Selected Letter of Rebecca West
Edited by Bonnie King Scott
Yale University Press £22.50, pp497
Buy it at BOL
Combining, as she did, both beauty and cleverness, the young Rebecca West must have seemed a charmed spirit to whom nothing had been denied. Strong-featured, with a magnificent bosom and dark, liquid eyes, she drove men mad with desire, and numbered among her lovers H.G. Wells, Lord Beaverbrook and Charlie Chaplin.
An infant prodigy who adopted her nom de plume at the age of 19 (she was born Cicily Fairfield), she was an outspoken presence on the literary scene by her early twenties. Wells got in touch with her after she had described him as 'the old maid among novelists', and she so irritated James Joyce that he incorporated her, unkindly, into the pages of Finnegans Wake.
She went on to become an redoubtable and independent-minded writer, publishing a steady stream of novels, specialising in psychological studies of spies and traitors, and producing in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her evocation of pre-war Yugoslavia, one of the great books of the twentieth century.
Never afraid to be a dissenting voice, she angrily championed Mihajlovic long after the powers-that-be had switched their allegiance to Tito (Churchill, the man responsible, was a 'particularly base and nasty person'). She denounced the anti-Americanism prevalent in post-war Britain, and if her anti-Communism sometimes seemed almost paranoid, those like J.B. Priestley and Arthur Schlesinger, who were rash enough to hint at McCarthyite sympathies, had their knuckles rapped.
An unabashed admirer of Mrs Thatcher - 'a sensible and utterly courageous woman' - she ended her days as a dame, noting on her visits to the palace how badly dressed the Queen was - 'the work of a miscreant named Hartnell'.
And yet her letters, for all their fascination, are oddly dispiriting, increasingly embattled and shot through with a terrible sense of failure or, as she once put it to a particularly close friend: 'It's been a bad life and the only one I have.' For all her literary success, her private life was a mess.
Her relations with Wells, who was already married and a serial philanderer, were always turbulent, despite the loving babytalk between 'Panther' and 'Jaguar'. Their son Anthony, her only child, came to loathe his mother, and the publication of his roman à clef, Heritage, with its 'monstrous, clotted spite', was a source of undying resentment.
Saddest of all was her long and entirely chaste marriage to the banker Henry Andrews. While covering the Nuremberg Trials she had an affair with Francis Biddle, the US chief prosecutor, who 'guessed the tragedy of my marriage, and for a week set himself to correct it'. After Andrews's death - he had become increasingly erratic, planting enough cabbages to 'carpet the whole of Buckinghamshire' - she discovered that her elderly, upright husband had enjoyed a string of mistresses.
She felt equally embattled and undervalued as a writer. 'I am too good for the world of modern literature,' she wrote, 'yet what chance did that give me in a world dominated by Eliot, who did not care of reality', or by the likes of E.M. Forster, 'a self-indulgent old liberal with hardly a brain in his head?' Visiting the Edinburgh Writers Conference in 1962, she was horrified by the company she kept - 'that old fraud Henry Miller' and 'that stupid lout, Norman Mailer'.
For all her forceful views, West's prose is surprisingly incoherent at times. Little help is provided by her editor, who is occasionally unreliable - Leonard Russell was never editor of the Sunday Times; Derby is hardly in 'north-west England' - and more concerned with the minutiae of editorial transcription than with putting the letters in context. But as an introduction to the work of an unhappy, brilliant woman, it has much to recommend it.
