by Rebecca West
The Only Poet & Short Stories
Rebecca West
Edited and Introduced by Antonia Till
Contents
Introduction
Adela
The Magician of Pell Street
Sideways
Lucky Boy
Ruby
They That Sit in Darkness
Madame Sara’s Magic Crystal
The Second Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Make Any Graven Image
Parthenope
Short Life of a Saint
Deliverance
The Only Poet
Thanks are due to Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan Magazine for permission to reprint ‘The Magician of Pell Street’; to Saturday Evening Post for permission to reprint ‘Sideways’; to the New Yorker for permission to reprint ‘Parthenope’; to Ladies Home Journal for permission to reprint ‘Deliverance’; to Doubleday, Doran & Co. for permission to reprint ‘Lucky Boy’ from The World’s Best Short Stories of 1930; to Eyre & Spottiswoode for permission to reprint ‘They That Sit in Darkness’ from The Fothergill Omnibus, 1931; and to Cassell & Company for permission to reprint ‘The Second Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Make Any Graven Image’ from The Ten Commandments, Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code.
Introduction
Rebecca West (née Cicely Isabel Fairfield) was born on 21 December 1892, and to celebrate and commemorate this centenary Virago, as a coda to its proud record of publishing her work, offers this collection of short stories and incomplete fiction. Several pieces were found among her unpublished papers after her death and, of the others, only one has ever been collected before. They embrace her entire writing career, a career which spanned most of the twentieth century – from the unfinished novel Adela, written while she was still in her teens, to the magnificent fragments of a late novel, The Only Poet, probably begun in the late 1950s and still being worked on in the late 1970s, a few years before her death in 1983. Here we can trace most of the concerns and preoccupations which engaged a writer for whom emotional and intellectual passion had equal and sometimes troubling primacy. For readers familiar with her work this collection should offer an illuminating and satisfying addition to her body of published fiction, while new readers will find an alluring introduction to her writing.
Rebecca West once provocatively described herself (in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon) as a ‘typical Englishwoman’. English she was not, having Irish and Scottish ancestry; ‘typical’ she certainly was not, being something of a phoenix and, occasionally, monstre sacré; above all, the range and intensity of her intellectual interests are more akin to those of the European intellectual than those of a ‘typical Englishwoman’. Her non-fiction could range from scintillating and contentious journalism and criticism, through a discursive and idiosyncratic essay on aesthetics, The Strange Necessity (1928), or an exuberant, compact biography, St Augustine (1933), to her majestic mature works, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1937) and The Meaning of Treason (1949). Her fiction has an equally broad compass, starting with the short, psychologically acute The Return of the Soldier (1918) and ranging through novels of changing styles and techniques, and short stories light-hearted, grave or satirical, to The Fountain Overflows (1956) and its successors, and the intense political thriller, The Birds Fall Down (1966). But in all her work, fiction or non-fiction, there are some common themes and elements. One of these is described in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:
I have never used my writing to make a continuous disclosure of my own personality to others, but to discover for my own edification what I knew about various subjects which I found to be important to me; … in consequence I had written a novel about London to find out why I loved it, a life of St Augustine to find out why every phrase I read of his sounds in my ears like the sentence of my doom and the doom of my age, and a novel about rich people to find out why they seemed to me as dangerous as wild boars and pythons.
It is this exhilarating inquisitiveness which gives so much of her work its furious gusto.
Another element which underlies almost all her writing is her temperamental dualism. To many Europeans, heirs to the Judaeo-Christian tradition (in which, as Gnosticism or Catharism, dualism was heresy), it is often an appealing form of moral cosmology, and it permeated Rebecca West’s thinking and writing. One of these dualisms is expressed in The Strange Necessity (1928) as ‘two opposing forces: the will to live and the will to die’, and glossed more fully in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1937):
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace … The other half is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundation. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness.
Another of these dualisms lies in what she perceived as the polarity of the sexes – what Victoria Glendinning, in her admirable, elegant and comprehensive biography Rebecca West (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), calls ‘the dialectics of gender’. For Rebecca West, men and women were fundamentally opposite and, too often, oppositional. She might hope for a fruitful tension, even for reconciliation, but saw more often uncomprehending hostility. In The Thinking Reed (1936) Isabelle reflects ‘that the difference between men and women is the rock on which civilisation will split before it can reach any goal that could justify its expenditure of effort’. In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon West portrays herself as the feminine ‘Balloon’ while her husband provides the masculine ‘Ballast’. The heroines of Harriet Hume (1929) and Sunflower (1986), despite the fact that both have successful performing careers, are to be read as quintessentially feminine, while the men they love display their masculinity in the public world of action and its sometimes dubious accommodations. These dualities inform even the lightest stories of this collection, and throb like a pulse through The Only Poet.
Some years ago Virago was able to acquire a collection of Rebecca West’s unpublished work, fiction and non-fiction. All of it was sorted, typed and annotated with affectionate and exemplary scrupulousness by Diana Stainforth, the writer’s last secretary. Our gratitude for this knowledgeable and sensitive work, especially on The Only Poet, is beyond expression. It was decided, with some reluctance, not to include three of the available complete stories, two of which were found among her papers after her death. ‘Encounter’ appeared in the International Literary Annual of 1958, and looks back to New York in the 1920s. It is very similar in mood and atmosphere to the ‘American’ stories included here, and has a culminating twist which would be lost on many present-day readers, hinging as it does on the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, whose explorations of identity and persona have rather gone out of fashion. It contains an incident which recalls an escapade of the writer’s when, with Charlie Chaplin, she broke into a Central Park boathouse to row on the lake at night. Another story, ‘Minority Problem’, probably written in 1951 and rejected by Punch in 1955, is a satire on what she seemed to have perceived as the growing power of a homosexual establishment. Here it is the heterosexual men who identify each other by covert signs, have special meeting places and express profound relief at being able to reveal themselves, at least to their own kind. Victoria Glendinning writes that ‘homosexuality in men distressed her because it represented the failure of the sexes to come to any understanding’, but assures us that there were many homosexuals among Rebecca West’s warm and wide circle of friends. Nevertheless, even a tolerant reader would be likely to conclude that this limp and rancid satire is disappointing when laid beside her other work. The third, ‘Edith’, was written in the summer of 1982, less than a year b
efore West’s death. It is set in a hospital or treatment centre after some unspecified nuclear disaster, and the characters face certain death. But, in spite of this inescapable fate, there lingers – as a palliative, as a sign of human grace – the ‘will to live’, a fragile hope. The story, evidently in first draft, is, however, incoherent and uncertain, and West herself was deeply dissatisfied with it. When there was so much else to choose from, it seemed perverse and unjust to publish so clearly embryonic a work of art.
The Only Poet, which gives its title to this collection, has been placed last, both for chronological decorum and because, fragmentary as it is, it represents Rebecca West at the height of her novelistic powers. Even the tantalizingly little we have shows her piercing intelligence and emotional perspicuity. She was working on it intermittently between the late 1950s and the late 1970s. Although, judging from the ‘Outline’ she left, there are long sections of the book on which she never embarked, other passages have several workings. The ‘real’ time of the novel takes place during an evening party attended by Leonora Morton. Now over eighty, she catches sight of the woman who, by the coarseness of her actions, ruined the great love affair of Leonora’s life. The core of the novel is centred round this affair and the lovers’ meeting ten years later. Rebecca West handles the technical problems of flashback with virtuoso accomplishment, and even in sections where we have only a line or two of dialogue there is a powerful narrative charge. She is capable of holding the reader’s attention through long passages of recall or reflection, and the mature artistry and characteristic density of texture which make her so demanding and so rewarding a writer are present here as consummately as they are in her other late novels.
Readers familiar with Rebecca West’s life, and with Sunflower, will note the painful episode where Leonora is rejected by the rich and powerful man who had seemed to desire her. It echoes West’s own sexual humiliation by Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. This painful and inexplicable encounter of the 1920s manifestly continued to rankle with her until the end of her life, a sore to be probed even in her last novel.
It is worth noting that Leonora stands almost alone among Rebecca West’s heroines in having no career. As we have observed, even those quintessentially feminine heroines Harriet Hume and Sunflower have vocations, though the rich Isabelle in The Thinking Reed seems to see her marriage as her job. The twins of The Fountain Overflows and its sequels have an ineluctable destiny as concert pianists. Laura in The Birds Fall Down, while too young for a career, seems unlikely to settle for what Rebecca West called ‘idiocy’, ‘from the Greek root meaning private person’. Only the tragic Marion Yaverland of The Judge lives the life of ‘idiocy’, imprisoned by the distorted consequences of love and by a proud shame. In most ways, the destiny of Leonora is happier; she is conscious of ‘the very pleasant situation in which she found herself in her old age, widow of a well-loved second husband, with two affectionate and handsome daughters who had married nice men and given her agreeable grandchildren, as well as a world of friends and a pleasant house’. Nevertheless, the loss of her great love, Nicholas, means that ‘when the night looked in at any uncurtained window she looked back at it, and saw that when she came to die she would have had nothing out of life’.
In 1934 (in her commentary for The Modern Rake’s Progress) Rebecca West wrote: ‘The two chief ills of life … are the loss of love or the approach of death’. This could be the epigraph for The Only Poet. At the end Leonora dies, having spent the evening contemplating the loss of love. Yet it is difficult to read what exists of the novel without feeling that Leonora had had something palpably valuable out of life. The long recall of her love affair leaves us with a sense not of tragedy but of fulfilment. We are given a rich sense of who Leonora is in the first part of the novel, which is the most fully worked. It is the portrait of a distinguished, alertly self-aware and humane woman who – as we are to see from the flashback section – develops naturally from her younger self. The section which deals with the affair is far more fragmentary, deriving mostly from a set of papers marked ‘Notes for Nicholas’. Yet, sketchy though these are, they evoke pungently the flavour and intensity of sexual passion and erotic intimacy. There is, perhaps, just a hint of wish-fulfilment here: Nicholas has many of the traits of the Byronic lover, the Heathcliff, or most pertinently, Mr Rochester, who leaves so strong an imprint on the bookish schoolgirl. He is recognizably kissing-cousin to the irresistible Fabrice of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, which Rebecca West undoubtedly knew. All the same, his character is wholly credible, and like the dashing but sympathetic Richard Yaverland of The Judge, he must be ranged in the gallery of successful male characters portrayed in Rebecca West’s fiction. Our regret that we see too little of him, that there are only fragments of what promised to be a superb novel, must be tempered by gratitude that even this much survives.
The first piece in the collection dates from Rebecca West’s teens suggests Diana Stainforth, who is familiar with every development of her employer’s handwriting. The heroine is manifestly an avatar of the bewitching Ellen Melville in The Judge (1922) and, like Ellen, something of a self-portrait. Adela, who had ‘the face of a young panther’, is in her teens already a passionately articulate socialist and feminist – as Ellen is and the young Cicely Fairfield was – and, like them, precociously intelligent. All three wince under the crassness of their more prosperous relations and have, as father, a ‘specialist in disappointment’. Adela’s description could serve for all three: ‘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’. Prevented from taking up a university scholarship by the miserliness of her mill-owner uncle and by the disconcerting arrival of her wandering feckless father, Adela goes to stay with his patrician relations in the country. There she meets the married man who, it can be conjectured, would have played an important part in the projected plot. Throughout this opening there throbs the sore sense of social displacement which was to afflict West her whole life long. Like the young Cicely Fairfield, both Adela and Ellen live in dire poverty, aware that they are much finer and wiser creatures than the people who look down on them. This soreness runs all through The Fountain Overflows (though the narrator despises its expression by the eldest sister, Cordelia), and in the Hertfordshire scenes of Adela there is a painful exacerbated atmosphere very similar to the emotion suffusing West’s 1960s radio talk ‘A Visit to a Godmother’. Adela’s kindly, patronizing elder cousin is a bluffer version of the vapid, aristocratic Englishwomen so vengefully portrayed in The Thinking Reed. While we might wish for more of this vivid and appealing story, it is unlikely that Ellen Melville would have been created if Adela had achieved complete life. Somehow Rebecca West seems to have needed to re-create her own youth: it is worth remembering that The Judge was originally planned as a novel about a judge who has a seizure in a brothel on recognizing the wife of a man he had sentenced to death some time earlier. H.G. Wells, her lover for ten years, voiced his exasperation at West’s inability to keep to this structure as she went further and further back in time to develop the character of the murderer’s wife, but this exploration seems to have fulfilled some profound creative and personal need.
The next group of stories takes us away from the autobiographical. All were written for American publications and all – like two of the four stories in The Harsh Voice, with which they have close affinities – are set in the United States. They explore a world far removed from West’s English settings, a world of playboys and speculators and dancers, of precarious money (the 1929 market crash casts a long shadow) and a relative morality. Like The Thinking Reed they seem to be written to find out why rich people seem as dangerous as wild boars and pythons. But it is undoubtedly a world West found seductive, partly because of the material deprivations of her youth. This formidable intellectual could, in The Strange Necessity, weave an account of ‘a sun-gilded autumn day’ in Paris duri
ng which she had bought a black lace dress and two beautiful hats in elegant salons, and lunched in a room with walls the colour of autumn leaves, into a magisterial critique of Ulysses with an examination of Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes, which later uncoils into an extended essay on aesthetics. All her life she was susceptible to the charm and value of such minor arts as couture and jewellery, and alive to female beauty. So these flawed and non-cerebral heroines are seen as having great charm and, almost unwittingly, high moral courage.
In ‘The Magician of Pell Street’ the beautiful dancer Leonora fears that, at a time of estrangement, she has caused a fatal spell to be cast on the husband she loves ‘so much even in those early days that continued possession of him had been necessary to her soul and body’. At last she learns that it is her husband Danny, ‘the grave heavy innocence of [whose] large fair head made her think of a chaste lion’, who is the true possessor of that instinct which engenders ‘good’ magic and, by a redemptive gesture, liberates the little Chinese charlatan who is the eponymous magician. ‘Sideways’ gives us another dancing heroine, ‘covered with fame and legend and love – and jewels’. Ruth’s ‘hair was red-gold and her eyes red-brown and mournful like a fallow deer’s, and her skin seemed blanched by moonbeams and a special delicate kind of blood within’. Every action of Ruth’s is oblique, sideways, as if ‘she didn’t want to give anything – even gratitude – away’. However – and this is true of all these frail heroines and strongly reminiscent of Lulah, the apparent gold-digger in ‘The Abiding Vision’ (the last story in the 1935 collection, The Harsh Voice) – ‘if anything really important had been turned up, she would have behaved well’. Behave well she does, but so oblique is the grand gesture which crowns her love for and saves her marriage to a comically unprepossessing husband that it manifests itself as flagrantly awful behaviour, giving a high comedic twist to this fairly slight and beglamoured tale. The third dancer, Kay Cunningham in ‘Lucky Boy’, is even more similar to Lulah, and disenchantedly aware of her function as a status symbol: