The Books: The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17; “The Gospel According to Mrs. Humphrey Ward”

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17

Where to even begin? Rebecca West did everything. Novels, essays, non-fiction books, reportage. She was a journalist. She was one of the “witnesses” in Warren Beatty’s Reds. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her book detailing a couple of trips she took through the former Yugoslavia in 1938, 1939, is one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. It’s 1,200 pages long. But it flies. Like Orwell, she was one of the prophets of what the 20th century would wrought, especially when it came to Ideology, the parade of “Ism-s”, harmful and good. She saw it early, she saw it clearly. She was a Socialist, a feminist, a suffragist, but also clear-minded enough to perceive the flaws in the major ideologies, to call things OUT. She was never a Party-Line kind of person. In Black Lamb, pro-Serb though it is, she predicts the rise of someone like Milosevic. Nobody was really thinking that way back then (although Serbs, of course, were.) She saw deeper and further. Her response was personal, idiosyncratic.

In some respects, she was like George Eliot, seated on a cloud, looking down from that lofty position on human beings, categorizing them, diagnosing them. Sometimes she is wildly wrong, but always in an entertaining way. (She is one of the most entertaining of writers. Nothing dry or intellectual about her.) Then there are other times when she is practically a modern-memoirist, talking about what she saw, what she ate, the people she met … in her travels through Yugoslavia. It’s all in there. I’ve written a lot about her: she’s somewhat difficult to get a handle on (as all great thinkers are).

She grew up in a somewhat unmonitored state, rare for little girls at the time. Her parents were thoughtful intellectual artistic types and they gave their daughters almost total freedom. She was born into the dying gasps of the Victorian era, and, like many of her generation, saw the flaws in that mindset and started fighting against it. She did not worship sacred cows just because someone told her they were sacred (the following article, written when she was just 18, shows that, and shows her fearlessness in “taking on” something deemed to be sacred and untouchable). Her intellectual freedom seems to have emerged partly because her education was so casual. She was not fully “indoctrinated.” She had to leave school at the age of 14 because she got tuberculosis. She recovered, but there was no money after that to send her back to school. She spent her time reading widely, reading above and beyond her years, and getting involved in politics, local and national. Unlike other young girls of that time, she was not molded and shaped in a strict boarding school/convent atmosphere. It was a time of violent upheaval along class and gender lines. Women started agitating for the vote. The process was violent, involving police brutality, hunger strikes, forcible feeding while in prison, and vicious commentary from reactionaries who feared for the state of the world if the Little Ladies got the vote. Then, as now, there were different factions in this fight, and West – as always – was too clear a thinker to submit totally to any Party Line. She is often mistrusted because of that. To the Pacifist Left, she was a traitor, due to her clear perception that war was often extremely necessary (with folks like Hitler running around), and although she was a staunch Socialist she also wrote eloquently about the flaws in that ideology. She was referred to once as a “Shaw in petticoats,” and Shaw himself remarked: “Rebecca can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could, and much more savagely.”

The word that comes to mind for her is “daring.” Even now, across a century, her writing is breathtakingly bold. One example: from the get-go, she saw the fight for the rights of women as going hand in hand with Socialism. Meaning: Industrialization had wreaked havoc among the lower-classes in England, men and women, and that women getting the vote was certainly important, but it was part and parcel of a fight to create a more equal society, where the poor didn’t stay poor, and the rich didn’t get richer … where mobility was possible. This was a message many feminists at the time did not want to hear. They were all about the vote. The lead feminists were pragmatists, and courageous women, all of whom emerged from the middle and upper-classes. The modern women’s movement in the 1970s was a similar movement, and it came under fire (then and now) as being a movement from the pampered class of middle-class white women. It ignored people of color, and it ignored working-class women, many of whom had no use for feminism (at least as it was presented by the mainstream leaders of the movement.) There are books written about all of this, so I won’t go into it further. Rebecca West saw that discrepancy in the movement around her, and while “anti-feminism” and “sex prejudice” (in the lingo of the day) enraged her (and also struck her as rather silly – and look out when West finds something silly: that is when she is her most savage and hilarious) … she was also baffled and upset that the real economic issues of the day were being ignored. She referred to middle-class and upper-class women as “parasites.” Way to make friends, Rebecca! The patriarchal system had created generations of useless parasite women, who never had to work a day in their lives, who were pampered and cosseted and taken care of, and who could never ever understand why poor women were the way they were. The blinders of privilege. A parasite woman did not even know that she was a parasite, because the society as it was set up was designed to keep her dumb, well-fed, and content. This was a message that many in the suffragist movement did not want to hear. Self-reflection has never been a quality revered in strong ideologies. Rebecca West also called out (controversially) the sex-phobic strain that ran in feminism, the prudishness, the rigid school-marm vibe. Now: there were definitely issues to address: birth control, for one. Having open conversations about STDs, and trying to lessen the shame around such things, was definitely a worthwhile goal. But the focus on birth control, at times, morphed into a “All sex is bad, avoid it at all costs” kind of chastity type thing – which West thought was ridiculous and unrealistic. There was also an anti-male thing that happens … and it happens now as well … and West, who had many good male friends, and who enjoyed the company of men, called that out as well. Let’s not submit to a phantasmagorical view of the world and the war between the sexes. Men are not evil, women are not Good – and the thought that all women were Victims was just more evidence of the Victorian Era in operation. (We see some of that today, with – just one example – the “hysterical” – in the true sense of the word – outcry against getting cat-called by construction crews on the street. For real? Toughen up, ladies. Shout something rude back. Flip them off and strut by, with your head held high. Don’t choose to be a victim when there are REAL victims in this world. Stop asking for the world to protect your every footstep through your life. That’s a middle-class privileged Victorian attitude right there. But calling that out can rain down hellfire on your head from those who should be on “your side”. Meghan Daum’s recent piece is awesome and I am glad she said it. It needed to be said.) Working-class women did not respond to such Victorian attitudes (they didn’t then and they don’t now). Rebecca West was not a prude. She liked sex, she understood its power. She also understood, in a way that was uncannily prophetic, that that kind of sex-phobia should never be mainstreamed – it could not sustain itself, it was not how the majority of most people lived. It would be harmful to the cause of woman. (Camille Paglia was sidelined by mainstream voices because of a similar calling-out against the likes of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon.)

It was a tempestuous rambunctious time, with imprisonment, and violent protests, and policemen throwing women down the stairs, causing grave injuries. This is not an either/or situation. It was a complex time. People fought it out in the op-ed columns of newspapers, and Rebecca West was one of the most vigorous voices out there.

Rebecca West started getting published when she was a teenager. She began writing for a feminist journal called The Freewoman, and her columns show the wide diversity of her interests. There are many book reviews, there are reports on strikes and protests, laws being passed, the ramifications thereof … West wrote quickly, gorgeously, and efficiently.

The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17, edited by Jane Marcus, is a compilation of articles written by Rebecca West in various outlets dating from 1911 to 1917. We owe Jane Marcus a great debt for rescuing this material from dusty archives that were not online. It’s a tremendous reading experience! You wonder how West ever slept, let alone had time to have a crazy affair with H.G. Wells, with a child resulting. The child was born in 1914, and 3 days after the birth, there’s another column from West. She never stopped. Unlike the “parasite women” she never got sick of criticizing, West had to work for a living. She was a single mother with no other means of financial support. So she wrote. And wrote. And wrote.

My one criticism of this volume is the lack of explanatory footnotes. Many of the names are now lost in the tides of history. Some context would have been nice. When I first read the volume, I did a lot of Googling. She would read a report of some speech made in the House of Commons, and then write an opinion piece on it … and none of this is explained by the editor. You kind of just have to go with it. While it is excellent to have access to these essays, it would have been extremely helpful to have just a brief paragraph of context before each one.

For example, the following essay, published in the Freewoman in 1912. Mrs. Humphrey Ward was a novelist of the Victorian era. A sacred cow if ever there was one. She wrote books with morals, Christian morals, and was an ardent anti-feminist. (The prototype of the “parasite woman” protecting her parasite status.) Her books were hugely popular at the time (although who reads them now?), and she was emblematic of the Morals of the Age. Rebecca West went after her, and went after her hard. (She references her constantly in her writing. She can’t stop taking pot-shots.) The following article caused an uproar. The offices of The Freewoman were bombarded with what would be called “hate-mail” now, so intense that Rebecca West was forced to address it in a following article. The sentence that people seemed most offended by was the one about the “Jolly public-house”. It figures. Because that sentence is classic West. What she is saying is: By putting Woman on a pedestal, by forcing her to represent an Ideal of some kind, we are killing her soul, we are condemning her to damnation. Far better to be the proprietor of a well-known bar, far better to work for your living, than sit around being a good beautiful Christian example.

Well. You can see why people said “Ouch” to that: it was a pretty hard pinch.

Rebecca West wrote this at the age of 18. It’s incredible because she emerged fully-formed as a writer. This voice is recognizably the voice of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. West is funny, and never more funny than when she is trying to take something DOWN. She points out the absurdity in ways that feel water-tight. It leaves no room for opponents. Opponents just bluster around saying, “Hey now, little missy, hold on a second …!” And West is already onto the next thing. Mission accomplished.

I’ll be doing a bunch of excerpts from this vigorous entertaining volume. I highly recommend it.

Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17: “The Gospel According to Mrs. Humphrey Ward”, by Rebecca West

It may strike one in reading Daphne that it shows a strange habit of mind to consider whisky and shop-girls as the only alternative to a happy married life. But Mrs. Ward has a poor opinion of men, and a worse one of women, whom, with Zarathustra, she considers “still cats and birds: or, at the best, cows”. Of course, Mrs. Ward is largely in agreement with Nietzsche – not only in this, but in her firm belief in the Superman, whom she considers to be realised in the aristocratic classes of this country, her contempt for democratic art and her voluble prejudice against socialism. But Nietzsche’s Superman is to have quite a good time, exulting in his eternal Bank Holiday, with the wide world on Hampstead Heath. But Mrs. Ward’s characters, judging from her ideal figure, Catherine Leyburn, would at their highest fail to enjoy the spiritual exhilaration of a meeting of the Poor Law Guardians.

Catherine Leyburn is revealed to us in her youth and in her late middle-age in the pages of Robert Elsmere and The Case of Richard Meynell. The distinguishing characteristic which differentiates her from, for instance, Isabel, in The New Machiavelli, is her physical abandonment. On every page her face works with emotion and is illuminated by a burning flush; once she has slowly succumbed to the turgid wooing of Robert Elsmere, she drenches him with tears and kisses. A spiritual upheaval is a picnic to her. Whensoever she approaches a deathbed, one has an uneasy suspicion that she is glad to “be in at the death.” After many years of widowhood, whiled away by the perusal of the lives of bishops, she dies as easy as she has lived. What a life! Never once had she earned the bread she ate. She had spent her life in thinking beautiful thoughts, in being a benign and beautiful influence … Never will Woman be saved until she realises that it is a far, far better thing to keep a jolly public-house really well than to produce a cathedral full of beautiful thoughts. “Here they talk of nothing else than love – its beauty, its holiness, its spirituality, its Devil knows what! … They think they have achieved the perfection of love because they have no bodies! – sheer imaginative debauchery!” It was of Hell that that was said. When people plead that “Woman should stand aside from the ugly mêlée” of things as they are, and “hold high the banner of the Ideal,” which is the usual way of alluding to Catherine’s life of loaferdom, they are instructing her in her damnation.

Mrs. Ward’s gospel is an easy one. If she was Mrs. Mary A. Ward, of Port Matilda, Pa., USA, it would be expressed something like this: “Girls! Make life a joy-ride! But don’t talk back to the police!” This easy gospel will give its disciples the heritage one may see in the faces of so many “sheltered women”: a smooth brow, that has never known the sweat of labour; the lax mouth, flaccid for want of discipline; eyes that blink because they have never seen anything worth looking at; the fat body of the unexercised waster. And within, the petulance of those who practice idealism on the easiest methods: a pastime that develops the conceit of the artist, with none of the wisdom and chastening of art.