The Only Poet (2 page)

The first piece in the collection dates from Rebecca West's teens suggests Diana Stainforth, who is familiar with every development of her employer's handwriting. The heroine is manifestly an avatar of the bewitching Ellen Melville in
The Judge
(1922) and, like Ellen, something of a self-portrait. Adela, who had ‘the face of a young panther', is in her teens already a passionately articulate socialist and feminist – as Ellen is and the young Cicely Fairfield was – and, like them, precociously intelligent. All three wince under the crassness of their more prosperous relations and have, as father, a ‘specialist in disappointment'. Adela's description could serve for all three: ‘not only a beauty[,] she was also that seething whirlpool of primitive passions, that destructive centre of intellectual unrest, that shy shameless savage, a girl of seventeen'. Prevented from taking up a university scholarship by the miserliness of her mill-owner uncle and by the disconcerting arrival of her wandering feckless father, Adela goes to stay with his patrician relations in the country. There she meets the married man who, it can be conjectured, would have played an important part in the projected plot. Throughout this opening there throbs the sore sense of social displacement which was to afflict West her whole life long. Like the young Cicely Fairfield, both Adela and Ellen live in dire poverty, aware that they are much finer and wiser creatures than the people who look down on them. This soreness runs all through
The Fountain Overflows
(though the narrator despises its expression by the eldest sister, Cordelia), and in the Hertfordshire scenes of
Adela
there is a painful exacerbated atmosphere very similar to the emotion suffusing West's 1960s radio talk ‘A Visit to a Godmother'. Adela's kindly, patronizing elder cousin is a bluffer version of the vapid, aristocratic Englishwomen so vengefully portrayed in
The Thinking Reed.
While we might wish for more of this vivid and appealing story, it is unlikely that Ellen Melville would have been created if Adela had achieved complete life. Somehow Rebecca West seems to have needed to re-create her own youth: it is worth remembering that
The Judge
was originally planned as a novel about a judge who has a seizure in a brothel on recognizing the wife of a man he had sentenced to death some time earlier. H.G. Wells, her lover for ten years, voiced his exasperation at West's inability to keep to this structure as she went further and further back in time to develop the character of the murderer's wife, but this exploration seems to have fulfilled some profound creative and personal need.

The next group of stories takes us away from the autobiographical. All were written for American publications and all – like two of the four stories in
The Harsh Voice,
with which they have close affinities – are set in the United States. They explore a world far removed from West's English settings, a world of playboys and speculators and dancers,
of
precarious money (the 1929 market crash casts a long shadow) and a relative morality. Like
The Thinking Reed
they seem to be written to find out why rich people seem as dangerous as wild boars and pythons. But it is undoubtedly a world West found seductive, partly because of the material deprivations of her youth. This formidable intellectual could, in
The Strange Necessity,
weave an account of ‘a sun-gilded autumn day' in Paris during which she had bought a black lace dress and two beautiful hats in elegant salons, and lunched in a room with walls the colour of autumn leaves, into a magisterial critique of
Ulysses
with an examination of Pavlov's
Conditioned Reflexes,
which later uncoils into an extended essay on aesthetics. All her life she was susceptible to the charm and value of such minor arts as couture and jewellery, and alive to female beauty. So these flawed and non-cerebral heroines are seen as having great charm and, almost unwittingly, high moral courage.

In ‘The Magician of Pell Street' the beautiful dancer Leonora fears that, at a time of estrangement, she has caused a fatal spell to be cast on the husband she loves ‘so much even in those early days that continued possession of him had been necessary to her soul and body'. At last she learns that it is her husband Danny, ‘the grave heavy innocence of [whose] large fair head made her think of a chaste lion', who is the true possessor of that instinct which engenders ‘good' magic and, by a redemptive gesture, liberates the little Chinese charlatan who is the eponymous magician. ‘Sideways' gives us another dancing heroine, ‘covered with fame and legend and love – and jewels'. Ruth's ‘hair was red-gold and her eyes red-brown and mournful like a fallow deer's, and her skin seemed blanched by moonbeams and a special delicate kind of blood within'. Every action of Ruth's is oblique, sideways, as if ‘she didn't want to give anything – even gratitude – away'. However – and this is true of all these frail heroines and strongly reminiscent of Lulah, the apparent gold-digger in ‘The Abiding Vision' (the last story in the 1935 collection,
The Harsh Voice)
– ‘if anything really important had been turned up, she would have behaved well'. Behave well she does, but so oblique is the grand gesture which crowns her love for and saves her marriage to a comically unprepossessing husband that it manifests itself as flagrantly awful behaviour, giving a high comedic twist to this fairly slight and beglamoured tale. The third dancer, Kay Cunningham in ‘Lucky Boy', is even more similar to Lulah, and disenchantedly aware of her function as a status symbol:

‘I was what comes after the suits and the studs and the cuff-links and the apartments and the English valets; and he hadn't noticed that I wasn't what a rich man would go after any longer; that I'd been out of fashion for three years. And that wasn't the kind of mistake a rich man would make.'

Like Theodora and Ruth and Lulah she deceives the man she loves to save both him and their love, and Rebecca West implicitly endorses this indirectness and collusiveness. As we have seen, this reflects the dualistic view of ‘the dialectics of gender' which finds its fullest expression in the mannerist rococo of
Harriet Hume
(1929) and pervades the posthumously published
Sunflower.
Much of the drama of West's fiction lies in the attempts – or, more often, failures – of men and women to make the required reconciliation, and it is the underlying theme of
The Only Poet.
In these stories such attempts are seen in a comic or tragi-comic light.

‘Ruby', while it comes later in the
oeuvre,
has been grouped with these stories because the eponymous character is so patently an older version of their fallible heroines. As the narrator says, ‘Sometimes I nearly detest Ruby. She seems to me that stock figure of bad fiction, the golden-hearted courtesan.' ‘During the last thirty years she has dropped through destiny like a stone.' The shadowy narrator (three of these stories are recounted by an almost transparently neutral woman) accompanies Ruby to consult a seedily implausible fortune-teller, ‘clammy with failure'. But Ruby ‘is uniquely good, … she performs an act of charity which others cannot achieve'. This redemptive act is almost twin to the one performed by Theodora for the magician of Pell Street. The character of Ruby also has strong affinities with Evelyn in an unfinished short story, ‘The Truth of Fiction', found among the writer's papers after her death. Evelyn formerly ‘had a golden beauty brighter than any I have seen since, and a matching kindness and generosity'. Her kinship with these heroines is manifest. But ‘some deep part of her had made a tryst with disgrace, and she kept it faithfully. Her love affairs were at first spectacular and in the end ridiculous; she was at first extravagant and in the end dishonest; at first she drank a great deal of champagne and in the end, quite simply, she drank.' What she sees as her mortal sin, however, is that though a devout Roman Catholic she seeks through spiritualism the adopted daughter who had died after a bitter estrangement.

Spiritualism, and its fraudulent practices, are the background to the next story, ‘They That Sit in Darkness'. Its touching hero, George Manisty, ‘had never known any but those who communed with the dead, or who desired to do so'. Son of a father who is a medium and a mother who drinks and contrives ‘raps', he finds himself after their death trapped in the deceptions of the successful fraud while longing for his way of life to have truth: ‘He was hungry not only for the immortality of his dear ones, but for honour.' When he encounters another medium, ‘the most fairylike person he had ever seen', he believes in her powers and ‘might have been her husband and her servant if he had not been cursed with this heritage of fraud and trickery'. As in ‘The Magician of Pell Street' the supernatural element is redemptive love, but there are strong hints that ‘there is in fact a magical transfusion of matter, a sieve-like quality of this world that lets in siftings from eternity'. Certainly in
The Fountain Overflows
we are to take some of the supernatural events which cluster round Rosamund, and Rose's fatal clairvoyance, as being ‘true', and Rebecca West was convinced that she had access to the paranormal, even engaging in correspondence with Arthur Koestler. ‘The supernatural keeps pounding at my door', she wrote in 1962. Her sense that she was sometimes clairvoyant and the hallucinatory visions to which she was prone during illness seem to have convinced her that the world did indeed have a sieve-like quality. Moreover, just as West's theory of opposing but interdependent polarities of gender is reminiscent of Aristophanes' famous argument in
The Symposium
of Plato, ‘They That Sit in Darkness' echoes his allegory of the cave in
The Republic.
But such portentous comparisons should not distract us from the fact that in the main these stories are comedies – that the characters, seen as part of a given social fabric, move through dislocations and discord to a more or less harmonious happy ending.

As war approaches, the mood alters. The tone of ‘Madame Sara's Magic Crystal' may be comic, but it is the comedy of bitter lampoon. In the three visits to Yugoslavia which were to form the backbone of the monumental and comprehensive
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,
Rebecca West conceived an impassioned admiration for that troubled country and its courageous people. In that book she writes: ‘it is sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk', and in her view it was the smell of skunk which characterized the Allies' dealings with the rival partisan bands of occupied Yugoslavia. ‘Madame Sara's Magic Crystal' purports to be about France, as the fortune-teller reads newspaper stories about various political machinations there, but it can be inferred that the characters of ‘Brigadier Prendergast Macwhirter, MP' and ‘Major Thomas B. Smith' are slanderous caricatures of Fitzroy MacLean and William Deakin, while the ignominious Marshal Pierrot is manifestly a satire on the character and actions of Tito. After a meeting with a government official Rebecca West agreed to withhold it from publication, ‘thus giving guarantee of my willingness to sacrifice myself to the needs of the country', and until now the story has lain with her unpublished work. Its publication at this time has a painful topicality, besides reminding us of the power, penetration and characteristic non-conformism of her political judgements.

The next novella-length short story was written during the Second World War, perhaps just as the tide was turning against Germany but nevertheless in desperate times. ‘The Second Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Make Any Graven Image' was commissioned by Armin L. Robinson for an anthology,
The Ten Commandments,
whose subtitle, ‘Ten Short Novels of Hitler's War Against the Moral Code', makes it clear that, lofty in its purpose though it was, this is explicitly a work of moral propaganda. Many of the other writers are still renowned, and her inclusion shows how high Rebecca West's international standing was. They include Sigrid Undset, Franz Werfel, Jules Romains, André Maurois and, in a magnificent opening story which uses some of the tone and techniques of
Joseph and His Brethren,
Thomas Mann. Rebecca West's heroine, Elisaveta, is an actress in the Copenhagen State Theatre who, with two courageous and sympathetic playwright friends, finds herself almost involuntarily taking a heroic stand against the German occupying forces. Rebecca West, who had had a brief and unsuccessful acting career herself, had made her heroine Sunflower – the closeness of whose emotional situation to the writer's own was the reason for the novel's posthumous publication – an actress, and seems to have seen acting as an appropriate career for a woman who corresponded to West's idea of femininity yet had a certain self-sufficiency. Not that Elisaveta feels self-sufficient:

‘I am not a great beauty, I am not a great actress. I am only so-so. It is not fair that I should be asked to take part in great events of history. I could have borne with misfortunes that are like myself, within a moderate compass … but all this abduction and killing and tyranny, I cannot stand up to it.'

At a lunch party which has a Last Supper atmosphere, where the ‘gaiety of the party had existed inside the terror of the day, enfolded by it', she and her friends are interrupted by a hostile German officer. On his grudging departure the playwright Nils formulates the idea which informs the story's title:

‘That German … said that he and his kind had discovered the way of living that is right for mankind. That means they believe they could draw a picture of God's mind, and another picture of man's mind. What blasphemy! For we know almost nothing … that is why it was written in the Tables of the Law, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the water under the earth”.'

All three are now set on a course which will lead them to capture, interrogation, even torture, and to a train crammed with Jews destined for a Polish concentration camp. The story is a generous and honourable homage to the extraordinary courage of the many men and women who, overtly or covertly, resisted Nazi occupation. But, for all its loftiness, this is not one of West's most successful works of fiction. It is in fact what elsewhere she described as ‘volitional', with a laborious and contrived effect. Sometimes descending into a winsomeness inappropriate to the decorum of the rest, it is recounted in a stilted, vatic tone. She was to employ a very similar tone with great success in
The Birds Fall Down,
but it creaks rather here. The story is never less than interesting though, demonstrating her alertness to the political and emotional cross-currents of European history, and it can be seen as a precursor to her eloquent and analytical reporting of the Nuremberg war trials, and the astonishing explorations of the psychology of treachery in
The Meaning of Treason.
On a lighter note, it furnishes one of those affectionate and vibrant townscapes which are almost additional characters in much of Rebecca West's fiction: the Edinburgh which embraces the first part of
The Judge,
the Kensington whose verdure is
Harriet Hume's
backdrop, or the urban steppes of south London explored by the young people of
The Fountain Overflows.
Here it is the pretty city of Copenhagen, which West visited in 1935.