Rebecca West and the God That Failed
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Rebecca West And the God That Failed The recent rediscovery of Rebecca West’s masterful study of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), has brought deserved recognition to one of the more remarkable minds of this century. As her biographer here shows, West’s early stand against communism made her an isolated voice of conscience on the British Left. by Carl Rollyson n The God That Failed, published in the old communist haunts. 1950, Arthur Koestler and five other In memoirs such as The God That Iwriters told how they came to join or Failed, we have been schooled to believe fall within the orbit of the Communist in a paradigm—call it the Arthur Koestler Party. All had once experienced a sense of paradigm—of the intellectual true believ- outrage at injustice and a need to identify er whose disenchantment with the com- with a cause and an ideology that they munist utopia leads to an apocalyptic believed represented the wave of the vision of darkness at noon. The trouble future, a god to whom they could tender with the paradigm is that it concedes that their absolute devotion. at some point, however briefly, commu- At this late date—after many memoirs nism was a seductive ideal. We expect the like those in The God That Failed—there 20th-century intellectual, except for the is little need to rehearse why these and staunchly conservative thinker, to be other writers became disillusioned with enticed—even corrupted—before he or communism. We have a literature of she recovers. debates about John Dos Passos’s shift But what of Rebecca West? She occupies from left to right, the testimony of those a position that is highly unusual, if not who recanted their communism before unique. She had the honor, and also the the House Un-American Activities Com- misfortune, to declare communism a dud mittee, and more recently, Susan Son- as early as 1918—even before Lenin had tag’s apostasy in 1982, accompanied by consolidated his power. She was only 25 her coinage of the expression that com- years old, the author of The Return of the munism is fascism with a human face. If Soldier (1918), a classic of World War I fic- Francis Fukuyama’s announcement of tion, and of Henry James (1916), an incisive the end of history means anything, it is and witty study that helped to place that that the god not only failed but died. The author in the canon. George Bernard Shaw future that communism supposedly fore- observed that his British colleague handled shadowed, and the interpretation of his- a “pen as brilliantly as ever I could and tory it offered, have lost all credibility, much more savagely.” As early as 1912, she despite revenant rumblings in some of had been taken under the wing of H. G. 78 WQ Summer 1996 Wells, Ford Madox Ford, and the Fabian once said, when she did not have a socialists. A militant feminist, she had “rough idea of what is meant by capital- rocked the Edwardian world with her sav- ism, socialism, individualism, anarchism, age and witty essays in the Freewoman, a liberalism, and conservatism.” Her Scot- radical weekly of which Wells quipped that tish mother, Isabella, an accomplished it existed “chiefly to mention everything a pianist with an acerbic wit, often took her young lady should never dream of men- to public lectures, and both of her two tioning.” Indeed, the young author’s pseu- older sisters became involved in the donym, taken from the heroine in Ibsen’s Fabian movement. play, Rosmersholm, embodied the cause of political protest and seemed a desirable est learned very early how to alternative to Cicily Fairfield, her real— take the measure of people and impossibly genteel—name. Wand their ideas. Her conserv- If West displayed a precocious inde- ative father, an Anglo-Irish journalist pendence of mind, it was largely because named Charles Fairfield, brought home intellectuals, artists, and politi- cians, including several Russians. She saw then that Marxism was just another “rainbow,” as she said later. “Das Kapital is a dreary book, except for that chapter of wild praise for the achievements of the bourgeoisie.” Her father had been tutored by the Reolus broth- ers, anarchists who had been thrown out of France. Among her family’s friends were many Russian refugees and revolutionar- ies who came to argue with Charles Fairfield and to be shrewdly observed by his preco- cious daughter. She knew at eight what socialists such as the Webbs never figured out: that it would not do to patronize the Bolsheviks. She knew they were much more cultivated, more on the spot, and far more dangerous and sophisti- cated than the Webbs could see. That realization “rather cut me off from the left-wing movement of my time,” West dryly remarked. But West’s views did not turn Rebecca West in 1921 her into a young fogy of the Right. She flayed the conservative opposi- the world of ideas was a part of her life tion throughout the second and third from her earliest years. She was born in decades of the century, irreverently sug- London in 1892 but educated at George gesting, for example, that Prime Minister Watson’s School in Edinburgh. At 16, a Herbert Asquith would make an excellent bout of tuberculosis ended her schooling, butler. Her first published article trumpet- yet she never really regretted her lack of a ed her defiance of the status quo in blunt university degree, possibly because she language rarely employed by male writers, received a first-rate education at home. let alone by a woman not quite 19 years of She could never remember a time, she age: “There are two kinds of imperialists— Rebecca West 79 imperialists and bloody imperialists.” H. G. Wells, and many prominent social- Yet never for a moment did West con- ists. The Left at first feted Goldman but sider the 1917 revolution in Russia the har- then quarantined her when she made it binger of hope. To this day, significant ele- clear that the Soviet system could not be ments of the Left have never forgiven her ameliorated. It was not just a matter of for being correct. Her position cost her protesting this or that failing of commu- friends and earned her enmity. It was nism, it was time to junk it, Goldman damned indecent of her not to have had at argued. But that is what the Conservative least some initial enthusiasm for the great Party recommended! gasped the Left. experiment. West responded with a preface to Goldman’s My Disillusionment with ut this is to get ahead of her story, Russia (1923), observing that to “reject a one that is not widely known or conclusion simply because it is held by the Bunderstood. The common im- Conservative Party is to be snobbish as the pression of her is that after starting out well suburban mistress who gives up wearing a as a flaming feminist and socialist—and in hat or dress because her servant has one 1914 bearing a son, Anthony West, out of like it.” To pretend that the Soviet Union wedlock with H. G. Wells—West let down was a “conscientious experiment in com- her side: she turned conservative, married munism” was sentimental rubbish, West a rich man in 1930, retired to a country declared, and socialists who shut their eyes estate, and by the time of her death in to its evils degraded the socialist move- 1983 was a supporter of Margaret ment, which would rot from within, she Thatcher. In other words, West is con- predicted, if it did not oppose a govern- signed to the left-to-right slot. ment that deprived its citizens of the “ele- In fact, Rebecca West never deserted mentary rights of free speech and assem- the Left; it was the Left that repudiated bly.” Neither Goldman nor West advocat- her. In late 1917, as reports filtered into ed intervention in Soviet affairs: “We must England about the Bolshevik seizure of let each people seek God in its own way,” power, West wrote disdainfully of the rev- West proposed. Her concern was that in olutionary movement’s “orgiastic loquaci- propping up the Soviet Union as a positive ty.” A year earlier, she had denounced the model, socialists would lose their credibil- trade unions for seeing things only in ity, their ability to reckon with “real facts,” terms of the class struggle and ignoring the and become “tedious liars about life.” German invasion of Belgium and the Isn’t this precisely what happened? Kaiser’s threat to England. She believed in Didn’t the Left discredit itself by willfully national purposes and traditions—not in ignoring, or rationalizing, or denying supranational ideologies that led, as she Soviet oppression? It angered West that later argued in The Meaning of Treason the British, who had developed their own (1948), to the betrayal of rational, democ- tradition of socialism, should enslave ratic values. themselves to the Soviet model. One of her finest moments of intellec- West lacked the tactical and tempera- tual integrity came in 1924, when the mental sense to acquire acolytes or to anarchist Emma Goldman visited Eng- attach herself to movements such as land. West admired Goldman’s campaigns Bloomsbury, and she was not afraid to turn in the United States for freedom of speech, her corrosive and uncompromising wit on and now Goldman sought to awaken the friends as well as enemies. At Time and British Left to Soviet atrocities. West lined Tide, a British weekly to which West con- up speaking engagements for her, and tributed for more than three decades, a made sure that she met Bertrand Russell, colleague observed (anonymously): “It is > Carl Rollyson is professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and the author, most recently, of Rebecca West: A Life, to be published by Scribner’s this fall.