Rebecca West

Book Reviews REBECCA WEST Victoria Glendinning. Rebecca West I A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. $19.95 Victoria Glendinning's final chapter, entitled "Dame Rebecca," draws a portrait that reminds me, with considerable vividness, of my one interview with Rebecca West. That took place late in the summer of 1978. I was about to leave London to fly to Yugoslavia, where I hoped to visit several of the cities and sites described in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, perhaps her strongest claim to literary immortality. Her apartment was a large but gloomy affair, with drawn curtains and overstuffed furniture; the walls were covered with pictures of varying quality; it was uncompromisingly Late Victorian. I had been warned that Dame Rebecca could be formidable, and at the very least unpredictable; I had also been advised not to believe everything she would tell me. Her manner —when she appeared, after a dramatic berating of her secretary in the hallway— was suitably imperious: two pairs of glasses rested on chains on her dress. She insisted on knowing whether I had read specific books by a long list of obscure writers, and when I confessed that I had not, expressed disappointment that "nobody" read anything worthwhile nowadays. She told me increasingly incredible stories about her servants as well as reputable American scholars like Gordon Ray (who had written a book on her relationship to H. G. Wells). She dropped names relentlessly, tracing a lineage that (I discover from Glendinning 's biography) has only intermittent connections with reality. She let me know, early on, that her hearing aid prevented her from hearing questions that she did not wish to answer. Indeed, she did not want to talk at all about her sister Lettie, who had achieved distinction in more than one career; Glendinning suggests that this sibling rivalry had obscure but deep roots in Dame Rebecca's past. My final impression was that my efforts to tell Dame Rebecca how much I enjoyed her books had been spumed as largely irrelevant to her present concerns; she was pursuing an agenda of her own so far as visitors were concerned; and I soon became convinced that her unpleasantness was standard behavior, a substitute for true dialogue. Victoria Glendinning's Prologue, which describes a "small lunch party in a comfortable flat in Kensington House, a large block facing Kensington Gardens in London," confirms this impression. Dame Rebecca makes comments that are "wickedly acute," behaves badly, sighs loudly as her sister speaks, denigrates Evelyn Waugh as "vulgar" because he "had the nerve to call other people common ," requests gossip "as lurid as possible," und so weiter. It is the usual kind of performance, Glendinning implies; at any rate, she is not surprised by any of it. To the outsider, however, the real wonder is that Glendinning 447 31:4 Book Reviews sketches the afternoon's proceedings with amused tolerance for what is obviously a harridan's performance. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of this biography is its tone, which manages, by a series of feats of breathtaking legerdemain, to create sympathy for a woman who became increasingly unlovable as she aged (bom in 1892, she died in 1983), while at the same time recognizing the difficulties in her chosen subject 's temperament. "It has turned out to be a sadder story than I expected," Glendinning writes, "on account of the way she felt about the things that had happened to her. She felt like Job, persecuted by God (and by man, woman, and child), and any friend who played the part of Job's comforter got short shrift from her." V. S. Pritchett, who had so little to say about the literary value of Dame Rebecca's work that he may not believe it exists, so admired Glendinning 's emotionally-restrained assessment of Rebecca West's histrionic manner that he chose to open his New Yorker review with Glendinning's sentence, she "lived her life operatically, and tinkered endlessly with the storyline, the score, and the libretto." Rebecca West's life may well be the only thing that interests most readers now that the canon is fixed. If we are unable to trust much that she...