Rebecca West on Goering

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I’ve got a couple of what I call “intellectual idols”, people who analyze and parse the world and its events, in a way that seems singular, important, and (in some cases) life-altering (for me). I was one way before I read Ryszard Kapuscinski. After reading him, I will never look at the world in the same way again. George Orwell is another one. Robert Kaplan is another one. I suppose Alexander Hamilton is another one, although I think of him more as my boyfriend. His perspective was, in many respects, larger and more sweeping than his contemporaries – for a variety of reasons. He was an immigrant? He wasn’t attached to one colony emotionally? He had grown up in a mercantile atmosphere, not agrarian at all – so he did not fear big money, and the loss of an agricultural economy. Who knows why – but he had a longer view going on than most, as far-seeing as all of “those guys” were. Robert Conquest is another intellectual idol. This is not about total agreement, by the way, which never interests me in the slightest. This is about people who seem to have some sort of perspective on events, perspective that gives them the LONG view of things, as opposed to the short. In many cases, these people (while very political) rise above politics, at least in the every-day mucky muck of them, and they see things in different contexts, because they understand history, because they can PLACE certain events in a context that makes them seem completely different. You are forever changed once you get that kind of perspective.

But the grand pooh-bah of intellectual idols is Rebecca West.

I am now reading her A Train of Powder, which I can’t believe hasn’t been on my radar at all. It’s certainly not going to be found at your local Barnes & Noble, where you can easily find Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Penguin Classics), her masterwork.

As with many of these people I mention, they are interconnected. Robert Kaplan introduced me to Kapuscinski and also Rebecca West (his Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History follows in her footsteps through the former Yugoslavia). In my opinion, he is definitely her heir.

Train of Powder is made up of four very long essays having to do with various trials that West, as a journalist, covered, one being the Nuremberg Trials. The Nuremberg Trials are broken up into three long parts, each one called “Greenhouse with Cyclamens”. One of the things that is so extraordinary about Rebecca West, and why she is so revered by anyone who wants to write thoughtfully about history and politics, is that she was able to see things before others did. (Or, not ALL others, but she certainly stands apart) She traveled through Yugoslavia in 1938, 1939. Not only could she sense the cataclysm that was to come in WWII (she is especially brutal about the German tourists she observed on the train – in them, she can see the entire Nazi Party) – but she predicts the breakup of Yugoslavia some 50 years later, and the genocidal campaigns of people like Slobodan Milosevic. Nobody who read her book would be at all shocked that Serbia would rise in such a monstrous way. Of course they did. Retrospect makes prophets of us all, and there are many who could say, “I saw it coming …” Yes: but could you have seen it coming in 1938? There was something about Rebecca West’s mind – cold and detached (yet she comes off incredibly warm in interviews) – that kept her above events, without the accompanying sense of superiority that so often comes with detached individuals.

She seems always to be on the side of the individual, which again separates her from her contemporaries – many of whom were swayed by Socialist ideas (Orwell and others) but she really never was. She considered herself a radical and a feminist, to be sure, but she always has a very healthy suspicion of any group, and such people are really rare – and almost nonexistent today, at least in political writing, where everything is about propping up your GROUP. West saw what group-identity-politics could wrought, in places like Yugoslavia, and then also in places like Germany, and she conscoiusly separated herself from the pack: “No, thanks. Not for me.” Not an easy stance to take, and she is often mistaken for a reactionary which makes me chuckle – because that is so often the accusation thrown towards someone who refuses to “play well with others”, who never drank the Kool-Aid in the first place.

I am devouring Train of Powder at the speed of light. The first big essay about the Nuremberg Trials has many different aspects to it: the vibe, in general, at the time, for those journalists who had been observing the trials in their entirety: the intense boredom, and the homesickness, but that’s just one element. She’s an incredible observer, which makes you want to read everything she writes, just to see how she interprets things. The whole “greenhouse” she encounters during her stay at a huge country house in Germany where all the press were camped out – is incredible because she takes the fact of the greenhouse (and the one legged gardener, and his devotion to cyclamens) and extrapolates out of that the meaning of the entire German people following the war. It’s not a stretch. This is a woman who observed history, who knew revolutions and wars, who understood tyranny on a deep Hannah-Arendt level.

Yet she was also a humanist. This gives her writing the power and scope that it has.

She sat in the press box in the court room at Nuremberg, for months on end, and observed, taking in everything: the zaniness of much of it (due, perhaps, to the fact that a trial like this had never occurred before), the behavior of the “defendants” (what a good eye she has), and thoughts on what all of this would actually mean. What exactly is going on here? She makes insightful observations – which probably rang uneasily in the minds of her contemporaries, who were still under the sway of the glorious revolution going on in Russia, something she never fell prey to. For example, she notes that the international judges, each read different parts of what each defendant was accused of. Here she observes:

It turned out that the Russian was reading the part of the judgment that condemned the Germans for their deportations: for taking men and women away from their homes and sending them to distant camps, where they worked as slave labour in conditions of great discomfort, and were often unable to communicate with their families. There was here a certain irony, and a certain warning.

The essay was written in 1946. It is fresh news. It was unpopular, at that moment in time, to criticize Russia – for various reasons – and many just decided to stick their heads in the sand, to avoid uncomfortable truths. That was never Rebecca West’s bag.

She’s good on all aspects here – atmosphere, context, analysis – this is journalism of the highest order, a dying art, which is one of the reasons why I love Robert Kaplan so much. If you read his books (which are part travelogue, part journalism, part history), and his long articles in The Atlantic Monthly, you can see a similar context at work. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he considers Rebecca West to be his idol as well. You can feel him trying to be as good as her, in his thoughts, analysis, and perspective. In many respects, he succeeds. My favorites of his are The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, and the aforementioned Balkan Ghosts. Recently Kaplan has become quite involved in the US military, which connects him inextricably to a group – something I view warily, because I care so much about his work. I would hate to see him lose his perspective due to his affinity for one particular group. All of that being said, the two books he has written about the US military (and he plans on writing two more, I believe) are massive accomplishments that I consider to be required reading, for anyone looking for context. Again: he is looking at things through a prism, another kind of lens than a jingoistic “my country right or wrong” lens, which may be satisfying in the short-term, but certainly won’t last as a work of literature past the current generation. His two books (Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond and Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (Vintage Departures)
) are examinations of the US military, its purpose and mission, but also its place in history. He talks to people. He gives great portraits of the men and women fighting in our military. You get to know them. He has traveled the world (obviously). He is not afraid to look deeply. He has spent his career examining other cultures – traveling through Iran and Indonesia and Turkey. In An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, he took that same journalistic observational eye he has turned on other cultures, and turned it on America. That one also is a must-read, actually. Bah. Just read all of his books, won’t you? He’s one of the few authors out there where I wait with baited breath for his latest.

But back to Rebecca West. (It is hard to talk about her without referencing the generations of writers she inspired …)

I was particularly riveted by West’s observations about the defendants in the Nuremberg Trials, some more monstrous than others. Here are a couple of excerpts showing her thoughts on Hermann Wilhelm Göring, which gives just a taste of her gift. There really is nobody else like her.

And though one had read surprising news of Göring for years, he still surprised. He was so very soft. Sometimes he wore a German Air Force uniform, and sometimes a light beach suit in the worst of playful taste, and both hung loosely on him, giving him an air of pregnancy. He had thick brown young hair, the coarse bright skin of an actor who has used grease paint for decades, and the preternaturally deep wrinkles of the drug addict. It added up to something like the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He looked infinitely corrupt, and acted naively. When the other defendants’ lawyers came to the door to receive instructions, he often intervened and insisted on instructing them himself, in spite of the evident fury of the defendants, which, indeed, must have been poignant, since most of them might well have felt that, had it not been for him, they never would have had to employ these lawyers at all. One of these lawyers was a tiny little man of very Jewish appearance, and when he stood in front of the dock, his head hardly reaching to the top of it, and flapped his gown in annoyance because Göring’s smiling wooden mask was bearing down between him and his client, it was as if a ventriloquist had staged a quarrel between two dummies.

Göring’s appearance made a strong but obscure allusion to sex. It is a matter of history that his love affairs with women played a decisive part in the development of the Nazi party at various stages, but he looked as one who would never lift a hand against a woman save in something much more peculiar than kindness. He did not look like any recognized type of homosexual, yet he was feminine. Sometimes, particularly when his humour was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel. His like are to be seen in the late morning in doorways along the steep streets of Marseille, the professional mask of geniality still hard on their faces though they stand relaxed in leisure, their fat cuts rubbing against their spread skirts. Certainly there had been a concentration on appetite, and on elaborate schemes for gratifying it; and yet there was a sense of desert thirst. No matter what aqueducts he had built to bring water to his encampment, some perversity in the architecture had let it run out and spill on the sands long before it reached him. Sometimes even now his wide lips smacked together as if he were a well-fed man who had heard no news as yet that his meals were to stop. He was the only one of all these defendants who, if he had the chance, would have walked out of the Palace of Justice and taken over Germany again, and turned it into the stage for the enactment of the private fantasy which had brought him to the dock.

As is well-known, the day before Göring was to be put to death, he killed himself in his cell. Rebecca West has some choice words about that event.

The executions were to take place on October 16. Some time during the preceding night Göring killed himself. The enormous clown, the sexual quiddity with the smile which was perhaps too wooden for mockery and perhaps not, had kicked the tray out of the hands of the servants who were bringing him the wine of humiliation, the glasses had flown into the air and splintered with a sound too much like laughter. This should not have happened. We are all hunters, but we know ourselves hunted by a mightier hunter, and our hearts are with the hunted, and we rejoice when the snared get free of the snare. In this moment visceral mournfulness changed to visceral cheerfulness; we had to applaud for the flesh that would not accept the doom that had been dealt to it but changed it to an expression of defiance. All those people who had fled from Nuremberg, British and American and French, who were scattered over the world, trying to forget the place of their immurement, would straighten up from whatever they had been bent over and burst out laughing before they could help themselves, saying, “That one! We always knew he would get the better of us yet.” Surely all those Germans who walked through the rubble of their cities while their conquerors drove, they too would halt, and throw back their heads, and laugh, and say, “That one! We always knew he would get the better of them yet.”

Göring should not have been permitted even this small amelioration of his doom. True, we now know some reasons for feeling that he might have been allowed to get a little of his own back. Like all the Nazis, he had been plagued by the attentions of the psychiatrists who haunted Nuremberg Jail, exercising a triple function of priest and doctor and warder hard to approve. They visited the men in the cells and offered themselves as confidants, but performed duties at the behest of the court authorities. When some of the defendants seemed to be taking an unrepentant pro-Nazi stand in their line of defence, one of the psychiatrists worked out, at the commandant’s request, a plan for a new seating arrangement at the lunch table in order to break up this group and expose them to other influences. It is not easy to think of an accused person on trial before a national tribunal being subjected to such manipulation by prison officials. There was no silver lining to this cloud. One of these psychiatrists has related, without humorous intention, that when Göring asked him what a certain psychological test had revealed about his character, he replied that it had shown that he lacked the guts to face responsibility. Göring had also the benefit of spiritual care of a remarkably robust kind. He asked the Lutheran chaplain to give him Holy Communion on the night before the executions, but the chaplain refused, on the ground that he was probably shamming.

Nevertheless Göring should not have been given the chance to use his courage to weaken public horror at his crimes, to which his courage was not relevant. The Nazis were maniacs who plastered history with the cruelty which is a waste product of man’s moral nature, as maniacs on a smaller scale plaster their bodies and their clothes with their excreta. Since sanity is to some extent a matter of choice, a surrender to certain stimuli and a rejection of others, the nature of mania should never be forgotten. It is unfair, not only to Germans, but to all the world, if the vileness of the Nazis be extenuated; and it was unfair that this Nazi of all Nazis should have been allowed to disguise his gross dementia. This suicide meant a long-term danger to human standards, and it might have meant a short-term danger too, had it not been for the severity of the following winter. Germany was to be ice-bound and water-logged and had no time to think of reviving the Nazi party; and if that stretch of bad weather broke Europe’s heart, it also broke the continuity of popular political thinking and forced it on to a fresh phase not shadowed by resentment at conquest. But the Allies had failed idiotically in a prime matter. All to no purpose had the military policeman in the CIP gallery shaken the venerable Lord of Appeal and bidden him wake up and uncross his legs. All to no purpose had his colleague waved his club round the ears of the judge and asked him how the hell he had got in. All to no purpose had the maternal colonel shadowed our passes with his pendulous bosom. The cyanide had freely flowed.

She is magnificent. A Train of Powder is a must-read.

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19 Responses to Rebecca West on Goering

  1. george says:

    “… she was able to see things before others did.”

    “Not only could she sense the cataclysm that was to come in WWII…”

    That picture of her (her countenance) couldn’t possibly be more apposite to her vision and your post.

  2. red says:

    George – I know, right? She led a really crazy life – long-term affair with HG Wells, which resulted in a child – who grew up to be a writer of some renown, who devoted his career to crucifying his famous mother in print. I think he wrote 6 books about her? Dude, get some therapy.

    But on the flipside, she was a serious journalist – and wrote a bunch of novels, too – and at the end of her life was writing AWESOME book reviews for, I believe, the Sunday Telegraph. She could be quite biting. She didn’t mince words.

    She also was one of the “witnesses” in the talking-heads sections in Reds. Warren Beatty basically fell in love with her and said that the more she talked, the more beautiful she became. She had to have been in her late 70s by that point? She died in 1983. Maybe she was older.

    She was one of the people in that generation where the labels are not so clearly drawn as they are now. Clearly liberal – she was enough of a pragmatist to distrust anyone blithering on about “utopias” – she saw what had happened in the USSR with that kind of talk – she broke step with her liberal contemporaries by seeing clearly the dangers of Communism, and also recognizing Fascism for what it was – the danger of identity politics, and nationalism, in general (that’s what her Black Lamb Grey Falcon is all about).

    A giant mind – one of the most important of the 20th century.

  3. red says:

    And the whole label thing: one of the things that seems to link all of these “idols” of mine together is their resistance to clear labels. The right wants to claim Orwell – but have to overlook so much in order to do so – the same with the left. The right wants to claim Robert Kaplan – but again have to overlook a lot – same with Robert Conquest – although it is my opinion that anyone who doesn’t claim Robert Conquest as the GIANT that he is is a moron. Yet at the same time, politically he couldn’t be said to be a staunch rightist – his background is much more flexible. None of these people are partisans, I guess is what I am trying to say – they are loyal to nothing but their sense that individual life matters – they are not loyal to a party – they resist groups. Many of them are viciously hated to this day for that – because they basically say, “Fine, claim me, but in doing so, you have to claim THIS part of me as well” …

    I think it is why their work will last long beyond their present day – because they somehow are ABOVE the petty infighting and defensiveness of party politics. They’re looking at a longer view. It’s a lonely path – I love them all!

  4. DBW says:

    I am in awe of her–and several others you mention in this post. I so admire people whose intellect informs their observations. She SAW the reality of tyranny and oppression, and the impact on culture, social order, and human life. Not for her the casual embrace of popular ideologies–she SAW. I love that. As you say, it’s not that difficult to say you saw something coming well after the fact. It’s very difficult to see monumental events in advance. We could use more people like Rebecca West writing and educating. There are some good people writing of global politics, but we are inundated with hacks for the most part–partisan hacks, which is even worse. In addition, she couldn’t be pigeonholed into some preconceived idea of what her belief structure was. An individual thinker.

  5. red says:

    DBW – I honestly think that in any generation there are only 1 or 2 people who have the ability that she has, or Orwell – or Conquest. It’s truly rare. This is not just think-tank knowledge – it’s based on experience and questioning and – a certain genius, I think.

    They also all are fine fine writers – which is rare as well. Some loudmouth on a street corner shouting about the end of the world or the downfall of Communism (or anyone of the big partisan-political bloggers today, whose writing seethes with hostility, defensiveness – and, frankly, terrible writing) won’t be listened to by anyone outside of the present moment. Never gonna happen.

    People like Conquest and West and Kapuscinski have CRAFT and are able to create these giant books – that withstand the test of time. And are often so prescient about events far in the future that it puts a chill up your spine.

  6. DBW says:

    Well put, Sheila. I agree.

  7. red says:

    Another thing they all seem to have in common is how much the “establishment” or “mainstream” rejected all of them – it is only when they have been proven RIGHT that one or the other side wants to “claim” them.

    An example of someone embraced by the mainstream – who seemed to have it all going on – but who (in retrospect) completely lacks the prescience that these great thinkers have – is Francis Fukuyama. He’s had quite an interesting journey himself – similar to many of the folks I talked about in my post – a supporter of the neoconservative agenda, which he then later rejected – perceptive economist, all that … He was Mr. Big Shot. People listened to him. He’s a big star. Meanwhile, Robert Conquest has been studiously ignored for DECADES. Regardless, back to Fukuyama:

    If September 11th hadn’t happened, maybe Francis Fukuyama would be seen as some kind of visionary – but he will now forever be seen as the guy who got it all wrong. He’s still doing damage control for his “end of history” book he wrote in the wake of the USSR collapse.

    He is obviously a very brilliant man, not lacking in smarts, but he just could not see far enough, and his analysis was completely wrong. He missed TOTALLY what was coming. He didn’t sense the stirrings in radical Islam (the way Robert Kaplan did in the late 80s) – he didn’t foresee the cataclysm of religious fanaticism on the rise – he missed it ALL.

    And then there’s someone like Samuel Huntington who wrote Clash of Civilizations – a book I didn’t really enjoy (his writing is pretty bad, I think) – but it is EERIE how much he gets right. He gets it ALL right. He saw it all: with the breakup of the USSR, nationalism is going to decline, and ethnic identities will rise and the results will be catastrophic.

    But Fukuyama, with his more hopeful message, was embraced – not just by mainstream media, but by think-tank politicans, etc. – and Huntington was scorned as an alarmist and a racist and every other kind of thing.

    This is not the sort of thing you want to be RIGHT about – I’m sure Samuel Huntington HOPED time would prove him wrong …

    Regardless: Mainstream folks, on either side of the political fence, rarely embrace such thinkers as these – because they refuse to drink the Kool Aid of any one brand of ideology.

  8. DBW says:

    How’s that for illuminating commentary. I think I just became your first “Dittohead.”

  9. DBW says:

    I think you get at it with your call of “hopeful message.” People wanted to believe Fukuyama. Not to pat myself on the back, but I remember thinking he was out of his mind, frankly. Given the history of humans on this planet, I thought it was more likely a World War would break out the next Morning than for conflict on the planet to be gone permanently. And, you are correct. History is full of individuals who were ignored and scorned until, miracle of miracles, they were proven right–then behold the public respect and adulation. Of course, there is also a long history of those who made predictions about, say, the Soviet Union, who, if anything, were more hated by some AFTER they were proven right.

  10. red says:

    DBW – hahaha I am not surprised that you would think he was out of his mind. Obviously a smart man – he just totally missed the boat on that one. I remember when that book came out and he was hailed as this Prophet of the New World – and then a couple years later, Sept. 11th – and suddenly everyone wants to read people like Robert Kaplan, and the vibe is Fukuyama who??

    He made himself irrelevant immediately. Fascinating.

    I know exactly what you mean with your last comment – I mean, Orwell predicted the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 40s (how did he do that??) – and not only predicted that it WOULD happen (an unpopular opinion) but HOW it would happen – which just – nobody else got that one right.

    Have you read Christopher Hitchens’s short book Why Orwell Matters? Well worth it. It’s a great examination of how both the left AND the right want to claim Orwell – but sometimes for all the wrong reasons. Norman Podheretz wrote an abhorrent article praising Orwell, for many reasons, one of them being Orwell’s hatred of homosexuals. “See? He’s like us – he hates the gays, too!”

    Disgusting – and also desperate.

    But there are just as awful examples from the left.

    Orwell still resists that classification. Love the guy. Keep being slippery, Orwell – they’ll never catch you!!!

  11. red says:

    It was as though Fukuyama was anointed by the insiders as “the one to listen to” and then “the one” turned out to be somebody else entirely, from the outside.

    I am sure there were more acceptable (at the time) inner-circle writers in the 30s and 40s – but most of these people are (rightly) forgotten because they were too busy propping up whatever cause they were into. It becomes too specialized and loses its resonance out of its time.

    Orwell stayed outside, kept this vast perspective, and really never was accepted (the correspondence between him and his editors about Animal Farm show the resistance to Orwell – “do they HAVE to be pigs?” Not even kidding – people had vested interests in going “soft” on the Soviet Union at that time – and for very valid political reasons, don’t get me wrong – it was the early 1940s – not the 50s yet – but the 40s. But you can really see how much everyone had drunk the Kool Aid and flat out resented Orwell because he hadn’t.)

    Not saying I am at all on the level of these people – – but being an iconoclastic and opinionated outsider like myself (I belong to no party) I have experienced the vicious condescension on the one side and the spluttering outrage on the other side – when I do not embrace ALL of their precious talking points.

    I know you know the background on all of that -and you’ve always been very humorous and supportive of my political leanings – but it has been an interesting first-hand experience of the kind of thing that these writers went through.

    “What? You haven’t drunk our Kool Aid??” scream the cray-cray partisans who live in a bell jar of agreement with other deranged lunatics.

    Nope. I haven’t.

    I’m essentially liberal (although I do not care for the term) with a fierce conservative streak (as you know!!) – and I will not let either side shame me out of it. I like being outside – as annoying as it sometimes can be, when partisans just BEG you to submit to their brainwashing.

  12. red says:

    Oh wait – I thought of two writers who were big freakin’ stars in the 1930s and their names have been forever tarnished because of the big fat lie they bought: Beatrice and Stanley Webb. They were the ones who were the most “useful idiots” of all in the West, in terms of propagating the beauty of Stalin and his 5 year plan. There was no famine. Oh no! Not according to the Webbs. Everyone in the Ukraine was happy and smiling! (Maybe cause you were on a tour sponsored by the Politburo, you morons?)

    Funny moment from Reds: Rebecca Webb is talking into the camera about socialism – and she says, “You know who was an idiot about socialism? Beatrice Webb. She didn’t know a thing.”

    50 years later, Dame Rebecca is still pissed.

  13. red says:

    Another thing that Reds shows, really well, is the splintering of the American left (which was also happening in left-wing circles around the world). It’s all about Russia Russia Russia. It’s hard to keep track of it all – the left-socialists, the right-socialists, the socialist democrats, the Trotskyites – like, guys, who the fuck cares? hahaha But we should care – it was an important moment (perhaps the most important moment) in the 20th century – the REACTION of the entire world to the revolution in Russia. I never ever get sick of reading books about that time.

  14. red says:

    Okay, now I’m just Ditto-heading myself.

  15. Kate says:

    Here’s the rub on Hamilton though – I really wish he had not, because New York was in debt – set things up so the feds would assume state and national debt. We really could have worked that better.

  16. red says:

    Well, yes, but you say that with a vast perspective of time where we can see it in a bird’s eye view. And you also say it because you disagree with the result. Context is decisive. See it in HIS context and it looks very different. Retrospect makes prophets of us all, and there is much that is botched, and much that could have been handled better. It’s Hamilton’s vision – long-term, future-driven – that sets him apart from his contemporaries, who couldn’t imagine the world as he saw it. We live in Hamilton’s world now, not Jefferson’s or Washington’s.

    Also he died young – he had been cut off from the political process entirely by the end – freezed out, so to speak.

    It was a tumultuous time.

    I suppose, with retrospect, we could say the Constitutional Convention could have been handled better – because in that was the seeds of the Civil War. The men knew it at the time – the prescient ones – but the present-moment needs overtook their anxiety about the cataclysm to come.

    Whatever – they did their best dealing with the landscape as they knew it and could handle at that time.

    But it certainly would have been nice to not have to go through the Civil War.

    I’m not into that type of thinking, though. I’m more of a realist. Shit happens. Things are botched. There is no Golden Age. Context is what matters, how we learn from them, how we get perspective.

    (And if that is your only comment to this post, encompassing many eras and many people – then you have just proved my point, that the majority of people are trapped in their own day and age – and a very few, a very very few, can see past their own noses to what is REALLY going on.)

  17. DAN says:

    BL & GF is one of my ‘Sheila’ books, that I bought because of this blog. I’ll have to put in the immediate queue(along with A Winter’s Tale.)

    //scream the cray-cray partisans who live in a bell jar of agreement with other deranged lunatics. //

    Hate hate hate them folks. And there’s so many.

  18. beth says:

    //Göring’s smiling wooden mask//

    Great phrase. Really gives you a chilling, very *present* sense of the man.

  19. red says:

    I love, too, how Rebecca West nails the sort of self-loathing gay man vibe that really was so common in the Nazi Party – her characterization of Goring as a “madam in a brothel” is brutal.

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