise, it sometimes led to unpleasant scenes. The low point came when a dalliance with a young Austrian artist (by the memorable name of Gattenrigg) ended with that woman’s arrival at West’s flat one day in June 1923. The woman tried to commit suicide at Wells’s own house later that day. West kept her composure for the press, telling a local newspaper, “Mrs. Gattenrigg however was not abusive and there was not a scene. She is a very intelligent woman, doing really beautiful work, and I feel very sorry for her.”
She had begun to feel quite sorry for herself, too. In letters to friends and family she began openly complaining of Wells’s “constant disturbance of my work.” His commanding presence, which had once enchanted her, she now called “egotism.” The student had learned whatever the master had to teach, and though she worried she would not have enough to live on without Wells’s generosity—he, after all, had no legal relationship to either West or Anthony at the time—the situation was untenable.
The romance had served its purpose in her life, launching her into the career she’d dreamed of. She was, if anything, by then almost more famous than Wells, since she was more prolific and in her prime while his output was beginning to drop off. She did not need him anymore.
The chance of a clean break came in the form of an American lecture tour. West sailed in October 1923, leaving Anthony with her mother. In America she was a hot commodity, and the freedom of being outspoken and unmarried suited her, at least as far as her public image was concerned. The American press was clearly enchanted with her. She was an avatar for the new sort of independently minded woman. Even better, for a reporter, she was quite willing to answer questions about it. The New York Times, for example, asked her why the numbers of young women novelists seemed to be surging. Was it the war? West shook her head:
It is true that in the field of the novel the younger women are “carrying on” but it didn’t need the war to swell their numbers. It didn’t need the war to show them the open door of expression. It wasn’t war fever or war relaxation that did it. It was something for which the English woman had fought for years. It was the spirit of freedom, of feminism, if you will. It was something more than a fight for the vote. Remember that always. It was a fight for a place in the sun, a right to grow in art, in science, in politics, in literature.
She added, too, that she didn’t think age should matter, that in fact it could only enhance her powers, using the examples of Virginia Woolf, G. B. Stern, and Katherine Mansfield. “The woman of 30 and over, you see, is coming into her own,” she averred. “Life begins to mean something to her: she understands it.”
West seemed to be talking about herself. She was already thirty by the time she said this, and indisputably in the sun. Massive public interest followed her everywhere she went in America. She was, like Parker, a celebrity writer. She lectured at women’s clubs across the country. Her social calendar was full to the brim. She was less sure about America than it was about her: New York could “dazzle the eye with richness” but also “fatigue it with monotony,” she’d write in one of her four New Republic articles about the trip. There were unqualified positives: she loved the American train system and the Mississippi River. But in her letters she tended to be cutting, particularly on the subject of American women: “beyond all belief slovenly,” “repulsive wrecks,” “incredibly uninteresting even in their evening clothes.” The fame was of a very comfortable sort. It left her space to remain oblique about her personal life in public, though Wells’s name often came up in tandem with hers. As cover she was sometimes characterized as his “private secretary.” Neither Anthony’s name nor his existence was mentioned. But the affair and the child were open secrets among the intellectuals and writers she met in America.
Among them were several members of the Round Table, including Alexander Woollcott. She met the Fitzgeralds too. It’s not clear if she ever met Parker herself. Although the New York journalists and wits would seem obvious kindred spirits to a sharp young woman from London, West did not fit in. Only Woollcott became a friend, and memories of the others were fraught. A party was held to honor West at some point during the trip. Parker doesn’t seem to have been there. But her friend the feminist writer, activist, and Round Tabler Ruth Hale was. Hale had made her name as a war correspondent, then became a frequent arts commentator. She had married Heywood Broun but kept going by her maiden name, and in 1921 made headlines by getting into a fight with the State Department over whether her passport must bear her married name instead. When the State Department wouldn’t budge, Hale returned the passport and gave up a trip to Europe. She was a woman of principle.
Apparently, too, Hale was not afraid to speechify in private. As West reported it to a biographer, Hale approached her at the party and launched into a tirade:
Rebecca West, we are all disappointed in you. You have put an end to a great illusion. We thought of you as an independent woman, but here you are, looking down in the mouth, because you relied on a man to give you all you wanted and now that you have to turn out and fend for yourself you are bellyaching about it. I believe Wells treated you too darn well, he gave you money, and jewels and everything you wanted and if you live with a man on those terms you must expect to get turned out when he gets tired of you.
Usually the members of the Round Table had a subtler manner of insulting each other, but Hale was not a humorist like the rest of them. West was remembering the remarks thirty years after they were made, and may have sharpened them in the telling. But Hale’s disappointment obviously stung. The confrontation was a bad note amid so much praise, during a trip that on all professional accounts was successful. But it was such a bad note she would never forget it.
People were often disappointed with West: her mother, her elder sister Lettie, Wells, critics of her novels, her peers. No member of that choir sang louder than her son Anthony. As he grew up, shuttled between two parents whose ambitions lay only partly with his development, he grew resentful of their lack of attention. In what has become a time-honored tradition, Anthony focused all his resentment on the parent to whom he had greater access, which was West. He would eventually act on his bitterness by excoriating her in both a novel (the subtly titled Heritage) and a nonfiction book. So persistent was his obsession with this subject that in an interview with the Paris Review late in life, West could only bring herself to be dry about it: “I wish he’d turn his mind to other problems than bastardy. Alas.”
For almost everyone but Anthony, West’s writing was, in some ways, the problem. There was something about who West was in prose that promised people something they then felt distressed not to see materialize in person. Ruth Hale read West, saw the Platonic ideal of a strong, independent woman, then was disappointed when someone else appeared at a party. Even those clearly dazzled by West’s intelligence and talent sometimes had difficulty coming to terms with what they saw as a kind of flyaway personal style. “Rebecca is a cross between a charwoman and gypsy, but as tenacious as a terrier, with flashing eyes, very shabby, rather dirty nails, immense vitality, bad taste, suspicion of intellectuals and great intelligence,” Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister in 1934. It was one-half insult, and one-half compliment.
Her inability to satisfy people confused her, though she was hardly averse to employing personal criticism herself. Her journalism is larded with personal barbs, women unflatteringly described as having “hair light and straight and stiff as hay” and “sharp-nosed” men. But she could not understand why so many people reacted badly to her. “I’ve aroused hostility in an extraordinary lot of people,” she said at the end of her life. “I’ve never known why. I don’t think I’m formidable.” She wanted lovers, admirers, and friends, and she never thought of herself as not caring about what other people thought: “I should like to be approved of, oh, yes … I hate being disapproved of. I’ve had rather a lot of it.” At the heart of her confidence was this fundamental insecurity, a tension between wanting to be heard and wanting to be liked.
After Wells, West cycled through multiple suitors, among them the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook (William Maxwell Aitken). She seemed to be finished with affairs with other writers, or perhaps just with affairs that came with major dramatic complications. Her cap was set for businessmen, which perhaps did prove, as Ruth Hale suspected, that she valued financial security above all else. Later, remembering their first meeting, she’d call an investment banker named Henry Andrews “rather like a dull giraffe, sweet, kind and loving.” Evidently that was what she was looking for. Within a year she married him, in November 1930, and they would be together until his death in 1968. There were infidelities on both sides. It didn’t change things. Mostly it left West to derive her satisfaction from her friends, and from work.
Among them, in the 1930s, was a then still-unknown French writer by the name of Anaïs Nin. West came to know Nin through the first book she published, a slim volume on D. H. Lawrence with the subtitle “An Unprofessional Study.” It was one of the first defenses of Lawrence’s work—often viewed as misogynist—from a woman’s perspective. West, who had known Lawrence, and at his death had complained in print that “not even among his own caste was he honored as he should have been,” invited Nin to meet her in Paris, where West was vacationing with her new husband.
Nin was exactly the sort of person and writer West was not. She was gamine and elegant where West was imposing and brash. The persona Nin affected in prose was lacquered and fragile, the opposite of West’s confident warrior. Nin’s approach to art was all about articulating private desire, and that she did it in her diaries rather than in the pages of a newspaper gives a pretty good measure of the distance between their approaches to both writing and life.
So their first meeting in 1932 was not obviously an encounter between kindred spirits. Nin recorded the mixed result in her diary:
Such brilliant, intelligent fawn eyes. Pola Negri without beauty and with English teeth, tormented, with a strained, high-peaked voice which hurts me. We meet on only two levels: intelligence, humanity. I like her full mother’s body. But everything dark is left out. She is deeply uneasy. She’s intimidated by me. Excuses herself for her hair being messy, for being tired.
Nin added that she could see West “wanting to shine exclusively, yet [was] too timid deep down to do so, nervous and talking far less well than she writes.” But over time this unlikely pair warmed to each other. West began to flatter Nin, telling her she thought Nin’s writing was much better than that of Henry Miller. She also told Nin that she found her beautiful, which set Nin to thinking of seducing West. (There is no evidence the desire was ever consummated.) Nin even came to hope she’d be just like West. “Her tongue is sharp, and she does not suffer from naïveté,” Nin wrote in her diaries. “At her age, will I be as sharp?” Very different women, as it turned out, could find much to admire in each other.
In the 1930s West’s life grew more and more stable. There were problems with Henry’s career in banking, but then the couple inherited a great deal of money from his uncle and became rich. Anthony grew up and though he was never easy with his mother, he became less of a logistical burden for her. She kept up a steady stream of book reviews and essays, though literary affairs had plainly begun to bore her, almost the same way Parker had grown bored with the New York scene. But West did not go to Hollywood. She went, instead, to Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was a patchwork country, cobbled together at the end of World War I by a movement determined to unite Slavic peoples in a single territory. It was a grand experiment in cosmopolitanism, blessed by the Allied powers. And by the 1930s, it was a grand experiment that had totally failed. There had been coups, ethnic nationalism was on the rise, and the country was squeezed on both sides by German and Italian Fascist movements. The country would ultimately survive multiple annexations in World War II and manage to hold itself together—with the help of authoritarian rule—right down through the 1990s.
In 1936, the British Council had sent West to Yugoslavia on a lecture tour, and though she fell dreadfully sick there, she also became enchanted with the place. For some time she had been yearning to write something about a country she didn’t live in, and a country whose fault lines were as elaborate as Yugoslavia’s appealed to her. So did the tour guide she had there, Stanislav Vinaver, though when he tried to make their mutual affection into a sexual relationship, she refused him. Evidently the rejection was amiable. She kept using him as her guide over five subsequent trips and five years’ work on a book about the country, and she kept visiting even as Hitler was making incursions into Czechoslovakia. The book that resulted, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, stretched to over twelve hundred pages by the time it was published in October 1941.
A recent biographer of West’s called Black Lamb “masterful albeit somewhat rambling.” This is a fair criticism, but it perhaps understates the way rambling was always key to West’s appeal, the whole reason the reader could keep going through so many pages. By the 1930s West had become a master of unlikely connections, moving from one thought to the next in maneuvers unique to her. One read West to watch her brain work.
Intellectually speaking, West’s theories about Yugoslavia have their faults. She was not a person afraid to psychoanalyze an entire nation, a practice now rightly thought of as reductive, at least in the absolute terms she used. Early on we are told that a group of four plodding obedient Germans on a train are “exactly like all Aryan Germans I have ever known; and there were sixty million of them in the middle of Europe.” West believed that nation was destiny, that there were certain unavoidable differences between people that had to be understood and respected. It led her to some unabashedly racist lines of analysis. In one passage in the book she even makes the claim that a “cherry-picking dance” she had often enjoyed seeing performed in America by “a Negro or Negress” became “animalistic” when she saw it performed by a white person.
She could move between geopolitics and jokes with ease. In the midst of explaining the 1915 Treaty of London, which had nearly handed several Slavic territories to the Italians, West paused. She had just described the way Italian protofascist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, a bald, waxed-mustachioed man, had marched soldiers into Fiume (now a part of Croatia) to prevent the Italians from losing it. Considering the chaos this caused, and the fuel it gave to Italian nationalists, she observed:
I will believe that the battle of feminism is over, and that the female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down and led to the brink of war by its passion for a totally bald woman writer.
And then there is Henry, who at all times in the book is presented as a sensible foil to West’s more alluring matters of pure sentiment. An illustrative episode occurs when at one point West and her husband get into a discussion of literature with a Croatian poet, who tried to insist that Joseph Conrad and Jack London were writers superior to the more traditional “literary” types like Shaw, Wells, Péguy, and Gide:
They wrote down what one talks in cafés, which is quite a good thing to do if the talk is good enough, but is not serious, because it deals with something as common and renewable as sweat. But pure narration was a form of great importance [the Croatian poet felt], because it gathered together experiences that could be assimilated by others of poetic talent and transmuted into higher forms.
Henry offers a wan rejection of this (“Conrad has no sense of tragedy at all”), but it is the poet’s continuing opinions that West goes on to quote at length and, one might even suspect, adopt.
The reviews of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, were to say the very least quite flattering. In the New York Times, it was praised somewhat curiously as “a most brilliantly objective travel book,” even as the reviewer credited its genius specifically to the fact that it was written by “one of the most gifted and searching of the modern English novelists and critics.” In the New York Herald Tribune, the reviewer wrote, “This is the only book I have read since the war began which is life size, which has a stature of its own comparable to the crisis through which the world is moving.”
That last remark was important. When Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was published, Pearl Harbor was still a couple of months off; America was still feeling quite safe from the tumult of Europe. For most Europeans, the war was not something to be compared to a thrilling book. By the time Black Lamb appeared, it was the all-consuming fact of daily life.
West and her husband spent the war quietly in England. Henry had been working for the Ministry of Economic Warfare since the beginning of the war in Europe in the fall of 1939. The couple had bought a manor in the country to live at, partially because they thought that if the worst came they could possibly “live to some extent on what we can grow.” From England she sent two dispatches to Harold Ross’s New Yorker. In them she referred to herself repeatedly as a housewife. Her travails during the war were not the stuff of Gibbon, she admitted, but she would never have wallpapered the new house if the price of wartime paint were not so high. Her lampshades were unsuitable only because they “send out rays that might cost us our lives, for my house stands on the top of a hill and might easily catch the eye of a cruising Dornier.” She was particularly attuned to the effect of the war on cats, beginning one piece with some remarks about her ginger tabby:
This crisis has revealed cats as the pitiful things they are—intellectuals who cannot understand the written or the spoken word. They suffer in air raids and the consequent migrations exactly as clever and sensitive people would suffer if they knew no history, had no previous warning of the nature of warfare, and could not be sure that those in whose houses they lived, on whose generosity they were dependent, were not responsible for their miseries. Had Pounce found himself alone in the house and free, he would probably have run out into the woods and not returned to the dangerous company of humans.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon had established West as a reporter of the first rank. She could not really put her journalistic tools to use until after V-day in Europe, but she then became the New Yorker’s chief correspondent on war trials. Trials were a good subject for West, since they consider both the case in front of them and the general principles of law, a move from specific to general not unlike the way West generally reasoned in her essays.
The first she covered was that of William Joyce, a man who had become known in England as Lord Haw-Haw. Joyce’s backstory was somewhat involved. He was born in America but spent his life in Ireland and later England as a die-hard Anglo-Irish nationalist. He joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s Fascist movement in the 1930s, then found himself in Germany in the fall of 1939. He became a propaganda broadcaster for the Nazis, whose broadcasts were played on English airwaves to hurt morale in England. His nickname came from the British papers; he was a reviled figure. Captured after the war, Joyce was put on trial for treason in England. West was among those who believed firmly that he deserved the death sentence he would eventually receive. She was eager to connect what she considered Joyce’s moral smallness with his physical stature: “He was a tiny little creature and, though not very ugly, was exhaustively so.” By the time she witnessed his hanging she was interested no longer in Joyce, but in what she thought were his victims: “An old man told me that he was there because he had turned on the wireless when he came back from seeing his grandchildren’s bodies in the mortuary after a V-1 explosion and had heard Haw Haw’s voice.”
The trials at Nuremberg, which West also covered for the New Yorker, presented somewhat more difficult questions for her. It was not that she liked the Nazis any better, but she used her pen to sketch them as ultimately not very menacing. On seeing Rudolf Hess, the deputy führer, she observed that he was “so plainly mad that it seemed shameful that he should be tried.” She wrote that Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor, was “very soft.” She was not quite making the argument, later made famous by Hannah Arendt, that certain of these officials were not evil in the traditional sense of the word. West was certain they were guilty of the crimes committed, she was not persuaded by the argument that these officials had only followed orders, and she said so quite directly:
It is obvious that if an admiral were ordered by a demented First Sea Lord to serve broiled babies in the officers’ mess he ought to disobey; and it was shown that these generals and admirals had exhibited very little reluctance to carry out orders of Hitler which tended towards baby-broiling.
The question of collective German guilt for the atrocities of the Nazis, which was to become one of the great moral and political questions of the second half of the twentieth century, was not of great interest to West in these early postwar writings. She had little to say about the Holocaust beyond the fact that it deserved punishment. Even then, she believed the Nazis deserved punishment for their conduct of war in general, and lumped “what they did to the Jews” under the general category of Nazi criminality.
This was a serious moral oversight. In part, it happened because as the trials dragged on, West’s attentions were turning away to Soviet Russia. She identified certain similar strains of thought in Nazism and Communism, and as early as the Joyce article she was sounding alarms:
There is a similarity between the claims of the Nazi-Fascists and the Communist-Fascists, and no less similarity between the methods of putting them forward. The claims depend on an unsound assumption that the man who possesses a special gift will possess also a universal wisdom which will enable him to impose an order on the state superior to that contrived by the consultative system known as democracy: which will enable him, in fact, to know other people’s business better than they do themselves.
Her preoccupation with Communism would take up much of the next forty years of her life and writing, although she did not keep to a single subject. She was sent to write about the king’s funeral, Democratic conventions, the trial, Whittaker Chambers, South Africa. She was called upon to remember the dead, as in a 1975 reminiscence of the suffragettes, whom she remembered as “extremely good-looking.” But the attention she could command had leveled out, stalled. Her alienation from leftist causes and her flighty style alienated her from the young up-and-coming writers of the 1940s and 1950s. She was a kind of crank to them, a relic from an earlier era.
Late in her life, West sensed this diminution of interest and felt it keenly. To a friend, she wrote, “If one is a woman writer there are certain things one must do—first, not be too good; second, die young, what an edge Katherine Mansfield has on all of us; third, commit suicide like Virginia Woolf. To go on writing and writing well just can’t be forgiven.’” She would write in that same painterly, chatty way of hers until the day she died. Her books would still receive acclaim, and in her later years she became a regular guest on intellectual talk shows. She was one of the only women who were considered experts on grave matters of state. But she made mistakes. Her obsession with anti-Communism was just one of them.