"Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl" by Carl Rollyson

This is a biography of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West. It's one of those biographies that seeks to chronicle every aspect of the subject's life, and it is a literary biography that carefully describes each book she wrote. As a fellow novelist, what really interests me about a writer is not whom they have sex with or where they lived but about how they worked, what they saw as 'good' and 'bad' writing, their literary influences, and how (and why) their art matured as they grew older. This book manages this to a certain extent (more than many others) but I was a little overwhelmed by all the rest of the stories. Though some were fun.

My overall impression of Cicely Fairfield who named herself 'Rebecca West' after a feisty Ibsen heroine is that I wouldn't have liked her very much. She was likened by her niece to a firework: great fun but rather dangerous. This was a woman who took no hostages. She had forthright opinions and was able to express them in pithy and often unforgettable prose but I doubt she was ever very charitable. She believed (and I suspect she took pleasure in the notion) that she rendered some of her lovers impotent. Her relationship with her son (whom she packed off to boarding school when he was three) showed minimal understanding, little kindness and a lot of mutual anger. And yet this is the woman who wrote The Return of the Soldier, a novel that has compassion at its very heart (though not, perhaps, for Kitty). 

One characteristic which is shared, I imagine, with many novelists, is that “Rebecca could not tell a story without exaggerating, or as some would have it, lying.” (Rebecca West: a Portrait)

Her childhood was the classic late Victorian one of genteel poverty. Her father abandoned the family when she was eight or nine and died when she was thirteen after which her mother typed theses for a living but managed to put three girls through school (though Rebecca was clearly a challenging student) although they subsisted on a “dreary diet of bread and butter, porridge and eggs and milk.” 

Politically she was a suffragette and a very early feminist. But her iconoclastic approach meant that she was often regarded as a rather renegade socialist. She believed from its start that the Soviet Union would prove authoritarian and she considered pacificism naive. “Do you believe that you are going to abolish Cancer if you get 100,000 people to sign a pledge that they do not intend to have Cancer?” (Ch 18) Neither view endeared her to the comrades.

She is perhaps best known for her affair with the much older H G Wells which resulted (on the day that Britain joined the First World War) in an illegitimate son who later became the novelist Anthony West. Although HG was a notorious adulterer (at the funeral of one of his mistresses, "Rebecca is supposed to have turned to [another of his mistresses] Odette and remarked, ‘Well, I guess we can all move one up’.”), she seems to have made much of the running and they seemed to have been in love for ten years, even though he never left his wife. She also had affairs with, among many others, Max Beaverbrook and Charlie Chaplin. In  her eighties she responded to Warren Beatty asking her about her sex life by telling him: "I have some time free on Thursday afternoons."

Her husband was an (apparently financially incompetent) banker who had numerous affairs and was, in later life, a really bad driver. 

She travelled in pre-WW2 Yugoslavia; perhaps her best book is a thinly fictionalised account of her travels there. During WW2 she hosted Yugoslav exiles and refugees at her farmhouse. Following that war she covered the Nuremberg trials and wrote a book analysing the nature of treason when covering the controversial trial of Law Haw Haw.

In later life she repeatedly fell out with her son and other members of her family, and with her friends, and with her staff. Given that she was born in the nineteenth century, it was wonderful to discover that she enjoyed watching Star Trek and that she had to be evacuated because she lived next door to the Iranian Embassy when it was occupied by terrorists. She was born before powered air flight, before commercial radio broadcasts and before television. Some lives experience so much change. 

There was much to enjoy in this biography but there was too much detail. I didn't need to hear about every visit she made to her son and his family. I would have preferred a better focused, broader brush approach.

Selected quotes: 

• “She provided vivid portraits of the defendants such as Goering, whose soft, feminine, and sometimes humorous qualities reminded Rebecca of a madam in a brothel.” (Ch 25)
• “Henry thought of himself as a gentleman farmer and liked to give guests the benefit of his agricultural knowledge, which in fact was negligible.” (Ch 34)
• “She was against censorship, but she objected to literature that had no moral standard” (Ch 34)
• “Dr. Stephan Ward, she concluded, represented a society that used women as commodities. Look at the way he had taken home a prostitute simply because he had spotted her standing next to a cigarette machine, Rebecca emphasized, ‘two machines standing side by side, waiting for custom’.” (Ch 34)
• “For her, dialogue, much more than description, revealed character. In her Sunday Telegraph reviews she chided novelists such as Iris Murdoch for talking too much about their characters rather than letting them talk.” (Ch 36)
• “She calmed herself by watching television, finding a ‘nice idiotic’ episode of Star Trek” (Ch 39)
• “On 30 April 1980, at about eleven a.m., April Edwards happened to look out of Rebecca’s big picture windows, which had a view of the back of the Iranian embassy. In the garden, a man was lying on his stomach with a gun in his hand.” (Ch 41)

October 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God