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.”
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