Dame Rebecca West (Cicely Fairfield in private life) had a literary career that spanned most of the 20th century, and she seems to have been just as feared and respected a journalist when she was writing suffragette polemics in her teens as she was when she was reporting on the Iranian Embassy siege — happening outside her windows in Kensington — aged ninety. Many of her book reviews, with the famous knockout blow in the first sentence, became legendary. But her fiction often seems a little bit intimidating, tucked away in that pile of Viragos we mean to get around to one day, and overshadowed by its autobiographical elements, particularly the relationship with H G Wells and her long-running feud with their son Anthony West, a lot of it conducted through competing novels. And then there's the whole complicated business of her stance on Yugoslavia and her objection to Churchill switching his support from Mihailović to Tito. Lots of scope for biographers to get side-tracked.

Victoria Glendinning knew Rebecca West in the last couple of decades of her life, and, with a track-record of biographies of Great Female Writers, was obviously signed up as a safe pair of hands to tell her side of the story and defend her against the inevitable posthumous attack from Anthony. All the same, this isn't quite a bland "official biography". Glendinning is quite prepared to admit that her subject had her faults, that her famous determination to speak her mind in print and take no prisoners went together with a dangerously thin skin, and that her feminism and independence were never entirely free from the gender attitudes of her Edwardian childhood. Those contradictions, perhaps, were what made her so interesting, but they also gave her a difficult life. Because of the sort of person she was, it took her ten years to accept that she would never be anything more than "the other woman" (or rather, one of them) in the relationship with Wells; it brought her a humiliating and distressing rejection when she tried to turn a fling with Lord Beaverbrook(!) into a relationship, and of course it particularly hurt her relationship with her son.

Glendinning calls this a "little biography", and at 250 pages of text it's certainly quite short by the standards of the genre, but it packs quite a lot of thoughtful analysis into that space, sparing us a lot of the day to day detail that we probably didn't really want anyway. If you're a serious student of West's work, you'll probably want something with more footnotes and a more detailed bibliography, and perhaps with a bit more outsider's perspective on the quarrels, but otherwise this seems like a very good place to start. ( )

Very good.

The perfect length, too. No biography needs to be more than 300 pages. Fat biographies are a plague. I don’t need 1,300 pages on Benjamin Disraeli, thanks.

Here follow a few fun underlined bits, more or less at random.

--On “the intimate enemy”:

"Cissie [West’s nickname in her private life—her given name was Cicely Fairfield] tended to externalize her problems, attributing failure or unhappiness to a malign fate. One of the last friends of her long life was the comedian Frankie Howerd. In the car after lunch with him in the 1970s, she asked him whether he felt that the fates were against him—clearly expecting the answer 'Yes.' When he replied that he felt that anything that had gone wrong was generally a result of his own mistakes, she was silent. It was not just fate that Cissie blamed for her own troubles but, very often, a particular person, the intimate enemy."

--H.G. Wells took Rebecca to meet Thomas Hardy and his wife, and she wrote about it to her sister:

"Rebecca sent Lettie a postcard reporting that Hardy had complained that the Daily News called his poems pessimistic, to which his long-suffering second wife had replied, 'Well, dear, they aren’t what you would call hilarious.'"

--On tour:

"In Chicago she stayed at the Drake Hotel, and found its view of the lake more impressive 'than anything I’ve seen since Spain.'”

--Taking to motherhood, or not:

"Rebecca loved Anthony [her only child, with H.G. Wells], the only person in the world who really belonged to her. But she was not fundamentally 'good with cubs,' as she put it."

--The path not taken:

"In old age, ruminating on the loyalty of women and the iniquities of men towards women, Rebecca wrote: 'If I were young again, I would deliberately (and against my nature) choose to be a lesbian.'”

--On what she left out of her biography of Saint Augustine:

"She told her brother-in-law Norman Macleod, that 'the only departure I have made from strict historical accuracy is that I have soft-pedalled on his innate lack of decorum—also I have omitted some examples of his curious callousness.' She replied to a reader who complained she had made Augustine unsympathetic that 'if I had told all I know about the old blackguard he would have been asked to resign from all his clubs.'”

--The most famous paragraph from her most renowned book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:

"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, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us 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."

--The state of her relationship with her son until her death ranged from fraught to outright hostile.

“'I have no love for Anthony and no hate,' Rebecca wrote in the aftermath [of the publication of his novel which featured a thinly-veiled and unflattering version of her]. 'I have a passionate concern with him in a no man’s land where love and hate do not exist, only vertigo.' … As the years passed, Anthony published many well-written autobiographical articles, in both Britain and the United States, always hostile to his mother, which never failed to upset and madden her all over again. 'Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.'”

--On buying her husband a gift after a publishing windfall:

“'I bought Henry a beautiful Daimler coupé, the first new car we have ever had, a tender antelope of a car.'”

--She considered converting to Roman Catholicism and took instruction thereon for eighteen months, but ultimately found it, and its literary wing, unavailing:

"Nor did she like literary Catholics. Evelyn Waugh 'made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.'”

--Shortly after the death of Henry Andrews in 1967, to whom she had been not particularly happily married since 1930:

“'I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.'”

--Further:

“'There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano.'”

--On seeing the hippie musical Hair:

“'[A] very poor version of the kind of thing one saw in Berlin nightclubs just before the Weimar Republic collapsed.'” ( )

Rebecca West, 1892-1983. Victorial Glendinning writes well, but I don't think this is her best work. She knew Rebecca West at the end West's life, and she agreed to write a "short" biography of her. I had the feeling, reading this thing, that Glendinning had a hard time with that constraint. She ended up focusing on West's early years. I think it's a shame that Glendinning didn't write the full biography, since she had a sympathetic understanding for her difficult subject.

I didn't much like West she she was a young 20-and 30-something. I had more respect for West as a personality as she aged. She lived to be 90 and evidently worked productively up until almost the end of her life.

I read this biography mainly as background for reading West's correspondence. She was a prolific correspondent, writing somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 letters in her lifetime. Hers was probably the last generation of great letter-writers. ( )

Mentioned in The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women by Harriet Rubin.