Rebecca West: An Extraordinary Career

For a critical piece it is worth remembering that a writer’s contract is always with the reader.

Sarajevo 2016

In a rather startling achievement, Lorna Gibb’s The Extraordinary Life of Rebecca West manages to combine the disappointment of getting what you want and the disappointment of not getting what you want into a single book. This isn’t an easy feat, and I know of no other literary biography—especially one for such a major 20th Century writer—that comes as close to success while still leaving, at least in this reader, nothing but frustration.

Yet this reaction, I must acknowledge, does nudge me toward an uncomfortable position, as it comes dangerously near the most common and most detestable sin in literary criticism: to review the book that you wished to read rather than the book that you did read. What a critic wishes to read is sufficient for dinnertime chatter or a bit of loose bookchat over drinks, but it should stay far away from the page—the obligation to readers is to provide a critical response based on the actual intentions of the author and the context of the book. To concentrate on what you wanted to read and how that differs from what you did read is to use the ingredients of solipsism and childishness and arrogance to write criticism. You must, instead, meet the book at a location of the book’s choosing, and not, for instance, read a farcical, slapstick comedy and then complain that the characters don’t have the complexity found in Shakespeare. If you do find yourself sniping that a book should have been different, that should needs to be intrinsic to the writer’s project—because that is criticism that points out the failure to accomplish a goal rather than the failure to choose the right project.

In Rebecca West, we have a novelist, essayist, critic, a writer of one of the most significant nonfiction books of the 20th Century—Black Lamb and Grey Falcon—and, unfortunately, a writer who just might be vanishing from view. So I do arrive at page one of The Extraordinary Life of Rebecca West with my own longstanding project of persuading more people to read West—to revivify a writer who kept politics at just the right distance in her literature, and who never forgot about the literary aspect of politics. Of course this means that I end up quoting and referencing and simply slipping her name into, I admit, too many essays and conversations, and it also means that I have my own visions of what a biography of West should contain. For such a dynamic and crucial and simply interesting figure, we might also wonder why there aren’t already a few dozen Rebecca West biographies gathering dust in our libraries, and why Gibb’s book isn’t an addition to a large shelf rather than one more in small collection.

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Born in 1882, Gibb notes that West “began writing in the ninetieth century, and unpublished work written by her was still appearing in the twenty-first, and still being well-received.” Had she only written her journalism about the Nuremberg Tribunals, her contribution to history would have been meaningful and worth remembering; had she only written the part-travelog, part-history, part-sociology, and part-narrative, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, that would have been sufficient for a career; and had she only written the novels, especially The Return of the Soldier, she would be worth including in a 20th Century literature syllabus. Although this synopsis ignores a lifetime of reviews and essays and narrative reporting, it does make clear the necessity of a literary biography, of an explanation of how the life informed the work.

Only because of that work, because of that long trail of pages, it is worth remembering, is there a reason for a biography—any interest in Rebecca West the person trails an interest in her books, and to want a biography is to want a greater context for the writing, to understand how the accomplishments and setbacks and turmoil in her life hint toward the character of her work. A good critical biography encircles a writer’s creations and reveals how the life affects the page.

Rebecca West, in fact, demonstrates this principle with the image of a painter’s studio, explaining that a visitor to a studio “looks from the canvas on the easel to the sitter,” with the critical eye an attempt to assess how the painter’s brush compares to the view. Note that this angle permits the critic to see the work through the artist—you look through the artist’s eyes to uncover a lens for the creations. It is a reasonable approach for how we might think about literary biographies, too, and it comes from a fiery, bombastic essay in her 1928 book The Strange Necessity, where West also emphasizes the importance of all this criticism:

Criticism is a process that ought to be continuous. Every man is in a state of conflict, owning to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.

For a critical piece it is worth remembering that a writer’s contract is always with the reader. When in doubt—and doubts will certainly arrive, especially if you write about political figures—the consistent lodestar must be your readers.

There is need for an outside observer who will stand clear and look down on the proceedings as from a height.

And this is what we demand in a literary biography—a striving toward what West called reconciliation, a striving toward an understanding of how the life affects the work, of how looking closely at the painter informs our view of the canvas. So we aren’t surprised when Gibb begins her biography of West by suggesting the importance of these questions:

She was a chronicler of her time, revealing in momentous global events, yet somehow, like so many of us, never quite getting the hang of how to live. Happiness eluded her. Often she despaired of her own passions and her ability to hold back. The outspoken opinions that made much of her writing so compelling were her own undoing. She lamented, ‘It seems that, on reflection, I do not behave as I would have liked to. Why do I spoil things by nosiness and impulsiveness?’

How does the life inform the work? What mistakes triggered changes on the page? Gibb brings the reader through the milestones in West’s life, so we learn how West’s first political endeavors came as a firebrand in the suffragette movement. And that she selected the pseudonym Rebecca West from an Ibsen play, in the noteworthy choice of a character who is a mistress to a married man. We also learn that her time spent organizing and protesting enriched her early political writing for a paper that H.G. Wells described as existing “chiefly to mention everything a young lady should never dream of mentioning,” which is actually a pretty good recommendation if you’re trying to sell papers.

Now this is quite an informative beginning, and it illuminates West’s later work, but it is also when we begin to stray. Moving too far from those original and necessary questions about how the life informs the writing leaves the reader with just the life, and to linger on the vicissitudes of life puts biography a bit too close to gossip—even if that gossip, in West’s case, is certainly rich. So we pause during West’s affair with the insufferable and capricious H.G. Wells while somehow forgetting about the work; we learn that having a son with the married Wells was pretty much a ghastly experience without seeing that imprinted in the sentences West wrote; we learn that the gossip of grand names in West’s life continues, with Charlie Chaplin, D.H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russel, and Virginia Woolf all making appearances, for which we assume, at some point, the discussion turned to writing; we learn that Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald threw a party in her honor in New York, to which she hilariously missed; and we learn just ever-so-briefly but without elaboration that she gave evidence at the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial; and, eventually, the reader learns that she lived long enough to meet and write about the next wave of literary figures, calling Norman Mailer a ‘stupid lout’, which was at least half right.

Yet this cascade of milestones–chapter upon chapter of life events, parties, humdrum occasions, angry letters, family troubles—just might make the casual reader forget the justification for this biography. How easy it is to overlook that the milestones in Rebecca West’s life aren’t necessarily synonymous with the milestones in her literature. Beyond the excitement of what is admittedly an active life, a steady amount of writing piles up, which is the reason why we’ve grabbed this biography. Now consider the root of her greatest triumph and the most important book of her life:

Then, in the spring of 1936, Rebecca received an invitation from the British Council to make a lecture tour of Yugoslavia. It was intended as a short and interesting trip but developed into a project that would consume the next five years of Rebecca’s working life. The first days of the trip went well, with Rebecca writing to Henry about her traveling companion, a ‘most extraordinary’ person, Stanislav Vinaver.

You might be forgiven for wondering whether an entire chapter has gone missing between sentences two and three. For the greatest work of West’s career, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the time between inception to the personal all but disappears. And what results on the page from her trips seems, instead, to surface amid mystery, with the compulsion to write almost always unexplained and somehow incidental to her personal life, despite the flurry of personal letters written both from and to her. There are some exceptions in the book—such as how the ending of World War II sparked West’s later writing—but too often her books are omitted for life’s tribulations, as if this book focused on someone without an interesting career. To find yourself putting down a literary biography to check the publication date on some novels because you’re unsure whether the biography has skipped over them isn’t a good sign.

What’s curious and delightful is that indications of West’s irrepressible character still come through even amid all the gossip—and you can see how she, as critic and journalist, brought a cocktail of determination and excitement to her work. So readers can uncover some clues as to how her desires led to the vigor of her writing. To see her reaction while reporting on the fascist riots in London, for example, is to understand how she approached nearly every subject:

Fascists and communists alike loathed her pieces, and she found that when she turned up to report on an event they would join together to boo and hiss at her. Rebecca loved every minute of the attention, commenting that the bad people hated her and ‘that’s grand’.

Of course this is also an orientation that helps us understand how such a consequential literary figure in the 20th Century can slip away: to have both the left and right loathe your presence is one way to ensure that nobody remains to champion all the times you were right. There’s no public organization of vigorous, strident reasonableness that will praise your work after the partisans have gone and you’ve left the scene—there are no critics exalting that continuous process of reconciliation on your behalf. Being right too early on major political issues is typically a way to be forgotten, but that is a result that should be resisted with West, and it is why I greet a biography of her with excitement, as it is a necessary and vital project. And it is undeniable that Lorna Gibb’s The Extraordinary Life of Rebecca West is upfront in its title about the desire to stress the life over the work, and Gibb does provide context for the swirling, turbulent life that West lived—especially in its nuanced portrait of the rather complicated H.G. Wells. Exhibited in this biography is a meticulous profile of West that’s compiled from countless letters and journals, but I must, in the end, return to what’s on the pages that West wrote, as this is the reason why she is worth salvaging. For a book that describes the life as a catalyst to the work, we will have to wait.