The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West

246 Pages·1986·21.786 MB·English

by  Harold Orel (auth.)

THE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT OF
REBECCA WEST
By the same author
THE WORLD OF VICTORIAN HUMOR
SIX ESSAYS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH
LITERATURE AND THOUGHT (co-editor)
THOMAS HARDY'S EPIC-DRAMA: A Study of The Dynasts
THOMAS HARDY'S PERSONAL WRITINGS
THE DEVELOPMENT OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,
1885-1900
BRITISH POETRY 1880-1920: Edwardian Voices (co-editor)
THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITER AND HIS
AUDIENCE (co-editor)
ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS AND THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
IRISH HISTORY AND CULTURE: Aspects of a People's
Heritage
THE FINAL YEARS OF THOMAS HARDY, 1912-1928
THE SCOTTISH WORLD (co-editor)
KIPLING: INTERVIEWS AND RECOLLECTIONS, two
volumes (editor)
VICTORIAN LITERARY CRITICS
THE LITERARY
ACHIEVEMENT OF
REBECCA WEST
Harold Orel
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-18040-0 ISBN 978-1-349-18038-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18038-7
© Harold Ore! 1986
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1986
All rights reserved. For information, write:
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Published in the United Kingdom by The Macmillan Press Ltd
First published in the United States of America in 1986
ISBN 978-0-312-48744-7
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Orel, Harold, 1926-
The literary achievement of Rebecca West.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. West, Rebecca, Dame, 1892 - - Criticism and
interpretation. I. Title.
PR6045.E8Z83 1985 828'.91209 85-12510
ISBN 978-0-312-48744-7
To Hub and Barbara
Contents
Preface IX
Acknowledgements xu
The Life of 'Rebecca West'
2 Literary Criticism 31
3 Duties Owed to God 70
4 Duties Owed to the State 93
5 The Novels 121
6 Black Lamb and Grey F al~on 164
Notes 208
Bibliography: Books by Rebecca West 225
Index 228
Vll
Preface
Rebecca West published eight books of fiction, twelve books of
non-fiction, two books in which her text accompanies cartoons by
David Low, a number ofindividually printed lectures, pamphlets
and limited editions, contributions to more than three dozen other
books, and several hundred periodical and newspaper pieces. Her
status as a major literary figure in England has been very high for
more than six decades, and she was justly proud of the honours
and awards that came to her: Member, Order of St Sava
(conferred by the government of Yugoslavia), 1937; Chevalier,
Legion of Honour, 1957; DBE (Dame Commander, Order of the
British Empire), 1959; Fellow, 1947, Benson Medallist, 1967, and
Companion of Literature, 1968, of the Royal Society of Literature;
Honorary DLitt., New York University, 1965; Honorary
Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1972; and
Honorary Life Member of the Modern Language Association.
Her interests, as recorded in her work, were extraordinarily
wide: feminist polemics, literary and dramatic criticism, fiction,
'court commentary' (crime, treason trials, etc.), and cultural
history. President Truman presented her with the Women's
National Press Club's Award for Journalism for being' the world's
best reporter'. This eclecticism has barned many critics. Some
view her primarily as a spokeswoman for women's rights, others
as a novelist, and still others as a political commentator. All agree
that she is difficult to classify.
Efforts to identify a controlling principle or unifying interest in
her work have ranged from a consideration of how she treats
human dignity, to 'the tragedy of man's failure to master reality
when he has the glorious potential to do so', to 'the Augustinian
doctrine of original sin'.
These treatments, despite their suggestiveness, fail to render
full justice to one of the more subtle intelligences of our century,
and, indeed, they often seem disappointingly reductive. Neverthe
less, they are more helpful than any number of critical comments
lX
x Priface
which isolate groupings of her work one from another, though
they, too, will no longer do.
Professor Samuel Hynes, who wrote an important essay for The
Times Literary Supplement (21 December 1973), that, in revised
fonn, serves as Introduction to Rebecca West: A Celebration (1977),
suggests that 'her achievement is not to be located in this book or
in that one, but in the whole - that her books combine to make one
created work of art, the mind of Rebecca West'. If! may carry this
insight still further, her passion for order and justice unified her
work from the very beginning. She was always convinced that a
writer has a duty to his society as well as to himself or to his art.
The best artist, she said, starts an argument with his audience,
and demonstrates through his art that the difficult problems oflife
can be endured (if not solved).
My study deals with her literary achievement, for she is a stylist
who developed, surprisingly early in her career, formidable
rhetorical skills and a mature, occasionally Jamesian prose style
that remained till the end very much what it was at the beginning,
in the second decade of the century, when she was writing for the
Freewoman (1911), the Clarion (1912 on), the New Freewoman (1913
on), and the New Republic (1914 on).
The thinness of available critical, scholarly and biographical
material on Rebecca West is a scandal. For example, the Modern
Language Association, for its Annual Conference of December
1976, approved the holding of the first session in its history
devoted to her writings. As another example, Peter Wolfe's
Rebecca West, Artist and Thinker (published in the Cross
currents/Modern Critiques Series of Southern Illinois Press, 1971)
is one of only two books about Rebecca West thus far published;
its merits have led more than one reader to regret its brevity. The
other book, Rebecca West, by Motley F. Deakin (Boston, Mass.:
Twayne Publishers, 1980) is too brief, and too constrained by the
format of the series in which it appears - Twayne's English
Authors-to sustain a reader's interest long in the review of any of
the categories Deakin identifies. A number of longer studies are
not easily accessible to the general public: three doctoral disserta
tions, by Sister Margarita Orlich ('The Novels of Rebecca West: a
Complex Unity', University of Notre Dame, 1966), by D. S.
Rubin ('The Recusant Myth in Modern Fiction', University of
Toronto, 1968), and by Tony Neil Redd ('Rebecca West: Master
of Reality', University of South Carolina, 1972), as well as Verena
Preface
Xl
E. Wolfer's Rebecca West: Kunsttheorie und Romanschaffen (Bern:
Francke Verlag, 1972). Gordon N. Ray's H. C. Wells and Rebecca
West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974) concen
trates on the years 1913-23, and is a biographical study. Articles,
reviews and interviews are, for the most part, surprisingly slight.
In the belief that more needs to be said - Rebecca West is one of
English literature's underrated treasures - I have written this
book. In successive chapters - as I discuss her life; her critical
concepts; the connections that she traces between the individual,
Christ and Caesar; her fiction; and her magnificent Black Lamb and
Crey Falcon - I hope to evaluate her moral stance; to say interesting
and useful things about her fascination with theological doctrine,
her recurring stress on the differences between masculine and
female psychologies, and the elements in her philosophy that have
appeared in all her major works; and to earn for her, if possible, a
wider audience.