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. Yo
u 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 perh
aps 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.
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