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. He has also written biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, and Pablo Picasso, and is currently working with Lisa Paddock on a biography of Susan Sontag. Copyright © 1996 by Carl Rollyson.

80 WQ Summer 1996 probable that if there is ever an English although she was Buckley’s guest and Revolution there will come a point when often his sympathetic reader. Early on, she the Reds and Whites will sink their differ- was one of Winston Churchill’s fiercest ences for 10 minutes while they guillotine opponents, finding him to be a politician Miss West for making remarks that both without principle, saying that his career sides have found intolerably unhelpful.” proved that there were some souls for Her editor at the Evening Standard whom the devil did not care to pay a price. remarked that people saw her as a “caus- Yet she gloried in his prosecution of the tic, bitter, twisted woman with a tongue war, saying he had brought back the age of like broken glass, fierce, mocking, inhu- the Elizabethans. Like the majority of man.” British voters at the end of the war, she Although West wanted a home on the voted to remove him from office, believing Left, she was never willing to play by the he had served his usefulness. Yet even as house rules. She thought Stalinism a she helped vote in a Labor government, greater threat than McCarthyism, and she was highly critical of it in her private when she said so in 1953, her series of arti- letters and conversations, just as she criti- cles in U.S. News & World Report was sub- cized big-government corruption in the jected to a firestorm of criticism from lib- New Deal but praised Roosevelt’s efforts to erals. If West did not fiercely attack Joseph lead the nation. McCarthy, she was regarded as pro- McCarthy and conservative. But to the hat appealed to West was hysterical claims about the danger of patriotism—not mindless loy- McCarthyism (she conceded McCarthy Walty, but a critical devotion to did abuse the system), she replied that the national ideal. She once wrote that focusing on him merely diverted attention every nation should be chauvinistic in the from the menace of the communist con- sense that it should believe it has some- spiracy. He was not murdering people; the thing unique to contribute to the world— communists were. And in Europe the but, she added, thank God the whole myth of McCarthyism was used as an anti- world was not England or, perish the American weapon to suggest that America thought, the Soviet Union! Not enough now had a dictator, the puffed-up senator readers have been exposed to the biting from Wisconsin. humor and the wisdom of such remarks— Not surprisingly, West’s main criticism too many of which are still buried in peri- of McCarthy was ignored. She argued that odicals, having never appeared between the real danger in McCarthy was that his hard covers. reckless attack on the federal bureaucracy West’s early and persistent criticism of weakened faith in government. She did communism cost her dearly. The South not see how modern life could be gov- African novelist Doris Lessing, responding erned without bureaucracies, and while to my biography of West (published in the she supported their reform, she distrusted United Kingdom in the fall of 1995), wrote politicians who seemed to run against gov- to me that she thought West had been ernment itself. consistently and bravely critical of com- est wrote an admiring review munism, at a time when this meant she was subject to the usual denigration and of Whittaker Chambers’ Wit- slanders. I remember it all too well. It ness (1952), but unlike him W wasn’t just a question of “the comrades” she could not embrace the conservative but a climate of opinion which extended cause. (Chambers, for his part, came up far beyond the extreme left. Orwell was a with perhaps the most trenchant descrip- target and so was Rebecca W. It must tion of her temperament: “Rebecca West have been hard to stand up to it, particu- is a Socialist by habit of mind, and a con- larly as she was sensitive and hated being servative by cell structure.”) She shied considered negligible, yet she did, stand- away from William F. Buckley, Jr.’s invita- ing by her guns. And of course she was tions to write for National Review, right, and her critics so very wrong.

Rebecca West 81 That climate has not entirely risen as Marxism has bankrupted itself. changed. When I began work on my Both Burke and Tocqueville believed in biography of West in 1990, I was puz- the character of a people, that the zled at the paucity of good work on her. French major in being French just as Other than Victoria Glendinning’s the Americans major in being American. excellent short biography,* there are There is no political god, only political reviews, a few introductory studies, a legacies that people can extend and handful of perceptive articles, but no in- improve upon. depth study of this major 20th-century West emphasized the need for writer. In academic circles, it has been improvements in the legacies; this is why quite all right to approve West’s early she regarded herself more as a liberal socialist articles, collected under the than as a conservative. But she shared title The Young Rebecca (1982), but her common ground with conservatives in mature work has been ignored. There that she treasured conservation and was are many reasons for this neglect, and willing to support a government that was one of them surely is her politics. 30 percent right as opposed to one that was 15 percent so. (I cite her figures.) In est’s hostile readers might other words, she could live with the ter- want to dismiss her as a ribly flawed aspects of the positions she Wcareer anticommunist who supported, recognizing the truth, howev- at best has served her purpose and is only er small, in other positions, and not pre- of historical interest. But in addition to tending she had found her god. her considerable legacy as a novelist, lit- erary critic, and biographer, there is a here remains a puzzle. How political body of thought that deserves did West get it right so much book-length treatment. Her masterwork, Tsooner than others? Why did Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), is a she never express even sympathy for the monumental study of Yugoslavia as well Soviets? For one thing, she did not con- as her definitive pronouncement on fuse means and ends. She was not will- feminism, marriage, the history of Eu- ing to overlook crimes in the Soviet rope, and that of Western civilization. regime because its ends (so people What is happening in the former Yugo- thought) were good. If the means were slavia would not have surprised her, for evil, the ends would be evil. To take she realized that although Tito had sup- away human rights and civil liberties was pressed national and ethnic rivalries, he to take them away—they would not had not addressed them. Indeed, com- return on a better day. munism, with its bogus international- West also believed in her own intel- ism, attempted to deny people their her- lect and her assessment of human char- itage—not just the national political acter. She could not brush off Emma rights of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, but Goldman the way Susan Sontag brushed those of Macedonians, Albanians, Hun- off Czeslaw Milosz’s Captive Mind: garians, Italians, and Slovenes. “When it came out in 1953, I bought the For Rebecca West, history could not book—a passionate account of the dis- be understood in terms of ideology, of honesty and coerciveness of commu- ideas that could be superimposed on tra- nism, which troubled me but which I dition. Instead, she allied herself with also regarded as an instrument of Cold writers such as Burke and Tocqueville, War propaganda, giving aid and comfort precisely those thinkers whose worth has to McCarthyism.” As Rebecca West would say, this is the logic of the status- *Glendinning’s Rebecca West: A Life, published in 1987 by conscious suburban housewife. Knopf, was supposed to be followed by a fuller biography, to But what gave West the wherewithal be written (at West’s request) by Stanley Olson. But Olson and courage to stand by herself? Here died before he had done much research or writing, and I decided to write the second biography after West’s Yale biography helps. Her father, though a University archive was opened in 1989. brilliant archconservative, taught his

82 WQ Summer 1996 child to have faith in her own arguments the idea of authority, traditionally invest- and insight. And in fact, she came to ed in the male, than could Cordelia. reject many of his own pet ideas, espe- Like Shakespeare, West was drawn to cially his antifeminism. Yet what she characters who had treason in the blood. absorbed and retained from Charles Fairfield was an unflinching intellectual f The Meaning of Treason is West’s rectitude. He was a man who was not most profound study of the god that afraid to go it alone, as her fictional por- Ifailed, it is because it fuses her own trait of him in The Fountain Overflows biography with the main story of her (1956) shows. book, an account of the traitor, William But Fairfield left his daughter a darker Joyce (1906–46), popularly known as legacy, one that taught her to yearn for Lord Haw-Haw. Joyce grew up in a and yet to beware of the god that failed. home torn by religious differences (he He had been a brilliant man but an aloof had a Protestant father and a Catholic father, with an Anglo-Irish aristo- cratic bearing, a contempt for his wife’s lowly Scottish relations, an insatiable appetite for other women, and a penchant for gam- bling away the rent money. West was only eight years old when he abandoned the family, going off to Africa in search of his fortune. He returned to die in Liverpool, virtu- ally a pauper, when West was 13. She never saw him again after he left home. Though she never ceased longing for his return, she never stopped blaming him for the hardship his desertion had caused her, her mother, and her two older sisters, as her writing attests. Godlike male figures abound in West’s fiction, where they take the form of characters such as the adulterous Edward Rowan, an Anglo-Irish politician who fails Laura Rowan and her mother in The Birds Fall Down (1966). The mad King Lear, arbitrary William Joyce—the infamous Lord Haw-Haw—whose but grand, demanding that his treason inspired some of West’s best writing daughters love him even as he destroys the possibility that their love mother) but devoted to the British can be freely granted him, haunted Empire. William’s father, Michael, had West’s imagination. His story was both a made himself most unpopular in his familial and a political metaphor—as native Ireland because of his pro- she makes clear in her great study of pol- Unionist politics, and William adopted itics and literature, The Court and the his father’s allegiance—to the point of Castle (1957), a book the distinguished enlisting in the British army before he critic John Wain ranked beside T. S. was of age. There was something extra- Eliot’s finest prose. West hated Cordelia ordinarily pure and touching about for not rebelling against her father as William’s patriotism. During his brief West had rebelled against Charles army stint, his fellow recruits made sport Fairfield. Yet she could no more forsake of his earnestness by whistling “God

Rebecca West 83 Save the Queen,” knowing that he fully explained. Yet West provided an would jump out of bed and stand to entirely plausible account. With psycho- attention. logical brilliance, she extrapolated a narra- Yet William knew there was some- tive that equates the intensity of Joyce’s thing in his family history that might desire to be accepted by the British with cause others to doubt his allegiance to the intensity of his fascism, a powerful new the British Empire. He had been born in ideology that would restore an effete Brooklyn, New York, and feared that the England to Joyce’s idealized and heroic British authorities would consider him version of it. Indeed, Joyce is depicted as an American citizen, even though his Britain’s insidious alter ego, invading father had brought the family back to British homes with an intimate, cocksure Ireland (and destroyed evidence of his radio voice. own U.S. citizenship) when William was For West, family life determines the still a boy. Ironically, William’s treason individual, and in her evocation of trial would hinge on the issue of his citi- Joyce’s background she remarks that he zenship: did England have the right to was being “strangled by the sheer tortu- try him once his American citizenship ousness of his family destiny.” Like was established? West, Joyce was the “apple of his family’s However complicated its sources and eye,” and, like her, he reacted to his fam- twisted its expression, Joyce’s devotion to ily’s confidence in his exceptional abili- Britain was passionate. And even though ties with an extraordinary rebelliousness, it led him to embrace fascism and street as if his own genius were paradoxically brawling, such patriotism was something inhibited by the family’s claim on him. with which West could identify. Like Joyce invested fascism with an interna- Joyce, moreover, she too was the product tional character, West argues, so that fas- of mixed parentage, was precocious, and cism sanctioned his betrayal of family possessed a sharp tongue that often got and country in a way that other British her into fights. fascists, such as Mosley, could not abide. Those passages in which Joyce’s char- est’s earliest memories of acter melds with West’s become appar- her father’s conservatism, of ent when she shifts to suppositions. She Wreading writers such as has him embarking for Germany: “One Kipling, of revering the Royal Family day his little feet twinkled up the area of (memories that came flooding back to his basement flat near Earl’s Court. His her when she met the queen during the eyes must have been dancing.” Such war), equipped her to amplify Joyce’s passages are bereft of evidence but full of biography. She presented him as a sin- her utter identification with her subject, cere soul, an excellent tutor of young her ability to show what joy it must have children, who perverted his own desire been to Joyce to turn traitor. for distinction into an identification with totalitarianism, when England did not ebecca calls William Joyce “the recognize his abilities, when its own fas- revolutionary,” a term she uses cist leader, Oswald Mosley, failed to Rto define one who both hates treat his deputy, William, with the order and loves it, who will destroy so respect that he had worked so hard to that he might create a superior order. It earn. In West’s telling, Joyce turned on is here that West took her stand in the England as if on a lover who had postwar world against revolution, reaf- spurned him, leaving the country at the firming what she had said 20 years earli- beginning of the war to serve Hitler as a er about the Russian Revolution—that it means of seeking a way to return tri- was bound to restore the tyranny of tsar- umphantly to London. dom. One cannot murder society in Exactly how William Joyce transformed order to save it. The transformation of himself from British patriot to traitor, from Joyce into the quintessential Rebecca a conservative to a fascist, can never be West character is achieved in a single

84 WQ Summer 1996 sentence: “He was not going to be king.” gest that it was a near thing in her own Every dynamic character in her fiction mind, that her own sympathies and the and nonfiction sooner or later is mea- court’s judgment could have gone the sured in terms of royalty. Joyce’s kingly other way. A part of her clearly believed attributes suggest to West that he is a that the individual has a right to throw symbol of humanity, that he has it in off allegiance, a matter the lawyers him to want simultaneously to live and debated for days during Joyce’s trial. to die. Like one of Shakespeare’s heroes, West concedes at the end of The he achieves tragedy in his struggle. His Meaning of Treason that there is a case example marks an “end to mediocrity.” for the traitor and that all men should have a drop of treason in their blood. t is an empathetic portrait, yet West Otherwise, how can the status quo be affirms the court’s decision that challenged, how can a nation avoid the IWilliam Joyce must hang. All of fatal complacency that can lead to its her later writing is an effort to reconcile demise? Thus West presents herself as a herself to authority and to study how hanging judge, with qualms. No more badly things go wrong when those such than Joyce did she ever see herself as as Joyce will not submit to be governed. acceptable, an Establishment figure. Even though he was not a British sub- But if her sense of herself as an outsider ject, she thought it right that he should was as strong as Joyce’s, she always resisted be tried as a traitor. She carefully thread- the easy solution. She never had to visit ed her way through the legal arguments, Russia to be disillusioned. She never went affirming the rightness of the principle through a conversion experience with that allegiance draws protection and pro- communism. It never represented the tection draws allegiance. William Joyce, rainbow or an eschatological hope. Her in other words, conducted himself as a father brought history home to her when British subject, traveled abroad on a she was just a little girl. She had revolu- British passport, had a claim to be pro- tionaries in her home for dinner. At table, tected by British laws and the British she heard their arguments and saw them government—and by the same token was for the word-spinning zealots they were, liable to be tried by them. and she knew for the rest of her life that The very lengths to which West goes there are visions of better worlds that are to justify this conclusion, however, sug- not worth the price.

Rebecca West 85