The Only Poet

by Rebecca West

  ‘I was what comes after the suits and the studs and the cuff-links and the apartments and the English valets; and he hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t what a rich man would go after any longer; that I’d been out of fashion for three years. And that wasn’t the kind of mistake a rich man would make.’

  Like Theodora and Ruth and Lulah she deceives the man she loves to save both him and their love, and Rebecca West implicitly endorses this indirectness and collusiveness. As we have seen, this reflects the dualistic view of ‘the dialectics of gender’ which finds its fullest expression in the mannerist rococo of Harriet Hume (1929) and pervades the posthumously published Sunflower. Much of the drama of West’s fiction lies in the attempts – or, more often, failures – of men and women to make the required reconciliation, and it is the underlying theme of The Only Poet. In these stories such attempts are seen in a comic or tragi-comic light.

  ‘Ruby’, while it comes later in the oeuvre, has been grouped with these stories because the eponymous character is so patently an older version of their fallible heroines. As the narrator says, ‘Sometimes I nearly detest Ruby. She seems to me that stock figure of bad fiction, the golden-hearted courtesan.’ ‘During the last thirty years she has dropped through destiny like a stone.’ The shadowy narrator (three of these stories are recounted by an almost transparently neutral woman) accompanies Ruby to consult a seedily implausible fortune-teller, ‘clammy with failure’. But Ruby ‘is uniquely good, … she performs an act of charity which others cannot achieve’. This redemptive act is almost twin to the one performed by Theodora for the magician of Pell Street. The character of Ruby also has strong affinities with Evelyn in an unfinished short story, ‘The Truth of Fiction’, found among the writer’s papers after her death. Evelyn formerly ‘had a golden beauty brighter than any I have seen since, and a matching kindness and generosity’. Her kinship with these heroines is manifest. But ‘some deep part of her had made a tryst with disgrace, and she kept it faithfully. Her love affairs were at first spectacular and in the end ridiculous; she was at first extravagant and in the end dishonest; at first she drank a great deal of champagne and in the end, quite simply, she drank.’ What she sees as her mortal sin, however, is that though a devout Roman Catholic she seeks through spiritualism the adopted daughter who had died after a bitter estrangement.

  Spiritualism, and its fraudulent practices, are the background to the next story, ‘They That Sit in Darkness’. Its touching hero, George Manisty, ‘had never known any but those who communed with the dead, or who desired to do so’. Son of a father who is a medium and a mother who drinks and contrives ‘raps’, he finds himself after their death trapped in the deceptions of the successful fraud while longing for his way of life to have truth: ‘He was hungry not only for the immortality of his dear ones, but for honour.’ When he encounters another medium, ‘the most fairylike person he had ever seen’, he believes in her powers and ‘might have been her husband and her servant if he had not been cursed with this heritage of fraud and trickery’. As in ‘The Magician of Pell Street’ the supernatural element is redemptive love, but there are strong hints that ‘there is in fact a magical transfusion of matter, a sieve-like quality of this world that lets in siftings from eternity’. Certainly in The Fountain Overflows we are to take some of the supernatural events which cluster round Rosamund, and Rose’s fatal clairvoyance, as being ‘true’, and Rebecca West was convinced that she had access to the paranormal, even engaging in correspondence with Arthur Koestler. ‘The supernatural keeps pounding at my door’, she wrote in 1962. Her sense that she was sometimes clairvoyant and the hallucinatory visions to which she was prone during illness seem to have convinced her that the world did indeed have a sieve-like quality. Moreover, just as West’s theory of opposing but interdependent polarities of gender is reminiscent of Aristophanes’ famous argument in The Symposium of Plato, ‘They That Sit in Darkness’ echoes his allegory of the cave in The Republic. But such portentous comparisons should not distract us from the fact that in the main these stories are comedies – that the characters, seen as part of a given social fabric, move through dislocations and discord to a more or less harmonious happy ending.

  As war approaches, the mood alters. The tone of ‘Madame Sara’s Magic Crystal’ may be comic, but it is the comedy of bitter lampoon. In the three visits to Yugoslavia which were to form the backbone of the monumental and comprehensive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West conceived an impassioned admiration for that troubled country and its courageous people. In that book she writes: ‘it is sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk’, and in her view it was the smell of skunk which characterized the Allies’ dealings with the rival partisan bands of occupied Yugoslavia. ‘Madame Sara’s Magic Crystal’ purports to be about France, as the fortune-teller reads newspaper stories about various political machinations there, but it can be inferred that the characters of ‘Brigadier Prendergast Macwhirter, MP’ and ‘Major Thomas B. Smith’ are slanderous caricatures of Fitzroy MacLean and William Deakin, while the ignominious Marshal Pierrot is manifestly a satire on the character and actions of Tito. After a meeting with a government official Rebecca West agreed to withhold it from publication, ‘thus giving guarantee of my willingness to sacrifice myself to the needs of the country’, and until now the story has lain with her unpublished work. Its publication at this time has a painful topicality, besides reminding us of the power, penetration and characteristic non-conformism of her political judgements.

  The next novella-length short story was written during the Second World War, perhaps just as the tide was turning against Germany but nevertheless in desperate times. ‘The Second Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Make Any Graven Image’ was commissioned by Armin L. Robinson for an anthology, The Ten Commandments, whose subtitle, ‘Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code’, makes it clear that, lofty in its purpose though it was, this is explicitly a work of moral propaganda. Many of the other writers are still renowned, and her inclusion shows how high Rebecca West’s international standing was. They include Sigrid Undset, Franz Werfel, Jules Romains, André Maurois and, in a magnificent opening story which uses some of the tone and techniques of Joseph and His Brethren, Thomas Mann. Rebecca West’s heroine, Elisaveta, is an actress in the Copenhagen State Theatre who, with two courageous and sympathetic playwright friends, finds herself almost involuntarily taking a heroic stand against the German occupying forces. Rebecca West, who had had a brief and unsuccessful acting career herself, had made her heroine Sunflower – the closeness of whose emotional situation to the writer’s own was the reason for the novel’s posthumous publication – an actress, and seems to have seen acting as an appropriate career for a woman who corresponded to West’s idea of femininity yet had a certain self-sufficiency. Not that Elisaveta feels self-sufficient:

  ‘I am not a great beauty, I am not a great actress. I am only so-so. It is not fair that I should be asked to take part in great events of history. I could have borne with misfortunes that are like myself, within a moderate compass … but all this abduction and killing and tyranny, I cannot stand up to it.’

  At a lunch party which has a Last Supper atmosphere, where the ‘gaiety of the party had existed inside the terror of the day, enfolded by it’, she and her friends are interrupted by a hostile German officer. On his grudging departure the playwright Nils formulates the idea which informs the story’s title:

  ‘That German … said that he and his kind had discovered the way of living that is right for mankind. That means they believe they could draw a picture of God’s mind, and another picture of man’s mind. What blasphemy! For we know almost nothing … that is why it was written in the Tables of the Law, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the water under the earth”.’

  All three are now set on a course which will lead them to capture, interrogation, even torture, and to a tr
ain crammed with Jews destined for a Polish concentration camp. The story is a generous and honourable homage to the extraordinary courage of the many men and women who, overtly or covertly, resisted Nazi occupation. But, for all its loftiness, this is not one of West’s most successful works of fiction. It is in fact what elsewhere she described as ‘volitional’, with a laborious and contrived effect. Sometimes descending into a winsomeness inappropriate to the decorum of the rest, it is recounted in a stilted, vatic tone. She was to employ a very similar tone with great success in The Birds Fall Down, but it creaks rather here. The story is never less than interesting though, demonstrating her alertness to the political and emotional cross-currents of European history, and it can be seen as a precursor to her eloquent and analytical reporting of the Nuremberg war trials, and the astonishing explorations of the psychology of treachery in The Meaning of Treason. On a lighter note, it furnishes one of those affectionate and vibrant townscapes which are almost additional characters in much of Rebecca West’s fiction: the Edinburgh which embraces the first part of The Judge, the Kensington whose verdure is Harriet Hume’s backdrop, or the urban steppes of south London explored by the young people of The Fountain Overflows. Here it is the pretty city of Copenhagen, which West visited in 1935.

  In ‘Parthenope’ we return to the private. It is quite unlike any of her other short stories, though it has something of the atmosphere of Harriet Hume. The style, however, is very different. It is told at a double remove, like many classic nineteenth-century stories, ostensibly by the writer. She tells of accompanying her slightly quixotic and ‘sideways’ Uncle Arthur – who, with his Irishness and perverse honourableness, has something of West’s father, Charles Fairfield – to one of those riverside settings which seem so weighted with the pastoral in West’s fiction. There they hear someone calling out the unusual name Parthenope, and the narrative dissolves into Uncle Arthur’s voice as he recalls the Parthenope he loved but met only at widely separated intervals. There is a powerful atmosphere to this story, whose curious turns would be spoiled if the plot were revealed. A fairy-tale light misleadingly surrounds the seven young women in their soft bright muslins, so like the seven dancing princesses. They recall the ‘Ladies Frances, Georgina and Arabella Dudley’, irrevocably bound together by a chain of garlands in the whimsical fable recounted by Harriet Hume to her lover. But this is a curdled magic, and the tale has the disquieting effect of one of M.R. James’s ghost stories.

  ‘Short Life of a Saint’ is another of the unpublished stories found among the writer’s papers after her death. Possibly the raw, unmediated personal pain it reveals was the reason it was never published. Maybe it was the memory of the shock and hurt felt by Rebecca West’s eldest sister, Letitia or Lettie Fairfield – a response received by the writer with not wholly disingenuous astonishment – when she saw the cruel depiction of herself as Cordelia in The Fountain Overflows. For the autobiographical content of this story is insistent and overwhelming. Gerda, the saint of the title, is born in Australia, talented, beautiful and good. She is succeeded by a younger sister, Ellida, before the family return to England. Lettie and the next daughter, Winnie, were born in South Africa before the Fairfields moved back to the British Isles. It was there that Cissie was born and where the story’s third daughter, Ursula, is born. Gerda takes anxious – and resented – responsibility for the younger two and, for the highest motives, frustrates their ambitions. When Ursula fails miserably as an actress, as Cissie did, Gerda says, ‘“Don’t you think dear, that you would do better to choose some occupation in which your appearance would not be so important?’” before suggesting that she become a Post Office clerk. According to Rebecca West, this had been Lettie’s suggestion for herself. Then ‘one day Ursula ran away with a married man’. This is Ayliss who, like Wells, ‘had run away with other young women and made them very unhappy’. When Ursula’s child is born, Gerda looks after her in the face of the family’s estrangement, as Lettie looked after her sister at Anthony’s birth. As Gerda’s life of self-sacrifice and efforts to correct her sisters’ errors continues, it yields her nothing but dissatisfaction. She converts, as Lettie did, to Roman Catholicism, and disapproves of Ursula’s Vionnet dresses as drawing too much attention to their wearer. It should be remembered that Lettie, unlike Gerda, had an extremely distinguished professional career as a doctor specializing in public health, and even qualified as a barrister. But Rebecca was never fully to overcome the acrimony and indignation she felt towards her sister, nor her perpetual sense of soreness and exclusion. One of her secretaries saw a piece of paper on which West had written: ‘I know I have largely invented my sister Lettie’, and Gerda is undoubtedly another version of the ineffable Cordelia. She has similarities, too, with the obdurately self-righteous Alice in ‘The Salt of the Earth’, one of the stories in The Harsh Voice. Yet however frightful Gerda is seen as being, however uncompromising the implicit accusations, there is a flickering ambiguity to the tone: it is possible that here we have a genuine, if unsuccessful, attempt at exploration of and empathy with an alien, uncomprehended, uncomprehending nature – that once again Rebecca West is writing to discover, for her own edification, what she knew about this subject.

  ‘Deliverance’, the last short story of the collection, shows Rebecca West at the height of her powers. Within its brief compass it distils many of her central themes. The clearest of these is the strife between the will to live and the will to die. The protagonist, Madame Rémy, is in her sleeping compartment on a train between Rome and Paris, carrying vital intelligence for the man who is both her lover and her spymaster. She learns that travelling on the same train is an assassin with orders to kill her. Again we meet ‘the two chief ills of life … the loss of love … the approach of death’. Her love affair, possibly founded on deception, is going wrong, and her only family connection is bitterly estranged. Like Isabella in Measure for Measure she prepares ‘to strip myself to death as to a bed/That longing have been sick for’. But the denouement is radiantly life-affirming. Other parallels which suggest themselves are, of course, the highly charged train journey in The Birds Fall Down, and that novel’s explorations of treachery and deception. Besides these there is the insistence on the primacy of love in a woman’s life, and the texture is dense with those warmly, delicately sensuous details which inform so much of Rebecca West’s writing, whether light or more serious. It is an adventure story, an oblique love story and a tender portrait of one of those vibrant, self-reliant yet vulnerable women with whom she so readily sympathized. And, as the last of the finished pieces in this collection, it furnishes an appropriate microcosm of the work of this astonishing writer. It shows all the vitality, all the sometimes uncomfortable intelligence, all the delighted sensuousness and all the compelling storytelling which characterize the fiction of Rebecca West.

  Adela

  Diana Stainforth, Rebecca West’s secretary, tells us that this is ‘an unfinished story of which no more has come to light than the sixty-two corrected manuscript pages … The manuscript pages are small and pinned together into three chapters. “Adela” was found in an envelope with the manuscript of “Indissoluble Matrimony” (published 1914) and the handwriting is very early. It still has the right-slant spikiness of Rebecca West’s schoolgirl handwriting and is only just beginning to have the delicate lacy look of her later writing. Furthermore, from the hardness of the nib and the dark-to-light contrast of the ink every couple of lines, it appears to have been written with a dip-pen. These factors alone suggest that “Adela” was written in her mid to late teens.’

  The only editorial intervention has been the correction of spelling and punctuation.

  I

  The Kingdom of the Squinting Owl

  Beneath the windows of Tom Motley’s drawing-room at Boggart Bank lay Saltgreave. In the gathering twilight it was a mass of darkness patched with greasy roofs, a network of narrow alleys overhung by the livid fumes of the factories, a squalid undergrowth of hovels spiked with tall ch
imneys: a clothed puddle of filth dripping down from the grim hills around where the gaunt instruments of England’s wealth stood black against the scarlet sunset. A distant furnace sighed tragically, trains softly rattled away on their mysterious traffics. Slowly, as the sun died majestically on the skyline, the town awoke from her absurd preoccupation with work and began to proclaim the secrets of her heart under the cover of the night. She glowed in warm affection through the little windows of the tenements, vehemently confessed her burning lusts in the undying furnace-flames, innocently confided her chaste passions in the white fervent beam of her electric lights. She pretended to luxury, for the red and green signals on the railway-line that sundered her straightly from North to South gleamed richly like jewels on the ribbon of darkness. Even she began to speak aloud. One heard the happy broken shouts of little boys as they swam their puppies on the only canal that lay like a fat snake under Boggart Bank, and a sensuous waltz refrain travelled sentimentally from the bandstand in some near recreation ground. Now Saltgreave was awake, and she was beautiful.

  But Tom Motley’s niece, who was sitting in the windowseat, looked down on Saltgreave and caressed her hip and thigh. If fire had leapt down from Heaven and licked up the city and her hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants she would have laughed for joy. Yet if one had looked on her brown eyes, as melting as the wild antelope’s, the wide gracious arch of her eyebrows, the smooth waves of her black hair streaked with gold, the delicate droop of her lower lip, one would have judged her mild as the turtle-dove. But Adela was not only a beauty: she was also that seething whirlpool of primitive passions, that destructive centre of intellectual unrest, that shy shameless savage, a girl of seventeen. Hence for various insignificant reasons she would unmoved have seen plague and pestilence stalk down the streets of Saltgreave. For one thing it had no University; no harbour for her young ravenous intellect and her hunger for academic fame. For another, she lived in one of these little houses about whose roofs the chimneys belched their smoke, and her fine beauty felt the murk and grease as an insult. Each morning, when she drowsed in a light sleep shot with dreams of academic victories and adventures in laboratories, she was awakened by the clattering clogs of the halftimes children on their way to the mills: an intolerable reminder of her own poverty as well as theirs. And then – how could human beings have so hopelessly lost all self-respect as to actually submit to squalid slavery just to pile up capital for old Tom Motley! Serfs! Worms!