Rebecca West: A Life: This is What Matters
By Victoria Glendinning
Alfred A. Knopf, 284 pages, $19.95
Like the statue of Nelson on Trafalgar Square, the reputation of Rebecca West has always rested secure on its foundation, her writing and only her writing.
It has weathered the revelation of her scandalous Edwardian affair with H. G. Wells and even a lifetime of scurrilous attacks by their son, Anthony West, who seems to have made a career of vilifying his mother.
Her readers have made up her life from the autobiographical fiction ”The Fountain Overflows” and its late sequels, ”This Real Night” and ”Cousin Rosamund,” and from the Edinburgh scenes in ”The Judge” (1922), sharing in her fantasy of idyllic childhood, impoverished but intellectually and artistically rich, a mother-daughter world of uninterrupted postamniotic bliss.
Perhaps people who choose their own biographers deserve what they get. West apparently held a contest and Victoria Glendinning won the right to pen a short biography, with a longer one to come (though Glendinning points out that there are still some closed archives at Yale).
Glendinning`s mean little biography has put an end to West`s fantasy childhood, and the grand statue of West as Justicia brandishing her sword against political, social and artistic evil lies shattered in the dust.
The statue analogy is echoed in a disturbing passage in ”Sunflower,” an autobiographical revenge fantasy based on Wells and Lord Beaverbrook that West scribbled on the back of her notes for psychoanalysis in the `20s and, most wisely, decided not to publish. (One of the spoils of Glendinning`s research, ”Sunflower” was published last year as a novel.)
West gives her heroine the text for what might be called the classic nightmare of the famous woman. She dreams she is the torso of a living statue, lying in the dust in a public square being poked at, and feeling in her flesh the thrusts of the umbrellas of tourists.
Shorn of her intellectual and artistic achievements, the headless torso of a tormented and anxious woman (and this is achieved by the biographer simply by not quoting from West`s published writing at length) is a broken monument to the possibility of overcoming the constraints of gender.
Paradoxically, while this book creates West, the woman, in the worst possible light, it represents the best of Glendinning`s biographies. The prizes for the studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell and Vita Sackville-West are due, in part, to the comfortable ways in which Glendinning has inscribed the contours of women artists` lives within the cultural constructs of Establishment expectations, writing ”official” biographies to satisfy the literary estate`s needs for documentation and confirmation of the minor status of these women as writers.
No claims for genius are made. Eccentricity is allowed as an English characteristic and problems are swept under the rug with a finely developed talent for casual mention in the middle of paragraphs on other topics.
One thinks of the maintenance of the myth that Sitwell`s great love
(probably created by Sitwell herself and ascribed to by the family) was the painter Tcheletchev, when it is obvious that the most important person in her life was her governess and music mistress, who liberated her from her family and into art.
Glendinning`s great virtues as an official biographer are her capacity to gather the facts in a chronological narrative. She fills her biographer`s pen from a deep well of embalming fluid and her subjects lie rigidly respectable inside the coffins of their biographies, as ladylike as such wild spirits can be.
Perhaps because West had so many enemies, Glendinning spares the embalming fluid, tidies up all the lies and misrepresentations of Dame Rebecca`s fantasy past, and plays psychologist, poking her umbrella into the wounded heart of the broken torso in the dust.
A classic fatherless daughter, according to this script, West was lonely, suspicious and felt unloved. Charles Fairfield, an Irish adventurer, abandoned his Scottish wife, Isabella Mackenzie, and their daughters, Letty, Winnie and Cissie (as Rebecca was called, for Cicily or Cecily Fairfield) to a genteel poverty both more and less difficult than she told the story.
All her life was a search for conventional respectability. She was a friendless child abandoned by her father and never got over it. This means, of course, that the brilliant work of socialist feminist political polemic for which she is justly famous is dismissed as ”bohemian youthful protest” and given very short shrift indeed.
Her marriage to Henry Maxwell Andrews, a gentle scholarly banker, appears to be exactly what she was after all along. If we were to read the lives of Freud or Marx in this reductive way, it is obvious how much work of purely intellectual value would be attributed to family deprivations.
Perhaps Glendinning is right to read the radical girl as just a rebellious conservative, given her moves to the right and her later fascination with spies and treason.
I think that, like other modern left-wing intellectuals, she was more disturbed by Stalin than by H. G. Wells or her father. Abstract ideas were her forte and she wrote about them-economics, politics, religion, psychology, music, art-with 18th Century wit, ardor and rage.
But that, of course, is to emphasize the head rather than the torso in the biographical portrait. Glendinning writes: ”If Rebecca West had been a medieval woman, and rich, she would have been a great abbess. If she had been a seventeenth century woman, and poor, she would have been burnt as a witch.” But she was the representative female intellectual of the 20th Century. She had a child out of wedlock with a famous man and insisted on a public career as well. It is at the intersection of the public and private that all the difficulties arose for Dame Rebecca. It is also where her readers and admirers find lessons in how to live in her work and a cautionary tale in the life itself.
The revised Jungian analysis used here is not a sharp enough tool to explain West`s predicament. But this book should be read by all the young women who think they live in a ”post-feminist” age.
West, fortunately, is not here to feel the umbrellas in her side and complain, as she always did, of being persecuted. She is in prose heaven, a place reserved for those who have served language well. Before she died at 90, West drew the same figure over and over, a dancing woman with two umbrellas becoming airborne. It was not Mary Poppins she had in mind. It was rather the old dream that haunts her fiction, the dream of female flight.
